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.

A Conversation With 2026 on America’s Meaning to the World

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Come on in, 2026. Welcome. I am glad to see you because your predecessor year was not to my liking.

Yes, I know there is always something going on in the world that we wish were not going on. Paul Harvey, the conservative broadcaster, said, “In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.”

Indeed. Wars, uprisings, oppression, cruelty and man’s inhumanity to man are to be found in every year. But last year, the world lost something it may not get back. You see, ’26 — you don’t mind if I shorten your title, do you — we lost America. Not the country but the metaphor.

We were, ’26, despite our tragic mistakes — including slavery and wrongheaded wars — a country of caring people, a country that cared (mostly) for its own people and those who lived elsewhere in the world.

It was the country that sought to help itself and to help the world. It was the sharing country, the country that showed the way, the country that sought to correct wrong, to overthrow evil and to excel at global kindness.

It was the country that led by example in freedom of speech, freedom of movement and in free, democratic government.

When John Donne, the English metaphysical poet, described his lover’s beauty as “my America” in the 1590s, he foreshadowed the emergence of the United States a nation of spiritual beauty.

From World War II on, caring was an American inclination as well as a policy.

We rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan, an act of international largesse without historical parallel. We rushed to help after droughts, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis and wars.

We were everywhere with open hands and hearts. America the bountiful. We had the resources and the great heart to do good, to show our own overflowing decency, even if it got mixed up with ideology. We led the world in caring.

We bound up the wounds of the world, as much as we could, whether they were the result of human folly or nature’s occasional callousness.

We delivered truth through the Voice of America and aid through the U.S. Agency for International Development. Our might was always at hand to help, to save the drowning, to feed the starving and to minister to the victims of pandemic — as with AIDS and Ebola in Africa.

In 2025, that ended. More than a century of decency suspended, suddenly, thoughtlessly.

America the Great Country became America Just Another Striving Country, decency confused with weakness, indifference with strength, friends with oil autocracies.

It wasn’t just the sense of noblesse oblige, which not only distinguished us in the 20th century, but also earlier. In the 19th century, we opened our gates to the starving, the downtrodden and the desperate. They joined the people already living here to build the greatest nation — a democracy — that the world has ever seen. First in science. First in business. First in medicine. First in agriculture. First in decency.

These people brought to America labor and know-how across the board, from weaving technology in the 18th century to engineering in the 19th century to musical theater in the 20th century, along with movie-making and rocket science.

I would submit, ’26, that it is all about American greatness, and last year we slammed the door shut on greatness, abandoned longtime allies and friends. We forsook people who had been compatriots in war, culture and history for the dubious company of the worst of the worst, aggressors, oppressors, liars, everyone soaked in the blood of their innocent victims.

Yes, ’26, America stood tall in the world because it stood for what was right. Its system of law — including the ability to have small wrongs addressed by high courts — was the envy of foreign lands where law was bent to politics, where democracy was an empty phrase for state manipulation of the vote. The Soviet Union claimed democracy; America practiced it.

America soared, for example, with President Jimmy Carter’s principled and persuasive pursuit of human rights and President Ronald Reagan’s extraordinary explanation of its greatness: the “shining city upon a hill.”

It sunk from time to time. Slavery was horrific; Dred Scott, appalling; Prohibition, silly; the Hollywood blacklist, outrageous.

But ’26, decency finally triumphed and America was great, its better instincts superb — and now worth restoring for the nation and for the troubled, brutalized world.

Good luck, ’26. You will bear a standard that the world has looked to. Lift it high again.

 

How Europe Stole Christmas and Promoted Snow

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The Grinch didn’t steal Christmas. Europe did. Filched it, packed it up and moved it north, where it snows.

In this wholesale looting of the world’s greatest holiday, the U.S., Canada and some other non-European northern habitats were also complicit.

I grew up in the Southern Hemisphere in faraway Zimbabwe — then called Southern Rhodesia, a British colony — and we had to bear Northern hegemony at Christmas. We had to bear it the rest of the year as well, but this is about Christmas and that symbol of the North: snow.

In subequatorial Africa, snow was a distant European asset. We had learned to associate it with Christmas, and we would celebrate the holiday by singing the carol about the good Bohemian King Wenceslas, looking out “on the feast of Stephen, when the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even.”

