High Caucasus

I just made my way through Tom Parfitt's 2023 book High Caucasus, which recounts a journey he took on foot through the Russian part of the Caucaus (i.e. not Georgia, Azerbaijan, or Armenia) in the aftermath of the Beslan school siege in 2004, where he was present as a journalist. A little refresher for those of you who (like me before I read this), were fuzzy on the details: Chechens led by Shamil Basayev seized a school in Beslan, North Ossetia and kept 1100 people hostage, most of them students. Eventually 334 of them died, most of them students.

Parfitt was there. It was traumatic. He decided to walk across the Caucasus, from the Black Sea to the Caspian. This involved going through a lot of places with names we hear infrequently: Abhazia, Adygea, Ossetia, Kabarday-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, Ingushetia, Chechnya, and Dagestan. I think that's it. It's a beautiful place (see below), so I get why he'd want to do it.

It's also a pretty rugged place, with not a ton of creature comforts. That said, the hospitality traditions for the region are sacrosanct. Pretty much every night he gets invited by someone whose house or town he's passing by to stay with them and he rarely pays. He ends of eating a wide variety of meats, many of which sound unappealing to the naked ear but would totally hit the spot if you had walked 20 miles in the mountains that day.

The reader learns a lot about the history of the region, most importantly I think about how the Russians deported pretty much everybody from the North Caucasus to Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan) around '43-'44 for some trumped up reason. They got to come back after Stalin died but it was a pretty massive shared trauma. Ironically, it also allowed much of the region to rewild itself, turning it into a great spot for Soviet hunters and outdoorsmen, and I do mean men.

If the book has one fault it is its repetitiveness. Walk. Recount some history. Come to a village. Get invited in. Eat some wierd stuff. Sleep the sleep of the just on a couch or an iron bed. Now and again get hassled by some security forces and be accused of being a spy. Lather, rinse, repeat.

But these are mild criticisms and I'm well aware of how repetitive my blog is and therefore how this is the pot calling the kettle black. Part of me is just jealous of Parfitt and admiring of his courage to undertake a journey like this. I never quite got that adventurous, but am grateful for the people who have (see also Itchy Boots). 

Also, admiring though I might be, I also remembered getting to the point where I felt my adventuring, mild though it was given that it ran its coure within the staid boundaris of academic programs and conferences, had run its course and that it was time to settle down and get ready to embark on the new journey of parenting. I was hoping Parfitt wouldn't deny himself that transition. As he writes in his epilogue, he did not.

Theory of mind deficit

Twice in recent weeks I've been in situations when people I know have asked very good open ended questions in conversations that really opened things up in a way that felt utterly beyond me (Caroline at GI Board meeting, Ken talking to Carolyn at dinner at Dave and Betsy's). All too often I find myself trapped in the mire of performing myself and looking for points of intersection with the person I'm talking to that I am unable to step back and open things up or ask questions in a way that lets them move in a different direction. 

I think this is why the early films of Atom Egoyan so resonated with me and why I've come back to them in my mind so often. Egoyan's characters repeat themselves endlessly to others, albeit with slight variations, as they perform theirselves into being.

Experts say that one of the characteristic traits of autism is that the autistic lack a theory of mind, that they cannot easily put themselves in other people's shoes and imagine what the others are thinking. I definitely have more than a little of that. So I have to focus on just trying to be good natured and doing the right thing to the extent possible but also by memorizing and internalizing social rules and aping them back to others. Not entirely unlike what an LLM does.

I have probably said this before, but because I am relatively social and our livelihood to an extent rests upon my sociability Mary can't admit that I have a fair number of autistic traits. But in fact I have just to some extent engaged in brute force (in the computing sense) social learning.

The final countdown

Prepping for a colonoscopy first thing tomorrow morning, I am at the tail end of the liquid diet day and have begun the truly fun stage. I will spare you further details. Most of you will have gone through this before. The rest of you, if you haven't, likely will some day soon. Or at least you definitely should if you are fortunate enough to have decent health insurance.

