Augusts
Posted: August 23, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
August is often a contemplative month over here. A leisurely month sometimes, and thus a fruitful time at Helytimes.
Here’s a gathering notes and thoughts from previous Augusts.
We hope all Helytimes readers and enthusiasts are having a relaxing and refreshing August. We appreciate you.
August 2012
selling the Aga cooker, Lon Chaney.
August 2013
Athletes, sharks, showrunners, executioners, painters.
August 2014
August 2015
John Quincy Adams, Julie London.
August 2016
I was down in New Zealand and Australia.
August 2017
August 2018.
Taleb, Warren Buffett, the Ten Day MBA, and what is a story?
These are your only options
Posted: August 21, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics Leave a comment
Shouldn’t you be allowed to vote for whoever you want?
I remember the anger at the people who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. I get it. I voted for Al Gore, I loved Al Gore, Al Gore is like my dream politician (boring experienced intellectual veteran centrist conservationist globalist). But the people who voted for Nader get to vote for Nader! Al Gore didn’t earn their vote. They don’t owe Al Gore a rotten fig. You can’t be mad at the people who voted for someone else for not cynically falling into line to vote for an establishment centrist they didn’t prefer.
Same deal with Susan Sarandon! She can vote for whomever she wants, cool for her for having interesting choices. You’re gonna blame her for Trump? Blame the woman who had an absolute slam dunk layup election on her hands, who had many advantages, enormous amounts of money, her husband was a very popular President of the United States two Presidents ago, for failing to convince enough voters to vote for her.
Dr. Jill Biden, in New Hampshire, says:
You have to swallow a little bit and say, ok, I personally like so and so better, but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump.
If you check out the video you can also see Joe Biden’s first campaign ad, which highlights how “all the polls agree” Joe Biden is the best candidate to beat Trump.
Quit your thinkin’, voter, this one’s been decided for you. Who’re you gonna believe, your judgment or some polls we pulled together?
The whole premise of the Biden campaign makes me sick. This is a guy who was a weak, confused candidate who couldn’t stop himself from making stuff up and plagiarizing not just speeches but the family histories of other politicians when he was in his prime! And now he is… guess how old Joe Biden is.
Did you guess 72? 74?
Joe Biden is seventy-six years old! He will be seventy-eight if he takes the oath of office in Jan 2021. Eighty-two at the end of his first term.
What has Joe Biden done with his life? I get that he was Obama’s pretend best friend, but really, who is a person who in Joe Biden’s thirty-eight some years of public life he really helped? Uplifted?
(skimming his Wikipedia page)
OK I guess he did stand up for Delaware’s chicken farmers, Delaware’s banks, and in many ways benefitted the people of Delaware (by getting them federal taxpayer money). He was an advocate for Delaware, a state with a population of about one-quarter of the city of Los Angeles.
Where has he been on the big issues? He voted against the “good” Iraq War, the one we won, and for the bad one, the one that was a stupid, deceitful, horrible disaster from start to… finish? I guess it’s over? For us?
(Oh no wait we still have five thousand troops there.)
Joe Biden is sometimes said to know a lot about foreign policy but he was exactly wrong on the biggest American disaster of my lifetime.
Biden has said, “I consider the Violence Against Women Act the single most significant legislation that I’ve crafted during my 35-year tenure in the Senate.”[119]
OK, well that is cool, but didn’t the same bill also eliminate higher education for inmates and create new death penalty offenses?
The argument I hear for Joe Biden is that white Rust Belt working class men, who are alleged to have cost Hillary Clinton the election in Wisconsin, Ohio, etc, like him. Well, I don’t know if that’s true, I am not a white Rust Belt working class man.
I do think that:
1) the group credited with “swinging” the last election is never the group credited with swinging the next one
2) it’s not my job as a voter to put myself in the hypothetical mindset of some possible swing voter in another state and attempt to pander to their whims in order to take out the current whim-panderer.
It’s my job to choose the candidate who I try and suss out has the best character, judgment, and policy understandings and preferences to be the President of the United States.
For a campaign to suggest anything else, to suggest five months before the first primary/caucus that voters should shut up and get in line, that this is your only option, is so insulting I can scarcely believe it.
We try not to be all negative at Helytimes, so in the interest of saying something nice about Joe Biden he does have a great smile.
The evils of private planes
Posted: August 18, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, aviation Leave a comment
from Wikipedia, Boeing 727
Once I was told a story about a world famous celebrity. This celebrity, the story went, was in a new-ish religion. This celebrity had some sexual desires and proclivities that he was ashamed of. Maybe the religion made him feel bad about it. But in the theology of this religion, what you did at say 30,000 feet of altitude wasn’t technically on Earth or something and thus was bound by different rules, or maybe no rules at all. So the celebrity would fly up in a plane and fulfill these desires up there between here and space.
Whether that story is true I dunno. It wasn’t told to me very reliably. Pure gossip and alleged. But doesn’t it ring kind of true? Mythologically if not actually?
There’s something evil about private planes.