Cotton wool was our snow substitute. When we decorated for Christmas, we couldn’t have it lying about “deep and crisp and even.” We just put cotton wool puffs on Christmas trees (another symbol of European expansionism), picture rails and window frames.

The shops used glitter and cotton wool in Christmas window scenes that were out of Victorian-period Europe, not the Holy Land.

Only nativity scenes in churches were exempt from the scourge of cotton wool. Well, mostly. As kids we were confused by the snow mania, and sometimes we tried to embellish the straw in manger scenes with cotton wool.

My mother, who never visited anywhere north of the equator, was a campaigner, in her way, against the theft of Christmas. She would lecture people on what the temperature was at Christmas in Bethlehem. She said it was very hot.

There was no way she could have known what the actual temperature was in Bethlehem, but she didn’t let that inhibit her argument against the Northern appropriation of something that was rooted in the Levant.

In fact, Christmas is the beginning of the coolest time of year in Jerusalem and Bethlehem; the temperature hovers around 40 F. It isn’t a winter wonderland in the way that Christmas is portrayed in Europe and America.

And all that hoopla about sales and shopping till you drop came from those delightful Christmas markets, which you see all over continental Europe at this time of year.

You can blame the Germans for Christmas trees and the Scandinavians for reindeer, but it seems to me that the Brits, my people, have done a rather good job of Christmas appropriation.

Put aside that they have tried to grab the entire concept of the people of Israel. Yes, the British Israelite movement postulates the British are descendants of the 10 lost tribes of Israel.

This is an attempted act of cultural appropriation on a massive scale, and it hasn’t succeeded, but it still has its adherents.

The great English poet William Blake has been more successful. His poem “Jerusalem,” which he wrote in 1804, was put to music by Hubert Parry in 1916 to aid the World War I effort and has become a second British national anthem. People prefer it to “God Save the King” — and it has a better tune.

Blake wrote:

“I will not cease from Mental Fight/ Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:/Till we have built Jerusalem,/ In England’s green & pleasant Land.”

Well, that is a very ambitious attempt to steal a legend, and it makes cotton wool seem rather timid in the struggle to own Christmas.

I wish you, yes, a white Christmas. I like the white stuff — snow, not cotton wool.

The Stateless in America Would Face a Kind of Damnation

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I have only known one stateless person. You don’t get a medal for it or wear a lapel pin.

The stateless are the hapless who live in the shadows, in fear.

They don’t know where the next misadventure will come from: It could be deportation, imprisonment or an enslavement of the kind the late Johnny Prokov suffered as a shipboard stowaway for seven years.

His story ended well, but few do.

When I knew Johnny, he was a revered bartender at the National Press Club in Washington. By then, he had American citizenship, was married and lived a normal life.

It hadn’t always been that way. He told me he had come from Dalmatia, when that area was so poor people took their clothes to a specialist who would kill the lice in the seams with a little wooden mallet, which wouldn’t damage the cloth.

To escape that extreme poverty, Prokov became a stowaway on a ship.

So began his seven-year odyssey of exploitation and fear of violence. The captains took advantage of the free labor and total servitude of the stowaways.

Eventually, Prokov jumped ship in Mexico. He made his way to the United States, where a life worth living was available.

I don’t know the details of how he became a citizen, but he dreamed the American dream — and it came true for him.

An odd legacy of his years at sea was that Prokov had become a brilliant chess player. He would often have as many as a dozen chess games going along the bar in the National Press Club. He always won. He had had time to practice.

The United Nations says there are 4 million stateless people in the world, but that is a massive undercount. Many of those who are stateless are refugees and have no idea if they are entitled to claim citizenship of the countries they are desperate to escape from. Citizenship in Gaza?

Now the Trump administration wants to add to the number of stateless people by denying birthright citizenship to children born of illegal immigrants in the United States.

It wants to deny people — who are in all ways Americans — their constitutional right of citizenship. Their lives will be lived on a lower rung than their friends and contemporaries. They will be denied passports, maybe education, possibly medical care, and the ability to emigrate to any country that otherwise might have received them.

Instead, they will live their lives in the shadows, children of a lesser God, probably destined to have children of their own who might also be deemed noncitizens. They didn’t choose the womb that bore them, nor did they sanction the actions of their parents.

The world is awash in refugees fleeing war, crime and violence, and environmental collapse. Those desperate people will seek refuge in countries which can’t absorb them and will take strong actions to keep them out, as have the United States and, increasingly, countries in Europe.

