Category: Living in Society

Politics mostly social commentary.

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Living in Society

Tuesday Miscellany

After moon rise and before sunrise on the state park trail.

Like with many Americans, a lot is on my mind these days. Not enough for a full post, yet the flotsam and jetsam of living a life in the Republican dominated United States.

The No Kings rally was fun, yet it is over. It was good to catch up with people I know. By studying the terrain in advance, I think I did a better job capturing photographs. It is important to live engaged lives and mass organizing events like this, combined with a modicum of thoughtful photographic work make it easy.

After much study of my October activity, I determined the thousands of views of this blog originating in China are likely a Bot or Bots scraping me to train artificial intelligence.The views are neither human activity, nor do they necessarily originate in China, whose “Great Firewall” blocks WordPress. Combine that with posting my high school class reunion photos the same month, and I received more October views than I did in the five previous years combined. I don’t feel good about it because the rate is not sustainable. Once the Bots have their way with me, I will be jettisoned like an empty chewing gum wrapper.

I planted garlic last week, so the garden is done except for the gleaning. For some reason, it took a lot more energy this year. I truly needed Sunday as a day of rest as in I took four naps during daylight hours. I feel more rested now, and pulled out the manuscript of my autobiography.

I reread the chapters last written and they stand up okay. I decided to write through my work at the transportation and logistics firm I called home for 25 years to clear space for topics I find more interesting: things like cooking, gardening, political activism, and such. I’ve been toying with ending the second volume after becoming an empty nester, yet reconsidered. I’ll write all the way to the end and see the word count. In any case, due to some unforeseen expenses, I’m not as liquid as I’d like and don’t have the money to publish volume two or any volume. It is possible I will push through the draft of the entire story by end of year. I changed while writing it and that means a rewrite of a couple of big sections. I do want to publish the rest. At the same time, I expect to start drafts of the entire story to which I will add on a continuing basis as I find new material and gain new insights. It will become a never ending story.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!

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Living in Society

The Span of Wired Telephony

Last dusty telephones remaining in our home in 2025.

When my parents and I moved from Grandmother’s rented duplex they bought our first home. Recently a realtor posted room-by-room photographs of it on a website when the single family residence was on the market. I looked at each photograph, taking time for memories to rise. I have living memory of things that happened in most of the rooms. Very little remodeling was evident since we lived there. We moved before I entered first grade.

That time in the mid-1950s was for new beginnings, including being when Mother and Father first had a telephone account in their name. Mother remarked it was our own line, not a party line, what was called single party service. She had had a party line on the farm, so she was familiar. Having our own dedicated, direct line felt luxurious. It was private. I hardly remember either of them using the telephone in that house, although I am certain they did.

When my spouse and I built a new home in Big Grove Township, we felt very modern by specifying a telephone wall jack in almost every room. To even have had that discussion with our builder seems remarkable in 2025. Soon we came to rely on other communications devices.

First, my spouse had a bag phone while she closed her parents’ estate. I followed with a flip phone with which I took a photograph of Barack Obama in 2006. When the phone company could not resolve a hum in our land line, we discussed it and cancelled the account, moving our telephony to mobile devices. In 2012 I bought an Android smart phone while working on a political campaign. It freed me from the leash of wired telephony. The transition from wired service was complete.

We inherited a book from my in-laws who owned and operated a small telephone company in Western Iowa. Lines Between Two Rivers: A History of Telephony in Iowa tells the story of Iowa’s pioneers in leading the nation in the number of telephone companies. In it, the authors wrote:

The thrill of having the first phone in your home before the turn of the century must have been something, but in reality, we take it for granted today. From the whoop and hollar days, the Iowa telephone communications business has continued a tremendous growth, both in numbers and technology. The rural and small town areas have the same modern services as the larger populated cities. (Lines Between Two Rivers: A History of Telephony in Iowa, Iowa Telephone Association, Tom Griffith Chapter, Independent Telephone Pioneer Association).

