Senate Majority Leader Thune
Posted: November 4, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics 1 CommentThe Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is a chronic liar and uninspiring character, at least to this home viewer. From The New York Times:
Mr. Johnson, who without the president’s backing wields little influence over his own members, has chosen to make himself subservient to Mr. Trump, a break with many speakers of the past who sought in their own ways to act more as a governing partner with the president than as his underling.
“I’m the speaker and the president,” Mr. Trump has joked, according to two people who heard the remark and relayed it on the condition of anonymity because of concern about sharing private conversations with him.
(who knows though, maybe that is a “seven almonds” story)
But what about the Senate Majority Leader, John Thune? Everyone seems to like this guy. From a Politico profile by Michael Kruse:
There is, however, a not inconsiderable camp of Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans who expected more. “To the extent that there needs to be Republicans in the Senate, and obviously there’s going to be, I wish they were all like John Thune,” Drey Samuelson, the longtime chief of staff of the late Tim Johnson, the last Senate Democrat from South Dakota, told me. “I mean, I don’t know anybody that really doesn’t like John Thune,” Samuelson said. “I like him.”
from a New Yorker profile by David D. Kirkpatrick:
a city aptly described as Hollywood graduated from for ugly people, Thune could pass for an actual movie star, with pale-blue eyes, a square jaw, and Mt. Rushmore cheekbones. Now sixty-four, he has salt-and-pepper hair that is still thick enough to part neatly on the side, and the broad lats, shoulders, thick arms, and narrow waist of a basketball player. His morning workouts at the Senate gym are legendary. Until a recent knee injury, Thune held the informal title of the fastest man in Congress. (He has likened that honor “the best surfer in Kansas.“)
(why did he say Kansas instead of his home state, South Dakota?)
Thune used to be opposed to Trump:
Thune’s candor often stood out in the course of Trump’s rise to power. During the 2016 race, Thune condemned Trump’s expressions of bigotry as “inappropriate.” After the leak of the “Access Hollywood” video, on which Trump boasted about grabbing women by the genitals, Thune was one of the first Republican senators to demand that Trump quit the race “immediately,” though the election was only a month away. And, even after Trump’s victory, Thune never masked his opposition to the President’s most cherished plans. In a 2017 television interview, he objected to the mass deportation of illegal immigrants, adding that “a lot of my colleagues” shared his view. He has called across-the-board tariffs “a recipe for increased inflation” that would punish South Dakota farmers and ranchers by setting off trade wars. He has consistently stood with what he calls “our trusted intel community” on the conclusion that Russia indeed meddled to help Trump in the 2016 election; he has called Vladimir Putin “a murderous thug” whose invasion of Ukraine proved “the value of NATO.” Thune also often praises wind energy—a booming industry in his home state—even though Trump considers turbines loathsome eyesores.
Trump’s demand that Congress refuse to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 election win elicited one of Thune’s few memorable turns of phrase: he told journalists that the request would “go down like a shot dog” in the Senate. After January 6th, Thune called Trump’s role in the riot “inexcusable.” Linda Duba, a friend from South Dakota and a retired Democratic state legislator whose children used to run in track meets alongside Thune’s, told me that she once asked him what working with Trump was like. “Not fun,” Thune had said. Another old friend was blunt: “I think he thinks Trump’s an ass.”
Not so much anymore. Here’s a (long) recent history of Congress I guess you can skip:
Thune arrived in Congress at a time that now looks like a high point of its power and effectiveness. In the nineties, lawmakers debated issues, committees drafted bills, and the parties compromised to tackle urgent problems.
Congress sent Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton major legislation on trade, crime, environmental protection, financial regulation, civil rights, and other issues. Negotiations between the parties even closed the deficit, briefly.
Philip Wallach, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the author of a timely book, “Why Congress,” told me that, looking back, “it’s really amazing-nothing like that has happened in the last fifteen years.”
One turning point, Wallach told me, was Newt Gingrich’s Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, in 1994. Gingrich relished partisan warfare, demanded loyalty from his rank and file, and turned district elections into contests between the national parties. Political scientists have identified long-standing trends that have contributed to the deepening polarization of Con-gress, including the growing ideological homogeneity of each party and the breakdown of the media into echo chambers.
But Wallach is surely correct that Congress, the branch of government designed to mediate factional conflicts, has succumbed to them—and even made them worse.
To more effectively wage partisan battles, Democratic and Republican leaders in both chambers consolidated their own power. Instead of relying on committees to draft bills, party leaders increasingly negotiated significant measures behind closed doors, then brought often in the form of giant “must-pass” bills against a tight deadline, such as measures to keep funding the govern-ment. In the Senate, the concentration of power has been especially stark. Senators used to take pride in proposing amendments during floor debates, facilitating bipartisan dealmaking even against party leaders’ wishes. Yet those leaders now often block individual senators from such freelancing by allowing consideration of only a limited number of amendments and then filling those slots with innocuous proposals of their own choosing—a tactic called “filling the tree.” The former Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid pioneered this strategy in the two-thousands, and his successors from both parties have kept it up ever since.
