Breakin' that Skein of Self-Reflection

Thomas Merton, like Pope Francis, was big on criticizing and lobbing complaints, particularly at the fellow Catholics around him.  But that's a feature, not a bug, turns out. Interesting to see a “lean in” admission/defense of Merton (by Thomas Moore) in the introduction to the monk's book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

He is an unsentimental monk writing from a basic optimism, but fully aware of the follies and unsophisticated thoughts surrounding him. Don’t demand that he be aware of his own follies; for, every passionate person has to break through the skein of self-reflection, and live and talk with abandon.

Hey, turns out I’m allowed to be passionate and critical on Twitter and Blogger sans guilt! Yay me.

But seriously, I did find the introduction a very good read.  Moore’s comment is not too far afield from what I was thinking not long into Francis’s pontificate, how by definition the passionate crusader must lack self-reflection. I wondered if you can even be effective Leftist voice [with self-reflection] since if you're going to change the world you have to be sure of what you're doing. There's no way Luther starts a Reformation if he was unsure of his rhetoric or if he gave his enemies the benefit of the doubt.

Jesus Wanted Open Borders?

Kind of fascinating how Dawn Eden has become radicalized in the Pope Francis era.  Mostly shown by her energetic tweets attacking Vigano and defenders of Vigano.  Yesterday she retweeted someone saying, "Jesus Christ would tear down a wall, and give immigrants the shirt off of his back. I know this, and I'm Jewish. What the hell has happened to Christianity in America?”

I tweeted “This just in! Lost gospel says that Jesus said countries shouldn’t have borders! Don’t tell Joan of Arc.”  An imperfect analogy, of course, given we're not at war with Mexico but I've noticed the whole concept of having a border (which means a wall/fence) is insulting now to the Left, who have moved strongly left on the issue.

Sarcasm aside, it's surreal to me how they see the only authentic charity as "government charity” through force (or lack of force, by abolishing ICE).  The Left might respond, "oh, you feel the same way about abortion, trying to use the government to enforce morality."  I guess.

So it’s seen as the Christian position to open our border and try to save millions of Mexicans and Central Americans while ignoring that our own middle class is falling into poverty and opioids.  Who on the Left cares if you send private charity dollars to Mexico in hopes of building up the economy there?

The lack of nuance of a complex issue is what leaves me breathless. There are huge societal impacts to having large numbers of immigrants without skills come here. There are benefits to be sure as well, even if they disproportionately benefit the well off. There are “unseen” costs involving a much greater need for social services and education, and more visible ones like multicultural tensions and fewer unskilled jobs for current Americans. Not to mention the political risk of tons of new Democratic voters unwittingly hellbent on hastening the country’s decay.

The issue is admittedly not given to easy answers. “How many is too many immigrants?” is a tough question.  What no one on the Left will never consider (which is how you know not to take them seriously) is: “How many immigrants is the ‘right’ number and to what degree should they be educated and have skills?”  Everything else is a cheap trick.
_

Last year heard a well-connected priest from our diocese (he talks to papal nuncios and bishops regularly about immigration), but he didn't have a solution to the general problem of Catholicism and state, which has been going on for 2,000 years.

But I do have a better feel for why the bishops tend to be so big on the issue.  The gist, according to him, is that Catholicism has always wanted to see the unity of the Body of Christ lived out on the ground as far as there being not nation states, hence the appeal of the Roman empire and later the Holy Roman empire.  The universal nature of Catholicism innately pictures a kingdom of Catholics irrespective of nationality, hence that's the reason the bishops across the world are so supportive of the European Union and the United Nations.

Origin said that the kingdom of Heaven should be mirrored on earth as well as possible; Catholics didn't even evangelize outside the Roman empire in the early centuries, equating Christendom with an earthly empire (in this case Roman) in which Christianity can be lived out more seamlessly, while the Arians did evangelize the "beyond the pale" to the Germanic tribes and thus therein lies much of the success of the Arians.

He said the conundrum was that we need Mexican labor so a wall won't solve that problem;  he said the old Ellis Island days of one port of entry was gone, that you couldn't really do that in this day of social media and instant communications, presumably because illegal immigrants will always find a way around.

Coriolanus Calling

Good Kevin D. Williamson piece on the plebes and the elites and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The problem with reading is everything leads me to something else, endlessly.  Fortunately this led me to Shakespeare.

The conservative Twitterverse was roiled of late by Tucker Carlson’s recent populist/viral pronouncement, about how the elites like Romney don’t care about us - some say he made some good points, others were of the mind (like David French) that he was wrong.

Part of the Tucker thing comes down to the familiar tension between personal responsibility and a leader’s responsibility. It seems almost impossible to square and ultimately is a judgment call that involves the judging of others.