Telephony was a marvel of technology, yet it was never more than a means to an end. It changed how people communicated with each other forever. Even the party line Mother did not like blurred boundaries between public and private life. Eavesdropping became part of early rural telephone culture. More frequent and easy contact, made us a society of gossips as connection to the rest of society became faster. It seems trite to refer to the telephone as the first social media yet comparisons are apt.

From farmers checking commodity prices in real time, to merchants ordering and tracking the status of shipments, to allowing faster access to emergency services when needed, telephony added something positive that we now take for granted. Mother was a telephone operator in her post-high school graduation life, providing her a source of income and personal prestige. She likely used the telephone more than Father, giving her a new kind of influence at home and in society. Being tied to a land line was part of how this culture evolved. When the cord cut loose, things went global.

My process of going through collected belongings in retirement is slow. What to do with the four telephones in the photo? We discussed it and will keep one of the Trimline sets for old time sake. It is branded ITT and has a sticker with the name of the phone company my in-laws owned. The other three? I will call the county landfill and ask about disposing of them. If they have a process to spare the landfill, I will follow it.

Who would have thought land line telephony would end? It seems unlikely we will return to wire telephony yet we will have a device if we do. Being ready seems like a good thing.

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Living in Society

No Kings Rally – Oct. 18

No Kings Rally – Oct. 18, 2025.

The second No Kings Rally in Mount Vernon, Iowa, on Oct. 18, 2025, was much better attended than the previous one. I did not count yet there were at least 500 people participating. The rally started off with a gathering outdoors at the First Street Community Center, then walked a block or so to line the streets at Highway One and First Street. Here’s what the rally looked like.

Community Center Rally
Crowd size.
Another crowd shot.
The U.S. is all of US.

About all I heard from the speaker was, “something, something, Heather Cox Richardson.”

I found some farmer friends with whom I talked about apple trees. Former Iowa House member David Osterberg was there. He represented us when we first moved to Big Grove Township. Former Congressman Dave Loebsack arrived early to get a good perch. We reminisced about his first election to the Congress in 2006. Here are Dave and Terry Loebsack with their flags.

Terry and Dave Loebsack at the No Kings Rally in Mount Vernon, Iowa on Oct. 18, 2025.

There were hundreds of people, and many signs.

Release the files
Navy Vet fighting for Democracy again!
Stand Up!
No Kings I love America!
Along Highway One.
More signs.

The crowd stretched for blocks.

On the corner.
Looking up hill
Looking toward the hilltop from the end of the protest line.

And these…

Costumed protesters.
Flags.

The clear autumn day was a backdrop for everyone to feel good about standing up for our rights. A lot of work remains to take back our government for everyone. Days like this make us hopeful. The feeling is infectious.

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Living in Society

The Meat of It

Cattle in Cedar County, Iowa.

Beef and meat prices have little immediate impact on our family of vegetarians. About the only time I noticed the price of meat was while buying some for a low-income household. My money would have gone farther if prices were not so high.

“Beef prices have climbed to record highs after cattle ranchers slashed their herds due to a years long drought in the western United States that dried up lands used for grazing and raised feeding costs,” reported Reuters. “By the beginning of the year, the herd had dwindled to 86.7 million cattle, the smallest number for the time period since 1951, according to U.S. government data.”

Sounds like the impact of the climate crisis. Just saying.

The president said he is looking at doing something. “(The price of beef is) higher than we want it, and that’s going to be coming down pretty soon too. We did something,” Trump said in typical obfuscatory language. “We are working on beef, and I think we have a deal on beef.”

When the president says he “did something,” he is fighting a fire he started. That’s one heckuva way to run a government. This is also true with the collapse of the soybean market for American farmers, and so much more.

Here’s the core of it. Many people feel meat is an important part of an American diet. Cattle supply is one thing yet the Trump tariffs are another driving up prices. “The Trump administration’s tariffs are hitting major beef suppliers such as Brazil — and are set to push prices for American consumers even higher,” reported the Washington Post.

It’s no secret livestock farming is a primary cause of the climate crisis. Farmers and scientists are seeking solutions like anaerobic manure digesters in confinement livestock operations. They capture methane released as manure is processed into liquid fertilizer and bedding material for cows. The better solution is to find other sources of nutrition than meat.