There is a point, particularly in Europe, where the culture and established religion is threatened by different cultures and clashing religions.

But when it comes to children born in America to mothers who live in America, why mint a new class of stateless people, condemned to a second-class life here, or deport them to some country, such as Rwanda or Uganda, where its own people are already living in abject poverty?

All immigrants can’t be accommodated, but the cruelty that now passes for policy is hurtful to those who have worked hard and dared to seek a better life for themselves and their children.

It is bad enough that millions of people are seeking somewhere to live and perchance a better life, due to war or crime or drought or political follies.

To extend the numbers by denying citizenship to the children of parents who live and work here isn’t good policy. It is also unconstitutional.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the administration, it will add social instability of haunting proportions.

Children are proud of their native lands. What will the new second class be proud of — the home that denied them?

The Case for Prescribed Burning: Fighting Fire With Fire

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Wildfire takes no prisoners, has no mercy, knows no boundaries, respects no nation and is a clear and present danger this and every summer as summers grow drier and hotter.

The American West is burning; across Canada there are wildfires; and swaths of France, Spain, Portugal and Greece are ablaze. In 2022, faraway Siberia was ablaze.

California bears the scars of where wildfires and humans have collided and the humans and their homes have lost, recently and devastatingly in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood. Experts say that even in the formerly moist East, conditions for wildfire are growing.

The damage to lives and livelihoods here and abroad is beyond calculation.

Olive oil and wine from Europe will be more expensive this year because so many trees and vines have burned. Humankind’s ancient enemy stalks the world: irrational, brutal and very hard to stop.

One of the largest U.S. electric utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric, facing an estimated $30 billion in liabilities from 2017 and 2018 wildfires believed to have been caused by their equipment, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2019. Utilities have been on the forefront of wildfire suppression because some fires are started by sparking from overhead lines.

An army of people and technology is deployed in the United States to fight wildfires and still it comes up short; these tools include AI and drones, aircraft and, of course, the indefatigable but inevitably limited intervention of firefighters on the ground.

There is an additional tool: Fighting fire with fire with so-called prescribed burning or controlled burning.

I learned about this technique from J. Morgan Varner, director of research and senior scientist at Tall Timbers in Tallahassee, Florida.

For 60 years, Tall Timbers, a nonprofit group, has been doing prescribed burning — the controlled application of fire to a specific area of land to achieve defined management objectives — in southern Georgia and northern Florida. Now their expertise on this traditional and effective tool for maintaining ecosystems and reducing wildfire risks is widely sought.

Even so, Varner said, the technique has its critics, mostly from those who have sought to suppress or avoid fire as the first line of defense.

Varner explained that this has led to decades of fuel (made up of dead trees and vegetation) accumulation on forest floors. When this burns, it burns with great heat and destroys everything; in a prescribed burn, the damage is less severe and more of a forest’s natural infrastructure survives.

I didn’t see a burn in progress, but I did see the aftermath of one on a hunting estate in southern Georgia, where the landlord worked with Tall Timbers. There was a strong smell of burning and some residual smoldering logs, but the land was ready for natural rejuvenation.

The idea is that with careful burning, the land is returned to its natural rhythm. This region of Georgia along the Florida border, known as the Red Hills, has seen controlled burning for a long time, and the forests and the wildlife are both healthy.

Wildlife is one of the concerns about deliberate burning, but Varner says animals are naturally fire sensitive and very adept at getting out of the way.

A prescribed burn is a carefully managed event. Conditions must be exactly right: wind, humidity, the nature of the vegetation and the amount of fuel on the ground.

Varner says that the ideal burn area is 40 acres, and burning is done in the spring or the fall, not in the summer heat. A team of experts surveys the area of the burn and calculates the behavior of the fire before ignition.

Although prescribed burning has ancient history and a lot of scientific evidence supporting it, it isn’t everyone’s solution. I asked the president of a West Coast utility about using it and got a curt reply: “No way.”

Looking at a beautiful stand of trees, I find it hard to imagine deliberately setting it alight. However, I am convinced that fire has to be used to fight fire and that periodically in nature there is wildfire, and it is part of a natural cycle. I’m beginning to take note of the dead trees among the living ones.

If summers get even hotter and drier, more radical solutions to fire will have to be employed, including fire.

