

After almost 6 years of traveling, we sailed into Woods Hole on Cape Cod. We continued living aboard for the next five years and I wrote about that, adding ‘and Beyond’ to the title of the blog. Then shortly before Mark’s death in 2016, we sold our beloved Windbird and my travel logs became land logs. At this point, I had written a daily account for each and every day for 11 years. I fully intended to end the blog at that point, but when I wrote that news in a log, I got many responses saying that I really needed to keep posting. At the same time, I realized that I couldn’t stop writing. Summarizing each day had become a permanent part of my life and I will probably continue writing until I can no longer. These postings reflect the ordinary, and sometimes the extraordinary, days in my life and I would like to invite you to join me on my journey.
2025 Life Logs, Day 35: The Six Principles of Stupidity
2025 Life Logs, Day 35: The Six Principles of Stupidity
Date: Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Weather: Mostly Sunny; Temp 43, Low 18 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
After watching the press conference with Trump and Netanyahu this evening where Trump declared that he thinks the United States should ‘own’ the Gaza Strip and turn it into a new ‘Riviera’, sending its people to live in other countries, stupid is one word that came to mind. Last week, the New York Times published an article by conservative opinion columnist, David Brooks, “The Six Principles of Stupidity.” So instead of writing about my day that ended with a great conversation with friend Lynne Kirwin in New Zealand, I suggest you read those principles. As Brooks says in the article, we are going to have to learn a lot about stupidity in the next four years.
THE SIX PRINCIPLES OF STUPIDITY
Jan. 30, 2025–The New York Times
By David Brooks, Opinion Columnist
This was the week in which the Chinese made incredible gains in artificial intelligence and the Americans made incredible gains in human stupidity. I’m sorry, but I look at the Trump administration’s behavior over the last week and the only word that accurately describes it is: stupid.
I am not saying the members of the Trump administration are not intelligent. We all know high-I.Q. people who behave in a way that’s as dumb as rocks. I don’t believe that there are stupid people, just stupid behaviors. As the Italian historian Carlo Cipolla once put it, “The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.”
And I am certainly not saying Donald Trump’s supporters are less intelligent than others. I’ve learned over the years that many upscale Democrats detest intellectual diversity. When they have power over a system — whether it’s academia, the mainstream media, the nonprofits or the Civil Service — they tend to impose a stifling orthodoxy that makes everybody within it duller, more conformist and insular. If Republicans want to upend that, I say: Go for it.
I define stupidity as behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next? If somebody comes up to you and says, “I think I’m going to take a hike in a lightning storm with a copper antenna on my head,” stupidity replies, “That sounds like a really great idea!” Stupidity is the tendency to take actions that hurt you and the people around you.
The administration produced volleys of stupidity this week. It renewed threats to impose ruinous tariffs on Canada and Mexico that would drive up inflation in America. It attempted a broad and general purge of the federal work force, apparently without asking how that purge would affect government operations. But I’d like to focus on one other episode: the attempt to freeze federal spending on assistance programs, and Trump’s subsequent decision to reverse course and undo the freeze.
When announcing the freeze, the administration stated its clear goal — to defund things like the diversity, equity and inclusion programs that Trump disapproves of. A prudent administration would have picked the programs it opposed and focused on cutting those, through a well-established process known as rescission authority. But the Trump administration decided to impose a vague, half-baked freeze on what it claimed amounted to more than $3 trillion in federal spending. Suddenly, patients in cancer trials at the National Institutes of Health didn’t know if they could continue their treatments, Head Start administrators didn’t know if they could draw federal funds, cities and states across America didn’t know if they would have money for police forces, schools, nutrition programs, highway repair and other basic services.
This Trump policy was like trying to cure acne with decapitation. Nobody seems to have asked the question: If we freeze all grant spending, what will happen next? Once the ramifications of that stupidity became obvious, Trump reversed course. And this is my big prediction for this administration: It will churn out a steady stream of stupid policies, and when the consequences of those policies begin to hit Trump’s approval rating, he will flip-flop, diminish or abandon those policies. He loves popularity more than any idea.
