Time to Think

The Future Starts Now                      #248 By Hank Silverberg  I spent part of this past weekend with my nine-year-old grandson. We took in a minor league baseball game on Saturday night. He stayed over and on Sunday morning this fourth-grader beat me in Scrabble for the first time, 251-247. We have been playing the board game since he was five and he has been very good at the strategy of the game to go along with his growing vocabulary. His win came with the small words at the end when he was able to use all his letters, stranding me with two unusable C's.   This game gave me hope for the future. At least until I went online and started reading the latest news. The enthusiasm for the rest of the 21st century then faded fast.  I have tried for several years to figure out what approximately one quarter of the electorate sees in Donald Trump, and I just don't understand it.  He has no "family va...

  21st Century Blues                                                                                   #247           By Hank Silverberg        I was born in the 1950's and got my college education in the 1970's. Yes, I am a Baby Boomer and proud of it.  But I must admit the deeper into the 21st Century we get, the more worried I become that  somehow;  I can't keep up. Little things that were simply facts of life in the past, like the failure of an electronic device, didn't bug me. That 45-rpm record jumped because the vinyl  was scratched.  Yet this weekend when one of the four different remotes I have to use on my TV got wet and fried out, I found myself feeling a bit put upon. (Yes, I know about universa...

Eyes on The South China Sea                    #246 By Hank Silverberg Most Americans probably can't find the South China Sea on a map. Partially because on many maps it's called the Philippine Sea. It's a vast part of the Pacific Ocean that encompasses 1,423,000 square miles bordering China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan, and therein lies the problem.  The international community recognizes most of the sea as international waters, but the Chinese claim most of it as their territorial waters, including parts claimed by the other countries.   As I wrote last week, even something as simple as the Barbie movie (see Barbie's nine dashes map from last week) can create controversy over just who owns what in that part of the world.    The South China Sea is one of the busiest shipping lanes on Earth, and therefore has the potential to be a flashpoint for regional conflict that could escalate int...

Age vs Wisdom                                                      #245                                                              By Hank Silverberg Ageism How old is too old to be president, or Senate Minority Leader, or Speaker of the House, or a Supreme Court Justice?  (How old is to old?)  This question has come up a number of times over the last few months as we enter the political season, and it did so again this week when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, 81, appeared to have some kind of medical issue right in the middle of a news conference. He froze up and could not even finish his sentence. He   had to be slowly ushered away by colleagues.  McConnell had a concus...

Fantasy, Reality and Revision                     #244          By Hank Silverberg                                                                                                                       With the writer's and actor's strike I wrote about last week now in full swing, it's likely we won't be seeing too many blockbuster movies in the near future. So, it's ironic that three of them are now out and creating a big buzz that, like everything else these days, ends up in the political realm.  I have only seen one of them. I am not a movie critic, but "Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny" was entertain...