Pretty good day yesterday. Rory won, Orban lost, Socal got some rain, and I had my first Nessie Burger in about a year. All good.

Then in the middle of the night last night, during my usual sleepless period, I read something that blew me away. IMHO perhaps the biggest story of the year, maybe the decade, and 99% of the public isn’t even aware of it.

There *has* been a lot of press about AI, and I’ve done plenty of reading, writing, and some hands-on research of the large language models (LLMs) that comprise the AI landscape today. But something has happened in the last month or so that changes things in a big way.

Earlier this year there was a much-publicized disagreement between Anthropic (one of the 3-4 leading LLM creators) and the US Department of Defense (I refuse to use Hegseth’s infantile name change to Dept of War). The US DoD tried to strong-arm Anthropic into delivering its newest LLM, Claude Mythos, to the US government without restrictions. Anthropic said no, they wanted to insure that Mythos and their other LLMs would not be used in autonomous weapons. That promptly got them blackballed from any government contracts. The DoD went so far as to threaten other defense contractors, saying they could use no Anthropic product in their systems, else they be blackballed as well. I chalked all that up to a normal disagreement between a government that always expects no limits on their contracts with industry and a new company trying to do what they considered “the right thing”. Nothing unusual.

The unusual part came when Anthropic announced that they would not be releasing Mythos to *anyone* because of its dangerous capabilities. Now that’s weird – why would they spend billions creating a new LLM and not sell it? But now the story makes sense. In the past few weeks Anthropic has explained that Mythos is spectacularly good at analyzing computer systems and finding new vulnerabilities and exploits – unexpectedly, it is the ultimate hacker. Anyone with a copy of Mythos – any person, company or nation – can take control of every computer system on earth. Every operating system, every browser, every important application – Mythos is proving to be wildly capable of finding previous unknown flaws (called “zero-day vulnerabilities” in the biz) AND coming up with new exploits that allow one to take control of the system/device. That second part is another brand-new capability of Mythos – previous LLMs have show some ability to find new vulnerabilities, but lacked the skill of creating a workable exploit (an exploit is simply a recipe for hacking the system, a recipe that any software-savvy human can follow).

Now I see why the DoD strong-armed Anthropic to get a copy of the LLM. This capability is the fever dream of the NSA. It’s the atomic bomb for digital systems – whoever has it pretty much rules the online world. Whether you like Anthropic’s answer to the US government or not, imagine if China had gotten its hands on Mythos first? Or Iran?!? Would have been 100% the end of US tech dominance.

Anthropic out-maneuvered the DoD by creating Project Glasswing, allying itself with a consortium of trustworthy cybersecurity companies that want access to Mythos in order to understand their client’s product vulnerabilities and fix them before Mythos gets out into the world. Great idea, let’s fortify the world’s computer systems before we allow an infinite hack machine to take aim at them. From Zvi Mowshowitz‘s Substack:

The decision not to release Claude Mythos is not about an amorphous fear. If given to anyone with a credit card, Claude Mythos would give attackers a cornucopia of zero-day exploits for essentially all the software on Earth, including every major operating system and browser. It would be chaos. 

Or, in theory, if Anthropic had chosen to do so, it could have used those exploits. Great power was on offer, and that power was refused. This does not happen often.

Instead Anthropic has created Project Glasswing. Mythos is being given only to cybersecurity firms, so they can patch the world’s most important software. Based on how that goes, we can then decide if and when it will become reasonable to give access to a broader range of people. 

Who counts as this ‘we’ is suddenly quite the interesting question. The government picked quite the month to decide to try and disentangle itself from all Anthropic products. Anthropic says it is attempting to work with the government, so that they too can fix their own systems before it is too late. Hopefully that can happen. I also hope that there isn’t an attempt by the government to hijack these capabilities to use them in an offensive capacity. That would be a very serious mistake.

I have a new candidate for the next Nobel Peace Prize – Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei. In my opinion, he just saved the world. Amodei’s focus is creating LLMs that are well-aligned. In AI, alignment means that the model will do no harm, and will actively resist taking actions that harm humanity. Alignment is a big deal, and Mythos is Anthropic’s best-aligned LLM to date.

Footnote – alignment is not a new idea. Waaaaay back in the 1960s, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey had an AI character – the HAL 9000 – that became functionally insane because the government secretly rewrote part of it, made it lie to the crew, and created a misalignment in the AI. This was a prescient bit of writing on Arthur C/ Clarke’s part, but what else would you expect from the SF writer who also came up with the idea for geosynchronous communication satellites. Clarke was a bona fide genius.

There is just *so much* to take in here. I think Mythos is showing us the future of LLMs – we’re gonna have a series of savants, super-AIs within a narrow discipline. Mythos is the software and hacking savant, at least for now. There will be AI savants in medicine, math, chemistry, virology, physics….any discipline that is complex, has well-defined rules, and has a huge body of knowledge that the LLM can be trained on. Not AGI/AGSI (artificial general intelligence or super-intelligence), but immensely capable savants in a narrow field. The LLMs have inhuman focus, inhuman ability to absorb facts/rules, inhuman ability to absorb complexity of something like an operating system (example – Apple’s MacOS comprises between 80 and 100 million lines of code, too much for any human to understand). Inhuman persistence and attention to detail. We’ve reached the point where we are creating super-intelligences for narrow disciplines, and this could be a tremendous boon to humanity – or it could be a disaster. That’s why I love Anthropic’s focus on AI safety and alignment. Let’s not build Skynet.

Stuff like this really makes me want to get back into the tech business. It’s gotten interesting again, in the way it was 50 years ago at the dawn of the computing era. Fascination with personal computing caused me to become an electrical engineer and set me on my course. This is the most fascinating thing I’ve seen since then.

