Easy Sunday: REQUEST: What was your best Christmas gift?

Here is a replica of my favorite gift.

Please tell me about your favorite gift. 

I hope to publish holiday-themed posts on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The posts will be a collection of some of your stories.

The photo above is of a cleaned-up, repainted version of the gift I got in 1954. It is in my living room today, a quirky piece of art.

The tractor was under the tree when I was four. It is four feet long, made of metal, and weighs about 50 pounds. It is geared low, like a real tractor. I could pedal it through mud, with traction from the thick treads on the rear tires. That is what I loved: that risk of getting stuck in soft ground, but then powering out of it. This was an extravagant gift for my parents. Dad was an elementary school principal; mom stayed home at our house at the farm to take care of my two siblings and me. On Christmas morning I mostly ignored the tractor to play with something else, disappointing my parents, a story they told me decades later. But soon I played with it every day.

One person my age told me about his favorite gift, an electric train set -- by Lionel -- and setting it up with his father. 

1950s Lionel locomotive

Another told me about getting hand-painted toy soldiers from his father who was in active duty in the Navy. The two of them arranged them in battle formations.

Please send me your story, using my email address:  peter.w.sage@gmail.com.  Please describe the gift and write a couple of sentences about it. If you happen to have a photograph of it or something similar to it, please send that, too. Let me know if I can use your name or if it must be anonymous.

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Trump's speech: Second opinion.

President Trump is a salesman.

Normally he is a very successful one: forceful in the hard-sell, fast-close way that I see in infomercials.

He looked desperate, like a salesman who needs to close a sale to meet a quota and keep his job.

I watched Trump Wednesday evening and wrote about it on Thursday. I thought his pressured speech and hard grip on the lectern, combined with wild exaggerations, blaming, self-praise and overall grandiosity, made him look like a salesman grasping at straws in a losing battle. A person receiving a hard-sell wants to think he is getting a giant bargain, almost too good to be true. The sales magic disappears if the customer senses this isn't about how great the opportunity is for the buyer, but instead how important this sale is for the seller.

College classmate Tony Farrell also watched the speech. Tony had a long career in marketing with The Nature Company, The Gap, and The Sharper Image, and in that latter context, managed the Trump Steaks account. Tony has an expert's eye on branding. Like me, Tony encountered Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in high school, so he was instantly familiar with my allusion to the characters Willy Loman and the brother, Charlie, who summed up Willy's desperation at the climax of the play. Tony lives in the Bay Area, where he has watched the careers and evolving political brands of Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom from up close. 

Tony Farrell and his daughter

Guest Post by Tony Farrell

“A terrible thing is happening to him, so attention must be paid.”

So said Mrs. Loman. Having viewed Trump’s address to the nation Wednesday evening, I agree with Peter’s impression: Like Willie Loman, Trump “knows he has a spot on his hat.”

Sure, the “tell” Peter recognized as a salesman's desperation could be Trump trying, for once, to follow the advice of handlers: Speak directly and powerfully (no weaving); look energetic (no dozing); stay on message (stare down the TelePrompTer); and, for God’s sake, keep it short (this is not a rally crowd)…so, rush if you must!

Even if so, Trump trying to follow such advice signals a crack in self-confidence. Biden? A distant, fading foil. Recent elections? All the Democrats’ way. Indiana’s GOP? Openly defiant. Epstein? Fiasco. Polls? Terrible. Prices? Too high for his base. ICE? Radically unpopular. The duck is lame with no one to blame. 

Trump is flailing because, to quote Charlie Loman again:

The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell.

Practically nothing Trump proclaimed in his speech was credible, so few are buying the fictions wrapped in tiresome verbal tics: “like never seen before” and “in the history of our country” and “than any administration in history” and “never been anything like it” and “levels never seen before” and “more than anyone could have imagined” and “nobody can believe what’s going on.” (Okay, the last one is true.) Laughable claims that he’s “bringing, for the first time in 3,000 years, peace to the Middle East.” An election “landslide” of 1.5 percent margin?

Unlike Peter, I was never a salesman; mercifully, I was always a buyer. But a great salesman is a wonder; I loved them. They listen. They make you comfortable when you have to say “no,” making you feel comfortable when they call again. They convey calming assurance they will be there when you need them. They never over-promise; they always deliver. They have your back. You trust them. 

Trump’s 2024 campaign promises have proven fraudulent (except the border; definitely quiet now and he can boast). But Trump’s not taking well his obvious failures to deliver. Losing the salesman’s confident touch. He’s not listening. He can’t deliver. Has excuses no one wants to hear, and no credible ones. Reality cannot be promised away. His assurances ring hollow. Trump won’t deliver midterm victories to his acolytes; he won’t bring economic relief to “ordinary Americans.” 

What did The Hollies sing? “He’s King Midas with a curse; he’s King Midas in reverse.” How ironic, if that’s what Trump is becoming, and it shows -- and tells.