What plane did Jeffrey Epstein even have? I went looking for a photo of it, and couldn’t find one I felt came from a reliable source. Christopher Maag, writing in the North Jersey Record (is that a good newspaper? I don’t know!):
His planes, which ranged from a Cessna to a Gulf Stream jet to a Boeing 727, recorded at least 730 flights to and from Teterboro between 1995 and 2013, according to flight logs contained in documents unsealed last week by a federal court in a lawsuit brought by one of Epstein’s alleged victims against one of his close associates.
Look for a photo of Epstein’s plane, if you have idle Internet time. See if you find one that you’re pretty confident is a confirmed, legit photo of his plane.
Making sense of his flight logs is beyond my expertise.
Did Epstein own these planes outright? Did he pay the bills on the gas and stuff? The hanger? He had a 727?
Gladwell, Malcolm: Writer.
“I was invited to the TED conference in maybe 2000 (I can’t remember), and they promised to buy me a plane ticket to California,” Gladwell says now. “Then at the last minute they said, ‘We found you a ride on a private plane instead.’ As I recall, there were maybe two dozen TED conferencegoers onboard. I don’t remember much else, except being slightly baffled as to who this Epstein guy was and why we were all on his plane.”
You and me both, buddy! From NY Mag’s roundup of everyone who knew this guy.
found this here at the Museum of Flying, kind of hard to find a photo of the Caroline, and I can’t figure out who took this one
When John Kennedy was running for President his father Joe Kennedy bought a plane. Other candidates had chartered planes, but unless I’m mistaken he was the first candidate to own his own plane.
The President has use of a plane, Air Force One. Supposedly JFK helped pick the colors.
Cecil Stoughton photo of Air Force One in 1962 from the JFK Library.
But it’s not his (her) plane. It’s our plane, the people’s plane. Once you leave office, it’s not yours any more.
For eight years Bill Clinton had Air Force One. But then he left office, and he wasn’t rich enough to buy his own plane. What was he supposed to do, fly commercial? Of course not! He called his friends who were rich enough to have private planes, and got rides from them.
Some of these guys were bad guys.
That level where you have a private plane. Where you can fly anywhere you want, any time you want.
You can be kinda rich, where you’re not really worried about money, you can eat fancy dinners and live somewhere you like*. Then let’s say you get twenty million more dollars. Might feel very nice, maybe you buy a fancier house, or worry even less about money, or start a small foundation or take care of more people around you or something. But have you really jumped a level?
I don’t know, I don’t have $20 million dollars, but I don’t think so. What if after the twenty million you get ten million more? Is anything improved?
But then there’s the private plane.
That plane isn’t just comfort, it’s power. It’s access, it’s freedom, it’s being on another level. Above it all.
What will people do to get to that level? To stay there?
Who is that important that they need a private plane? No one. Richard Branson loves it, Warren Buffett admits he likes his (he doesn’t own it, I believe Berkshire does). No doubt it saves them time and hassle, no doubt they can get to deals quicker and the power compounds. And if you believe in capitalism don’t you believe you should be able to buy what you can afford, the market has determined efficiency, and what’s better than freedom, etc.
But isn’t there something a little obscene about private planes? Everyone wants to fly in them, but everyone knows there’s something a little wrong about it.
From Politico:
“I’m not shocked that while thousands of volunteers braved the heat and cold to knock on doors until their fingers bled in a desperate effort to stop Donald Trump, his Royal Majesty King Bernie Sanders would only deign to leave his plush D.C. office or his brand new second home on the lake if he was flown around on a cushy private jet like a billionaire master of the universe,” said Zac Petkanas, who was the director of rapid response for the Clinton campaign.
The gall.
Radical proposal: in the wake of the Epstein case, the FAA and Congress should look into banning private planes. Everyone can fly commercial for awhile. (Exception if you are yourself at the controls as pilot.)
Sandwich I’m still thinking about
Posted: July 1, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, Arkansas, food 1 Comment
BBQ Beef:
When you are at Craig’s you are on the Arkansas Pie Trail:
Delta
Posted: June 16, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, Mississippi, music Leave a comment
ruins of Windsor Plantation
Found myself, for the second time in two years, driving Highway 61 through the Mississippi Delta. I don’t feel like I intended this, exactly. Once was good. But there I was again.
This map by Raven Maps was a breakthrough in understanding the Delta, what makes this region freakish and weird and unique. The Delta is low-lying bottomland. Thinking of the Mississippi in this area as a line on a map is inaccurate, it’s more like a periodically swelling and retreating wetland, like the Amazon or the Nile. Floods are frequent, vegetation grows thick, the soil is rich and good for growing cotton. That is the curse, blessing and history of the Delta. This year Highway 61 was almost flooded below Vicksburg.
The river from the bluffs at Natchez
The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg. The Peabody is the Paris Ritz, the Cairo Shepheard’s, the London Savoy of this section. If you stand near its fountain in the middle of the lobby, where ducks waddle and turtles drowse, ultimately you will see everybody who is anybody in the Delta and many who are on the make.
So said David Cohn in his famous essay of 1935.
It’s been awhile since I was at The Peabody.
Dave Cohn was Jewish. Shelby Foote had a Jewish grandfather. The Delta was diverse.
