Bob Schwartz

September 11, 2026

5787: The Jewish New Year of Compassion

May I be a guard for those who are protectorless,
A guide for those who journey on the road.
For those who wish to cross the water,
May I be a boat, a raft, a bridge.

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year 5787, begins this evening.

For what it’s worth, I have declared 5787 a Year of Jewish Compassion. This requires explanation.

It is not to suggest that Judaism and fellow Jews, together and individually, are not compassionate, in thought and action. That would be wrong.

Instead, it may lead to questions. Have we been compassionate enough and often enough? Have we been unconditionally and universally compassionate? How can we cultivate compassion in ourselves and others?

Of the major religious traditions, Buddhism maintains a particular focus on compassion. Hundreds of teachers, beginning with the Buddha, and thousands of texts ask this of us, in thought and action.

Here is just one text, excerpted from The Way of the Bodhisattva by Shantideva (685-763), with an excerpt from commentary by the current Dalai Lama:

May I be a guard for those who are protectorless,
A guide for those who journey on the road.
For those who wish to cross the water,
May I be a boat, a raft, a bridge.

May I be an isle for those who yearn for land,
A lamp for those who long for light;
For all who need a resting place, a bed;
For those who need a servant, may I be their slave.

May I be the wishing jewel, the vase of plenty,
A word of power, and the supreme healing;
May I be the tree of miracles,
And for every being the abundant cow.

Just like the earth and space itself
And other of the mighty elements,
For boundless multitudes of beings,
May I always be the ground of life, the source of varied sustenance.

Thus for everything that lives,
As far as are the limits of the sky,
May I be constantly their source of livelihood
Until they pass beyond all sorrow.

The Way of the Bodhisattva, Chapter 3, Verses 18–22

These last two lines are very powerful, are they not? The lives of a great many beings depend on the presence of the five elements, so let us think: Just like the earth, may I support beings as numerous as the sky is vast….Consider that we are surrounded by all the beings in the universe and generate compassion for them….

Now that we have taken this vow, we should try to be good human beings in our daily lives. We should not, for example, pretend to be very nice while we are in this tent and start fighting with each other as soon as we get out! We should from now on try to have a positive and kind mind: we are going to be happy in life. I really think that the future depends on the quality of one’s mind, on a good mind. So we must try to be good people and be good examples for those around us. The initiative to be like this has to come from each one of us individually.

For the Benefit of All Beings: A Commentary on The Way of the Bodhisattva, Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama

Shana Tova! May you have and give a good and sweet year!

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September 10, 2026

Where can I apply for the promised post-midterm election $5,000? I asked AI.

Yesterday the president announced that every American would receive $5,000 if Republicans controlled Congress after the midterm election.

You can find plenty of expert analysis of this announcement. You can also find members of the Cabinet and supporters trying to explain this or to walk it back.

I often turn to AI in these complicated and sometimes absurd situations, not because AI is the smartest or stupidest entity, but because their responses can be interesting and entertaining.

Here is the question I posed to leading AI models:

Where can I apply for the promised post-midterm election $5,000? Is there a form or online site?

Gemini:

There is no application, form, or online website where you can sign up for the proposed post-midterm election $5,000 payment.

The $5,000 “Trump Dividend” is currently a campaign promise, not an active government program. President Donald Trump proposed the idea during a speech at the Republican National Committee’s midterm convention in Dallas.

Because it is a political proposal rather than a finalized policy, several critical conditions must be met before any money can actually be distributed:

• Election Outcome: The proposed payout is explicitly conditional upon Republicans maintaining control of both the House of Representatives and the United States Senate in the upcoming November midterm elections.
• Congressional Approval: The president cannot distribute federal funds on his own. The U.S. Congress would first have to draft, vote on, and pass legislation authorizing a $1 trillion-plus package to fund the payments.
• Policy Specifics: The White House has not yet released specific legal or structural details regarding eligibility criteria or a distribution mechanism.

