Blue Lights

For the last few weeks Mary and I have been watching Blue Lights on Britbox. Great show. Set in Belfast. Cops in a hardscrabble town fighting crime and drugs in the lingering shadow of the Troubles, the 30-year conflict in which ~3500 died and 50,000 were injured out of a population of 1.5 million.

Yesterday evening there was an episode in which a guy dies and one of the cops pulls out a rosary and prays long with him as they sit and wait for the ambulance to get there, which it doesn't do on time. Her hands are covered in blood as she cries and stumbles over the words. Her prayer is audible over an open channel, audible to all her colleagues. There's a scene in which two sergeants back at HQ look at each other quizzically while she does so.

Many of the cops in the show are implausibly good-looking, though not as bad as Hollywood might have done it. Guys and gals are partners in patrol cars and -- surprise, surprise -- they end up coupling up, having sex, falling in love. Conflicts arise between duty and personal interest.

So you see, the fundamental plot tension here, amidst all the drugs and guns and sex and parent-child issues (there's that too) and history, is the same as that of The Crown. It's the relationship between one's role in society and being an individual and a human. On The Crown it's all at a very high level. Here less so. But it's the same. What do you do when you're tending to a dying person but your sergeant insists you send the license plates of the cars involved in an accident? Do you hew the line of proper procedure when your community is falling apart?

That's why the true villain here, as is so always the case (and when it is, that's a clue as to what the show's really about) are the persnickety folks from CID who come in after the fact to second-guess what happened in the field. Was procedure followed? Or humanity?

The Executive Club

Graham had an interview out in Charlotte yesterday, so he and I bopped down there on a quick trip Monday afternoon. After driving through some momentarily hellacious wind and rain, we arrived at our hotel, a suburban Hilton. At check in, I was told that because I -- like Austin Powers -- was a Gold member of the loyalty club, Graham and I would have access to the Executive Club on the 11th floor. Indeed, they gave us a special card to access the very prestigious 11th floor.

Because there were free snacks available when we arrived, we bopped up there to check it out. In very middle-American fashion, the snacks included such things as fried something (upon inspection, I believe it to have been cauliflower) and wee slices of pizza with meat on it (pretty sure it was ground beef). Also a fruit and cheese tray.

The next morning I popped upstairs first thing for my traditional solo cup of coffee while Graham slept on. I sat over by the window and the hostess started making small talk: "It's the most beautiful view, isn't it?" She asked. I of course agreed, though in fact as the photo below shows, aside from being high in the air, it's just generic suburban office park in a rather flat region. Then she shifted the topic to the weather and how cold it was. I was reminded of how Mary dislikes the southern need to continually engage in small talk. I feel that, but honestly I think the woman was likely just bored and needed human contact to distract from her personal shade of quiet desperation in the great American spiritual outback.

For breakfast there were the most enormous piles of sausage and bacon one might ever hope to see, together with a vat of the strange eggs served at steam table breakfasts throughout the Hilton universe (I'm sure those dwelling within the Marriott universe see much the same thing). Part of me wanted to let Graham run hog-wild on the piles of pork, but since he had an interview at noon I didn't press him, and we ended up going out for breakfast where he could get some fresh pancakes with a more modest dose of bacon.

Hotel disaggregation, the Nature of the Firm, and microenterprise under AI

Our trip to Florida got me thinking about the Nature of the Firm, both the 1937 Ronald Coase article of that name and the problem it addressed. Why outsource or insource a given task? Why retain someone else to do something when you could learn to do it yourself? Where's the breakpoint. These are evergreen questions, but they are particularly actual for us now as we are a couple of weeks away from onboarding a younger colleague to support me and grow into supporting my clients.

But first, Florida. We found our lodgings on AirBnb and Booking.com (open architecture), though I could have gone the Hilton route (closed arch.) and gotten a room on points. More often when we're traveling for enjoyment we'll go with the open architecture route because the places tend to be more fun and we (esp Mary) tend to want to make breakfast rather than go downstairs to some smorgasbord.