So says Shelby. On the Delta fondness for canned beans:
from:
Here’s something North Mississippi Hill Country man Faulkner had to say about people in this region:
Q: Well, in the swamp, three of the men that lived in the swamp did have names – Tine and Toto and Theule, and I wonder if those names had any type of significance or were supposed to be any type of literary allusion. They’re rather colorful names, I think.
A: No, I don’t think so. They were names, you might say, indigenous to that almost unhuman class of people which live between the Mississippi River and the levee. They belong to no state, they belong to no nation. They – they’re not citizens of anything, and sometimes they behave like they don’t even belong to the human race.
Q: You have had experience with these people?
A: Yes. Yes, I remember once one of them was going to take me hunting. He invited me to come and stay with his kinfolks – whatever kin they were I never did know – a shanty boat in the river, and I remember the next morning for breakfast we had a bought chocolate cake and a cold possum and corn whiskey. They had given me the best they had. I was company. They had given me the best food they had.
The Delta is a ghost town. In 2013 The Economist reported
Between 2000 and 2010 16 Delta counties lost between 10% and 38% of their population. Since 1940, 12 of those counties have lost between 50% of 75% of their people.
Another Economist piece from the same era has a great graphic of this:
“You can’t out-poor the Delta,” says Christopher Masingill, joint head of the Delta Regional Authority, a development agency. In parts of it, he says, people have a lower life expectancy than in Tanzania; other areas do not yet have proper sanitation.
Everywhere you see abandoned buildings, rotting shacks, collapsing farmhouses. This gives the place a spooky quality. It’s like coming across the shedding shell of a cicada. There are signs of a once-rich life that is gone.
Here’s an amazing post about the sunken ruins of the plantation of Jefferson Davis.
Every town that still exists along the river of the Delta is on high ground or a bluff. Natchez, Port Gibson, Vicksburg. Once beneath these towns there were great temporary floating communities of keelboats, canoes. But the river has flooded and receded and changed its course many times. Charting the historical geography of these towns is confusing. Whole towns have disappeared, or been swallowed.
Brunswick Landing, of which nothing remains.
The first time I ever thought about the Mississippi Delta was when I came across this R. Crumb cartoon about Charley Patton, who was from Sunflower County.
Something like 2,000 people lived and worked at Dockery Plantation. It’s worth noting that this plantation was started after slavery, it was begun in 1895.
At the time, much of the Delta area was still a wilderness of cypress and gum trees, roamed by panthers and wolves and plagued with mosquitoes. The land was gradually cleared and drained for cotton cultivation, which encouraged an influx of black labourers.
In a way, the blues era, say 1900-1940 or so, was a kind of boomtime in the Delta. The blues can be presented as a music of misery and pain but what if it was also a music of prosperity? Music for Saturday night on payday, music for when recording first reached communities exploding with energy? Music from the last period of big employment before mechanization took the labor out of cotton? How much did the Sears mail order catalog help create the Delta blues?
We stopped at Hopson Commissary in Clarksdale, once the commissary of the Hopson plantation. (Once did someone run to get cigarettes from there?) Here was the first fully mechanized cotton harvest – where the boomtime peaked, and ended. If you left Mississippi around this time, you probably left on the train from Clarksdale.
If in Clarksdale I can also recommend staying at The Delta Bohemian guest house. We were company and they gave us their best.
you may need this number
Here’s something weird we saw, near Natchez:
We listened to multiple podcasts about Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads, that whole bit. The interesting part of the story (to me) is that, according to the memories of those who knew him, Robert Johnson did somehow, suddenly, get way better at the guitar. I like this take the best:
Some scholars have argued that the devil in these songs may refer not only to the Christian figure of Satan but also to the African trickster god Legba, himself associated with crossroads. Folklorist Harry M. Hyatt wrote that, during his research in the South from 1935 to 1939, when African-Americans born in the 19th or early 20th century said they or anyone else had “sold their soul to the devil at the crossroads,” they had a different meaning in mind. Hyatt claimed there was evidence indicating African religious retentions surrounding Legba and the making of a “deal” (not selling the soul in the same sense as in the Faustian tradition cited by Graves) with the so-called devil at the crossroads.
Does everybody in the music business sell their soul to the Devil, one way or another?
Is there something vaguely embarrassing about white obsession with old blues? I get the yearning to connect to a past that sounds like it’s almost disappeared, where just the barest, rawest trace echoes through time. But doesn’t all this come a little too close to taking a twisted pleasure in misery? And is there something a little gloves-on, safe remove about focusing on music from eighty years ago, when presumably somewhere out there real life people are creating vital music, right now?
I dunno, maybe there’s something cool and powerful about how lonely nerds and collectors somewhere and like tourists from Belgium connecting to the sounds of desperate emotion from long dead agricultural workers.
My favorite of the old blues songs is Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground. Blind Willie Johnson wasn’t even from the Delta though, he was from Pendleton, Texas.
Plans are worthless, but planning is everything
Posted: May 14, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, war, writing, WW2 Leave a comment
During a speech in November 1957 Eisenhower employed the saying again. He told an anecdote about the maps used during U.S. military training. Maps of the Alsace-Lorraine area of Europe were used during instruction before World War I, but educational reformers decided that the location was not relevant to American forces. So the maps were switched to a new location within the U.S. for planning exercises. A few years later the military was deployed and fighting in the Alsace-Lorraine: 2
I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.
so says Quote Investigator. Eisenhower’s speech can be found here. Nixon picked up the quote in
I remember learning at the Nixon library about Nixon’s writing routine when he wrote this book in a house in Apple Valley, CA:
He used a Dictaphone or wrote longhand, working in seclusion, according to Esquire Magazine.
