This story seems particularly apt in these dark times.  It is a cousin of “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” It sounds ancient, but was actually written as the 60’s ended, by Loren Eiseley (NOT anonymous). Here is the original starfish story.

But like all good quotations, it becomes more concise with repetition. With due credit to the author, here is the Reader’s Digest condensed version (35 words shorter than the original)

I saw a man in the distance bending and throwing as he walked. As he came near, I could see that he was throwing starfish, abandoned on the sand by the tide, back into the sea. When he was close enough, I asked him why he was working so hard at this strange task. He said that the sun would dry the starfish and they would die. I said to him that I thought he was foolish. There were thousands of starfish on the beach. One man alone could never make a difference. He smiled and hurled a starfish far into the sea, saying, “It makes a difference for this one.”

Don’t let the cynics convince you there is nothing you can do about the current situation. Every act of kindness helps. Not to mention every act of courage in the face of evil.

Insomnia is a sign of dementia, according to AARP. In total, a Daily Beast review found, Trump posted 189 times between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. local time in April. This is not fake news; you can go count them yourself, as a matter of public record.

There were only five days in April when he could have had a full night’s sleep.

Fun Fact (speaking of matters of public record): Trump doesn’t post transcripts of his public remarks. What is the White House hiding? How does it differ from Joe Biden? Oh wait! All of Biden’s comments are in the National Archive, which includes all presidential comments from 1929 until May 22, 2025, when the White House not only stopped posting new transcripts, it erased all the transcripts from his first term. Who’s hiding signs of dementia? You be the judge.

Memory Hole anyone? According to the Trump White House (especially Karoline Leavitt), war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.  (See George Orwell’s 1984).

Who Wrote The Declaration Of Independence

From LinkedIn, by Mark Henderson

Pop quiz: Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? Thomas Jefferson in 1776 [Ed. Note: With help from Ben “LLM” Franklin and John “Better Prompts” Adams].

An AI “detector” flagged it as 97.75% AI-generated. AI detection tools are not the answer. They never were.

If your entire academic integrity strategy is “run it through a detector,” you’re building on sand. The real question isn’t did AI write this? It’s does this assignment even require original thinking? Redesign the work. Make it personal. Make it specific. Make it theirs.

No detector needed.

One is a Rasputin-like figure, a senior advisor to a war-mongering authoritarian with imperial aspirations. The other is Joseph Goebbels

This arrest is beyond comment

The Donald Trump Hour

Brendan Carr clinched the job of Executive Producer and Enforcer the day he ordered up the show, but he needs me to serve as Producer of the Donald Trump Hour, weeknights at 9 (8 central) on CBS/Skydance and ABC/Disney (coming soon to NBC/Universal). Affiliates failing to carry the show will suffer dire consequences.

Continued here

Screeds Relieve Pressure

Screeds permeateted my writing this week, so why shouldn’t they permeate your reading? Part of my “shove less down your throat” campaign impelled me to offer 650 words somewhere else:

An Open Letter To The People “Running” Paramount/Skydance
“Dear Keister-Kissing Trump Toadies”

Just Because They Say We Can’t Tell The Truth About Him, Doesn’t Mean We Can’t Tell The Truth “Hypocrisy on Parade”

I looked at these pictures so you don’t have to. If you think Trump is either God or Jesus or the Second Coming of Jesus, stop reading here.

Megalomaniac Trump was so proud of the image of him as Jesus that he reposted it, then removed it 13 hours later.[1] A trickle of RWNJ supported it: “the country needs healing.”

Not a single religious leader praised the image. It was considered vile by droves of Catholics and the Christian-adjacent (like me). As far as I recall, Jesus wasn’t a megalomaniac.

Then Trump swelled with pride[2] and posted another piece of AI Slop, touching heads with Jesus. These images are so low-res and hard to find it’s as if someone were scouring them from the Internet.

Trump has form in Jesus boasting going back to his between-term trial. In October 2023, Trump shared a meme of himself sitting beside Jesus Christ, on the first day of his civil fraud trial.

Trump can’t and shouldn’t be blamed for all AI Slop Fan Art, just the “art” he proudly reposts. And we know he is reposting them himself (no blaming a staffer this time) because he says he vets every post under his name. Would the president lie to us?

Let’s just check how Trump is going with the seven heavenly virtues (you be the judge…) prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope and charity.

[1] How proud is that?

[2] Pride is one of the seven deadly sins, since we are in bible territory.

In a WordPress post, I quoted Benjamin Franklin: “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” I tried to publicize the post containing that quotation. There followed a tale of AI incompetence, aided and abetted by human incompetence, which forced me to bowdlerize Franklin’s words.

All I had to change to make the post palatable was to paraphrase the quotation: “Franklin also suggested that if we all agree to stand together and speak truth to power, there aren’t enough masked men in black to arrest all of us.”

If you have a high school education and ever once paid attention in US History, you would realize not a threat. It is not a call to violence. It is not racist (ala Strange Fruit). It’s something one of our founding fathers said.

CONTINUED HERE

Joe Kashi, my friend and fellow MIT alum, was mulling over George Washington, and had this to say.

I recently reread Washington’s Farewell Address, which he circulated to citizens the new United States upon leaving the Presidency after two terms.  Washington’s Farewell embodies great wisdom about the proper course of statesmanship and the conduct of human affairs.  His address bears careful reading and rereading in our present day.

Continued here

George Washington has been deified and simplified as part of our national myth. Turns out he was really great. And I don’t care if he “never told a lie” and confessed to his father that he had cut down a cherry tree.

His Farewell Address (actually a letter) was a Nostradamus-level prediction of 2026, and a Pericles-level analysis of the state of democracy. Thanks to my obsession with accurate quotation, I simply wish to note he didn’t write it alone: Alexander Hamilton and James Madison drafted it; Washington would not have performed it had he not agreed with the sentiment.

This story seems particularly apt in these dark times.  It is a cousin of “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” It sounds ancient, but was actually written as the 60’s ended, by Loren Eiseley (NOT anonymous). Here is the original starfish story.

But like all good quotations, it becomes more concise with repetition. With due credit to the author, here is the Reader’s Digest condensed version (35 words shorter than the original)

I saw a man in the distance bending and throwing as he walked. As he came near, I could see that he was throwing starfish, abandoned on the sand by the tide, back into the sea. When he was close enough, I asked him why he was working so hard at this strange task. He said that the sun would dry the starfish and they would die. I said to him that I thought he was foolish. There were thousands of starfish on the beach. One man alone could never make a difference. He smiled and hurled a starfish far into the sea, saying, “It makes a difference for this one.”

Don’t let the cynics convince you there is nothing you can do about the current situation. Every act of kindness helps. Not to mention every act of courage in the face of evil.