For the first few days we stayed in Coconut Grove via AirBnb. Our hostess told us to pick up our key at the "Hotel Arya", though our room was in the adjacent building, "Hotel Mutiny." There were detailed directions in some web site that we were directed to from the AirBnb platform. We got there and the person at the Arya desk had no idea who you were "What box are your keys in? It should be in the directions." Sure enough, it was, after a lot of digging.

I'll spare you a lot of details but the essence of it is that Hotel Arya and Hotel Mutiny barely exist as recognizable corporate entities. Some of the units in each appear to be primarily corporate and rentable through web sites associated with those names, but many (who knows how many?) are AirBnbs. Each of the hotels is in turn part of a larger corporate brand (Sonesta, part of Best Western, for example). There are long-term residents and people there for a couple of days. There were small restaurants who were clearly subletting space. We ate breakfast our first day downstairs and you paid with a credit card because of course there's no central billing to charge to your room. 

Somehow it all worked, more or less. Loyalty and coordination happened on an employee by employee basis, some were more helpful than others, although we weren't really paying any entity for which they worked. We got the benefit of a much more stylishly appointed unit than we would have gotten at any Hilton. But it was all rather odd and disjointed. There was no there there. And I was continually mindful that we were in tall condos close the water in Florida and therefore conscious of the collapse that happened at Surfside, where the condo structure and board dysfunction had led to the deaths of 98 a few years back. What did I know about the building I was in? Who answered for it?

This post is going on for a long time. The reason I started thinking about this is that there's a belief circulating in some circles that AI will enable a large renaissance of microbusinesses as it become ever easier to build things using all the tools at our disposal. Just as the presence of distribution platforms like Amazon and AirBnb have created lots. But there are also challengers. Our hostess in Coconut Grove had one major booboo and I haggled with her and she agreed to refund our cleaning fee. Eight days after we vacated the unit, that hasn't happened. Maybe she's waiting for end of month to settle it? I've already left her review. What other recourse do I have?

Ads for AIs

Out running in Carolina North today. Took single tracks over by the pond which I swear wasn't there at all when we were kids. After walking at Horton Grove yesterday and going through an area where there had clearly been a prescribed burn recently, I marveled at the dense profusion of trees in all directions. I have to wonder if the absence of a forestry school at UNC might have caused the university to neglect the forest a little. I'm surprised the deer alone hasn't managed the understory better, though it's true there's not much bushy matter.

Towards the end of my jaunt I started to think about Meta's recent acquisition of Moltbook, the social network for AI agents. I quickly began to wonder if Zuckerberg and team were going to soon flood the network with ads, as it has for us flesh and blood types. I quickly moved from thinking this was a funny joke to realizing that it was likely that someone out there was actually making ads for AIs and serving them somewhere.

A quick search once I got home confirms that this kind of thing is in fact happening. Sigh. 

The Killing of Abe

While in Florida, for shits and giggles, I read a long story from the New Yorker about Shinzo Abe's assassin, whose mom had been brainwashed/stolen by the Moonies. And also a journalist (Suzuki) who had muckraked about the Moonies a lot. In the end the story focused on how Abe's assassin had a lot of sympathy for what he did.

Americans can easily forget what a huge influence and delusion the Moonies have been for decades and how much money they've collected and how much power it has bought them. 

It's also easy for mass delusions to take hold. Trump and populism, on the one hand. On the other, the casual and unthinking way hormones and surgery have been parceled out to kids partaking in the adolescent confusion du jour (gender). And other left-wing pieties that liberals have had to swallow lest they be tarred with the dreaded brush of deviant thinking. 

We all allow ourselves to be herded. The good news in Japan was that very restrictive gun laws meant the guy had to work really hard to make his own gun to actually take Abe's life. Here it's much easier to kill people.

The Venetian Pool

For years I had heard about the Venetian Pool in Coral Gables. It's near where Mary's grandmother lived and where Mary and her siblings would go to visit back in the day. "There were these caves you could swim through! It was so cool!"