I will comment only on being where I am in the cycle of consumption. On Friday I began the low fiber diet which forces one to eschew vegetables, whole grains, fruits, nuts, etc. but allows one to eat white bread and pasta, cheese, eggs and meat. Sounds great. But in fact, even for someone predicposed to the diet of a 12-year old boy, it's more restrictive than it sounds. I've gotten used to eating a little fruit and a lot of nuts and at least a pro forma vegetable a day. Being without it is pretty wierd. But I did get an arguably gratuitous chicken biscuit from Sunrise after tennis yesterday and enjoyed the hell out of it.

Today, the liquid diet day, during which I've subsisted black coffee, apple juice mixed with seltzer, and bone broth, is a whole nuther trip. By now I am a little spacy but surprisingly at peace with the whole thing. All in all it feels kind of good for me, like a heightened state of consciousness. Or perhaps I flatter myself. Admittedly, when Mary's alarm went off at 8:30 this morning my first word was "fuck!" -- because I was definitely planning to sleep in.  I'm not proud of that, but I did at least get back to sleep. But thereafter I have been pretty chipper. Even Mary would attest to that.

Graham and I plan to watch a couple of episodes of season 3 of "The Lincoln Lawyer" this evening. It's not a great show, admittedly, but it very much fits the bill.

The Mormons

I've mentioned a number of times that I've read and appreciated Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People after seeing it on my mom's shelves and snarkily sneering at it for years, in the capacious comfort of my own mind. Even though it does seem like the apotheosization of Boy Scoutism at times, he makes a lot of points which resonate with me. Which should surprise no one since I am the fricking WASP from central casting.

I had never bothered to Google the guy. So this morning when I was reading another of his books which I must have picked up at a thrift store or when mom was trimming her library for a move, I was only slightly surprised to read that he taught in Brigham Young's business school. A quick Google informs me that he was, not surprisingly, a Mormon.

Leslie has told me that, back in the day when she was at Bain, there were a lot of Mormons running round there. Per Wikipedia seems like Mitt Romney was probably one of them but Bain's confidentiality policy and culture might have inclined her not to say. I can't recall if she said that they were in fact all as moral as their PR would lead one to believe or if there was a little bit of hair on them. I will have to investigate.

Anyhoo, this other book of Covey, Principle-Centered Leadership, appears to pretty much bundle up and extend the Seven Habits stuff and apply it more specifically to corporate contexts. Which is all good. We're all just more or less recombining our own or someone else's greatest hits all the time anyway and once someone strikes a vein of gold they are absolutely entitled to mine it till all the gold is gone.

Some notes on DuoLingo

I listened to an interview with the founder of DuoLingo on ACQ2 last week and he said that the firm has lots of specialists in language-acquisition on staff. If he says it, it must be so. Certainly they are changing the game on language learning for all of us, and in a good way.

But one thing that frustrates me as someone who has studied languages in a traditional way is the complete and utter obeisance to the ideology of usage and repetition and the lack of any reference apparatus. So, for example, DuoLingo teaches numbers, family member terms, and days of the week solely by using them in sentences and there's never a list of all of them in order or in relation to one another. Certainly learning them in order has been a powerful mnemonic device for centuries.

Of course, one may rightfully argue, one has the whole internet on which to look up these kind of lists, I will not dispute this. Or one could snag dictionaries, textbooks, what have you. But having this kind of thing available within the app (click on a day of the week to hyperlink down to the list of all days?) would be useful.

Anyway, a minor quibble. DuoLingo owns 20-25 minutes of my day for now and, as the CEO has noted, its primary competitors are Facebook/Insta/YouTube and that's pretty much true for me. I am benefiting.

The darkest days

As we hunker into the year's darkest days -- which are, not coincidentally, the most brightly lit here in Greater Suburbia and throughout the world wherever electricity is cheap -- I find myself managing myself through a number of slow situations. First and foremost, Mary's reconstruction, which I commented on earlier this week. But also a temporary dental implant, which has prompted me to give my incisors a holiday while I await the arrival of a permanent implant Thursday. Which means my molars are working harder and more consistently than ever.* Plus tennis elbow to manage around.

