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.

Rascal moves on

I have been remiss this week in failing to note the passing of our cat Rascal. We got her and her "brother" Leon from the Goat House Refuge down by Pittsboro not too long after coming to NC, somewhere around 2009-10. 

She was always the more social of the two. So much so, in fact, that she was known to upstage even Josh. One time at a fundraiser at our house he was standing on the stairs, addressing the assembled crowd, while Rascal went back and forth along the bannister, pretty effectively upstaging him. Thankfully it did no harm to him politically.

She was always happy to be petted, especially if you would scratch her haunches. She loved in particular to perch on the pillows on the back of our couches when we were watching something or reading. Sometimes, in fact, she was even willing to play the role of pillow herself, letting me put the entire weight of my head back on her while I watched TV. That was pretty awesome. She loved to hop into any box that crossed her path and also bags, if they were laying on their side. She also had this adorable way of hanging a leg or two off of a couch or table, as in this classic photo where a sleeping Graham unconsciouly pays tribute to her.

In her last few months things went downhill. She lost more than half her body weight. She started leaving various types of presents around the house, often on the rugs or couches, so we swathed the couches in blankets and towels. It was a bit of a pain for us but we had no indication that she was in pain. We were happy to let her live out her days as long as made sense. She is missed.

The thin line between small talk and oversharing

On the way back from Cleveland today I was picked up at my hotel at 5:15 for a 7am flight. Actually the driver was early, so it may have been 5:10.

A very nice guy, to be sure. But super chatty. When I told him I was from NC he paused and then was telling me about a trip he had taken to an AA convention in Myrtle Beach with a friend who is a recovering alcoholic. I told him I was in AA. He was quiet for a little while then he recounted about how awesome the lazy river was at a neighboring hotel. "It was much better than the one at our hotel, so we snuck in over there." Then he started telling me about the guy who made the omelets at his hotel, who was named Omelet Ray for his complete mastery of his craft: "I'm pretty simple, I just like bacon, sausage and cheese," he told me. 

It was like this pretty much the whole way to the hotel, just a ton of detail. Oversharing.

Which made me wonder. Am I like that? When does one reach the edge of making light chit chat to pass the time and venture into the realm of inane and excessive detail?

Certainly the night before at dinner with four members of the firm that was courting us only the CEO had much of a gift for small talk. I did have to wade in with a story or two, lest the conversation should die out.

And I had to pick the apps and the sides since, for some reason, everybody else was afraid to make suggestions. I picked pretty well.

Rolling up the trades and hollowing out towns

Maybe it's because I'm descended from small-town businesspeople, but it has long struck me that one of the ur-scenes of the disconnectednes and anomie that afflicts small towns is the destruction of so many local businesses by chains of everything. I know I'm not alone in this observation, I don't make a claim to any great originality here.

Which is why it's so wonderful to walk into a place like Dick's Hot Dog Stand in Wilson, which is right next door to the Wilson County Democratic Party HQ, where we went to canvass on Saturday. Open since 1921, it looked awesome. I was very sad to have eaten a turkey and swiss in the car on the way down.

But I digress. It had long seemed to me that the trades (plumbing, HVAC, electricians, etc) were one of the few places where it was still possible to start and run a good solid small town business. So it was with some sadness that I read an article in the Journal about how the trades are being consolidated and rolled up by private equity companies. 

Now the management consultant in me sees how this could happen, how one could get economies of scale in purchasing, one could define fairly standard practices not just for the actual carrying out of tasks on sight but of training, etc. I can also see how the corporatization of the trades could lead to better opportunities for classes of people largely shut out of them now.

But I also see a loss of some pretty well-hewn pathways to independence for a class of people who like to work locally and in community and build relationships. Yes you put money in the hands of existing tradespeople when they monetize upon exit. But another leg of the the small-town table could be kicked out from under it and a rare path to prosperity and independence for less academic types could dead end into the brick wall of The Corporation.

ISP Shabbos

Thinking about the apparent disconnectedness of neighborhoods like the ones we've been visiting (not all of them, mind you. When I canvassed in Stem I saw a fair amount of porch-sitting and driveway hanging out. Also a decent number of walkers and hedge trimmers in Fuquay Varina) it occurs to me that much of it probably derives from people isolating around their screens of choice. One remedy for this would be for internet service providers and cell companies to shut off service for a period, like parents often do around bedtime to make kids unplug and sleep. Of course, by now too many services run over the internet and cell networks ("I've fallen and I can't get up!") so I know this can't happen. But one way or another forcing people to get off their screens could be helpful.

Disinformation aside, all that I have seen from Western NC in the aftermath of Helene indicates that people have been very generous and neighbor-oriented without regard for political or whatever affiliation. This seems to be more or less the rule after natural disasters when modern communications are challenged. People recoonnect and help each other.

If we could manufacture that condition without endangering people, it would be great.

On integration and ZIP codes

On Sunday we canvassed in Willow Spring (or is it Springs?), NC. As had been the case in nearby Fuquay-Varina a couple of weeks back and also Roxboro, Stem, Butner, basically all the places we've canvassed this year, we were impressed with how integrated the neighborhoods were. Not so many Asians as Chapel Hill, but a broad range of white, black and hispanic people living next door to one another. Trump flags and Kamala signs here and there.