For breakfast, he ate a bowl of Grape Nuts and drank a can of orange juice. He wrote until noon, then paused for a ham sandwich.
Believe I first heard Eisenhower’s quote from Jeff Melvoin at a WGA showrunner training like mini-camp. I’ve found it profound.
One time a female Uber driver told me the secret to winning over women is “plan ahead.”
A brief skim of Eisenhower images on NARA.GOV leads us to this gem
General Eisenhower’s dog, Telek, poses for photographers on top of desk. [65-658]
Top Of The Rock
Posted: April 14, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, TV Leave a comment
Purging some books from my collection.
This one no longer sparks joy. Perhaps because the cover itself is too busy, and also summons up a specific 90s period that now feels almost grotesque?
I got a lot out of this book. What an era – when the most popular TV show really was the funniest. On Frasier:
What a great, brilliant innovation. It really gave Frasier a different, quieter feel than some of the other shows of the era.
How about this story about Clooney on the first day of E.R.:
Busy
Posted: April 10, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, writing Leave a comment
Noticed something about myself, but maybe it’s true for you, too. I am most productive when I am a certain level of “busy.”
When I have absolutely nothing to do, like zero, I rarely get anything done.
There’s a level of overwhelmedment where I am also useless.
But at just the right level of medium busy, my machinery hums and I get a lot done.
Surely there’s meaning in this!
(Image found by doing a search on NARA.gov for “busy.”
Original Caption: Older Citizens, Retired Persons and Those Unable to Care for Themselves Physically Are Cared for in Two Community Centers. This Man Lives at the Highland Manor Retirement Home, Keeping Busy with “Old Country” Crafts. New Ulm Is a County Seat Trading Center of 13,000 in a Farming Area of South Central Minnesota. It Was Founded in 1854 by a German Immigrant Land Company That Encouraged Its Kinsmen to Emigrate From Europe.
U.S. National Archives’ Local Identifier: 412-DA-15875
Photographer: Schulke, Flip, 1930-2008
Subjects:
New Ulm (Brown county, Minnesota, United States) inhabited place
Environmental Protection Agency
Project DOCUMERICA
Persistent URL: arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/ExternalIdSearch?id=558325
)
Suttree
Posted: March 27, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, books, cormac, writing Leave a comment
Moving stuff around in my house I found the handwritten list of words I had to look up from Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy, and their definitions.
Trull: a prostitute or a trollop.
Tellurian: an inhabitant of Earth.
Feels like I used to have a lot more spare time.
Suttree is set along the river in Knoxville, TN.
If you think Suttree might be for you, try the first sentence:
Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.
Marijuana and psychosis
Posted: March 26, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, business, coffee Leave a comment
This was in today’s Economist newsletter, and I’ve seen it elsewhere too. Scary! But then again, what is the definition of psychosis?
Isn’t getting your thought and emotions so impaired that you lose contact with external reality the point of high THC content marijuana? Is this a feature not a bug? External reality can be rough.
The study, in The Lancet, used the ICD-10 Criteria (F20-33), so schizophrenia and manic/bipolar episodes. The study compared people hospitalized for that kind of thing versus a control general population. Here’s how the study worked:
We included patients aged 18–64 years who presented to psychiatric services in 11 sites across Europe and Brazil with first-episode psychosis and recruited controls representative of the local populations.
Then this part:
We applied adjusted logistic regression models to the data to estimate which patterns of cannabis use carried the highest odds for psychotic disorder. Using Europe-wide and national data on the expected concentration of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in the different types of cannabis available across the sites, we divided the types of cannabis used by participants into two categories: low potency (THC <10%) and high potency (THC ≥10%). Assuming causality, we calculated the population attributable fractions (PAFs) for the patterns of cannabis use associated with the highest odds of psychosis and the correlation between such patterns and the incidence rates for psychotic disorder across the study sites.
“expected” and “assuming” are two words that do a lot of work here, but I don’t have time to read the whole study, I have to write cartoons.
In my neighborhood the most booming new shops sell either marijuana or cold brew coffee. Personally I wonder if drinking huge amounts of highly caffeinated cold brew might be more crazy-making than marijuana.
There is certainly ample psychosis in Los Angeles, so much so that it might be necessary to induce mild psychosis just so you can understand what’s going on with everybody. The chicken and egg, correlation and causation on psychosis / drug use is a tough one to unravel, as the study’s authors acknowledge. The study also notes that patients presenting with psychosis were more likely to have smoked ten or more cigarettes a day.
Cornel West and Peter Thiel
Posted: March 25, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
This isn’t content for everybody but watching Cornel West and Peter Thiel in convo is appealing to me.
Had a class with Professor Unger and what I most remember is him describing an infantilization he was perceiving among young people. Perhaps old people always think that the next crop of young people is infantile.