In the Congress of 1991-92, Wallach noted, the Senate adopted more than sixteen hundred amendments. In 2023-24, that number fell to two hundred. And the last Congress passed just two hundred and seventy-four bills- down from about seven hundred a year during the late eighties and fewer than any Congress since before the Civil War. Of those two hundred and seventy-four bills, the ten longest were assembled by the party leaders, and they accounted for four-fifths of all the pages of legislation passed in that Congress.
Lawmakers sometimes grouse about their loss of power. Ten years ago, Mark Begich, then a Democratic senator from Alaska, tried, unsuccessfully, to instigate a revolt against Reid’s tree-filling. Lamar Alexander, another critic of the practice, told me that being elected to the chamber now resembled “joining the Grand Ole Opry and not being allowed to sing”
Several senators told me that, at the end of last year, Thune negotiated an agreement with Democratic leaders that allowed Biden to equal the number of judicial confirmations made during the first Trump Administration. In exchange, the Democrats agreed to drop a handful of liberal appellate nominees whom Republicans found especially objection-able, leaving those seats open. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat who participates in a weekly Bible study with Thune, told me that “he was fundamental to all the bipartisan work we did in the last cycle.” For example, Thune helped initiate talks on an immigration bill, even letting legislators use his office. In the end, the bill became a classic example of partisan paralysis: when Trump indicated that he preferred to leave the border problems unaddressed, so that he could keep campaigning on the issue, the Republicans killed the legislation.
The Thune ancedote that stuck with me is this one, from Kruse in Politico:
But Thune decided against a White House run. His mother neared the end, a decade of dementia having taken its toll. “She would sit down at a meal, and she would say, ‘We suffer greatly here on Planet Earth,’” Tim Thune told me. “She might say that 30 times over the next 15 minutes.”
The Psychology of Strange Killers
Posted: November 3, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
Reader, you can breathe: I found the origin for the Charles Starkweather quote we first found in Larry McMurtry’s Roads. It appears in James Melvin Reinhardt’s book Psychology of Strange Killers. Reinhardt was a sociologist at University of Nebraska, and interviewed Starkweather at length. This particular quote seems to come from a letter Starkweather wrote Reinhardt.
In the death cell he wrote:
“I began to wonder what kind of life I did live in this world, and even to this day, I’m wondering about it, but it don’t matter how much I used to think about it I don’t believe I ever would have found a personal world or live in a worth-while world. They say, this is a wonderful world to live in, but I don’t believe I ever did really live in a wonderful world. There hadn’t been a chance for me to have the opportunity, or privilege, for the best things in life.” What were the “best things in life.” Here they are:
“I haven’t ever eaten in a high class restaurant, never seen the New York Yankees play, or been to Los Angeles or New York City, or other places that books and magazines say are wonderful places to be at.
“Yes, I went out with girls, some were mild dates with nice Christian girls, but most of the girls I went out with, were either the flibberty-biggerty (sic) type, that used too much make-up, and dressed in expensive clothes, or they were the harlot type, that weren’t hard to get a date with, and easy to get along with.
“I had my fights that seem to happen every other day, and like almost everybody, I had my dreams of things I wanted. But of all the dreams, fights, and women to me none of them ever seem to fit in this world. I guess that’s what I meant when I said,
“I didn’t know life, or what it was good for, and the reason I didn’t know, I just didn’t take time to fine out.”
••. Charles invariably showed an affectionate concern for his mother, his sister and younger brothers. Reference to his father,
I have to agree with the magazines Starkweather cites that New York and Los Angeles are pretty good.
Reinhardt’s own life is a reminder that life for pretty much everybody was a lot harder a hundred years ago:
Orphaned at age three, Reinhardt lived with his grandfather. Instead of attending school, he spent most of his young life working, mainly in cotton mills. During World War I, Reinhardt served as a private in the infantry. After the war he went back to school and received his high school diploma at age 22. He then enrolled as an undergraduate at Berea College in Kentucky and graduated in 1923. Reinhardt received his Master of Arts in 1925 and Doctorate of Philosophy in 1929, both from the University of North Dakota.
Never trust these retvrn types – hypermodernity has its problems but for comfiness it’s quite nice.
Reinhardt isn’t sure what to make of Starkweather, even he seems a little baffled. Somehow Charlie comes off as vaguely likeable:
even though among his victims was a two year old girl:
You can see why artists as diverse as Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, and Terrence Malick were interested in this story. The movie Badlands seems as meaningful an attempt at understanding as Reinhardt’s book.
Those interested in following this further may wish to acquire Reinhardt’s full length treatment, The Murderous Trail of Charlie Starkweather. Personally I’ve had enough for now.
When they put him in the electric chair Charlie Starkweather tested the straps and asked if they could be a little tighter.
Great comment
Posted: November 2, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, Kennedy-Nixon 1 Comment
on our February 2016 post When did JFK’s soul go to Heaven?
Sinner though he was I gotta believe in a God who could redeem and receive JFK.
“Seven almonds” stories
Posted: November 1, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
from a July 2, 2016 NY Times article, “Obama After Dark: The Precious Hours Alone” by Michael D. Shear:
To stay awake, the president does not turn to caffeine. He rarely drinks coffee or tea, and more often has a bottle of water next to him than a soda. His friends say his only snack at night is seven lightly salted almonds.
“Michelle and I would always joke: Not six. Not eight,” Mr. Kass said. “Always seven almonds.”