Sorry, Europe Is Full, Tourists Are Told

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This was the summer when much of Europe said to the ever-increasing flow of tourists, “Sorry, we are full.”
Of course, Europe isn’t full at all. It is just those places that we all want to go, that have been tugging at our imaginations since we began imagining, are hopelessly crowded — and some are brutally hot as well.
The most overcrowded getaways are in southern Europe: Nice, in the legendary South of France; Barcelona, Spain; Italian coastal towns, especially Venice; the best-known Greek islands such as Mykonos, Hydra and Santorini. Along the Croatian coast, Dubrovnik and Split are crowded.
What is ugly outside and delightful inside? Answer: a cruise ship.
The sight of those multitiered behemoths squeezing into a port that was designed for something a lot more gainly reminds me of someone struggling into clothes they have far outgrown. It can be done, but it isn’t pretty.
You can’t blame everything on cruise ships. They aren’t to blame for the summer traffic jams in Britain’s Lake District or around the Cotswolds. They aren’t the reason you can’t get into the great museums of Europe in summer, such as the Louvre in Paris or the Churchill War Rooms in London.
But cruise ships have become a particular problem for much of coastal Europe and aren’t the kind of tourism locals want.
The Greek tourism minister, Olga Kefalogianni, explained it to me when I interviewed her a few years ago. She said that the cruise ships dump a lot of people who don’t spend enough time (i.e., money) ashore. They disembark a veritable army who take tours and are back on board for supper. The ships tend to sail at night to avoid overnight docking fees, and the locals get very little economic gain from the thousands upon thousands who arrive every summer.
She told me Greece was trying to get more of the restocking contracts and to have more of the ships homeport in the country.
For tourists, in general, she said: Avoid the famous sights, such as the Acropolis in Athens, in summer and try to visit in the spring and fall.
She said for Greece, where tourism is especially important, it is a delicate matter, urging tourists to go to the less-visited northern areas of the country.
A couple of summers ago, I was in Santorini when five cruise ships arrived simultaneously. It was ugly. There is a cable railway to get up to the pretty town of Fira, and it meant waiting — and fuming and cursing all of the other cruise ships.
A friend said he had to ride down from the cliffside town on a donkey in order to make his ship’s departure.
There are questions about cruising. Many of them involve a kind of travel snobbery. Some seemingly well-traveled people reject cruising. “I wouldn’t want to be stuck with all those people. Never,” a friend told me.
A large cruise ship with nearly 6,000 passengers and a crew of about 2,000 is, well, just about the size of many of the largest hotels. New York’s Waldorf Astoria had 1,400 rooms from the time of its construction in 1931 until it was gutted and rebuilt recently — and the number of rooms was greatly reduced. The largest hotels in Las Vegas, the Mirage and the Venetian, are the size of the largest ships.
The problem isn’t with the number of your fellow cruisers, but with the destination ports: The cruise ships have worn out their welcome in some places, not others.
My wife and I were hostile to cruising until we did it. That was in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea in the early 1990s and we saw places — such as Yalta, Odessa and Constantia — that we maybe wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
So, we formed a pattern of using cruising for exploration rather than sightseeing. We went through the Panama Canal when it came back into the news because we wanted to see it and know what it was like. We went around Cape Horn, seeing one of the ends-of-the-earth places, where so many mariners have died, from the comfort of a luxury liner.
That is bucket list-stuff, and I want more of it.

Europe Knows Russia and Is Deeply Afraid

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Europe is naked and afraid.

That was the message at a recent meeting of the U.K. Section of the Association of European Journalists (AEJ), at which I was an invited speaker.

It preceded a stark warning just over a week later from NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, also speaking in London, who said the danger from Vladimir Putin’s Russia won’t recede even if there is peace in Ukraine.

Rutte said defense spending must increase across Europe and recommended that it should reach 5 percent of GDP. Singling out Britain, he said if the Brits don’t do so, they should learn to speak Russian. He said Russia could overwhelm NATO by 2030.

The British journalists’ session reflected fear of Russia and astonishment at the United States. There was fear that Russia would invade the weaker states and that NATO had been neutered. Fear that the world’s most effective defense alliance, NATO, is no longer operational.

There was astonishment that America had abandoned its longstanding policies of support for Europe and preparedness to keep Russia in check. And there was disillusionment that President Trump would turn away from Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression.