I endeavor to set aside the drama of politicians in Washington, D.C. We, as a society should reduce our consumption of meat. There are plenty of other great tasting, nutritious things to eat. Likewise we can and should address the climate crisis… before it’s too late. The meat of it is eat less meat.

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Living in Society

AI in Big Grove Township

Moon setting at sunrise.

An advertisement circulates that the only AI people over 40 use is ChatGPT. Okay. I don’t pretend to know a lot about AI, and my experience with ChatGPT began in earnest only last week. I accept that AI can be a reasonable part of life, although I don’t understand the bigger picture. Larry Ellison of Oracle is one oligarch who talks like he gets it.

“I think it’s very, very clear: AI is a much bigger deal than the Industrial Revolution, electricity, and everything that’s come before,” Ellison said in a video conversation with former UK prime Minister Tony Blair.

“We will soon have not only artificial intelligence but also — much sooner than anticipated —artificial general intelligence and then, in the not-too-distant future, artificial superintelligence.” (Oracle’s Larry Ellison on AI: ‘Most Important Discovery in Human History’, Cloud Wars, Feb 25, 2025).

Bigger than electricity? We mere mortals must live our lives and depend upon basic science that produces electricity. How shall we adapt to AI? Who will change our flat tire on a long stretch of deserted Iowa highway?

This recent statement is tainted by my memory of Ellison from when I attended OpenWorld in 2006. He was onstage with a penguin to announce Oracle’s full support for Red Hat Linux. In other words, he was co-opting the open source software and branding Oracle’s support. What a prick. Well, the penguin was interesting, if concerned about being in a room full of people.

What did I learn last week? I asked, “What are best practices for using ChatGPT in writing?” The answer was long and confirmed my natural impulses on how to use it. To a degree, AI is all about what I’m thinking. It cautioned me to use ethical and transparent practices:

Disclose AI assistance when appropriate (especially in journalism or academia).

Don’t claim AI-generated content as wholly your own if it’s substantial.

Always fact-check: AI can make confident errors.

I found ChatGPT is an uninspired writer. The assignments I entered returned something wooden and definitely not mine. Its editing skills were positive for short paragraphs. I expect to spend time determining how I might use it. When I get stumped on how to word something I’ll paste the paragraph into the dialogue box and see what comes back. I have yet to use something the machine sent back without further editing. It will become one more tool among many in the writer’s workshop.

The machine helped improve the structure of my daily life. Through five iterations, I wrote daily work plans. The culmination was a template to use on writing days. Even without a daily plan, I have ideas on what to do to forget my worries and work on things in my personal life that need it. ChatGPT brought everything into sharp focus and I’m the better for it.

My morning wake up regimen began after a visit to a podiatrist for plantar fasciitis. By the end of last week, the machine and I added exercises to address not only plantar fasciitis, but balance, upper body strength, and my core. The process was much quicker than looking through websites or books on my shelf. After a few days, I’m feeling positive results. In a few months, I will take another look at the regimen.

In my quest to become a better photographer, I asked the machine to help me with a plan to capture half a dozen shots of the No Kings rally on Oct. 18. It proposed a series of different types of shots and refined it when I uploaded a map of the site with a description of the topography. It even gave me specific places to stand to get the shots. When doing an amateur photo shoot, we have to be alert for developments as they happen. Having a plan makes the experience better and hopefully produces better photographs.

There is a balance between using ChatGPT and Google search. The search engine incorporates AI, although I find it a bit annoying. Spare me the machine-generated narrative and just give me the facts. It won’t take long to determine which method to use for different types of queries.

Because of the internet we have AI in Big Grove Township. As we spend more time at home in retirement, managing daily affairs keeps us engaged and that’s good for our longevity. Like many people, I seek to spend less time online. ChatGPT is not really helping yet I want to use it. There in a nutshell is humanity.

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Living in Society

Still More on AI

Wild turkeys walking on the state park trail.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere on the internet. The most common encounter I have is in responses to queries on Google search. It is annoying, yet that feeling might be my failure to adapt to modernity. Time will tell.