How to tell Bruce Springsteen bad news
Posted: February 21, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, business, music Leave a comment
DEADLINE: What parallels were there between Silvio and Miami Steve? You can see the affection between you and Springsteen onstage, and in the stories Bruce tells between songs about the old days.
VAN ZANDT: The common dynamic is, as a best friend you have an obligation to tell the truth and you’ve got to know when to do that and how to do that, and it’s never going to be easy when it’s bad news. But once in a while, hopefully rarely, but once in a while you’ve got to be the one to bring the bad news because nobody else is going to do it, so you’re obligated. That’s your responsibility as a best friend. Sometimes they will get mad at you and then, as happened on the show, you see occasionally Jimmy will be screaming at me over something and that’s how it is in real life.
It’s just one of those things that goes with that job, that relationship, in being the only one who’s not afraid of the boss because you grew up together and that puts you in a special category that is very, very useful and very helpful to that boss whether they like it or not. No boss likes to hear bad news or hear they made a mistake. You can’t do it every day or even that often, but when it’s really, really important, you pick your moment and you’ve got to take the consequences and you just have to live with that. That’s the job. And ironically, right after we filmed, Bruce decides to put the band back together that same year.
from this Deadline oral history of The Sopranos.
John Wayne
Posted: February 20, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, writing 1 Comment
some recent Twitter stir about John Wayne’s unwoke Playboy interview from the ’70s got me looking up a phrase that stuck in my craw since I read it. It’s Charles Portis, author of True Grit, telling his impression of seeing Wayne on a movie set.
What impressions do you have of John Wayne from the film?
“Wayne was a bigger man than I expected. He was actually bigger than his image on screen, both in stature and presence. One icy morning, very early, before sunrise, we were all having breakfast in a motel…. A tourist came over to speak. Wayne rose to greet her. He stood there, not fidgeting and just hearing her out, but actively listening, and chatting with her in an easy way, as his fried eggs congealed on the plate. I took this to be no more than his nature. A gentleman at four o’clock on a cold morning is indeed a gentleman.”
Found that here on the Fort Smith National Historic Site website.
Munger speaks
Posted: February 15, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, business Leave a comment
Looking forward to getting a transcript of Charlie Munger yesterday at the Daily Journal shareholders’ conference. Here the 95 year old former meteorologist and HelyTimes Hero talks to CNBC’s Becky Quick:
BECKY QUICK: Anything that rises to your radar screen now that may be under the radar for other people?
CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, nobody knows how much of this money printing we can do. And of course we have politicians who like– and are in both parties, who like to believe that it doesn’t matter how much you do. That we can ignore the whole subject and just print money as convenient. Well, that’s the way the Roman Empire behaved, then it was ruined. And that’s the way the Weimar Republic was ruined. And– it’s– there is a point where it’s dangerous. You know, and of course, my attitude when something is big and dangerous is to stay a long way away from it. Other people want to come as close as possible without going in. That’s too tricky for me. I don’t like it.
BECKY QUICK: In terms of possibly getting sucked up into it?
CHARLIE MUNGER: Yes. I– I– if there’s a big whirlpool in the river, I stay a long way away from it. There were a bunch of canoeists once that tried to– to run the Aaron Rapids. I think they were from Scandinavia. And– and the fact that the whirlpools were so big made them very eager to tackle this huge challenge. The death rate was 100%. I regard that as a normal result.
Are we in The Great Stagnation?
CHARLIE MUNGER: The opportunities that we all remember came from a demoralized period when about 90% of the natural stock buyers got very discouraged with stocks. That’s what created the opportunity for these fabulous records that my generation had. And that was a rare opportunity that came to a rare group of people of whom I was one. And Warren was another.
BECKY QUICK: So you’re talking–
CHARLIE MUNGER: And people who start now have a much less– they have lower opportunity.
BECKY QUICK: Do you think we saw a generational low after 2008, beginning of 2009?
CHARLIE MUNGER: Generational? Maybe.
Life advice:
BECKY QUICK: Charlie, so many of the people who come here come because they’re looking for advice not on business or investments as much as they’re looking for just advice on life. There were a lot of questions today, people trying to figure out what the secret to life is, to a long and happy life. And– and I just wonder, if you were–
CHARLIE MUNGER: Now that is easy, because it’s so simple.
BECKY QUICK: What is it?
CHARLIE MUNGER: You don’t have a lot of envy, you don’t have a lot of resentment, you don’t overspend your income, you stay cheerful in spite of your troubles. You deal with reliable people and you do what you’re supposed to do. And all these simple rules work so well to make your life better. And they’re so trite.
BECKY QUICK: How old were you when you figured this out?
CHARLIE MUNGER: About seven. I could tell that some of my older people were a little bonkers. I’ve always been able to recognize that other people were a little bonkers. And it helped me because there’s so much irrationality in the world. And I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, its causes and its preventions, and so forth, that I– sure it’s helped me.
I noticed a glitch in the transcript, btw. It’s written as follows:
BECKY QUICK: Do you think we saw a generational low after 2008, beginning of 2009?
CHARLIE MUNGER: Generational? Maybe.
BECKY QUICK: We–
CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah, I don’t think the market is going to be cheaper.
