Evan X. Merz

Pine trees are dinosaurs. They were born alongside the dinosaurs in the distant eddies of lost time that we call The Jurassic. Their story is epic and unknowable. All we can say about their history for sure, is that they somehow managed to find a way to survive on every continent except Antarctica. They are supreme pragmatists, doing what they must to adapt to any climate and any situation. No matter how much damage humanity does to this planet, the pines will inevitably adapt and survive us.

Yet, even within this resilient genus, Pinus taeda, the Loblolly Pine, distinguishes itself as the king of tenacity, and a quiet titan of the American landscape.

Loblolly is not a word that is heard much in modern English. It’s an antiquated term for a mud hole or a swamp, and that’s the natural setting for Loblolly Pines. Loblolly Pines prefer to grow in the waterlogged, acidic soils of the American South where other species may struggle. Far from being a niche specialist, however, this tolerance for swampy ground has allowed the Loblolly Pine to become the second most common tree in the United States. It drapes the southern states in a vast, evergreen blanket, a testament to its adaptive genius. It is a generalist in the best sense, a tree that saw opportunity in the muck and claimed an empire.

What makes the Loblolly Pine truly fascinating is the duality of its nature: it is both a rugged survivor and a vigorous grower. In the wild, it is a pioneer species, often one of the first trees to recolonize disturbed land, its thick bark providing a defense against the periodic fires that sweep through southern ecosystems. It holds its ground with a quiet defiance. Yet, this same tree is the backbone of the southern timber industry precisely because it is anything but quiet when growing. Shooting upwards at an average of two feet per year, its ambition is relentless. This rapid growth, paired with its straight trunk and strong wood, makes it an ideal tree for the lumber industry.

The Loblolly Pine’s genetic story is also one of epic proportions. In 2014, it became one of the first species to have its entire genome sequenced. Its genome is roughly seven times the size of a human’s, and it held the record for the longest discovered genome until 2018. This vast genetic toolkit is a reflection of its long evolutionary journey, providing the raw material for its remarkable adaptability. It is a living chronicle of survival, a complex script that allows it to be both an ancient relic and a modern workhorse.

The Loblolly Pine is more than just a tree; it is a symbol of persistence, a quiet engine of economy, and a deep-rooted piece of the American story, written in needles, bark, and an unyielding will to grow.

TLDR: Here's the guide to things you can see in my garden!

This year I really committed to native plants. I pulled out nearly all of the non-native plants in my front yard. The only three non-native plants that remain are a Japanese Maple that the prior owner planted, a strawberry fruit tree that I planted when I first moved in, and some aeoniums that I use to shade the hottest part of the yard.

So I decided to submit my garden to the local native plants garden tour, The Growing Natives Garden Tour. I was excited to be accepted into the tour, and I used it to motivate me to spend a little more time planning and tending to my native garden this year.

That inspired me to redesign sections of the yard. I hunted down some beautiful hollow logs to act as tunnels for lizards and little critters. I added several more boulders and planted groups of native verbena and aster around them. I also moved some plants around in favor of aesthetics, which is not something I did in past years.

I made this little guide to what can be seen in my garden on the tour this year. I hope you will stop by on Saturday, March 18th, between 10am and 4pm.

For more updates from my garden, follow Evan's California Garden on Facebook.

After The Second World War, Dwight D. Eisenhower was the most popular man in the world. He had been the Supreme Commander of the allied forces in Europe, and in that role he led the D-Day invasion that brought down Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

As such, he was immediately thronged with calls to run for President of the United States, but he didn't want to be president. He didn't like politics, he didn't like fundraising, and he didn't like public speaking. Here's how Stephen E. Ambrose described the situation.

Daily, in one form or another, he was asked, "Don't you want to be President?" He emphatically denied it, in his private conversations with his family, the gang, his other intimate friends; he denied it in his private diary; he denied it in his correspondence; he denied it in every public utterance he made on the subject. There is not a single item in the massive collection at the Eisenhower Library prior to late 1951 that even hints that he would seek the job or that he was secretly doing so.

That situation continued unabated from 1945 until 1952, when Dwight and Mamie were living in Paris as part of Eisenhower's work for NATO. While in Paris, all of Ike's friends flew in from the states to convince him to run, but none of them were successful.

Until Jacqueline Cochran stepped in.

His friends and the politicians kept telling him how much the American people yearned for his leadership, and on February 11, he got a dramatic demonstration of how right they were. Jacqueline Cochran, the famous aviator... flew to Paris with a two-hour film of an Eisenhower rally in Madison Square Garden, held at midnight following a boxing match... Some fifteen thousand people attended, despite - according to Cochran - a total lack of cooperation from the city officials... The film showed the crowd chanting in unison, "We want Ike! We want Ike!" while waving "I like Ike" banners and placards. Eisenhower and Mamie watched in their living room and were profoundly moved.

