My Best Web Advice: "Open in Brave Browser"

The Backstory

A while back I completely maxed out on super twirly, flashing and stupidly animated ads every time I opened a browser to visit a website. All this extraneous crap was driving me crazy. So I decided to try the Brave browser, which some geeks in my tech podcasts have long been recommending. 

Now don't get me wrong. I fully understand the need for people creating content to support their creation work with advertising. But I have lost all patience with over-the-top, in-your-face flashing banners and twitching graphics that serve as a de facto entry barrier to many websites. Fortunately for us all there is a browser that puts these ads in their place and sometimes even eliminates some of them.

To learn more, I asked my AI assistant to answer this question: 

• "What is so great about the Brave browser?”

You can scroll down a few paragraphs to see my assistant's nicely detailed and summarized response. 

However, if you'd rather just jump right in and start playing with Brave on your own you can simply go to https://brave.com/, download it for yourself and get started.

Brave fixes YouTube!

Here's my favorite Brave setting: "Open YouTube links in Brave." Because the video plays inside Brave rather than the YouTube app, you benefit from Brave’s built-in ad blocker and privacy protections, meaning zero video ads. Needless to say, I never go to YouTube anymore to watch videos. I have completely wiped out all YouTube ads by watching YouTube videos exclusively through the Brave browser. It makes YouTube usable again!! 

I'm sure there's some really cool stuff going on under the hood to make this possible. The bottom line is that you are using a powerful tool that has automatic ad blocking and privacy shields while running on the superfast, open source Chromium web engine. If you're like me, once you use Brave you'll never go back to Chrome or Safari or any other browser with a hidden agenda.

Four Steps to Cranking Up Brave

In practice, there are four steps to activating Brave when you're doing a Google search. (Of course this assumes you've gone to your app store first and installed it! Duh!) 

1.  Complete the Google search & decide which site you want to go to.

2. Go to the site and open it. (And ignore all its twitchy ad solicitations.)

3. Find the three dots in the upper right corner of your browser screen and click them.

4. Choose "Open in Brave Browser." 

That's it! The animated ads and other garbage have been slapped back, giving you a much more pleasant and focused browsing experience.

(Note: Brave browser is available for Apple and Android devices, as well as Windows, Mac and Linux devices. So whether you're on a portable device or powerful desktop device, you can take advantage of braves features. See: https://brave.com/ )

Detailed AI Summary: What's so great about the Brave browser?

[Content within the quotes below was generated by my AI assistant. -MG]

"The Brave browser is highly regarded primarily because it offers robust, out-of-the-box privacy protections and significantly faster page loading speeds compared to traditional browsers like Google Chrome. Built on the open-source Chromium web engine, it combines the familiar performance and extension compatibility of Chrome with a strict, privacy-first philosophy.

The core features that make Brave popular include:

Built-In Privacy & "Brave Shields"

• Automatic Ad Blocking: Brave blocks invasive ads by default on every page you visit, including YouTube ads, without requiring third-party extensions.
• Tracker and Cookie Blocking: It automatically blocks cross-site trackers, third-party cookies, and bounce tracking.
• Fingerprint Protection: It prevents companies from identifying your device through browser fingerprinting techniques.
• HTTPS Upgrades: The browser automatically forces websites to use secure, encrypted HTTPS connections whenever possible.

Enhanced Performance

• Faster Speeds: Because it strips out heavy ads and trackers before a page even loads, web pages load noticeably faster than they do on standard browsers.
• Lower Resource Usage: Blocking background tracking scripts reduces RAM consumption and device processing power compared to memory-heavy browsers like Chrome.

Advanced Security Features 

• Tor Integration: For maximum anonymity, Brave includes a private browsing mode that routes your traffic directly through the Tor network.
• Independent Search Engine: It defaults to Brave Search, which operates on its own independent index of the web to deliver search results without tracking your search history.
• Built-in VPN: For device-wide security, Brave offers an optional, subscription-based Firewall + VPN.

Added Ecosystem Utilities

• Brave Talk: Free, fully encrypted video calling built right into the browser with no extensions or sign-ups required.
• Brave Rewards: An optional opt-in ecosystem where users can choose to view privacy-respecting ads in exchange for Basic Attention Tokens (BAT), a cryptocurrency used to tip favorite content creators.
• Easy Migration: Because it is Chromium-based, you can seamlessly import your Chrome bookmarks, history, and passwords, and use any extension from the Chrome Web Store."

Conclusion

So why not just jump right in and start playing with Brave on your own? Simply go to https://brave.com/ and download it for yourself.

Enjoy!

How to Protect Our Democracy from Trump

"Democracy? I don't think so..."

Yes he's nuts. But because he could trigger his army of fellow nut jobs (AKA MAGA crazies) to show up in primary political races and polling booths all over the country, Trump is essentially intimidating reasonable Republicans who might otherwise oppose him. So he continues to stomp along, crushing any opposition, as the egomaniac who would be king of a country that rejected Kings long ago. 

So what can we do? See the four strategies below. Then dive deeper in the references presented with each. Then, most importantly, get involved at your state and local levels to actively protect our democracy. 