But if you listen closely it’s pretty clear Munger says “I don’t think Bank of America is going to be cheaper.” Almost exactly nine years ago today, Feb 2009, BAC was trading at $5.57. Today it’s at $29.12.
On Tactics by B. A. Friedman
Posted: February 15, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, war, writing Leave a comment
This book is an excellent size and weight. Small, portable, yet solid. It’s published by the Naval Institute Press, they who took a chance on an unknown insurance man named Tom Clancy who’d written a thriller called The Hunt For Red October.
Amazon suggested this book to me as I was browsing translations of Sun Tzu. Military history has interested me since I was a boy, maybe because 1) the stakes are so high and 2) the stories are so vivid. Metaphors and similes drawn from famous war events are powerful and stark. Consider for example Friedman’s description of the Battle of the Bulge:
… Although the Germans had caught the Allies at their culminating point, the Germans reached their own far too early. Newly created infantry units were filled with hastily trained and inexperienced conscripts. These green units could not effectively hold the territory gained by the leading panzer units. On 22 December the fog cleared and Allied air units hammered the German formations from the skies. Despite the prestaged fuel reserves, panzer units still ran out of fuel, just when they needed it to escape the Allied aerial counterattack.
Buried in there is a tactical lesson, and also an intense story about some poor children getting blown up right before Christmas.
The author was a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. If I understand right, might make this book the equivalent of a book called like Writing A Hit TV Show by a staff writer. But Friedman seems like he’s gone deep on the knowledge, and there’s a quote from Gen. Anthony Zinni on the back. Good enough for me.
Alexander The Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, vice just reading – the men who have gone before us. We have been fighting on this planet for 5,000 years and we should take advantage of their experience.
So goes a quote from James Mattis that opens this book. Friedman cites the example of Cortes in 1520 CE, referring to written accounts of Alexander’s battle at Gaugamela eighteen hundred years before to design his tactics against the Mexica/Aztec.
What is strategy? What is tactics? Where do they divide? Friedman summarizes Clausewitz:
Clausewitz divided warfare into tactics, actual combat between opposed military forces, and strategy, the latter being the overarching plan for using tactical engagements to achieve the ends as set forth by policy… The strategy acts as a bridge between the tactical actors (military forces) and the desired political end state of the entity those forces serve.
Much of this book is summaries of Clausewitz, really and Sun Tzu as well. How could it not be?
What I thought I remembered most of all from Clausewitz is the concept of Fingerspitzengefühl, fingertips-feel, a sensing of what’s going on, and where. But I don’t have my copy of Vom Kriege at hand, and searching for fingerspitzengefühl it seems possible the term may be of later origin. Maybe it was discussed in the introduction.
Clausewitz is very concerned with will, the imposing of one’s will on the enemy, breaking the will of the enemy. Given the time and place where Clausewitz was coming from, 1800s what’s now-Germany, I can’t help but think this idea of will was connected to other philosophers like Kant who were pondering the meanings and dimensions of will around then.
Friedman picks up on the idea of will, or what he refers to as moral cohesion. He digs in on the idea of destroying the enemy’s moral cohesion.
Clausewitz defined the destruction of an enemy as “they must be put in such a condition that they can no longer carry on the fight” (emphasis added). This does not mean that the enemy force must be totally destroyed. Indeed, he went on to say, “when we speak of destroying the enemy’s forces we must emphasize that nothing obliges us to limit this idea to physical forces: the moral element must be considered. In other words, breaking the moral cohesion of the opposing force is destruction of that force as an effective unit and the true goal of tactics.
In a whole chapter on moral cohesion, Friedman quotes Marine Major Earl “Pete” Ellis speaking of how important it was to marines fighting insurgents in the Philippines to believe that the United States was acting from “purely altruistic motives.” Jim Storr’s The Human Face of War is quoted as well: “In general, defeat occurs when the enemy believes he is beaten… Defeat is a psychological state.”
Friedman brings out Clausewitz’s concept of “the center of gravity,” too, and points out, in a thought-provoking way that it’s not totally clear what Clausewitz meant or understood by “gravity,” and what Clausewitz understood about physics. Clausewitz died in 1831 — have we even figured out gravity now? Clausewitz noted that the center of gravity could be a capital city, an ally, the shared interests of an alliance, particular leaders, or popular opinion. The North Vietnamese correctly located the center of gravity of the US in the Vietnam War as American political will. They destroyed our moral cohesion.
Friedman is tough on the U.S war in Iraq, which he says is “a glaring example of tactics, strategy, and policy in disarray.” We need to maintain our sense of moral cohesion. It’s slipping away from us.
We get some Boyd, too, a favorite here at HelyTimes. As a bottom line lesson on tactics, this is pretty clear and cool:
Boyd says if you move and decide faster than your enemy, you will win.
Friedman concludes by pointing out that tactics are subordinate to strategy.
The tactician employs tactics that will best serve the strategy, but he must also know when a flawed strategy cannot be achieved with reasonable tactics. Duty might still demand that he try to accomplish the mission, but he will need to inform the strategist that his aims are improbable.
Taking on a big concept like tactics and attempting to codify and create a short, comprehensible theory or unified system is a nobel mission. I found On Tactics profitable to read and full of stimulating ideas and examples.