But it is still true that we’re going to have to learn a lot about stupidity over the next four years. I’ve distilled what I’ve learned so far into six main principles:
Principle 1: Ideology produces disagreement, but stupidity produces befuddlement. This week, people in institutions across America spent a couple of days trying to figure out what the hell was going on. This is what happens when a government freezes roughly $3 trillion in spending with a two-page memo that reads like it was written by an intern. When stupidity is in control, the literature professor Patrick Moreau argues, words become unscrewed “from their relation to reality.”
Principle 2: Stupidity often inheres in organizations, not individuals. When you create an organization in which one man has all the power and everybody else has to flatter his preconceptions, then stupidity will surely result. As the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it: “This is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”
Principle 3: People who behave stupidly are more dangerous than people who behave maliciously. Evil people at least have some accurate sense of their own self-interest, which might restrain them. Stupidity dares greatly! Stupidity already has all the answers!
Principle 4: People who behave stupidly are unaware of the stupidity of their actions. You may have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is that incompetent people don’t have the skills to recognize their own incompetence. Let’s introduce the Hegseth-Gabbard corollary: The Trump administration is attempting to remove civil servants who may or may not be progressive but who have tremendous knowledge in their field of expertise and hire MAGA loyalists who often lack domain knowledge or expertise. The results may not be what the MAGA folks hoped for.
Principle 5: Stupidity is nearly impossible to oppose. Bonhoeffer notes, “Against stupidity we are defenseless.” Because stupid actions do not make sense, they invariably come as a surprise. Reasonable arguments fall on deaf ears. Counter-evidence is brushed aside. Facts are deemed irrelevant. Bonhoeffer continues, “In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”
Principle 6: The opposite of stupidity is not intelligence, it’s rationality. The psychologist Keith Stanovich defines rationality as the capacity to make decisions that help people achieve their objectives. People in the grip of the populist mind-set tend to be contemptuous of experience, prudence and expertise, helpful components of rationality. It turns out that this can make some populists willing to believe anything — conspiracy theories, folk tales and internet legends; that vaccines are harmful to children. They don’t live within a structured body of thought but within a rave party chaos of prejudices.
As time has gone by, I’ve developed more and more sympathy for the goals the populists are trying to achieve. America’s leadership class has spent the last few generations excluding, ignoring, rejecting and insulting a large swath of this country. It’s terrible to be assaulted in this way. It’s worse when you finally seize power and start assaulting yourself — and everyone around you. In fact, it’s stupid.
2025 Life Logs, Day 34: Understanding or Not
2025 Life Logs, Day 34: Understanding or Not
Date: Monday, February 3, 2025
Weather: Mostly Sunny; Temp 38, Low 37 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
After I sent my log last night, I stayed up to watch a bit of the Grammy’s. Soon after I started watching, Shakira, a Columbian singer-songwriter, came on and what a show that was! While singing, she can move her body in every conceivable way. Wow! Maybe I’ll come back as Shakira in my next life.
That was enough of the Grammy’s for me, so I headed outside with Shadow. I knew it had been snowing, but I thought it was too warm to stick. I was wrong, as the world around me was snow covered and beautiful. And it was still that way this morning.
Staying with the beautiful them just a bit longer, late this afternoon Google sent me a video of this day in 2015. Windbird was in the middle of the Florida Keys anchored in Boot Key Harbor. On the way into the harbor, dolphins had come to greet us. I watched the video with a longing to return to that day.
But then, it was once again time to take Shadow outside. This time I was greeted with a melting world of white and a crunching sound of destruction. Shadow and I walked to the backyard to witness the long-abandoned house on the adjacent property being torn down. In just the time that Shadow and I played fetch, about a fourth of the house had been taken down and crunched into dumpster. It had probably taken weeks, maybe even months to build that old house which was once part of a downtown Falmouth motel. In just a few minutes it was turned into rubbish. And that jolted me back into the reality of what is happening to our government. It has taken almost 250 years to build the strongest and longest lasting democracy on earth, and in just two weeks we are watching it being dismantled chuck by chunk. And apparently nobody is going to stop this. I guess everybody else is just like me, watching and trying to figure out what is really happening.