Then there's work, where I'm slowly working up a buy in strategy with my firm while we consider outsourcing functions to others to help us focus on the most important stuff. And clients, where there are annual (year-end tax review, asset allocation framework review and true-ups), quadrennial (assessing regime change implications for tax code and investment strategy) client lifecycle (retirement and succession planning, new companies and jobs, deaths, job change, college application, college graduation, car replacement, house renovation [or not?]) and global macro shit to think about.

Plus exercise. It's all a bit much at times to balance.

Honestly I didn't have a clear plan of where I was going with this post but knew I was overdue to post to keep up even my reduced target cadence of fifteen a month for 2024. I guess where I was headed at the beginning is that the darkness, cold, mortality nudges and reflectivity they foster make it harder at times to create entertaining blog posts. Ah well.   

*I should note that the process of bypassing my incisors has instilled in me a degree and brand of mindfulness in the simple act of eating that hearkens back to the time of the pandemic when we were more attentive to and appreciative of little things like our food. Right now I am feeling grateful for the food but also I am pretty much about ready for some pizza and a burger, if I'm honest. And I want to pick those dogies up and snarf them. 

Feeling the burn

A quick review of the blog shows that I have written surprisingly little about Japanese stilt grass over the years. I won't go into a big discussion of this invasive plant, there is plenty of English-language interweb warbling about it and there's lots around here. Mary doesn't want it in our yard, and I get that.

She pulled a bunch of it out on the LFA property that abuts our lawn just before it went to seed (she's pretty sure) and then left it on a tarp on in our yard. She doesn't think it would be right to have the town haul it away and resisted my putting it down below where we haul our excess leaves each year despite thinking she got it before it started generating a lot of seeds. 

I had been thinking of burning it in our pandemic-era fire pit for some time. Yesterday, while out raking, I decided to give it a go. It burned nicely, but slowly. It took a fair amount of effort to burn the stuff in small quantities and to keep it going. But boy was it gratifying and also warm. I thought about Leslie, our family's truest and purest pyromaniac, and how much she would have enjoyed being there and watching all of this flaming and somewhat evil biomass. 

As I burned it, I wondered to myself "is this legal here in Chapel Hill?" After I went inside after burning maybe 25-30% of it, I consulted the interweb on this question. It turns out that burning yard waste is not governed by a Chapel Hill ordinance but a North Carolina statute, which does in fact ban it. Whoops. Moreover, burning it is not even considered a good way to manage stilt grass since viable seeds could be scattered to the wind by the fire itself. Of course, Mary was pretty sure (but not entirely so) that she had pulled the stuff in time.

And so ends my little experiment in burning stilt grass in my back yard. It was illegal and probably not even a good idea. But it was fun.

 

Breaking out a little

After the holiday, we were back up at the hospital for the continuation of Mary's reconstruction process, which was deferred after the lingering infection of early summer and then her show at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, which remains open for viewing until February 28. We left the hospital by a little after 2, more or less on schedule, though the procedure really didn't seem all that minor.

Because I've got a temporary crown for another week or so I am under orders to not bite down hard on things with my incisors. "Molars only!", they told me.

So around mid-day I found myself in the cafeteria enjoying a hearty baked spaghetti, a dish that is not really part of Mary's repertoire or anything I am encouraged to make at home. The seating in the cafe area off the main atrium was a little crowded, so I sat at a four top where there was a container with a hardboiled egg in it. I didn't look closely at it, I though someone had neglected to bus and I didn't really care, I just wanted to power down some food before returning to my mission of picking up Mary's prescriptions.

As I was eating a Black woman in her 40s came up and sat down with me. Turned out it was her egg and she had been trying to make sure she had a place to sit and the egg was definitely uneaten. A very nice woman. She had grown up in Newark though her dad was from Durham and she had moved back down here in her 20s. She worked in food service, taking patient orders and making sure they got served correctly. 

