 I’m cleaning out some old emails and there’s a note from a guy about getting out of New Orleans the day before the terrorist attack. Huh? Oh, yeah, there was a terrorist attack—some guy ramming some pedestrians???—on New Year’s Day, wasn’t there? One of those new Tesla trucks blew up the same day, didn’t it? Was that a terror attack or a suicide or just another Tesla blowing up for no particular reason? I forget. Actually, I’m forgetting lots of stuff these days as each crisis comes at me more quickly than the last one and I try to adapt to the 24-minute news cycle. Is California still on fire, do I believe Blake Lively or Justin Baldoni, and why can’t I download Tik Tok for my updates? Welcome to 2025, only four months old and already reeling like a Category 5 Hegseth. We’ve got to get much better at crisis management if we’re going to survive this thing, and step one is a new definition of crisis itself. Otherwise, we’re all going to die from dopamine overdoses before we’ve read our third tweet of the day. First, we have to recognize that some crises are real and some are pseudoclysms, events that seem to be earthshaking until you read the fine print. For example, renaming the Gulf of Mexico is a dick move, but crashing an incredibly strong economy is a real disaster. Selling citizenships for $5 million a pop is similarly dickish, but dismantling USAID is going to kill thousands, lose critical global connections and make China stronger. It’s all breaking news, of course, because we don’t pay attention unless there’s a chyron crawling across the screen. Even with the CRISIS!!!!!!!!! OVERLOAD!!!!!, though, our biggest crises are oddly unnoticed. Well, they’re under-noticed and under-reported, at least, including: Electricity. This is a frog-in-water story, unreeling over decades, so it’s easy to miss the tipping point, but here we are. The grid is outdated, overloaded, and incredibly susceptible to multiple forms of hacking. If we think China cannot already bring us to our knees by crashing the grid, we are whistling in the graveyard. Data. Essentially all our private information is in the hands of a relatively small group of behemoths led by bad actors, people who are more than happy to abuse their consumer-bestowed power to reshape governments. Now that DOGE has tapped government data, as well, no one is immune. We’ll all assume we're safe and the bad stuff will happen to someone else, until it happens to us. Defense. Recruitment is lagging while the Defense Department erases the heroics of the blacks, females and Hispanics who make up half our armed forces. Killing USAID and Voice of America, among other programs, is costing us a seat at the table in nations that can be/already are strategically important for our security. Meanwhile, Congress treats defense spending as a jobs program in key states, often overruling the pleas of military leaders who need to focus more on cybersecurity, asymmetrical warfare and, absolutely, conflicts sparked by the drought/famine resulting from climate change. Now that the War College is being ordered to be politically correct, MAGA style, we are getting more vulnerable by the day. Artificial Intelligence. We’re burning up the environment and electricity with $trillion investments in systems that pull disinformation off the web and present it to us as superior insight. We’re hardly into the beta phase as we demand that employees, customers and, soon, government agencies, replace the systems that are already working with something that should work even better after we get the kinks worked out, if we ever get the kinks worked out. Yes, some of you will die before our glorious future is revealed, but humans aren’t part of that future anyway, so no big deal. There’s more, of course, but most people stopped reading after that comment about the Category 5 Hegseth. For those of you with more stamina, the lesson is pretty clear. We need to learn which crises require the most focus and which are just pseudoclysms. Otherwise, we’re all playing Whac A Mole without a mallet. Subscribe? Why, yes, I'd love to, and all I need to do is click here?
