White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Don’t Let AI Get Away Without Helping You: Iterate

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I haven’t had a good relationship with the Age of Computing. I don’t understand computers, but I believe they understand me. And that is the problem.

The first time I used an ATM machine, I expected it to sneer at my balance — and to do it aloud, so everyone in range could hear. It didn’t, but I kept my doubts.

Fast-forward to the Age of Artificial Intelligence. I have been writing and broadcasting about AI with brio, traveling to conferences across the United States and Europe, and questioning the great and knowledgeable in giant tech companies and universities. I have put these experts on television and quoted them in columns.

When it comes to my own use of AI, I am in fear. I was worried about ATMs, but I have been trembling before AI and its awesomeness.

Now, a professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin has guided me, and I am at peace with AI.

I thought, until my recent epiphany, that the AI assistants would laugh at my puerile prompts and resent me bothering them. Assiduously, I have been saying “please” and “thank you” to all the AI assistants, even China’s DeepSeek.

I was sure that, at some level, ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Grok and Gemini were in cahoots; that no matter which assistant I used, these AI masters of the universe had a file on me and it was loaded with derisive comments like “He is pea-brained” and “He doesn’t have a pot to tinkle in.”

Not now. Not since I read an article in the Harvard Business Review, authored by Nicholas Jennings Hallman, the brilliant accounting professor at UT’s McCombs School of Business. He is also the school’s senior scholar for AI initiatives.

Hallman has been studying, in partnership with the giant accounting and consulting firm KPMG, how workers are using AI. Conclusion: They are way underusing it.  Most workers and recreational users are just skimming the surface of what AI can do to help them. They are turning on the car’s engine without going anywhere.

Resoundingly, Hallman and KPMG found in their study that workers used AI assistants, for example, to draft an email or solve a minor problem. But if the AI assistant they used didn’t provide the answer they were seeking, they either gave up or thought there wasn’t an answer.

Hallman’s answer is to “iterate.” Keep asking, push AI assistants to do better, and they will. It can be the main show, not a side event.

In a recent appearance on “White House Chronicle” on PBS (whchronicle.com), he said, “Some of what we found in the work we’ve done here with KPMG is that the most productive users are those who ask a question often and get back a less-than-satisfactory response, but they iterate until they get back something that is satisfactory and learn along the way — so that the next time, they can get the same satisfactory response with fewer iterations.”

Hallman urged: Don’t be afraid of how often you ask a question or modify it.

Too many workers, a majority, according to the UT/KPMG study, are prepared to accept one-and-done rather than pushing an AI assistant for more. Hallman also said users should give an AI assistant enough to work with. State the task in a way that authorizes it to dig deeper.

When “White House Chronicle” co-host Adam Clayton Powell III asked about security, reminding Hallman that emails, which were never supposed to be public, can end up in the wrong hands, Hallman said there is little chance of your privacy being violated by AI use or of your interactions with AI going public. Also, he said, there are security measures that a corporation or sensitive user can employ, including using a modified AI assistant or totally disengaging from the wider net.

Hallman doesn’t recommend that workers use voice interaction with AI. He said he has found it is less efficient and the answers tend to be more superficial.

However, Hallman said that when driving long distances, he uses voice-activated AI to learn about subjects he knows little about. He said he did this with black holes in space because he wanted to know more about them.

Many leaders in the AI firmament, including former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, have said that AI  won’t replace humans, but those who use AI will replace those who don’t.

Clearly, the unsaid thing isn’t that you use AI, but how well you use it. It isn’t enough to ask one question, as Hallman said. You must make AI work for you if you plan to stay in work yourself.

Democratic Graybeards Detail Tools Trump May Use To Negate Midterms

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After two long, dark years, there is an optimism afoot among Democrats, many independents, and a few old-school Republicans that the clouds will part and the sun will shine brightly again on Nov. 4.

Most votes in the midterms will be counted, and Democrats believe the House will have flipped Democratic with a decent majority. They are daring to hope that the Senate, too, will be theirs. The Trump presidency, its opponents hope, will be firmly marked “lame duck.”

Better, they hope the years of Trump raging, as they see it, outside of his constitutional authority and acting illegally, will be over.

It is fantasized that he will be trussed and restricted from authoritarian governance; that his claims of having a mandate will have been repudiated.

But Trump isn’t a man who takes reversals easily. So there is widespread fear that he will find some way to negate the results of the Nov. 3 ballot, and that Nov. 4 will see him crowing, declaring victory, and being more determined than ever to act as an authoritarian.

