How to Break the Software Bullies’ Grip, Restore Sanity to an Overpopulated World, and Maybe Get Famous and Rich Doing So

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law.” — Folk saying about ownership
“Own the libs.” — Right-wing political slogan that helped bring us deep social division and Trump

How do our tech titans, past and present, resemble Josef Stalin?

They want to control and centralize everything. They want to put all your digitized data — all the detailed records of your business life, love, work and politics — as well as all the means of using them, in “clouds,” in their possession and under their control. And over the past decade they have largely succeeded in doing so.

For a few bright years in the 1980s and 1990s, personal computers promised to personalize and democratize computing and data handling. But the Internet let software titans turn your personal computer, and lately your smartphone, into mere dumb terminals serving as gateways to their digital empires in their clouds. They control how you compute, what programs you use, what you see on your screens, and most importantly, when and how you can access and use your own data and whether others (including government and malefactors worldwide) can.

They have centralized business, commerce, social life, and politics to an extent that Stalin, in his wildest dreams, never could have imagined. His ghost is green with envy.

In so doing, the Internet titans have subverted the promise of personal computers, and even some of the promise of smartphones. These personal devices could have been great tools of democratization. They could have “leveled the playing field” by putting all your data and computing literally in your own hands, and doing the same for every small shop and restaurant in America.

But that’s not how things turned out. The vast bulk of computing power, data storage, and the economic, social and political power they generate now lies in the hands of “Big Tech.” That’s a deceptively benign moniker for a very few gigantic privately-owned (and obscenely rich) corporations, including Alphabet (which owns Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (which owns Facebook), and Microsoft.

It’s hard to prove that any of them has unlawfully achieved or maintained a “monopoly” in the traditional language of antitrust law. Settled legal norms of “market power” and “market share” are hard to apply to them because the economic influence of their software and hardware is so broad, deep and difficult to unwind, even for experts. But their practical dominance of commerce and Internet discourse is evident to all of us who shop or wander online.

As these firms have broadened and entrenched their practical power, they have subjected you and me to a daily avalanche of intrusive and disruptive importunities from strangers: online ads, political pitches, conspiracy theories, “breaking news,” a veritable cesspool of lies, inventions and exaggerations, and more. Sometimes this online sewage spurts out of our monitors in unwanted full-motion video. Sometimes it distracts our attention by jumping around in the margins of web pages. Very often, it uses sex as a come-on. Sometimes it assaults our ears with disruptive and ear-busting simulacra of “music.” In addition to on-screen interruptions in almost every website we visit, it appears in unwanted texts, robocalls, and a daily torrent of email spam. And throughout this entire process, Big Tech vacuums up our private data and uses it as it pleases, subject only to nascent, belated and feeble federal, state and EU laws, which are poorly and inconsistently enforced.

All of these intrusions on our privacy and thought processes have three things in common: (1) they are unexpected and unwanted; (2) they interrupt our attention and trend of thought, turning us into digital scatterbrains: and (3) they produce profit, or at least the hope of profit, for private firms that exploit our supposedly “own” personal data and devices as means of imposing all this on us. They seem more intrusive — and they are supposedly more effective for those who pay for them — than print and TV advertising precisely because they use our own private data to target us. When you consider their effects on small businesses, which generally lack the money and sophistication to use them, as well as individuals, you can begin to appreciate how drastically so-called “Big Tech” has transformed our economy and our daily life through unnecessary and undesirable centralization of data.

It’s no secret that small retail shops and restaurants are in steep decline nationwide. You can go “downtown” in nearly every small town or big city in America and see some vacated, some even boarded up. The pandemic and its dismal aftermath are partly to blame, but the roots of this decline are decades old.

It all started in the 1950s, with the proliferation of suburbs, new roads and highways, and the cars needed to traverse them. When I was a young adult in Southern California, we thought nothing of driving thirty miles, one way, to go to dinner, or sometimes even lunch. It’s hard for a restaurant to sustain a personal reputation and regular clientele in a world like that, practically devoid of casual “walk-ins.” Today that on-the-road lifestyle is waning under the influence of massive traffic congestion, increasing fossil-fuel pollution (despite afterburners), distaste for the suburban lifestyles with far too much time spent in a car and on the road, and awareness of the role of excessive personal travel on climate change. But foot traffic has yet to replace it.

The next big change was much more recent. In the past decade or so, Internet recommendations by such sites as Around Me, Google, Tripadvisor and Yelp virtually replaced (pun intended) word-of-mouth recommendations from friends, neighbors and relatives. So posted reviews by unknown patrons, many visitors from far away, began to replace recommendations from people you know personally.

Now that the Covid pandemic appears to be winding down, people and small businesses (the ones that survived!) seem to be yearning to return to an earlier era of walk-ins, personal service and in-person human relations. We all crave small grocery stores, convenience stores and restaurants whose vendors know us and our preferences personally, or at least have human staff that can attend to our needs in person. Most of us abhor those supposedly automated telephone queues that trap us in seemingly endless, repetitive message loops and give us all the options and information but what we are looking for.