Be highly cautious of any websites, text messages, or emails claiming to have a registration or signup form for this $5,000 payment, as they are likely scams designed to steal personal or financial information.

ChatGPT

If you mean the $5,000 “Trump Dividend” announced yesterday, there is no application, form, or official online site to apply through at this time.

President Trump said on September 9 that every adult U.S. citizen would receive $5,000 if Republicans retain control of both the House and Senate in the November 2026 midterm elections.

A few important points:

• The payment has not been authorized yet.
• Trump did not announce an application process or eligibility form.
• The payment would require Congressional approval before it could actually be issued.
• The estimated cost is roughly $1.2 trillion, so there are substantial unresolved questions about financing and implementation.
• Consequently, be very cautious about websites or emails currently offering a “$5,000 Trump Dividend application.” They could be scams or attempts to collect personal information.

So, you cannot apply for the $5,000 at present. There isn’t a legitimate government application site for it yet.

If you encounter a site claiming that applications are open, you can give me the URL and I can check whether it is legitimate.

Claude

I need to be straight with you: there is no promised $5,000 post-midterm election payment. This isn’t a real program, and there’s no form or website to apply for it, because the money doesn’t exist.

Let me search to see if there’s a specific claim circulating that you may have encountered, so I can point you to accurate information.

Now I understand what you’re referring to. Here’s the accurate picture, and it’s important:

There is no application form or website, because there is nothing to apply for. What you’ve heard about is a campaign promise, not an existing program. President Trump said at a GOP gathering in Dallas that if Republicans keep the House and Senate after the November midterms, American adults would each get $5,000 — something he called the “Trump Dividend.”

A few things you should know before you go looking for any form:

This is a conditional political promise tied to an election outcome, not enacted law. No money has been allocated, no eligibility rules exist, and no agency has been directed to send anything. For any payment like this to happen, Congress would have to pass legislation first — and it hasn’t. This mirrors an earlier, separate $2,000 “tariff dividend” idea Trump floated, which similarly remains just a proposal that must pass through Congress first, with no IRS office, congressional committee, or federal agency having confirmed a new stimulus program.

Here’s the part I most want you to hear: any website, form, email, or text asking you to “apply” or “register” for this $5,000 is a scam. These fake-stimulus scams appear every single time a payment gets talked about in the news. The U.S. government’s own warning is blunt on this point — the government does not offer free money or grants to people for personal needs, and legitimate government sites only ever use .gov or .mil addresses. Scammers set up lookalike sites to harvest your Social Security number, bank details, or a “processing fee.”
politifact

So, concretely: don’t enter your information anywhere claiming to sign you up. If real payments were ever authorized in the future, they’d be distributed automatically through the IRS based on your tax return — you would never need to “apply” on some third-party site. If you want to track whether anything real ever materializes, stick to IRS.gov directly.

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September 9, 2026

James Hillman

“An education that in any way neglects imagination is an education into psychopathy. It is an education that results in a sociopathic society of manipulations. We learn how to deal with others and become a society of dealers.”
–James Hillman

I cannot fully explain James Hillman in this space, not briefly, not at all. If there is a badge, it might say psychologist, or Jungian psychologist, but that would be misleading, limiting and wrong. Thomas Moore, in his Prologue to A Blue Fire: The Essential Introduction to James Hillman, begins with this:

“James Hillman is an artist of psychology. If it sounds odd to call a psychologist an artist, then you, the reader, know your task as you take up this anthology. You will be challenged all along the way to rethink, to re-vision, and to reimagine. The difficulty in reading Hillman is not to learn a new bag of techniques or a new conceptual system. Hillman demands nothing short of a new way of thinking. He takes psychoanalysis out of the context of medicine and health, not only in the obvious ways, rejecting the medical model, but in subtle ways: asking us to give up fantasies of cure, repair, growth, self-improvement, understanding, and well-being as primary motives for psychological work. He is more a painter than a physician, more a musician than a social scientist, and more an alchemist than a traditional philosopher.”