Two of the most revered and admired members of the hierarchy of the Democratic Party, Tim Wirth, who represented Colorado for 12 years in the House before entering the Senate, and Richard Gephardt, who represented Missouri for 26 years in the House and rose to become majority leader, have been studying the emergency powers they fear might be used to obstruct the midterms.

The Democratic graybeards state: “Over the past several months, we have been examining the structure of presidential emergency authorities, particularly Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) and related to continuity of government provisions. These authorities have existed for decades. What has changed is the context in which they might be used.”

It is these documents, and how they might be used with new intent by Trump and his allies, that alarm the senior Democrats.

They point out that the cadre of Trump loyalists who supported his claim that he won the 2020 election are seeking ways to overcome the Democratic victory in the midterms.

Wirth and Gephardt state: “Actors involved in efforts to contest the 2020 election remain active and are again discussing the use of a national emergency to justify federal intervention in election administration.

“At the same time, federal law enforcement has been used directly in relation to contested election processes, and the president has called for federal control over aspects of voting while describing domestic opponents in terms that go well beyond ordinary political language.”

Wirth and Gephardt wonder if “taken together” these developments raise the question of “whether emergency authorities of uncertain scope, capable of rapid implementation and subject to limited oversight, could be brought to bear in a domestic political context before Congress or the courts can respond effectively.”

Clearly, the former members of Congress believe the administration will find pretexts to either subvert the vote, challenge the result, or set aside the entire election on emergency grounds.

The first moves are underway to limit mail-in voting and not to count mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. Before Congress, the SAVE America Act will impose what its opponents say are excessive voter identification requirements, including proof of citizenship, supposedly to prevent non-citizens from voting. No evidence that this is a problem has been produced.

Trump has added to the uncertainty in one statement, suggesting that his administration is so successful that no election is needed. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt walked that back, but the intimation lingers.

My belief is that in no way will there be a smooth transfer of power if the Democrats win the midterms, and that the full apparatus of emergency powers could be employed to negate the result.

The president has produced an extraordinary convulsion in the country, and it is unlikely to be corrected as easily as by the midterm elections.

Trump, who can widely be inconsistent in what he says, even in the same speech, remains consistent in his claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent. No evidence of this has ever been found despite exhaustive investigations, but he remains firm on that allegation.

He will at least make that claim about the midterms if the results go against him.

Of course, a lot happens in a single month of the Trump administration, and there are seven months until the elections.

What is certain is that if the Democrats triumph in the midterms, Trump will use every tool of the executive to frustrate the new Congress. A wild elephant is a dangerous creature when antagonized.

Summer Is Too Important for Politics to Steal

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If you can get your mind off the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, if you can stop checking your 401(K), which seems to have taken off for the dark side of the moon, if you can turn off the cable news channels and do a quick personal inventory, noting that your arms, legs and enough of your mind are still functioning, then you are ready for the balm of summer.

I had always thought that summer culture was epitomized by the French fleeing Paris during August. But the summer migration that renews, whether it is to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, or to Botswana, is just as important to Americans.

People need to get away. Staycation is an oxymoron, like airline food.

Americans live for summer and nothing will keep them from the beaches, lakes, mountains and resorts of their bounteous native land. But an increasing number go abroad.

Beware. We might not be as welcome in that great bistro in Montmartre where we often supped, or on the delightful beach in Crete where we once sunned. There are just too many tourists trying to do the same things all over Europe, and more are planning to go.

Americans are part of a new phenomenon, known as overtourism. We were the first mass tourists in the world, but we have since been joined by people of other nationalities, many of whom think they must see Venice, visit the Acropolis, and walk Britain’s Lake District. Not in high summer you won’t, and if you do, you will pay high fees and face various gentle disincentives.

The problem is that more and more people can afford to travel, and they do.

In his 1961 musical “Sail Away,” Noel Coward wrote, “Why do the wrong people travel?” If Coward were alive today, he might write, “Why do so many people travel?”

Curious Germans and inquiring Americans have long since been joined by regiments of Japanese picture-taking tourists. Now the Chinese, too, feel they must gaze upon the Mona Lisa, and the Indians want to see the Highland cattle of Scotland, affectionately referred to as “hairy coos.”

The solution: Go early or go late, if Europe is your destination. There is much to enjoy in what the professionals of the travel industry call the “shoulder season,” which is from about now until late June — and from September to October. Some places like Dubrovnik and Venice are unable to accommodate mass tourism in the summer, and have prevented cruise ships from docking.

