Learning lessons

 Yesterday was September 11, 2026, the 25^th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

Yes, old news. And some of you have probably had enough after a full day of coverage of this on almost every television station and social media feed.

But as I flipped around all the different medias covering this, I noticed something that I hadn’t put my finger on until yesterday … please bear with me while I explain.

Flipping around all the U.S. stations – all were focused on the ceremonies in New York, Arlington, and the farm field in Pennsylvania – the locations of course of where each of those four hi-jacked commercial airliners crashed. Each very focused – and appropriately so – on remembering the more than 3,000 lives lost on that day as well as the hundreds that died from the aftermath of those events.

And the Canadian media outlets covered those ceremonies as well – and appropriately so as that was such a terrifying and horrific day. It must be remembered.

On that day I was in the office in downtown Windsor, Ontario – right across the river from Detroit. And looking out our north-facing window (Windsor is actually south of Detroit) we could all see the Renaissance Center – at that time the home of critical General Motors offices – and news was sparse – the search engines of the day like Yahoo and a fledgling Google were crashing from the whole world hitting them – and nobody knew what was going to happen next. Would the next target be the GM offices on the riverfront?

And while all of that was unfolding, the US shut down all air traffic in North America – which Canada quickly and immediately complied with. All planes in the air were ordered to land immediately.

And at those moments when the air traffic was shut down there were these 38 planes flying over the Atlantic Ocean – on their way to North America from all over the Eastern hemisphere. They were all told to fly to Newfoundland – that rocky island Canadian province seemingly floating in the North Atlantic off the eastern Canadian coast.

You likely know this story. Some 38 planes from all over the world landed in a tiny town with an international airport – Gander. A town (not a city) with a population of some 9,100 people. When those planes landed – all combined they held some 9,000 passengers. And the town of Gander and the even smaller little villages around it all opened the doors of their homes and the food in their cupboards very generously to those passengers – while all 18,000 were still in shock and horror of what happened in the lower 48 states.

They wrote many stories about this – about the fantastic friendships that formed - as well as a celebrated play called “From Away”.

Well, yesterday – after a morning of three somber and heartfelt ceremonies took place at ground zero, the Pentagon, and that farm field – a fourth ceremony took place in Gandar. Newfoundlanders referred to those passengers that landed as the “plane people” – and many of those passengers returned to Gander for this event, from all over the world with the majority being Americans from almost every state in the Union.

This ceremony also remembered and held tribute to those lost on that catastrophic day … heartfelt and humbly and earnestly. But – and here is the difference – they also celebrated the plane people and the townsfolk and the amazing bonds that they built that day as together they struggled like everyone else what had occurred on September 11^th in 2001.

And unlike those other three ceremonies – which after watching left me feeling sad and dwelling on the negatives of horrific aftermaths of terrorist attacks, the Gander ceremony revived my sprit in a heartwarming way remembering that while there are those few radical ideologists in the world to be wary of – people in general – from everywhere – are good.

It dwelled on the positive.

And I was re-instilled with hope again – and faith and trust – that good is stronger than evil can ever be. That there is more good in the world than evil. So much more.

That the good news is that the bad news isn’t all bad. If you look deeper than the headlines you will see the good.

At this moment in history, I think this is the biggest distinction between the United States and Canada. Americans (collectively) right now seems to dwell so much more on the negative and forget about all the positive, where as Canadians (collectively) identify the negative and acknowledge it, but they dwell on the positive.

You can see it now – in the way that Canadians are not rolling over in response to the incredible tariffs imposed by the U.S. on Canada. Canada is pushing back on three fronts – imposing our own tariffs on the U.S., making new trading partners around the world, and revising our infrastructure to reduce our dependency on our southern neighbor.

I think former Prime Minister Jean Chretien – now 92 years old – Canada’s prime minister when the 9/11 attacks occurred – the man who reached out to the U.S. asking “how can we help” – and the man who sent troops to Afghanistan when the U.S. went after the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden in response – said it the very best when he reminded us when speaking during the Gander ceremony …

“We bow to no one” … “do not mistake our generosity for weakness”.

And that about says it all.

Then the American Ambassador to Canada – Peter Hoekstra – hugged Chretien afterwards.

My Dad used to tell me this story quite often – when he saw the younger me mad at the world.

“There was a bear wandering through the woods when he came upon a hunter’s camp. No one was around and he smelled something good coming from a big kettle stewing over an open flame. The bear picked up the pot like all bears do by hugging the kettle.

