I haven’t blogged in weeks, not because nothing has happened – it has, both to the world and me – but because I seem to be in a loop. Everything in my life and everything I want to blog about seems to be on repeat. We went to the Carizzo Plain some time ago, hoping to see a superbloom. It turns out that we were a little late, but it was still nice. But I’ve written about the Carizzo Plain’s Superbloom several times, and doing it again just seems superfluous.
One new thing: we went to the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek over Easter. Now, thinking back on it, I’m surprised I haven’t gone before. I have certainly heard of it for years. I was working as a Construction Manager only a few blocks away in the late 1960s, but it was still a farm in those days. Now it is primarily a cactus and suculent garden, beautifully laid out.
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again, President Donald Trump said, referring to what would happen to Iran if his demands were not met.
How deranged do you have to be to be upset with the Pope for preaching about peace and love in the spirit of Jesus Christ? RepresentativeIlhan Omar (who is a Muslim in case you didn’t know).
To change the subject to something which is actually sort of new, the Wall Street Journal – which I don’t read, but saw in Which Car – Reports from April 15, 2026, indicate that senior defense officials have held preliminary meetings with top executives from Ford, General Motors, GE Aerospace, and Oshkosh Corp. The goal of these talks is to determine how quickly the domestic auto industry could pivot to a “wartime footing” if needed.
We seem to be running out of munitions, especially anti-drone munitions, in our so-called war with Iran, and that doesn’t surprise me. I was stationed on a Hawk anti-aircraft site in the mid 1960s, and we had 18 missiles ready, or near ready, to fire with another 18 missiles in the onsite maintenance-storage facility. There were 16 HAWK batteries in Korea and China, alone had an estimated 3,000 planes, so it never seemed like we were very serious about protecting “Freedom’s Frontier”. It still doesn’t.
Don’t mope, take action. Accept mistakes, lessons learned. Every day, something good. Help others, humor. A project. A random note from Jim Compton to himself.
Jim Compton, my sister Paula’s husband, died earlier this year after a long bout with Parkinson’s disease. Without him, the world is a dimmer, less fun, and less interesting place.
Jim was born Dinsdale Michael James Compton in London in 1930, but he was known by almost everyone as Jim Compton. When The War started, Jim, along with almost all of the other school-aged kids, was sent to the country to get them out of range of the German bombers. Jim was smart, exceptionally smart, and that led to his being accepted into a boarding school, established in the 1400s, that educated children from working-class or poor families. From there, he was accepted into Oxford, where he earned a PhD in Chemistry, and then went on to a postdoctoral position in Canada. His research spanned physical chemistry, solid-state physics, and medical technology.
According to Paula, “Jim always said that he would rather do a bit of everything than become a distinguished specialist in a single field.” Although he rarely spoke to his family about his scientific accomplishments, his professional footprint was significant; he filed at least 7 patents and published more than 30 papers, ranging from “Neutron capture cross-section measurements for U-238 between 0.4 and 1.4 MeV” – whatever that means – (published in The Journal of Chemical Physics with W. G. Schneider and T. C. Waddington) to developing methods to use radioactive isotopes to visualize and measure how air and blood flow through the lungs, providing a critical diagnostic tool for identifying lung diseases and blockages (I think I was on the other end of that paper when I was tested at Sequoia Hospital for asthma; thank you, Jim).
More importantly than his academic accomplishments, in my opinion, Jim had a contagious love of life that was hard not to catch when he was around. He lived in the moment. He was curious about everything, kind, and funny. Jim Compton was a remarkably nonjudgmental man. I’ll miss him, we’ll all miss him.
It’s not about how much you earn. It’s about what you’re worth. And who’s worth the most? Companies that lose money. Pinterest, Snapchat, no revenue. Amazon has lost money for every fucking quarter for the last 20 fucking years, and that Jeff Bezos is the king. Russ Hanneman in the HBO fictional series Silicon Valley.
The photograph above is of my first car on California Highway 395. In my car log, now lost on a hard drive on a computer I will never use again, I described it as A 1948 Pontiac 4-door sedan: faded blue with chrome stripes on the hood and an Indianhead hood ornament that lit up; powered by a flathead straight 8. It was my maternal grandmother’s car that I was asked to buy (for $300) when she got too old to drive. She had covered the seats with thick plastic seat covers, so when I got the car, it was an 8-year-old beater with new gray wool – derogatorily called mouse fur – seats. About this time, I started camping, and this car did many uncomplaining miles on dirt roads. The car had a good life. It eventually died on a dirt road near Longs Peak, Colorado, while being driven by the second owner after me. He, fittingly in my opinion, left it by the side of the road to exfoliate back into the earth.
I don’t remember ever taking this car this far south on 395, though. I also don’t remember the Velociraptors, but it was a long time ago, and I didn’t take the picture. I did, however, make it, or at least direct Gemini to make it. And the fact that an 85-year-old, computer-illiterate person can do this in about 15 minutes surprises me. Even more surprising is that this is just the start of the AI revolution, maybe iPhone 2 level. It is still early enough in the cycle that anything seems possible, and the stock market reflects that.
Just before Christmas, I heard the tail end of a speech by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – more commonly known as AOC – on November 18, 2025, during a House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee hearing. AOC said we are probably in an AI bubble and that, when that bubble pops, the Government shouldn’t bail out Wall Street or AI companies. My first reaction was surprise that she knows so much about both AI and the Stock Market since I know so little about either. About a month later, I had lunch with a friend who pays close attention to the Market, and he felt the Market was acting strangely.