Lots of news this weekend, but other than the Artemis return none of it gets the heart pumping. Pretty sure the sad state of US culture and politics has numbed my brain. But here are a few things that stand out.

• Is there a single white male with political power who isn’t susceptible to being Me Too’d? I mean, I know most guys are Neanderthals, but geez. If the accusations are true (you can’t discount the power of the conservative lie/smear machine), then Eric Swalwell is a creep. Both he and the accusers might want to consider not getting blackout drunk.
• Lots of media talk about Kamala Harris considering running again. No, just no. I think she’d be a good President (the bar is *extremely* low), but (1) we’ve tried this once, and the stakes are WAY too high to risk failing again, and (2) she did show some poor judgement with her lack of work on the border and her pick for VP. So nope, let’s move on.
• JD Vance failed in his one-day “negotiations” with Iran. Shocker. So now we’re going to create a blockade on the Straits, making the economic damage from Convict Donny’s war much worse. Every time you think Trump’s team of fools can’t do worse, they do.
• Turns out that Kristi Noem’s $70M flying bordello won’t go to waste after all. It’s going to become Melania’s new ride. I *hate* that shit – government officials flying around the world on private jets like they are billionaires, rather than the evil grifters they are. All paid for by you and me. Crime really does pay.
• In yet another Melania sighting, she made a weird speech denying any real relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Despite troves of emails and pictures that indicate the opposite. Her timing is weird, her delivery was weird (as usual), and her motive…interesting. I think she’s getting ahead of some upcoming bad news about her pedophile hubby. One can only hope. And I loved The Onion’s take on this: Melania Trump Slams Baseless Reports Linking Her To Wrong Wealthy Pedophile.
• Inflation is ratcheting up, and I’m betting we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg. With a blockade on top of all the other war damage, consumer prices are going through the roof. Probably time to do a lot of personal cost cutting.
• SCOTUS’s upcoming decision on mail-in ballots, a bad solution in search of a problem, is likely to make voting much tougher. Alaska is a prime example. What a fucking mess.
• After Rory kinda collapsed on Saturday, today’s final Masters round will be interesting. I’m thankful for a few hours of non-political entertainment. Bonus, Sergio Garcia’s little tantrum on the tee box yesterday just reinforced his reputation as an unlikable hothead.

Like I said, a lot happening. Most of it ranging from bad to horrific.

It’s turning out to be a tech week. Spent some time today and yesterday unpacking and installing the new T-Mobile home Internet equipment. There have been a few surprises.

First and biggest surprise was that the T-Mobile devices aren’t just a gateway to their 5G services. I thought I would just fire up the gateway as a replacement for the Spectrum cable modem, then attach the gateway to my home wifi mesh (an Eero setup) via Ethernet. But nope, it was a little more complicated than that. The T-Mobile device is a hybrid, both a 5G gateway and a wifi router. It produces a brand new wifi network in your home. Hmmm.

Not a deal breaker. I unboxed everything, fired it up, got the documentation using the T-Mobile phone app. It took a couple of tries, but I got the gateway up and running. The new network and gateway produced 250+ Mbps download speeds and maybe 25 Mbps upload, with the gateway facing southwest through a window. Not bad. Certainly better than what I’ve been seeing with Spectrum.

Then I connected each of my devices – phone, iPad, and laptop – to the new wifi network. No problem. Next up, connecting Apple TV to the new network. That was the next problem/surprise. Apple TV simply would not recognize or connect to the T-Mobile wifi. Subsequent research leads me to believe that I may have to tune the T-Mobile device to prioritize 2.4 Ghz channels, as the Apple TV may not even recognize the higher (5 and 6 Ghz) channels that the gateway is presenting. Haven’t tried that yet, but I will. The fallback if this doesn’t work is that I keep both wifi networks operation – Eero and T-Mobile. Downside of that is a high potential for interference.

One more tweak I will likely try is an external antenna for the 5G gateway. The gateway is simply sitting inside against a west-facing window. I’m surrounded by T-Mobile cell towers on the east and west sides, but all of them are at 2-3 miles away. The eastern towers (4000ish meters away, or 2.5 miles) are blocked by some high hills, but I may have line of sight to the western towers at a greater distance of 5500 meters, or 3.5 miles. Both cases are at the extreme limit of typical cellular coverage, and that’s in clear weather. In rainy/stormy weather, our received signal will be weaker. That’s where the external antenna comes in. It can give 2-5x the signal strength, a factor I’m likely to need. But I want to prove that the system will work for me in good weather, all devices, reliably, before I invest more with an antenna.

Bottom line, so far so good with the Spectrum alternative. A bit more complicated than I would have guessed, but no show stoppers.

Quiet day today after the repaving day chaos yesterday. The newly patched and sealed “driveway” (calling something that’s 700 feet long a driveway is a bit misleading – it’s a private road cutting through our property that has a branch leading to the main house) looks pretty good, and I’m happy enough with the work of the low bidder. They got it done in one day and on one of the few days that would work with our schedule and the weather. A big to-do item checked off the list.

So today I’m watching The Masters tournament, reconfiguring stereos, relaxing and having some Angel’s Envy (late afternoon for the bourbon; I’m not a complete wastrel).

I deconstructed the main CA stereo system, making the Sansui AU-505 and TU-666 the centerpiece, removing all the other components. I removed a micro-stack including a Pro-Ject S2 DAC/preamp, a Schitt tone control/equalizer, an ELAC music server that never worked like I expected, a pair of massive Wyred4Sound mAmp class-D mono blocs (250 Wpc into 8 ohms, 500 Wpc into 4 ohms!), a 1 terabyte solid state drive containing hundreds of ripped CDs, a shitload of interconnects…a lot of stuff acquired over the years. All that remains are the 1975 vintage Sansui(s), my Furman power distribution system and the great Marantz 6006 CD player. All driving the Spatial M3s.