The tone in Europe toward the United States isn’t one simply of anger or sorrow, but anger tinged with sorrow. Europeans see themselves as vulnerable in a way that  hasn’t been true since the end of World War II.

They also are shattered by the change in America under Trump; his hostility to Europe, his tariffs and his preparedness to side with Russia. “How can this happen to America?” the British AEJ members asked me.

In many conversations, I found disbelief that America could do this to Europe, and that Trump should lean so far toward Putin. In Europe, where Putin has been an existential threat and where he invaded Ukraine, there is general amazement that Trump seems to crave the approbation of the Russian president.

Speaking to the journalist’s meeting via video from Romania, Edward Lucas, a former senior editor of The Economist, and now a columnist for The Times of London and a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy, said, “Donald Trump has turned the transatlantic relationship on its head. He wants to be friends with Vladimir Putin. We are in a bad mess.”

He said he saw no realistic possibility of a ceasefire in Ukraine in the near future, and he said Trump had made it clear that he was prepared to walk away from trying to bring peace “if it proved too hard.”

Lucas suggested that if European nations continue to back Ukraine after a Russian-dictated peace offer endorsed by America, Trump will punish them. He might do this by withdrawing U.S. assets from Europe, pulling back large numbers of troops from the 80,000 stationed there, and refusing to replace the American supreme commander of Europe.

“Then we will see how defenseless Europe is,” he said.

In Washington, it seems there is little understanding of the true weakness of Europe. No understanding that money alone won’t buy security for Europe.

Europe doesn’t have stand-off capacity, heavy airlift capacity, ultra-sophisticated electronic intelligence or anything approaching a defense infrastructure.

Trump has equated defense simply with money. But in Europe (although 27 of its nations are part of the European Union), there is no cohesive structure in place that could replace the role played by the United States.

Within the EU there are disagreements and there is the spoiler in the case of Hungary. Its pro-Russia ruler, Victor Orban, would like to try to block any concerted European action against Russia. The new right-wing Polish president’s hopes for good relations with Orban are a worry for most EU members.

I have long believed that there are three mutually exclusive views of Europe in the United States.

The first, favored by Trump and his MAGA allies, is that Europe is ripping off America in defense and through non-tariff trade barriers and is awash in expensive socialist systems embracing health, transportation and state nannying.

The second, favored by vacationers, is that Europe is a sort of Disney World for adults, as portrayed on PBS by Rick Steves’ travelogues: Watch the quaint people making wine or drinking beer.

The third is that Europe has been encouraged by successive administrations to accept the U.S. defense umbrella, as that favored America and its concerns, first about Soviet expansion and more recently about expansion under Putin.

Now Europe is alone in defense terms, naked and very afraid — afraid of Trump’s pivot to Putin.

Hello, World! America Doesn’t Have Your Back Anymore

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America has your back. That has been the message of U.S. foreign policy to the world’s vulnerable since the end of World War II.

That sense that America is behind you was a message for Europe against the threat of the Soviet Union and has been the implicit message for all threatened by authoritarian expansionism.

From the sophisticated in Western Europe to the struggling masses worldwide, America has always been there to help. Its mission has been to serve and, in its serving, to promote the American brand — freedom, democracy, capitalism, human rights — and to keep America a revered and special place.

America was there to arbitrate an end to civil war, to rush in with aid after a natural disaster, to provide food during a famine and medical assistance during an infectious disease outbreak. America was there with an open heart and open hand.

If you want to look at this in a transactional way, which is the currency of today, we gave but we got back. The ledger is balanced. For example, we sent forth America’s food surplus to where it was needed, from Pakistan to Ethiopia, and we opened markets to our farmers.

The world’s needs established a symbiotic relationship in which we gained reverence and prestige, and our values were exported and sometimes adopted.

President Trump has characterized us as victims of a venal world that has pillaged our goodwill, stolen our manufacturing and exploited our market. The fact is that when Trump took office in January, the United States had the best-performing economy in the world, and its citizens enjoyed the products of the world at reasonable prices. Inflation was a problem, but it was beginning to come down — and it wasn’t as persistent as it had been in Britain, for example.

Trump has painted a picture of a world where our manufacturing was somehow shanghaied and carried in the depth of night to Asia.

In fact, American businesses, big and small, sought out Asian manufacturing to avail themselves of cheap but talented labor, low regulation, and a union-free environment.