And it appears Trump is not satisfied with the destruction of American government, he wants to involve the whole world with his tariffs. What is really behind them? I saw a post on a friend’s Facebook page this morning that at least helped me understand the Trump tariffs. At the same time that I saw that post, I read a piece by Robert Reich, What you need to know about Trump’s tariffs and the rest of Trump’s madness: The art of the deal, with him as dealer. Trump says he’s imposing the tariffs for the American workers. According to Reich, nothing could be farther from the truth. Reich says “he’s doing this for himself and for the world’s oligarchy, which, in turn, is busily siphoning off the wealth of the world.” Reich’s next question was how to stop this. His answer is that the first step is to understand it. And that brings me back to the post I saw on Facebook. I am copying it in full here as I found it very informative.
The introduction to the article by Professor David Honig of Indiana University says this is “the best, most cogent and elegantly simple explanation into the inexplicably destructive negotiating processes of the president.” The person writing the post then went on to say, “Everybody I know should read this accurate and enlightening piece.” I agree. It did help me understand what might really be going on, at least with the tariffs.
“I’m going to get a little wonky and write about Donald Trump and negotiations. For those who don’t know, I’m an adjunct professor at Indiana University – Robert H. McKinney School of Law and I teach negotiations. Okay, here goes.
Trump, as most of us know, is the credited author of “The Art of the Deal,” a book that was actually ghost written by a man named Tony Schwartz, who was given access to Trump and wrote based upon his observations. If you’ve read The Art of the Deal, or if you’ve followed Trump lately, you’ll know, even if you didn’t know the label, that he sees all dealmaking as what we call “distributive bargaining.”
Distributive bargaining always has a winner and a loser. It happens when there is a fixed quantity of something and two sides are fighting over how it gets distributed. Think of it as a pie and you’re fighting over who gets how many pieces. In Trump’s world, the bargaining was for a building, or for construction work, or subcontractors. He perceives a successful bargain as one in which there is a winner and a loser, so if he pays less than the seller wants, he wins. The more he saves the more he wins.
The other type of bargaining is called integrative bargaining. In integrative bargaining the two sides don’t have a complete conflict of interest, and it is possible to reach mutually beneficial agreements. Think of it, not a single pie to be divided by two hungry people, but as a baker and a caterer negotiating over how many pies will be baked at what prices, and the nature of their ongoing relationship after this one gig is over.
The problem with Trump is that he sees only distributive bargaining in an international world that requires integrative bargaining. He can raise tariffs, but so can other countries. He can’t demand they not respond. There is no defined end to the negotiation and there is no simple winner and loser. There are always more pies to be baked. Further, negotiations aren’t binary. China’s choices aren’t (a) buy soybeans from US farmers, or (b) don’t buy soybeans. They can also (c) buy soybeans from Russia, or Argentina, or Brazil, or Canada, etc. That completely strips the distributive bargainer of his power to win or lose, to control the negotiation.
One of the risks of distributive bargaining is bad will. In a one-time distributive bargain, e.g. negotiating with the cabinet maker in your casino about whether you’re going to pay his whole bill or demand a discount, you don’t have to worry about your ongoing credibility or the next deal. If you do that to the cabinet maker, you can bet he won’t agree to do the cabinets in your next casino, and you’re going to have to find another cabinet maker.
There isn’t another Canada.
So when you approach international negotiation, in a world as complex as ours, with integrated economies and multiple buyers and sellers, you simply must approach them through integrative bargaining. If you attempt distributive bargaining, success is impossible. And we see that already.