When the film was over, Eisenhower got Cochran a drink. As they raised their glasses, she blurted out a toast: "To the President." She later recalled, "I was the first person to ever say this to him and he burst into tears... Tears were just running out of his eyes, he was so overwhelmed...So then he started to talk about his mother, his father and his family, but mostly his mother, and he talked for an hour."

So who was this woman who changed history with a short film?

It turns out, she was a pretty incredible person. She came from a poor family in the Florida panhandle, and became the leader of the women's air force in the second world war. After the war, she became the first woman to break the sound barrier. When she died, she held more flight records than any other pilot.

You won't regret reading her wikipedia entry.

I'm sitting here in Silicon Valley riding the AI hype cycle like everyone else. On one hand, it feels like something new and different. On the other hand, it kind of feels like we've been here before.

I was born in 1981, so I'm old enough to remember the boom-and-bust of the dotcom bubble. In the late 1990s, tech companies really convinced us that we were going to be doing everything online in no time at all. Obvious things were moving online, like encyclopedias and restaurant reviews, but they really tried to sell us on a bunch of products that nobody needed, and few people even wanted.

It's really easy to look back and mock defunct services like CueCat, which was essentially the 90s version of a QR code.

But, unlike some other tech products that have received mountains of investor cash, the only real problem with CueCat was that it was ahead of its time. People do legitimately need to shop for things. Maybe they don't need to fill their homes with the plastic crap that just ends up in the landfill, but they do need to shop on some level.

The dotcom bubble burst in the early 2000s, but it was followed by wave after wave of questionable tech "innovation."

The weirdest tech bubble was easily cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is a technology that allows people to buy things without actually transferring paper money or coins. It's very similar to a credit or debit card, except that the currency isn't backed by a government like the United States, and the accounts aren't stored in banks, but in a common ledger called the block chain. It's a payment technology that is just complex enough to confuse and inspire people who don't understand it. The actual value of cryptocurrency technology seems limited almost entirely to criminals who need to transact outside of government watchdogs, and to confidence tricksters who want to run a pump-and-dump scam with a meme coin.

The AI bubble emerged just as it became clear that cryptocurrency wasn't going to become a widely adopted technology. The long term value of AI is also very unclear. It might be critical to all business in the future, as cryptocurrency claimed to be, on the other hand it might end up being a niche technology that most people don't actually need.

It's already clear that most people don't actually want AI and even business leaders with egos larger than their bank balances don't actually need it.

But the emergence of these recent tech bubbles has caused me to reflect on all the tech we've adopted in my lifetime. I've started to wonder, do I really need any of this? Maybe this question seems obvious to you, but given the obviously scammy nature of the cryptocurrency grift, I'm wondering if scamming has always been integral to the tech game.

Are cell phones a scam? Are smart phones a scam? Are apps a scam? Are websites a scam? Are computers a scam? Is the combustion engine a scam? For each of these technologies, there is an element of a pyramid scheme. The more people who buy into these technologies, the more valuable they become. For instance, cars wouldn't be so valuable if all of us didn't agree that we should be spending our tax dollars on roads. Every new technology claims to solve problems, but it's increasingly unclear that they don't create as many problems as they solve.

And that brings me to the nominal topic of this post, Steve Jobs.

I don't have much to say about Steve Jobs that hasn't already been said. He is often praised as a visionary leader and tech genius. The Netflix science fiction show Pantheon is even loosely based on the idea of him resurrecting himself to create the singularity through his tech genius. But if all this tech is just layers of stuff that we don't really need, what did Steve Jobs really do when he sold us all smart phones?

More and more he just looks like a confidence man standing on stage and selling us magical health elixirs that will cure all the problems that ail us. His main achievement was getting us to pay huge sums of money for something that we didn't need. More and more he just looks like another salesperson huckster in the same vein as PT Barnum or Donald Trump. He was just chasing the holy dollar in the only way he knew how.

He was just a twenty first century huckster in the right place at the right time.

But this post isn't really about Steve Jobs, it's about the tech he sold us, and all the tech hype cycles we have survived. After all, if you can see through the hype cycle for cryptocurrency, and you can see through the hype cycle for AI, shouldn't you question the still-ongoing hype cycle for the smart phone?

The name Dwight D. Eisenhower doesn't conjure up a lot of emotions to modern citizens of the United States. Like most presidents, Eisenhower did some good things, and he did some bad things. The balance on his account seems like it's close enough to even that it's hard to take a strong stance for or against him. He defeated the Nazis and integrated the schools, and he also embraced covert CIA military operations in a pretty reprehensible way.

Eisenhower wasn't a thinking man. He just wasn't. He grew up in a relatively insular Mennonite community, then he was trained to execute orders without question by the US military. He wasn't trained to think, or question authority. He was trained to act, and he did so brilliantly when he led the D-Day invasion in the second World War.

Still, part of his genius is that his wisdom came from the blue collar values of his hardscrabble upbringing. In some ways, his words feel like a twentieth century reformulation of Lincoln's aphorisms, through a person who is less skilled with words.