And then it occurred to me: it's not so much that these places are exceptionally well integrated so much as that Chapel Hill and the affluent ZIP codes where I spend my time are particularly segregated just by way of price.

Don't get me wrong, the subdivisions we've been in haven't been all that cheap. Houses in the one we visited Sunday were 10-12 years old and were valued by Zillow at $350k-$500k for 2500-3000 square feet. That's a lot more house than you can get for that money here in Chapel Hill.

So basically it would appear that we are more outliers than the places we are visiting.

I will say that the places we go have been generally pretty low on street life. Sunday was a beautiful day, temps around 70-72. We saw one kid out on a bike and two people out walking. They were visiting from Jamaica. A couple of guys working in garages on projects. Otherwise people were indoors or perhaps in back yards. Which is a shame. I suspect it's mostly because people are glued to one kind of screen or another, but that's bad.

Holes in the self

A few weeks ago at our 40th high school reunion my hopes of having at least a half-way decent conversation with the girl (now woman) I had an unrequited crush on back at the day were cruelly dashed. Yeah I stood around in clumps with her but and we exchanged witticisms but I had hoped to chat a little and bask in the glory of her attention at least momentarily. One time I sat down next to her (again in a clump of folx) and she sprung up immediately and said "I need to go talk to Nik, I haven't connected with him." I assume she meant Niklaus. I get that. Who doesn't love Niklaus.

Then the other day I was at the polls and a woman I had served with on a board was there with her husband. We had worked together pretty closely for years on important stuff. After we voted I hoped to catch up a little but she was immediately off doing other stuff around the church, where she's also on the board. I get that she is a pretty high octane WASP doer at all times, but it felt in the moment like she was avoiding me.

The problem is of course me. Part of me still just wants everybody to like me which is just ridiculous, counter productive and silly. At least you, my reader, take the time to stop by the blog and subject yourself to whatever I serve up, and for this I am grateful.

Gotta get organized to go canvass in Fuquay Varina now. 16 days till election day. GOTV time.

Third-Rate Romance

Really I just want to bookmark and share this video. Just perfect. Didn't know this song before but I really like this performance. I am on record as a Josh Turner fan already. Carson is also always solid but this is the first I've seen of his little brother Skylar, who I think stars here.

Canvassing on

By now I -- mostly with Mary -- have knocked on maybe 175 doors and talked to 40-50 voters about the upcoming election. In the towns of Butner, Stem, Rocky Mount, Fuquay-Varina, and Roxboro. Everyone is following the top of the ticket of course and many people are aware of Josh and Mark Robinson. In addition to advocating for the state legislative candidates for whom we're nominally canvassing (which have included Bryan Cohn, Terrence Everitt, Lorenza Wilkins, James Mercer, Lisa Grafstein and Safiyah Jackson) we're making sure people are aware of the Mo Green-Michelle Morrow race for Superintendent of Public Instruction. For those of you who haven't been following that, we have Mo Green -- who did a great job running NC's 3rd largest district (Guilford County) vs. Michelle Morrow, who has no experience in education, said that Obama should be executed on pay per view, that Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act and put the Constitution to the side around January 6, and other just flat out crazy shit.

We are also trying to get people to understand what it means for a party to have a supermajority in the state legislature so that they can always override the Governor's veto. That Phil Berger is really a huge factor in their life right now, even though they've never heard of him.

It's a lot to get through. But we are headed back out Sunday. I feel a little slack to not be headed out both days but some concessions must be made to self care

Cornbread and eggs

I made some cornbread the other night to accompany some bbq (pretty good) and slaw (excellent) we picked up at the store in Hurdle Mills on the way back from Roxboro. Great store. Always worth stopping in.

It wasn't the best cornbread ever, for whatever reason, but likely cuz it was a little low on salt. Yesterday evening I crumbled some up and threw it into the mediocre chicken chili Mary had gotten from Trader Joe's. Both of them improved. It got me thinking about how to incorporate old cornbread into stuff, like for instance scrambled eggs. It seems like a very natural combo -- especially since Mexicans have been making Chilaquiles for a long time with much success. The internet confirmed I wasn't the first to think of it.

So this morning I tried it, throwing in a little cheddar as an insurance policy then squirting a little salsa verde on there for spice. I approve this message. It also has me thinking more expansively about how to do things like make a spoonbread loaded with some veggies, cheese and perhaps even bacon as a dinner main course. I suspect that the internet will have gotten there first. 

As a bonus, I was thinking about how the cornbread in chili was a lot like cowboy food and it took me back to this great scene from the 2009 documentary Sweetgrass, one of the more singular movies ever.

The End

I finally made it to the end of the Bible today. I just looked back at the blog and see that I have been at it for more than two years, so I'm happy to have gotten past this initial phase of engagement with the text. The next phase will certainly be a little time away.