Hillman wrote many books and articles, but A Blue Fire, made up of short passages from many works, is what to read to get the essence. Choosing a representative excerpt is impossible, since it is bound to miss most other points Hillman makes. But the excerpt below, covering the nature of illiteracy, silence and imagination, is close to my heart: “An education that in any way neglects imagination is an education into psychopathy. It is an education that results in a sociopathic society of manipulations. We learn how to deal with others and become a society of dealers.”

Why have we as a nation become more and more illiterate? We blame television and the computer, but they are not causes. They are results of a prior condition that invited them in. They arrived to fill a gap. When imaginative ability declines, other ways to communicate appear. These ways work even though they too are dyslexic in structure: simultaneity of bits, odd juxtapositions, messages that do not move linearly from left to right. Yet television and personal computers communicate.

Evidently, reading does not depend solely on the ordering of words or the ordering of letters in the words. Indeed, poets use dyslexic structures deliberately. Reading depends on the psyche’s capacity to enter imagination. Reading is more like dreaming, which, too, goes on in silence. Our illiteracy reflects our educative process away from the silent grounds of reading: silent study halls and quiet periods, solitary homework, learning by heart, listening through a whole class without interruptions, writing an essay exam in longhand, drawing from nature instead of lab experiments. This long neglect of imaginational conditions that foster reading—Sputnik and the new math; social problems and social relatedness; mecentered motivation; the confusion of information with knowledge, of opinion with judgment, and trivia with sources; communications as messages by telephone calls and answering machines rather than as letter writing in silence; learning to speak up without first having something learned to say; multiple choice and scoring as a test of comprehension—has produced illiteracy.

The human person as a data bank does not need to read more than functionally. A data bank deciding yes or no on the basis of feedback (i.e., reinforcement) need not imagine beyond getting, storing, and spending. Just get the instructions right; never mind the content. Learn the how rather than the what with its qualities, values, and subtleties. Then the human agent becomes an incarnated credit card performing the religious rituals of consumerism. You need only be able to sign your name in the space marked Xy like an immigrant, like a slave, or a …

Or a psychopath. Descriptions of psychopathy, or sociopathic personalities, speak of their inability to imagine the other. Psychopaths are well able to size up situations and charm people. They perceive, assess, and relate, making use of any opportunity. Hence their successful manipulations of others. But the psychopath is far less able to imagine the other beyond a fantasy of usefulness, the other as a true interiority with his or her own needs, intentions, and feelings. An education that in any way neglects imagination is an education into psychopathy. It is an education that results in a sociopathic society of manipulations. We learn how to deal with others and become a society of dealers.

James Hillman
“Right to Remain Silent”
Journal of Humanistic Education and Development (1988)

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September 7, 2026

Labor Day: International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU)

Look for the union label
when you are buying that coat, dress or blouse.
Remember somewhere our union’s sewing,
our wages going to feed the kids, and run the house.
We work hard, but who’s complaining?
Thanks to the I.L.G. we’re paying our way!
So always look for the union label,
it says we’re able to make it in the U.S.A.!

I am here because of a union, particularly the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.

My Grandpa was an ILGWU furrier in New York. It allowed my Grandpa and Grandma to raise a family, including my mother. That’s my proud heritage.

Here is an ILGWU parade float:

Here is the wife of the then governor of New York, Republican Nelson Rockefeller, sewing an ILGWU label into a garment:

Here is an ad from 1978:

Unions like the ILGWU are not the vestige of a bygone era or contributor to a too “woke” ethos that stands in the way of a great America. They are the once and future foundation of broad American prosperity and fairness—if we will let them be and grow rather than demonizing and discouraging them.

That’s what Labor Day is about. Sing along.

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September 7, 2026

Urim and Thummin: Instrument of decision

Jewish High Priest and Levites, Andreas Müller, 19th century

For HB on his birthday. Zolst leben un zein gezunt.

