Cities have become a breeding ground for dissent and violence and are a very costly place to live. People packed in like sardines are angry and in a constant state of turmoil.

He was sitting there in the white rocking chair on the front porch at the Cracker Barrel in Cookeville, Tenn. about 1 p.m. on May 16 of this year. That is where he said he would be, and as always, he had done exactly what he said he would do. A small, unassuming old man, about 80 years old, baseball cap, blue T-shirt, with a nice blue and white striped dress shirt over it, open as if it were a light jacket. Jeans and sneakers completed the ensemble. No one would know he got shot up badly in Vietnam and was awarded the Silver Star. 

Why do you dislike your neighbor? The simple answer is because there is money in it.

There have been between 160 to 200 million people killed, i.e., they did not die of natural causes but at the hand of their fellow humans, since about 1860. It stands to reason if we could find one root cause of this tragedy, we would ban it from the face of the earth. Yet, I am sure we won’t. Why? The root cause is electricity.  

Brussels, Belgium is the capital of the European Union. Asunción, Paraguay is the capital of (you guessed it) Paraguay. There is important news from both this week, one a note of caution; the other a sigh of relief.  

Decisions that have long-term, potentially irreversible consequences, need a heavy dose of adult thinking. As a society, we are not protecting our children. After all, it takes a village to raise a child.

This week (April 20, 2023), it will be 21 months until the next U.S. presidential inauguration. What are some possible scenarios between now and then?

I thought adulthood would let me make choices as long as they were within my means.

AI development is at the point where researchers are not sure when its intelligence will surpass humanity’s and concede perhaps it already has. Earlier this week, an open letter containing names like Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple) and others gained over 1,000 (latest count 2,137) signatures calling for at least a six-month pause in training the AI systems to be more powerful than Chat GPT-4. Others are saying the pause needs to be 30 years. Good luck with that.

Our lack of acceptance of many issues on the table today is simply because no one has made the effort to explain them in a way we can understand. As long as they can be lazy and just implement such issues by government fiat, they will not attempt to explain them. Such an attitude is an insult to democracy and to our citizens.

Most of us would say our life is more important than material goods. However, here in our neighborhood, two people have lost their lives in the last six months because, in a rapidly developing situation, they thought saving material goods was paramount. They didn’t have time to think it through.

Finally, there is a new political party for those fed up with establishment Washington, both the Rs and Ds. It is called the No Label Party. No Label intends to present a presidential candidate next year who is a middle-of-the-road moderate, not extreme on either the right or left.

Social Security was on fairly stable fiscal ground when founded. But look what has happened since then. Families have gotten much smaller, reducing the number of future contributors to Social Security.

When Vladimir Putin looks back a year, I suspect he is quite startled at how things have turned out.

It is not going to get any better, folks, when it comes to gathering reliable information. The new AI software – already discussed in these pages – will cast further doubt on the veracity of publicly available information.