Humans are complex and situations likewise and it’s pretty unrealistic to think anyone can come to a determination (such as where a person’s free will really ends). I was hoping Shakespeare might’ve weighed in on it, and Kevin Williamson quotes the Bard's play approvingly (in fairness, related to a different issue, that of the Twitter mobs) but according to the Globe Guide to Shakespeare says it’s not that cut and dried:

The story is a fable however you look at it, but it points in different directions: in one reading, Coriolanus is a hero deserted by a fickle populace; in another, he is a villain whose arrogance threatens dictatorship. Shakespeare makes room for both those positions and more besides, drawing on the politics of his own day to press home urgent and thorny questions about how democracy should operate.

The play has been used in the past for both a denunciation of democracy and “mob rule” to the opposite. But of course that's what makes great art.

It's the End of the World As We Know It...

I recall on Jerry's blog he talked about how he was going into a funk, the “black dog” of depression and anxiety, when his stepdaughter called and told him she wanted to play a musical instrument and asked if he had one. He had indeed played trombone in school and so spent the next couple hours looking for it all over the house with her, and then he taught her the basics of trombone playing.  He said he was lifted out of his depression and it had changed his outlook for awhile.

And just today I heard a podcast with the author of “Tribe”, Sebastian Junger, who said:

“Admissions to psych wards went down during the WWII blitz of London and back up when it stopped.  If you give people an urgent task it gives them the opportunity to stop thinking about themselves, and when you do that you cut short this awful feedback loop of something that’s called ‘anxious rumination’.  If you give troubled folks enough space to think too much and they think themselves into a circle and get more and more anxious and depressed.  A crisis pops them back into the present moment, a sort of zen idea to be in the present moment, right here right now and they can forget about their personal troubles. One British official said in amazement, ‘We have the chronic neurotics of peacetime driving ambulances.’”

Junger said that humans are evolved to deal with trauma, that there’s been traumatic events for all of our history (in the past much more so) and that if survivors of traumatic events didn’t gather food the next day there would be no human race eventually.  He said that what’s different now is that we experience our trauma in an isolated environment. A rat tortured by a cat for awhile and left by itself will develop ongoing symptoms of trauma.  A rat tortured by a cat but immediately reintegrated into the rat community will be indistinguishable from the other rats within a week.

People need to be needed he says.  This seems to explain the inexplicable, such as why my grandmother was aggrieved by no longer being able to cook for live-at-home son Mark.  I'd thought that a great boon to her.

I’m unsure if it’s just a natural condition of aging, that one feels that the “centre cannot hold” (or, more prosaically, that things are going to hell in a hand basket), but things feel tenuous, house-of-card-sy.  Fiscally, for sure, post-2008 (which showed even money market funds aren’t secure).  Politically, obviously. Environmentally. Drug-wise. Idols are being smashed, the handy definition of which being anything that “I can control that will meet my needs.” There’s a confluence at work and it’s writ large in tragic script of the local obits.

Part of me looks at the dysfunction and wonders, “how long?” And yet another part looks at Detroit and thinks, “the Tigers still exist; we’ll muddle through, we always have.” The Christian view is that resurrection follows every death or decline and that “children are an act of optimism—sheer belief that the future will outshine the present.” 

From a Salman Rushdie (“The Golden House”) at the fools’ gold the Boomers discovered:

[They] grew up in fantasyland, the last generation in full employment, the last age of sex without fear...but somehow in their years in the fairy tale had... given them the conviction that by their own direct actions they could change and improve the world, and allowed them to eat the apple of Eden, which gave them the knowledge of good and evil, without falling under the spell of that spiraling Jungle Book Kaa-eyes of the fatal trust-in-me Snake... Whereas now horror was spreading everywhere at high speed and we closed our eyes or appeased it. 

Seems there’s something for everyone these days, dystopian-wise. The environmentalists, the politicians, families, Christians, economists, schoolteachers, health care pros, dog-catchers (“Dogs and cats, living together..”), even (especially) this Pope, who, like the dog who caught the car, now isn’t sure what he wants to do with it. 

Death and Hope

Saddened to learn a longtime co-worker died last at a local hospice due to drug addiction related illness. I wish there was something I could’ve said or done. He did cobble together a 30-year career which is impressive given his demons.

Reminds me so much of David Foster Wallace, though Wallace only made it about 46 years and he didn’t commit suicide outright.

Saw a local TV news interview with his daughter who poignantly is trying to find his guitar (he’d pawned it, looking to get money for opiates). She wants to buy it and learn to play it to honor him.