But before I move on let me make a few comments about Revelations. I was a little anxious about this book, mostly based on my well-documented fear of horror films, many of whom draw inspiration from this last book of the Bible. But when I got to it I found that what it reminded me of more than anything was watching The Avengers with Graham. As with the super heroes series, Revelations alternates between seeming like the coast is clear and the second coming about to commence before some other plague or demon beast swoops in and a bunch more people get carried off into hellfire. Lather, rinse, repeat. Just like in the Old Testament how it seems like everyone's in good shape for a while then they drift back to those damned hill shrines to those pesky other gods. Even at the very end there's a warning about the sanctity of the text itself: if anyone adds to the holy writ, they will be damned. Same thing if anyone takes away from it. Then it ends on an up note.

I will confess that all through the Bible it has been difficult to keep my attention on the text. I start to reading, then drift off. I suspect that is from a childhood of going to church and then ignoring what is going on up front, whatever the preacher or whoever is saying or reading, while looking at the stained glass and calmly reviewing the events of the week. Not as a conscious decision, mind you. Just because that's how it works for me. I got the main points, for the most part.

I am not entirely done with the Bible. It's kind of a phenomenon. But I will take some time off.

Brief hiatus

These have been some busy weeks. Lots of client meetings during the week followed by weekends of canvassing and then getting together with folks in this context and that. All good, but a lot, not leaving a lot of time or energy to reflect and write.

This weekend Mary and I headed up to Roxboro, always a favorite destination since it's where my mom is from and where I went to visit my grandparents back in the day. 

Roxboro is looking a little bit up. Businesses continue to invest in and revivify Main Street, though there's still work to do. 

We canvassed a small neighborhood back behind the Food Lion, with a mix of newer and older, smallish houses that per Zillow trade in the $200k-$250k range. As one would predict, there was a mix of folx back in there. Some Trump signs but also a mix of Black people and recent transplants from Durham, Ohio and elsewhere. Solid D houses. One guy had very clearly posted No Trespassing signs but he was home and when we knocked he invited us in and said that yes, he'd very much like a ride to the polls.

A good solid day. 

Ghosted by a child

Graham and I have been having weekly check in calls about his search for an internship for next summer. This last week I was trying to nudge him on the importance of having informational interviews and talking to people about their jobs, their industries, their career paths -- as compared to the general futility of firing off resumes to random megacorporations across their career web sites -- and I visibly upset him. So much so that we needed to cut the call short.

I immediately apologized, but he didn't respond for 24 hours or so. With Graham it's never 100% clear if he is intentionally ghosting me or whether he just didn't see the text (as he sometimes claims, perhaps plausibly). But I know I experienced it as being cut off, which saddened me tremendously. The last thing we ever want as parents is to upset our kids. There are moments to administer some tough love, and I guess that job and career search is a domain in which some non-intuitive learnings need to be conveyed, but it doesn't need to be in a way that upsets our kids.

I know of parents who have been flat out cut off by their kids, one of them because of their son's borderline psychotic girlfriend. Somehow they have been able to carry on with their lives. Ultimately one has to realize that one does the best that one can, is not in control of other people and that time heals most wounds. But it's hard. 

The Big 2-0!

And so, as if in the blink of an eye, this blog is all grown up and ready to set off on its own in the world. Twenty years old.

I had a nightmare last night. Trump carried Massachusetts on the way to victory. What the actual fuck? Praise the lord I woke up, and that Mary and I head off to Fuquay-Varina under the auspices of County to County to knock on doors for NC State Senator Lisa Grafstein and Safiyah Jackson, who is running for the first time for NC's House. Aside from the gubernatorial contest everything is rather tight here in NC. Everything we can do helps.

I may have touted him before, but for me right now the artist of the year title goes to this Jesse Welles kid from Arkansas. He cranks out a fresh song every few days. Not every one shimmers with brilliance, but none suck and many of them grow on me. The one below is seasonally (and life stage) appropriate and approved for all audiences.

Thanks so much to all my regular readers. You know who you are and I think I do. I appreciate you.

My blog, venerable yet vulnerable

As we shall soon see, my blog has gotten rather long in the tooth. Last night I was looking for a specific post and the whole thing refused to load and for a moment I was filled with fear. Has Google stopped supporting this platform? You can see how it easily might. I sincerely doubt it's a big money-spinner.

Many years ago a friend and reader ran a script and backed the blog up and sent me the file. Which I of course lost. Yesterday I began to reflect on what would be lost if the Grouse disappears. From the perspective of discourse, not so much. Anything I've written here about some abstract topic can either be recaptured elsewhere and/or lingers somewhere in the back of my brain or just isn't that important.

But the specifics of my kids' lives, the notes on their early childhood, those remain rich and irreplaceable veins of gold, if only for me and (if she ever bothered to look at my blog) Mary. So I need to back it up later today, after I get done with work. 

I can't look away

It is very hard for me to consistently tear my eyes away from the images of the destruction in the NC mountains. We were just there in late July/August. I love it out there. 

A couple of thoughts. I am disproportionately swayed by the fact that it is NC. Cross the boarder into South Carolina and -- even though I have friends there -- I am less tied to and influenced by it. This is nothing short of stupid, silly and shameful, yet it remains true.