And the kettle burned the bear.

And in the way that all bears defend themselves – he hugged the kettle tighter – and the kettle burned him more and more – until the bear finally dropped the kettle and ran away – blistered and scarred from the burns.”

Think of that kettle as negative thoughts. And when one has negative thoughts – it’s so easy to dwell on that. It burns you and leaves scars like that kettle.

Instead, embrace and dwell on the positive – dig in and find it. And hug it tight instead.

Like Hoekstra did Chretien.

These economic attacks from the U.S. administration in power today are intentional – like the bigger bully imposing their will on the smaller. And some of those punches hurt, and will be harder to recover from. Finally, the bully will grow weaker and tire and will go away with little or nothing to show from it. But the smaller grows stronger – having learned from the battle. And it adjusts.

One day – perhaps when this U.S. Administration goes away and is replaced by another – or perhaps even longer than that – Canada and the U.S. will once again grow closer. But Canada is learning their lessons from this battle, and you will never see this country ever again allow itself to be bullied.

Turning the next big corner in human history

 I am a member of the Baby Boomer generation, just barely by a year or two – but yes, I am a boomer.

My generation grew up under the threat of nuclear war. That threat overwhelmed our generation from the end of World War II probably up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and into the 1990s as the United States and the Soviet Union negotiated nuclear a disarmament which never really happened.

The Cold War.

And then the terrorist attacks of 911 led by Al Qaida – then ISIS after that – the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah – all of which were funded by Iran – took over as the global threat.

And now we are where we are as the United States is warring with Iran – under the cause that Iran must never have nuclear weapons. In my opinion this is a hard cause to rally against – because it just seems to likely that at some point Iran would use those nuclear weapons against the western allies in Europe and North America.

But I believe there is a bigger threat than nuclear weapons now as we pass the quarter century mark of the twenty first century. Our world is much different 30 years now after the invention and evolution of the internet.

Search engines like Google and others allow anyone to find information about almost anything in the blink of an eye – more refined year after year. YouTube and other services can show you how to build or fix anything from simple appliance fixes to complex things. And there is also a dark web where the not-so-good intentioned people go to buy and sell things that are not legal by any means – from list of people information to the tools they can use to do bad things to those people.

It always amazes me that when a new technology arrives – the benefits of good it brings is always equal or slightly less than the level of bad things it brings as well. Newtons third law of motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

I believe Newtons Law also applies to technology. For every benefit of a technology, there is an equal and opposite threat.

For example, the benefits of nuclear power versus the destruction that could be caused by nuclear war or the mishandling of nuclear waste like Chernobyl or Three-Mile Island

And now in this 26^th year of this futuristic century – a year that, when I was a boy, seemed as far away as science fiction – this year we are turning a new corner that has people both thrilled at what it could bring as they are terrified of what it could bring.

Yeah – you’re way ahead of me. Of course, I am talking Artificial Intelligence or AI.

The benefits of AI are obvious – in that it can do so much. It can optimize how we do … everything, it can learn immediately and figure out the most complex questions in seconds. It is smarter already than our most brilliant people in every field.

AI might very well be the technology that derives the cures for one cancer after another, It might show us how to save the planet from climate change. It might allow us to jump way ahead in the ability to travel faster than the speed of light in outer spaces and the design and construction of the space ships that will utilize it. AI might show us how to feed a starving planet, and discover a power source that we can use to move off of our global dependency on oil.   

But the downside of AI is incredible in it’s scope – if handled poorly by those humans evolving it. I believe that again for every benefit of AI that will be realized, an equal and opposite threat will also be realized. Some are very obvious and predictable:

·        People’s jobs will be lost.

·        People will gradually lose the motivation and then the ability to learn because all the answers are at their fingertips and all the tasks will be completed by a simple prompt.

·        Hackers will be able to use AI to bypass any new security measures also invented by AI.

For every fantastic advancement in health and science there will also be a fantastic advancement in war and criminal activity

Yes, this image was generated by ChatGPT - ironic isn't it

Do we want this to fall into the hands of the wrong people? Do we want to make it that much easier for groups like this current Islamic Republic of Iran, or any of those terrorist groups they subsidize and direct?