This is especially so for restaurant dining, the quintessential retail social occasion. For me at least, the mechanical, regimented, soulless experience of reserving through Open Table, or ordering online through one of the many online food delivery services, is as tasteful as spoiled milk. And this is so without even considering the many features that harassed programmers neglected, like reserving an outside table during pleasant weather or during the pandemic, or receiving information on how busy or crowded the restaurant is now. (I won’t even mention reports, during the pandemic, of delivery services adding or taking as much as 30% of the bills from small restaurants, whose profit margins are, at best, in the 5-10% range.)

So how can all this change for the better? The solution, I think, is to get the software and websites out of the hands of Big Tech and put them in the hands of the small-business or restaurant owner. (The hardware, I think, is already there, in the form of a desktop or laptop, even if only the owner’s personal device.)

It’s neither hard nor expensive to register a proprietary Internet domain name through ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), and to get (or repurpose) a desktop or laptop and an Internet connection. The only thing missing, in most cases, is specialized, decentralized small-business Internet software, running on the business’ own small computers and providing its unique Internet face to the world, while managing its own internal operations, free from domination or interference by “Big Tech” or other outside intermediaries.

This software would involve just a few basic modules: (1) public Internet face, (2) receiving, including accounts payable, (3) inventory, (4) online ordering, purchasing and/or (for restaurants) reservations, with fields for special requests and replies, (5) accounts receivable, (6) pickup and delivery (by USPS or private courier) and (7) HR and employee matters. (Part (7) could be separate or integrated.)

Ideally, the software would be largely and easily customizable, with ways for businesses to insert such things as photos, audio/music, menus, lists of “specials” and other unique material, so as to customize their offerings and their public faces. But the basic public data interface would be unchanging, so that a customer who learned to use the site of one small shop or restaurant could use the sites of others without re-education. There might be special features (included or optional at additional cost) like Q-code scanners for incoming shipments, to put the product IDs and quantities directly and automatically into inventory, perhaps with prices paid added manually. The software might even have optional tax modules for preparing local, state and/or federal tax returns at the push of a virtual button.

Programs like these are basically a matter of simple accounting, data storage, and online presentation. They could be generalized for almost any operating system and small-computer hardware, perhaps now with the help of AI. They could be made available to retail shops and restaurants on an extended free-trial basis (say, six months) with later payment made as a small percentage of profits, presumably much lower than Amazon’s royalty. Businesses that now sell on Amazon could thus try out a localized computer system entirely under their control before cutting their ties to Amazon. The end result for small shops and restaurants would be independence, agency, and absolute control of their operations, public face, private data and public image, as well as permanent refuge from the monster that ate retail (you know who!).

Is this already being done? Perhaps, but not enough. There are a few non-titan intermediaries, such as Door Dash and Instacart, that assist in online ordering and delivery from restaurants and supermarkets. But they lack individual identification with the businesses they serve; they take a big cut of the profits; and they take control of the purchasing and delivery experience away from the small-shop or restaurant owner.

That’s why so many small businesses rely on Facebook/Meta for their Internet presence and on Amazon to sell their stuff. Yet in so doing, they cede their public presence, and their agency, not to mention much of their operations, to the likes of Mark Zuckerberg. That’s something I would rather stick a fork in my eye than do.

It’s not yet thirty years since Bill Clinton, on Al Gore’s recommendation, opened the Internet—originally a secret US-government DARPA project—for general commercial and personal use. At the beginning, I and many others saw that opening as a massive boon to humanity, giving everyone access to all of human knowledge and every thinker, writer and small business, in theory, access to a global audience.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t turned out exactly that way. Big Tech has centralized and dominated commerce and communication in a way that Stalin never could, and on a global scale. The few smaller online intermediaries just do more of the same, albeit on a smaller scale: they act as intermediaries, take a share of the pie, and take control of the data. Isn’t it time for independent programmers to reverse that trend, give people and small businesses some independent agency, and bring back the Internet’s early promise? Who knows? Those programmers might become the next tech billionaires, this time by decentralizing commerce and communication and giving individuals and small entities back their agency.

Endnote: My Own Personal Data-Control Journey. Years ago, I kept all my own data stored on my personal computer’s internal hard drive, backed up on an external hard drive. The backing up was and still is easy and cheap: a two terabyte external drive costs now $72, while 100 megabytes of cloud storage on Google costs me about $20 per year. For two terabytes of storage on Google’s cloud, I would have to pay (if proportional) something like $400 every year.

So why do I keep any of my data in the cloud when I could have all my data doubly or triply backed up on my own desktop for less money and no recurring payments? Because Google, in ways big and small, has made it difficult if not impossible for me to use my own local internal solid-state storage (256 Gb) on my Chromebook. Out of sheer frustration, I switched back from a Chromebook to a MacBook Air two years ago, only to discover that Apple now also makes it hard, in ways big and small, not to use its cloud storage, for which I pay about a dollar a month for 50 Gb.

So now, after using my new Apple laptop for two years, and after backing up all my documents and many of my photos on its internal storage, I still have nearly 400 Gb of internal SSD storage unused, on the machine that I bought and paid for. I’m an unwilling, dissenting and much aggrieved captive of Apple’s and Google’s clouds, where much, if not most, of my life data reside, if only in duplicate.