I am a little ashamed as well that, as was the case with 9/11, I don't have a strong instinct to rush to the scene and help. I have given money a couple of times, to MANNA Foodbank of Asheville, which is hard at work distributing food despite the fact that its headquarters were severly damaged, and to the Governor's Recovery taskforce through United Way (can't find link), but I don't have an urge to run down there because my skill sets aren't well-suited for it. I've never used a chainsaw. I can't build stuff. Almost undoubtedly the highest and best use of my efforts are to stay here and send support, but I'm not proud of that, for some reason.

Closing notes on Isaacson on Musk

For some reason I read to the end of Walter Isaacson's bio of Musk. I guess because my brother-in-law Rob liked it and I'm curious why, because Musk seems so much like the kind of guy Rob would hate.

Musk no doubt impresses with his ability to get stuff done, including big stuff. He has a willful disregard for all norms, rules, laws, anything that would hold him back. He veritably incarnates the marriage of intellect and testosterone. Not generally a good thing.  

Though Musk has indeed made the electric car a thing through his manic mad-dash balls to the wall style of leadership, and has by similar means created in SpaceX a really impressive company, the big question is whether one can lead like that in a way that could save humanity's tenure on earth, honestly a much more important goal than shepherding some small number of us to Mars, the thing that really makes Musk's dick hard. Once there, after all, what will we be doing other than scratching out survival? I am reminded of William Shatner's quote about actually being in space instead of, like Troy McLure, playing it on TV: "When I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold ... all I saw was death... I saw a cold, black emptiness."

Instead of manic turbo-charged project managers like Trump, we need leaders who can calm us down and focus on preserving what we have. I refuse to concede that it is too late, if only because that concession would represent our ultimate failure.

Don't read this book. 

The sadness of the hills

Watching the vidoes and pictures from western North Carolina in the aftermath of Helene fills me with sadness not just on account of the harsh reality of climate change but also because it strikes a region that will likely be carried by an asshole of world-historical proportions, a man so idiotic that he would debase the office of the Presidency mocking an autistic Swedish teenager. Yes Greta Thunberg is pretty extreme, but not without cause. 

I will continue to manage down my meat and petro-fuel consumption.

One wonders if the slowly-festering crisis in home insurance will eventually be the thing that wakes the Right up to what is going on. Kyla Scanlon lays it out well here. It's probably reasonable to think of this crisis as a component of the carbon tax we've never been able to push through legislatively.

Public and private spending, and the election

I was thinking of writing on a more refined topic around the question of public and private goods but started looking into the question of government spending as a % of GDP. There are lots of ways to slice and dice the question, it's not simple. I haven't had (and will unlikely soon have) opportunity to kick the tires of the graph below, taken from Wikipedia, but it accords with what I read and see elsewhere. Click on the image to expand and see details if you need to.

Right now it feels like that government's role in the overall economy, generally, is at a pretty high level historically. Americans have tended to want to trim it down. Which is why we have tended to have alternating regimes of Democrats who build it up (perhaps excessively), followed by Republicans who tear it down (perhaps excessively). 33% seems to be a rough equilibrium point around which we oscillate.

Right now lots of Republicans seem to be feeling this and are willing to tolerate Trump's excesses to do some tearing down. Democrats ignore this tendency at their peril. 

The problem is, of course, that the existential problems we face (global warming, an unstable geopolitical situation, populism) call for steady-handed leadership and significant public expenditures. Democrats need to make this case rather than run around trying to promise shit to people that we can't deliver. Unfortunately, taxes need to rise even for people with incomes around $200k and spending needs to fall. The upper middle class needs to participate. It has the means, just not the will.

Once more trained by pets

When pets die people post pictures of them on their social networks of choice containing pious testimonials about the love and joy the little animals had brought to them and their families. All true. We love our two cats, Rascal and Leon, and will be very sad when they are gone.

That said, the process of caretaking their later years is less rosy-tinted. We have been covering our couches in blankets and towels for what seems like years now to protect them against various cat emissions. We have limited the cats to the public part of the house, barring entry to the bedrooms, after a couple of poops in rapid succession on a rug in Graham's room. The rug in our rec room came up months ago after a couple of incidents. And now the one in our dining room is next. Mary had said we should take it up a couple of days ago but I resisted. Then I woke up today with not one but two little gifts left for us on the rug. Mary was not happy with me and my resistence, to say the least, and the terrible part of it is that she was (sigh) right.

This will likely provide Mary with another excuse to not have guests over.

Earlier in life I had thought about how having pets and needing to feed them, walk them, clean up poop, come home early, prepared young people for parenthood. Now I am seeing that having them later in life trains us to take care of our spouses as we move towards the exit.

Stem, NC

With Mary out of town with friends, I canvassed solo yesterday for Brian Cohn for NC House and Terrence Everitt for NC Senate in the town of Stem, NC. Home to all of 960 residents, Wikipedia tells me that Stem is famous for having its high school basketball team beat UNC sometime in the 30s when they went down to Chapel Hill as spectators but then the opponent, maybe Davidson, was unable to get there because of snow. So the boys from Stem (including apparently a 22-year old ringer) took on the Tar Heels and won.