It was lovely, the kind of casual social interaction outside of normal social circles that happen a little more often in cities and on public conveyances but we get too little of in our heavily siloed suburbs. I look forward to my next one.

Notebook LM disappointment

I had hoped that Google's new Notebook LM might be able to ingest my blog and provide some valuable insights, particularly with its whizzy new feature which generates an audio dialog between two AI-generated podcasters discussing whatever text you feed to them. I was disappointed. 

I uploaded the root Chew Your Grouse URL to the tool hoping it would process the entire 20 years of my blog but instead all it took in was the posts that were on the splash page, so around a month and a half's worth. From this small sample it generated a 16-minute discussion which basically tried to reiterate and regurgitate the main points of what I had said since mid-October. So it took me back through my canvassing and the death of Rascal, etc. It was hard to listen to, really not a good use of my time. The only legitimate quasi-value additive observation it made was that maybe I identified more with Leon than Rascal since Leon is the more introverted of the two cats and I characterize myself as introverted. That's a little interesting. Though maybe I said that myself.

In any case, I was underwhelmed. If I could easily upload the whole corpus of the blog to Notebook LM I would, but I only have the big text as an XML export, not a text file, and lord knows I'm not spending the time to figure out how to convert the one to the other right now.

Given the energy-intensiveness of AI, I think we need to be careful in how we play with it, just as we should try to drive our cars efficiently and mindfully. While I'd be interested in seeing eventually how an AI might digest my blog and offer insight back to me, it's really no rush. No reason to do a lot of emitting for that purpose. And if it never quite happens, hey, I'll be dead and who will care then?

On the other hand, Natalie was very productive this break in going through her bookshelves and packing up ones she no longer needs. Mary saved a few, so did I, the others we took to the Goodwill store up on Weaver Dairy, which is veritably packed to the gills with stuff. I felt kind of guilty for only dropping things off and not buying anything to lessen the crush.

Credit card exchange fee externalities

This week's Economist contains an article making the argument that credit card points represent a transfer from less affluent to more affluent people because businesses taking cards price in the average 2% exchange fee that includes the points. So those who use cash or loyalty points free debit cards don't get the benefit of the points, thereby transferring wealth to those who do. 

I get that. I've heard the argument before. So far so good.

But what about the benefits of reducing the amount of cash in circulation and thereby the transaction costs associated with securing the cash. All the extra layers of security guards, armored trucks, trips to banks at the end of the day to deposit cash, etc. The diminished risk of a store being subjected to an old-fashioned pistol-toting hold up because crooks know that the risk-reward balance isn't there if a store will have very little cash in the till. There are all sorts of benefits in terms of diminished transaction costs to trimming down cash. Pre-crypto, the traceability of digital commerce made policing it a little easier, so long as institutions lifted a finger on their Know Your Customer efforts, as Morgan Stanley apparently has left off doing.

One could produce arguments that that whole value chain of physical security represents a lot of employment possibilities for working class people, but that depends upon the cynical assessment that these people are so ineducable as to be unemployable in a digital world, which I reject out of hand. In the form of the market and we have just decided that we don't care enough to do the educating.

Alternately, one could argue that, to the extent that the cash-based world depends on higher levels of person-to-person interaction, community of shared interest and mutually acknowledged interdepency than does a digital one, and that all that is preferable. That's a fun thought exercise.

My gut is that digital commerce -- pre-AI -- is less carbon-intensive than cash-based commerce, but that would be a complex thought process.

Undoubtedly, however, the cash-based world provides for a much richer range of dramatic situations suitable for action movies. Office Space pretty muched plumbed the depths of that one and it came up all comedy, no action. But eminently worth revisiting.

Grumpy dad

Natalie has been up early two mornings in a row and I have been a little grumpy. Even on the second morning, when I heard her up downstairs before coming down myself. I have perhaps too much of my sanity invested in the sanctity of my morning routines. When I was listing some of my habits for Leslie when she was visiting a few weeks ago, I realized that it sounded as if I verged on OCD if not worse (worse than verging, that is, not worse than OCD, which is just a thing).