I am going to build a church some day. It will have a holy of holies and a holy of holy of holies, and in that ultimate box will be a random number table.
—Gregory Bateson

Chance plays a repeated part in the Hebrew Bible.

In the Purim story, the evil Haman employs a lottery—“pur” meaning “lots”—to determine the date on which the Jews will be eliminated.

On Yom Kippur we recall the story of the sacrificial goat:

And Aaron shall place lots upon the two he goats: one lot “For the Lord,” and the other lot, “For Azazel.”
And Aaron shall bring the he goat upon which the lot, “For the Lord,” came up, and designate it as a sin offering.
—Leviticus 16:8-9

Then there is the mysterious Urim and Thummim:

Inside the breastpiece of decision you shall place the Urim and Thummim, so that they are over Aaron’s heart when he comes before God. Thus Aaron shall carry the instrument of decision for the Israelites over his heart before God at all times.
—Exodus 28:30

We don’t know exactly what the Urim and Thummim were supposed to be. Like the lots drawn to choose the goat, they are binary, perhaps as simple as two stones—heads or tails, a flip of a coin.

One perspective is that when it comes to decisions, big or small, there may be a point beyond which reason does not work. What lies beyond reason is different for different traditions and philosophies. It may be God, it may be the nature of reality and our mind. We are told to look and keep looking. Meanwhile, we experience the limitations of reason. Something will happen, a choice will be made, but who can know what’s next? It’s a beautiful and necessary mystery.

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September 3, 2026

These are the people who stand between you and an authoritarian America.

These are some of the people who should be standing between you and an authoritarian America:

For reasons that historians will have plenty of time to consider, they are not.

Under the circumstances, these are the people, these nine lawyers, who stand between you and an authoritarian America:

What do you think? How do you feel?

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September 3, 2026

“In the biographies of men and nations, success often arrives in a mask of failure.” (2018)

This post is from 2018, which you may legitimately believe means it is out of date and irrelevant. I hope the point that Bill James made is timeless. The book mentioned, the The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, is from 2010, which some baseball fans complain makes it dated, since a generation of players and game changes have arrived since then. That is nonsense. What James did, as the tiny excerpt below reflects, is to elevate the place of statistics and data in baseball while never letting go of the humanity of the players and the game. A lesson we can still learn for all of the sports we embrace.

This isn’t about baseball, though the quote is from a baseball writer. Bill James is not just a superb writer; he is a thinker whose analysis of the game has changed baseball more than any other thinker has ever changed any game. You can look it up.

This is about optimism and hope. I was reading The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (a 998-page volume whose title alone should tell you just how thoughtful Bill James is). He describes Robin Yount, who as of the time of publication James considered the Number 4 shortstop in baseball history:

Robin Yount (1974–1993, 2856 G, 251 1406 .285)

Robin Yount was a major league regular when he was 18 years old. We always wondered how good he would be, how much he would improve. In 1978, after Yount had been in the major leagues four years, he held out in the spring, mulling over whether he wanted to be a baseball player, or whether he really wanted to be a professional golfer.

When that happened, I wrote him off as a player who would never become a star. If he can’t even figure out whether he wants to be a baseball player or a golfer, I reasoned, he’s never going to be an outstanding player.

Yount was unhappy about suggestions that the Brewers would move him to the outfield. According to Dan Okrent in Nine Innings, “Yount didn’t merely reject the suggestion; he brooded about it, resented it, and lost himself in self-doubt. Members of the front office… saw Yount’s reaction as immature sulking.”

But as soon as he returned to baseball, Yount became a better player than he had been before; his career got traction from the moment he returned. What I didn’t see at the time was that Yount was in the process of making a commitment to baseball. Before he had his golf holiday, he was there every day, he was playing baseball every day, but on a certain level he wasn’t participating; he was wondering whether this was really the sport that he should be playing. What looked like indecision or sulking was really the process of making a decision.