There were jokes about this at the time, that Obama was so precise as to only have seven almonds. However, in a followup article on July 28 of 2016, Michael D. Shear quoted Obama clarifying:
But in an interview broadcast on Thursday, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie put the question directly to Mr. Obama, who seemed eager to set the record straight.
“This is an example of the weird way that the press works,” Mr. Obama said, chuckling.
“Michelle and Sam Kass, who was our chef here, one night they were talking about me and teasing me about how disciplined I was, that I didn’t have potato chips or I didn’t have a piece of cake. And this is when Michelle said: ‘Yes, and he just has seven almonds. That’s it,’ to really drive home the point that I needed to loosen up a little bit.
“And Sam relayed this joke to The New York Times in the article, and somehow it was relayed as if I was counting out the seven almonds.”
In the interview with Ms. Guthrie, Mr. Obama acknowledged the point that Mr. Kass made during our interview: that what impressed him about the president’s nighttime habits was the discipline he has in getting through hours of difficult work without unhealthy snacks.
But Mr. Obama insisted that he’s not quite so disciplined that he counts out seven almonds every time.
“All my friends were calling up, and they’re saying: ‘You know, this seems a little anal. This is kind of weird,’” Mr. Obama told Ms. Guthrie. “And I had to explain to them, no, this was a joke.”
Asked whether he would allow himself to eat 10 or 11 almonds once he has left the White House, Mr. Obama said, “Absolutely.”
As the interview ended, he added with a smile, “I am so glad I had this opportunity, because this has been really weighing on me.”
He did offer an endorsement, noting, “You know, almonds are a good snack; I strongly recommend them.”
So this is a story about a humorous exaggeration or joke being taken as literal truth and printed in The New York Times.
When converted to print, the tone of a joke or semi-humorous remark is often lost.
How much of history and “the news” consists of “seven almonds stories”? Statements or anecdotes taken literally when in fact there was a shade of comedy about them that’s lost in when repeated, retold, set in type? Relay a story somebody told you and some nuance of it is already lost.
The Hunter Gracchus by Guy Davenport
Posted: October 20, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, New England Leave a comment
Revisited this one after seeing some footage from The Testament of Ann Lee.
Photograph of a Marine Giving Water to a Kitten on Tarawa
Posted: October 11, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945 1 Comment
perusing the National Archives Record Group 38 as one does and found this.
Also:
How big is Iran compared to the United States?
Posted: June 18, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
It’s pretty big. It would stretch from Oregon to Texas.
(Move it around yourself).
I was reminded of this from Halberstam’s Best and the Brightest:
There were men who opposed the invasion or at the very least were uneasy with it, and to a degree, they were the same men who would later oppose the Vietnam commitment. One was General David M. Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps. When talk about invading Cuba was becoming fashionable, General Shoup did a remarkable display with maps. First he took an overlay of Cuba and placed it over the map of the United States. To everybody’s surprise, Cuba was not a small island along the lines of, say, Long Island at best. It was about 800 miles long and seemed to stretch from New York to Chicago. Then he took another overlay, with a red dot, and placed it over the map of Cuba. “What’s that?” someone asked him. “That, gentlemen, represents the size of the island of Tarawa,” said Shoup, who had won a Medal of Honor there, “and it took us three days and eighteen thousand Marines to take it.” He eventually became Kennedy’s favorite general.
from Shoup’s Wikipedia page:
On May, 14 1966, Shoup began publicly attacking the [Vietnam] policy in a speech delivered to community college students at Los Angeles Pierce College in Woodland Hills, California, for their World Affairs Day:
I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own—and if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the “haves” refuse to share with the “have-nots” by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they above all don’t want crammed down their throats by Americans.
While yapping about Thucydides Trap did we forget Herodotus Trap (war w/Persia? No! Why?)
Good Press
Posted: June 18, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, everyone's a critic Leave a commentHaving a good press week:
New York Times, The Best TV Shows of 2025 So Far
Vulture, 119 Books Every Comedy Fan Should Read
Hollywood Reporter, Ten Best TV Shows of 2025
Vanity Fair, The Best TV Shows of 2025 So Far.
Alan Sepinwall writing in Rolling Stone
You know what? Showbiz is mostly heartbreak and failure so we’re gonna celebrate our wins around here.
They can’t give this thing away!
Posted: June 3, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
Back in 2021 we reported on Platt National Park/Chickasaw National Recreation area, which as far as I know is the only national park ever to be downgraded. We even had a chance to visit. The nature there has been heavily altered by human hand, it’s almost a crafted landscape. That’s not usually how we now like to think of or act in our national parks.
Yesterday in Bloomberg:
mentions the former Platt NP:
Republican Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma has offered Chickasaw National Recreation Area in Oklahoma as a candidate to be transferred to the Chickasaw Nation, which sold it to the federal government in 1902. Congress turned it into Platt National Park, until it stripped the park of “crown jewel” status and changed its name in 1976.
Today, the park service spends about $4.5 million to accommodate more than 1.5 million annual visitors at Chickasaw NRA.
Cole’s office said the Chickasaw Nation hasn’t asked for the recreation area to be returned, but the nation’s governor, Bill Anoatubby, said in a statement that it’s interested.