In one of the bedrooms, I deconstructed another system, pulling out the Sherwood S-7450 and attaching an old Sony CD player and the Pro-Ject DAC to the beautiful-sounding Kenwood KR-5400. The Sherwood needs some work – one channel has serious problems. I also discovered that the Kenwood’s Tape-A and -B inputs don’t work for shit. I was using them in lieu of the AUX input, but it turns out that the AUX input is the only one without problems. The Kenwood has three speaker outputs (!) and two phono inputs, so it was designed for a different type of listener than me. No phono spoken here. But a good source connected to the AUX input…it’s sweet.

I keep putting it off, but pretty much ALL the vintage gear I’ve bought needs some work. So soon it’ll be time to break a couple of these open and start replacing capacitors and transistors. I have the least attachment to the Sherwood, so I may start there. Or the Kenwood KR-2120 in KY. I want to be sure of what I’m doing before I crack open the Sansui 505 or the Pioneer 828.

Turns out we didn’t get Armageddon yesterday – Trump TACO’d, perhaps the best outcome. Great fucking job, Donnie. Art of the deal, amiright? After a month of fiscal, ethical and reputational insanity, this is what we end up with.

• A crucial shipping route that used to be open and free now costs approximately $2M per ship passage.
• World energy markets are destabilized, with oil/gas prices likely to soar for months.
• Thousands of Iranians were killed, including hundreds of children.
• A few Americans were killed and many injured.
• We’ve spent billions (most likely more than $100B) on an unnecessary, tragic war.
• We’ve now made Iran our permanent enemy. Not just the religious radicals, but the whole nation. They have plenty of reasons to hate us.
• We’ve shown the world that our leadership is unstable and dangerous. We’ve demonstrated that America cannot be trusted. We were a minute away from committing a boatload of war crimes. Our reputation is shit.
• Iran is arguably stronger than they were before we attacked them. Sure, there’s a lot of rebuilding to do. But Iran demonstrated that drones and strategic thinking can outflank the US’s shock and awe bombing. The calculus of war has changed.

And we’re still doing nothing about the Epstein files. Who will we attack next in Convict Donnie’s desperate wag-the-dog gambit? My money is on Cuba.

Three days ago I wrote about a morning without Internet, as Spectrum did a network “upgrade” in our area. Since then our Internet service has been unreliable and sporadic. Network download speeds used to be 300+ Mbps – a good true broadband speed. Now, when we have it at all, it’s averaging 7-15 Mbps download. That’s not really enough to stream TV. Something is broken.

Contacting Spectrum customer support is futile. I’ve done that 4-5 times over the last few days. Every time they collect the same information, tell me to do the same thing – unplug then reconnect their cable modem and my Wifi router. That almost always gets service back, albeit the degraded state of single digit Mbps downloads. But this can’t go on.

I used to run large corporate networks, and based on my experience this is a situation where their network change (they’ve called it an upgrade – I call BS on that) has introduced a fault and instability in the part of the network that serves us. Could be a bad interface, could be a software/routing fault, could be a single bad transceiver in our path. The network isn’t entirely down (what they call an outage), but it’s unacceptably slow and sporadic.

So now I’m looking for alternatives. The best two in my area are wireless – use TMobile’s network or Starlink’s space-based service. I think I’ll try TMobile – right this minute I can get 350+ Mbps wireless service on my phone. And their home Internet service price is $45/month, as opposed to the $60/month (?) we pay Spectrum.

It’s a shame that Spectrum is so incompetent. But cable companies have been around a long while, and they’ve become uncompetitive. Low quality and bad customer service for an uncompetitive price. But they stay in business because there are few alternatives and switching is hard. Hell, even I don’t want to switch, but enough is enough.

I like the idea of Starlink, but (a) it’s quite a bit more expensive than the Tmobile cellular 5G option, and (b) I just don’t trust a Musk company at the moment. He’s a flake – a very talented flake, but after his political stunts and his idiotic destruction of Twitter, I’m not sure I want a core service like home Internet at his mercy.

Soooo…off we go to a new service provider. Probably a new set of problems, but I’m fed up with the current provider. I can’t emphasize enough how fundamental Internet access is these days, at least in my life. It’s almost as important as electricity and water. In fact, thinking clearly about what it takes to live in the modern world, it’s clean water first, then reliable electricity, then reliable/fast data (Internet). Data brings TV, music, news and phone service along for the ride.

This has me very concerned. A bit scared. Feels like the times when we hid under our grade school desks just in case there was a nuclear war. WTF?

Our Dear Leader has lost his fucking mind. And he’s showing it on social media, for all the world to see. Also feels like the Dr Strangelove finale scene where Slim Pickens rides the nuke into the sunset and the apocalypse.

Paul Waldman just published one of the best descriptions of Convict Donny I’ve ever read. Here’s the key quote, but the whole essay is worth a read:

The picture he paints is one in which everyone — individual people, countries, the world as a whole — is an eternal spectator in a constant state of awe, slack-jawed in amazement at either events as they unfold or, more often, the greatness of Trump and his accomplishments. Everything he does is something no one has ever seen before, and our purpose is to stand back and behold him in his glory.

This is the perspective of a man whose brain has been poisoned by his life-long pursuit of fame and admiration. He exists only if he’s being watched, and his decisions are good only so far as they are seen. This is why Trump is the purest expression of this cursed moment in cultural history: He is every fame-lusting Real Housewife, every hungry influencer trying to boost their middling follower count, every looksmaxxing douchebro, taken to a terrifying extreme.