About cruising: My wife, Linda Gasparello, and I used to build our vacations around horseback riding, taking our boots and hats with us wherever we went in the world. Then, reluctantly, we took our first cruise. We had misgivings about cruise ships, thinking of them as floating holiday camps. In fact, cruising is a way of taking the hotel with you.

Our first cruise, not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was from Greece through the Bosporus and into the Black Sea, and it was magnificent. We went to places we would never have seen if left to ourselves, like Yalta, Odesa, and Constanta, and we had great tours in all of them. We were enchanted from the moment we stepped on board in Athens to our disembarkation in Venice. Also, I was able to visit Istanbul for the first time.

Another memorable cruise was around Cape Horn from Argentina to Chile with plenty of stops in some of the most delightful and unusual towns such as Punta Arenas, Ushuaia and Puerto Montt. To be cruising the treacherous body of water at the bottom of the world, where so many mariners perished, in a luxury liner, is to marvel at technology and your own good luck.

Our most delightful cruise, perhaps, was last year when we took Cunard’s stately Queen Mary 2 across the Atlantic from New York to Southampton. This cruise reached levels that were near ecstasy for us.

The crossing entertainment featured conductor Anthony Inglis with members of the UK’s National Symphony Orchestra. Inglis assembled a passenger choir — complete with auditions and rehearsals — which gave two rousing concerts.

In the interests of harmony, I stayed in the audience, but my wife made it into the chorus and was elated that her long-unused gifts as a soprano were still there.

You have to love a man who travels with an orchestra. That, as they say, is class. And to think that we were once snobbish about cruising.

We learned that Inglis will conduct the NSO on the Sept. 5 to 12 QM2 crossing from New York to Southampton. This was music to our ears.

Tech Giants Will Boost Nuclear but Won’t Help With Your Bill

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There is an abiding faith that if someone is good at one thing, they must be good at many things. At heart, it is a belief that outside the metaphorical box, there is much greater ability than inside it.

This is once again on display with widespread enthusiasm for the idea that the looming shortage of electricity can be solved by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta because they have been so wildly successful at what they do — and have mountains of cash to demonstrate it. Also, it is thought they will somehow do it better than the entrenched utilities.

The argument is that those who use vast new quantities of electricity for data centers will pay for its generation, and somehow the rest of the electricity supply system will be unaffected. It won’t.

The new dedicated generators will still buy steel, connectors (wires), transformers, switches, and the myriad bits that go to generating and transmitting electricity. They will still buy uranium, natural gas, strain the gas pipelines and the transmission system.

They will still buy available solar cells, wind turbines and dominate the competition to site these. They will be exerting four-square price pressure for all supplies, including utility-scale batteries.

The data center-dedicated generator will still compete in the labor marketplace for precious skilled workers, now in perilous short supply as the utility industry, without counting data center generators, spends well over $2 billion yearly on upgrading its systems.

I am not saying it isn’t a good thing to shake up the utility industry. I am saying not to expect magical new electricity developments that won’t affect everyone. The bills will still come, and they will be hefty.

Also, big tech will learn some sharp and costly lessons.

The thing about the internet and the world of computing is that they have been a zero-sum game. There are no rules, there is no legacy drag, and every invention, every step forward, enters the marketplace unencumbered.

There was nothing and no one to hold things back. There still isn’t, except for the availability of power for the data centers.

Not so in the electricity ecosphere. There are rules — local, state and federal. There is political oversight, and issues such as land use, water supply and air pollution must be factored in.

The new generation has to accommodate the rules of yesterday. It will be examined, debated, disputed and delayed.

For big tech and artificial intelligence, its latest frontier, everything is possible. But in their new role of making kilowatt hours, there are entrenched stakeholders and they are vociferous and opinionated, and NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) is an ever-present reality.

Building a power plant isn’t like designing an algorithm. It isn’t done in secret and then released to the world, as ChatGPT did in November 2022. It must be collaborative and transparent at every step.

The tech giants are betting on nuclear power for their future power needs. Two of them, Microsoft and Google, are supporting restarting mothballed reactors, Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Duane Arnold in Iowa. All of them are interested in small modular reactors and have working arrangements with SMR developers.

In this way, the future of nuclear power may rest with the tech giants: They have the money to take the risk. Microsoft has even signed an agreement with Helion, a company planning to bring fusion power to market.

These developments favor a bright future for all electricity as the tech giants assume the challenges and risks of new nuclear technologies. But they won’t contain electric bills in the years ahead. These will continue to rise.

