Rock band The Black Crowes drew loud boos and fans left a recent concert after frontman Chris Robinson mocked audience members who started “U.S.A.” chants.
“Thanks for the geography lesson, I don’t know what you have to be so proud of right now,” Robinson told the crowd, according to reports.
When fans began booing, Robinson said, “For those of you f—ing booing us, some of us are not afraid, and we most assuredly are not f—ing ignorant, so thank you.
Gas prices can easily rise to over $6 per gallon in the next week or so as our oil reserves are at a very low level. Iran continues to pull the chains of Trump, Hegseth and Rubio in negotiations to end the war. The White House, between the UFC fight stage and the ballroom, looks like one of the deserted Atlantic City casino buildings Trump left by Steel Pier. Trump officials stonewall on Epstein files, Trump’s insider stock trades and proposed $1.8 billion for reparations for January 6 vandals.
There still exists a sizable part of the population who supports Trump for reasons that I can’t fathom at this stage.
Roughly one in five lawyers who worked in the government at the end of 2024 had left by March of this year, according to a New York Times analysis of federal employment data.
Along with the usual retirements and turnover in the federal work force, the last year saw deep staffing cuts and the resignations of some staff members who objected to Mr. Trump’s policies. Their departures show how rapidly the president has eroded the image of the federal government as the gold standard for lawyers seeking public service roles.
At the moment, the United States is negotiating with a regime that President Trump claimed we had already changed, to open a strait that was supposed to be open last month, and to end a nuclear program that we said we had obliterated… Not only was Iran able to immediately and decisively close the Strait of Hormuz; it’s now clear that the Iranian regime inflicted significant damage on American bases in the region and significant damage on oil and natural gas production around the Persian Gulf. In addition, in spite of U.S. air superiority, the Islamic republic was able to damage or destroy at least 42 manned and unmanned American aircraft.
Six in 10 Americans (59%) say they read at least one book in 2025, a new YouGov survey finds. That’s in line with similar YouGov surveys in 2024 and 2023. Most Americans who did read books only finished a handful of books, while a minority of Americans were plowing through the pages. Here’s what YouGov found about Americans’ 2025 book-reading habits:
Besides the 40% of Americans who didn’t read any books in 2025, another 27% read one to four books. And 13% read five to nine books. That leaves 19% of Americans who read 10 or more books, including 9% who read 10 to 19 books, 6% who read 20 to 49 books, and 4% who say they read 50 or more books.
(I am surprised that 10% of Americans read more than 20 books per year. I don’t know many in my circle of friends and acquaintenances who have read even five books a year.)
Excellent essay in today’s New York Times How to Be Old by Roger Rosenblatt. He offers some advice to seniors that I have excerpted a portion below…There are thousands of articles, videos and media offering life advice to those whose vast experience and life lessons should make them invulnerable to unnecessary guidance.
Don’t forget to bestow confidence. It’s the best thing you can give someone you love. Saying “You can do it” to a loved one in a situation in which that person has self-doubt — taking an exam, making a speech, writing a poem — means more than any sweet profession of affection.
Don’t share despair. Not even with your friends. Not that they won’t sympathize. It’s just too much to ask of someone dear to you to bear your burdens.
Look only at the rim. Disregard the impediments to your well-being — a noisy neighbor, a treacherous colleague — and concentrate instead on where you are headed.
Turning 74 next month, here is my philosophy guiding my actions and thinking for the next few years (?) or decade (?)
1. Close the circle. Stay in touch and communicate with family members and friends who reciprocate with their interest. If possible, visit them or call. If your relationship is based on text messages and infrequent e-mails. Close friendships are like marriage, “till death do us part.”
2. Avoid nursing homes, hospitals and doctors in that order. Their focus is not so much on improving your life but treating you as if you are on your way to death.
3. Watchmovies and TV shows produced before 2020. Listen to the music made before the 1990s. Feeling patriotic, read about American history that occurred before 1945.
4. If I watch a sporting event, movie or TV show that lasts more than two hours from my recliner, I should expect to miss half of it.
5. Don’t vote! I have probably voted 55 times or more. Given the state of our country and the lack of leadership nationally and locally, I can’t think of any activity that has produced less desired results. I would also recommend that at a certain point, seniors avoid being involved in politics, or even having a great interest in them. Now, I speak as someone with no heirs or grandchildren, so my opinion is a bit self-serving.
6. Avoid most advice on money, diets, exercise, life insuranceandaging. Including this one..
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 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 