This is the fourth installment in the short blog series, Cleanup on Aisle 47, which is meant to present ideas on rebuilding and strengthening U.S. democracy. The legislative branch of the U.S. government is currently broken. When Donald Trump first served as president and was impeached twice, he should have been removed from office, but Republicans, who were and still are in the majority, were so much in thrall or in fear of Trump that…
Let’s see if we can give AI more complexity to chew on, shall we? If the AI tech bros are going to steal whatever they can from the web to train their models, why not provide our human way of bringing together disconnected thoughts? This is the opposite of what web content creators have been told since the dawn of blogs, when we were encouraged to pick one topic and hammer on it endlessly in…
To learn about ways to save U.S. democracy from an anti-democratic regime, I read “Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World,” by Srdja Popovic. Popovic helped lead a nonviolent student movement called Otpor! to overthrow Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. Though I have read the book three times, I didn’t understand how, in a practical way, people could use…