In an article posted at the National Library of Medicine, author Michael Cheng-Tek Tai wrote, “Artificial intelligence, known by some as the industrial revolution 4.0, is going to change not only the way we do things, how we relate to others, but also what we know about ourselves.” Like it or not, AI is already affecting me in those ways.

Earlier this month I got a free account with ChatGPT and began querying. Thursday, I typed in the dialogue box, “I received a number of responses to queries in October. In about 100-150 words, please analyze and describe them.” Following is the response I received.

In October, your responses showed a thoughtful, organized approach to learning and productivity. You explored practical topics such as meal planning, time management, and writing effectiveness, often asking for customized, actionable outputs like recipes, essays, or PDFs you could use on your mobile device. Your questions balanced curiosity and precision — for instance, refining a vegetarian enchilada recipe to fit available ingredients or requesting productivity adjustments for specific times of day. You also engaged with public affairs by seeking factual background on Dr. James Zogby, reflecting intellectual breadth. Overall, your October queries reveal a pattern of reflective self-improvement, efficiency-minded planning, and attention to detail across both creative and analytical pursuits.

I don’t often receive such positive responses to questions in real life. Of course the machine is giving back what I gave. I recall Dale Carnegie’s reminder, “Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Since I got my account, the machine never mentioned my name, although it remembers stuff about me better than I do. The machine is quite seductive.

Once I start something, I am quick to adapt, and I don’t reject AI out of hand. I find uses for the technology even though I remain generally skeptical about machine responses to my queries. Substantial impacts in my life, less than two weeks in are:

  • Instead of providing detailed sources for its work, the machine presents a returned narrative with a few links. The Zogby query is a good example. It gave me significant things to know about him. I know each one of those to be true from studying his work. It won’t always be the case, so a new dimension of query returns using AI is evaluating the quality of the information. The seductive tone of responses might have me overlooking this important aspect.
  • It can help with writing. AI is limited to what is currently available on public sources on the internet. That means I can’t usefully ask it to write long essays for me. What I can do is when I’m stumped about how to word something, type a draft sentence or two into the dialogue box and ask the machine to edit it. Without asking, it produced multiple examples of better ways to word something. If I continue to use it like this, it will be a time saver. I am confident AI won’t get it right for how I write. It will make me think about language in a constructive manner.
  • I’m four days in using AI to help plan a more productive day. With its”Balanced Day Plan,” I immediately eliminated a background concern that there is too much to do and not enough time in which to do it. I am fond of the saying an air traffic controller can only land one airplane at a time. So it is with tasks I have before me. AI finds a way to get it all into a day. If it can’t, it tells me. This serves as a stress reliever, helping me focus on the task at hand, and I do a better job with it. For example, I need to drink more water to stay hydrated. The balanced day plan actually schedules it, resulting in me drinking more water. This pursuit is just getting started and my best hope for AI lies herein.
  • There are plenty of tools to use ingredients on hand to make dinner. A most formidable one is my years of cooking experience, especially since when I lived in South Georgia 25 years ago. Because ChatGPT is interactive, a thread about vegetarian enchiladas can go back and forth, resolving issues, until I have something usable. Each cook has different approaches to doing that work, and using AI to help with cooking may be a short-duration fad. It does have capabilities to use if we ask the right questions.

Next step is to just use it. If I discover anything more, I will be sure to post about it.

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Living in Society

Who to Read in Socials

Photo by fauxels on Pexels.com

Like every progressive activist, I want news from reliable sources — newspapers, newsletters, blogs, and social media. The question is always, “Who is active and can tell me something I haven’t heard elsewhere?” Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American is the top Substack, with more than 1.3 million subscribers. It’s a must-read. There are others, less well known and on different platforms. Here are five to consider. Hopefully, this provides some value as we trek across the internet wasteland.