Businesses will always go where the ecosystem favors them. The business ecosystem offshore was as irresistible to us as it was to a tranche of European manufacturing.

The move to Asia hollowed out the old manufacturing centers of the Midwest and New England, but unemployment has remained low. Some industries, including farming, food processing and manufacturing, suffer labor shortages.

We need manufacturing that supports national security. That includes chips, heavy electrical equipment and other essential infrastructure goods. It doesn’t include a lot of consumer goods, from clothing to toys.

Former California Sen. S.I. Hayakawa, a Republican and a semanticist, said you couldn’t come up with the correct answer if your input was wrong, “no matter how hard you think.” Trump’s thinking about the world seems to be input-challenged.

The world isn’t changing only in how Trump has ordained but in other fundamental ones. Manufacturing in just five years will be very different. Artificial intelligence will be on the factory floor, in the planning and sales offices, and it will boost productivity. However, it won’t add jobs and probably will subtract them.

Trump would like to build a Fortress America with all that will involve, including higher prices and uncompetitive factories. While not undermining our position as the benefactor to the world, a better approach might be to build up North America and welcome Canada and Mexico into an even closer relationship.  Canada shares much of our culture, is rich in raw materials, and has been an exemplary neighbor. Mexico is a treasure trove of talent and labor.

Rather than threatening Canada and belittling Mexico, a possible future lies in a collaborative relationship with our neighbors.

Meanwhile, Canada is looking for markets to the East and the West. Mexico, which is building a coast-to-coast railway to compete with the Panama Canal, is staking much on its new trade deal with the European Union.

Trump has sundered old relationships and old views of what is America’s place in the world order. No longer does the world have America at its back.

This is a time of choice: The Ugly American or the Great Neighbor.

Ukrainian Stray Dogs and Cats Threaten Europe with Rabies

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Amid the war in Ukraine, an epic tale of another war in that country has been unfolding.

It is a tale of “tails,” which is what Ukrainians call their pet dogs and cats: a tale of a great-hearted man and woman who have been battling against the spread of rabies in Ukraine from the exploding stray dog and cat populations and to Europe, where the disease has been largely eradicated.

The great hearts are Dan Fine, a retired tech entrepreneur and founder of the Ukraine War Animals Relief Fund, who resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Krystyna Drahomaretska, 27, an architect-turned-manager of the Under the Sun animal sanctuary in Odesa.

Appearing on the PBS program “White House Chronicle,” Fine explained, “Ukrainians are a pet-loving people — some people had nine dogs. But when the Russians invaded Ukraine, over 8 million people were forced to flee their homes and abandon their pets. This resulted in over 1 million stray dogs and cats, and 65 percent of them weren’t sterilized.”

Foraging for food, the surging stray dog and cat populations are contracting rabies from foxes, wolves and other wild animals, whose populations are also surging, due to a wartime ban on hunting. “It’s a perfect storm,” Fine said.

Rabid stray dogs and cats are biting people. Rabies has the highest mortality rate  — almost 100 percent — of any disease on earth. “Bites from rabid animals affect children the most — 55 percent,” Fine noted.

In the spring of 2022, he went on his first mission to sterilize, vaccinate and microchip the stray dogs and cats of Ukraine. After treatment, many are returned to the streets because the animal shelters are overflowing — and were even before the Russian invasion. The Ukrainians, who are a religious people, don’t believe in euthanasia, he noted.

Fine teamed with Drahomaretska, who, along with other volunteers, caught the strays and transported them to clinics set up through his nonprofit Ukraine animal relief group.

Drahomaretska is nonchalant about the dangers of catching stray tails, even on the front lines. “I am the only female catcher on the front lines,” she said in the TV episode.

To catch stray dogs, she explained, she shoots them with a tranquilizer gun, and they run away. She follows them to wherever they drop, picks them up and carries them to her van.

While pursuing a tranquilized dog, she was injured by a landmine, and she is still on crutches. On another catch, she was bitten twice by a dog she was transporting to a clinic. And she had to go through post-exposure prophylaxis after some slime from a rabid dog got into her eye.

Over five missions, they sterilized, vaccinated and microchipped 8,200 dogs and cats. “That seems like a lot,” Fine said, “But you won’t stop this problem unless you do 500,000 over the next four to five years.”