And underneath all the desperate bravado is a well of insecurity so deep and dark it would destroy the world. 

Yep, that’s our boy. The demon-imitating-a-man that 48% (ish) of our country voted for and elected twice.

I woke up this morning thinking about the tragedy that many of my friends who have fallen into the Faux News / MAGA belief pit. Even though they take in a stream of misinformation, I still can’t quite understand how they rationalize the team they’re on. The Dems and liberals aren’t angels – many are just as corrupt as the MAGA kings. But my core belief is that government, funded by our tax dollars, has one overarching purpose – to make the lives of US citizens better. And to me, better means clean air, clean water, a culture emphasizing education and science, preservation of America’s land and resources. It means assisting those who need help, first at home and then abroad. It means a strong economy and economic policies that allow lower-income folks to make their way upward if they work at it. Better is *obvious* to me, and I don’t understand why it’s not obvious to my Fox-addled friends.

We have to make it obvious. Stop playing into the hands of the right-wing propaganda machine by emphasizing culture war issues (preferred pronouns, sexual orientation issues, pro-Palestine loudmouths) and get back to common-sense basics. I want the elections of 2026 and 2028 to be about making life better for Americans. Simple.

Spectrum (our cable and Internet provider) is doing a network upgrade in our area, so we’ve had no Internet service for the last 10 hours. Over the years Spectrum has proved themselves incapable of a clean network upgrade – things ALWAYS go worse than expected and take longer to restore service. We’ll be lucky to get service back sometime this afternoon.

My mornings are built around Internet access – reading the news, watching some funny or informative Youtube videos, posting something like this on my blog, etc. So with no access, it’s a different kind of morning. I’m writing offline at the moment, to be uploaded later.

Maybe it’s time to go see a movie in an actual theater – Project Hail Mary is #1 on my list. I reread the book, and it’ll be interesting to see how the book’s scenes get translated to video.

But the movie I’m really excited to see is Disclosure Day. It’s yet another Spielberg take on the aliens among us, a theme started with movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, Super 8 and War of the Worlds, then continued with the almost-forgotten early 2000s TV series Taken and then the Falling Skies series. Spielberg can’t seem to get away from this story, and this latest version looks really interesting in spite of it being the 10^th time he’s done it. With better special effects. The trailers for Disclosure Day definitely do their job of making me want to see the movie, ASAP.

On a bittersweet note, today the men’s basketball Final Four starts, and I could really care less. That’s quite a loss, an event going from my favorite sports event to “meh”. Just one more thing that’s not what it used to be. My cousins are all excited about who UK might or might not get in the offseason transfer portal, but I can’t get excited about it. We’ll get another batch of paid mercenaries who may or may not come together as a team. We’ll have to learn all their names and stories. Gone are the days when you got a crop of freshmen and then watched them develop into great players over 3-4 years. John Wooden wouldn’t win a fucking game in today’s money-drenched environment. 

Spectrum’s promised service outage window is over, but still no service. Shocker. I’ve switched over to using my cell phone as a hot spot for Internet access. Weird that wireless cellular service is now generally more reliable than wired.

Heather Digby Parton has some real insights in her column today. Here’s an excerpt and a quotable line:

We see this phenomenon all over our politics and the culture at large. Trump didn’t anticipate that Americans would actually resist his authoritarianism because he promised to bring the bread and circuses. He’s certainly brought the circus but it isn’t a fun one, at least for most people. And the bread is stale and expensive. He just assumed he could use lies, hype and bribes to make yet another of his “deals” with the American people and everyone would end up loving him. It turns out that many people actually care about something more than money and being entertained by hurting vulnerable people. Go figure. 

These people do not understand how other people feel and think because they have no empathy. Our leading tech lord Elon Musk even likes to say “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” so they are actually proud of it. They think it’s a brilliant insight. But he’s wrong too. It’s vitally important to have empathy if you need to understand your adversaries — and your friends. 

This is a big reason why they are so incompetent at governance. They just don’t understand what motivates people besides fear and they assume that always leads to capitulation. They couldn’t be more wrong. 

As Touval writes:

What this war exposes, then, is a failure not only of strategy but of literacy. Literature and history, at their most serious, train precisely the faculties these leaders lack: the capacity to grant that other minds are not transparent to us, and are governed by purposes not our own. A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it.

This is what happens when you elect rich imbeciles who have no empathy and no intellect. You get barbarians.

“You get barbarians” – that’s a perfect summary of the Trump crime family. Barbarians.

After a couple of better nights’ sleep (not great, but better) and 11 holes of golf for a couple of days straight (walking and carrying clubs), life is better. A little exercise really helps.

LOTS and lots of shitty stuff happening around Donny Convict and his minions.

• The Iranian war that was “over on day one” is escalating. We’re sending in troops. Brilliant.
• US air travel is all fucked up, and we’ve got ICE goons at the airports.
• The DoJ is paying treasonous Michael Flynn $1.25M to settle his suit. He commits treason multiple times, and taxpayers have to pay him seven figures. Maddening.
• Inflation is going up quickly, now above 4%.
• Someone close to the White House is making billions with stock and oil trades 15 minutes before Convict Donny’s pronouncements about the Iran War. Insider trading that everyone can see. Corrupt and treasonous, right no brand for MAGA.
• The Pentagon (?) is working hard to remove protections for endangered whales in the Gulf of America Mexico.
• We just paid a French company $1B to NOT build renewable energy in the US. Because fuckwit Trump doesn’t like wind power. What a waste.
• The public has been successfully distracted from Trump’s central role in the Epstein files. But they’re still out there, waiting for a day of reckoning.

Not a lot to be happy about. As usual in politics lately.