So far, though, there’s little other interest in transfers.
Sure, why not?
Worth remembering how we got here though:
In some cases, the National Park Service was put in charge of some areas because residents didn’t trust the states to manage them.
That’s what happened at Big Cypress, which became the first national preserve in 1974. Congress agreed with many south Floridians that the Rhode Island-sized wetland needed to be protected from the state’s plan to build what would have been the world’s largest commercial airport.
Floridians “wanted to protect it and they didn’t trust the state,” McAliley said. “People wanted the Park Service because they trusted them to manage natural qualities.”
Based
Posted: April 3, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
from THR’s White Lotus oral history.
Professor Longhair
Posted: March 4, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, music, New Orleans Leave a comment
Mardi Gras has me thinking about Professor Longhair. In his memoir Rhythm and Blues Jerry Wexler tells a story about Ahmet Ertegun finding the Professor:
I’d started noticing Atlantic’s early releases with Professor Long-hair’s “Hey Now Baby,” “Hey Little Girl,” and “Mardi Gras in New Orleans.” Fess—as the Professor was called—was a revelation for me, my first taste of the music being served up in Louisiana in the late forties.
There were traces of Jelly Roll Morton’s habanera-Cuban tango influence in his piano style, but the overall effect was startlingly original, a jambalaya Caribbean Creole rumba with a solid blues bottom.
In a foreshadowing of trips I myself would later take to New Orleans, Ahmet described the first of his many ethnomusicological expeditions. “Herb and I went down there to see our distributor and look for talent. Someone mentioned Professor Longhair, a musical shaman who played in a style all his own. We asked around and finally found ourselves taking a ferry boat to the other side of the Mississippi, to Algiers, where a white taxi driver would deliver us only as far as an open field. ‘You’re on your own,’ he said, pointing to the lights of a distant village. ‘I ain’t going into that n***ertown.’ Abandoned, we trudged across the field, lit only by the light of a crescent moon. The closer we came, the more distinct the sound of distant music—some big rocking band, the rhythm exciting us and pushing us on. Finally we came upon a nightclub—or, rather, a shack—which, like an animated cartoon, appeared to be expanding and deflating with the pulsation of the beat. The man at the door was skeptical. What did these two white men want? ‘We’re from Life magazine,’ I lied.
Inside, people scattered, thinking we were police. And instead of a full band, I saw only a single musician—Professor Longhair—playing these weird, wide harmonies, using the piano as both keyboard and bass drum, pounding a kick plate to keep time and singing in the open-throated style of the blues shouters of old. “ ‘My God,’ I said to Herb, ‘we’ve discovered a primitive genius.’ “Afterwards, I introduced myself. ‘You won’t believe this,’ I said to the Professor, ‘but I want to record you.’ “ ‘You won’t believe this,’ he answered, ‘but I just signed with Mercury.’
Ahmet recorded him anyway—“ I am many men with many names who play under many styles,” Fess used to say—and jewels from that first session remain in the Atlantic catalogue today, over four decades later.”
(source on that photo) Previous coverage of New Orleans.
Snappy lines from Uncle Warren
Posted: February 24, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, business Leave a commentWarren Buffett at 94 still writing in a crisp, appealing style in his annual letter. Is he fibbing a bit when he brags about not doing due diligence on real estate purchases? And bragging on himself for how much tax he pays, when he surely uses every dodge he can? Maybe so. He’s a mythmaker.
A decent batting average in personnel decisions is all that can be hoped for. The cardinal sin is delaying the correction of mistakes or what Charlie Munger called “thumb-sucking.” Problems, he would tell me, cannot be wished away. They require action, however uncomfortable that may be.
The philosophy:
… we own a small percentage of a dozen or so very large and highly profitable businesses with household names such as Apple, American Express, Coca-Cola and Moody’s. Many of these companies earn very high returns on the net tangible equity required for their operations. At yearend, our partial-ownership holdings were valued at $272 billion. Understandably, really outstanding businesses are very seldom offered in their entirety, but small fractions of these gems can be purchases Monday through Friday on Wall Street, and very occasionally, they sell at bargain prices.
Inflation:
Paper money can see its value evaporate if fiscal folly prevails. In some countries, this reckless practice has become habitual, and, in our country’s short history, the U.S. has come close to the edge. Fixed-coupon bonds provide no protection against runaway currency.
Businesses, as well as individuals with desired talents, however, will usually find a way to cope with monetary instability as long as their goods or services are desired by the country’s citizenry. So, too, with personal skills. Lacking such assets as athletic excellence, a wonderful voice, medical or legal skills or, for that matter, any special talents, I have had to rely on equities throughout my life. In effect, I have depended on the success of American businesses and I will continue to do so.
One way or another, the sensible – better yet imaginative – deployment of savings by citizens is required to propel an ever-growing societal output of desired goods and services. This system is called capitalism. It has its faults and abuses – in certain respects more egregious now than ever – but it also can work wonders unmatched by other economic systems.
The insurance biz:
When writing P/C insurance, we receive payment upfront and much later learn what our product has cost us – sometimes a moment of truth that is delayed as much as 30 or more years.
(We are still making substantial payments on asbestos exposures that occurred 50 or more years ago.)