There is no official record of this having happened. Certainly the university did not send its crack archivists to ensure that the memory of this was preserved for all of eternity.

Honestly I read about this when I got home but I really wish I had known about it so I could have asked some of the older people about it, especially the old white guy who was offended that I had made him interrupt his Sunday afternoon NFL watching just so he could slough off an annoying Democrat. Then again, that guy had no interest in discussing the fact that the road that he lived on was named after his family, and he lingered at the door and watched as I got in my Prius and drove off, so he might no have been drawn out by any topic of conversation whatsoever.

Other than that, amongst the 960 residents of Stem were a surprising assortment of different folx, including transplanted Yankees. One woman was from Nutley, NJ. Her daughter had worked for Trump and she swore he was a good man who cared about people, having been a "good husband to three women," despite cheating on them. Beyond that she was very open to hearing about Democratic candidates and certainly wasn't going to vote for Mark Robinson. Really a lovely woman in her own way.

Then there was the Jehovah's Witness who summed up their theology as not even trying because the Lord would sort it all out in the end. An interesting spin on the school of though ushered in first by Parmenides, that since all is One change is impossible.

Distance and proximity in syntax processing

It is interesting that I can quite easily assimilate how radically Japanese syntax differs from English syntax. At least at the elementary level where I am operating, verbs always go at the end of the sentence  (with or without an interrogative particle), temporal adverbs and/or statements go at the beginning, descriptive adverbial phrases in the middle, direct objects come right before the verb.

By contrast, differences between German syntax and English are much harder. Remembering to put temporal adverbs right after the verb, before indirect and/or direct objects, for example, takes a lot of focus. Also putting verbs at the end of dependent clauses, though that was eased back in the day by learning to sing the prepositions that make clauses dependent (aus, ausser, bei, mit, nach, zeit, von, zu) to the tune of the Blue Danube. Unfortunately, DuoLingo doesn't offer that kind of tip.

Almost certainly, accepting the difference of German syntax takes much more effort than that of Japanese because my native English syntactical instincts are butting their little heads in all the time when I'm dealing with German. Some little voice in there is saying "I got this" when in fact I don't.

Dying in foreign wars or not

On the one hand, it is right that lower income kids have disproportionately borne the brunt of death and and injury in foreign wars and that should be acknowledged and honored. I at times think that, just as Israel's Supreme Court has ruled that the ultra-orthodox Haredim should no longer be allowed not to be conscripted, that it might make sense for America's jeunesse doree to be subject to some sort of mandatory national service, up to and including military service, to bridge the gulf between the privileged and the less so.

On the other hand, it is the network of international trade, diplomacy and statecraft driven by the so-called "global elite" which have managed down the incidence of great power conflict since 1945 but really since 1989 and which have decreased the rates at which anyone has died at all in foreign wars.* This should be recognized, acknowledged and honored as well. 

And also the progress in medicine and battlefield medicine in particular, which have been made possible by the growth of science, medical schools, nursing schools, and of course dedicated and selfless medical personnel who serve in the military. I think it is safe to say that 95% of this is funded by taxpayer dollars (leaving out something for privately-funded pharma advances).

The fact is, that though in the recent decades of "forever wars" military service has been the domain of lower-income and less-educated Americans, very few people have died in these wars. 

(Source: Statista)

Yes there has been a lot of trauma too and a lot of mental health issues and later deaths by opioids coming out of the wars, but overall the years of global order following the collapse of the Soviet Union captained by the dreaded "global elite" and subtended by international organizations aiming at rules-based governance have been relatively safe ones in which to live. So I'm not sure how much if anything needs to change.

The more recent disintegration of any pretense of abiding by a rules- and norms-based order in favor of an entirely "might makes right" world does neither look good nor bodes well. 

* I highly recommend Stephen Pinker's 2017 TED Talk that maps progress on the declining probability of men dying at the hands of other men in war or crime.

Open windows

In the spring we are buffeted by pollen so it's hard to leave our windows open very much, so fall is the true time for living with windows open. It was my dad who inveighed about the wickedness of a world in which office and hotel buildings didn't let one open windows and let in fresh air, and as with many things he was not altogether wrong, he just couldn't fucking shut up about it and stop insisting on being the center of attention all the time, the proverbial smartest guy in the room, which made him difficult to take in any thing except the most measured of doses.

Speaking of which, I looked at the biography of Musk yesterday and decided I needed a little break from that motherfucker and his ilk. Not that we are not reminded of their presence constantly in the media daily. So I decided to take up One Man's Meat, a volume of essays by EB White from the late 30s. My friend Hilary had been reminded of it by reading my blog and it has been in the stack on my bedside table. I've dipped into it but never really caught White's groove, but I stdarted to last night. I'm sure I'll be coming back to it because the article I was reading before I turned off the light was about a visit to the Methodist camp near White's farm in Brooklyn, Maine from one Francis Townsend, whose name rang a bell though I wasn't sure why. Turns out he was one of the driving forces behind the development of Social Security. 

But let me return for a second to Musk. One of his principles in his catechism for product design and manufacturing process design is that every product requirement ("must be able to withstand support 2,000 pounds of pressure" or whatever) should be associated with a name. So that each requirement can be ruthlessly and continually interrogated so that things can be done and made in as efficient a way as possible. He has had results, we must credit him with that. 