Is this dissatisfaction just theoretical, the discomfort of an aging, old-school purist? Hell, no! My typical day is disrupted, intruded on, and partially wasted considering and deleting ads, text messages, emails from strangers, and all sorts of for-profit and not-for-profit come-ons that some rogue marketing genius (or AI), working through the cloud, thinks I might possibly be interested in. I can spend a half-hour to an hour every day just deleting unwanted texts and messages from my e-mail inbox. And no matter how many ostensible methods so-called “Big Tech” provides to make unsubscribing easier, the tide of unwanted bilge slopping up daily on my digital decks increases relentlessly.

I understand that we, the public, get to use a lot of complex software for “free,” at the cost of putting up with all this intrusion, annoyance and assault on our privacy, security and agency. But no one ever asked me to make this tradeoff. And as my search requests on Amazon’s site become increasingly useless due to all the clutter from Sponsored but non-responosive search results, I’m not sure I would make this tradeoff today even if fully informed. As for Facebook, I deleted it from my computers and my life about seven years ago, for reasons outlined here.

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Telling Bezos Goodbye, or the Real Revenge of the Nerds

For me, today was the last straw.

It wasn’t enough when Bezos apparently commanded his WaPo editorial staff not to endorse Kamala Harris. (I didn’t think that made much difference to the “low information” Fox fiends who put Trump over the top.) It wasn’t enough that I used to be able to find a precise product on Amazon with a well-thought-out search request but now have to wade through pages of irrelevant “Sponsored” products, as if computers could no longer apply basic logic or handle detail.

But Bezos reportedly telling his editorial staff to focus on free markets and “personal liberties” while our democracy melts down was too much for me. I’m now going to cancel my WaPo subscription, and I’m committed to using my spare time in retirement to avoid shopping on Amazon. Already I’ve discovered that Home Depot has a website for online inventory, product selection and purchase/delivery much like Amazon’s, and I’ve started using it for the hardware and tools that I buy.

Then I started thinking more broadly. Today’s oligarchs are now jumping on the bandwagon of despotism, just as the leaders of I.G. Farben (maker of the Zyklon B Holocaust death gas), Krupp, and Seimens did in Hitler’s time. But there’s a big difference between some of today’s oligarchs and Hitler’s.

Hitler’s goons had established vast industrial empires of steel, aluminum, wheels, big machines, chemicals, and gigantic plants to make them. In contrast, many of today’s oligarchs have built their empires on the shifting sands of software. That means that their empires are much easier to topple and reproduce, especially Bezos’ and Zuckerberg’s.

Take Bezos, for instance. His Amazon sells others’ stuff. Suppose a software startup offered similar website software to every vendor of stuff in our nation. Suppose it put all the local sellers you once used to buy from on line. Suppose you could pick out their products at home, with precise searches that actually work. Suppose you could choose among in-store pickup, delivery by USPS, or more expensive (and faster) delivery by courier, or perhaps even delivery by an Uber of Lyft driver trained and software-programmed for package logistics.

Would you purchase online that way and kiss Bezos and his threatened right-wing monopoly of online retail goodbye? I would.

Funny thing, that. Trump and Musk are in the process of firing tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of federal workers. Surely many of them are software designers or programmers. Many may have accepted Musk’s “resign now, get paid until September” plan. Some may want to use that down time to start a business, especially one that levels the playing field.

They could call their product “Freedom Shopper.” They could make versions that run on Apple, Google, Microsoft, Linux and foreign-made machines. They could make it work on cheap machines within the price range of every local shop now losing market share to Amazon. And so they could help bring back local shops from the ranks of twenty-first-century zombies.

How hard would it be? I think not too hard. It probably takes a lot of non-essential subroutines to display all those “sponsored” products and collect the ad money from their manufacturers or distributors. And take a look at the category line on Amazon’s site: most small shops don’t have a pharmacy, a grocery store, and all the other stuff that Amazon has put together in its quest to become the monster that ate retail.

The legal impediments I know something about. I spent some 32 years consulting and teaching about intellectual property. The most common form of IP protection for software is copyright; but it doesn’t protect ideas, only the precise form in which they are coded and/or displayed. Some software ideas are patented, but it’s not too hard for experienced patent lawyers to check that, and not too hard for clever programmers to work around the patents. And all the providers and users of “Freedom Shopper” software could share the expense of this professional advice.

So here’s my simple dream. Some oligarchs truly believe in democracy, even if it doesn’t line their own pockets. I see them and progressive venture capitalists getting together to finance one or more software startups that can let every local seller become a mini-Amazon.

In so doing, they could not just slow the relentless march of right-wing monopoly far quicker than even valiant public servants like Lina Khan, the doughty head of the FTC now reportedly about to resign. They could also help restore the fabric of local communities, whether in city or country. They could bring small shops back into the mainstream of retail commerce where, until Amazon came along, they’d always been.

Imagine being able to support your local shops in person and—whenever the weather is bad, you are too tired, or the next pandemic rages—on line. And when the “Freedom Shopper” site made a copyrighted change in programming or GUI, as software nerds are wont to do, you would learn that change only once, and it would apply most everywhere you shopped.

Nerds and small retailers arise! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

If you know any nerds who are out of work, especially any of those now leaving government in droves, please send them a link!

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Will Neville Trump Bring On World War III?