She said Jerry had begun using opiates about 2-3 years ago (2015 or 2016), which would put the timeline right in line with his loss of job. Whether he lost the job due to the drugs, or the drug relapse came without the structure of a job it’s hard to say but at that point there were no brakes on self-destruction. I’d reached out in June of ’17 and he was involuntarily retired at that point and was told he was “doing okay”, but turns out he’d pawned his guitar the month before.

He never quite believed in hope, but then he had the mental condition (depression) that fought constantly against it. Surely that limited his culpability, perhaps completely.

Seeing a picture in the news link of him and his family reminds me that whatever responsibility I had to try to give him light and hope and Christian faith was dwarfed by the responsibility that poor family must’ve felt. In 2014 he wrote:

Winston Churchill's own "black dog" of depression and frequent bouts of bottomless despair are often credited with giving him the mindset that allowed him to fully grasp the grim reality of Hitler's grandiose and dark intentions, while also tapping a deep-rooted resiliency and hope within his people to enable them to carry on, in the face of really bad odds.

Well, I already gave up all the goddamn kibble that kept my own lifelong black dog of depression well fed. No alcohol, drugs, or smoking, yet that loyal depressing f---ker is still going strong, a constant companion by my side.

The paradoxical thing about hope is it’s not hope, really, unless there’s a darkness or obscurity that prevents it from being easily seen. Thus my own belief in hope must include Jerry’s lack of belief in it. He, unwittingly, exercises mine by his lack thereof.

The desire for a neat little gingerbread sense of faith and hope is alluring but not really what the Bible teaches. Just ask Job, or the Jews around the time of the Babylonian captivity, or the apostles on Good Friday. This quote found via Twitter today from Frank Sheed is appropriate:

“Catholic novels have got themselves a bad name, so that even Catholics avoid them. Why? Not, we think for the reasons usually given. It is not simply that too many of them end with a flurry of wedding-bells and a shower of conversions. The reason is more fundamental. The Catholic as a Catholic has been taught that God is everywhere and that all things are overruled by Providence: he has been taught and he believes it. But he sees the hand of Providence best when things fall out as he would have arranged them if he had been God! So that as a novelist the Catholic too often takes his little section of life, and instead of seeing Providence in it, acts Providence to it. As you read you feel that the thing is being maneuvered.” 

“All things are overruled by Providence.” I wanted to see Jerry’s life succeed in visible terms with outward faith and drug-free end. I’d attempted to argue with him a few times on his atheism; I took much joy when he became Catholic presumably under the influence of his second wife, and said what drew him was the Eucharist, specifically the words of consecration: “This is my Body...”. He said he was greatly moved. I was wonderstruck a non-believer could have a change of heart. But the conversion didn’t seem to last, and they got divorced after a dozen years of marriage and he reverted to agnosticism, at least as of March 2016.

This quote on Twitter is timely:

“The Incarnation does not give us a ladder to climb out of the human condition. It gives us a drill that lets us burrow down into the heart of everything that is and, there, find it shimmering with divinity." - Avery Cardinal Dulles, SJ

Why Ohio Republicans Differ from Texas Republicans

Heard interesting NR “Editors” podcast in which Charlie Cooke asked Reihan Salam why Ohioan Republicanism is different from Texas’s libertarianism:

“Ohio is a state where Gov John Kasich basically reversed his early approach. Soon after coming to office he decided he wanted to curb collective bargaining rights for public employees including firefighters, police officers – so in some ways he was more aggressive than Gov. Scott Walker, his contemporary, yet Kasich then got this intense pushback from organized labor and then he caved. Then he pushed through a Medicare expansion.

"One argument about the Ohio Republican party is that it really did move to the center of opinion in Ohio (whether folks in the Democratic party acknowledge it or not), [since Ohioans] were for Medicare expansion and more pro-life than pro-choice, so that’s where the party went and it wound up being a recipe for the party’s success.

"I guess my big picture thought is that at the state and local level I believe in small government, that’s lean, effective.  At the national level I believe you have to do something about the huge disparities across states. A state like Ohio, or more so West Virginia - has very limited fiscal capacity. What this winds up meaning that 1.5% spent of West Virginia’s GDP on teachers means a very low teacher salary, while 1.5% of New Jersey’s would mean a relatively high teacher salary.

"Those disparities across regions make it really hard to have the kind of decentralized government I’d prefer.  You’re not going to be able to say that Medicare is going to go down to the states and leave them in charge of it when some states just don’t have the fiscal capacity and others do.  That’s why Canada is actually a lot more decentralized country than the U.S. is.  We have to have some sort of redistribution across regions. This isn’t too popular now because the Left, the traditional party of redistribution, happens to now represent all the rich parts of the country.