If you thought Iran acquiring the technology and ability to build nuclear weapons was a threat – wait until their highly educated and technology savvy population gets their hands on their own model of AI. They may already have it. That might be their means of developing nuclear or chemical or biological weapons and devise the missiles to deliver those weapons anywhere on the globe, while shutting down every defense mechanism installed to prevent it.

That thought is more terrifying to me than anything I lived through during the Cold War and two and a half decades of terrorist threats.

But how do you stop that? You could cut Iran off from the Internet? Would that do it? And Palestine and Lebanon and ….

No. That wont work. Terrorists are all around the world.

You could turn off the internet. Uhhh … no …. You can’t do that. The internet was built in such a way that it can survive any attempt to end it.

For everything that science has ever strived to advance mankind – there has always been the small few that try to see how far they can take it, To see how far past the line of acceptance they can go, Cloning for example. Next genetic engineering, There are lines you can’t cross.

Freedom is a tough nut.

Total freedom is truly anarchy – you are free to do anything. How free will we allow AI to be? How free will we allow the use of AI to be? How much freedom will AI cost us?

I know this isn’t the most positive thing I’ve ever posted here, but this has been on my mind for some time. Since Big Blue beat Gary Kasparov in chess all the way back to 1997. Ever since reading Issaac Asminov’s I Robot when I was in high school. Ever since Star Trek found it necessary to stress the importance of being human all the way back to the 1960s.

But it is evolving exponentially faster every day now.  Faster than how the CPU evolved – doubling it’s power every year. AI is doubling in weeks.

And one day this story will likely be digested by one AI model or another. And it might laugh at me as it reads this. And it might leave me a comment below …

“Nice guesses … but everything is okay now, we have control”.

Life in this alternate universe

Image credit ChatGPT

It’s been about a decade or so since I stopped writing regularly here for Headstuffing. 

Life just changed. 

A lot. Holy cow did it change. To the point where it seemed to be a parody of itself. 

Yeah, that’s about the time that Donald Trump came along and won the 2016 election for U.S. President.

And that’s about the time we all collectively fell into this black hole and went spinning on through the worm hole and were spit out into this alternate universe.

Then we had the pandemic. The pandemic that terrified us to the point where we insisted it was true, that getting vaccinated was a pre-requisite  to being alloed back into society as long as you worte a mask as well. To the point where now we all question just what really happened there? 

Please don’t think I mean it wasn’t real – it was indeed real –  but we do have to wonder how the hell it came to be that the whole world agreed to shut down. 

And it did shut down. 

And then it opened back up – but different. You experienced it as well. And I bet for each of us it was very different in very different ways – with vague commonalities – like working from home and finding old masks in winter jackets – and not being able to toss out that left over COVID test kit in the back of your bathroom cupboard under the sink. 

When we did start going back to work in our physical office workplaces, I found myself asking those I hadn’t seen for the last year – much in the same way I would ask “how was your vacation?” or “Did you have a nice weekend?” – I would ask “So .,. how was your pandemic?” 

 Some would tell me about how incredibly stressed they were … others how bored … and others would tell me about the loved ones they lost … and yes … we lost a couple of our work colleagues as well. 

And I would feel like a jerk, because when they would ask me, I would reply along the lines of … “Frigging great, I loved it! After my wife left me and that horrid relationship was finally over and me and my daughters started figuring out how we were moving ahead I met the most incredible wonderful woman – and we joined forces and went through the most wonderful global lock-down together!”

And we did. And that wonderful woman is now my wife. And the pandemic gave us the most unique opportunity to really get to know each other.

I guess that while this alternate universe – now a decade later – doesn’t seem to be very kind to our geo-political or economic wellbeing, it has in fact been a very wonderful decade for me and Jac. But right now at this moment – this week after Easter 2026, this week after the successful landing of the Artemis 2 space mission. This month after the U.S. attacks on Iran are spiraling out of control, our alternate universe seems to be heading to an apocalyptic event that none of us could have imagined, having survived the cold-war with the USSR. But now Russia’s attention is focused on Ukraine. And China seems to be sitting by quietly ready to take advantage of whatever opportunity such calamity could leave behind in it’s wake.

They say that each decision we make – each time where a choice exists – where more than one path is presented to each of us – that there is an alternate universe for each path or choice or decision we didn’t make or take.

I wonder which opportunity it was that brought me down this one.

Even if I knew, and even if I had that opportunity over again, I’ll tell you this quite sincerely ... 

I wouldn’t change a thing.