Every male who’s ever encountered a grammar-school bully knows the best way to make sure the bullying never stops: don’t fight back. It doesn’t matter whether you get a bloody nose, get knocked down, or even “lose.” All you have to do is fight back. The bully will then back off, if only to find an easier target.

It’s tragic that lessons most of us learn in grammar school are lost in geopolitics, even though history reinforces them. The parallels between pre-war Europe and our global dilemma today are so close that family, if not personal, memory can inform us.

Before World War II, Britain was the democratic global superpower, just as the US is today. It had an empire on which the Sun never set. It had been among the chief victors in World War I and had helped impose harsh terms on the loser, the Kaiser’s imperial Germany.

Yet when Nazi Germany reached to grab the Sudetenland from hapless Czechoslovakia, Neville Chamberlain apparently hadn’t learned the grammar-school lesson. The result was a year of false peace and the most brutal, catastrophic war in human history, in which an estimated 50-80 million people died prematurely. (And that “peace” was all the more deceptive for giving Hitler yet another year to build weapons and organize his Panzers.)

Now comes Neville Trump. Personal parallels fail. Chamberlain was a well-educated Conservative British pol, with decades of service in high offices. Trump is a poorly educated, multiply failed businessman and compulsive liar whose accidental first presidency was his only prior public office. And not only is Trump a bully himself. He apparently suffers from senile dementia.

Like Neville Chamberlain, Trump is promising “Peace in our time.” Yet in coveting Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal, he sometimes seems eager to emulate Putin, on a much smaller scale, rather than stop him. Nevertheless, the grammar-school lesson still applies to Putin, who may have eyes on Greenland, too.

Members of Congress, including Republican Senators, know well the lesson of Chamberlain. Some recited it before Trump’s recent win. And though Congress has largely abdicated its power to declare war since our disgrace in Vietnam, our Constitution still gives that power to Congress alone.

If Congress has the power to declare war, surely it has the duty to avoid another global one by facing down a global aggressor without involving our own troops. It seems that a host of Republican Senators, nearly all of them males, have cravenly forgotten the grammar-school lesson.

No doubt the interwar British felt themselves partly immune, protected by the English Channel that later saved their defeated army at Dunkirk. No doubt Neville Trump considers us immune, protected by our nuclear umbrella (which he appears intent on denying Europe) and by the vast oceans that separate us from Russia. No doubt he is too dull to foresee the catastrophic global economic, social and environmental consequences of even a “minor” World War III in Europe, say, over Poland, Romania, the Baltics and Finland. He can’t seem to fathom the vastly increased risk of such a widened war going nuclear.

Britain learned the fragility of distance in the Blitz. In our age of hypersonic intercontinental ballistic missiles and artificial satellites, its protection is even more an illusion.

The fate of our cultural and intellectual mothers and fathers, who are now our NATO allies, is our fate, too. An imperialist dictator’s war that touches them will be ours, too. There is no way we can avoid it, if only to supply the much greater quantities of arms and ammo they will need to fight when Putin’s insatiable imperial ambition turns to them, and when time has made his war machine far more formidable.

The best time to fight back and stop the bully is now, when his forces are stalled in Ukraine, and when we can do so at no cost in blood to us or to the rest of Europe.

Ukraine shares our thirst for democracy and openness. Its leader Zelenskyy does, too. He’s one of the most heroic and sympathetic leaders of our new century. If we cannot find it in our hearts to spend a few bucks to continue supporting him and his brave people—and in the process to modernize our own drones and other non-nuclear weapons—we can be certain that immense suffering will follow. And that suffering will not be confined to Europe, let alone Ukraine.

As for nuclear weapons, the very same lesson applies. The time to stop the bully is now, not when the fighting is on multiple fronts, perhaps closer to Moscow.

Now Putin knows that international norms and agreements—not to mention non-medieval morality—forbid bald, unprovoked aggression for territorial conquest. Yet when/if the war expands to Poland, Romania, the Baltics and Finland, the temptation for our allies to march on Moscow, or to bomb it or the Kremlin using stealth aircraft, missiles or drones, will become irresistible.

It is only then that Putin will feel backed into a corner, like the cornered rat in the St. Petersburg staircase that formed his worldview. That would be almost certain to provoke a nuclear response, and perhaps a nuclear war that would extinguish our species.

Endnote on “Freeloading” by our NATO Allies. Of course it would be helpful, right and effective for the Baltics, Europe and Scandinavia to do more in their own defense. (Ukraine is doing all of which it is conceivably capable, including maintaining a home-made drone industry.) Nevertheless, there’s a huge problem in timing.

It took us all of the eighty years since WWII to reach the pinnacle of advanced armament, global reach, and instantaneous electronic coordination that the US inhabits as the preeminent superpower today. It would take at least a decade for the Baltics, Europe and/or Scandinavia to reach similar heights. It might take longer, simply because those powers, unlike the US, enjoy no common, universal language and have diverse military supply chains, customs and commands.

Without American help now, some—perhaps even most—of them would become involuntary parts of a New Russian Empire. Not only would that be a gigantic human tragedy: Gulags across Europe. It would mark a catastrophic shift in the global balance of power.

