Musings is Fun & Politics — Tech is just Tech 
Generational Defeat vs Setback isn’t just a catchy phrase, it’s the cleanest way to describe the split-screen unfolding right now between Iran and Russia. One regime has just suffered what America’s top Middle East commander openly calls a “generational military defeat.” The other is bleeding its army and its future away in a grinding war it can’t really win, even as Donald Trump keeps trying to pretend that the loser isn’t the side he effectively backed.
My recent battle with Medicare’s new online registration system made me think a lot harder about how we handle voter registration in this country. What Washington now demands for basic benefits makes the debate over simple voter ID look more than a little upside‑down.
Most Americans still register to vote the old‑fashioned way: a short form, a basic ID, maybe a quick stop at a county or state office, and you’re done. There’s no motion‑photo selfie, no video call with a stranger, no juggling half your life’s documents under a phone camera just to prove you exist. That’s not how my “enhanced” Medicare registration went—and that contrast is exactly where this story is headed.
Grokipedia vs Wikipedia is exactly the kind of clash you’d expect in 2025 and beyond: an AI‑generated encyclopedia from Elon Musk’s xAI taking a direct swing at what many see as a Democrat‑leaning, establishment‑policed Wikipedia. If you’ve spent years watching Wikipedia tilt on politics, culture wars, and “approved narratives,” the mere existence of Grokipedia feels like that same Drudge‑to–Citizen Free Press moment for reference sites—only this time, the jump isn’t just editorial, it’s AI vs human.
Legacy media elites think you’re a “village idiot” — and this week they went ahead and said it out loud. CBS’s new Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil posted a video promising to stop leaning on “advocates” and “academics or elites” and instead put the average American at the center of the broadcast, and the very people he was talking about instantly proved his point.
Bari Weiss CBS wasn’t supposed to matter this fast—but within weeks of taking over as editor-in-chief, the new boss yanked a 60 Minutes Trump deportation hit piece just hours before airtime and sent a shockwave through legacy media.
A segment built around sympathetic Venezuelan deportees inside El Salvador’s notorious CECOT mega-prison went from heavily promoted to “postponed” after Weiss ordered more reporting, more on-the-record Trump administration voices, and tougher scrutiny of a narrative that had all the fingerprints of activist television, not journalism.