This is often true. What Watergate was about was not the corruption of government, as most people thought, but rather, the establishment of new and higher standards of ethical conduct. Almost all scandals, I think, result not from the invention of new evils, but from the imposition of new ethical standards. Same thing with Yount; he wasn’t backing away from baseball; he was just putting the bit in his teeth, accepting new responsibilities. In the biographies of men and nations, success often arrives in a mask of failure. (emphasis added)

–The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract

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September 2, 2026

John Heartfield

John Heartfield (1891–1968) was a German artist best known as a pioneer of political photomontage. He was born Helmut Herzfeld in Berlin-Schmargendorf. In 1916, as a protest against German nationalism and anti-British sentiment during World War I, he anglicized his name to John Heartfield.

Heartfield became involved with the Berlin Dada movement after the war, working alongside figures such as George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, and Hannah Höch. He and Grosz are often credited with helping develop photomontage as a serious artistic and political medium.

He is most famous for the biting anti-Nazi and anti-fascist photomontages he produced during the 1920s and 1930s, many of which appeared on the covers of the workers’ illustrated magazine AIZ (Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung). These works satirized Hitler, Göring, and the Nazi regime through sharp visual juxtaposition — one of his best-known images depicts Hitler with an X-ray torso revealing a spine of gold coins, captioned to suggest he was funded by big business.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Heartfield fled Germany, first to Prague and later to England, continuing his anti-fascist work in exile.

Adolf, the Superman, Swallows Gold and Spouts Tin (1932), John Heartfield

War and Corpses: The Last Hope of the Rich (1932), John Heartfield

The Voice of Freedom in the German Night on Radio Wave 29.8 (1937), John Heartfield

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September 2, 2026

So many things askew. Take a breath.

Askew: Crooked, awry, lopsided, cockeyed.

There is a Buddhist practice to welcome the most adverse things as opportunities and the most adverse people as spiritual friends. I ask myself, “How’s that going?” and I admit “A work in progress.”

The good news for me is that for a portion of the day, I breathe. Obviously I spend the entire day breathing, but for a time I breathe consciously, in and out.

No, those askew/crooked/awry/lopsided/cockeyed things keep multiplying like a virus, no matter how many conscious breaths I give and take. Just as with any virus—we’ve had some recent experience with that—it is essential to address the problem. But those breaths can put those things in their place and us in our place.

Yes, “take a breath” is seemingly cliched advice when we are overwhelmed. We certainly are being overwhelmed, in many ways strategically. The reason “take a breath” is constantly advised is…it works.

Take a breath.

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September 1, 2026

Google gave in to the ludicrous attempt to rename Lake Ontario. Goodbye Google Maps, hello Here We Go.

It is reported that the Mapquest app—yes, Mapquest—became the number one app in the Apple store, after Mapquest refused to give in to Trump’s attempt to rename Lake Ontario.

Google gave in without a fight.

My first thought was that I would protest by discarding Google from my digital life. Yeah well. Easier said than done.

My AI life is not a problem, since it is already squarely based in Claude, with Gemini in distant second place. And unlike many other users, I don’t do much with other Google apps like Google Docs.

Mail and search are a different story. I could shift both away from Google, and I should, but convenience in that case outweighs conviction. Though if Google continues its kiss-ass ways, that could change.

One place that is vulnerable to my principles is Google Maps. It is admittedly pretty useful, and alternatives are slim. Waze, one of the leading alternatives, is of course owned by Google.

Then my search (yeah, okay, a Google search), turned up Here We Go. Here We Go was developed by Nokia, and evolved into a mapping app supported by multiple car makers.

It is well reviewed as a Google Maps alternative, highlighted for its lack of clutter and especially for its ability to download maps that can be used in offline settings.

I have downloaded Here We Go to my phone but haven’t used it yet. I will. (I also downloaded Mapquest to send a message to Google. I could send an email to Google too, though it would be a Gmail and anyway Google could care less.)

Here We Go!

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