With power comes responsibility. If the US shirks its responsibility now, just to punish what Trump sees as “freeloaders,” the world now and our progeny later will be terribly sorry. And our green Earth will be a far darker and more dangerous place.

And don’t forget where the money we spend on helping Ukraine and our NATO Allies goes. The vast majority of it goes into our own defense industries, to buy the arms and equipment we supply others.

Not only does that expense help keep us safe for an uncertain and dangerous future. It also keeps alive our dying manufacturing sector. It thus supports good jobs for workers without a college education.

Finally, that money supports an infrastructure of “hard” technology and science underlying hard goods and global coordination, far beyond the “Big Tech” of software implementing mere business and logistic ideas. Like it or not, some of the greatest advances in human knowledge have come from the quest for better weapons, including nuclear ones. That was the origin of our nuclear power industries, which even now are helping us hold back climate change.

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A New Dark Age

In the grey dawn of the second month of the second term, the grim chain of cause and effect gleams dully. We are entering a new Dark Age.

The man who is now president is a tyrant by nature. His first term was his apprenticeship. (Savor the irony of the title of his “reality show” that lifted him from repeated business failure to political success.)

Never mind that a traditional apprenticeship was seven years, and the first term only four. Never mind that his analytical intelligence is self-evidently at the very bottom of our presidential roster, and likely below rank average for our entire population. Never mind that he has taken extraordinary measures to keep his college grades and test scores secret.

He doesn’t need analytical intelligence to rule, because his emotional intelligence is off the scale. He needn’t discern actual cause and effect because he’s so damn good at exploiting emotional cause and effect. He gets millions of people to believe things that are not so, to see false effects of false causes, and to knuckle under despite grave moral, political and social qualms. Boosted by quisling right-wing and “social” media, he’s become a master of mass deception who would make Orwell frown.

According to the Washington Post’s careful tally, he told 30,573 lies and near-lies in his first term. From all appearances, that firehose of falsehoods continued during the interregnum, although the WaPo’s tally didn’t. The result: our voters re-elected him by a narrow margin.

He won by playing on voters’ emotions and tribalism. He accused the people who pick our crops, tend our homes and kids, and install our drywall of being murderers and rapists. He painted innocent and hapless refugees from gang violence as demonic pet eaters. He managed to get white, Black, Hispanic, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—citizens and migrants alike—all to suspect and fear each other, without enough of us asking, “Is there any scapegoat he’s left out?”

It would be worthy of hilarious laughter if it all weren’t so horrific. As an obscure Nazi-era German media oligarch once reportedly said of himself and Hitler, our free voters have just anointed as their leader the greatest demagogue in human history. And he’s far more insidious than Hitler, whose screaming tirades were emotionally repellent, or Julius Caesar, who had no TV or social media to egg him on and spread his lies.

But let’s not look back. It’s too late for that. The deed is done.

We must look forward. And how do we do that? We must reason from what he is, what he has been and what he has done.

After eight years of the most intense media scrutiny ever bestowed on a single individual, his character is an open book. His lodestars are grievance, tribalism, retribution, vengeance, dominance, and loyalty. He sums it all up for us, every so often, in his favorite words, “win,” “winning” and “winner.” He reportedly called the soldiers who died saving the Enlightenment from Hitler “losers.”

He’s converted politics—our species’ means of governing itself—into a bizarre and increasingly deadly blood sport, something like the fictional “Hunger Games.” Already he’s referred to himself (he says jokingly) as “king.” And he did promise to be a “dictator,” albeit only on his first day.

But that’s not just how he sees himself. That’s how he acts. His attitude toward law and order is the same as it’s always been throughout his decades-long mostly-failing business career: dispute, deny, delay, distract, defend against, and generally ignore the rules. As heiress Leona Helmsley once said about taxes, rules are for “little people.” They are just obstacles to crush under his heels as he strives for dominance. And our supine Supreme Court has acquiesced, making him immune from criminal responsibility for “official” acts. Our Senate has become his doormat.

“Dominance” means that anyone he doesn’t like, for whatever reason, must suffer. If you didn’t see that before, just look at the way he turned on Ukraine and its doughty leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had riled him by refusing to find dirt on Hunter Biden in Ukraine (the subject of his first impeachment.) This week he threw Zelenskyy to Vladimir Putin like a hawk throwing a dead mouse to its chick. And the Republican “hawks,” who once resisted the Russian bear at the risk of nuclear Armageddon, stood by.

But this same week, he did something even more consequential for us. He fired once-four-star-General Charles Q. Brown, Jr. as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of our armed forces. That’s the second key step in his personal takeover of the world’s most powerful, professional, restrained, and law-abiding military. The first (in case you didn’t notice it) was insuring that once-four-star General Lloyd J. Austin III got replaced by once-Major Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. Now the “top brass” of our once world-beating military are in our rogue president’s pocket.

But that’s only the beginning of the frightful chain of cause and effect that’s now shaping up. Even as our military is falling under the thumb of a demagogue, it’s also getting weaker.

Our aircraft carriers, destroyers, big bombers and other Cold-War means of projecting military power abroad are becoming obsolete. They are all sitting ducks for much cheaper and more nimble drones, which can be made autonomous, deployed in swarms, and imbued with artificial intelligence. Yet our military-industrial complex continues to churn out “big hardware” because it’s immensely expensive and immensely profitable.