It led me to rethink AOC’s speech and credentials. I knew she graduated from Boston University in 2011; what I didn’t know or forgot was that she graduated summa cum laude with a double major in Economics and International Relations. I also went back and listened to earlier parts of AOC’s speech.
AOC said there is an AI bubble that poses a significant threat to the U.S. economy. She pointed out that 40% of U.S. economic growth and 80% of stock gains in 2025 were attributed to just seven major tech companies. Many of these companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, the creator of Claude, and xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, among other AI companies, have yet to turn a profit and might never make a profit. She argued that their current valuations are based on “promises” rather than actual returns and warned that the broader economy’s exposure to this single, unproven sector creates a massive stability risk.
A couple of days ago, I read in the Washington Post that Michael Burry, the fund manager made famous in the book and movie The Big Short, is now saying he thinks we are in an AI bubble, so I’m convinced we are all in for an AI shock. I’m also convinced that Russ Hanneman, quoted at the top, is right, even though he is not real.
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. An excerpt from Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr., where he was imprisoned as a participant in a nonviolent demonstration in August of 1963.
I’ve grown up thinking that the Democrats were liberals, but I was only half right. The Democratic Party during my growing-up years was Fiscally Liberal with Social Security and Medicare, and, except for President Lyndon Johnson and a few others, controlled by the socially conservative southern Committee leaders. Just as the world has changed since I was growing up, so has the Democratic Party changed. It happened right in front of my eyes, and I didn’t even see it. Today’s Democrats are Socially Liberal and Fiscally Conservative. There are outliers like Ocasio-Cortez and a few others who are both Fiscally Liberal and Socially Liberal, but the Party, en masse, is Fiscally Conservative.
On the other hand, according to Anthony Scaramucci, Trump says his supporters are Fiscally Liberal and Socially Conservative. Not counting, I guess, rich tech entrepreneurs who Trump keeps around with big tax breaks and are fiscally conservative and socially liberal.
We live in a society where money has become so important that it demands special treatment. By that, I mean money – and making money – has the status of being more holy than secular. When Trump threatened to have the U.S. Federal Communications Commission unapprove a major merger between Paramount Global, which owned CBS, and Skydance Media, a deal that many in the media said was contingent on appeasing Trump by firing the late-night comedian, Stephen Colbert, over his anti-Trump comedy, the media didn’t blame CBS or Paramount Global. The general attitude was along the lines of They had no choice.
The unspoken inference was They had no choice because it would cost their stockholders money, and that is of a higher value than doing the right thing. The unspoken part of the inference, BTW, is that the top executives will get more money at the expense of employees further down the totem pole. – I think that the Right Thing, the right choice, the moral choice, is to say “We believe in freedom of speech, which we have a moral obligation to protect and is guaranteed by the First Amendment, especially in political commentary, even though it may cost us money; therefore, we will not bow to political pressure.”
Sort of on the same subject, a couple of days ago, I heard William J. Haynes II interviewed on NPR. Hayes was with the Bush Administration on 9-11 and was one of the people, along with the more infamous John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales, who gave Bush the Younger political cover on attacking Afghanistan after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Haynes was being interviewed on the Trump Administration’s use of the US Military for a strike on at least four vessels that originated from Venezuela, killing more than twenty people. The pretense was that the boats were smuggling drugs into the US, drugs that have “killed more people than have died in the World Trade Center attack”.
Haynes thought the use of the US Military to attack the boats was illegal. I don’t remember exactly why, or how, but, somehow, Haynes came up with because al-Qaeda was attacking us with intent to harm us, they were a legitiment military target.The boats from Venezuela were not attacking us, even though their cargo killed lots of people; all they are trying to do is make money, so we couldn’t legally use our military.
Speaking of NPR, sort of, I noticed that their commentary is now better, more insisive without being partisan, than I am used to. I think this is because NPR is no longer receiving funding from the Government, and they no longer have the Government looking over their shoulder with the implied threat of cutting off their funds if they were too partisan.
A couple of months ago, every newspaper I read and almost everybody I talked to was outraged that Trump was going to cut off NPR’s funding. I don’t think most people, including people in the Trump Administration, were really thinking about what would happen if NPR funding were cut off; they were just reacting to Trump, ad hominem. Trump is a petty little man who is vindictive and seems to take pleasure in hurting people. He’s a punch down, kiss-ass up kind of guy, and it is very easy to be critical of everything he does, but sometimes, what he does is better for all of us, and I think making NPR truly independent is one of those times.
My father, who died just before I turned 28, was a secular Jew. However, he was proud of being Jewish. He never said that we were the chosen people, but I suspect that was more because he didn’t believe in a Chooser than anything else. Still, he thought we were better than the people who looked down on us. We were more compassionate, more inclusive, more accepting, all Jewish virtues he strongly believed in.
In a way, I grew up feeling that my compassion and inclusiveness were a result of being Jewish. In a Of course, I believe everybody should be treated equally; I’m Jewish sort of way. Now, watching Israel slaughter Palestinians in Gaza and constantly terrorizing other Palestinians in the West Bank, that all seems like a lie. To a certain extent, who I believed I was now seems like bullshit. It is more than disheartening.
If there is any consultation, it is that I am not alone in my anger and existential grief. Below is a short (-ish) conversation between two very smart, very compassionate people about Israel, Palestine, and being Jewish during the horror of what is going on. Please give it a try.