Trump has raised tariffs on China. China responded, in addition to raising tariffs on US goods, by dropping all its soybean orders from the US and buying them from Russia. The effect is not only to cause tremendous harm to US farmers, but also to increase Russian revenue, making Russia less susceptible to sanctions and boycotts, increasing its economic and political power in the world, and reducing ours. Trump saw steel and aluminum and thought it would be an easy win, BECAUSE HE SAW ONLY STEEL AND ALUMINUM – HE SEES EVERY NEGOTIATION AS DISTRIBUTIVE. China saw it as integrative, and integrated Russia and its soybean purchase orders into a far more complex negotiation ecosystem.
Trump has the same weakness politically. For every winner there must be a loser. And that’s just not how politics works, not over the long run.
For people who study negotiations, this is incredibly basic stuff, negotiations 101, definitions you learn before you even start talking about styles and tactics. And here’s another huge problem for us.
Trump is utterly convinced that his experience in a closely held real estate company has prepared him to run a nation, and therefore he rejects the advice of people who spent entire careers studying the nuances of international negotiations and diplomacy. But the leaders on the other side of the table have not eschewed expertise, they have embraced it. And that means they look at Trump and, given his very limited tool chest and his blindly distributive understanding of negotiation, they know exactly what he is going to do and exactly how to respond to it.
From a professional negotiation point of view, Trump isn’t even bringing checkers to a chess match. He’s bringing a quarter that he insists of flipping for heads or tails, while everybody else is studying the chess board to decide whether its better to open with Najdorf or Grünfeld.”
— David Honig
2025 Life Logs, Day 33: Bath for Shadow, Dinner for the Goldstones
2025 Life Logs, Day 33: Bath for Shadow, Dinner for the Goldstones
Date: Sunday, February 2, 2025
Weather: Some Sun, Some Clouds, Snow Tonight; Temp 34, Low 32 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
This was one of those free and easy days. I spent a bit of time on my current jigsaw puzzle while watching Meet the Press. Working a puzzle helps keep my blood pressure down while watching a review of Trump II, week 2. What a chaotic mess. “We the people” are going to have to make ourselves heard loud and clear if we are going to save any part of our government as we know it.
I fixed a roasted chicken with baked stuffed potatoes and broccoli and took that to Heather and family for their Sunday dinner. Sam is better, so he should be back in school tomorrow. Heather is still achy and moving very slowly, but she says she has to go to work tomorrow. Jed’s fever still comes and goes, so he will still be at home. I sure hope Jonah doesn’t get whatever this is.
My only other project today was giving Shadow a bath. Now I just have to figure out how to trim his hair. I cancelled his grooming appointment for January because it is just so expensive. I’m trying to save money, but I am not sure it’s worth it in this case.
2025 Life Logs, Day 32: Down with the Holiday Lights
2025 Life Logs, Day 32: Down with the Holiday Lights
Date: Saturday, February 1, 2025
Weather: Snow Flurries, Strong N Wind; Temp 39, Low 16 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
I decided to extend the holiday season this year by leaving the lights and garland wrapped around the rail fence at the front of the property in place until the last day of January. Those little white lights lifted my spirits every time I looked at them. But today being the first day of February, it was time to put them away until next December. It was chilly today as there was a fairly strong north wind blowing as well as snow flurries falling, so I had to take a couple of breaks to warm my hands. By day’s end, however, I finally got everything tucked away.