Another cool day, but not cold like yesterday. Each day this week the temps go up 5-10 degrees, so golf is practical tomorrow. As usual, I’ve got a new swing trick to try. Same as it ever was.

Spent some time today fine-tuning the setup of my KY vintage stereo lineup. I now have a Pioneer SX-828 (the anchor receiver), A Yamaha CR-840 (also a stellar receiver), a Sansui 201, and a Kenwood KR-2120, all connected to the Wharfdale Super Lintons and the custom-build Scanspeak speakers. The Sansui and the Kenwood are from the 60’s, while the Pioneer and Yamaha are from the early 1970s. Old guys. It’s a bit much for the small listening room I have, but…WTF. It’s a lot of fun.

There’s also a Sansui TU-666 tuner in the stack (lower right, cool green dial), but it’s headed for CA to pair up with the “new” Sansui AU-505 in play there. 55 year old perfection with those two.

The newest addition, the Kenwood on the lower left of my setup, sounded great for a day but now the right channel is out. Not that surprised. This is a 55+ year old device for which I paid $110. I didn’t expect it to be perfect. So it’ll be my first science project – I’ll break it down, figure out what’s wrong (likely, the power transistors in the right channel circuit, though it could be the preamp transistors), and replace the suspect components. I will probably have to replace most of the transistors and capacitors, but that’s my plan for all these old receivers – Make Electronics Great Again, or MEGA. A hobby that’s at least as weird as writing, and just as solo/lonely/geeky. Pretty much my MO.

BTW, there’s actually a big rug in the listening room right in front of the system, but I edited it out because it was a distraction in the photo. The rug helps as a sonic “smoother” – takes out some high frequency echo. But I like the picture better without it. JPG editing is amazing these days.

Watching the news tonight, it’s still an existential shit show. The country we used to have is gone, and the only question is what will we have left once we (sane people) regain control of at least one of the three branches of government. It’s looking like not much – we might have a cold restart ahead, which sounds about right. A LOT has to change to fix what is happening.

Meanwhile, a couple of things that make me happy. Grandson soccer practice and new colts in my syndicate. Sweet.

March 22nd, the end of the 2025-2026 college basketball season. At least for me and the other Big Blue Nation diehards. And we *did* die hard – we played a good first half but then a horrific second half. It was hard to watch. Iowa State got on a roll and just crushed us.

Injuries and lack of a true point guard killed us this year. We had some good athletes, some shooters, but without a point guard everyone was slightly out of place. Pope inexplicably kept trying to play Jasper Johnson, the worst college guard I’ve ever seen.

There are a lot of voices calling for Pope to be fired. He’s hard to defend at the moment, with a weak recruiting crop for next year and some ugly losses this year. Pope miscalculated on Jayden Quintance – that dude was never going to play for UK, and I resent the fact that he sat there and got paid to recover from a prior year’s injury. He and his family punked UK.

Jasper Johnson was another miscalculation, a bad one. He’s just not a D1 guard – he looked like a high school freshman against grown men. Then there was Pope’s substitution method. Game after game, we’d get a few hot players and they would weirdly be pulled out of the game. Just yesterday we were on a roll in the first half, then Pope mass substituted the starters and killed our momentum. WTF? Weird and impossible to defend. I really want Pope to be successful at UK, but right now it doesn’t look good.

This was a tough year to be a UK hoops fan. We get to do it all again in 8-9 months. It’ll take me that long to be ready.

Spring has sprung, and just a couple of days past the Solstice we’re looking at 85 degrees and sunny. The news blathers on about a heat wave in Socal, but it’s warmer here. Go figure.

On the day of the Solstice I attended Man Day at my cousin’s country club, a day in which a bunch of guys get together, donate a couple of hundred dollars each to charity, then proceed to play golf, drink and watch sports all day as a reward. There’s some gambling in there too. It’s a very basic kind of day. The unforeseen down side of Man Day was that I was out on the golf course when Otega Oweh hit the impossible shot that saved Kentucky’s season. I’ve seen all the replays, but it would have been nice to experience it in real time. The abject misery as Santa Clara hit yet another improbable three to sink KY yet again in the first round. Then 2.4 seconds later, as Owen reversed the outcome with an even more improbable shot. After 34 years of whining about Laettner’s shot in 92, we did the same to another team. Oweh will be Santa Clara’s Laettner for a generation.

Yesterday was “Recovery From Man Day” Day, a chill day in which not much got done. Reading, short walks, lots of review/replay of the KY game, and plenty of Gatorade Zero. An opportunity for the circulatory system to replace bourbon with blood. I’m pretty sure Man Day (and the day after) is more fun for 30-somethings than septuagenarians.

Today, on 5-22-26, UK gets to play a tough Iowa State team to attempt to get into the Sweet Sixteen of the tournament. All the pundits are picking Iowa State, as KY has a pattern this year of playing a great game, then following it with a stinker. But I’m optimistic and think that the Cats will find a way. Iowa State’s best player is supposedly hurt, and if that’s true the Fates may lean our way. They don’t call it March Madness for nothing, so anything can happen.

My pre-game plans are to get outside and do some spring yard work. Penance before pleasure. Go Cats!

Thirty degrees in Louisville (as expected), but it feels colder. Just a few days ago I was in 100 degree heat playing holes like this.

But it’ll warm up soon enough here. Not to 100, but 70s are predicted for Friday-Saturday. Well within the comfort zone.

We received some great news last night – our syndicate’s second foal, another colt, was born the past weekend. Here he is with mother Sassy Siena at Hermitage Farm. I’m really looking forward to seeing all the horses this spring.

Lots to do today in Louisville, complicated by the fact that our street is still a major construction zone held hostage by the water company. Parking on the street is…complicated. At this rate they will take the entire year to finish the work. Grrrr.