To drive this mission forward, Fine said they need the investment of another organization. “There are about 200 unemployed vets in Ukraine. They could be paid and mobilized, but we can’t do that alone,” he said.

Fine hopes that “War Tails,” a documentary he and Tana Axelle, also a Vancouver resident, produced about the challenge of stopping the spread of rabies in Ukraine and into Europe, will draw the attention and support of the European Union. They have entered the documentary at the Seattle Film Festival, and they plan to enter it at more film festivals and to get it aired on television.

As Fine sees it, “Ukraine wants to enter the EU, and the EU wants them to enter. And the EU has animal and human health standards. So stopping the spread of rabies into Europe is in their interest.”

Somberly, he added that when the war ends and the rebuilding begins, “they will have to do a culling of millions of rabid dogs and cats. And all that goodwill will go away.”

Five Things That Underlie the Anxiety That Is Gripping the Nation

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They say Generation Z is a generation of anxiety. Prima facie, I say they should get a grip. They are self-indulgent, self-absorbed and spoiled — just like every other generation.

Yet, they reflect a much broader societal anxiety. It isn’t confined to those on the threshold of their lives. I would highlight five causes of this anxiety:

—The presidential election.

—Climate change.

—Fear of wider war in Europe and the Middle East.

—The effect of AI on everything, from job losses to knowing real from fake.

—The worsening housing shortage.

The election weighs on all these issues. There is a feeling that the nation is headed for a train wreck, no matter who wins.

President Biden and former president Donald Trump are known quantities. And there’s the rub. Biden is an old man who has failed to convey strength either against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the pro-Russia movement in Congress.

Biden has led on climate change but failed to tell the story. He has been unable to use the bully pulpit of his presidency and layout, with clear and convincing rhetoric, where the nation should be headed and how he will lead it there.

And if his health should further deteriorate, there is the prospect of Vice President Kamala Harris taking over. She has distinguished herself by walking away from every assignment Biden has given her, in a cloud of giggles. She has no base, just Biden’s support.

Trump inspires that part of the electorate that makes up his base, primarily working people who have a sense of loss and disgruntlement. They really believe Trump, the most unlikely man ever to climb the ramparts of American politics, will miraculously mend their world.

More reprehensible are those members of the Republican Party who are scared of Trump, who have hitched their wagon to his star because they fear him and love holding on to power at any price.

You will know them by their refusal to acknowledge the last election was honest and or to commit to accepting the result of the next election. In doing this, they are supporting a silent platform of insurrection.

The heat of summer has arrived early, and it is not the summer of our memories, of gentle winds, warm sun and wondrous beaches.

The sunshine of summer has turned into an ugly, frightening harbinger of a future climate that won’t support the life we have known. Before May was over, heat and related tornados took lives and spread destruction across Texas and elsewhere.

I wonder about children who have to stay indoors all summer in parts of Texas, the South and West, where you can get burned by touching an automobile and where sports must be played at dawn or after dusk. That should make us all anxious about climate change and the strength and security of the electric grid as we depend more and more on 24/7 air conditioning.

The wars in Europe and the Middle East are troubling in new ways, ways beyond the carnage, the incalculable suffering, and the buildings and homes fallen to bombs and shells.

Our belief that peace had come to Europe for all time has fallen. Surely, as the Russians marched into Ukraine, they will march on unless they are stopped. Who will stop them? Isolation has a U.S. constituency it hasn’t had for 90 years.

In the Middle East, a war goes on, suffering is industrial and relentless in its awful volume, and the dangers of a broader conflict have grown exponentially. Will there ever be a durable peace?

Artificial intelligence is undermining our ability to contemplate the future. It is so vast in its possibilities, so unknown even to its aficionados, and such a threat to jobs and veracity that it is like a frontier of old where people feared there were demons living. Employment will change, and the battle for the truth against the fake will be epic.

Finally, there is housing: the quiet crisis that saps expectations. There aren’t enough houses.

A nation that can’t house itself isn’t fulfilled. However, the political class is so busy with its own housekeeping that it has lost sight of the need for housing solutions.

There are economic consequences that will be felt in time, the largest of which might be a loss of labor mobility — always one of the great U.S. strengths. We followed the jobs. Now we stay put, worried about shelter should we move.

This is, ultimately, the decade of anxiety, mainly because it is a decade in which we feel we are losing what we had. Time for us to get a grip.