This mode of operations has the desirable effect of giving P/C insurers cash before
they incur most expenses but carries with it the risk that the company can be losing money – sometimes mountains of money – before the CEO and directors realize what is happening.
After some years of reading Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger materials these letters become kind of familiar, but it’s soothing, like hearing a folktale told once again with a few variations.
Juicy headline
Posted: February 23, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, the California Condition Leave a comment
Picked up a copy of Los Angeles Daily Journal, Orange County Edition, and was intrigued by this story. The evidence seems lopsided:
Anaheim police officers arrested Ferguson at his home in August 2023 after receiving a report of a shooting. Ferguson told officers at the scene and his court clerk via text that he shot his wife, Sheryl, after the couple returned home from dinner, according to affidavits filed in 2023 by Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer’s office.
Seeking more information I found this:
The couple’s adult son called 911 to report the shooting. A court filing from prosecutors states Ferguson texted his court clerk and bailiff minutes after the killing: “I just lost it. I just shot my wife. I won’t be in tomorrow. I will be in custody. I’m so sorry.”
…
Earlier that day, Ferguson had been drinking when he argued with his wife about finances during dinner at a local restaurant and later while watching “Breaking Bad” at home with their adult son, said prosecutor Seton Hunt. At one point in the evening, Ferguson made a gun hand gesture toward her, and she later chided him to point a real one at her, Hunt said.
Ferguson proceeded to do so and pulled the trigger, Hunt said.
Just a strange little story in California. Reminded of Hemingway in A Moveable Feast while he’s on a road trip with Scott Fitzgerald:
While waiting for the waiter to bring the various things I sat and read a paper and finished one of the bottles of Macon that had been uncorked at the last stop. There are always some splendid crimes in the newspapers that you follow from day to day, when you live in France. These crimes read like continued stories and it is necessary to have read the opening chapters, since there are no summaries provided as there are in American serial stories and, anyway, no serial is as good in an American periodical unless you have read the all-important first chapter. When you are traveling through France the papers are disappointing because you miss the continuity of the different crimes, affaires, or scandales, and you miss much of the pleasure to be derived from reading about them in a cafe. Tonight I would have much preferred to be in a café where I might read the morning editions of the Paris papers and watch the people and drink something a little more authoritative than the Macon in preparation for dinner. But I was riding herd on Scott so I enjoyed myself where I was.
In the same paper:
I found this phrase vivid:
“We had a phrase in dependency: ‘Clear is kind,” she said. “If you’re clear about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what orders mean, people are more likely to comply.”
Power by Jeffrey Pfeffer (2010)
Posted: February 22, 2025 Filed under: advice, America Since 1945, business Leave a comment
Pulled this one from my shelf because I remembered there was a funny claim about how flattery 100% of the time no exceptions always works. Indeed:
Most people underestimate the effectiveness of flattery and therefore underutilize it. If someone flatters you, you essentially have two ways of reacting. You can think that the person was insincere and trying to butter you up. But believing that causes you to feel negatively about the person whom you perceive as insincere and not even particularly subtle about it. More importantly, thinking that the compliment is just a strategic way of building influence with you also leads to negative self-feelings— what must others think of you to try such a transparent and false method of influence? Alternatively, you can think that the compliments are sincere and that the flatterer is a wonderful judge of people— a perspective that leaves you feeling good about the person for his or her interpersonal perception skill and great about yourself, as the recipient of such a positive judgment delivered by such a credible source. There is simply no question that the desire to believe that flattery is at once sincere and accurate will, in most instances, leave us susceptible to being flattered and, as a consequence, under the influence of the flatterer.
So, don’t underestimate—or underutilize-the strategy of flattery.
University of California-Berkeley professor Jennifer Chatman, in an unpublished study, sought to see if there was some point beyond which flattery became ineffective. She believed that the effectiveness of flattery might have an inverted U-shaped relationship, with flat tery being increasingly effective up to some point but beyond that becoming ineffective as the flatterer became seen as insincere and a “suck up.” As she told me, there might be a point at which flattery became ineffective, but she couldn’t find it in her data.
Amazing. A powerful move:
I have observed similar ploys used to gain power in business meetings. In most companies, the strategy and market dynamics are taken for granted. If someone challenges these assumptions-such as how the company is competing, how it is measuring success, what the strategy is, who the real competitors are now and in the future— this can be a very potent power play. The questions and challenges focus attention on the person bringing the seemingly commonsense…
How to get powerful? There’s a simple plan:
The fundamental principles for building the sort of reputation that will get you a high-power position are straightforward: make a good impression early, carefully delineate the elements of the image you want to create, use the media to help build your visibility and burnish your image, have others sing your praises so you can surmount the self-promotion dilemma, and strategically put out enough negative but not fatally damaging information about yourself that the people who hire and support you fully understand any weaknesses and make the choice anyway. The key to your success is in executing each of these steps well.