So I see the politics of Ohio as part of the perverse reaction to how we haven’t gotten things right at the federal level."

All Code Works By Accident

Tweet storm from CTO of VividCortex, Baron Sc​hwartz:

Something that isn’t a “Law,” but has held true through my entire career: when you instrument and measure something, you always learn surprising things.

--The code is doing WHAT?
--That query usually runs in microseconds but sometimes hours?
--We have a server nobody knew about?
etc.

This isn’t just database-monitoring-related. It’s true of any system, like… application code; off the shelf software; company finances; my personal health and vital signs—whatever.

Example: what happens to my bodyweight in the 2-3 days after a night of bad sleep? SURPRISE!!!

An example from early in my career as a developer. I discovered that the MySQL protocol has a notion of “warnings” and the number of warnings generated by a query is exposed in the Perl driver. I was curious, so I put a wrapper around our DB access library to check for warnings.

If you’re a software developer, this might not surprise you, but I’m sure some of you wouldn’t believe the broken things I found. I don’t just mean “broken like a tire with low pressure, but the car still drives.” I mean, like the car is in the ditch upside down and nobody knew.

In this specific example, some of the fundamental underpinnings of what the business was supposed to be doing, weren’t working. At all.

The surprises come from realizing your mental model isn’t reality. You think you have awareness of this, but it’s order-of-magnitude wrong. (Meta: your mental model of your mental models’ brokenness, is itself broken.)

You never understand how badly your model of the world and the world itself, have diverged until you measure. Then you’re aghast. But it’s just business as usual. Pick yourself up, go on.

One of the things I learned from that incident was that the stuff I thought was the fundamental, non-negotiable underpinnings of the business was just a nice-to-have.

I didn’t find just ONE thing broken, though. I found dozens, immediately. And many more in subsequent years.

Simple things reveal these totally invisible ways in which your mental models are broken. Quick: pick a server, SSH in, look at any log. Any one. Odds are you’ll find something ghastly.

Pick your system and your tools, do it any way you like. Dig into the bank account statements, look at HR data, whatever. (We recently got a gas+water bill from the city for an astronomical amount.) There’s always broken, weird stuff because NOBODY KNOWS HOW ANYTHING WORKS.

And a lot of what’s broken doesn’t even need to be fixed, despite the engineer’s impulse to make things perfect. The broken world turns on its axis every 24h anyway.

In reply someone said, "All code works by accident." Ha.

Raising Alma Mater

So what gives with my alma mater begging for money?  Miami has a half-billion endowment, is the most expensive college in Ohio, has a wealth of new buildings, and gets millions in state monies in addition to tuition.  Kids going to Miami pay, their parents pay, the taxpayer pays, and they want alumni to pay.  Does it take a village to raise a university?

The problem is complex but it’s telling that stats are hard to come by since the colleges only promote the declining percentage of their budget coming from the state. This is partly due to flat-lined state giving (due to other priorities like health care spending, prisons and K-12 education), but it’s also because college education is going up much faster than the rate of inflation.

Fifty years ago 70% of Miami’s funding came from the state and now only 10-15% does. Colleges back 50 years ago didn’t try to rein in expenses because they didn’t have to. So the inflation rate of college education sky-rocketed while the amount of money given by the state barely stayed the same.

Even former Miami president James Garland admits that the university culture plays a role in the problem:

Unlike corporations, public universities have had few purely financial incentives to improve themselves and become more productive.

In my opinion, both the Ohio legislature and the universities are partially correct: the problem of rising public college tuition is driven by a combination of declining state subsidy levels and the inability of universities to exercise the cost discipline that is common for well-managed organizations outside academia.

So should the alumni kick in money to try to prop up this broken system?

On the one hand, if you just let market forces force the universities to seek profit, will colleges become available only to the rich and the intellectually gifted.  Are there too many mediocre students going to college today simply because so many jobs require a college diploma?  Or should there be more low-cost colleges much as Walmart undercut the competition in retail by going for the low-cost angle? 

The Case of the Missing Cashier

So today I found out what happened to June, the cashier from whom I’ve bought approximately 12,000 lunches from over the past 25 years.

She didn’t show up a few days before Thanksgiving. It was uncharacteristic since she normally mentioned upcoming absences. Typically it was me who announced absences since I take frequent vacations and she doesn’t get much vacation time. Despite being at least 62 years old and working there for umpteen years.

I first took notice of her when she used to chastise Ham of Bone (of the Bobber beer fame) for his “soups”. In his pre-marital frugality, he’d carefully load up no broth, just the meat. With lots of free packages of crackers, he got a meal for the price of a newspaper.

