December 8, 2025

NOREEN DANA The Hub Lady story

by Steve Dana

Iva Noreen “Simon” Dana, affectionately known as THE HUB LADY, age 76, of Snohomish, WA, died suddenly on November 14, 2025 after a lengthy battle with chronic kidney failure. 

Noreen was born in Everett, WA to Herbert and Calista Simon.  She was one of seven children. Brother Lynn, Sisters Diane, Ladora, Susie, Linda, Noreen and Marvis.  Linda Jenkins of Whiteville, NC and Marvis Warren of Marysville, WA are the remaining survivors of the Simon children.

Noreen was a proud member of the Everett High School Class of 1967. Go Seagulls!

Noreen is survived by her husband Steve Dana, daughter Shelly Dana, grandsons Stephen Crowe and Austin Crowe all of the greater Snohomish WA area, and numerous nieces and nephews from around the country.

After her passing, Noreen was cremated.  The family is planning for a Celebration of Noreen’s life in late January, 2026.  The time and location will be announced as soon as the details are set.

Noreen went to work at The Hub Drive In around 1974 before she was in the Dana family.  She spent thirty-five years at The Hub both as an employee and an owner.  Many people never knew her name, but they knew her as The Hub Lady.  On several occasions when she was traveling around the country and in Europe, she was approached by strangers and was asked if she was The Hub Lady of Snohomish, WA.  You have no idea how gratifying it was for her to have such a dedicated following.  And even though the Hub closed in 2010, she was still recognized as recently as this past summer.  Over the years, she watched families grow up from across the counter.  She remembered birthdays and anniversaries of people she only knew from The Hub.  She established real lifelong friendships with many of you.  The restaurant business is hard, but the relationships with her staff members and customers made it very satisfying.

After The Hub closed, Noreen went to work at the Delta Rehabilitation Center in the activities department.  She had the opportunity to work with wonderful co-workers there and for so many residents she thought of as family.  Her love for crafting fit right in at the Chalet as is a valuable tool in the rehabilitation process for patients with traumatic brain injuries.

Away from work, Noreen loved to play BINGO.  She played mostly at the Tulalip Bingo Hall, but frequently traveled around the Puget Sound region trying her luck from as far south as Tacoma and north to Canada.  On more occasions than we can recall, she traveled to Reno and Las Vegas Nevada to compete in high stakes BINGO tournaments. She was known to play as many as thirty cards at once at Tulalip.

Noreen always said she liked to travel, but when given the choice between visiting places like New England in the fall or playing BINGO in Vegas, she often picked Vegas.  But not always.  She traveled all over the country and to Europe three times.  Going was always exciting for her, but coming home was special.

Noreen loved being home surrounded by people she loved and who loved her.  She enjoyed cooking for them and they enjoyed eating wonderful food.

Noreen was a Christian woman who was a prayer warrior.  She had a tortuous relationship with God because she couldn’t understand why God allowed there to be so much suffering in the world.  She was a deeply caring person who spent her life in service to others

Noreen passed away exactly three months short of her Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary.  She was participating in the planning for the event just days before her death.  Noreen and Steve were individuals, but in many ways, they were one.  They worked together every day for twenty-five years and more often than not, chose to be with each other rather than someone or somewhere else.  She was deeply loved by her life partner and he was crazy about her.

The family would like to extend our thanks to the dedicated staff at the Puget Sound Kidney Center in Monroe for the great care Noreen received while on dialysis.

And to the medical staff a Kaiser Permanente Everett who took care of Noreen since 1975.

Thank you all for being a part of a special person’s life.

In lieu of flowers, feel free to make a contribution to her GoFundMe page to offset the financial impact to the family. (https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-noreen-danas-memorial-family )

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November 14, 2025

AI and the Beginning of Possibility

by Steve Dana

By Steve Dana

A week or so ago, I wrote about my exploration of AI platforms. After letting the topic sit with me for a few days, here’s where I’ve landed: Artificial Intelligence isn’t the end of the world — it’s the beginning of a new array of possibilities. Bold? Maybe. But stay with me.

I’ve been retired from real estate for five years now, and in that time AI has gone from a faint whisper to a constant roar. And here’s the surprising part: I’ve watched how it empowers us far more than it threatens us.