A tale of California politics:
In government, Jesse Unruh, a former Democratic political boss and treasurer of Califor-nia, called money the mother’s milk of politics. Former two-term San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, whose 16 years as speaker and virtual ruler of the California Assembly prior to becoming mayor marked him as an extremely effective politician, began his campaign for the legislative leadership post by raising a lot of money. And since he was from a “safe” district, he gave that money to his legislative colleagues to help them win their political contests. Brown understood an important principle: having resources is an important source of power only if you use those resources strategically to help others whose support you need, in the process gaining their favor. In contrast to Brown, the Assembly speaker at the time, Leo McCarthy, irritated his Democratic colleagues to the point of revolt by holding a $500,000 fundraiser in Los Angeles featuring Ted Kennedy and then using 100 percent of the money for his nascent efforts to run for statewide office.’ He was soon out of his job, replaced by Willie Brown.
(Similar schemes are a theme in Caro’s LBJ book, he got lots of money from powerful Texas guys to whom he steered government contracts for projects like dams, then he distributed that money around Congress to his desperate colleagues).
If you want power don’t give up power:
You need to be in a job that fits and doesn’t come with undue political risks, but you also need to do the right things in that job. Most important, you need to claim power and not do things that give yours away. It’s amazing to me that people, in ways little and big, voluntarily give up their power, preemptively surrendering in the competition for status and influence. The process often begins with how you feel about yourself. If you feel powerful, you will act and project power and others will respond accordingly. If you feel power-less, your behavior will be similarly self-confirming.
Restaurants and Railroads: Chili’s Triple Dip Boom
Posted: February 20, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, beverages, business, food 1 Comment
Once I’m cast off from show business perhaps I’ll start a newsletter called Restaurants and Railroads. This will analyze those two types of businesses, specifically publicly traded companies. Hedge funds as well as passionate hobbyists will subscribe. They’ll invite me to their conferences, to which I’ll travel in style, by rail when possible. I’ll sample the various restaurants as I go, Tijuana Flats for example, and Pizza Inn which I’ve never tried. In a world of niche media I wonder if I could make that work.
You might not think restaurants and railroads are a natural combination. Fred Harvey might disagree, but I’ll concede they’re very different businesses. The railroads have no new competition, no one is building a new railroad. Only a handful of companies control all the track. Two railroads serve the port of LA: one is BSNF, owned by Berkshire Hathaway, and one is Union Pacific. A duopoly.
The restaurants on the other hand are in frantic, constant competition. They must capture taste and vibe. Tastes change, vibes shift. Plus your customer could always just make a sandwich. How restaurants stay profitable? How do they maintain quality, especially at scale?
These two differing business categories are the two I’m excited to read about when I get an issue of ValueLine. Consumer Staples, Metals & Mining, etc, these lose our interest. But take a look at a personality like Kent Taylor’s or a real railroader like Hunter Harrison (or Casey Jones) and the mind comes to life, it’s hard to get bored.
In the publicly traded restaurant space, a big story this year has been Chili’s:
Chili’s may have just pulled off one of the greatest comebacks in restaurant history.
Same-store sales at the bar and grill chain surged more than 31% from October to December, marking its best quarter since the period just after COVID and accelerating a streak of double-digit same-store sales increases that began last April.
The growth once again was driven by a mix of social media buzz, value-based advertising and a renewed focus on restaurant operations and atmosphere that seemed to snowball as the year progressed.
Just to put this into context, these numbers are comparable to when Popeye’s went off with their spicy chicken sandwich. CEO Kevin Hochman points to TikTok:
About halfway through last year, its Triple Dipper appetizer platter, a staple on the chain’s menu for years, went viral on TikTok, where young customers showed off their “cheese pulls” with the Triple Dipper’s fried mozzarella sticks. …
“What’s happening is that young people are coming in after they’ve seen us on TikTok, and they’re like, ‘Wow, this experience is really good,’ and it becomes a part of the rotation,” Hochman told analysts during an earnings call Wednesday. “I think that’s why you’ve seen the longevity in the results and the acceleration, not just kind of a boom-splat that you typically would see without the operational investments that we’ve made in the business.”
Kevin Hochman seems like a brand guy: while at P&G he worked on Old Spice. $EAT stock has indeed thrived:
On an episode of A Deeper Dive, a quick service restaurant business podcast, the host and guest discussed Chili’s phenomenal success, and possible reasons for it. The fast food competitive price with the sit down experience came up, as did the mix and match. But in the end they agreed people just kinda like it.
It does seem like Chili’s is doing something right:
Spoonful
Posted: February 7, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, music Leave a commentHave been listening to Spoonful as recorded by Howlin Wolf lately.
The lyrics relate men’s sometimes violent search to satisfy their cravings, with “a spoonful” used mostly as a metaphor for pleasures, which have been interpreted as sex, love, and drugs
Chester Arthur Burnett was born in White Station Mississippi, near West Point, in the “Black Prairie” (later remarketed as the “Golden Triangle“). JD Walsh digs up a photo, source undescribed, of our guy working on a horse’s hoof while he was in the 9th Cavalry.
Howlin Wolf was an apprentice/student to Charlie Patton. I first heard about Charlie Patton from R. Crumb’s comic, which was reprinted in an anthology of underground comics they had at the Needham Public Library.
The Library also had a cassette of some of these blues guys. Living walking distance to the library, a life-changer.