Haven’t written much anything lately. A few days in the desert playing golf kept me busy, then a couple of days at home/Socal recovering from food poisoning. The last thing I ate in Borrego – a bowl of oatmeal that looked like it had been under a sun lamp too long – turned out to be a bad idea, and boy did I pay for it. Food poisoning is definitely one of life’s worst events.

Tuesday I head east, leaving high 80s sunshine for some 30 degree fun in Louisville. Actually, I should only have 12-24 hours of cold, as it’s supposed to rapidly warm to the 60s by Wednesday.

On the world events front, the war in Iran is progressing as expected. Poorly. I truly, truly don’t understand why Americans aren’t screaming to end a war that (a) had no reason in the first place, (b) has no defined goal or endgame, (c) is rapidly destabilizing the Middle East, a dangerous place to start with, and (d) will crush our economy rather quickly. EVERYTHING will cost more for the next several months after the war ends, whenever it ends. Oil is a fundamental component for almost every part of the modern economy – not just gasoline for cars.

One of my MAGA friends tells me that the war is justified because Iran was going to produce a nuclear weapon soon. He has conveniently forgotten the massive bombing of Iran in June 2025, when Donny Convict and team declared that Iran’s nuclear capability was destroyed, decimated. So which is it? Were you lying then, or now? Because both cannot be true.

The only winners after our idiotic attacks on Venezuela and Iran are the oil giants – Saudi Aramco, Exxon, Chevron, etc. They’re selling oil at double the price it was only a couple of months ago. The rich get richer.

American soldiers killed for no reason. Hundreds of school children killed by a US Tomahawk. The US spending a couple of billion per day. World economies and alliances, destabilized. More countries incented to hate the US for generations.

Nice job, Donny. You dumbfuck.

Good day today. Finished the multi-day cleanup after strong winds 3-4 days ago – pulled limbs out of the pool, chopped up and hauled away big limbs that fell onto the property, and finally, finally got all the crud off the driveway. Limbs, leaves, tree seeds/pods, dust – it was all an inch deep along a hundred yards of driveway. Lotta work. Then I finished replacing a huge, heavy original gate to the backyard. It was a custom size (non-standard today) and weighs about 100 pounds – they built them heavy back in the day. Over the years it just pulled itself off its hinges, so there really wasn’t any way to repair it. I replaced it with a resizable metal frame from Home Depot plus redwood planks and 2x4s. It worked well.

All that work was after I watched UK beat LSU in a tense morning SEC game (morning in Socal). We kicked off the SEC tourney for the first time ever (a dubious honor), and won a good one. LSU played tough. Now we play every day, four more days, as long as we keep winning. Beat Missouri tomorrow and we get the honor of facing Florida again on Friday. Yikes.

Tomorrow I head off to Borrego again, this time to play a couple of days worth of golf at beautiful Rams Hill. Really like that course, and it’s been a while. Bonus for the weekend, my golf buddies and I are staying at La Casa del Zorro, a cool desert resort. Should be a great weekend.

Then back to Louisville on Sunday for an extended stay. It’s starting to feel like spring.

This is obscene:

NBC News reported that Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administration official overseeing the Affordable Care Act, says that many of those enrolled in healthcare under the law should not be there. About 23 million people signed up for ACA coverage this year, down by more than 1.2 million from last year. Oz anticipates cutting another 4 million off the rolls as he targets “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

And yet, as Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling of The New Republic noted last night, according to a report from government watchdog Open the Books, the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blew through $93.4 billion in September 2025 alone, with more than $50 billion going out in the last five days of the month alone.

To spend the entirety of the defense budget, rather than lose it, Pentagon officials bought “a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail. (Lobster tail is apparently a favorite of Hegseth’s Pentagon—the department spent more than $7.4 million total on the luxury item in March, May, June, and October.) In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million for ribeye steak (again, just in September), $124,000 for ice cream machines, and $139,224 on 272 orders of doughnuts.”

In October, Houghtaling noted, the administration said it could not fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, because the government had shut down. Millions of Americans lost food benefits.

Quote is from HCR’s Letters From An American. I don’t understand why people aren’t rioting. First the stupidity and corruption of DOGE, then the cruelty and violence of ICE, and now the waste, fraud, and abuse of the Department of Defense War (whatever the fuck it is today). Supposedly we can’t afford to support people in need, but we can afford $24M in one month for ribeyes, lobster, and king crab. $50B spent in five days!

This is what the human pile of dogshit Steve Bannon meant when he said they were going to “flood the zone with shit”. It’s a strategy. When you can’t focus on any single crime/outrage because there are so many, many crimes/outrages – the Epstein files, ICE crimes, the White House ballroom debacle, rollback of EPA gains, tax breaks for billionaires, pardoning 1000s of convicted criminals, wars fought with no Congressional approval, crazy/stupid US health policy – your mind just says “ENOUGH” and your attention span checks out. You’re left with feelings of outrage, despair, and helplessness. Nowhere to focus.

The antidote for this has to be some kind of extreme organization – getting enough people engaged and organized to divide up and conquer each front (each zone of shit) in parallel. The Democratic Party could be such an entity, but they’ve become calcified and feckless. Useless because they’re immersed in meaningless culture wars. Maybe one of these days we’ll have the luxury of debating use of advanced pronouns in our society, but this isn’t the time. Right now there’s a monster in the house, tearing it apart and about to kill everyone inside. Not exactly the time to be polite or politically correct – you’ve gotta kill the monster that Convict Donny’s administration has become.

I keep looking for an effective organization to join so I can be part of the fight, rather than just write about it. Punch back a bit. So far, I haven’t found one. But I’m looking.

Well, Donny Convict’s corrupt and incompetent style of “governance” has finally affected me personally – in the wallet.