By contrast, I read this WaPo article about the guy who runs the nation's military cemetaries and has made them the organization with the highest customer satisfaction rating of any in America. I could say his name but that's not the point. He's not about that. Quite the contrary. He considers it an accomplishment when the origins of the best practices of his organization become so integrated into his organization's way of doing things are forgotten. This, my friends, is a leader. 

Re-equilibrating

60% done now with my first five-day week of work in a month or so. I think I will survive, if only just barely. Beginning to catch up on the Economist issues that came while I was away.

500 points a day on Duolingo has proven to be a reasonable and sustainable level. It works out to 20-25 minutes and keeps me in the Diamond League, where my vanity commands me to stay. I have decided to stop alternating weeks of Japanese with Italian and German and just focus on Japanese for the time being so as to drill the syntax and also the characters properly into my brain. It seems to be going well.

September always presents challenges since it presents us not only with the kickoff of the academic and social years but also but Mary and Graham's birthdays and the attendant gathering organization. Not to mention election season and a 40th high school reunion. For another year I fear it will be the guys' Bulls game which will suffer.

Plus our cats just continue to get older. I will spare you the details.

Life

Turning the page on summer

This morning it was cool enough that, when I came out onto the porch to eat my pancakes a little after 9, I had to switch out my slides for slippers, despite the fact that I was already operating in Danish tourist mode and had socks on under the slides. And had on sweatpants and also one of the classic Be Loud! Sophie long-sleeve Tshirts that have been my constant companions since the onset of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, Natalie came home yesterday for the first time since Christmas, having moved from Juneau to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a week or so back. After a late summer dinner on the porch, we watched The Meyerowitz Stories on TV, a movie Mary and I had never heard of despite its star-studded cast (Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler) and the fact that it's a conscious throwback to the films of the 70s-80s which document the emotional travails of realish people and their families. Not unlike The Holdovers. More of this.

All systems go! 

Breeding Musks

Returning to my discussion of Musk and Isaacson's book about him, we learn a lot about how Musk thinks people should have more kids, and in particular intelligent people, like Musk. At one point in time a child Musk and his rock and roll on again off again girlfriend Grimes are having a child carried by a surrogate who was in the hospital at the same time at the same time Shivon Zilis, an executive at Neuralink (a Musk company), was having twins using some of Musk's sperm. Musk didn't bother telling Grimes about that. Zilis, a Yale grad and mover and shaker venture capitalist before being inveigled into Musk's orbit.

I'm sorry, but all this genius mating with genius stuff smacks of micro scale eugenics, I gotta call a spade a spade. As if our society weren't already adequately set up for "assortative mating" which puts the rich and smart together to mate. It surely hasn't solved our problems.

Overall Musk seems to want to breed superkids so that we can go to Mars to get away with the destruction we have wrought here on Earth. I think it would be a better plan to try to realize the potential in normal kids, most of whom have a kernel of genius somewhere in there if it can only be brought to light, to do a better job here on earth. I think it's a much better bet.

Learning blocks

Some of the time and energy that used to go to my blog continues to be siphoned off by Duolingo. I am of mixed mind about whether that's good or bad.

Of the three languages on which I'm rotating weeks -- Italian and German being the others -- Japanese is by far the biggest lift, and therefore the one that's of clearest value. With Japanese Duolingo's strictly usage-based model shows weaknesses, at least for me, and in the way I'm going about this process. Since it never lines up logical categories (numbers, family members, colors) and teaches you them together, they don't stick that well in memory. I'm sure it would be better if I were to just stay with Japanese week after week, but I don't. Probably I should suspend my practice of alternate weeks and hunker down on Japanese.

But sometimes one needs an Italian vacation. 

Stump speeches and the one and the many

Went out to a political event yesterday evening and heard a friend give his stump speech. I had been surprised at another candidate's event a month or so back when someone said my friend was a great public servant but not a great candidate because he didn't "connect" with voters. 

It's hard to give the same speech night after night and keep it fresh. One thing which struck me last night was the absence of a solid micro-macro tie in. A staple to this kind of speaking (also sermons) is the anecdote about one individual which is extrapolated to the big theme. This makes the whole thing relatable for the listener. I would think that varying that individual from day to day or perhaps week to week or else month to month, would help keep the whole thing fresh. "Yesterday in Kinston I was talking to a young man who said that blah blah blah, and it reminded me..."

I know this has got to be hard, perhaps nigh onto impossible when you are racing from event to event. But that's what struck me. I didn't hear it. Maybe I had spaced out, but I don't think so.

One or many geniuses, or one too many alpha males?

I'm about halfway through Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk, which Rob had praised highly. Overall, it reads like a sequel to Isaacson's bio of Steve Jobs. Each of which seem to bear the moral that extraordinary men should be forgiven their excesses because of what they accomplish. Personally, I'm not so sure about that.

Meanwhile, I happened upon an article about the "Gilbert Goons" of Gilbert, Arizona, a bunch of rich kids who rage across an affluent suburb and beat up nerds and non-members of their gang. Public pressure eventually resulted in some prosecutions and, in recent days, a plea bargain, in the case of a beating which turned fatal.