 

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Artificial Intelligence peril for attorneys

Warning to attorneys: 

Don't trust artificial intelligence -- or a client -- to write your legal briefs.

I post an example of what can go wrong.

Magistrate Judge Mark Clarke assesses sanctions, awards attorney fees, and dismisses a plaintiff's case with prejudice. 

The subject matter of the case isn't the point of this post, but for context, this case arises from a dispute over the family winery among the adult children of an aging mother. The winery in question is Valley View Vineyards in the Applegate Valley, a pioneer vineyard and winery in Southern Oregon. The plaintiff in the case is the older sister of the two brothers who operate the winery, Mark Wisnovsky and Mike Wisnovsky. 

The lawsuit is a long and tangled mess. After a multi-year period of briefs, hearings, motions, moves for summary judgments, and continuances Magistrate Judge Mark Clarke made a decision that may resolve the cases. He determined that the lawyers for the plaintiff submitted briefs that included multiple instances of inaccurate precedents and citations that were invented or hallucinated by artificial intelligence.

Judge Clarke decided to sanction the attorneys with monetary penalties, but noted that these fines may not be sufficient to discourage attorneys from submitting inadequately-checked briefs. He told counsel for the defense that they should submit a claim for attorneys fees for the time spent responding to the plaintiff's erroneous citations. Most consequential, Judge Clarke determined that the plaintiff herself, even though represented by attorneys, was sufficiently involved in the preparation of the briefs as an experienced pro se (i.e. do it yourself) litigant that her lawsuit should be dismissed with prejudice. "With prejudice" means that she cannot refile them. 

The judge's order made reference to evidence that the plaintiff's strategy involved handling the cases with little or no legal cost, while the defense would need to hire expensive attorneys to respond, thereby pressuring the other side to a favorable settlement. Judge Clarke cited a voicemail message from the plaintiff's non-party brother, Robert Wisnovsky, left on the phone of one of the two defendants. That message claimed that he and his sister are winning in court using unpaid attorneys, presumably with the real legal work done by the plaintiff.

When I meant that we don't have an attorney, I really meant we're not paying for an attorney. . . . [Our attorney  is] representing us for nothing. So, if you want to continue on, we're not spending a dollar compared to what you're spending. I filed a motion today to delay this other trial of this May 2nd thing, which they're going to grant. And you're just going to continue hemorrhaging money. Like I told you, when I saw him at the hearing, I saw you there. I ripped fucking Dole's heart out right there. I didn't even go to law school. And your boy, Jim. Oh, my God. What a failure that guy is. What about Brooks? 7 hour deposition. Took him out too, so I'm fully engaged now with this. Walk away. Make money and quit losing money. So if you're interested in
that, call me.

Dole and Brooks are the names of attorneys employed by the defense that Robert asserted that they were defeating in court, while avoiding the cost of legal representation.

It appears that the plaintiff's briefs were filed without careful review by her attorneys of record.

I normally find legal documents difficult and tedious to read. This one is different, even for a non-lawyer. Attorneys among this blog's readers may find this a powerful warning on the financial and career risks of artificial intelligence and of signing off on material submitted by third parties. They are also warned that judges take seriously local court rules, especially when the judge repeatedly warned the plaintiff that court rules were being ignored. 

Non-lawyers are reminded that AI is an extraordinary tool in multiple contexts, but it is not trustworthy. It appears to be programmed to be agreeable -- to give you what you want --rather than to be accurate. As President Ronald Reagan famously advised, one needs to "trust but verify."

Click the link below to read a PDF of the judge's order.

https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:1ef60353-4735-4f65-a035-0b3e6631df9c 

[Note: Tomorrow another response to President Trump's Oval Office speech by Tony Farrell, a frequent and well-received guest-post expert on brands and marketing. Farrell, readers may remember, had managed the Trump Steaks account.]

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Trump's speech: My takeaway is that he is flailing.

 Fight! Fight! Fight!

A salesman senses when he is losing a regular customer.

Customers lean back. They ask questions. They wonder about alternatives. Meetings get postponed. Instead of just refilling their regular order, they cut back a little but don't say why. It's little things, but they tell a story.

I will quote from Charlie's graveside speech near the end of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Willie Loman was a salesman, Charlie said:

He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished.

Trump knows he has a spot on his hat. He doesn't need pundits or polls or staffers to tell him. He sees and feels the signs: questions about his age and dozing off; inquiries about the spot on his hand; people openly questioning his mental fitness; Marjorie Taylor Greene's betrayal, the Epstein discharge petition in the House; Democratic wins in recent elections; GOP congressmen defecting on the ACA subsidies -- the list goes on.

He planned a power play, and it began with a ruse. With an armada stationed off Venezuela, Trump scheduled a prime-time Oval Office address to the nation.  All broadcast networks interrupted regular programming for the big presidential announcement. 

Trump gave a partisan rally speech. That was the power play. The pundits and media got punked. Ha! Fooled you!! He said he inherited carnage and his predecessors are corrupt, foolish traitors. But he fixed immigration, taxes, the economy, public safety, everything. America is now safe, secure, envied and respected.  