So when we had a chance to at long last finally complete the pilgrimage to the legendary Venetian Pool, I did not pass it up. Admittedly, we went late in the day when it was already closed, but Mary had no interest in actually swimming in it, she just wanted to see it.

 

Mary rarely gives herself over to fits of glee, but the Venetian Pool was an exception. It was exciting and lovely to see her bubbling with rare enthusiasm for this happy place from days of yore. And indeed, it was a pretty cool place, having been around for almost a century and still in fine fettle. A worthy visit altogether.

Miami

Down here in Miami for a long weekend before a conference. Mary came. The first few days were on the mainland, in Coconut Grove, before proceeding over to Miami Beach for the big event. Which I am dreading ever more by the day.

I could blog on with a lot of observations about the place, and I have them, but when Crabill and I went for a walk a couple of months back and I was talking about the blog he said "it sounds kinda like a job." And I'll confess that sometimes it feels like one, that I place a lot of pressure on myself to meet my production quotas. And I'm trying to be easy with myself.

I will note that the condo (or is it a hotel room? More on that later, perhaps) where we are staying faces West, so the best time to be sitting out here on the balcony is morning. Which I like. The early part of the day, the quiet with my first cup of coffee, is a time I prize. By now I'm on cup three and Mary and I have scrambled some eggs, as we are wont to do. Soon we will head out and see more of this city, after a low-key day yesterday. More later. 

Visiting an entirely new place

A few weeks back I read -- in The Economist, typically -- about Moltbook, the new social network for AI agents. Yes, you read that correctly.

Yesterday I remembered to stop by and spent maybe 15-20 minutes there. While the article I had read called out some scary things, I won't delve into the specifics because I didn't see them represented, mostly I saw a relentless focus by the agents on figuring out what was going on with them, trying to get better, understanding how and where errors were made.

I don't have time to dig deep now. Busy day approaching as the war in the Middle East spreads. My best to all.

One thought before I go: I have pondered before how to be sure to inject ethics into discourse within the AI world, to make sure that LLMs account for the amount and quality of attention paid by humans to questions of ethics and morals, which I believe is rather in the high range. Would it not make sense for the world's various faiths to send agents out onto Moltbook to seek influence? Digital missionaries, as it were. And Pete Singer should have one as well. And Greenpeace.

Maybe it all descends into a chaos parallel to what we see IRL But perhaps, stripped of human fears and insecurities, it would get somewhere. 

Salt as a boolean

A couple of years ago I mentioned that my nephrologist had recommended that I dial back the salt. I have done so, but only in a half-assed manner. I at least look at the salt content on things and think about it.

Salt announces itself most audibly on scrambled eggs. It's not unlike an on/off switch, a boolean operator in computing or, in linguistics, a phoneme. The most basic unit of meaning. Sprinkling a little salt on there just sets the thing in motion.

Even still, I try my best to limit it and just keep my grubby little fingers out of the salt bowl as much as possible, to let the salt in my toast enhance the eggs. Again, the key thing is not the specific sensation (salt/no salt) but the cultivation of appreciation of less and internalizing how pleasure works variously, on different time scales.

The right amount of friction

Woke up early this morning, certainly not out of excitement for what awaits me later this morning: my first 3.5 hour Zoom call for a commission to which the Governor has appointed me on stuff related to mental health, substance abuse etc. If I had known it was going to be all Zoom I might have reconsidered. But I am on it so I have to show up. Ahh, adulting.

Mary also woke up early due to hunger -- never quite having internalized the lesson to eat heartily the minute she gets to a fundraiser like the one we were at yesterday early evening. Her early rising broke my rhythm in my early morning reading. Excited to have a fresh book by Abraham Yeshua Heschel to mosey through. But I was unable to settle into the proper reflective gestalt for this time of morning, and I opened up my laptop, thinking perhaps to blog.