Meanwhile, in a bookstore in Portland I ran across a copy of There's Nothing for you Here by Fiona Hill, the National Security Council senior Russia expert who figured prominently in Trump's first impeachment hearing. I remembered the book getting good reviews, so I talked Mary into listehning to it in the car on vacation. It is far from light on detail, perhaps she lingers in the weeds excessively here and there (but who am I to point fingers on that score). But overall it's a great story of determination and professionalism by someone from a disadvantaged background who finds herself with a front-row seat to history -- in a position where in a good administration she would have been listened to.

Hill focuses a lot on what she terms the "infrastructure of opportunity" which helped her make it from a poor post-industrial town in NE England to the White House, and how this infrastructure has frayed and become unavailable to many, not just women and people of color but also people from forgotten post-industrial places like her hometown and the post-industrial Midwest and rural regions of the US (and Russia, BTW), the homelands of global populism. I don't need to recount it all. It's worth reading in general, though she has never met a weed she doesn't like and she can and does get lost there. At it's worst her book is like listening to everyone else you know say things you agree with. At those times, it's a waste of time.

As for the Isaacson, I guess it's also worth reading, though I feel a little guilty doing so. It's easy reading, that's for sure. I guess my big question is whether a culture of swaggering male exceptionalism like that which Musk (and Trump) epitomize can fruitfully coexist with a technocracy which seeks to optimize opportunity for as many as possible, as Hill espouses. Certainly her vision appeals to me more. But it's much harder to bring to pass and a much tougher sell.  

Rising mists

Now we are north of Montpelier, VT, in Worcester in an AirBnb which is cute as a button if a little old school in terms of amenities. Every morning there is mist, so that our view down from our deck changes from this

To this

To this

Over a couple of hours. Actually that last transformation heppened in the five minutes or so when I lowered my head to read my novel. It was pretty dramatic.

What with the lake in our backyard and all you would think I would be used to this kind of thing. Similar stuff happens on the surface of the lake early in the morning at certain times of year. Nonetheless, I am reduced to a state of slack-jawed fanboydom by this gradual mist dissipation. Also, when we sit out on the deck and listen to the birds and insects, not necessarily in that order, we hear a little creek off in the woods to the left. 

Yesterday we hiked up Mount Elmore and then I swam in the lake at the bottom. I have now achieved my summer trifecta of lobster roll -- plate of fried clams -- swim in mountain water. And then I went and got coffee, a fresh-baked cookie and a baseball cap with a moose on it!

Mary is also happy enough that we have extended our stay here in VT by one night and trimmed our time in Boston to just the night before we fly out. We our getting our Jeffersonian groove on.

Sweet and Savory

Making our way from Portland over to Worcester, Vermont yesterday, we passed through Standish, Maine a little after noon. Just as we were bending to the right a low-slung white building caught our eye. The sign out front said "Sweet and Savory Bakery." I looked at Mary and said, "Should we check it out?" She nodded assent.

Inside a girl of maybe 10 or 11 was minding the register. Behind the display cases mom and dad were hard at work, as were two even smaller sisters. We surveyed their bill of fare and ordered up some sandwiches, a piece of foccacia with huge chunks of garlic falling off it for post-hike snacking, and a bag of bagels. I told her I was going to get a seltzer and was pondering the flavors: "Grapefruit is my favorite," she told me.

Our young hostess checked with her mom to see how long the sandwiches would take (15 minutes) and asked my name. I told her my name, then she asked "How do you spell that?" I paid and then we mosied off down the hall of this odd building to wait. A number of flyers told us that a musical production ("Shrek, the Musical"?) was coming up soon, maybe in a performance space down the hall. I went to the bathroom, then sat at a table and caught up with my phone. 

We were the only people in there. I was sitting maybe 30 feet down the hallway. When our sandwiches were ready, our cashier yelled at the top of her lungs: "Clark, your order is ready!" 

Off we went.

Mind blowing truths

To date I have done a good job leaning into this vacation thing. I haven't been looking at the markets at all during the day. For the most part I am not reading work email. I am not hassling Mary about how slowly she gets ready to leave wherever we are staying.

For her part, Mary has been saying nothing about my having bacon or sausage every morning. Or, for that matter, when I have had both. 

For example, that glorious morning a few days back in Northport when I -- having preceded her out of bed (as is normal) -- had made my way out to Wentworth's on Rte 1 to peruse their breakfast fare, which I had noticed the day before when picking up orange juice. The stove at our AirBnb turned out not to work so we were on our own for breakfast, you see. So I get up there and look in the warming ovens to see what sorts of goodies they had and there were little bacon, egg and cheeses on english muffins, a good start. But out of the corner of my eye I saw a familiar disc shape, only topped with yellow flaked with pink rather red, white and various other colors. Could it be? My mind whirred as it processed what was before it. Yes! It was indeed..... breakfast pizza! A momentous find, topped with not bacon or sausage but both bacon and sausage. I hesitated only momentarily before grabbing a piece and also a sandwich for Mary because I knew this would be a lot for her.