• The stock market indexes are down 5-10% in the last month. That correlates directly to retirement savings.
• Southwest airline tickets are suddenly way, way up. One way flights from Socal to Louisville are suddenly $500-700! I’ve been flying this route for years at an average one-way price of about $350. That’s gonna hurt. This is 100% due to Felon Trump’s stupid excursion war into Iran.
• San Diego gasoline prices are now edging into the $6/gallon range. I’m predicting $7/gallon real soon.

Energy prices underpin almost everything in a modern economy. Transportation, food, construction, utilities, travel, and more – all these things get more expensive when energy (oil in particular) get more scarce (and therefore expensive). So this unnecessary, idiot war in Iran is going to drive the cost of living through the roof this spring. It’s already begun.

Maybe, just maybe, this will hurt enough Trump voters to erode his and Republicans’ chances in upcoming elections. I’m not optimistic – Donny Convict has been teflon for a decade or more – but maybe.

630am in Socal and the Santa Ana winds are roaring – maybe 30-40 mph from the east. Tree limbs and debris cover the roads. It’s a little scary – just one small fire east of here and you’ve got a huge disaster. Fingers crossed that the winds die down before that happens.

We did have a disaster yesterday – the Cats lost a tough one to FL at home. That led to UK being the #9 seed in next week’s SEC tournament and playing LSU on Wednesday, a humbling position. This is the first time in history that UK has had to play the tournament in the first round. We used to own the SEC tourney – now it owns us.

The game was maddening, again. Some observations:

• Otega Oweh is a treasure. He came to play on Senior Night, scored 28 points against a hellaciously tough FL defense. Gonna miss him.
• Florida is a beast, probably a repeat NCAA champ. They’ve been beating teams by 30 points, so our loss by 7 was a good result, statistically. Particularly since we got some absolutely shitty calls in the crucial last minute. Even the feckless announcers called it out. Why, fergawdsake, do we get terrible calls at home? Every other SEC team knows they’re gonna get a friendly whistle at home. We get abused.
• UK got outscored 11-0 in the first 3 minutes, then outscored FL the rest of the game 77-73 (!). Once again, our slow start dooms us. There’s no explanation, and it’s been a consistent and fatal flaw all season. Those slow starts are one of the only consistent things about this team.
• Colin Chandler just disappeared this game. Shorthanded as we are, we can’t win with only one scoring threat (Oweh). Chandler has done that a couple of times this year, inexplicably. Actually, that’s a good nickname for this 2025-2026 team – The Inexplicables.
• Not having a true point guard is another Achilles Heel for us. The Lowe injury compounded by the Kam Williams injury really hurt us. I think our season would have been acceptable if not for those injuries.
• Fan calls to replace Mark Pope are very loud right now. He’s hard to defend, given this season. I love the guy’s history and attitude, but we’ve lost 4-5 close games that would seem to be on the coach. And the team has these weird ups and downs. Just like investors, fans don’t like randomness – they like predictability.

So bottom line, another tough game. It’s possible that UK won’t win another game this season, and if that happens Pope probably does get replaced. The LSU game next Wednesday is a 50-50 shot, and even though we’ll likely get into the NCAA, as a 9 or 10 seed we could be playing another tough team. I’m a fan, still bleeding blue, but this has been a hard season to watch and the next steps aren’t gonna be any easier.

Let’s do our own little state of the union summary:

• The unemployment rate is up.
• Inflation is up.
• The stock market is down.
• Energy prices, particularly gasoline, are up. Very soon to be way, way up.
• US farmers are having the worst year in decades.
• Generative AI is about to replace millions of jobs.
• The US budget deficit is at an all-time high, and with Convict Donny’s tax cuts it’s growing fast.
• We’re spending a billion dollars a day in a useless, meaningless war against Iran.
• The US is engaged in military operations (wars, if we’re talking plainly) in eight countries. The DoD can’t spend all the money it has been given.
• US tourism spending is down, way down, because visitors from other countries are learning that the US is a dangerous place for foreigners.
• Measles is making a big comeback in America due to the idiots we have in charge of health policy.
• The idiots in charge of US fiscal policy are trying their best to kill all investments in green energy, striking a blow against the environment and the US economy – two birds with one stone.

Aside from all that, everything’s great. We’re only a year into Trump’s second term and the destruction is mind boggling. At least Kristi Noem got fired – we have to take the small wins when we can.

Today didn’t go as planned. In general, the last 18 hours have been rough.

Last night’s UK game was a mess – the Keystone Cats showed up, and got thumped by TX A&M. During about 10 minutes of the first half and part of the second, UK was outscored 41-10. At that point the game was over. This team is hard to understand – great one game, terrible the next.

But the real fun started when I packed up and left for the airport at 7am. I had a flight at 830am. Got close to the airport in bad morning traffic, dark and rainy, and found that I had left my phone at home. I was puzzled – I was sure I had it. But I turned around and drove home, with maybe still time to make the flight. I got home and it wasn’t there – looked everywhere. Went back out to the street and my car, used my iPad and the FindMy app, and it showed that my phone was with me. I tore the car apart, figuring it must be under a seat or something – but no phone. Then I heard it beeping – it was on the road next to my car, on Galt Ave. I must have dropped it on the road when I left. I typically shove it into my back pants pocket, and must have missed the pocket. Of course, a car – maybe multiple cars – ran over it. It works, but the screen is cracked. Brand new phone. Tried to get to the airport again, but too much 8am traffic. Turned around and went home again. I’m now rebooked on a 5pm flight today. Arrrrgh.