Has it really been only two weeks since the Trump regime took over our country? It certainly feels like a lot longer and the damage already done is immense. But we have only just begun. Every day, I wrack my brain trying to come up with something, anything, I can do that might make a difference. My best idea of today is to boycott Proctor & Gamble products and encourage friends to do the same. I only use one item on the list and our numbers are too small to really make a difference anyway, but it will make me feel better. Why Proctor & Gamble? They are a major advertiser on Fox News, and I don’t believe an organization that promotes lies should be called a news organization. If you want to join me, here is a list of some of P&G’s products to avoid:
Tide, Gain, and Ariel laundry detergents
Bounty paper towels
Cascade dishwasher detergent
Charmin bathroom tissue
Crest toothpaste
Dawn dishwashing detergent
Downy fabric softener
Febreze odor eliminator
Gillette razors, shaving soap, shaving cream, shampoo, deodorant and anti-perspirant
Head & Shoulders and Pantene shampoos
Mr. Clean
Oral B products
Olay personal and beauty products
Pampers & Pampers Kandoo and Luvs disposable diapers and moist towelettes
Vicks cough and cold products
SK-II beauty products
2025 Life Logs, Day 31: Busy, Busy Day
2025 Life Logs, Day 31: Busy, Busy Day
Date: Friday, January 31, 2025
Weather: Overcast, Rainy, Warmer; Temp 43, Low 34 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
Delivered and had lunch with the Baranowski’s to ‘celebrate’ Peter’s successful knee replacement this week, met with an Encore team to discuss the best ways to store important documents to share with others, picked Ollie up after school, rushed to get to a 3 0’clock showing of the movie Conclave at the Falmouth Public Library, came home to spend a little time with Shadow before heading to a Bites and Bingo Encore social evening. Whew! It was busy, productive, and enjoyable day.
I was sad to learn from Ollie that the Goldstones are not going to Stow to snowboard this weekend. Whatever Ollie had last week, Sam had this week, and today Heather and Jed came down with it. So, no snowboarding this weekend. And unfortunately, it looks like the fun the boys have been having on the neighborhood frozen pond might also come to an end this weekend. With the temperature warming up and the rain, the ice will probably melt quickly.
2025 Life Logs, Day 30: Working on my VOW Presentation
2025 Life Logs, Day 30: Working on my VOW Presentation
Date: Thursday, January 30, 2025
Weather: Sunny and Cold Again; Temp 29, Low 23 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
On February 12, I have been asked to give a Voyage of Windbird (VOW) presentation to a church women’s group in town. I’m doing it as a favor for an Encore member who is also a sailor. I told her that I would ‘adjust’ the presentation to highlight churches we visited along the way. For a couple who didn’t attend church prior to sailing out of Boston, Mark and I visited churches on almost every island where we landed in the South Pacific. We did that for a number of reasons. One was to listen to the beautiful, harmonic voices of the South Pacific islanders. Some people describe their singing as having a brightness to it, an almost artificial loudness. But when you sit and listen you can begin to hear that each person is singing a different part, unrehearsed, and it always comes out to be spectacular. We also went to the churches to see examples of the fine wood carvings of each island on display. And then the main reason was to meet the local people. We were always warmly welcomed. And after a church service, we were often invited to come home with the minister for Sunday dinner. So, I spent much of my day reliving some of those wonderful moments and choosing new photos for my presentation to focus on the art, music, and unparalleled human kindness Mark and I experienced. I did not finish the new presentation, but I got a good start.
When I stopped for a lunch break, I turned on the television and saw some of the reporting of the tragic plane crash in the Potomac River in DC. Unfortunately, my timing was such that I saw the first part of Trump’s press conference about the crash. It shouldn’t shock me, but that he turned to name calling and blaming was more than I could take. I turned off the television and adopted a slogan that was put out there by Robert Reich today. “SAY NO to BIGOTRY.
2025 Life Logs, Day 29: Field Trip to the Harvard Museums
2025 Life Logs, Day 29: Field Trip to the Harvard Museums
Date: Wednesday, January 29, 2025
Weather: Sunny and Warmer; Temp 46, Low 19 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
Today was a long one. I was up before 7 am to get ready to head to the Harvard campus in Cambridge. Our Newcomers-Encore Field Trip group was visiting the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the Harvard Art Museums. Four of us went to the Natural History Museum and the other six went to the Art Museum. I chose to start at the Natural History Museum because no matter how many times I visit there, I cannot get enough of the Blaschka glass flowers and marine invertebrates. My all time favorite of the glass flowers are the Ginko tree leaves, and my favorite marine invertebrate is the little Atlantic white-spotted octopus. But today I focused on the mountain laurel and the spaghetti worm. That they are made totally out of glass amazes me.
After a couple of hours, my group decided to go to the Art Museums to have lunch and tour there for the afternoon. There are three museums housed in one building with so much to see. It was a great trip.
