The managers at the yacht club bought a statue of a coyote, hoping to scare away the geese who populate the lagoon all summer and make a mess of the facility. And it worked, too, for about a minute. Once the geese figured out it was a fake, they went back to marking up all the poop decks in the harbor.  It turns out that scare coyotes are as useful as scarecrows when it comes to pest control.

Like pretty much every animal, geese are much smarter than people. Their survival depends on their street smarts, even where there are no streets, so they develop a talent for learning what’s a threat and what isn’t, what needs attention and what can be ignored.  

If only people were that insightful, we’d all be better off. Not only are people dumber than geese, we have a truly annoying habit of overestimating just how smart we really are.  Perversely, or maybe inevitably, we tend to overstate our smarts in the areas where we know the least. For instance…

Nobody knows more about how dangerous Chicago is than people who live in a suburb 30 miles away. Do I need to add “almost all white” to that note, or is it a given? My friends in the suburbs will lecture me nonstop about the threats I would face if I ever journey down the deadly streets I actually do journey down every damned day. And it’s a given that they know much more about my mayor and city council and police department and schools than I do. One day, I should ask them the name of their police chief or mayor or...never mind.

Nobody knows more about the Black experience than an over-educated liberal who is simultaneously wracked by the limitless guilt of white oppression and the unsurpassed arrogance of a supreme ally who truly feels their pain.  Ditto for the Native American experience, the immigrant experience, the AAPI experience...never mind.

Nobody knows more about all that 14-dimensional chess that Trump is always playing than some high-school dropout in a trailer park in Mississippi. Was that too specific? Sorry, I should have included a bunch of suburbanites with master’s degrees in that cohort.

Nobody knows more about investing than some guy who went to med school and nobody knows more about government than a guy who runs a car company and nobody knows more about how to argue before the Supreme Court more than a guy who binged Law & Order last week.

It’s as if every one of us spent the last night at a Holiday Inn Express.

Whenever I spend some time with a true expert in a field, or even an avid hobbyist, I get a sense of how uninformed I really am. And that’s a good thing, because we all have our zone of competence and, ipso facto, our zone of incompetence. Knowing where expertise ends and ignorance begins is a form of wisdom that’s also a great survival skill.

By the way, if anyone is in the market for a slightly used coyote statue, I think I can set you up with a motivated seller.
 
 
 
 

From immigration to obesity and jobs of the future, we’re solving all the world’s problems today. Hop on the bandwagon as we discover…

• Obese quiet. The woman at the next table is praising her child for finishing his food and making a big deal about what a good boy he is and I think I’ve found the cure for obesity. From almost age zero, we tell kids they can please their parents by eating more, get applause for clearing their plates, disappoint us terribly by letting food go to waste and, horrors, chastise them for not liking something that’s good for them. Five or ten years later, we have no idea how they developed food issues. Well, now you know.
• Finally fitting in. I ended up in a bird sanctuary one morning, taking photos of a bunch of creatures I couldn’t name and plants I didn’t recognize, and it occurred to me that we’re way off base with this whole ‘survival of the fittest’ thing. When you look at all the types of birds and plants that thrive in an area, it’s pretty clear that you can go a long way on ‘just fit enough.’ Clearly, some species are trying much too hard. 
• Legal tender immigration. A friend of mine says immigration is the one thing we absolutely got right in this country and I think he’s on to something. Everyone says America was founded on the idea of freedom, but the biggest draw is the opportunity to get rich. Money is the great equalizer and people from all over the world are willing to forsake their pasts for a shot at the golden ring. We should probably appreciate that just a bit more than we seem to be doing these days.
  