The utilities are doing what they can to contain these bills. The future demands significant expenditures, and, in some way, these will be reflected in consumer electricity costs.

The fact that the tech giants with money aplenty are going to shoulder greater risks doesn’t mean that their presence as ever more demanding electricity consumers won’t affect the commodity’s cost.

The war with Iran will affect global electricity demand. Countries will seek to substitute electricity for oil and gas where they can, thereby straining already-tight supply chains for generation and transmission components.

The essentiality of electricity is growing, as is the household outlay on it. Ouch!

Women Face Massive Layoffs as AI Use Spreads in the U.S.

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March is Women’s History Month and a time to take a look at how women are progressing, or otherwise.

Alas, the news for women in the United States isn’t good, and the future is foreboding as they are about to lose 6 million jobs to artificial intelligence. Work traditionally done by women — secretaries, receptionists, payroll clerks and customer service representatives — is likely to lose jobs. Except for healthcare, semi-skilled workers are the most vulnerable.

I must confess to a longtime interest in the women’s movement, particularly the path of women in journalism. In 1964, in New York, my first wife, Doreen, a stupendously gifted English journalist, and I created what we liked to believe was the very first women’s liberation magazine. Ms., co-founded by Gloria Steinem, didn’t launch until 1971.

Our magazine was “Women Now,” and we only got out one issue before we ran out of money. As I have said often, “It didn’t liberate any women but liberated all of our money,” which was utterly insufficient for the undertaking. However, I remained interested in the progress of women in society.

When I was at The Washington Post about six years later, I was elected president of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. Women’s rights and their path in journalism were on the agenda, propelled as much by our talented business agent, Brian Flores, as by me.

The guild held conferences (including a national one in Chicago), formed study groups, and made the path of women an issue at the bargaining table. The Post’s editor, Ben Bradlee, asked if I was doing this “to improve my love life.” I wasn’t, and it didn’t.

Women could write themselves to glory, but it was a lot harder from the women’s pages or if you weren’t considered for reasons of your sex for a foreign assignment or war coverage. However, I think Marguerite Higgins, Martha Gellhorn and Dorothy Kilgallen were towering talents who circled above their contemporaries, male and female.

In the time I have been watching women’s issues, I have seen great progress and now backsliding.

I have seen progress in the numbers of women editors, film directors, board members and company heads. Yet many women are hired, I believe, because it is possible to pay them less, on the assumption that they will be supported by a partner or husband. The old thinking.

In the 1960s in Britain, jobs were advertised with one salary for men and another, a lower one, for women for the same work. In that sense, things have improved. But women worldwide are still losing ground in abhorrent ways. They encounter gender oppression, including honor killings in Muslim societies, female circumcision in parts of Africa, and femicide in some Caribbean and Latin American countries.

In the democracies, there is a backward movement for women as the bad ways of old are championed as “conservative” or “traditional.” Worse, reproductive rights have been scaled back or denied, and overt efforts to promote equality have been prohibited.

The unwelcome news isn’t at an end: Enter AI.

Several studies, including those by the United Nations and McKinsey & Co., conclude that women will bear the brunt of the first American AI-induced layoffs. This will be felt between now and 2030, and as many as 6 million women may have to find new jobs or quit the job market altogether.

In the years ahead, it is going to be harder for women than men as the first waves of what I call the “AI adjustment” hit the workplace. The political class needs to absorb this reality and to start thinking about the nature of work when AI starts snatching jobs by the millions.

So far, political talk has been to eschew the looming future — a future that, initially at least, threatens women most.

Women’s history is about to have a new chapter written.

Entrepreneur Weir Says Kilowatts Need Liquidity To Be Banked, Traded Like Money

Chase Weir, Vice Chairman and CEO, Distributed Sun

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Chase Weir isn’t easy to unpack. But it is an endeavor that is worth it.

Weir gives the impression of being a quiet, perhaps contained man. But when he talks, ideas flow, and particularly about the electricity supply ecosystem.

I spent the best part of two days at the University Club in Washington talking to Weir about electricity and how the current crunch might be ameliorated.

Weir differs from many who talk about the future supply of electricity. He has questions and answers.

He isn’t a theoretician; he has been engaged in the electricity supply challenges since the founding of Distributed Sun in 2009, where he serves as vice chairman and CEO.

Weir is also the founder and CEO of truCurrent, which was spun off from Distributed Sun last year with $37.5 million in working capital to facilitate microgrid and distributed energy deployments across the nation.