So I got back to her place and cut her off a piece of my pizza to have with her sandwich. She looked it over carefully and asked about the dark brown spots: "is this mushroom?" Because, you see, she was a bit overwhelmed. No, I explained, it was sausage, because the pizza was topped with both bacon and sausage. She nodded slowly, taking it in.

It reminded me of a time in the fall of '88. I was at Bowdoin being the lead of Kathy Lahti's 75h anniversary production of Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy. I was in the basement of the building where the Russian Department had its office, and a student was sitting alone watching Apocalypse Now. He sat there, slack-jawed, trying to process what he was seeing on screen. "Look" he said to me, "they are both drinking and smoking pot at the same time." This was a lot for him to take in, so I calmly said that I thought he was right.

Society Hill

We are now in Portland, Maine. I was very impressed just now to see that our hotel provides its guests with Society Hill toilet paper, the very quintessence of understated luxury.

For the record -- Northport, Maine

For Act 1 of our vacation Mary and I ended up in an AirBnb in Northport, Maine, not far from David and Carol in Belfast. Here's the view from the swing chair in front of our place. Unless, of course, it's all foggy (as it has been for much of the time).

It turns out this has been a brilliant choice. After hanging with David and Carol on Sunday, on Monday Mary and I walked two miles north along the shore road to the village of Bayside, established as the site of a Mehodist camp in the late 19th century. It looks an awful lot like Oak Bluffs from the Vineyard, except that there are no retail establishments whatsoever in Bayside, unless a realtor counts. Then we walked home and cobbled together lunch, despite the fact that our stove didn't work at all (our hosts gave us a small rebate for that0. 

On Tuesday we walked a couple of miles in the other direction from our place and ended up in Temple Heights, also part of Northport. It turns out this place was established as a camp not for Christians, but for mediums and other angelic spiritualists. No joke. It is a going concern to this day.

Then I went and sat in a squat chair and read a mystery novel looking out at the water. It was much like being at the beach in NC in the summer except the bathroom and the coffee machine were much more convenient.

IRS Absurdity

Still working my way through an audit of our 2021 taxes. I have probably whined about it before, but this kind of thing is obviously just part of life and honestly provides me with good experience. If a client has a similar problem, I can provide counsel.

Which is not to say there are not utter absurdities in the details of the process. For instance, when sending something back to the IRS examiner in principle one can submit things online. The specs are below. A reasonable range of file types are in bounds, it all sounds OK. Until you look at the second to last bullet which lays out the types of special characters that cannot be included, which include the dollar sign, the comma, and parentheses.

Chew on that for a second. When sending something to the IRS purtaining to your taxes, a document -- even a pdf or a jpg, so basically an image file -- cannot contain dollar signs or commas. I tried several times to upload something but ultimately gave up, drove to the post office and sent it certified mail or some such. Maddening.

Harris on the Economy

I am of course delighted that Kamala Harris bears the flag for the Democrats now. Though far from perfect (what human is not?), she is at least younger than Biden and therefore not too far along the cognitive decline slope that awaits most of us at some point in time in our future.

On the economy, unfortunately, she is hewing too closely to Biden's script, scapegoating corporations for price gouging and seemingly calling for some sort of government intervention to right every wrong called out by her campaign (admittedly I've only read a WSJ article on her economic agenda so their may be a skew to their reportage). Democrats too often lean in this direction, assuming that government intervention of one sort or another will be the best way to fix things. It's not always true. Sometimes it is, but often it's not. Overall we should be obsessing over which functions should be best financed and executed by the public sector and which by the private. That is one of the great Hegelian questions of modern human history. The answer won't be the same in all societies and places, but it will rhyme and resonate across cultures.

75% of the last 16 years have been under Democratic regimes. There is pent up demand for regulatory relief, which we see expressed by the stampede of companies moving from California to Texas. Not just Tweedledum Musk, others. Rather than squelch it, we should acknowledge it and try to work with it.

In picking Walz as veep, Harris has signaled to progressives that she is on board with them. Now she has room to tack back to the middle to engage moderates. She can and should do so with her economic program, not just because it's politically astute, but because it's correct.

A bookstore in Seattle

When I was in Seattle a couple of weeks back I stopped into the Elliot Bay Book Company after breakfast with one friend and coffee with another. It's a great book store. It doesn't have the depth of Powell's in Portland, but it's great nonetheless.

I went to the business/finance section because I was looking for a specific book for a client (Morgan Housel's  The Psychology of Money). As with your typical book store, this section is hidden away in the back, not unlike the pornography section in magazine stores of yore. When I got there there was a big dad with his 10-11 year old sun. The dad pointed to a Tony Robbins book he apparently had or swore by, while the son seemed puzzled by the whole concept of a book store. The dad explained that, unlike libraries, in book stores one purchased books to keep them rather than borrowed them.

Apparently the boy had never been to a book store before, which is a sad state of affairs but not all that surprising, nearly a quarter of a century after Jeff Bezos took aim at the category. Thankfully, physical stores haven't gone away entirely, but clearly they are now luxury goods and we are lucky to live in a place where we have one.