Ike famously warned us about our military-industrial complex. But it’s not just a political liability. It’s a military one, too. It continues producing the last century’s huge, lumbering and mindlessly expensive war machines while missing the drone revolution that will win the next war. And in a final irony, Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine sidelines that nation’s revolutionary home-made-drone industry, leaving it for Europe’s scientists, engineers and military industries to adopt, assist and exploit.

Yet another military-related domestic trend is threatening us at home. A lot of people who never heard of it before now know about the Insurrection Act. It’s an obscure 1807 statute, enacted sixteen years after our Constitution was ratified. It allows the President to deploy our federal armed forces, and to federalize and deploy states’ National Guards, to put down a “rebellion” or “insurrection.” It’s considered an exception to the later Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits deployment of federal troops for purposes of domestic law enforcement.

The legal space between the two statutes is big enough to move an aircraft carrier through, let alone a tank. By the time the supine Supreme Court gets a chance to fill it, a lot of protestors could be dead, and we could be in a second civil war.

So now the dismal logic of Trump’s fevered mind is taking shape. We no longer need a world-beating military—or the cutting edge science and engineering that supports it—if only we accept a new world order. All we have to do is admire, befriend and emulate the world’s existing tyrants, as he apparently does Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. (Trump seems more reluctant to cede a sphere of influence to Xi Jinping because his main threat is economic, not military, at least to us as distinguished from Taiwan.) Then we can share the world most amicably with them by dividing it into spheres of influence.

All we need our own grand military for is keeping “order” within our own sphere of influence. It can do that by intimidating, if not annexing, Canada, Greenland, Mexico, the Panama Canal, the EU, Australia and New Zealand, and by suppressing domestic dissent. Then we can appease China and Russia by throwing them the bones of Taiwan and Ukraine, respectively. An obsolete military based on sitting-duck carriers, destroyers, bombers, tanks and Blackhawks is plenty strong enough for that, even if the Blackhawks occasionally do bring down passenger aircraft.

Think my pessimism is getting out over its skis? Then take twenty-five minutes to watch this episode of Washington Week. In it, four top reporters on the national scene examine how Trump’s recent acts and utterances portend a return to nineteenth-century imperialism, with a global regime of “spheres of influence.” It’s the only way to make sense of them besides senile dementia. And, seen in that light, they do have their usual puerile, facile logic.

I never read Machiavelli’s The Prince until late in my middle age. When I did, I was appalled. I had thought that the book would teach some positive moral or practical lesson. But its lessons were all grossly negative. What I learned was the plight of medieval Italian city-states, each run by a duke much like Trump, bent on dominance and “winning” at any internal cost. The only details I remember now were two incidents in which such worthies invited delegations from rival city-states for peace talks, and then slaughtered the entire delegations by surprise, in cold blood.

Imagine that mindset controlling nukes! Back to the Dark Age! It was perfect for Trump’s personality and mindset. And that is precisely where we’re headed under his “leadership.”

If you’re uncomfortable with that, you have two choices. You can find refuge in one of the world’s few remaining democracies and hope that: (a) it will admit you as a citizen or resident despite your own country’s (and Europe’s) increasing antipathy toward migrants; and (b) it will remain, at least for your miserable lifetime, independent of Trump’s sphere of influence, which now threatens to include all but China’s and Russia’s. Or you can protest, resist and fight to save our own democracy, with all the strength and intelligence of which you are capable.

There’s no middle ground but complicity. If you choose to resist, I’ll join you in the February 28 universal boycott for equality. I won’t be spending a penny for twenty-hours, online or otherwise. It’s just a small gesture of protest, and it’s just a start; but it’s the least an old man can do.

Endnote. In March 2022, less than a month after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I wondered when the US would be sending such cheap drones to Ukraine. Apparently we didn’t yet have them, because Ukraine has had to develop its own, domestic cheap-drone industry, using civilian and “hobby” drones.


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Democracy’s Evanescence

When Ben Franklin emerged from our constitutional convention, an anonymous woman asked him what form of government our Founders had devised. “A Republic, Ma’am, if you can keep it,” Franklin famously replied.

It’s now increasingly clear that we cannot. If present trends continue, our Republic will not last through Trump’s second term. Nor will the Western Enlightenment, whose four pillars are Reason, Science, Democracy and Equality. Though subjects of frequent verbal genuflection, these pillars no longer serve as practical supports of US government. They lie cracked and broken in the sands of history.

All four are but abstract ideas. If the truth be told, they are tenuous. They require intelligence and often robust education to appreciate fully. They require diligence, self-discipline and self-restraint to remain standing.

Next to the hopes, fears, dreams, lusts, rages, loyalties, fealties, jealousies and desires of daily life, they are but shadows. Next to our evolution from small tribes of about thirty individuals, each ruled absolutely by an alpha-male ape, they are a minor polish on our species’ DNA.

The truth of our species lies in history. Our written records go back only five or six millennia. During all that time, there have been only a handful of democracies lasting even a century: Greece’s tiny city-states (Athens and Sparta), Rome, the British Empire, and the US.