Recently, I was doing some reading about him when I stumbled upon a speech he gave in 1953, not long after he assumed the presidency. This speech is called the Chance for Peace speech, and as I was reading the text of it, I realized that it is exactly the wisdom we need to guide our country and our planet in 2026.

In 1953, Eisenhower was just at the beginning of the Cold War, and just at the beginning of his presidency. Part of him was still the naive optimist from Abilene, Kansas who believed in the righteousness of his cause. He saw that moment in time as a final ramping down of the Second World War, and a continued opportunity to push the world toward peace. Stalin had just died, and he took this as a chance for the world powers to stop fighting and move away from confrontational militarism.

So he called for peace.

In this spring of 1953 the free world weighs one question above all others: the chance for a just peace for all peoples.

To weigh this chance is to summon instantly to mind another recent moment of great decision. It came with that yet more hopeful spring of 1945, bright with the promise of victory and of freedom. The hope of all just men in that moment too was a just and lasting peace.

The 8 years that have passed have seen that hope waver, grow dim, and almost die. And the shadow of fear again has darkly lengthened across the world.

Eisenhower recognized the lost opportunity of the second world war. He recognized the lost opportunity of the wide ranging agreements made between countries in 1945. He wanted to summon that spirit of cooperation again in 1953.

He took an optimistic view of the role of the United States in mid century politics, and an antagonistic view of The Soviet Union.

The way chosen by the United States was plainly marked by a few clear precepts, which govern its conduct in world affairs...

The Soviet government held a vastly different vision of the future.

In the world of its design, security was to be found, not in mutual trust and mutual aid but in force: huge armies, subversion, rule of neighbor nations. The goal was power superiority at all cost. Security was to be sought by denying it to all others.

In 2026, this must sound both ironic and appropriate, as The United States maintains the largest military in the world by a huge margin, and both the US and Russia have recently started wars of aggression led by aging leaders with dimming vision.

But Eisenhower, with his life of service in the military, knew that militarism was no end in itself. He knew that conflict led to more conflict. He knew that a country spending money on war could not spend money on peace, and that was the idea behind the most inspired section of the speech.

What can the world, or any nation in it, hope for if no turning is found on this dread road?

The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated.

The worst is atomic war.

The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

When he tallies up the true cost of war, his vision for our country is almost palpable. This passage alone tells such a vivid story. "This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

This is the passage that resonates the most to me in 2026. When I think about the unilateral invasion of Ukraine or the unilateral bombing of Iran. Trump and Putin are busy spending our work and our lives on their violence.

What really amazes me about this passage is that Eisenhower was essentially calling for less military spending. He was calling for a lower defense budget. This was idealistic at the time, and it seems almost hopelessly optimistic in 2026.

But that doesn't make it wrong.

Perhaps Ike's call for less spending on the military may not have worked out in his favor, but it wasn't misinformed or naive. Nobody in the world knew more about military spending and foreign policy at that moment that Dwight D. Eisenhower. He stood in the unique position to know exactly how war spending was draining America's strength then. He knew that if we kept fighting each other, then we would have no strength to work together on the real problems facing the people of the world.

We seek, throughout Asia as throughout the world, a peace that is true and total.

Out of this can grow a still wider task—the achieving of just political settlements for the other serious and specific issues between the free world and the Soviet Union.

None of these issues, great or small, is insoluble—given only the will to respect the rights of all nations.

Eisenhower then made a specific call for disarmament and a slow draw down of military spending by all countries. Eisenhower loved bullet point lists, and he made a list of goals for limiting army sizes, limiting atomic arsenals, and enforcing these limitations.

And in the final lines of the speech, he reiterated the purpose of all of this in a way that doesn't even need to be altered to resonate with the people of 2026.

The purpose of the United States, in stating these proposals, is simple and clear.

These proposals spring, without ulterior purpose or political passion, from our calm conviction that the hunger for peace is in the hearts of all peoples—those of Russia and of China no less than of our own country.

They conform to our firm faith that God created men to enjoy, not destroy, the fruits of the earth and of their own toil.

They aspire to this: the lifting, from the backs and from the hearts of men, of their burden of arms and of fears, so that they may find before them a golden age of freedom and of peace.

Sadly, Eisenhower's call for peace fell on deaf ears.

The cynics in The Soviet Union took this speech as nothing more than propaganda. Then, as now, they didn't believe that anyone would truly act "without ulterior purpose."

The people of the US loved the speech, but they didn't appreciate the implications of Ike's words. Then, as now, the people of the United States were too mesmerized by the power of capitalism to pay attention to foreign policy.

The Cold War only heated up from there. Even though Ike was able to bring a swift end to the war in Korea, he was quickly dragged into covert operations to overthrow the governments in Iran and Guatemala. The text of this speech almost seems ironic when viewed through the lens of his later embrace of the CIA .

Still, I wish Trump and Putin had more of Eisenhower's earthy optimism. I wish they could see, as Ike did, that war only leads to war.

You can and should read the full text of Ike's speech on Wikimedia.