Back when I was selling real estate, AI wasn’t on anyone’s radar. We relied on instinct, experience, and mountains of paperwork. Today, agents can analyze markets, identify trends, and match clients with remarkable precision. The research that once devoured hours can now be done in minutes. That isn’t a threat — it’s liberation. It frees people to do the human work: building trust, negotiating deals, and guiding clients through life-changing decisions. Machines can crunch numbers. They can’t replace relationship.

And I’ll be honest: I’m not your neighborhood tech wizard. I didn’t go back to school. I learned AI the same way many of you might — by experimenting, asking questions, trying tools like Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT. If I can do this in my seventies, so can anybody with curiosity and a little patience.

So why the panic? Why the fear? Because fear thrives in uncertainty. When people hear stories about layoffs or machines writing code, they imagine a future where humans are obsolete. But history tells us something different. Every great technological leap — from the steam engine to the internet — has displaced some jobs and created many more. The danger isn’t AI. The danger is refusing to adapt. If we dig our heels in, yes, we’ll be left behind. But if we embrace change, retrain, and reinvent ourselves, then the future opens up.

I’ve come to see AI as a power tool. A carpenter doesn’t fear a nail gun; he uses it to build faster and better. A writer doesn’t fear a word processor; she uses it to refine her work. AI is the next power tool in the human toolbox — one that amplifies what we already do well.

For coders, it can debug faster.
For teachers, it can personalize lessons.
For doctors, it can analyze scans in seconds.
For political commentators like me, it helps sharpen arguments and cut through noise.

But in every one of these examples, the human being remains at the center. AI cannot replace judgment, empathy, integrity, or vision. Those remain uniquely ours.

Now imagine a world where education adapts to every student… where rural clinics diagnose illness with big-city precision… where small businesses compete globally because AI levels the playing field. Imagine journalists who can sift through a mountain of documents in minutes, or real estate agents who can generate valuations on the spot. This isn’t science fiction. It’s already happening.

Of course, with great power comes great responsibility. We need transparency in how algorithms work, fairness in how they’re applied, and accountability so humans stay in control. These aren’t minor challenges — but they are solvable. And they require citizens who stay informed rather than afraid.

So when you hear fearmongering about AI, remember this: the answer isn’t shutting it down. The answer is shaping it.

Practical Advice Moving Forward

  • Experiment. Try the tools. Don’t wait for permission.
  • Upskill. Look for the ways AI can complement your work.
  • Stay curious. Curiosity is the real superpower in the AI era.
  • Think human-first. Let AI handle the drudgery so you can handle the meaning.

AI isn’t the apocalypse. It’s the dawn of a new frontier. The question isn’t whether AI will change the world — it already has. The question is whether we’re willing to change with it.

I believe we are. I believe we can. And I believe that if we embrace AI as a partner — as a power tool that multiplies human potential — then the future will be brighter than anything we’ve imagined.

So the next time someone tells you AI is the end of work, tell them this:
AI isn’t the end of humanity. It’s the end of limits. And the beginning of possibility.

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Future of Work
  • Technology and Society
  • AI Tools
  • Personal Growth
  • Human-Centered Technology
  • Innovation
  • Real Estate and AI
  • Digital Transformation
  • Commentary

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November 9, 2025

When Righteousness Becomes Violence

by Steve Dana

Lessons from Mao’s Cultural Revolution

Tell me if this sounds familiar. At the height of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, China’s universities stopped being places of learning. They became factories of ideological conformity.

Teachers and administrators who didn’t embrace the Communist revolution were branded “rightists.” Students were told to find them, expose them, and punish them. Many obeyed with religious zeal, convinced that loyalty to Mao outweighed every other moral duty.

The Rise of the Red Guards

From this fanaticism emerged the Red Guards — militant bands of teenagers unleashed upon society. With Mao’s blessing, they stormed through cities and villages declaring themselves defenders of revolutionary purity.

They tore down monuments, burned books, and desecrated temples. Teachers were beaten. Children informed on their parents. Neighbors became accusers and victims all at once. It wasn’t random chaos — it was the logical outcome of what they’d been taught.

The Redefinition of Morality

Disagreement itself was redefined. To question the Party was not merely to be wrong; it was to be inhuman. And once an idea is labeled inhuman, violence against it becomes not only acceptable, but righteous.

The act of silencing or destroying an opponent was no longer seen as cruelty — it was seen as virtue. The moral compass had been inverted so completely that brutality felt like heroism.