There was an underlying message, and his real intent. He is as young and formidable as ever. His voice was loud and strong, voiced from the diaphragm. He is unbowed, confident in his own greatness, ferocious in attacking enemies, and no one can sell harder and better than he can.

I expect Trump's supporters to be re-assured. Trump still has the magic with them. Facts don't matter. What matters is his swagger and his sticking to the story of national redemption, thanks to him. 

There is music for this, 1977, Carly Simon:

Nobody does it better
Makes me feel sad for the rest
Nobody does it half as good as you
Baby, you're the best

It works better when it's said about you, not by you. 

I have been a salesman all my life -- fundraising in Boston, politics and investments here -- and I, too, have a feel for the telltale signs of peril for a salesman. I saw a giant "tell" last night. I saw desperation in his pressured speech and grandiosity.

When a salesman starts talking loudly and quickly, it is a tell. The salesman is trying to fill the potential void when objections might be voiced. Overselling is a tell. Superlatives and black-white absolutes can project confidence, but there is a tipping point where puffery backfires. Customers hear the overselling. Confident salespeople know it's a tell, and avoid it even when they know something is wrong. They project reliability. They communicate that they have no fear of the simple truth. They don't raise their voices.

Whether in a brokerage office, a car dealership, or at one's front door hearing a pitch from a pest-control company, we know when the salesman has moved into the "Hail, Mary" zone. The salesman starts talking about discounts, two-for-one,  and money-back guarantees.  Infomercials do this, because they have one brief time to make a sale or it is gone forever. Trump sounded like an infomercial on Home Shopping Network or a local ad for a business doing a close-out sale. 

I am reminded of a 30-second ad from the 1980s, an ad for Dry Idea underarm deodorant:

"Never let them see you sweat."

The woman in the ad says:

"There are three nevers in comedy. Never follow a better comedian. Never let hecklers have the last word.  And no matter how bad a joke bombs -- although that has never happened to me -- never let them see you sweat."

Trump is watching his mandate disappear. He needs it back. He wants to be adored and feared, and it isn't quite working now. He was trying so hard not to let people see him sweat that people saw him sweat last night. He has a huge base of supporters, and they won't see it. Trump is being Trump, angry and confident as ever. I think the speech worked for them.

But on the margin, persuadable voters noticed that Trump is flailing.

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Cheap oil: Should you be happy or sad?

"Did you ever have to make up your mind?
You pick up on one and leave the other behind
It's not often easy and not often kind
Did you ever have to make up your mind?"
          John Sebastian, performed by The Lovin' Spoonful, "Did you ever have to make up your mind," 1965

West Texas Intermediate crude oil is priced at about $56/barrel. This is a five year low.

I have mixed feelings. 

Cheap oil means lower prices at the pump. The average price nationally for gasoline at the pump is now under $3. It is about $3.50 in Oregon, because the West Coast has a shortage of refineries, and new ones are hard to site, and we are at the far end of oil and gasoline pipelines. Prices are a dollar/gallon higher in California.

West Texas oil rig

Cheap oil is anti-inflationary. The nestegg I created for my retirement lost some 15 percent of its buying power during Biden's presidency. During this year of Trump's presidency, Americans lost another four percent of purchasing power in dollars, plus another 10 percent of the dollar's purchasing power in the context of the world economy. Trump's disruption to trade and the world order caused the dollar to depreciate against a basket of other currencies. A dollar was worth .95 Euros when Trump was inaugurated; now it is .85 Euros, with the big reset happening coincident with Trump's Liberation Day announcement of tariffs.

Value of the dollar, in Euros.

I prefer American energy independence, rather than dependence on oil from the Middle East, which was our condition prior to the shale oil revolution. The dependence distorted our foreign policy and caused inflation that could only be stopped only with 15-percent interest rates and a deep recession. In the 1970s I remember planning trips from New Haven to Boston and from Medford to Portland around where I might be able to buy gasoline.

The U.S. is energy-independent today, and the world's largest producer of oil, because oil companies learned how to find oil trapped between layers of shale. At $75/ barrel, it is profitable to pump that oil. At $56/barrel shale oil is only marginally profitable. Existing wells with sunk costs of development can continue to be pumped because the extraction cost is about $25/barrel, but new wells are not drilled. The full-cycle cost of shale oil is more than current prices for all but the most efficient drillers in the very best locations.

The world economy is slowing down. Trade disruptions are having an effect. That means oil demand is down. Jobs have stopped growing and unemployment is rising. OPEC is pumping more oil to reduce the profitability of the U.S. oil shale competition. We are moving into a bust cycle in the oil fields. Oil country is bright red politically. Democrats might not care if drillers go broke. Indeed, they may see an upside to the bust. Fracking is controversial. It uses water; it causes earthquakes; it leaks methane. Landowners who get paid a royalty like fracking, but neighbors who don't get royalties often do not. The oil shale technology breakthrough means that America perpetuates the fossil fuel era, which green-oriented Democrats oppose. Many Democrats say good riddance to fracking.