In most facets of life and on most occasions I am able to adjust to changes in plan and get back to some semblance of equanimity. But it's definitely not without effort.

Right about now I am still adjusting to the dramatic shift in fortune brought on by the reelection of Trump and all of his fucking Tweedledum homunculi like Musk. It's just the broad societal validation of masculine destructiveness that is blowing my mind in the moment. Plus the exhaustion of working so hard for an opposite result and, perhaps, the fact that it feels like we have reached the holidays right at the end of summer, based on the weather outside.

The next week promises to be colder. Maybe that will help.

Dream report

Just before waking this morning I had a dream which was pretty disturbing, though probably not to you. Beth had moved to somewhere in the upper Bronx and I had to meet my friend and client C. somewhere across "the river" in Brooklyn/Queens whatever (as usual with dreams, just ignore the geography. Of course it's not gonna make sense). I was planning to cross over the river somewhere to the south and east of Beth's place (didn't really know how or when). Mary was with me and decided to join me on the trip over to whatever ferry I was going to be taking. We set out walking. She was wearing some kind of a nightie, slightly see through. We were way high up in the Bronx, it was kind of rural, and there were no cabs. We kept walking. Mary didn't even have her phone with her and I was starting to get concerned she wouldn't be able to find her way back to Beth's.

Then down to the left (we were on an elevated section of road) I saw Katherine Davis. I don't remember talking to her but one way or another she lent Mary a kind of shiny gold jacket, so at least I didn't have to worry about Mary walking around half naked and perhaps catching a cold. We weren't getting anywhere closer to where I needed to go and it was increasingly clear I wasn't going to get to my meeting with C. on time. Which made me feel very guilty.

Then my alarm went off.

Given that C. died of cancer in 2024 and we/Mary had our first run in with cancer this year too, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that there's a lot of mortality being meditated upon here. 

Sorry to burden you with my dreams but it is, after all, my blog.

Boxed in by the day

With the holidays fast approaching, it's one of those Sundays that feels more like a Monday. Today I need to.

1. Get the leaves off the roof (with Mary)
2. Submit my Obamacare application for 2025, since I know that next weekend Natalie and Graham will be around and it will be even worse than this weekend and I'm sure not going to let this slide towards the last weekends of the annual enrollment period
3. Play a league tennis match in the afternoon against Eamonn, who smoked me in the spring
4. Get to the pet store for food for Leon (don't ask why I will draw this straw)
5. Hit my 500 daily pont quoate on DuoLingo

I apologize for laying down what is essentially a task list. But all this makes it feel an awful lot liek a work day.

This after going to Snapper Hackney's memorial service yesterday. I'm glad I went. It was another reminder of just how much a segregated school within a school I was in when I was younger. As I'm sure I said before, I knew the black guys at some very superficial level through trying (with varying, mostly low levels of success) to play basketball but really knew almost none of the black women. The problem by now is that the black guys are dying at younger ages than the black women (Snapper, Chris Tate, Freddy, Alton and Elton Harris, Russell Dula, Ivan McClam, Harry Alston, to name a few that come to mind off the top of my head). The women are hanging on.

It was a very traditional black southern Gospel service. I won't expand deeply on that, save to say there were many moments where I -- and even Lisa and Amy -- didn't know just what to do (Ellen Weaver gave us some guidance at one crucial moment). My overarching impression was that there were a lot more people I knew there from high school than I'm used to seeing at funerals and that what remains of the Chapel Hill African-American community seems admirably tight.

The first thing

My pre-breakfast routines are pretty well-formed and consistent. I won't belabor you with all the detail, but it all culminates in a period of reading on the couch with Leon sitting to my left and a cup of coffee on the table to my right. There were times when Rascal sat to my right, and in the last few months of her life she took to perching behind my head and, at times, climbing down onto my shoulder.