2025 Life Logs, Day 28: A Little of This and That
2025 Life Logs, Day 28: A Little of This and That
Date: Tuesday, January 28, 2025
Weather: Sunny to Partly Cloudy, Back to Sunny, Windy; Temp 42, Low 24 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
A little puzzling, a little reading, a little house cleaning, a little laundry. Then dinner with the Woodins. It was a delightful, stress-free winter day. That is, until I got home after a wonderful hearty beef stew dinner with Bruce and Jane to catch up on the news today. The blanket freeze of federal grants and loans and the ‘invitation’ to nearly all federal workers to resign and take a ‘generous’ retirement package sickens me. Trump has been telling us for months what he planned to do if we elected him to be President a second time, but I think most people thought some of his ideas were so outrageous that even he would not really do what he said. Well, I think anyone who thought that needs to think again. Remember Project 2025? If not, it is time to get familiar with it as it looks like that blueprint is being put into action. Public pressure today resulted in a lot of back pedaling. That push back must continue.
On the brighter side, when I took Ollie to his saxophone lesson late this afternoon, I dropped him off and drove to nearby Menauhant Beach. I got there just as the sun was setting. The orange glow of the setting sun was gorgeous. That is what I will remember about today.
2025 Life Logs, Day 27: If it’s Monday …
2025 Life Logs, Day 27: If it’s Monday …
Date: Monday, January 27, 2025
Weather: Sunny, Windy, Windy; Temp 39, Low 32 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
If it’s Monday … well, really only every other Monday, I spend my late afternoon and evening hanging out with the Goldpebbles. Heather has Select Board and Jed has Health Board. Select Board is not supposed to start until 6:30 pm, but often they have an Executive Session beginning at 5:30 pm. And that is the time that Jed must be at the Health Board meeting. So, I plan to arrive at 5 pm, conjure up or heat up something already prepared for dinner, and stay until Jed gets home sometime between 8 and 9 pm. Heather often doesn’t get home until 10 or 11 or even later. I love having the time with the boys, so I jump at the chance to help out. Unfortunately, Sam now has whatever Ollie had over the weekend. So far, Jonah has escaped it. He is continuing to play ice hockey with friends down on the pond every minute he can. Maybe all that time on the ice is keeping him healthy.
There is a gale warning for the Vineyard Sound, Nantucket Sound, and Buzzards Bay that is in effect until 7 pm tomorrow night. Today, beginning late afternoon, there we had winds blowing 15 to 25 knots with higher gusts offshore. So, it is a bit blustery out there tonight. We are supposed to get another dusting of snow overnight tomorrow night. Hopefully it is not enough to cancel a planned field trip to the Harvard Museum of Natural History on Wednesday. We shall see.
2025 Life Logs, Day 26: It’s All About the Wind
2025 Life Logs, Day 26: It’s All About the Wind
Date: Sunday, January 26, 2025
Weather: Mostly Sunny: Temp 39, Low 27 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
It was warmer when I walked with Shadow this morning, so I didn’t wear my warm scarf around my neck. But I didn’t factor in the wind. It was only blowing about 15 mph, but that was enough to make my face feel like it was freezing. By the time we got home, my face was still freezing, but the rest of me was on the verge of perspiring. When I checked the weather tonight, I see we are going to have winds over 20 mph for the next could of days. I guess I’ll have keep wearing that scarf around my neck. I should know from experience, that it’s all about the wind.
Around noon, I got a text from Ollie inviting me to come over and watch more episodes of The Mandalorian with him. He is feeling better, but his energy level is still not back to normal. He went ice skating down on the pond with his mom and dad this morning and when he returned, he didn’t have the energy afterwards to do anything other than be a couch potato. So why not watch more of the series we started last night? I really didn’t have anything that had to be done today, so I accepted the invitation. Watching TV all afternoon is not my usual M.O., but in another year of so, I know I will no longer get that kind of invitation. Ollie will be a full-fledged teenager, and we all know that teenagers are all about being with their friends. So, I jumped at Ollie’s invitation.