Is ending fracked oil good for the environment? The answer is complicated.

Cheap oil doesn't mean oil doesn't get used. Cheap oil means more oil is used -- after all, it's cheap! -- just less of it will be sourced in the USA. Cheap oil re-establishes our dependence on places with cheap oil. It also means that alternative energy sources favored by green voters are less competitive, so wind and solar projects get cancelled for price reasons, not because Trump defunded them. American car buyers see lower prices of gasoline. They buy a car with an internal combustion engine instead of an electric vehicle, a decision with long consequences. It will be on the road for 20 years. General Motors and Ford saw the writing on the wall and cut back on electric vehicle production. Ford took a $15 billion write-off, saying it had over-estimated the EV market. 

What should a conscientious America cheer for? Do we want cheap oil and lower inflation, or expensive oil because it is good for the environment, if it is, given that it makes fracking profitable? Is the world's environment better off if oil gets drilled by state oil companies in Nigeria, Venezuela, Russia, and the Middle East?

Many Democrats consider oil companies intrinsically bad, and urge college endowments and state treasurers to divest from them. That, too, is complicated. American-based oil companies can lose money and even go broke, but it doesn't mean the world stops using oil, not if oil is cheap, and cheap oil is what would damage their profitability. Someone supplies oil; just not us. There is demand.

Nothing I do personally affects oil prices very much. I heat part of my home with natural gas, but I converted part of the house to electricity when a furnace broke. I drive an electric car. As voters and consumers, we mostly are bystanders.

Arlington, Oregon wind turbines

I support alternative energy projects, but realize than one of the great impediments to building them is that neighbors of potential solar and wind projects oppose them. Anything that creates energy creates opposition. I am mostly a "Yes" person. I see NIMBY opposition as a generally negative force, but I am probably in a minority and maybe I am wrong. People want abundant cheap energy, but not the ways to get it. Everything has a pros and cons.

If I had my wishes, oil prices would rise back to $75/barrel, even though it is inflationary. Oil in that range means the U.S. can produce oil now, but the incentives for wind and solar stay in place. I don't want to be dependent on the Middle East for our energy.

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Am I too hard on Trump-supporting White Christians?

The Jesus described in the Bible warned us about men like Donald Trump. 

I have been critical of American Christians who treat Trump as the God-provided leader.

Jesus said don't be cruel. Don't be selfish. Don't hate. Don't hit. Don't seek gold and other riches. Help the poor. Heal the sick. Pay workmen what they've earned. Turn the other cheek. Be like the Good Samaritan.

Trump is a popular political figure. He won two elections. He is nothing like the Good Samaritan.

I have depicted images of those American Christians who follow what I consider to be a false idol. They are people apparently comfortable with their privilege. Prosperous, powerful, victorious, and usually White.

I have published images like these:

A reader raises a fair question: Am I being fair? Am I pointing out religious hypocrisy only among the comfortable White Christians -- an easy target? What about Trump-supporting Christians among groups coded left? Would I feel free to criticize them, too?

I got this letter from Thad Guyer. Guyer is an attorney with an international reputation as an advocate and litigator on behalf of whistleblower clients. 

"Hi Peter.  I regularly read your blog. When you write your anti-Christian posts, I have always assumed that you're talking about White Christians who voted for Trump thinking that in some way God is working through him. And then it occurred to me in church today, maybe I am wrong, maybe Peter has the same political perspective for LGBTQ Christians, Hispanic Christians, Asian Christians, even Jews who voted for Trump.  You have the same opinion of all of them too, right? We aren't supposed to just imagine White men in MAGA hats when we read your disparaging words on this; Christians in marginalized groups are included, am I correct? I would just like to know that the basket of deplorables you have put me in is multi ethnic, Judeo-Christian, and diverse."

Guyer is correct in his reading of this blog. I have focused on comfortable White Christians. I don't think I have ever pointed out regligious hypocrisy among LGBTQ Christians, Hispanic Christians, Asian Christians, or Jewish supporters of Trump. Guyer is right to question me on this.

But the truth is, I am unaware of any organized or individually prominent LGBTQ, Hispanic, or Asian supporters of Trump who tie their support of Trump to their membership in that identity.  "Lesbian Christians for Trump"? I haven't seen or heard of such a group, nor seen one in White House photos, although I am sure that there are, in fact, lesbian Christians who voted for Trump. I have seen thousands of political T-shirts and photographed hundreds of them. I have never seen anything remotely like "I am gay and Jesus is my savior. Trump is my president." So, no, I have not addressed LGBTQ Christian support for Trump.

The Methodist church I attended as a youth considers itself a "welcoming" church, which signifies that it considers nontraditional gender and sexual orientation as fully consistent with Christian beliefs. If there were organized support for Trump by pastors or representatives of those churches, I would happily point out the apparent contradiction. I have not seen it.