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 There’s an old story about Abe Lincoln asking an audience how many legs a dog would have it you called a tail a leg. The audience said five, but he reminded them it was still four, because calling it a leg doesn’t make it so. I’m thinking about that tale almost every day as I hear people discussing the Trump administration’s attacks on the bureaucracy, immigration, science…you get the idea. The most Orwellian labeling is the so-called department of government efficiency, which is still not truly a department and is absolutely making the government less efficient. I hate to lose readers by bringing math into the discussion, but efficiency is actually a formula, not just a word. Efficiency is a measure of how much you get out of a process in relation to what you put into it. You get increased efficiency if you cut staff and keep output the same or keep the same staff and increase output, but that’s not what’s happening. Still, every member of the media and every politician and refers to the attack doges as if they are working on efficiency. Ditto for border security, where we’re making a show of deporting legal visa holders who are not dangerous and hyping mass deportation flights that are advertised as carrying bad dudes in violent gangs. Turns out, not everyone on those flights is in a gang, some of them appear to be citizens or legal residents, and lots of people in violent gangs are still here, laughing at us. I’m a big fan of secure borders…also a big fan of legal immigration…but I feel zero percent safer as we watch this show. It's the same way all around as we cut funding for medical research and cancel visas for research teams while proclaiming a goal to Make America Healthy Again. Somehow--and call this a crazy hunch--but I don’t think we’re about to get any healthier. And, before anyone on the Left feels even more smug than they already do, let’s look at some of the mislabeling along that side of the aisle. In that world, people are evil if they have too much money, so all billionaires are bad, including Taylor Swift. Fun fact: Forbes identified 83 billionaires supporting Kamala Harris and only 52 backing Trump in 2024. “White male” is shorthand for everything that’s ever gone wrong in the world, even though there just might be a few white males who are decent folks. Rural people are all racist, ill-informed rubes who cannot understand how to turn their underwear right-side out, if they had any in the first place. “Conservative” is synonymous with racist or nazi or fascist…or all three. If anyone was misgendered the way liberals misrepresent other people, there’d be hell to pay. It’s pretty clear we’re getting no help from politicians or the media, as each of them mimics the false claims and characterizations as if they were true. That means every one of us needs to be deputized (Barney Fife shoutout!!) to defend truth in labeling. It’s more than a century since Mark Twain alerted us to the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. It’s well past time for us to have received the message. Subscribe? Why, yes, I'd love to, and all I need to do is click here?  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the most fragile and irreparable thing in this world: Trust. People sometimes talk about rebuilding it after a breach, but there’s a major bit of self-deception in the concept. Once broken, trust can never be restored in full. We make adjustments, make amends, apply new standards, but the seeds of doubt will germinate forever.
Ultimately, this is the eternal damage done by the Trump Administration. Whether it’s NATO or the full faith and credit that has made it possible to fund our debt at rock-bottom rates, or the leadership role the United States has held since World War II, we’ve broken the trust. We will not get it back within the lifetimes of anyone reading this note. If you had asked me one year ago about the likelihood of a president, any president, invoking a 250-year-old statute to deport citizens and legal residents without due process, I would have said zero. If you had asked me one year ago about the likelihood of a president, any president, invoking martial law in order to use the military against the civilian populations, I would have said zero. If you had asked me one year ago about the likelihood the United States would abdicate its leadership role in the world in return for….nothing, really…I would have said zero. Today, the answer to all those questions is “more than zero.” In a few cases, it’s 100%. Even worse, if such things could get any worse, there is no return to the status quo ante we did not value or protect nearly enough. Europe has already moved on. China is finding new allies among the nations we’ve scorned. Russia is reinvigorated. Canada and Mexico will play at negotiations, but they’re not going to plight their troth to the States in the way they have in the past. There will be negotiations and the kabuki of diplomacy, of course. We’ll see new contracts or investments or shifts in consumer sentiment. Something has changed, though, and that something is the foundation on which our globe balanced. In hindsight, we benefited greatly from a mirage. We never really thought about the United States abandoning Europe or Western democracies. We never really thought about the possibility we’d default on our debts. We never really thought about surrendering the global leadership role we’ve held for eight decades.We never really thought about the missing guard rails that neither we, nor the Founders, realized we needed. Pretty much nobody else thought about it, either, but now they have. And now that they’ve had to factor it into their thinking, it’s not simply going to disappear. The administration can change policies or adjust practices, but the rest of the world knows we can change them back at any moment. That unpredictability is as monumental as any cataclysm short of nuclear war. We’ve crossed the Rubicon. We’ve burned the ships. There is no passage back to the place we were before. The new normal is not normal at all, but it is the new reality. Subscribe? Why, yes, I'd love to, and all I need to do is click here?  Add this one to the list of things that were always true and, somehow, turned upside down. We’re already seeing the damage, but I haven’t seen much awareness of the cause.