Core Strategies Summarized

With the 2026 midterms approaching, the Trump administration and its allies have intensified a sweeping campaign to erode the safeguards that keep our elections free, fair and secure. These efforts form a clear pattern: undermining the rule of law; destabilizing election administration; and weakening our institutions and election protections.

In response, organizations and legal groups have published analyses, legal frameworks, and safeguarding strategies to protect the 2026 midterm elections from executive and partisan interference. These include:

• Legal Litigation: Filing lawsuits to block unauthorized federal collection of state voter registration lists and restrictive postal service rules.

• Voter Education: Helping eligible citizens understand their voting rights and countering false narratives about noncitizen voting or ballot integrity.

• Community Mobilization: Deploying trained volunteers and nonpartisan monitors to polling places to assist voters and document irregularities.

• State-Level Safeguards: Supporting state lawmakers and attorneys general who pass local protections against unauthorized federal law enforcement presence or sudden rule changes near Election Day. 

Core Strategies: The References

• The Trump Administration Is Interfering in the 2026 Midterm Elections To Entrench the Imperial Presidency  -- Details 15 potential tactics involving executive and federal actions around elections and outlines structural responses.

• The Fight to Protect the Midterms (Brennan Center for Justice) -- Examines ongoing legal challenges regarding mail-in voting rules, voter roll demands, and post-election certification safeguards. 

• Defending Our Vote: The ACLU’s Election Safeguarding Program (American Civil Liberties Union) -- Outlines a multi-million-dollar initiative focused on volunteer training, legal monitoring, and fighting voter roll purges in court.

• Are President Trump and His Allies Laying the Groundwork to Undermine Our Elections? (Campaign Legal Center)  -- Focuses on litigating against unconstitutional executive orders and defending independent voting access organizations.

• Protecting Free & Fair Elections (Protect Democracy) -- Tracks and litigates against federal data seizures and attempts to compile private voter files without state authorization.

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See also this video:  Democrats' Midterms Move Shocks Trump, New Bill Seeks Ban on Armed Agents at Polling Sites

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Bonuses: Need a little pep talk to nudge you to action? Check out these articles & podcasts:

• A Year Later: Team Trump's Drive from Democracy to Autocracy
• The Trump Resistance: Fighting Back Against Fascism
• 21 Lies Per Day? Really?! Fact Checking Tools Help You Find the Truth.
• 5 Things You Can Do to Get Positive Political Results in a Soul-Numbing, Negative Media World (w/ links to tools & resources)
• Be the Change You Want to See  (the audio podcast)
  “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” –  Mahatma Gandhi
• Take the Risk  (the audio podcast)
• Just Do It!  (the audio podcast)
• (Why you can trust your judgement...) Inside the Black Box: Thoughts on Judgement, Intuition, Synthesis & Artificial Intelligence
• Trust Your Judgment (book chapter w/graphic of "your internal wisdom filter") or listen to the podcast

[Reprise] Inside the Black Box: Thoughts on Judgement, Intuition, Synthesis & Artificial Intelligence

 [Originally published in 2023, in this article I try to provide some much-needed perspective on AI (artificial intelligence). Enjoy!]

Your Inner "Wisdom Filter" & Decision-Making

[Note: This article was inspired by a comment from a Facebook friend, one of the smartest people I know, after I posted a link to a news article about the potential for AI systems to attain singularity with humanity very soon. She said, "... as a writer and artist, I am not convinced that the divine spirit that informs great writers and artists can be replicated by computers." This comment poked at me for days, irritating and causing me to abandon the half-written article I had been working on. There is an old saying that sometimes writers write to figure out what they are actually thinking. Below is my response to my friend's comment, in which I have begun to figure out what I think about AI's place in our world. - MG]

Why You Can "Trust Your Gut" 

A few years back, when I was teaching project management (PM) for new project managers, I encouraged them to overcome their decision-making doubts and "analysis paralysis" by showing them a graphical depiction of why their so-called "gut decisions" or intuitions were actually grounded in their many valuable life experiences. (See diagram above.) I later captured the matching narrative in a podcast then an essay which became the chapter Why You Should Trust Your Judgement (Your "Inner Wisdom" Filter) in my book Worth Sharing: Essays & Tools to Help Project Managers & Their Teams.  

Here's a quick summary: 

"... Your intuitions, “gut feelings,” and hunches are derived from, and ultimately grounded in, your unique life experiences, both good and bad. And because of this, they have behind them the solid proof of your reality. To illustrate how all these experiences come together to generate solid, trustworthy judgments, I present to you the analogy of the common kitchen strainer... Your inner voice (i.e., your judgment) operates pretty much like that kitchen strainer! Let’s say you have to make a difficult decision and don’t have time to think about it. All sorts of possibilities and pertinent facts and constraints and outcomes rattle around in your brain. Your “internal strainer” is activated to deal with this. The wires in your strainer are made up of a vast set of unique experiences that you’ve acquired over your lifetime. Successes, failures, joys, miseries, and all sorts of life events combine to form this internal screening mechanism.... when all the possible solutions and issues related to a problem are dumped into that strainer, the good stuff — a unique and powerful judgment — emerges. It’s a judgment that’s automatically informed by all of your life experiences. And, as such, it’s powerful and trustworthy!" -  from Why You Should Trust Your Judgement (Your "Inner Wisdom" Filter)