June was no-nonsense and was so fast at her job that I used to say she must be getting paid by number served. Being a victim of the modern cult of efficiency, naturally I gravitated to her line and I’d do the computations in my head (6 people in line at cashier X, meant if I could be number 9 in June’s line, I’d still come out ahead). Memory like an elephant too - she’d recall trivial things like how much I’d spent the previous day, and in the extremely rare cases of making a cashier mistake in cafeteria’s favor she’d rectify it the next day even though I’d forgotten about it.

There were things I wanted to ask but couldn’t or didn’t. I recall just after the O.J. Simpson trial wondering where she, an African-American, stood on it. It was the most revelatory thing to me ever at the time, to see the disconnect between how white America and black America viewed it. Probably not so surprising to blacks, who likely knows how white culture thinks much better than vice-versa in the same way conservatives know what liberals think better than liberals know how conservatives do, due to the imbalance in media. In hindsight it was probably good not to know.

So because she was fast - and friendly without being chatty which is always a mercy - I ended up buying three lunches a day from her for about 200 days a year times for the past quarter century. (Three lunches a day since I buy one for me, and two more for dinner for my wife and me.) The touching and funny thing was that if I went to another line she saw it (eagle eyes, she has) and would chastise me the next day. One time another cashier tried to woo me to her line and I said, “no thanks” and June grumbled about that gal trying to steal her customers.

She was like ol’ (wo)man river, so much so that though she’s much older than me I’d always expected to retire before her. I’d already planned how when I was in that last week at work, feeling light-hearted at the impending retirement, I’d get her a card and put a $50 in it as a tip for all those years. Make her day for once.

But now, to paraphrase former White Sox announcer Hawk Harrelson, she gone. Just like that. Without a goodbye or a last name. I asked the manager what happened and he said she retired. Said she took a couple days off and he guesses she liked it so much she decided not to come back. It seems an impulsive move for a woman so dependable that if she missed work you thought maybe the Apocalypse was upon us. Nothing on earth lasts forever, a timely message in November.

Stray Thoughts

Good long soaking read trying to find answers to quotidian mysteries like...

Why did U.S. faithfully and inexorably reenact France’s failure in Vietnam? From hubris to napalm to trying to piss off the locals to losing 50k+ men to not understanding that to win a piece of land only to abandon it the next day was no way to win a war ... It’s maddening that LBJ or JFK couldn’t sit down and talk with French leaders asking, “so what can you tell us about fighting in Indochina so that we don’t make the same mistakes?”. But we didn’t apparently and arguably the Vietnam War was what helped killed all authority, even extending to that of churches perhaps.
___

I remember someone saying that the reason the elites don’t worry much is that often they were born on third base and think they hit a triple so there attitude is there is little cause for alarm. And the poor always live precariously and have made it this far, so there’s little cause for alarm.

But the middle class is different because most know privation and surplus and greatly prefer the latter and worry about securing it.

The rich know they can buy their way out of difficulty, and the poor that they’ll never avoid difficulty, so it’s only the middle class perhaps with something to lose.
___

“Why do demons wish to excite in us gluttony, fornication, greed and other passions? So the mind, under the weight, should be unable to pray as it ought. When the passions of our irrational part begin to act, they prevent the mind from acting rationally.” - St. Nilus of Sinai
___

Started reading more of the Eric Gill biography last night. One fascinating bedeviled personality is he.
___

My ambition has always been to lack ambition.  Sort of my super power. But now I realize that lacking ambition is not a good or bad in itself and that the ambition I should have is God’s ambition for me, whatever that might be.  Because God, for sure, doesn’t lack ambition. Just look around. His ambition for some might look slight, but that’s only on the surface.

PGIC, Liz Bruenig before she Bruenigs you, and Tolstoy

I'm impressed if not edified by the PGIC (professional grievance industrial complex) for making "public hanging" a dog whistle and/or insulting.  Tons of whites got hung; ain't nobody seen no Westerns?

Hyde-Smith didn’t say "lynching".

It was a joke.

There hasn’t been a public hanging in almost a hundred years.

It's kind of strange how this culture has become so strange.

*

Listened to the lovely and exotic Elizabeth Bruenig on her podcast. It's not every day you hear a Catholic Marxist.  Of course it's all good until somebody gets hurt (i.e. the country, by going socialist).

the 18-yr old WaPo columnist

Then listened to her and Ross Douthat and JD Flynn talk about - what else? - the sex abuse scandal via a Livestream.

Interesting to hear the panelists respond to what one thing they'd advise the pope to do, and the three responses seemed pretty spot on (none of which have much chance of happening):

1. Tell the truth.
2. Exercise penitence, not for PR but because “it’s who we are”
3. Put a mom in charge of the abuse scandal.

