We had a very nice dinner with a group of friends last night. One of the couples are (is?) the Schneiders. I am not going to identify them further, but you may want to try to figure out who they are. According to Google’s AI, there are 101,290 people in the United States named Schneider, and it is the 312th most popular name in the country. So, good luck.

By the way, when I asked Google how many Schneiders there were in the country, did I expect a real response? No, I didn’t. But there you go. I also learned there are approximately 44,000 Hessels in the country. It is hard to believe that the ratio of Schneiders to Hessels is less than 3 to 1, but that’s what Google says. This may be one reason not to trust Google AI. And, you may also be interested to know there are fewer than 5000 Trumps, thank God.

The reasons I bring this up is that last night I learned about the “Schneider Rules”. They are rather straightforward, although I may have missed a couple of subtleties.

1. You do not talk about Donald Trump before you have had your morning coffee or breakfast.
2. You do not talk about Donald Trump after 9:30 p.m.
3. You do not talk about Donald Trump on holidays or Shabbat.
4. You do not engage in a conversation about Donald Trump with anyone at any time until you have received their consent.

There was a brief further discussion (even though it was by now after 9:30 p.m.) about what your responsibilities are if you violate one of these four basic rules. That seems to be unclear at the present time.

I have been watching MSNBC this morning. It is so often you see people on news shows with whom you vehemently disagree, and it is refreshing to watch people with whom your sense of agreement is almost 100%. The guests on this morning’s shows included Congressman Jamie Raskin, recently “fired” Federal Election Commission commissioner Ellen Weintraub, and Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza. In fact, if you asked me to name the three people I would most like to have dinner with (last night’s friends not included), I would suggest Jamie Raskin, Ellen Weintraub and Vladimir Kara-Murza. What a delight that would be. If you are not familiar with them, I would suggest you Google them and click “News”, read Vladimir Kara-Murza’s Washington Post op-ed piece that I think is being published today, and then go on YouTube and watch some of their recent interviews.

What a world (with all its problems) this is that you can do all of that by a click on a keyboard.

Kara-Murza (can I just call him Vladimir?) of course is one of the luckiest men alive, having been released from Russian prison (his friend Alexei Navalny was not, unfortunately) in a prison swap that clearly had nothing to do with Donald Trump. He was interviewed by Ali Velshi (I’d be happy to have dinner with him, too, but he seems to busy) and spoke about the actions of American social media companies that say that they favor free speech, but which succumb to the “laws” of countries like Russia that prohibit free speech. He specifically mentioned Apple, which has eliminated certain news apps from its app store inside Russia at the request of the Russian government. He made the point that the United States, with Radio Free Europe, etc., had spread democratic thinking behind the iron curtain, but that now American companies were in effect conspiring with dictatorial regimes to repress free speech.

Kara-Murza talked about his initial days after his arrest in Moscow, when he was thrown together with four other normal Russian prisoners, and he was able to learn exactly what they knew about the war in Ukraine from Putin’s clampdown on free speech in the Russian media. He said that after a few days, he was able to convince them of what was really going on (civilian killings, hospital and utilities bombing, etc.), and that this shows you what would happen to build up opposition to Putin if technology was used to broadcast “truth” into Russia, rather than suppressing it in accordance with “local laws”.

Ellen Weinstein, who has been illegally “fired” by Trump, and locked out of her office and computer, is still an FEC commissioner because her term is not up and Trump clearly has no right to fire her. I saw her a couple of nights ago on Rachel Maddow, as well as this morning on MSNBC, and she is still figuring out what to do. But, as you will see when you Google her, she is someone you clearly want to serve out her term, and maybe you would like her then to do even something more (beyond having dinner with me, that is).

At any rate, today is a rather unscheduled day in our house. I guess I will watch the Superbowl tonight. For the last several years, I have rooted for Kansas City (home state loyalty), and I never like Philadelphia fans to win anything (for obvious reasons), but I seem to be very neutral this year. Not sure why, except I guess maybe my mind just has bigger fish to fry.