Blues research is a famous graveyard for the curious – we’ve gone about as far as we dare on this topic, see previous coverage. Listening to Charlie Patton especially with the warble of the old recordings sounds spooky, and there’s a desire to see this as emerging from some mysterious beyond, but the turth might be more interesting, these people were modern. Elijah Wald shed some light on Delta blues in his book Escaping the Delta:
If someone had suggested to the major blues stars that they were old-fashioned folk musicians carrying on a culture handed down from slavery times, most would probably have been insulted.
Mississippi was legally dry until 1966, at least in theory, a factor in blues history.
It is startling to thank that all of the evolution from the first Bessie Smith record to the first Rolling Stones record took only forty years. When Skip James and John Hurt appeared at the Newport Folk Festival, they were greeted as emissaries from an ancient, vanished world, but it was only three decades since they had first entered a recording studio – that is, they were about as ancient as disco is to us today.
The Mississippi Delta at this time was actually kind of a dynamic region, crisscrossed with railroads, you could quit your job and move and get another one.
Wald tells of an anthropological team from Fisk University and the Library of Congress that visited the Delta in 1941 and 1942. They reported:
There are no memories of slavery in the delta. This section of the delta has little history prior to the revolution of 1861
Howlin’ Wolf was on to health insurance for musicians long before Chappell Roan was born:
After he married Lillie, who was able to manage his professional finances, he was so financially successful that he was able to offer band members not only a decent salary but benefits such as health insurance. This enabled him to hire his pick of available musicians and keep his band one of the best around. According to his stepdaughters, he was never financially extravagant (for instance, he drove a Pontiac station wagon rather than a more expensive, flashy car).[48]
That Sun Records link reports that Howlin’ Wolf was 6’6″ and close to 300 lbs.
reviewing some news in The Wall Street Journal
Posted: February 3, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, business, food 3 Comments
I don’t care for Applebee’s, it’s sub Friday’s and way sub Chili’s, but I do like living in the United States of America. All told this was a nice story. The conclusion:
Common Side Effects, Sunday Feb 2 11:30pm on Cartoon Network, streaming on MAX Feb 3
Posted: January 31, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, drugs, the California Condition Leave a comment
Our attitude towards critics is influenced by the Duke of Wellington, who supposedly didn’t let his troops cheer for him because that meant they could also boo him.
While he is said to have disapproved of soldiers cheering as “too nearly an expression of opinion”,[247] Wellington nevertheless cared for his men
(He did call them the scum of the earth but w/e).
But hey, these reviews are terrific and we must celebrate our wins in a business full of heartbreak. Making a TV show is so difficult and time consuming, Resistance fights the work of art at every stage, very blessed to have worked with this amazing team on this project.
Here is The New York Times. And we’ll take this one:
A treat and a half says Margaret Lyons!
Here’s a funny one, a pharma ad embedded right in there:
(I don’t think the reporter here edited his AI transcript.) Neil Postman would’ve predicted if you made a TV show satirizing pharmaceuticals they would use it to sell pharmaceuticals. In Amusing Ourselves to Death he predicted The Daily Show.
Anyhoo watch, stream, and spread the word, we’ll return to amateur history and digestions here on Helytimes as time permits! I’ve been meeting to write up the Atlanta Cyclorama, where Van Gogh bought his paints and the role of the aluminum tube in art history, Lester Hiatt’s Arguments About Aborigines, Dan Levy’s Maxims For Thinking Analytically, Randall Collins Violence, the Santa Barbara Channel, and more!
The Chumash people of the region have traditionally known Point Conception as the “Western Gate”, through which the souls of the dead could pass between the mortal world and the heavenly paradise of Similaqsa.[4]
It is called Humqaq (“The Raven Comes”) in the Chumashan languages.
Carter’s, congealed electricity, AI and Needham
Posted: January 30, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, business, children, New England, Uncategorized Leave a comment
If you have a little kid in the US you will have some clothes from Carter’s. They sell them at Target and Wal-Mart as well as 1,000 or so Carter’s stores, and they cost $8.
Before I had a kid it didn’t occur to me that kids outgrow their clothes so fast they can’t cost too much.
When I see the Carter’s label, I think of my home town.
William Carter founded Carter’s in Needham, Massachusetts in 1865. Textiles were a big business in New England. Two inputs, labor and electricity, were cheap. Labor from excess farm children, and electricity from running streams? That would’ve been the earliest mode, what were they using by 1865? Coal?
One of the biggest buildings in Needham, certainly the longest, is the former Carter’s headquarters, which stretches itself along Highland Avenue. A prominent landmark, it took a long time to walk past.
The story of Carter’s is a global economic story in miniature.
Old Carter mill #2, found here.
The Carter family sold the company in the 1990s. It went public in 2003. In 2005, Carter’s acquired OshKosh B’gosh, a company famous for making children’s overalls. This company started in 1895 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin (the name comes from an Ojibwe word, “The Claw,” that was the name of a local chief).
The term “B’gosh” began being used in 1911, after general manager William Pollock heard the tagline “Oshkosh B’Gosh” in a vaudeville routine in New York.[4] The company formally adopted the name OshKosh B’gosh in 1937.
OshKosh B’Gosh’s Wisconsin plant was closed in 1997. Downsizing of domestic operations and massive outsourcing and manufacturing at Mexican and Honduran subsidiaries saw the domestic manufacturing share drop below 10 percent by the year 2000.