I have addressed Hispanic support for Trump. My sense is that most Hispanics are cultural Roman Catholics. I don't consider it self-contradictory for them to support Trump because of two issues, and I have been critical of Democrats for being blind to this. People who come here legally and become citizens go through a complicated, time-consuming maze. Democrats were foolish to think that Hispanics would vote in solidarity with an ethnicity of people from multiple cultures, instead of solidarity with law-abiding citizens. Lawbreaking Hispanics injure the reputation and safety of Hispanic citizens.

Moreover, many Catholics are single-issue anti-abortion voters. Trump's position on abortion is inconsistent, but Trump is the better anti-abortion choice than would be any Democrat. It makes sense for anti-abortion voters to vote for Trump. So, no, I have not criticized Hispanic Christians for supporting Trump.

Asians who came here legally and became citizens have every reason to protest scofflaw immigrants from Asian countries. It raises the risk that citizens of Asian heritage will be treated with suspicion by ICE. I have not pointed out the difference between Jesus and Trump in an Asian-American context because I subsumed Asian Christians generally along with White Christians.

I have not addressed "Jews for Trump," but I will do so in a future post. I will simply say here that a right-populist leader who picks out minority ethnicities and calls them subhuman, Low-IQ, garbage, sneaky, and treasonous has a very bad history for Jews. There remains in America a reservoir of anti semitic feeling, exacerbated by the success of people perceived as elites who are identifiably Jewish in the visible fields of finance, law, entertainment, and government. Trump roused up a constituency that accepts demonization of the "other." Yesterday's post on chimpanzee xenophobia described the danger of human instincts here. Jews are visible targets. Jews who support Trump are playing with fire.

I was brought up Christian but am no longer one. I am not hostile to Christianity. I bemoan the fact that Christians have abandoned the Jesus I learned about in my youth. I think our current Pope generally reflects Jesus' beliefs, as bureaucratized into an institution designed to perpetuate the faith. I think that Trump is a frank, overt contradiction of everything Jesus preached.

But the self-contradiction of seeing Trump as a God-sent leader is not the sole province of White Americans. Guyer is correct in pointing out the narrow focus of my observations. It must appear to some that I am only criticizing comfortable White Christians. Trump contradicts Jesus, regardless of who carries the Trump-Christian flag. Hereafter, when I see Asians, Hispanics, and LGBTQ Americans joining in the celebration of Trump as God's chosen leader, I will be certain to include them.

If readers send me examples of organized support for Trump from those groups, I will happily include them in comments or a future post.

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Humans are Apes

Insults from the White House
Warships moving into position in the Caribbean
A mass murder incident in Australia

What is wrong with humans?

Answer: We are acting like the apes that we are. 

Donald Trump succeeded politically in the past decade while expressing words that were shocking when he came down the escalator in 2015 and first uttered them. He insulted Mexicans. Some people found that disgustingly racist; others found his words refreshing and honest. Finally someone said frankly what they were thinking, that foreigners are dangerous. They are different from us and don't belong here. 

Xenophobia works as a political device. Xenophobia is a primate characteristic. Apes are territorial social animals. We are apes. Hogan Sherrow studied apes.

He received his Ph.D. from Yale in anthropology. He studied chimpanzee politics in their natural habitat in East Africa. He advises political campaigns as the principal consultant for You Evolving, LLC (www.you-evolving.com).

Sherrow

Guest Post by Hogan Sherrow

"We could go one way or the other and we're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage, she's garbage. Her friends are garbage.”

This is what Donald Trump said about Congresswoman Omar and every other person of Somali descent two hours and sixteen minutes into the December 2nd Cabinet meeting at the White House. Once again showing us that he operates at a very basic, primitive level and sees “others” through a xenophobic, aggressive lens.

I’ve studied primates in captivity and the wild for over thirty years. Nearly half that time has been spent studying one of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, and using their behavior to understand our own. Over decades of research, I like to think I have gained a somewhat unique perspective on primate behavior, both non-human and human. After all, we are primates and nothing about primates is irrelevant to us. Everything we observe in our non-human cousins has some bearing on what it means to be human.

One aspect of chimpanzee behavior that is particularly prescient for observations of humans is their xenophobic and aggressive nature. Chimpanzee society is intensely territorial, xenophobic, and aggressive. Groups of related, bonded males actively patrol and maintain territorial boundaries through aggressive interactions with members of neighboring communities. Interactions between communities range from vocalizations and displays, to attacks on individuals or small parties, to battles, where multiple males simultaneously fight. When it comes to chimpanzees, males from outside the community are always enemies and are always potential targets for elimination. There are no exceptions. There is no nuance.