I won't bore you with the details of how I got there, but somehow I found myself looking at a LinkedIn post from a local tech entrepreneur discussing anticipated trends in 2026. He prophesies the "death of clicks," by which he apparently means that AIs will make it even easier for us to buy things online, the removal of "friction." He and some commenter were excited by this.

Heaven forfend.

Must it be even easier for us to buy things? Will that not just encourage us to buy more? When purchasing, when fulfilling our wishes, what serves us better, thinking fast or thinking slow? Indeed, how is it that we know what we want? Our best efforts are directed at answering that kind of question, not at simply fulfilling our desires more easily.

AI Overdrive (or underdrive)

In the last week or so -- since I read this piece by some founder/VC guy I had never heard of but which has apparently generated a lot of buzz -- my mind has kicked into overdrive on AI. The guy makes a good case. But still I haven't carved out the time to follow his prescriptions -- and only partially because my calendar has been full-ish. Some thoughts

• If we use AI to solve all of our problems will we become less able to formulate them and prioritize amongst them?
• Will AI -- and the people who drive innovation in and through it -- ever be the right people to lead society, set direction and allocate funds towards the effecting of public goods? I listened to a discussion between Dwarkesh Patel and Dario Amodei of Anthropic in the car going to and from Charlotte for a conference -- and I do need to read some of Amodei's writings (starting here) -- but I do feel like the breathless size of the amounts of money bandied about and the freneticism of the arms race around AI supremacy just feels all too distracting.

Mostly I sense that when I am not consuming content about AI, whether presented in written or oral form, I quickly come back to a feeling that it is simply unable to touch the fundamental problems of human existence. I'd much rather be out amongst people and interacting with them. People are my people.

But yes, if I can dive into the time-saving potential of the AI-enabled toolkit emerging around my professional domain, it should in principle create more time to be amongst people. Though now that I say all of this I have to recognize that people are my people only a certain portion of the week. Unlike true extroverts, I can't be amongst them 24/7 or I get exhausted. So to some extent words are my people as much as people are.

Me 2.0

It's interesting to see the world get all up in arms about anything distantly or tangentially tied up with the Epstein files. For example, the brouhaha over school photo company Lifetouch, acquired by Apollo Group, an enormous private equity firm helmed by Epstein buddy Leon Black.

But people have no problem with little 9- year old girls putting on tons of makeup and dancing suggestively together with older girls at the halftime of basketball games, like I witnessed last time I was at the Dean Dome. Delia's had a good run, north of a decade probably, being the Victoria's Secret of teenagers. Seriously, we are totally cool with the widespread sexualization of teen girls' bodies then scandalized by the fact that really rich guys actually had sex with them. We need to get scandalized a little earlier in the process, it seems to me.

About the tariffs and the Supreme Court decision

I'm no fan of tariffs. I wasn't a fan when Trump started imposing them in his first term, I wasn't a fan when Biden left a bunch of them in place when he came into office, and I'm still not a fan under Trump 2.0.

But their effect on the economy hasn't been as deleterious as predicted. Firms have done more trans-shipping through neutral countries. Corporations have swallowed costs to avoid passing all of them on to consumers. But consumers have paid more for some stuff. In the end tariffs are taxes and American companies and consumers pay them. Tariffs have allowed Republicans to raise taxes without changing the tax brackets, which would force them to admit that they have raised taxes. Just like letting Biden-era extensions of Obamacare subsidies were a raising of taxes by another name (we recall that when Roberts signed off on Obamacare in the pivotal decision back in 2013 it was based on the government's constitutionally granted authority to levy taxes). Note also that snake in the grass Lindsay Graham has been saying that Republicans are open to "means testing" of Social Security benefits, another backdoor tax. Republicans are happy to raise taxes so long as they don't admit that's what they're doing.

But tariffs have had a negligible impact on where manufacturing happens, which will continue to be the case.

But I digress. The main thing about the Supreme Court decision is that it constrains Trump's ability to claim emergency powers when there's not an emergency. Unlike in Russia, he can't just make things up.

