Science is going to have to research whatever happened to the American backbone. Was it removed from many U.S. babies beginning in the 1950’s? Someone who has been away from this country in the past two years would not recognize or understand what has happened. Total capitulation by the Congress and many of the American public!
Aging has a way of humbling even the most optimistic among us.
Next month I turn 74, and for years I quietly congratulated myself on holding up pretty well. I could still move easily, climb stairs without thinking about it, keep my balance, and stay mentally sharp. On the pickleball courts, I was competing three or four times a week with players much younger than I was. More than a few people kindly told me I looked younger than my age, and I was happy to believe them.
It is easy, when things are going well, to assume the good years will simply continue.
But somewhere in your late 60s or 70s, you begin to understand that aging is rarely dramatic at first. It arrives in increments. A little stiffness here. A slower recovery there. An ache that stays longer than it should. Then one day you realize something that once seemed temporary may now be part of the landscape.
People often describe retirement in three stages: go-go, slow-go, and no-go. The transition between them can be subtle. You do not wake up one morning suddenly old. Instead, certain abilities quietly begin negotiating their exit.
Recently, my right knee decided to begin those negotiations.
After weeks of soreness that I stubbornly diagnosed myself as tendonitis, I finally visited a sports doctor. The X-rays showed moderate osteoarthritis. Nothing catastrophic. No immediate talk of knee replacement. But still, it felt like an announcement: the machinery is wearing down.
For someone who depends on pickleball and walking not simply for exercise, but for emotional balance, that diagnosis carried weight.
With unexpected free time from not playing pickleball, I found myself taking inventory of other signs of aging that I usually keep in the background.
Image by ChatGPT
A dental cap came loose and revealed a badly decayed tooth underneath. At my age, even dental decisions begin sounding like financial planning meetings. A root canal, implant, and crown can cost thousands of dollars, and older people inevitably start doing quiet actuarial math in their heads. How much repair makes sense? How long do we plan for? Younger people rarely think this way. Older people almost always do.
Then there is the mirror.
The thick brown curly hair of my youth has surrendered to gray, thinning strands and a growing bald spot my barber diplomatically works around. The vanity of youth fades eventually, partly by wisdom and partly by necessity. Thankfully, age gives us permission to laugh a little more gently at ourselves.
Sleep has also become an unpredictable companion. I may spend eight hours in bed, but much of it is restless. The afternoons often require a long nap that steals time from walks, errands, conversations, and sunlight. Leg cramps arrive without invitation. Energy has become something to manage instead of something to assume.
My hearing is not what it once was either, likely the accumulated result of decades spent playing music too loudly. I know hearing aids are probably in my future, although I keep hoping technology will improve while prices come down. In the meantime, selective hearing has certain advantages, especially during television news broadcasts.
The larger fear, however, is not physical decline. It is cognitive decline.
My mother spent the final years of her life slowly losing her memory, orientation, and independence. Watching someone you love drift away mentally while remaining physically present leaves a permanent impression. Many people my age carry similar memories of parents, spouses, siblings, or friends.
That experience changes how you look at your own aging.
At 74, I occasionally catch myself wondering whether I am forgetting too much, concentrating less effectively, or slowing down mentally. Some slowing is normal, of course. Aging is not a disease; it is simply life continuing forward. Still, the fear of losing oneself mentally remains one of the shadows that follows many older people quietly through their days.
And yet, perspective matters.
I live among many people my age facing challenges far greater than mine — walkers, surgeries, chronic pain, serious illnesses, loss of spouses, and profound limitations. Compared to many, I remain fortunate. I still have mobility, independence, friendships, and moments of joy that arrive unexpectedly and regularly.
That realization tempers self-pity.
Aging, I am learning, is partly about adaptation. Over the years I have already surrendered running, basketball, and tennis. Perhaps more losses will come. But there is still pleasure in movement, conversation, books, music, laughter, and ordinary mornings that begin without catastrophe.
Pickleball and walking remain especially important to me because they provide more than exercise. They create rhythm, structure, companionship, and peace of mind. Losing some ability does not necessarily mean losing oneself entirely, although it can feel that way in moments of frustration.
Perhaps the real challenge of growing older is learning how to hold gratitude and grief in the same hand.
We mourn what the body once did effortlessly. But we also gain perspective, patience, and a sharper awareness that time is precious. The days matter more because we know they are finite.
David Bowie was right. Time changes us all.
The trick, maybe, is not resisting those changes with bitterness, but facing them with as much grace, humor, realism, and appreciation as we can manage.
I’ve never had much appetite for horror—neither on the screen nor on the page. Tales of cruelty, suffering, and human rot hold little charm for me. And yet, each morning, with a kind of reluctant curiosity, I scan the headlines. That’s where the real horror lives now—brewing not in some gothic castle, but in Washington, D.C..