Humans are, obviously, not chimpanzees, but we do share a natural tendency to form in-groups and out-groups and see the “other” as dangerous. As the anthropologist Richard Wrangham has shown in his work, humans, like chimpanzees, are territorial, xenophobic, and aggressive by nature. Donald Trump has built his political career on tapping into these primal behaviors and exploiting them. While he is not the first to do this, his consistent behavior, actions, and policies towards specific groups is simplistic, targeted, and insidious. Unfortunately, it also very effective. Trump and his team repeatedly go after groups that are different, strange, or mysterious to his supporters and they eat it up.

Trump targets non-whites, the LGBTQ community, liberals, and intellectuals as criminals, perverts, snowflakes, and corrupt nerds. Whether he is attacking American citizens, who happen to come from an African nation, illegally killing citizens from other countries on boats in international waters, or suggesting that the free press be charged with sedition and treason for criticizing him, his attacks are chimpanzee-like, tapping into the chimpanzee-like instincts to protect against outsiders. It succeeds politically, because it has the inertia of our deep instincts as territorial apes. And it is far worse than anything we see in chimpanzees.

Chimpanzees simply do what chimpanzees do and the only calculations they make are whether the risks of aggression are low enough to make them worth it. Trump has added the x-factor that humans have perfected: He groups and targets people based on easily distinguishable ethnic and cultural traits that amplify our natural xenophobic tendencies. His attacks contribute to the dehumanization of entire groups, a phenomenon that, as philosopher David Livingstone Smith observes, has historically precipitated some of humanity’s gravest atrocities.

This weekend the world experienced yet another example of extreme, xenophobic behavior. At Bondi Beach in Australia, a mass shooting targeting Jewish individuals at a Hanukkah celebration took the lives of at least 15 individuals. It was intra-species killing, with the victims targeted because of cultural traits that marked them as “other.” It was the result of the dehumanization that occurs when xenophobic, aggressive tendencies are amplified and distorted by blind allegiance to an in-group.

We are not doomed to chimpanzee-like aggression and violence. Humans can, and do rise above our basal, primate instincts. The anthropologist Chris Boehm pointed out thirty years ago that humans have evolved empathy and developed multi-level cooperation, which keep our xenophobic, aggressive tendencies in check. Societies criminalize the chimpanzee-like behavior of killing others on sight or when there is easy opportunity. People learn to cooperate at multiple levels. These mechanisms are so powerful it takes the dehumanization of others and extreme psychological manipulation to turn humans into killing machines.

The question is, can we learn from our primate relatives and our own human history fast enough to rise above our xenophobic, aggressive instincts and continue our technological progress with weapons of mass destruction without blowing ourselves up?

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Easy Sunday: A funny take on a serious topic

If you liked our war in Iraq, you will love what is coming in Venezuela.

Jon Stewart looks at what we are getting ourselves into.

Click here

Jon Stewart is funny. He is disturbing. He is presenting high-quality political commentary inside an amusing package exposing folly, hypocrisy, dishonesty, and over-confidence.

But we have aircraft carriers and tanks and soldiers. We are big and they are small. We are right and they are wrong. We can do what we want. Besides, Venezuela is in the Americas, adjacent to the “Gulf of America.” What could be easier?

And there is oil. We aren’t doing this for the oil. Of course not. The fact that Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, and that they are selling oil to China, is irrelevant. We are doing it for humanity. The oil is just a bonus reward for doing a good deed.

Stewart compares the lead-up to our war with Iraq and our present actions against Venezuela. Same language. Same conviction that the foreign leaders, Saddam Hussein and Nicolas Maduro, are uniquely bad people and that they have weapons of mass destruction to use against us.

The same American political leaders are saying the same things about Venezuela that they said about Iraq.

The war has already begun. Congress is sitting back; the president is acting. This is an Easy Sunday post. Watch. Laugh. This is the easy part of the war, the start.

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Skip this post. It isn't about politics. It is about the tilt of Earth.

"Here comes the sun, doo doo doo doo
Here comes the sun
And I say, "It's all right"
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes. . . ."
     The Beatles, "Here Comes the Sun," Abbey Road, 1969

Today's post is not about politics. 

If you are noticing that it has been getting dark early for a long time, it is not your imagination. This is really happening. Early gloom isn't a literary device, nor a metaphor for the era of Trump, nor a commentary on our democracy. It is the reality of a tilted Earth.

Today's post is about the length of daylight for Medford, Oregon and for people who live near the 42nd parallel. Go to this site and enter your own location: Click.

First of all, let's ignore daylight savings time. That is the sharp break in time in March and November on this sun graph.

We all recognize that sunsets come early now: 4:42 p.m. on December 21, at the winter solstice. At the summer solstice sunsets occur at 7:51 p.m. standard time or 8:51 p.m. daylight time. It doesn't get dark for another half hour in the summer because of the long twilights, which exaggerates our perception of late nightfall. Twilights are short in the winter, which exaggerates our perception of early darkness. 

Days at the winter solstice are nine hours and five minutes long. Days at the summer solstice are 15 hours and 17 minutes long, a difference of six hours and 12 minutes -- 372 minutes -- over the 183 days between the two dates. That is two minutes and three seconds per day, on average. Sunsets come earlier or later by exactly half that amount.