Lying politicians
Posted: February 12, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, writing Leave a comment
Sometimes, for instance watching Trump talk about the wall, I wonder how much of politics is just people enjoying and wallowing in different kinds of lies. Reminds me of this passage from Mark Helprin’s novel A Winter’s Tale. A mayoral election is going on in New York:
He never talked about garbage, electricity, or police. He only talked about winter, horses and the countryside. He spoke almost hypnotically about love, loyalty, and esthetics … He promised them love affairs and sleigh races, cross-country skiing on the main thoroughfares, and the transfixing blizzards that howled outside and made the heart dance.
They thought, or so it was generally stated at the time, that if they were going to be lied to, they might as well pick the liar who did it best.
Looking for this quote in my old files I found F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Beautiful and the Damned, talking about Congress:
he tried to imagine himself in Congress rooting around in the litter of that incredible pigsty with the narrow and porcine brows he saw pictured sometimes in the rotogravure sections of the Sunday newspapers, those glorified proletarians babbling blandly to the nation the ideas of high school seniors! Little men with copy-book ambitions who by mediocrity had thought to emerge from mediocrity into the lustreless and unromantic heaven of a government by the people – and the best, the dozen shrewd men at the top, egotistic and cynical, were content to lead this choir of white ties and wire collar-buttons in a discordant and amazing hymn, compounded of a vague confusion between wealth as a reward of virtue and wealth as a proof of vice, and continued cheers for God, the Constitution, and the Rocky Mountains!
What to make of Beto?
Posted: January 25, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945 1 Comment
credit: Beto?
Jeff and I talked about immigration, about his travels in the U.S. and then about Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. He had just read it again after finding it for a dollar at a used book shop. I told him I read it as a kid and really liked it, and wondered if it held up. Surprisingly well he said. He then moved down to the other side of the table, I think to make sure that the students could more freely engage in the conversation.
Reading some of the former Texas congressman’s travel dispatches. He was just where I was, Taos pueblo:
We walked further into the village where I was struck by the magnificent beauty of the adobe homes, built next to and on top of one another. The Pueblo was established in the 15th century, had these homes been here that long? Men were shoveling snow off of the roofs against the backdrop of the breathtaking Taos mountains in the distance. As we walked, Tina shared with me history, of the Taos people and of her family. She talked about the role of the Catholic church and of the religion of the Taos pueblo. We talked about family, the village home she had just inherited from her mother, about the role of dance in her life, about her hopes for her community and her children.
In my grandparents’ time, Debbie said after a long while, we were not allowed to go into those mountains. When Teddy Roosevelt created the national forest, he took those mountains away from us. They are sacred mountains, so you can imagine what that felt like. We had to get special permission, a pass, to go beyond the fence line into what had been our home for centuries. It was only until Richard Nixon’s administration that those lands were opened up to us again. So, she said with a laugh, while most people admire Roosevelt and detest Nixon, we feel just the opposite.
The combo of hipster travel writing and political engagement. (Is travel writing always political?) The work to demonstrate you are listening, not proclaiming. Obama’s rise was partly due to his skill as a writer, the acclaim for his self-revelatory memoirs, why shouldn’t Beto’s?
A hazard of this kind of writing, of writing your life in close sync with living it, is becoming a character you’re trying to create on the page, of enacting scenes that you might imagine will become good copy. The danger then becomes manipulating what you really thought, and felt, of trying to pilot the course of your explorations a little too much. That doesn’t work, as writing or life, it’s inauthentic, you get yourself spun around and caught in whirlpools that way.
That’s always a danger when you’re a presidential candidate. Your soul’s at hazard. Somehow it feels extra tough though when your way of getting yourself there is your show of authenticity.
When you claim to report your very thoughts, almost in realtime, you need either an extreme level of mental self-control, or to have your actual self and your presentational self in some very real and genuine and hard-earned harmony. Maybe you need both. The first is terrifying to ponder. The second is rare, difficult both technically and at like a soul level. And scary to practice for any long amount of time, like walking a mountain ledge. If you fall you will suffer, somewhere from being revealed as a phony to breaking mentally and morally.
I know we can do it. I can’t prove it, but I feel it and hear it and see it in the people I meet and talk with. I saw it all over Texas these last two years, I see it every day in El Paso. It’s in Kansas and Oklahoma. Colorado and New Mexico too. It’s not going to be easy to take the decency and kindness we find in our lives and our communities and apply it to our politics, to all the very real challenges we face. And as Tina says, it’s complicated. But a big part of it has got to be just listening to one another, learning each other’s stories, thinking “whatever affects this person, affects me.”
We’re in this together, like it or not. The alternative is to be in this apart, and that would be hell.
A way to defend against inauthenticity when you’re writing/living is to make yourself the fool of your story when you really were a fool, and everyone’s a fool sometimes. But it’s tempting to exaggerate that direction, too. Writers can make themselves look foolish but maybe presidential candidates can’t.
I left the Pueblo heading south toward Chimayo, aiming to be back in El Paso by bedtime. Snow was starting to fall. I thought about all of the places I’d seen over the last week, all of the people I’d met. Communities within communities. Nations within nations.