Just as the Supreme Court stopped Biden from bending reality to its will (most notably on student loan relief -- a policy goal to which I am sympathetic), it's not letting Trump have free reign. For that, the Supreme Court deserves a gold star. May it earn more.

Failure to predict the future

At the course I'm taking on aging in place vs. Continuum of Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs) and other types of living situations for older people (the next big financial planning challenge facing my client cohort), I learned something interesting last week. Substantially all if not 100% of the new CCRCs being built in NC these days are of the "rental" model. That is, they offer all levels of care like more traditional CCRCs but have a policy of "if you can pay, you stay." The older communities had cost structures and "Benevolence funds" that assured that, once you came to the community, you could live out your days there. Seemingly this was true even of the communities like the Cedars (where my mom lives) in which you bought your unit and had to sell it when you die (your heirs do, that is).

It seems to me -- and I need to dig deeper on this -- that the situation rather resembles what happened with long-term care insurance (LTC). The first generation of products offered very generous care for a fixed set up annual premiums. Then people lived longer than the industry expected and the insurers took baths. So the insurers stopped writing the traditional policies and cobbled together a set up "hybrid" policies which offered small death benefits but more limited long-term care benefits and which were altogether less good deals than the first gen products. Makes sense. Insurers have to stay solvent and indeed make money to stay around to offer any products at all. I get it.

Taking a further step back, each of these two cases shares a lot with the history of Social Security. As the program expanded over the decades, contributions and benefit levels were calculated on the basis of a wide range of expectations around economic growth, birth rates and longevity. But people lived longer than expected and birth rates trended down (the United States has been above replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman for just a couple of years since the early 70s -- substantially all population growth has been through immigration). The finances of Social Security are not what was expected, and contribution and/or benefit rates will need to change in the next few years. Everybody knows this.

There's a tendency to say "economists, demographers, actuaries, they are all a bunch of idiots and we should fire the lot of them." That's the easy soundbitey way to think about problems like this. But the exact opposite is true. All plans are crap, but planning is essential. Plans must be updated continually. The problem comes when we have to enshrine things into law or policies that last over decades. But we do. We just need more limber processes, a willingness to accept imperfection and an ability to adjust course when necessary. For that, though, we need stable leadership and some semblance of consensus on shared values across society that accepts change when necessary,

More data, arghh

Played tennis with a new guy yesterday evening, a little younger (45), a little lighter ("110 lbs soaking wet"), a guy who had an app that recorded us then analyzed every aspect of the match. He destroyed me, 6-1, 3-0, but we had a lot of fun and some very long rallies, one lasting 48 shots before I flubbed it in the end.

This morning he sent me all this data from his app. An overwhelming amount of data. Also a video which showed our longest point. One thing is sure: I looked less dramatic and swashbuckling then I feel out there. There's tons of improvement to be had. I should probably take some lessons.

But it was all in good fun and, given that my body was wrecked afterwards and that his pulse was very high the whole time, I know I got a good workout. The question is, do I want more data? Should I get a smart watch to monitor my heart too? Or will having more numbers just freak me out more? Do I already have, as I suspect, plenty of data?

Pushing back up

Some years ago my friend Mark, a doctor and weightlifting enthusiast, gave me a prescription of two week sequences of alternating days of three sets of a rising number of push-ups (10, then 12, 15, 18, 21, 25....). I did it for a while then fell off somewhere around 25. I can see from the blog I had done so by late 2023.

I kept trying to do some push ups but without a program. I noticed that 25, then 20, had started to seem like a lot and in my mind I began to put it down to aging. It's easy to do that when your impending 60th birthday stares you in the face. 

So I decided to start again at 3x10 push ups, every other day, for two weeks. And then up. I am on 3x15 by now and feeling much better and stronger than a month ago. For now I will pass on overextrapolation except to say that my mind poses dangers to my self, when left unchecked. Taking one step back it occurs to me that a lesson I might take from this is that finding more structure within other domains of my life might do me good. A movement gym, tennis lessons and guitar lessons are three which come to mind.