Day lengths don't change on average. There are big changes in the length of daylight around the equinoxes and then, at either solstice, the changes are tiny. By November 15 the sun is setting at 4:48 p.m. December 8 has the year's earliest sunset: 4:38. On New Year's Day it sets at 4:48. There is a six week period of early darkness and a change of only a few seconds a day.  We aren't just imagining this. It is real.

The six hour difference in day length between summer and winter takes place in the middle months. By January 5 daylight begins lengthening by a minute a day and by January's end it is two minutes a day. In March days lengthen by almost three minutes daily. That pace of lengthening daylight slows only a little until May, when we re-enter the stable six-week period of near-constant late sunsets around the summer solstice.

I think the websites charting daylight hours are fascinating. The different lengths of day through the seasons aren't intuitive so it is fun to look at data. Google your location and a keyword like "sunset" or "length of day." Some religions want to know an exact time of sunsets to be observant, so there are lots of places to go.

Good news for people who like the holiday season but dislike the dark: Sunsets are already getting later. Because Earth's orbit is elliptical, the earliest sunset isn't on the shortest day. 

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Music-maker: I created a protest song

The singer complains that my congressman, Cliff Bentz, prioritized loyalty to Trump over the interests of his district.

Artificial Intelligence did 99 percent of the work. 

It sounds to me like a mix of Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction," 1965, and Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run," 1975. Not as good, of course, but reminiscent of them.

Listen to some of it -- or all of it. It is posted on YouTube. It is four minutes long. The song gets angrier as it progresses.

Click here

The song is, to my ear, credible as music someone might listen to, if one was in the mood for a political protest song.

I wanted to use a photo of Bentz, taken from the public domain.  For some reason the program would not let me use his photo. So I took an drawing of a gray-haired man of about 73 -- Bentz's age. The song suffers from having readers look at this still image rather than a very muscled Bruce Springsteen in a shirt with sleeves cut off, moving with animation on a stage.

ChatGPT would not let me write lyrics about Cliff Bentz or Trump. It said that it avoided commentary of specific personalities. There was an easy workaround. I told ChatGPT to write lyrics about a totally fictional congressman Biff Hence, and a fictional Donald Bump. It happily did so, assuring me each time it made a revision that this was for fictional political figures. 

I instructed ChatGPT to write lyrics in three verses, plus a chorus and bridge. I suggested three subjects. I said the song should criticize Bentz for having voted for the Big Beautiful Bill, which will make health insurance unaffordable for a great many people in this district. (Oregon's 2nd District has one of the nation's top concentrations of people getting health insurance through the Obamacare exchanges.) A second criticism was that the Big Beautiful Bill preserved tax cuts for billionaires, which increases the budget deficit. A third criticism was that Bentz was part of the GOP caucus obedient to Trump's demand that the Epstein files be kept sealed.

ChatGPT presented drafts in fewer than five seconds. It offered to make revisions that would either amp up the "protest vibe" or adjust the tone to an easy-going folk style. It inquired if I wanted the text to include more or fewer words that rhymed with "Hence." When the revisions were done, I substituted "Cliff Bentz" for "Biff Hence," and submitted those lyrics to the music application. 

The music app instantly matched the music and phrasing to the lyrics and supplied the voice, guitars, and drums that we requested. What astonishing technology!

I am not claiming this is great art. But I wanted to see if AI could produce a listenable protest song at the instructions of a novice. It could.

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Spheres of influence

Trump ended the post-WWII, global, rules-based era.

It is now the regional-sphere-of-influence era.

I erred in a recent blog about Trump's philosophy. I wrote that it was a Thomas Hobbes world: dog-eat-dog, brutal, selfish, always at war, and everyone against everyone else.

Click

No. Not the world, and not everyone against everyone. Trump views the world as divided into natural geographic and cultural regions. The great power in each area has free rein to do as they must inside their sphere. The regions give each other respect and space.

This foreign policy approach explains Trump's attitude toward Russia and Ukraine. Russia is the alpha country in its region and somebody needs to keep order. If Russia doesn't do it, the Georgians will be fighting with the Azerbaijanis over water or insults or religion or 200-year-old feuds, and every other ethnic or geographical special interest will make trouble. And, more important to Russia, the Ukrainians will play footsie with the West and give everyone else ideas. Squash that. 

1950s, 1960's and 1970s

Trump has no respect for NATO. Western Europe has its neighborhood, and the U.S. isn't in it. Europe is ours for the purpose of insulting. It is ours to chide for being overrun with the wrong sort of immigrants. But it is not ours to support. Europe is a competitor, not a natural ally, in Trump's view. The boundary between the European West and Russia is a blurry one. Are the Baltic countries really West?  Are Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova? Are we really going risk nuclear war to protect Latvia? Could Americans find Latvia or Moldova on a map?

Trump is dissolving this map, putting a new line down the center of the Atlantic.