Historically, the world has been run by C students. They were smart enough to get through their classes, but they didn’t bury their heads in the books to the exclusion of relationships. In fact, the C students who went on to found great companies had a major skill that many of their phi-beta-kappa counterparts lacked. They were good with people. They knew how to sell, they knew how to manage their boss’s perceptions, they knew how to outflank their competitors when it was promotion time. They knew how to hire, and fire, and they found a way to balance the demands of the job. When they succeeded, they hired a bunch of A students to be their CFOs and their chemists and engineers. Yes, there were major exceptions, but the pattern held for a long, long time. Even when someone had a stellar academic career, the ability to persuade other people was a gigantic differentiator for big-time success. And then came the tech era, when people skills became a liability and Plato’s shadows were replaced by digital simulations. Our new oligarchs aren’t people persons; absolutely the opposite. Our tech despots have the people skills of a polar bear and the social graces of orcas. Mark Zuckerberg started The Facebook because he couldn’t get laid. Elon Musk has more than a dozen kids, and he uses IVF and surrogacy to avoid that messy sex thing. Also, he doesn’t talk to some of his offspring, because people, yuk. Also, one of them is dead, but also alive, sorta like that cat in a box. Capital and labor are in conflict eternally, so business leaders have always been open to the idea of replacing people with machines. Now, though, there is this notion that one truly genius business owner can sit atop an empire operated solely by neural networks embedded on chips. The drive to eliminate people entirely, not just reduce their numbers, is a pernicious and often unrecognized shift in the paradigm. Even worse, a large number of tech bros are true believers, crusaders for the cause of AI supremacy. They think they are part of a new dawn, not the demise, of civilization. I’m not sure how many of them subscribe to any organized religion, but they all have the zeal of crusaders who have just begun their march. The devaluing of people is most obvious in the Musk-led assault on federal agencies, where it’s assumed that everyone is equally wasteful, equally expendable, and equally useless. Musk and his cronies would never pull random lines of code out of an algorithm or disconnect every third cable in a server farm, but the value they assign in the factory doesn’t transfer to 2 million people in a service network. Everyone who has ever worked inside a large organization, or managed operations in one, is aware of the complex connections and processes that make them work. Some people within these organisms are critical connectors who facilitate multiple functions; losing any one is the same as losing ten. Similarly, anyone who has seen a large company screw up a buyout offer knows the reality: the people most open to taking the payout are the ones most confident in their ability to find another position. Some people opt for early retirement and some opt to be very, very productive…someplace else. The guys who were rightfully assigned to work on projects without human interaction are now working on an even bigger project…also without human interaction. The result is an extremely predictable level of chaos that results when people who are good at one function assume they know about everything. We’ve been in the thrall of the tech bros for more than a generation now, marveling at each new advancement and ignoring the deterioration of our lives as the price of admission. We communicate on private networks where we exist at the whim of the owner, unlike public utilities that are required to accept everyone. Increasingly, our participation is subject to decisions by bots that have final say; no appeals to humans are available. Up until now, the anti-human bias of the tech glitterati has been an entertaining sideshow. Right now, though, it’s an existential threat to farmers, doctors, airline pilots…all the people the rest of us depend on to keep us alive…and also each of us individually. Note to parents: If your kid is getting average grades and is very good with people, be very happy. They might end up saving the world in a way we never expected. Subscribe? Why, yes, I'd love to, and all I need to do is click here?  