Fear replaced trust. Education gave way to indoctrination. Intellectual independence disappeared under the threat of public denunciation. Families disintegrated as children betrayed parents to prove loyalty to the revolution. By the time it ended, millions were dead, and the cultural memory of a nation lay in ruins.

A Pattern That Echoes Through Time

The lesson is dark, but it echoes through history:
When youth are weaponized by ideology…
When universities teach obedience instead of curiosity…
When disagreement becomes criminal…
Violence stops being taboo. It becomes justice.

Mao understood something terrifying: it’s easier to control a society by igniting passion from below than by enforcing power from above. Once the young believe their violence is virtuous, the revolution will devour its own.

What We Must Remember

The Cultural Revolution warns us what happens when certainty replaces curiosity and purity tests replace reasoned debate. The worst atrocities are not committed by those who know they are evil — but by those convinced they are righteous.

A Call to Vigilance

We must stay vigilant. Defend the spaces where disagreement is possible. Protect the right to question without fear. Resist the seductive clarity of ideologies that divide the world into saints and sinners.

Teach the next generation to think — not to march. To question their own certainty. To see even their enemies as human beings worthy of dignity.

History’s graves are filled with people who thought their cause justified cruelty. The question for our time is simple: Will we have the wisdom and courage to stop it before it consumes us?

I wrote the commentary on this document, but I didn’t write the original message at the top. I don’t know who did but thought it was important to share with my thoughts added.

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November 3, 2025

The New Heresy: When Questioning Becomes a Crime

by Steve Dana

The New Heresy: When Questioning Becomes a Crime

There was a time when science was the language of curiosity. It invited questions, welcomed challenge, and saw debate as the oxygen of discovery. That was the old school — the one I grew up admiring. Today, something quieter and more troubling has crept in: a growing fear that questioning authority, even in the name of truth, marks you as dangerous.

We saw it during the pandemic. People who asked honest questions about origins, treatments, and policies were shamed or silenced. Doctors were censored. Journalists were de-platformed. Social media companies became referees of scientific opinion. Yet, years later, many of those “conspiracy theories” turned out to contain inconvenient pieces of truth. The problem wasn’t that the public lost faith in science. It’s that science allowed itself to be managed by politics.

This new orthodoxy extends far beyond medicine. In the climate debate, for example, legitimate questions about policy design are treated as moral sins. You can agree that the climate is changing and still ask whether the proposed solutions make sense. But too often, that nuance gets lost. The message from the self-anointed guardians of truth is clear: “You may question the details, but never the narrative.”

Real science doesn’t behave that way. It doesn’t blacklist dissent or exile those who see the data differently. Science at its best is a humble companion of reason — not a pulpit from which elites preach certainty to the rest of us. When debate becomes forbidden, science turns into dogma. And once dogma takes hold, truth becomes whatever those in power decide it is.

The deeper issue isn’t about data; it’s about power. When government officials, corporate sponsors, and political foundations all profit from the same set of “approved” truths, it’s no wonder skepticism feels subversive. The pandemic showed how fear can justify sweeping authority, and how economic winners always seem to emerge from moral crusades. Policies built on partial truths can still inflict very real harm — to livelihoods, education, mental health, and basic freedom. And when citizens ask for accountability, they’re told to “trust the science.”

But science doesn’t ask for trust; it earns it. It earns it by being transparent, by admitting uncertainty, and by treating every challenge as a chance to get closer to the truth. The moment we treat questioning as heresy, we turn science into a faith — one enforced not by evidence, but by power.

This isn’t about relitigating the past few years. It’s about remembering that free societies depend on doubt. We are supposed to test ideas, expose errors, and speak freely about the motives of those who govern. When the powers that be suppress questions, the people will start looking for answers elsewhere — and sometimes, that search leads them down darker roads. The cure for misinformation is not censorship; it’s open, honest debate.

So let’s bring back the spirit of old-school science — the kind that believes truth is strengthened, not weakened, by challenge. Let’s respect expertise, but not worship it. Let’s ask hard questions, not because we reject knowledge, but because we want it to mean something again. If that makes us heretics in the age of managed truth, then maybe heresy is exactly what democracy needs.

Because when questioning becomes a crime, truth becomes a casualty. And a nation that punishes doubt has already decided it prefers obedience to wisdom.

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