In 2008, he created a Washington-based nonprofit at the nexus of energy and natural capital, Earthshot Foundation, to which he has contributed major funding. It shouldn’t be confused with Prince Williams’s Earthshot Prize, which came over a decade later.

Weir, 53, rejects my suggestion that he is the scion of a patrician Memphis family with deep roots in music and American history. His family motto has been vero nihil verius (nothing truer than truth) for nearly a millennium.

His first business success was acquiring the company that invented instant-response technology to measure audience reactions to television, film, political and advertising content. Many of the movies and sitcoms we know and love were first tested at his theaters at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, and changed before they were distributed and broadcasted.

In a television interview, Weir told me he has been influenced by Robert Wright’s writing, particularly his 1999 book “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.”

Weir is driven by a philosophy that good society stems from abundant and intelligent systems rooted in societal wealth. And he believes smart, affordable electricity goes a long way to assuring economic security and prosperity.

While studying economics at the University of Memphis, Weir learned about intelligent system and discourse process design under Art Graesser, professor of psychology and intelligent systems. Later he studied management science at the University of North Carolina.

In the electricity sector, Weir is attracting attention not only from his business success, but also from his philosophical and systems approach to the grid and the electricity supply ecosystem. That approach is spelled out in three Forbes articles. He is a member of the Forbes Business Council.

The first of these posits that the grid is suffering from what Weir calls “kilowatt illiquidity.” He lays out a scenario where the grid should be compared to the financial markets — where liquidity is essential for business to survive and prosper.

“America is entering an energy moment that few business leaders fully appreciate or are prepared to meet. Demand is soaring as data centers and AI compute, EVs and electrification reshape the economy. Yet the grid that must power this growth is constrained by something deeper than congestion, cost or infrastructure delays. It is constrained by illiquidity,” Weir writes in his Dec. 18 Forbes article.

“If cash flow is the lifeblood of business, kilowatt hours (KWh) are the lifeblood of a modern economy and currently those KWhs are blocked, locked in place, trapped by time, geography, regulation and physical bottlenecks. We’ve built a system where electrons cannot move freely or be stored flexibly. They cannot be accessed on demand or treated like the currency they have already become.”

He declares,“This is the defining crisis of the grid: KWh illiquidity. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.”

Weir says the grid is designed around the highest peak demand on days like when it is hot and air conditioning is running flat out. Instead, he says, liquidity can come into the grid if it relies to a much greater extent on the flexibility provided in distributed energy resources (DER).

He believes networks of flexible microgrids are the key to the future liquidity of the grid.

The tools, capital and demand, are at hand, and he has been successfully deploying them since the creation of Distributed Sun. Its customer base spans the gamut of use cases, from utilities that have needed to harvest their DER possibilities to a national foodservice company that has needed a series of microgrids across its service territories, to GWh-scale battery storage to facilitate interregional transmission.

It doesn’t matter whether the source is behind the meter, in front of the meter or a mixture, Weir tells me. Flexibility, availability and operational choice is the key, freeing the electrons for their highest-use value.

Utilities are warming to the idea of liquidity.

In that same Forbes article, Weir writes, “Utilities are beginning to adapt. Xcel Energy’s distributed capacity procurement model allows batteries and other distributed assets to be rate-based across circuits, effectively extending ‘banking hours’ on stressed infrastructure.”

Likewise, Weir writes, “PG&E’s flex connect program lets large customers connect EV fast-charging and grid-scale storage faster without costly upgrades. Think of traditional loads as cash and flexible loads as credit: utilities can constrain flexible loads during peaks while core demand continues to flow.”

His third article explores the mechanics of time, return-on-time and intentional design, and will be published later this month.

In Weir’s view, electricity is the currency and the grid is the marketplace. But the marketplace hasn’t yet taken advantage of the technologies, like storage, which will liberalize and make it efficient. It needs banking to make its wealth available.

Iran War May Speed Nuclear Proliferation Elsewhere

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The story goes that a weakling gets sand kicked in his face on the beach. He then joins a gym, pumps iron and returns to the beach, where all he has to do is flex his new muscles, and he is left alone.

That, it would seem, is one lesson of nuclear weapons. Small countries might be left alone if they had nuclear weapons, which would seem to be the case with North Korea: unloved but uninvaded.

In the case of Iran, which has sought a nuclear weapon for a long time, the fear was that it would do more than discourage aggression: It would move aggressively against Israel.

It also raises the question: Would Iran have been attacked by Israel and the United States if it already had a nuclear weapon?