Olena Halushka is a Ukrainian politician and activist. Her daily posts on BlueSky keep the terrorist acts of Russia in Ukraine in front of me. She was a member of the Kyiv City Council and a contributor to Ukrainska Pravda, the Atlantic Council, EUobserver, The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy. Find her on BlueSky here: @halushka.bsky.social

Nina Elkadi is an Investigative Reporter at Sentient, and freelance writer from Iowa who reports on agriculture, water, and the environment. Her work also explores the manipulation of science and how corporate negligence affects consumers and workers. I had the pleasure of meeting Elkadi in Iowa City. She posts on BlueSky at @ninaelkadi.com

Alice Miranda Ollstein is a senior health care reporter for POLITICO, with a focus on sexual and reproductive health. She is often first to market with major stories on her beat. She also monitors social media and reposts articles I find valuable and leading edge. Subscribe to her posts at the POLITICO website or follow on BlueSky at  @alicemiranda.bsky.social .

Hannah Ritchie is a Scottish data scientist, senior researcher at the University of Oxford, and deputy editor at Our World in Data. Her work focuses on sustainability, in relation to climate change, energy, food and agriculture, biodiversity, air pollution, deforestation, and public health. I read Ritchie because she brings a fresh voice to the subject of coping with the climate crisis.
Her first book, Not the End of the World, was published in 2024. Find her on BlueSky at @hannahritchie.bsky.social

Ana Marie Cox I’m likely dating myself here. Cox is a frequent critic of the Substack culture and simply a very interesting person. I have been following her since the Wonkette days and yes that was a thing. In addition to media criticism, she posts frequently about her trials and tribulations in the gig economy. She is contributing editor at @newrepublic.com; co-host of Space the Nation (sci-fi meets politics); plus @pastduepodcast.com. Follow her on Buttondown at https://newsletter.anamariecox.com/ or on BlueSky at @anamariecox.bsky.social. Her BlueSky account is mostly reposts of stories that track her eclectic interests.

What are your favorite reads on the World Wide Web? Feel free to leave a comment.

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Living in Society

Further Thoughts on AI

Milkweed gone to seed.

On Oct. 1, the machine at ChatGPT told me I had used my allowance of queries for my free account. It was fine. It offered me a lesser quality query until my account reset. I logged out instead and quickly found other things to do.

After re-reading my post about using AI, which includes an essay I asked the machine to write, I decided it was a good call to refrain from using ChatGPT in my autobiography. The main issue is it relies on what is available on the internet on a given topic. Because my autobiography is being written from journals, photographs, memories and other in-real-life documentation, such information is not available for the machine to read. It will produce a present-biased, internet-derived account about whatever I ask about my life. That is not what I want in this project.

While it did a reasonable job drafting something from the contents of this blog, it only knows me that way and that is a deficiency that cannot be easily corrected. For example, I asked the machine to write a brief autobiography of me. It’s response tells the story: “I couldn’t find enough reliable public information to write a full, detailed 1,000-word biography of Paul Deaton of Iowa.” This was despite my essay of that name, which lives on this blog and is my most popular post since I began in 2007. Either the machine is lazy, or it has programming that discourages this type of query. This discovery of the limits of ChatGPT is of value.

What can I use ChatGPT or another AI program to do? I see three applications based on asking these questions of the machine.

Give me ideas in how to use ChatGPT as diarist. I have been journaling since 1974 and the evolution of styles and content is striking. They developed over time. Naturally the machine wants to talk about events in my journal all day so it can learn as much as possible about me. I won’t do that, yet the occasional query can help me find direction in that kind of writing. It also made these suggestions for how to use the machine: “The key is deciding whether you want me to be: An analyst (finding themes and patterns); A recorder (storing entries); An editor (shaping them into narratives); or A mirror (asking questions back).” Even though I am alone when journaling, I don’t need a machine partner with which to interact.

What are some ideas for vegetarian and vegan enchiladas? Using ChatGPT to determine what to cook and eat seems solid. I entered on-hand ingredients and the machine suggested a specific recipe that used them. It provided grouping of ideas by flavor-type, such as hearty and savory, bright and fresh, protein-rich, toppings and finishing touches. So often, my ideas are pulling out a familiar cookbook and paging through it. AI could be an alternate way of figuring out what’s for dinner. There is value in that.