Consider this week’s “trailers”:
About 6 in 10 say they try to avoid Trump news U.S. debt tops 100% of GDP Inflation spikes to 3.5% as conflict with Iran drives prices higher The U.S. military was losing its edge—after Iran, everyone knows it Americans struggle under rising health insurance premiums after Congress declines to extend tax credits Trump delivers a word-salad response when asked about congressional approval for war
It would be comforting to dismiss all this as fiction. But unlike a novel by Stephen King, there is no final chapter, no closing of the book—only the uneasy sense that the plot is still unraveling.
Image by Chat GPT
The bitter truth is this: the public, in its wisdom or folly, has had a hand in conjuring these monsters. Not with the dramatic panic of Martians descending from the skies, but with ballots cast, loyalties hardened, and reason often set aside.
In Congress, the spectacle borders on the servile. One is reminded less of statesmen and more of Renfield, ever watchful, ever obedient, fearful above all of displeasing the Master.
And the public? There is protest, yes—but it is largely polite, contained, almost quaint. Handmade signs. Chants that echo briefly and fade. No torches, no reckoning—just a low, persistent murmur of discontent.
Meanwhile, the monsters do what monsters do: they carry on, untroubled, perhaps even amused. The republic searches for its kryptonite—and has yet to find it.
I am a bit old to take advantage of Ravikant’s advice on building a brand, a business and a life. His advice is pretty much opposite of what I heard over 50 years ago when I started my career. At that time, it was important to climb the corporate ladder. You got promoted by working long hours and making your boss look good. When your boss looks good, he or she gets promoted and then hopefully good things trickle down to you. Honestly, I can’t say that that strategy worked too well for me in the corporate world. Often the good things and results that I did accomplish went unnoticed and I did not get the credit that I deserved many times in my corporate career. But things are definitely very different. Young people, either out of high school or college, have to think entrepreneurial. Their goal should be to work for themselves and not for corporations or people who can take advantage of them. Technology is so important, particularly understanding how to use AI.
Listed below are some of Ravikant’s words of wisdom. I actually think that the first one on the list is the most important and true.
Earn with your mind, not your time.
Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner.
When you’re studying something, like a geography or history class, and you realize you are never going to use the information, drop the class. It’s a waste of time. It’s a waste of your brain energy.
Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.
There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.
Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.
It’s actually really important to have empty space. If you don’t have a day or two every week in your calendar where you’re not always in meetings, and you’re not always busy, then you’re not going to be able to think.
Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.
A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside of their control.
Spent money on books. I never viewed that as an expense. That’s an investment to me.
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness (Jorgenson, Eric)
If you enjoy wise and pithy aphorisms, I highly recommend this book. Taleb can also be found on YouTube videos in various presentations and lectures about risk, fragility, randomness, probability and other subjects.. He is a very smart man on a variety of topics. It’s a mental and intellectual adventure to keep up and understand what he is saying at times.
Here is a very small taste of his wisdom and thinking from the book…
Maternity’s double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.
If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead – – the more precision, the more dead you are.
It is not possible to have fun when you try.
Decline starts with the replacement of dreams with memories and ends with the replacement of memories with other memories.
The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.
Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age, without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
Avoid calling heroes those who had no other choice.
The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile and power without suffering from it.
The Bed of Procrustes
Those who can’t do shouldn’t teach.
For Seneca, stoic Sage should withdraw from public efforts when unheeded and the state is corrupt beyond repair. It is wiser to wait for self-destruction.
I feel like I am a family member whose father has gone on a drunken murder spree and murdered innocent women and children randomly in the streets. To make it worse, other members of my family support him and make excuses for his insane actions.
“We are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly — very shortly,” he said. “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”
Donald J. Trump 4/1/26 Address to nation
Washington has become the court of Nero, a fiery emperor, submissive courtiers and a ketamine-fueled jester in charge of purging the civil service…Never in history has a President of the United States capitulated to the enemy. Never has anyone supported an aggressor against an ally. Never has anyone trampled on the American Constitution, issued so many illegal decrees, dismissed judges who could have prevented him from doing so, dismissed the military general staff in one fell swoop, weakened all checks and balances, and taken control of social media.
Claude Malhuet on the End of American Democracy, speaking in the French Senate, Tuesday, March 4, 2025.
Most of America is exhausted with all the lies, buffoonery, hypocrisy, incompetence and delusions in Washington. With all the firings (Bondi, Noem etc.) can we fire Donald Trump too? Then we must seriously question the judgment of the people who voted for and still support him.
There was a time when I could sit for hours and read without interruption—five or six books a month, fully absorbed. At 73, that kind of sustained attention has faded. I now struggle to finish three books a month, and even then, my focus isn’t what it once was.