Looking across the blighted landscape of our Republic, it’s impossible to ignore the shattered guard rails and demolished institutions that, not so long ago, hummed very softly as they completed their appointed rounds. Salvation is at hand, though, and it’s coming from the one institution that outranks every other system in the nation. Capitalism. Think about that one for a moment. While the left is wailing about billionaires taking over the government and trying to launch a resistance to new tax cuts for the wealthy, capitalism is quietly thwarting the machinations of President Musk and Bobby KJ and even Donnie T. It’s a lot like War of the Worlds, except we’re getting saved by an invisible hand, not the invisible bacteria that’s too tough for Martians. One of the great things about capitalism is that it’s based on a fundamental human trait: greed. Some people try to overcome their avarice and others don’t, but it’s always operating in the background of everything we do. I know a few people who wonder, “What’s in it for me?” before they decide to inhale and, while they’re in the extreme group, we’re all human after all. So, how is capitalism about to save all of us from the worst onslaught on our freedoms since, um, ever? First, pretty much everyone has stopped buying Teslas. Chinese EVs have been outperforming them, sales have plunged across the globe, and the “world’s richest man” is headed for paupertown. The United States, particularly, is a consumer-led economy and consumer tastes can change quickly. Someone’s going to argue that boycotting Tesla’s is a political rejection of Musk, but it’s dollars, not votes, that will save the day. Consumers, particularly the demographic that has been the biggest source of Tesla’s allure, are very big on what their purchases say about them. They opted to pay a ton extra for a transportation choice that proclaimed their virtue in the global environmental wars. Now that the same vehicle sends a much different message, it’s not worth the extra cost. That’s how capitalism works. The same applies to the millions mobilized to buy from local merchants instead of Amazon. It’s often more expensive and a bit more trouble to stop at a local store, but the consumer is buying bragging rights. For a few extra bucks, a case of beer becomes a badge of honor and gives us a story to tell about our resistance. The people running companies might or might not care about DEI or immigration or LGBTQALEWKMLEI+, but they do care about their jobs and their bonuses, so they pay attention when the consumer turns sour. And it’s not just the consumer that’s calling the shots. As some law firms abdicate to the administration, corporate clients can start questioning the commitment those firms will show to them as clients and, in some cases, find new counsel. No major company is suddenly going to hire a law firm that folds under pressure, but cowering and surrendering is guaranteed to send more than a handful of clients and staff to other resources. Then we have the issue of economic policies out of the administration. I was going to cite one or two, but they’ll probably change three times while you’re reading this. The upshot, though, is that capitalism thrives on stability. You can’t build a plant with a 100-year life if the rule book gets replaced every week. After that, there’s global markets. Suddenly, many of our former allies are taking a fresh look at what they buy and, look out below. When Germany decides to spend an extra trillion on defense, but is leery of buying from the United States, and other nations join in the search for alternative vendors, even the military/industrial complex can be brought to tears. Contracts won under the Biden Administration will not be renewed, and many will be canceled, as former allies seek out new suppliers. One of the best things here is that these upheavals are hitting people who could not be reached otherwise. I know some folks in the business world who really don’t care a lot about citizens getting deported or enemies who are targeted, but they do care about their companies and their money. Capitalism is pushing more than a few to adjust their assessments of the Trump Administration. One of the really terrible things about capitalism is that it’s soulless. Capitalism responds to money and pursues money’s best applications. Social good and morality and all that other value-based stuff is not a part of the core directive. In the current situation, though, that soulless nature is going to help save the nation. Not from the top down, of course, but from the bottom up. Capitalism focuses on what works, not what we hope will work, and that emphasis on pragmatism is our best (only?) reason for optimism. Subscribe? Why, yes, I'd love to, and all I need to do is click here?  I started this whole blog with the intention of never inserting myself into political discussions, but that was before all the politics were injected into me...
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Who writes this stuff?Dadwrites oozes from the warped mind of Michael Rosenbaum, an award-winning author who spends most of his time these days as a start-up business mentor, book coach, photographer and, mostly, a grandfather. All views are his alone, largely due to the fact that he can’t find anyone who agrees with him. Archives
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