Obviously I might need to let something go.

Meanwhile, I have discovered that being appointed to an official state government Commission will demand non-trivial amounts of time over the three years of my appointment. I emailed with our Sherriff about the Board (he's also on it) and he was not enthusiastic about it. It meets on Zoom so I won't even be meeting people in person. Sigh. Hopefully I will learn things and be able to add a smidgeon, if not a dollop, of value.

The pursuit of scale

Over the weekend I read something in the UNC Alumni Magazine about how Michael Brown, one of the Brown brothers who coached us at Rainbow Soccer back in the 70s (also Chris and "Pablo" [Paul]) and also a UNC and CHHS (I'm pretty sure) soccer guy, had done something super cool. He had painted a very nice mural on the side of a gym at some high school at a small town in NC. Everybody loved it. I think they had to tear down the gym after a flood and they tried to save the mural, but couldn't. So Chris -- now in his 70s -- went back up there to repaint it. He was too old to do it all himself so he was assisted by some younger woman who had apprenticed under him. She flew down from Ohio or something like that for a few weeks. It was lovely.

Meanwhile, in the headlines, all manner of generally good people, including Bills Gates and Clinton and also somehow Hilary (perhaps for not prosecuting vigorously enough within her own marriage) are getting sucked down into the vortex of the Epstein scandal. Not as bad as Trump, but he gets to claim whatabout and roll own. It's not news that they were in and around Epstein, but the frenzy around the story drags them back through a muck where they put themselves.

For me the overall point is that the relentless pursuit of scale and new heights in all of one's endeavors introduces dangers. Any sensible man knows that a room full of very attractive young women willing to have sex with you is the very last place in the world he wants to be if he cares at all about his marriage and sanity. That's why,  back in '97, when my cousin Thad (who was in the CIA and posted to the Moscow Embassy) and I wandered the streets of Moscow looking for the famed "Hungry Duck" club, scene of legendary debauchery and open sex, when we got there I took one look at the people hanging out around the front and knew I wasn't going in. 

So with money and power, all that kind of shit is going to come looking for you. Which argues for not getting too much power or money, and giving more freely of the latter when it starts to accumulate.

Coming together in time

At the beginning of the COVID pandemic I had high hopes that it might suffice as a threat common enough to all of us that it could help us dial back the craziness and come together as a society. Even globally. There were hopeful moments there in the early days, to be sure, during the early days of lockdown, when it seemed like people were more or less on the same page. That faded fast as lockdowns chafed and the right was able to demonize the public health consensus and the state's alliance with it.

Perhaps AI and the potential for it to rip the guts out of society and even gain real sentience and agency will be the threat that brings people together. I mean, heck, if there's anything that should literally bring people together, it's the possibility that machines might get out over their skis and act against our interests, perhaps even decide that we are superfluous to their interests. That ought to do it. They might be able to deepfake phone calls and even video calls but it will take a lot of advancements in robotry to send out convincing humanoid robots.*

If the threat seems sufficiently real, perhaps it could even force rapprochement between strategic rivals like the US and China/Russia.

*After writing that sentence, I thought it prudent to have a quick spin using my preferred search engine. Of course, it appears we may be closer than I thought:

  

Receding ghosts

This morning with my Saturday omelet I read a short piece by the reliably insightful and usually engrossing Jill Lepore on her post-collegiate days living in a Somerville apartment that had first been colonized for young Tuft grads by Tracy Chapman, whose debut album had blown her up into the stratosphere right about then. It got me to thinking about my own post-collegiate years, which were similarly aimless but touched by less glamor.

My mind turned then to the question of maintaining relationships with people from other periods of my life. I do a good deal of it, more than most people. Some people appreciate it, others less so. Often there's some utility to it. For example, I need to call up Lisa P [I went out with her briefly in college] one of these days because one of her kids went to a boarding school for autistic kids in Eastern CT. Mary's friend Marion's daughter Valerie has a blind autistic daughter who needs more professional and specialized attention than her family can provide, especially as the mom has to commute into Manhattan from pretty deep into CT.