Newport argues that technology—especially the ever-present phone—has rewired our attention. His advice is deceptively simple: keep your phone out of reach. When it’s not within arm’s length, it loses its power to hijack your thinking. A small habit, perhaps, but one that hints at a larger truth: we are living in an age of constant distraction.
That theme—diminished focus—feels like it extends beyond the personal and into the national.
I’ve been watching commentary from Paul Krugman on the current tensions involving the U.S. and Iran. In one particularly sharp observation, he contrasted the so-called “Best and the Brightest” of the Lyndon B. Johnson era—those who guided America into Vietnam—with what he jokingly calls today’s equivalent: “the worst and the dumbest.”
The remark is biting, but it reflects a deeper concern about competence in leadership. Krugman suggests that this problem may not be confined to politics alone but could extend into the military, where experienced leadership has reportedly been sidelined in favor of loyalty.
Watching recent confirmation hearings only reinforces that impression. Time and again, nominees evade straightforward questions—particularly those concerning January 6, 2021 United States Capitol attack and the outcome of the 2020 election. The refusal to engage plainly with basic facts is not just frustrating—it’s revealing.
All of this points to a broader unease: a sense that competence, once expected as a baseline, is now optional.
Leadership matters most in moments of uncertainty, and yet this is when clarity, judgment, and integrity seem in shortest supply. The handling of tensions abroad, particularly involving Iran, reflects not just strategic missteps but a deeper erosion of seriousness.
Even figures like Pete Hegseth—sometimes dismissed as more performative than substantive—have come to symbolize this shift. The comparison to “Baghdad Bob” may be harsh, but it captures a growing perception: rhetoric is replacing reality.
Perhaps Newport’s observation applies more broadly than he intended. When attention fragments, so does judgment. And when judgment falters at the highest levels, the consequences are no longer personal—they are national.
Mr. Trump prides himself on his sporting acumen, boxing included. He might profit from revisiting the old tactic known as rope-a-dope—absorbing an opponent’s early blows while allowing him to exhaust himself.
It increasingly appears that Iran, whether by design or by default, has let the United States and Israel expend their fury in the early rounds. The fantasy of a swift and decisive victory has already begun to fade. The later rounds, as history reminds us, are rarely kind to the overconfident
I am struck by how many baby boomers—people who lived through the long, humiliating unraveling of the Vietnam War—now sit mute as events in Iran unfold with eerie familiarity. Administration officials boast of battlefield successes, air superiority, and naval dominance, seemingly oblivious to the central truth: one can win engagements and still lose a war. We have seen this movie before, and it did not end well.
Robert McNamara and Pete Hegseth could scarcely be more dissimilar in intellect, temperament, or experience. Yet each, in his own way, has helped steer the nation toward costly and unnecessary entanglements—misjudgments dressed up as strategy.
Donald Trump’s reaction to the death of Robert Mueller—equal parts gloating and grievance—barely registered. The public has grown accustomed to his braying bombast. What future historians may judge more harshly is not the noise, but the silence: the quiet acquiescence of supporters and enablers to language that is scurrilous, conduct that is aberrant, and a worldview steeped in grievance and suspicion.
Who, then, is winning?
Perhaps it is the side whose propaganda is merely implausible rather than preposterous. A concealed—and possibly incapacitated—ayatollah now enjoys more perceived credibility than an American president. That alone should give pause.
And who will yield first?
The Israeli citizen huddled in a basement as drones darken the sky? The Iranian civilian surveying shattered streets and calling it survival? Or the American consumer, grumbling at the gas pump before heading to the shore or a matinee?
“We didn’t tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise,” he said. “Who knows better about surprise than Japan, OK? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor, OK? Right?”
There was some laughter from the officials and journalists gathered in the room. “You believe in surprise, I think, much more so than us,” he added.
As Mr. Trump spoke, Ms. Takaichi (Japanese Prime Minister) widened her eyes and appeared to take a deep breath. She kept her arms crossed in her lap and did not speak.
My commentary:
Trump should be very careful about “Pearl Harbor references. The United States was in negotiations with Iran when it launched its attack. According to Oman diplomats who were facilitating the meetings, negotiations were going quite well and peace seemed reasonable as Iran had agreed to many of U.S. demands. Then the U.S. began to bomb Iran. In December 1941, the United States and Japan were also in the midst of diplomatic negotations and this provided confidence to the U.S. that no hostile acts from Japan were imminent. On December 7, 1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbor
2. Any journalist or official who laughed at that remark is an idiot and not worthy of being in a room with the stature of the Japanese Prime Minister and she would be right to consider the laughter as an insult to her personally and Japan.
3. Trump desperately needs not to make any more enemies or to make enemies feel more embittered to the United States. Japan, like most of the world is getting screwed from rising oil prices. And Trump wonders why no one takes him seriously.
Esot-eric 