Another thing that won’t happen is transparency around disgraced McCarrick. Apparently it’s impressive it’s gotten even this far - word has it that Dolan had to fight to expose McCarrick. And I’m not sure what I’m looking for really.  Not sure of my motives. Not payback for McCarrick, but perhaps payback for those who enabled him.

The European attitude is that Americans are obsessed with a “cold case”. Ancient history. Nothing to see here. Which I get on one level. I’m not interested in McCarrick's laicization since if he’s not repentant now he never will be, though perhaps it would be good as a future deterrent to others. But ultimately what bothers me is the lack of anyone owning up to it. Not looking for a penalty per se. To my knowledge there’s been a shortage of apologies. You could ask, “how did this happen?” and assume “he was glib and a good fundraiser, that’s how” but ultimately it’d be nice for someone to officially acknowledge that, maybe.

Towards that goal, I immodestly offer a USCCB press release:

"We would like to acknowledge that we supported the promotion and enabling of former Cardinal McCarrick because he was glib and a good fundraiser and we felt that uprooting the tares would disturb the wheat. We apologize and will do acts of penance." 

The other way to view it is a case where corruption is warping doctrine, where the lavender mafia that protected McCarrick has a vested interest in seeing doctrine on sexual matters change.

One wag said that the difficulty lies in that Americans are sacramentalized Puritans and Southern Europeans are sacramentalized pagans. I'd rather be the former.

*

I did not know the story of Leo Tolstoy’s last days, and how haunted he was by the fact that he felt he was “playacting” as a Christian due to his wealth:

In October 1910, at the age of eighty-two, he ran away from home, seeking to escape the world and find true peace. He did not get far. After collapsing at a train station at Astapova, he died on November 20. His last words were, “To seek, always to seek.”

A quote:

“If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die—what makes it any different from a half hour?”—Leo Tolstoy

Adventures in Babysitting 2018 Remake

Had grandkids early and often over weekend.  Adventures in Babysitting was an '80s movie which prompted a crush on Elisabeth Shue.

I’m suitably exhausted.  We started out watching OSU game but within the first twenty minutes our middle child was crying for reasons now lost in the archives of babysitting history.  Dog Max had gotten something he shouldn’t have, and 2-year old Katherine was trying to climb over Steph while grabbing everything that wasn’t nailed down.

We made it till mid-4th quarter when game seemed wrapped up before heading out in the frigid cold. First up was cutting the grass (or rather leaves, since a heavy blanket of leaves sat on it).  Despite charging the mower for a few hours the battery wouldn’t start. So next up was leaf blower which, alas, didn’t blow leaves since not powerful enough.  This left the unpalatable solution of raking the leaves by hand. The boys and I started raking and three minutes later the kids’ hands get cold.  So I told them to go in and get gloves.  They do and next thing is Max is running loose, loose as a goose in the front yard. Someone had left the door open.  So I spent then next ten minutes chasing Max around until he went into somebody’s garage and got cornered.

Max restored, we re-started the leaf-raking, doing it for a solid hour and getting it under control before diving into leaves for photo ops.

Then to hot tub, me, the boys and Katherine. Afterward Steph took Kath home and I ordered pizza. By 7pm we were happy and full.  Rented movie Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days which was surprisingly good.  For earworm purposes I introduced the boys to ‘80s song Safety Dance after reading Amy Welborn did that for her kids recently. But no earworms were said to have formed - except for me.  I'm still singing that song in my head. No bad deed goes unpunished. They had Alexa play something more their speed: “Radioactive”.

Sleep, blessed sleep, at 9:30.  For them if not for me. I holed myself up in my room like an outlaw, drinking Edmund Fitzgerald Stout and reading from the severely underrated writer Joe Queenan.  He’s sort of a sophisticated male version of Erma Bombeck.

Predicting Presidential Elections since '60

I’m too data-driven with regard to understanding events that defy logic to some extent like how someone gets elected president. The heart has its ways where reason doth not go, or something like that. And people are complex.

But I always try to figure out a formula that will determine who will win presidency.

I think in the modern era (1960s on), there are three components.

1) A feint in the opposite political direction. (Works for popes too since many thought Bergoglio was a conservative when he feinted that way years ago.)
2) Comfort with television and/or telegenic.
3) A lack of experience. Theoretically people’s thirst for a lack of experience must eventually find a bottom, though hopefully before we amend the Constitution and start electing pre-teens. Some would argue our current occupant is a pre-teen but that’s off topic.

Character plays a role too as reactions.  Jimmy Carter was a reaction to Nixon admin and George W. Bush against Clinton.  If this holds true in 2020, a Democrat like Bernie Sanders might be helped.