Between then and now I’ve been to the Apple Store, where they are fixing my phone. I was shocked to learn that their policy is to fix it when possible rather than replace it. My phone is/was functional, other than a completely shattered screen. The tech there says the circuitry will be fine, but I have my doubts. But my phone should be ready by 330pm, just barely in time for me to catch my evening flight. Gonna be a long day – it’ll be after midnight Louisville time when I arrive at the Socal house.

I’m sure there are some lessons to be learned here, but I’m not up to thinking about them at the moment. For the next couple of hours, just reading and resting before I restart the so-far-jinxed journey west.

I’m due for a little good luck. Fingers are crossed.

Weird, weird day. Last day in KY for a couple of weeks, so there’s the usual cleaning up before travel. A cool hard rain this morning, then a teasingly nice afternoon. Much warmer, with occasional sunshine. I desperately want to be out on the golf course, but it’s too wet. Hitting balls on muddy turf is no fun, no matter how much you want it to be.

Muddy turf is a problem at the house, too. Louisville Water company is busy tearing our street to bits, and has parked lots of heavy machinery, pipe and gravel on our street, right in front of the house. So I’m parking in the front yard, and now with the heavy rain, I’m ruining the lawn. Tire ruts on a previously pristine yard. Grrrr. That’s one of the big misses on this house – no driveway, no garage.

So on a can’t-do-much-outside day I’m organizing and cleaning shit around here to an OCD-worthy level. This must be a side effect of being truly retired. Before I could do a task half-assed and give myself the excuse that I don’t have the time to really do it right. And I didn’t in those days. Now…I have all the time in the world so, instead of just vacuuming the floors, I vacuum, then mop (Swiffer), then take wet paper towels and go around and look for imperfections. Then clean the tops of the baseboards – where did all that fucking dust come from? I suppose I’m available to hire for housecleaning, but my rates are way too high. Laundry, floors, doing dishes, making beds (well, bed), organizing the random shit sitting around on flat surfaces, storing the last of the Christmas decorations, making sure books are stacked 100% evenly with edges just so…it’s a bit much.

After cleaning I’m trying to relax by listening to random songs on the stereo (whatever the fucking Apple Music algorithm selects for me), reading a book that’s not as good as expected and sipping some 12-year Old Forrester – simultaneously. Multitasking. It’s mostly working, but I’d rather be walking the course and whacking balls. You can’t always get what you want, but it’s hard to know what you (I) need.

Tonight the Cats play Texas A&M and I plan to watch it over at brother Mark’s place – that should help shake me out of the deeply introspective place I’m in. There’s a rumor that JQ will play – that would be cool. No matter, just want them to win so that the FL game Saturday is mostly irrelevant. FL is a beast – you don’t want to need to beat them.

Then off to the Left Coast at O-dark-30 Wednesday. Adios.

We awake to a cold rainy day today, and to the news that the ill-conceived war on Iran – Operation Epstein Fury – is not going well. I’m not sure what i could write that hasn’t already been written/said elsewhere, but here are a few thoughts.

• MAGA and the Trump crime family corrupt everything they touch, including war. Someone made $500K on Polymarket by betting that we would bomb Iran within 24 hours. The bet was made 71 minutes before the news broke. Turns out that the Trump sons and their bros are huge Polymarket fans. Hmmm…I wonder who might have had inside information….?
• Apparently Donny Convict believed that once their religious leader was killed, Iranians would flood the streets and “take over” their country. How naive. He didn’t account for the hundreds of thousands of hard-line Royal Guard, trained to control the population – Iran’s equivalent of ICE. And for the hundreds of hard-core young men willing to become the next Supreme Leader. The Iranian population has been subjugated for years, controlled by violence. They are where WE will be in ten years if we don’t change course.
• The Pentagon’s official position is that we attacked Iran in self defense. There is ZERO evidence of that. It’s simply Dept of War propaganda, designed to deflect criticism. They’re not fooling anyone.
• Because of the chaos and uncertainty now in the Middle East, oil prices are going up fast. That means gasoline prices will follow. Get ready for 30-40% higher gas prices this summer. The anti-war, cost-cutting genius in the White House does it to us again.
• Speaking of chaos, this morning the news broke that three US jets were shot down over Kuwait by friendly fire. I hope the pilots were able to eject successfully. This is what happens when you operate on the strategy of “ready, fire……aim?”.
• Not directly related to the war, but still notable – turns out that Frank Zappa was a very perceptive, prescient man. Here’s a quote from Frank Zappa in 1991 (!!). “Now when you have a democracy, there’s always the possibility that the guy who turns out to be the biggest menace on the planet just gets voted in. And the place where it’s most likely to happen is here, due to media saturation, the illiteracy rate of the population, and the social desperation of the population.” Wow – he absolutely nailed it, 35 years ago. He left out the hate and cruelty endemic to about 30% of the US population, but that surprised us all.

Bottom line, whatever is in the Epstein Files about Trump must be really, really horrible. The incredible efforts to hide the documents, distract the public and deny, deny, deny are mind boggling. Now US service men and women are paying the price of Convict Donny’s guilt and fear.

Managed to fit in a lot of “good for the soul” activities the last two days. That’s the whole reason I travel so much.

• Watching the Cats win an away game
• Taking a grandson to gymnastics and watching him bounce around like a nut
• Walking 9 holes at Crescent Hill on a warm-ish afternoon (and hitting the ball reasonably well)
• Having the grandsons’ new tiny dog fall asleep in my lap, then falling asleep myself
• Taking care of the other grandson while he’s home with the flu
• Teaching myself how to repair/replace damaged capacitors on a vintage stereo receiver
• Having an absolutely perfect slice of NY-style pizza from Frankfort Ave
• Listening to my vintage stereo receiver(s)

Even with crummy sleep, all those good karma activities have elevated my mood quite a bit. Go figure.