What remains constant is the reading. I reserve this time for very long view reading. For a while it was Al Anon daily readers, followed by a variety of stoics, rabbis, neo-Hindu/meditation gurus, and then the Bible. The Good Book had me feeling I had maxed out on expressly spiritual reading, and my eye was caught by Annie Proulx's Fen, Bog & Swamp, which Natalie had picked up for Mary for her birthday to help her dig deeper into the thought process around her Gamelands series. So I set to it.

This is a very good book, not unlike McPhee, but somewhat less distracted, a testimony to what a lifetime concentrated on reading, reflecting and recording can create. I will keep going.

The story of abuelita

There were a number of shows going on at the Center for Documentary Studies the other day when Mary's was opening. I could have done a better job perusing them, but was caught up with a combination of hosting/talking to friends who showed up (thanks to all of you!) and also reverting to my graduate school days and feasting on the food that was brought. Somehow even after all these years away from grad school the economizer in me cannot resist the clarion call of free food, particularly when it includes a rather serviceable (if surprising) mac and cheese, as Thursday night's spread did.

In the kitchen there was an installation called "my grandmother's kitchen." A very nice young Latina (she preferred Latina with an a to Latinx) woman had decked the kitchen out with a wide range of decorations and foodstuffs to recreate the atmosphere of her grandmother's kitchen back in Texas. We talked for a while about a range of stuff, including baked goods. I told her I had never settled on a preferred item in Mexican bakeries (my polite way of saying I had never been impressed with anything in them) and asked her what her go-to was. She indicated a cinnamony brown item and said it was particularly good with coffee with a little whiskey in it. I took one of those home and toasted it for breakfast the next day. It was fine with a little butter on it.

After most everyone had left, Mary went in and talked to her. In short order Mary heard the story of her grandmother or perhaps great-grandmother, whose picture was on the fridge. Apparently she had been abducted by a white guy and forced to bear his children. When she learned that this wasn't the first time he had done this, and that he had killed her predecessors, she was fortunate to get away.

It seems to me that the moral to my story here is that, instead of pumping her for info about baked goods and snacks (she told me other stuff) I might have asked her about her installation as a whole, or noticed the pictures of the family members on the fridge and asked about them. Then she might have told her story. 

Reversals of fortune

Veritable oceans of ink have been spent speculating on how we got to a reelection of Trump. One of the favored theories is that it was the inflation that consumers suffered through that brought Biden down, the proverbial "price of eggs." Inflation was undoubtedly a major cause, but it's not because it was so bad. Our brief period of pretty bad inflation fairly pales in comparison to real instances of inflation, like Argentina's for much of the last few decades, or Venezuela's, or Rhodesia's, or Weimar Germany's. Or even our own inflation through the 70s and into the 80s.

The problem was to not so much the inflation under Biden as such but the presence of meaningful inflation at all after the end of the "Great Moderation," the period of successful central banking ushered in by Paul Volcker after his appointment by Carter, carried forward by Greenspan (the financial crisis notwithstanding) and his successors Bernanke, Yellen and Powell. People have been spoiled by stable prices and don't know how to think about or cope with inflation. 

In his 1965 classic The Anatomy of Revolutions, which looked at the American, French, Russian and Chinese revolutions, Crane Brinton pointed out that revolutions don't start because things are really bad, but when things have been pretty good and then do downhill a little. People unaccustomed to adversity get riled up and go around a break things. Compound generalized displeasure with a pressure cooker of social media and you have a recipe for disaster. And here we are.

All I can say is thank God the central bankers were able to keep us clear of the deflationary threat that hung over our heads coming out of the financial crisis. If you think inflation is bad, try a few years of deflation and then get back to me.

The damned leaves

They just keep coming. There's no escaping the fact that I'm gonna have to get up on the roof and push the ones up there down by this weekend. In fact, with rain approaching tomorrow, I should probably do it today.

The last place I usually attend to is the steps coming down to our front door. Relatively few people ever come there, mostly just deliveries. But that's why I should clear them.