Let’s see if it works.

1960: Kennedy v Nixon. Kennedy feinted as a conservative with his hawkishness and fiscal sanity. A Look magazine cover in 1946 read: “A Kennedy Runs for Congress: The Boston-bred scion of a former ambassador is a fighting-Irish conservative.” Nixon, by comparison, rarely looked liberal prior to 1960. Kennedy also wins on television obviously. Experience a wash, although slight edge to Kennedy likely.
Verdict: theorem worked.

1964: Johnson v Goldwater. Goldwater never feinted left in his life, at least not prior to ’64, and Johnson as a Southern Democrat feinted that way when he had to. They were a wash as far as television, and both were career senators.
Verdict: theorem worked, although wouldn’t have predicted a landslide.

1968: Nixon v Humphrey: This one I’m going to say the theroem didn’t work. Similar experience, slightly better TV maybe for Humprhey although Nixon had a lot of experience with the medium by this point. And both career pols.
Verdict: No.

1972: Nixon v McGovern. Similar experience, similar TV skills, but Nixon by this time had most definitely feinted left early and often (picture Bill Clinton after ’94 midterms), while McGovern never feinted right in his life except in restaurants if a waiter was coming by with a tray full of drinks.
Verdict: worked

1976: Carter v Ford: No (federal) experience for Carter, better on TV, and Carter feinted right simply by being a Southern Dem.
Verdict: worked

1980: Carter v Reagan: Reagan wins on TV easily, no federal experience for Reagan, so that’s two out of three right there.
Verdit: worked

1984: Reagan v Mondale: Reagan wins on TV, plenty of experience on both sides (wash), and Mondale didn’t perceptibly feint right.
Verdict: worked

1988: Bush v Dukakis: Bush wins narrowly on TV, less experience for Dukakis (point for him), but Dukakis never feinted right. Narrow win for Bush.
Worked, arguably.

1992: Clinton v Bush: Clinton kills on TV, less experience for Clinton, Clinton feinted right with Sister Souljah and being Southern Dem.
Worked.

1996: Clinton v. Dole: : Clinton kills on TV, experience a wash, Clinton feinted right with Sister Souljah and being Southern Dem.
Worked.

2000: W.Bush v Gore: Bush slightly better on TV, experience less for Bush than career pol Gore, and Gore didn’t feint right.
Worked.

2004: Bush v Kerry: Bush slightly better on TV, experience a wash, and Kerry didn’t feint right. Bush feinted right with “compassionate conservatism”, runaway spending, prescription drugs for Medicare, etc.
Worked.

2008: Obama v McCain: Obama killed on TV, less experience for Obama, and Obama feinted right with his 2004 “can’t we all get along unity-religious" speech at Dem convention.
Worked.

2012: Obama v Romney. Obama killed on TV, experience a wash (still slightly less for Obama arguably), and Romney didn’t feint left.
Worked.

2016: Trump v Hillary: Edge to Trump on TV for his experience and comfort with medium, experience huge mismatch in favor of Trump, and Hillary didn’t feint right.
Worked.

I want to examine why someone like Rubio wouldn’t have made it to nomination. Experience is in Trump’s favor, Rubio feinted left on immigration (not good in primary but good in general), and one would think he was better on TV but for his repetitiousness.

Fall Back Fellini

"Fall back" offers a precious extra hour of weekend and so I took time to bathe in the slow-motion documentary "Ex Libris" on Kanopy. Neat to see NYPL branches in those exotic NYC settings (Bronx, Chinatown, "Malcolm X" blvd). It blows your mind, the city does. People as art. People-watching as an activity.

Took dogs on a walk on nearby road because I wanted to read the home-made signs in one guy’s yard that I had trouble reading while passing by at 35 mph. It turns out it said something like "In 2008 you proved you weren’t a racist ... now prove you aren’t stupid. Red tsunami.".

I googled the phrase to see if it was used elsewhere and it turns out there was a book written in 2012 by a Neil Synder titled, "If You Voted for Obama in 2008 to Prove You're Not a Racist, You Need to Vote for Someone Else in 2012 to Prove You're Not an Idiot."

Seems pretty certain Synder, who has a blog called and is a retired professor from Virginia, was the inspiration directly or indirectly for the neighbor.

Halloween, Ole Miss, Voters and Old Churches

Halloween's "Trick or Treat" is no treat given our dog Max gets deeply unhappy and barks and whines at being prevented from going up to the door (we set up a gate in the hallway).  But it doesn't seem kosher to scare the kids by having a 75-lb dog coming at them full-speed. A bit too much trick.