For years I’ve been thinking how to quantify this point in terms of time elapsed and people affected. Suppose we could integrate (in the sense of calculus) the number of people, multiplied by the time each lived under any democracy, over the course of recorded history, and divide the result by the same integral over everyone’s lifetime (regardless of type of government). Wouldn’t we then have a rough measure, weighted by population and time, of how prominent in human history democracy has been?

Of course we can’t do that. We don’t have anything like the necessary data. But we can make a rough estimate simply but noting that the democracies we all study in history have been few, limited in their shares of global population, and short lived.

Take the Greek city-states, for example. The only reason we know of them at all was that their own historians and “philosophers” left copious and notable written records. But their populations were tiny (on a global scale), and their lifetimes—a few centuries at most—so short that we can safely neglect them.

For all of human history until 1776, Rome and the Brits were the biggies. In recent times, the US and the EU are worthy of note, if only because of their relatively large populations. Let’s do some arithmetic.

Rome’s recorded democracy lasted from some time in the middle of the millennium before Christ until Julius Caesar’s civil wars turned it into an empire. Let’s be generous and give it 700 years. As for population, Rome’s democracy at its height affected much of what is now Europe and part of Africa, but omitted all of Asia and the natives of the Americas. Probably one-quarter of the Earth’s people is a fair estimate. So Rome rates 1/4 x 700 = 175 human-population years.

As far as we know, Britain’s democracy was/is longer lived, 810 years to date, if you count from the first Magna Carta in 1215. But Britain’s relative population was and is much smaller than Rome’s. And I don’t think it’s fair to include its huge colonies, like India, which were mostly ruled by viceroys and had no vote in Parliament. So, as a very rough (and generous!) estimate, let’s take Britain’s 2024 population of 69 million, divided by the 2024 global population of 8.2 billion, or 0.008. Thus Britain’s contribution to history-weighted global democracy is 810 x .008 = 6.8 human-population years.

For the US, our short life reduces our numerical impact. If we take the 249 years since our 1776 Independence (NOT our 1791 Constitution), and multiply by our current share of the 2024 global population of 8.2 billion, we get 249 x 341 / 8,200 =10.4 human-population years.

As for the EU, let’s be generous to democracy and consider all of it, with a 2024 population of 449.2 million people, to have been democratic since the end of WWII, and let’s add in Japan’s 2024 population of 123.8 million people, for a total of 573 million people. That adds 80 x 573 / 8,200 = 5.6 human-population years.

Doing the calculation this way, based on fractions of total human population rather than absolute numbers, simplifies the analysis by eliminating the complicating factor of the explosion of the global human population over the last few centuries, since the discovery of Science and real medicine. What we get is the following tally in terms of human-population years:

(Ancient) Rome’s democracy	175.0
The Brits	6.8
US	10.4
The postwar EU	5.6
TOTAL	197.8

Rounding human recorded history up to six millennia is fair, because the Jewish calendar now stands at 5785 and the Chinese have even older records. If we accept that working estimate, the population-weighted incidence of democracy in human history is approximately so:

Incidence of Democracy = 197.8 / 6000 = 3.2%

Two conclusions follow from this rough but meaningful calculation. First, those of us who’ve lived most of our lives in the EU, Japan, US and other scattered modern democracies have been, on an historical basis, extremely lucky. Second, the chances of that luck continuing for the next two generations are—at least on an historical basis—slim.

The next essay in this series will explore what most of our youth and next generations can expect, and why. Will monarchy, Orwellian Chinese-style dictatorship, or a new kind of feudalism be their lot?


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A Breathtaking Lack of Perspective

This title states my take on the first week of Trump’s second term. To my mind, the problems we face are profound and devilishly hard to solve, but absurdly simple to state.

We face a rising, increasingly imperial China that already has vastly surpassed us in manufacturing, much of modern engineering and some of science. It is now grasping for the golden ring of supremacy in new scientific discovery, in quantum computers, microbiology, and artificial intelligence (if you call that a science).

We face a grisly imperial Russia that is out for eighteenth-century-style conquest. It boasts a nuclear arsenal and uses its ethnic minorities and North Korean peasants as cannon fodder, without (apparently) much internal dissent from its docile population. We face an autocratic and lawless Israeli prime minister who is using the remains of global sympathy for the Holocaust as fuel in an imperial machine barely less jingoistic and autocratic than Putin’s.

At the same time, our own nation is facing a drastic, precipitous decline. We have lost 60,000 factories. We have educated our youth, by and large, to eschew the rigors of science, math, engineering and medicine for “quick kills” in finance, software, memes and vibes. We are training and exalting “influencers” rather than doers, knowers and thinkers.

To the extent that we still have talent in the deeper and harder disciplines, it is starting to leave our shores in an appalling brain drain. We are watching helplessly as that drain draws supremacy in Western science back to Europe, where it began before an earlier, Nazi-fleeing brain drain insured our own brief supremacy during and after World War II.

Meanwhile, our economists bizarrely exult in a distorted economy of 70% services. Our so-called “thinkers” and “influencers” increasingly leave the world of hard reality behind. Instead they make careers in the abstract universes of profit, intermediation, “leverage” and financial manipulation, with or without the assistance of software and automation. Their intellectual laziness and alley-cat morality are not just spreading passively among us; they are boasted, celebrated and (because they promise riches) universally emulated.