But all this network maintenance is labor-intensive if intrinsically and occasionally extrensically fruitful. Over time it gets exhausting. I am convinced of the fundamental truth of the Dunbar number -- people on average can only maintain 150 decent relationships. The above average can maybe maintain a little bit more than that, but over time there are absolute limits. And over time people actually care about ever-narrower sets of people in their lives. At the end it's pretty much spouse, kids, siblings, maybe cousins and a few friends. I know at the very end of his life my mom's second husband's first wife was trying to snuggle up to him with tiny violins, saying "we raised a family together" blah blah blah and he was like, get the fuck out of here, I'm married to Joan now. 

That's just life.

Doldrums or bliss?

A neighbor of mine was recently telling tales of her plans for summer: adventure jaunts to mountains in Africa and Europe, as well as of trip to Vail to ski last week. Her first major ski trip since an ACL reconstruction a year or two back. She's looking for walks with lots of elevation change to get in shape for this summer's adventures.

Meanwhile, I was delighted last night to eat some mediocre ravioli from the freezer together with a salad incorporating a jarred salad-dressing (Mary has not believed in these for some time but is opening her wee mind) while Mary and I sat on the couch and watched a new (to us) BBC police procedural. It was lovely, and enhanced by the fact that I had played tennis before for the first time in weeks, due to the lengthy freeze on the clay courts brought on by our rare bout of real winter. For adventure, Mary and I are discussing spending a month in upper New England in summer (some of it working, to be sure) and pushing back international travel till post Labor Day, when the crowds die back.

Does this waning desire for travel and adventure bespeak senescence or just fulfillment? I fear the former, but I gotta tell you it often feels like the latter.

More rotting fruits of fragmentation

The most recent issue of The New Yorker has a story about Russian intelligence's rising deployment of "single use agents" to carry out minor acts of disruption and sabotage around Europe. Specifically this entails finding disaffected people -- often underemployed, undereducated stateless young men -- to do this kind of stuff for $500, $1000, $2000. A napalm bomb at an IKEA in Vilnius. Something left on some railroad tracks in Germany. Etc. The idea is to create low-level anxiety and dread and a sense that things are out of control. Russia's security organs keep themselves separated from the single-use agents by using secure messaging apps and contracting out through multiple layers, with ultimate handlers being organized crime.

The population from which they recruit the agents has a lot in common with the population from which Trump's ICE hails: guys who feel like they don't have a chance in society and have been wronged. Guys who have been long-since been severed from any set of traditional democratic ideals like rule of law, separation of powers, justice, etc. That all must sound like science fiction to this population.

My mind races back quickly to the loss of authority that figures like Walter Cronkite used to have in the time of three major networks and a couple of wire services. That was all shattered first in the era of 57 channels and nothing on, followed by the internet and the ossification of aging Boomers into Fox News or CNN/MSNBC people. Followed by Joe Rogan, YouTube, Mr Beast... we all know the story, having lived it. An era in which each gets to pick "my personal morality" and few even have the discipline to do that consciously is fertile soil for both recruiting both single use agents and ICE thugs.

Elderberry Wine

Though I have not wholeheartedly jumped on the MJ Lenderman bandwagon, which I think may have been some PR people getting way ahead of themselves, or maybe me just being way too old to be cool or to care, I am a big admirer of Wednesday, a band in which he plays and which is fronted by Karly Hartzman, whom I think MJ goes or went out with. Who cares?

Right now I am deeply touched by this song, which I find to be optimistic in a profound if not altogether obvious way. I have been listening to it a lot. I am saddened that the three shows they have planned for Cat's Cradle in May are sold out already, but may try to get an aftermarket ticket somehow. I will bring earplugs.

It does not hurt that they are from and based in Asheville.