Come 8pm I removed the gate and closed down shop and he raced to the candy and stole at least three. In trying to extract it from him he simply swallowed them, still intact in their plastic wrappings. He has the gullet of a python. Chocolate isn’t good for dogs but at his weight he can take that amount.

After reading Jeff Miller’s posts on Facebook I now lament my lack of imagination and esprit de Halloween corps. He came up with these ideas:

I am having fun shifting the colors of my porch light via the phone app as Trick-and-Treaters approach. Beautiful night so just sitting on my porch with my laptop handing out future dental problems. Next year I am going to have two bowls of candy. The first full of generic candy nobody likes, the second full of the good stuff. Will show the first one first, wait for the reaction and pull out the second.

Brilliancy.  Won't solve my dog problem though of course.
__________

Enjoyed the 2016 election returns from PBS via YouTube. It ne’er gets old, the dawning shock and dismay of the elites. It’s interesting to see who gloms onto the storyline early. I’ve watched most of ABC and PBS now. Next up NBC, FOX News, CBS.

PBS’s Mark Shields mentioned before any returns were in that the Democrat party has become elitist and no longer attracts white working-class votes. That indeed turned out to be THE story.

Another guest mentioned that a surprise was that the gender gap was similar to past elections - she said she thought women would turn on Trump due to the Access Hollywood tape - and that could be accounting for Hillary not winning by a landslide.

David Brooks wrung his hands and was crestfallen, looking as grim as Gen Robert E. Lee immediately after Gettysburg.

Jeff Greenfield intelligently picked up early that the seemingly mythical extra white voters that Ted Cruz was always hoping for seemed to have materialized for Trump. Someone said something like “looks like white voters have some fight left in them” (before their demographic winter).

It's perhaps surprising how everything was seen completely in terms of race and ethnicity and gender instead of the candidates, issues, class, change versus more of the same. I get that, being a data guy myself.  It's a good thing to recall how voters, who are supposed to adhere closely to their caricatures, can fail to do so.
_________

Interesting to hear Lino Rulli on Catholic Channel of Sirius XM say Michigan football isn’t even in his 5 top college football experiences.

He says Notre Dame is in top 5 but number one is.... Ole Miss. He said the tailgating, the Southern hospitality, the smaller-sized stadium all make it the best college football.
_________

Read some of Tucker Carlson book Ship of Fools. It's scary how no one is talking about the fact that the nation’s truckdrivers are going to lose their jobs with driverless vehicles given the tremendous number of truck-drivers. He laments the passing of the old Democrats, pests to be sure but pests needed in the nation’s ecosystem. Now, alas, they have become both indifferent to the little guy and socially liberal, a fatal combo for the country. Kill the family and the working man in one fell swoop.

Also read some WSJ, an intriguing article about how some millennials are looking to retire at 40 via heroic 70% savings rates.

Listened to some of Eric Scheske podcast about how crucial it is to train your brain, aka "Catholic mindfulness". He recommended “The Virgin Eye” big time (he bought copies for al his seven kids, first time ever he’d done something like that).

Grandkids came over and one of them is bad at “transitions” and so he was sullen and angry when his mother was taking him home and wouldn’t give my wife a hug. Rebuffed her and didn’t say a word. His father wasn't happy about it when he heard from his wife.  Around 5:30 we got a tearful Facetime call from a tearful one that appeared to be a hostage video. He would get a spanking if he didn’t execute this apology with sincerity and eye-contact and one sensed he would've proclaimed an indifference to candy under those circumstances.  But it is what it is. It ain’t easy raising kids.

Local Dominican priest comments on twitter: "Central Ohio is full of little towns with really neat 19th century Catholic churches."

And there was a response from a Deacon Ambrose Dobrozsi: "Some of the best to the west in our diocese of Cincinnati - St. Patrick in Glynnwood; St. Remy in Russia; St. Augustine in Minster; Holy Angels in Sidney. St. Patrick in Bellefontaine is undergoing work to be restored to its pre-V II glory."

Shocked to see St. Patrick’s of Glynnwood get a mention on Twitter! Especially given how large the Cincy diocese surely is.

Undeniably, I think, the most beautiful church in the area hands-down belongs to neither diocese -- I’m thinking of the basilica in Covington, KY.

And for the heck of it, I checked out Google reviews for churches on the web.  The Covington church got a stunning 4.9 of 5.0 scale and 55 reviews.

Cincy’s cathedral got a 4.5 on 46 reviews.  Columbus cathedral got 4.5 on 36 reviews.  Cleveland’s cathedral got 4.7 out of 49 reviews.  St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC got 4.8 out of 5,308 reviews. The Washington D.C. Basilica got 4.8 out of 12,000+ reviews.

I think of all of them for me, the D.C. church still number 1, but Covington number 2.