• Socialist conservatives. Getting rid of regulations is the height of socialism, so you’d think all those “free market” champions would love red tape. Dumping waste into the public water supply transfers the cost of cleanup from the individual or company to society at large, which is the essence of socialist practice. Whether it’s product safety or waste management or fraud prevention, regulations protect the rest of us from paying some other guy’s bills. In fact, it might be the most capitalist thing any government does.
• Hoarders Rule! I finally decided to get rid of stuff I would never need again, like old electronics and packages of blank CDs and DVDs. And then, for the first time in more than a decade, I needed to burn a CD. Which I didn’t have. Because I finally threw them out. And this is why hoarders will survive even longer than cockroaches. 
• Long past panic. A company I never heard of sent me a letter a few weeks ago, telling me that data they didn’t specify, which might or might not have included my personal information, had been stolen from a database they were managing for a supplier of mine that they didn’t name, at some point they couldn’t quite determine. Also, it happened more than 14 months ago, they have taken steps to fix it, and it’s all under control now. No worries, though, because I can sign up for credit and identity monitoring from another company I’ve never heard of, and look both ways before crossing the street. Okay, they didn’t tell me to look both ways, but I wanted to put some truly useful info into the paragraph, so there you are.
• Spam. A lot. I am so done with unsubscribing from all the crap that I didn’t ask for, don’t want, and never need. I’ve tried just clicking the unsubscribe button, but that just brings up more questions about why I want to stop receiving the garbage I didn’t ask for in the first place. Even worse, they don’t stop. So much simpler, now that it’s all spam.
  
• Techsplaining booms. I really miss the days when you could ask people what they did and you’d actually understand the answer. “I make anvils.” “I sell refrigerators.” Real stuff. Then we devolved into the era when everyone was “involved in facilitating the optimization of interactive interface modalities…” or something like that. Finally, we’re back to basics, because everyone I meet lately is a translator. Almost all of them are translating between tech bros and real people, but at least it’s a job description I can finally understand.
  

 
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The kid who always waits on me apologized that I couldn’t have lunch because the internet was down. The owner was at the other end of the dining room, on a speakerphone, trying to navigate his way to a customer support person who could actually support him.

Confused, I was, since I didn’t realize you needed to log in to make tacos, although it turns out there are many, many things I don’t know. Age is supposed to bring wisdom, but it has its limits, and the connection between tortillas and bitrate counted as my latest blockade.

Turns out, though, that the gap was his, not mine, since the gas line was just fine and the electricity was on and the cook still knew how to make a couple of tacos without a You Tube tutorial. I said I’d just pay with cash, but he wasn’t sure if that would work. He had to ask the owner, who was talking to his third or fourth AGENT on the winding journey to the "support" part of customer support.

At first, the owner thought it was fine, but then my server said he would still be unable to give me lunch, since he didn’t know how to figure out the sales tax. I said it’s about 12% in Chicago, so just add it to the bill and we’ll be fine. He wasn’t convinced, but he agreed to tell the cook to make me a couple of tacos.

While I marveled at the disconnect between food prep and internet access, other customers started wandering in. Three cops came by, but only one of them had cash, as was the case with another regular who showed up five minutes later. One guy said he had cash, but only if they could break a C-note. Big ask for a place where the tacos cost less than four bucks, so that deal went south, as well.

And so it went, with one person after another stymied by the idea of using legal tender that’s advertised at suitable for all debts, public and private. Except when it isn’t.

And that’s the problem, or at least one of them, as tech replaces both same-old and common sense. I go to restaurants that are cash-only and others that don’t take cash at all. The ones that don’t take cash won’t necessarily be taking whatever cash substitute I bring into the store, because everything’s proprietary and your results may vary.

Not everyone takes Apple Pay or Zelle or Google Pay or whatever you happen to have loaded on your phone. Nobody cares what’s in your wallet, because wallets are superfluous. It’s like the old days when some people took Visa and some took Mastercard and some accepted Discover (what’s that?), and everyone tried to avoid the fees charged by Amex. No matter what you had, you might get rejected when it was time to pony up.

Me? I like cash, which has all kinds of advantages. One big benefit is that I can pay and leave quickly when I don’t have time to wait for someone to process my credit card. Another is not having to pay six weeks from now for a lunch I, um, deleted a month ago. (Sorry for the crudity, but facts is facts.)

Also, a guy with cash can buy tacos even when the internet is down, unlike at least six other people who wandered into the same restaurant as I did. Trust me on this one: the IRL tacos tasted exactly the same as the online version.

Maybe better.
 
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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.
 
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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.
 
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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.


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