Category: Global Issues
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✍️ BLACKJACK RANCH CHRONICLES
What began as a dream of building a house on a Serbian hillside overlooking the Danube quickly became an education in perseverance. Bureaucrats, contractors, storms, power failures, runaway dog beds, elusive trash bins, curious neighbors, unexpected acts of kindness, sunsets, music, and laughter all became chapters in a story far larger than a construction project.…
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✍️ COFFEE MACHINE TRAGI-COMEDY WITH MOLIEREAN TWISTS
When my trusty German-engineered coffee machine died at our country home, I immediately bought a brand-new replacement. But plugging it in brought only deathly silence. Furious, I marched back to the store, ready for a retail showdown. The clerk plugged it in. Bingo. It hummed perfectly. Convinced I had discovered a bizarre geographical anomaly with…
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✍️ ROYAL NOTES
A British king helping America celebrate its liberation from a British king. Only in America. Pomp and ceremony over blood and guts. Glitz over gas prices. The ancient Romans had a name for it — panem et circenses — bread and games to distract a restless public. Some things don’t change. They just change costumes.…
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“THE NOTE”
ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT AT THE WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS’ DINNER A man in a tuxedo leaned in, holding a small piece of paper with the quiet gravity of something that didn’t belong at dinner. To the left, a face began telling the story in real time — curiosity giving way to confusion, then shock, then a hand…
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TRUMP’S BLUFF AND BLINK – AND THE SANDBOX RULES OF POWER
Power is not learned in boardrooms or war rooms. It is learned in a sandbox. As a child in Belgrade, I saw how bullies operate — intimidation, noise, and tests of will. Push back, and the dynamic changes. Years later, I saw the same patterns among corporate giants, political leaders, and now on the global…
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“IT IS ENGLISH”
In 1985, during a visit to Hitachi, I asked why Japan—despite its engineering excellence—lagged in software. The answer was disarmingly simple: “It is English.” That moment revealed a deeper truth about the future of computing. Returning home, I proposed a radical idea: digitize everything and make it searchable. It seemed obvious. It was. Yet nearly…
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FROM “EUROTOPIA” TO BERLIN
A trip from Vienna to Berlin revealed more than urban decay—it exposed a deeper systemic drift. What appears as small signs of disorder may in fact be symptoms of something larger: institutions that have grown too complex, too removed from the people they serve. Drawing on firsthand experience—from corporate America to 1980s Germany—this column traces…
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AN UNWITTING CAR PURCHASE: HOW HEART WON OVER MIND
From Audi Love to Audi Letdown: A Lesson in Globalized Failure “I didn’t buy a car—I bought a myth. And it broke down in a Costco parking lot.” What began as an impulsive detour—a Mercedes errand that ended with an Audi in my driveway—quickly turned into something far more revealing than a car purchase. Within…
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RETURNING TO THE BLEEDING EDGE
A simple experiment took me back to a place I first encountered in the 1980s — the “bleeding edge” of technology. This time, it was AI. A five-second silent video, generated from a poetic prompt, proved visually impressive but incomplete. It had no sound, no authorship, no meaning. So I added my own — music,…
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FROM THE “ROARING TWENTIES” TO THE “WARRING TWENTIES”
A century ago, the Roaring Twenties erupted in music, dance, and social release after the first industrial world war. People believed that progress, technology, and shared culture might finally civilize power. Today, we find ourselves in another set of Twenties — not roaring, but warring. Conflicts multiply, technology accelerates, and violence no longer interrupts life…
Truth in Media 