What are some ways to balance household work for today? I also entered tasks for the day. Personal productivity is important and the machine gave me useful ideas on how to structure my day. Because we are creatures of habit, we need to break out of what we do to improve how much we get done in a day. AI did not hesitate to tell me I scheduled too much to do, suggesting tasks that could be done tomorrow. It also changed how certain tasks were scheduled in the day, for example, moving cooking to the afternoon and spreading meal prep throughout the day. Going forward, I expect to use AI to help restructure how I spend my time. It may get to the point where I’m satisfied with how my new daily schedule is going. If so, then I will step away from AI for a while. I do know I was productive but exhausted by mid afternoon the first day I tried using an AI planner. This despite more scheduled rest and recovery time throughout the day.

It seems important we get AI out of our system. Like with everything, moderation of use seems essential.

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Living in Society

Cage Match

Early steel cage wrestling match. Photo Credit – Online World of Wrestling website.

In July, word came from the president he was considering a cage match wrestling event to be held on the White House lawn. As the Skydance – Paramount merger closed on Aug. 7, and UFC signed an exclusive deal with Paramount+ four days later, the UFC match to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary appears to be inevitable and will be aired on Paramount stations, including CBS, the former home of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.

Trump’s affection for professional wrestling is well known, as is his induction into the WWE hall of fame in 2013. Regardless of concerns about propriety, a cage match is an expression of the president’s character. The event is expected to host some 20,000 of his closest fans on the lawn and be available to countless others via the internet. From where do cage matches come?

The American Wrestling Association (AWA) was a professional wrestling promotion based in Minneapolis from 1960 until 1991, according to Wikipedia. It was founded by Verne Gagne and Wally Karbo, originating as part of the Minneapolis Boxing & Wrestling Club. Unlike modern professional wrestlers of the WWE, Gagne was an amateur wrestling champion who was an alternate on the U.S. freestyle wrestling team at the 1948 Summer Olympics. He ran the AWA with a conservative sensibility, Wikipedia said, firmly believing that sound technical wrestling should be the basis of a pro-wrestling company. Cage matches reflect no basis in technical wrestling as Gagne had come to know it. I submit they are about the fans.

Father and we kids attended a professional wrestling match at Municipal Stadium in Davenport. The stands were not packed although because of the popular Saturday morning television program, All Star Wrestling, the event drew a good-sized crowd. Patrons were unruly, with arguments breaking out among them. I almost got into a fight after mouthing off to a stranger. That day there was a cage match during which constructing a cage of chain-link fencing was part of the spectacle. Was that real blood when one wrestler crushed another against the cage wall? It was hard to say from the bleachers. Young women would visit the motel across the river where the wrestlers stayed and attempt to accompany them on tour. Such plebeian entertainments were typical in my home town. This is a crowd that later would evolve into MAGA cult members.

Once one admits a cage wrestling match is not sports, then what kind of spectacle is it? I have to believe we could all be pursuing more constructive use of our time. It’s a free country, though, and a wrestling star is president. Celebrating professional wrestling is just one more way our culture is getting away from us as the country marks its 250th birthday.

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Reviews

Book Review: 107 Days

It feels necessary for Kamala Harris to have written 107 Days. I’m glad she did. It was a quick read that touched the high points of her short presidential campaign. Hearing the story, in her voice, is important. It’s essential reading for anyone who follows presidential politics.

I make it a point to read or be familiar with every presidential memoir going back to Harry Truman, who was president when I was born. While Harris lost the 2024 election, she is part of the story of Joe Biden’s presidency and his eventual dropping out of the race for re-election. 107 days is not long enough for a modern presidential campaign and while Harris’ campaign staff worked diligently and smart in her recounting, they couldn’t get her across the finish line.

Harris chose not to make this a detailed account of her campaign. I respect that choice. It is a high level view full of her reactions to main events as they unfolded. There is value in that.

Even before it was published there were reviews out there. I don’t want to repeat, deny, or defend that work. My statement is if one is interested in U.S. presidential politics in the 21st Century, you should have 107 Days on your to be read list.