Europe, Japan, and China are trade rivals, not our dependents. If Europe is worthy of being a regional power, and if it really thinks that Ukraine is part of Western Europe, then it needs to pony up the troops and equipment to show Russia they act like one. Then Russia will adjust is goals to the reality on the ground. If Europe won't do it, then the game is settled: Ukraine is part of Russia. 

The Western Hemisphere is our neighborhood and problem. This makes sense of Trump's talk of absorbing Canada, buying Greenland, taking over control of the Panama Canal, and his meddling in governance of Venezuela, Brazil, Honduras, Mexico, Canada, and elsewhere.  

China has a sphere. The Uyghurs in western China are theirs to manage. North Korea is theirs. In ethnicity, culture, and language, so is Taiwan. China is the alpha. Do Americans want to die to preserve Taiwan's independence?

Africa is a "shithole" place as far as Trump is concerned, and that absolves us from a duty of care. We don't care about children starving there, or AIDS spreading, or civil war genocide taking place in South Sudan or anyplace else. Not our neighborhood. 

It is not illogical for Trump to think he is "the real peace president." As Trump sees it, wars happen when regional powers meddle in other spheres. Managing a sphere requires tough actions. Russia is doing it to Ukraine; we are doing it to Venezuela. Managing a region is hard, ugly work. Other regions should butt out.

In Trump's view, if the U.S. hadn't meddled and armed Ukraine, Ukraine would have been taken over by Russia in three days with minimal loss of life. Life would have gone on for Ukrainians. They would be at peace, perhaps not entirely happy with being part of Russia, but so what? Is California entirely happy being united with Alabama? Whether Ukraine is sovereign, a satellite, or a province of Russia is not Trump's concern. It is Russia's neighborhood.

This isn't the foreign policy order democracies imagined at the time the United Nations was formed but it is the one that a majority of Americans voted for in 2024. Like it or not, it is the one that has fallen into place. 

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"Let's not cut a deal."

     "President Trump dialed up pressure on Ukraine to swiftly accept a U.S.-designed peace plan, hardening his position toward the embattled country and its European backers. . . ."

    The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 10, 2025

Journalist Tam Moore disagrees.

He writes that it is in the common interest of Ukraine, Europe, and the world that Russian aggression not be rewarded.

It is the season when Christmas carolers sing about peace on Earth. Tam Moore writes that there isn’t peace. Russia is carrying out an invasion of its neighbor Ukraine. There is an aggressor. There is a victim.

Tam Moore in Vietnam

Moore is a lifelong journalist who worked in television in his early days and then in print, writing for the Capital Press. He was a Jackson County commissioner, elected as a Republican in 1974, back when Oregon Republicans were progressive on civil rights, when there were pro-choice Republicans elected locally and statewide, and when Republicans supported cleaning up the environment.

Guest Post by Tam Moore

Gonna lay down my sword and shield,
down by the riverside, …down by the riverside.
I ain't gonna study war no more. …ain't gonna study war no more.
     Down By the Riverside, African-American Spiritual ca. American Civil War

For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.
     Isaiah 2 3a-4

Advent. Time to think of Peace, Hope, Joy, and Love.

But I can’t get around it this year. Putin’s war in Ukraine is killing non-combatants almost every night. Munition-laden drones and a few precision missiles blast population centers and turn electrical power facilities into scrap metal.

The West encouraged this neo-imperialist Russian attack, first tolerating a 2014 Crimean election favoring a Russian-oriented oblast or provincial government. Russia claimed Crimea. Barack Obama and Angela Merkel fought a diplomatic battle to get European nations to join in financial sanctions. But no fight to eject the Russians.

Obama would later say they “had to pull in a lot of other Europeans kicking and screaming to impose the sanctions that we did and to prevent Putin from continuing through the Donbass and through the rest of Ukraine.”

As Serhii Plokhy observed in is 2023 book, The Russo-Ukrainian War, the 2022 Russian invasion produced a different reaction. There was a clear aggressor, and a victim – the Ukrainian people.

“Russia’s aggression against Ukraine produced a nineteenth-century war fought with twentieth-century tactics and twentyfirst-century weaponry,” Plokhy wrote.

Ukrainians blunted the invasion, and the country mounted fierce resistance. European neighbors and North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states sent material aid.

But here we are with a new U.S. administration perhaps more interested in looking good reality-TV style than in declaring that armed aggression be met with self-defense. And defenders be supported by countries of the democratic West.

Article 2 of the United Nations Charter is forgotten in the process. It says:

Member states must refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.

Armed force should not be used except in the common interest.

When I came home from Vietnam, the Army Reserve sent me to annual summer camps at the Armed Forces Staff College. We studied war. We also knew a lot about the human price paid for waging war.

So this Advent season, the U.S. pushes for trading the Donetsk Oblast for a ceasefire. And massive drone and missile strikes rain down on Ukraine’s cities. Let’s not cut a deal under these circumstances. Hold on to the swords. And use them in the common interest of halting the aggressor.

 

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