A few weeks ago when our soccer team was announced as inductees to the CHHS Athletic Hall of Fame, a co-inductee was John J. '82, who starred for our football team as a running back. John told me he's been living in Carrboro all these years and working for UPS. He also recited the litany of injuries he's suffered over these years, knee, elbow... Obviously a bunch of wet leaves don't help with that.

Still obviously numb

Like a black hole, the question of Trump's victory and its implications continues to suck in all too much of the world's energy, including my own. This will go on for a long time. Democrats do need to transition from thinking not just about how we got things wrong and what we did wrong to how we are wrong. That's a factor.

But we're not and have not been wrong about everything. One interesting thing here is how close the election actually was. As the California votes continue to come back Trump's lead in the popular vote continues to narrow. It's now at just about 2% and could settle much closer to 1.5%. Moreover, with a shift of around 250k votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania Kamala could have won without the popular vote. This was closer than we all thought. Trump's mandate is not as thumping as it has been made out to be.

Though he did win and perhaps his voters will back off on their attacks on the election integrity. That would be a win for all of us.

Here in our home, we are also still processing the loss of our cat Rascal, though ironically Leon seems the least affected by it. But what do we know about his internal state? Cats are not great communicators. By now we have returned all the rugs to the main part of the house and we are allowing Leon to roam freely. Some are more free, even as others have died.

The economy, stupid

Today in the Journal there's an article about how inflation was the number one issue on voters' minds. Some thoughts on this.

1. From the very beginning Biden and Kamala's line of reasoning and attack on inflation was stupid. They blamed greedy corporations and promised to crack down on them. Idiocy. Companies need to pass their costs through to customers to stay in business. Consumers can then make consumption choices. Why don't we trust the populace to be more intelligent and say "we printed more money during the pandemic. It's supply and demand. Supply creates demand and raises prices. We couldn't reduce supply through taxes so high supply created demand." Yes it's complicated but we have to let people think for themselves if we want them to be intelligent. 
   
   Oh yeah, on the labor supply side immigration helped bring inflation down. Particularly when we lost >0.4% of the population to COVID.
   
   
2.  One of the people in the Journal article was a mid-American hairstylist who wouldn't pass higher costs through to her customers out of consideration for how hard things are for them. Which is lovely from the community standpoint. But shitty business. Then it turns out her husband is a YouTube content creator who home schools their two kids. And they wonder why they can't buy a house. 
   
   Often the cultural right will criticize kids for taking impractical courses of study like Women's Studies, English, blah blah blah and then complaining they can't pay the bills. There is some substance to the critique that the public purse shouldn't have to subsidize that. Though to restrict support would restrict these areas of study only to rich kids. 
   
   But nor should some home-schooling YouTuber expect a bail out.
   
   
3. Time is running short so I need to hustle but one more couple in the Journal article were Northern NJ folks with low 6-figure jobs who could only afford one kid. So they voted for Trump. I am going out on a limb here but I wonder if part of what's going on here is that as progressively more of the profits in America are flowing in to the mega tech companies (including Musk, the great proponent of baby birthing) that other companies are less able to compensate people. This is complete speculation but I wonder...
   
   

Butterflies

It would just be dishonest of me to fail to note that today is an anxious day. The polls have led us to feel good about Josh's chances, though I have worn my knuckles out knocking on wood.

But the fact that the world-historical monumental jackass Trump is as close as he is to returning to the White House fills me with shame. How do I live in a country, nay a world, where something like 50% of the population thinks that's OK. Where people are so susceptible to disinformation that they will believe anything he says, seemingly reading directly off a teleprompter put there by the GRU.

Kamala Harris is far from perfect. Joe Biden's belated dropping out the the race and the backroom way in which we elevated her to the top of the ticket was not the greatest, though admittedly it spared us the necessity of going through a gut-wrenching set of debates where Democrats attacked each other viciously. But nor is she horrible. We can work with her and trust her to acquit the office honorably. If she is elected, she will need to up her game to act as a meaningful counterweight to Xi and Putin on the world stage, and she will need allies of greater stature and weight than are on offer at present.  

Then there's the issue of Michelle Morrow and Mo Green. Fingers crossed.