So how does our once and present president propose to address this society-wide decline? He threatens our closest trading partners with massive, non-targeted tariffs to force them to reduce the flow of fentanyl and allegedly nasty immigrants coming from or through them.

Both the targets and the methods of his “solutions” are far from the essence of what ails us. He’s like an archer who turns his back on the target and aims his crossbow 180 degrees away.

But in adopting this spectacularly inappropriate and ineffective posture, he also seems to be emotionally mimicking a similar lack of perspective on the Democrats’ side. Here I speak of the ethos of “DEI” programs, for “diversity, equity and inclusion.”

Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely believe that diversity is the essence of our national strength, that inclusion of every minority is necessary for a healthy society, and that “equity” among people of various identities is a worthwhile goal, although hard to define and even harder to implement. (Hence my support for reparations for slavery and its multi-generational consequences, here and here.)

But what we have done as a nation, in my view, is egregiously take our eyes off the ball. For four centuries, we have enslaved, disenfranchised, marginalized, legally and socially disfavored, and steadfastly refused to recognize the contributions of, people whom we brutally stole from their African homes and their descendants.

We have made some progress in redressing these wrongs, but we still have a long way to go. So why do we Dems spend so much time talking and fretting about transgender people? Adults identifying as transgender constitute about 0.5% of adults, while Americans identifying as Black alone constitute 13.7% of us, a proportion 27 times as large. The complaints of transgender people have come to our attention, at most, in the last twenty years, while the much greater plight of a much greater number has been with us four centuries and counting.

If I could address our transgender people and their advocates as a group, here’s what I would say:

“Trans people absolutely have the right to live your lives as you see fit, to have sex (among consenting adults) with whom and however you like, and to make decisions about your heath care (with your parents, if minors) freely. I will support your rights in this regard, just as I supported the rights of homosexuals to marry (before President Obama did!), as part of the very essence of our Bill of Rights,‘live and let live.’”

“But please recognize that a much larger minority has been waiting and pushing for equal rights for four centuries and has acquired an enormous amount of strategy, wisdom and experience in so doing. Please don’t try to cut in line ahead of them or pre-empt their vast expertise.”

“Please understand that your special requests, on their face, appear to intersect with the majority’s views on vital subjects like sex, children, family and procreation, and that the roughly half of our species that identifies as female has longer-lived and equally vital interests and expertise in that regard. Their rights to reproductive health care have just been put in legal jeopardy for the first time in half a century. They too, would seem to have priority in claims and invaluable expertise and experience.”

“Anyway, please, please don’t ask me to change the language of the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Washington, Jefferson, Churchill, JFK, MLK and Obama just to recognize your right to equality. Please don’t insist that I use plural pronouns for an individual, thereby enhancing that person’s status and twisting the syntax of centuries, just to recognize that individual’s peculiar sexual identity and proclivities.”

“I believe that you and your fellows will advance your claims to equality as and when Black people and women do in America. I believe that your (and our nation’s) best strategy is to leverage their numbers, experience, expertise and wisdom. By making your unusual claims, seeming to demand priority, and insisting that the English language be changed for you, you only make yourself a target for ridicule and encourage the breathtaking lack of perspective that we see unfolding all around us in Trump’s second term.”

This is not to blame transgender people for Trump’s and the Republicans’ breathtaking lack of perspective. It’s merely to point out that a regime clearly trending toward tyranny—and using distraction and misdirection as its consistent modus operandi—demands relentless and pitiless focus from its opponents, lest they lose not just their offices but our democracy and the last vestiges of the Western Enlightenment.

I have every confidence that the highest and longest hurdles—full Black and female equality—are the decisive ones. As we surmount them, we will see our society gradually transform into something new, perhaps unrecognizable and seemingly unreachable from our current perspective.

I call it the “Judy Woodruff approach.” Over the past decade or so, on the way and into her semi-retirement, the erstwhile PBS anchor has done DEI the right way. She has nurtured, fostered and promoted some of the best women and minority men in the news industry as examples of underappreciated excellence.

One small result is the co-anchors of the PBS Newshour: Jeff Bennett and Amna Nawaz, a Black man and an Islamic woman, respectively. They are quite simply the best news anchors I have ever seen, and my experience goes back to the legendary Walter Cronkite.

I have no doubt that their consistently excellent work, almost every weeknight of the year, does far more to advance the notion of equality, both unconsciously and consciously, than any mandatory DEI sessions that employees are forced to sit through while they would rather be doing something else.

Call me a cockeyed optimist. But I’m old enough to remember when virtually everyone in the news, on TV and in the press was white, and virtually all the people of obvious power and influence were male. Kids growing up today have an entirely different perspective: the role models they see and hear every day are nearly as diverse as our population.

So what should we do? Should we encourage each new minority claiming equal rights, like the trans folk, to make spectacles and cheap targets of themselves? Should we continue to insist they everyone sit through mandatory abstract DEI sessions? Or should we encourage everyone to learn from the grizzled veterans of the struggles for Black people’s and women’s rights, who know what works and have the scars (and some impressive victories!) to prove it?

On the answers to these questions turn the attention of our people and our chances for reversing the precipitous decline into which our whirlwind of presidential dementia is drawing us like a cyclone.



For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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