Israel is a small country with 10.2 million people, and a land mass equivalent to New Jersey. By contrast, Iran has more than 90 million people and a land mass more than twice the size of Texas. It is a big place to sustain an attack and to hide men and materiel, to say nothing of secret weapons development centers.

Israel and the United States have attacked Iran, but when it ends, what kind of peace can they expect?

The Iran war — and the one by Russia against Ukraine — is making the case for smaller nations to get a nuclear weapon of their own.

Ukraine voluntarily gave up its weapons — the third-largest nuclear arsenal after Russia and the United States — after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In exchange, the United States, Britain and Russia would guarantee Ukraine’s security in a 1994 agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum.

Would the Russians have invaded if Ukraine still had its weapons?

The lesson of that war is clear: You could be attacked for assorted reasons, but if you have a nuclear weapon, that likelihood is diminished.

The case in point is North Korea and its oppressive and dangerous regime. It is a threat to its neighbors and has an asocial stance internationally. Yet, the United States, South Korea and Japan have never proposed attacking it.

Over the years, there have been many studies among these allies as to how its communist regime might be brought down with force. The fear that the North Koreans would launch a nuclear attack on Seoul, Tokyo or even the West Coast of the United States has always been uppermost in the planning. No American president has been asked to approve a takedown of the country. It is too dangerous.

Nuclear proliferation is again an issue that the nations of the world need to heed. Not only is it frighteningly real, but it may be easier than ever.

In a severe report last July, Alan J. Kuperman, coordinator of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project at the University of Texas at Austin, raised the alarm that the drive for small modular reactors here and around the world would increase the chances of nuclear proliferation, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the “Doomsday Clock” forward.

The original nuclear weapons states were the United States, Russia, France and Britain. The world was shaken up when China joined the club in 1964, and again when India did so in 1974, Pakistan in 1998, and North Korea — the most worrying of all — in 2006.

Long term, more weapons make the world more dangerous, more subject to crazed governments and autocrats.

Concern about nuclear proliferation dominated U.S. nuclear policy for decades and was at a peak after the Chinese advance, and another peak when Pakistan became the first Muslim country to get a nuclear bomb.

President Jimmy Carter moved aggressively to avoid the risk that the United States could inadvertently contribute to proliferation. He cancelled the reprocessing of nuclear fuel, the breeder reactor program, and discouraged some new reactor ideas, which are, again, being developed.

Now, nuclear weapons are being considered by Poland, Saudi Arabia, Japan and South Korea, according to sources in the nuclear establishment.

Not only are nations looking again to nuclear weapons for their own defense, but designing and engineering them may also be easier with artificial intelligence, which can perform thousands of calculations instantly.

Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, once told me that calculations were the root of the whole weapons enterprise. In 1955, in records that are now declassified, he urged the development of “better computing machines” for nuclear weapons development.

Nuclear proliferation is a cause for deep alarm as mankind enters a new epoch where old treaties lose their meaning and where the vulnerable are seeking defense against the hegemons.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late, great senator from New York and former U.N. ambassador, said, “The world is a dangerous place.”

The war in the Middle East is making it more so.

Loving Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day — for Its Contradictions

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I won’t let St. Patrick’s Day pass without wearing something green and reaching for a glass of something that has been produced through fermentation or distillation. It is the least I can do for all the ways the Irish have enriched the world, but especially the English language, and me.

When it comes to writing, the Irish have what might be termed an ethnic advantage, from the literary game-changers in the last century — George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Brendan Behan — to two of the top practitioners of novel-writing today, Sally Rooney, who is only 35, and the prolific and so-readable John Banville.

When it comes to poets, William Butler Yeats is, to my mind, seated among the immortals.

Yet, as I enjoy my St. Patrick’s Day libation, I shall reflect on the contradictions that are Ireland. These are summed up in a personal experience.

I was, for over 20 years, the American organizer of the Humbert Summer School in Ballina, Co. Mayo. One of my missions was to take Americans — often Irish Americans who had never been to their ancestral land — to Ireland and the school.

Summer schools in Ireland are akin to Renaissance weekends or Aspen Institute meetings in America. Some are literary, like the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, or political, like the Parnell Summer School in Co. Wicklow, or musical, like the Willy Clancy Summer School in Co. Clare.

Mine, alas, is defunct, but it was named after the French General Jean Joseph Humbert who landed in Killala Bay to help the United Irishmen’s rebellion against the British in 1798, which was celebrated in Thomas Flanagan’s novel “The Year of the French,” and the movie based on it.