Would it be terrible to hear, every once in awhile, like:
I could feel horrible diarrhea coming over me coming down the 291. I was so relieved when I saw a Wendy’s in Espanola. But also troubled. I thought, ‘what if they recognize me, racing into the toilet at Wendy’s? Do I have to stop and buy something? What if buying something is when they recognize me? What if they recognize me buying something at Wendy’s and that becomes a thing, like ‘Beto O’Rourke skips local New Mexico food for corporate Frostie’? Well expedience trumped discretion in this case, I made it to the blissfully clean Wendy’s toilet a second ahead of a bottomside avalanche. I left without buying anything. Or apologizing. How could I? Should I have? I’d wonder that, on the road back to El Paso.
Good news bad news kinda thing: nobody at Wendy’s recognized me.
I can hear the Peggy Noonans groaning, that’s just what we need, to hear about candidates’ bowel movements! OK, sure, and Donald J. Trump is the president. Any candidate who wants to get the votes of anyone under forty will need to project authenticity. For anyone truly authentic, that’s not hard. Among the schemers, where will the quest for that end?
Anyway as for Beto good luck to him.
It’s almost like a powder
Posted: January 14, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, moon Leave a comment
It’s sometimes left out of the clips you see, but I like what Neil Armstrong says right before he steps on the moon.
… the surface appears to be very, very fine grained, as you get close to it. It’s almost like a powder. Down there, it’s very fine.
JTree
Posted: January 12, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, the California Condition Leave a comment
Today’s top story on Hi Desert Star. Photo is captioned:
article by Kurt Schauppner.
What good is bad news in a crisis? I’m more of an evangelist — a good news guy. Hoping reports of damage to trees and such during shutdown is overblown.
Take strength from local heroes?
From the local Facebook page, it sounds like there may be some exaggeration or misunderstanding.
Like so many problems, a few assholes are doing most of the damage. Good people do outnumber assholes, is my experience, and by a wide margin.
obviously don’t chainsaw me, or even shove me too hard, I could be hundreds of years old and I’m very fragile! I’m terrible firewood anyway I’m pretty much made of dust!
Back to good news next post!
Promise and glamour
Posted: December 17, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a commentYou’re not gonna get what you were promised.
An angry making idea. Maybe one of the most angry-making ideas possible.
I’ve been wondering if anger about the feeling of a broken promise is a major driver in US politics. We were promised something, and we’re not gonna get it.
But what, exactly?
The United States is the absolute best as promising. All of our greatest politicians were great promisers. Our founding fathers were great promisers.
John Lanchester, writing in LRB:
Napoleon said something interesting: that to understand a person, you must understand what the world looked like when he was twenty. I think there’s a lot in that.
[…]
I notice, talking to younger people, people who hit that Napoleonic moment of turning twenty since the crisis, that the idea of capitalism being thought of as morally superior elicits something between an eye roll and a hollow laugh. Their view of capitalism has been formed by austerity, increasing inequality, the impunity and imperviousness of finance and big technology companies, and the widespread spectacle of increasing corporate profits and a rocketing stock market combined with declining real pay and a huge growth in the new phenomenon of in-work poverty. That last is very important. For decades, the basic promise was that if you didn’t work the state would support you, but you would be poor. If you worked, you wouldn’t be. That’s no longer true: most people on benefits are in work too, it’s just that the work doesn’t pay enough to live on. That’s a fundamental breach of what used to be the social contract. So is the fact that the living standards of young people are likely not to be as high as they are for their parents. That idea stings just as much for parents as it does for their children.
But it’s not just politics. If you live in the USA and you turn on your TV, you are being tempted, teased, and promised.
The illusionary promise.
There’s a connection here, I believe, to the world glamour. What is glamour?
Etymology
From Scots glamer, from earlier Scots gramarye (“magic, enchantment, spell”).
The Scottish term may either be from Ancient Greek γραμμάριον (grammárion, “gram”), the weight unit of ingredients used to make magic potions, or an alteration of the English word grammar (“any sort of scholarship, especially occult learning”).
A connection has also been suggested with Old Norse glámr (poet. “moon,” name of a ghost) and glámsýni (“glamour, illusion”, literally “glam-sight”).
A magic spell. An illusion.
Here is Larry McMurtry talking about glamour, and its lack:
Kids in the midwest only get to see even modest levels of glamour if they happen to be on school trips to one or another of the midwestern cities: K.C., Omaha, St. Louis, the Twin Cities. In some, clearly, this lack of glamour festers. Charles Starkweather, in speaking about his motive for killing all those people, had this to say: “I never ate in a high-class restaurant, I never seen the New York Yankees play, I never been to Los Angeles…”
He was teased with something he could never have. Here is Andrew Sullivan on Sarah Palin:
One of the more amazing episodes in Sarah Palin’s early political life, in fact, bears this out. She popped up in the Anchorage Daily News as “a commercial fisherman from Wasilla” on April 3, 1996. Palin had told her husband she was going to Costco but had sneaked into J.C. Penney in Anchorage to see … one Ivana Trump, who, in the wake of her divorce, was touting her branded perfume. “We want to see Ivana,” Palin told the paper, “because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.”
Interested in readers’ takes on glamour and glimmers.
Helytimes 