The Humbert School was the creation of its director, John Cooney, a distinguished journalist and major historian. Its mission was to discuss Ireland’s future at home and abroad.

Before the start of one year’s summer school, I briefed my Irish American charge, Ray Connolly, on just how awfully the British, my people, had behaved in the northwest of Ireland, from colonization in 1611 to the 1798 rebellion, to the famine of 1846, when so many perished or fled in the great diaspora, to the notorious Black and Tans after World War I. They were a paramilitary force formed in 1920 to reinforce police posts, act as escorts, and conduct counter-insurgency operations. But their cruelty caused many Irish people to join the Irish Republican Army.

I spared nothing in the telling of Albion’s perfidy in Ireland.

After the weeklong summer school, on our drive to Dublin Airport and our flight back to Washington, we stopped in a pub. When the publican heard my English accent, he asked, ”How’s the weather over there?” I knew he meant in England. I had to explain that I was now an American and had been for years.

The publican threw his arms around me and declared, “God bless you. You never lost your accent.”

Our exchange confused Ray. He reminded me that I had recounted the full litany of English horror in the northwest of Ireland including, after the 1798 rebellion, how Gen. Charles Cornwallis, chagrined after his defeat in America, hanged 20 Irish rebels per day.

“That,” I said of the enthusiastic publican, “is part of the wonder of Ireland: its contradictions.”

Ireland’s relationship with Britain is a fine example of those.

Britain is a prime destination for work and for career opportunities for the Irish. They talk of London with affection, although they may still sing rebel songs with gusto, and mention the horrors of the past as though they were last week.

Under a treaty, the Common Travel Agreement (CTA), Irish citizens have the right of abode in England. For them, there is no frontier; although, I learn, that may change as people who have acquired Irish citizenship, but aren’t Irish-born, are abusing it, adding to the immigration woes in Britain.

If the CTA should end, Britain will lose much, just as America is set to lose Irish talent because of immigration restrictions.

When talking about the impact of Ireland on America – 23 presidents were of Irish descent — it should be noted that America has also had an impact on Ireland.

On the downside, there is fast food. When I asked a cab driver in Dublin about where to get good fish and chips, he said he preferred Kentucky Fried Chicken.

On the upside, there is the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, which started in America.

But before Americans went crazy for all things Irish on March 17, it was a quiet religious day in Ireland. Now it is more of a celebration there, as it is here and much of the world. Sláinte!

How Loneliness Became a Pandemic and What You Can Do

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You don’t have to be sitting by yourself on an island to be lonely. Loneliness is everywhere.

Studies from universities, governments and public health groups find that the world is in the grip of a loneliness pandemic. More than half the U.S. population is said to be suffering from loneliness. It is classified globally as a mental health problem.

Paradoxically, the studies place most of the blame on our interconnected society and social media: If we communicate electronically, we isolate ourselves. The COVID-19 pandemic also increased our social isolation, and working from home accelerated the trend.

I would suggest that we have been drifting toward loneliness for a long time. Years ago, I wrote about what I called the “box culture.”

In the box culture, people live in a box (apartment), ride down in a box (elevator), get into a box with wheels (car), drive to a stack of boxes (building), ride up in a box (elevator), enter another box (office), and stare into a box (computer).

That, I believe, led to greater isolation. No common dwelling; no common transportation, like a bus or train; and little common work habitat.

The phrase “my space” began to be part of the conversational language. A social networking service named Myspace was launched in 2003.

Email and texting gave isolation a boost even before COVID-19 gave it a massive steroid shot. Now we might be inhabiting “my isolated space.”

Adding to this world of paradox is perhaps the biggest paradox of all — the death of the telephone for the purpose it was invented: talking.

Not only has the telephone declined to near-oblivion as a way of talking to others, but it has also become something of a burden. I find that when I suggest a telephone call, the recipients want to set a time.

When did setting times for calls creep into our lives? It wrings the pleasure out of the telephone, which was always a spontaneous instrument.

When Irving Berlin wrote the song “All Alone by the Telephone” in 1924, he didn’t envisage that people would make appointments to talk.

We have robbed ourselves of the glorious spontaneity, or heartbreak, of the telephone. I have always thought of it as the instrument that can transmute life’s leaden metal into gold unexpectedly, as Omar Khayyam wrote, or as a ray of sunshine you didn’t expect to break through the fog, as Noel Coward wrote. Even just the laughter of an old friend can break out the sunlight on a dismal day.

I can’t catch the laughter in a text. Email is fine for a joke, but it fails where the telephone succeeds: catching the sublimity of laughter, the warmth of love.

Another source of isolation has been the conversion from shopping — the operative part of that word is “shop” — to online buying, a different experience. Or rather, another way of removing the warmth of human interchange from the transaction.

If you are among the legions of the lonely, I would like to suggest, aside from the highly recommended places people meet, like volunteering at a charity or an amateur theater group, going to a pub or to church, do something radical: Speak to a stranger.

My wife and I became friends with two people and their families because I spoke to a stranger in a hotel in Washington, and we spoke to one at a concert in Rhode Island.

We have friends who met while standing in line at an ATM and married not long after. Weight Watchers, when they held meetings, was recommended among the cognoscenti as a place to meet people.

These suggestions may sound trivial, but they are the commerce of life, some of which we have shelved in favor of electronic communications.

In particular, I feel for those who are shut-in by disease and suffer terrible loneliness. They are the loneliest of the lonely.

For many years, I have written and broadcast about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. It is a terrible disease whose victims have no energy, get no refreshment from sleep, and suffer a plethora of pain, usually for life.

Electronics may have robbed us of much human contact and caused a pandemic of loneliness, but not for those sentenced to loneliness by disease.

Inside the Civil War: New Letter Trove Takes You Among Soldiers, Widows, and the Enslaved

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J. Mark Powell’s new book, “Witness to War,” tells the story of the Civil War objectively through the letters of everyday people who endured it.

WASHINGTON, DC, UNITED STATES, February 24, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — J. Mark Powell, a journalist with the InsideSources syndicate, became fascinated with the Civil War when he was just 9 years old.

The passion has lasted through the decades and now, aged 65, Powell has produced an extraordinary book, “Witness to War: The Story of the Civil War Told by Those Who Lived It.”

His book stands out in a crowded field of Civil War books (which are known to number over 60,000, and speculated at twice that) because it allows readers to experience the war firsthand through excerpts from 432 letters, written by everyday people: Union and Confederate soldiers, and civilians — men, women, a few children, and slaves.

These previously unpublished letters, which come from Powell’s private collection, cover the full sweep of the Civil War from Lincoln’s 1860 election to the war’s end in 1865.

Over the years, Powell bought the letters as he could afford them. He introduces each excerpt in the book as though he were introducing readers to a dear friend of his.

This week, Powell discusses the book on “White House Chronicle,” the news and public affairs program which airs on select PBS and public, educational and government cable access channels. The audio airs on SiriusXM Radio’s P.O.T.U.S., Channel 124, and as a podcast, which is available on Apple and Spotify, among other platforms.

On the program, Powell talks lovingly and passionately about how he cadged, bought, and otherwise assembled the letters.

They comprise the most extraordinary voice of people who endured through the war, from a widow imaging her husband in bed beside her to a letter describing how on the Saturday morning before the Battle of Fredericksburg, the Massachusetts 1st “intermingled freely” with Confederate soldiers, before “the two lines of pickets had to separate and ‘go to work’ as a Rebel expressed it.”

None of these writers, Powell told Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III, could have anticipated that these very personal communications would be published. He also explained how letters were delivered during the war, and how complex and conflicted feelings were about it, both as it raged and in its aftermath. One writer said, “Now that the cruel war is over, and I look back and see the many lonely homes, I wonder what it all meant.”

King said, “In the 29 years ‘White House Chronicle’ has been on the air, we have seldom had such a moving, insightful and totally absorbing episode as this one with J. Mark Powell, talking about the Civil War and the voices he has unearthed from this crucial chapter in American history.”

In one of the book’s letters, read by Powell at the end of the broadcast, a freed slave, Lizzy, expresses concern for her former owners, takes a dig at their parsimony with food, and celebrates her freedom in Canada:

[Location unknown; presumably Canada]

March 11, 1866

Dear Mistress

It has been quite a few years since I last wrote to yourself and the master in hopes that the two of you will also rejoice as I do for my brethren that have been freed by Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation. Colored by the thousands have found their way to Canada.

The master and yourself will be happy to know that I have been doing my part in helping as many as I can get established in their new home.

Mabel and Jobe have joined me here at the school. They have asked that I write you and let yourselves know that they are well.

In all, thirty-four of your former captives reside here with me. They hold no ill will toward you and the master.

We all worry that you will soon starve like we servants have in your keep. We shall write again soon.

Forever free,

Lizzy

Contact J. Mark Powell at WitnesstoWarBook@gmail.com or JMP.Press@gmail.com