OshKosh B’Gosh was sold to Carter’s, another clothing manufacturer for $312 million
The headquarters of Carter’s moved to Atlanta. Labor and electricity were cheaper in Georgia, Carter’s had been opening mills in the South for awhile. Now the clothes are made overseas. I look at the labels on Carter’s clothes: Bangladesh, India, Cambodia, Vietnam. If you factor in the shipping and the markup how much of that $8 is going to your garment maker in Bangladesh? Then again maybe it’s the best job around, raising Bangladeshis out of poverty, and soon Chittagong will look like Needham.
The former Carter’s headquarters, now vacant, became a facility for elder living. My mom worked there, briefly. Carter’s today is headquarted in the Phipps Tower in Buckhead, Atlanta, which I happened to pass by the other day.
The loss of the mill and the company headquarters was not a crisis for Needham. Needham is very close to Boston, an easy train ride away, and along of the 128 Corridor. There are growth businesses in the area, hospitals, biotech companies, universities. TripAdvisor is based in Needham. Needham is a pleasant town, there are ongoing talks to turn the former Carter’s building into housing. It would be close to public transport and walkable to the library and the Trader Joe’s. That seems to be stalled.
Needham has brain jobs, attached to a dense brain network, while brawn jobs are being shipped overseas. There are many other towns in Massachusetts where the old run down mill is a sad derelict as production moved first south and then overseas. These towns are bleak. Oshkosh, Wisconsin seems ok, but the shipping of steady jobs overseas is of course a major factor in our politics, Ross Perot was talking about it in 1992 and no one did anything about it and now Trump is the president.
A similar story lies in the history of Berkshire Hathaway – the original New Bedford textile mill, not the conglomerate Warren Buffett built on top of it using the same name. Buffett talks about this, I believe this is from the 2022 annual meeting:
CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, I remember when you had a textile mill —
WARREN BUFFETT: Oh, god.
CHARLIE MUNGER: — and it couldn’t —
WARREN BUFFETT: I try to forget it. (Laughs)
CHARLIE MUNGER: — and the textiles are really just congealed electricity, the way modern technology works.
And the TVA rates were 60% lower than the rates in New England. It was an absolutely hopeless hand, and you had the sense to fold it.
WARREN BUFFETT: Twenty-five years later, yeah. (Laughs)
CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, you didn’t pour more money into it.
WARREN BUFFETT: No, that’s right.
CHARLIE MUNGER: And, no — recognizing reality, when it’s really awful, and taking appropriate action, just involves, often, just the most elementary good sense.
How in the hell can you run a textile mill in New England when your competitors are paying way lower power rates?
WARREN BUFFETT: And I’ll tell you another problem with it, too. I mean, the fellow that I put in to run it was a really good guy. I mean, he was 100% honest with me in every way. And he was a decent human being, and he knew textiles.
And if he’d been a jerk, it would have been a lot easier. I would have probably thought differently about it.
But we just stumbled along for a while. And then, you know, we got lucky that Jack Ringwalt decided to sell his insurance company [National Indemnity] and we did this and that.
But I even bought a second textile company in New Hampshire, I mean, I don’t know how many — seven or eight years later.
I’m going to talk some about dumb decisions, maybe after lunch we’ll do it a little.
Congealed electricity, what a phrase. In the 1985 annual letter, Buffett discusses the other input, labor, which was cheaper in the South, and why he kept Berkshire Hathaway running in Massachusetts anyway:
At the time we made our purchase, southern textile plants – largely non-union – were believed to have an important competitive advantage. Most northern textile operations had closed and many people thought we would liquidate our business as well.
We felt, however, that the business would be run much betterby a long-time employee whom. we immediately selected to be president, Ken Chace. In this respect we were 100% correct: Ken
and his recent successor, Garry Morrison, have been excellent managers, every bit the equal of managers at our more profitable businesses.… the domestic textile industry operates in a commodity business, competing in a world market in which substantial excess capacity exists. Much of the trouble we experienced was attributable, both directly and indirectly, to competition from foreign countries whose workers are paid a small fraction of the U.S. minimum wage. But that in no way means that our labor force deserves any blame for our closing. In fact, in comparison with employees of American industry generally, our workers were poorly paid, as has been the case throughout the textile business. In contract negotiations, union leaders and members were sensitive to our disadvantageous cost position and did not push for unrealistic wage increases or unproductive work practices. To the contrary, they tried just as hard as we did to keep us competitive. Even during our liquidation period they performed superbly. (Ironically, we would have been better off financially if our union had behaved unreasonably some years ago; we then would have recognized the impossible future that we faced, promptly closed down, and avoided significant future losses.)
Buffett goes on, if you care to read it, to discuss the dismal spiral faced by another New England textile company, Burlington.
Charlie Munger, in his 1994 USC talk, spoke on the paradoxes here:
For example, when we were in the textile business, which is a terrible commodity business, we were making low-end textiles—which are a real commodity product. And one day, the people came to Warren and said, ‘They’ve invented a new loom that we think will do twice as much work as our old ones.’
And Warren said, ‘Gee, I hope this doesn’t work because if it does, I’m going to close the mill.’ And he meant it.
What was he thinking? He was thinking, ‘It’s a lousy business. We’re earning substandard returns and keeping it open just to be nice to the elderly workers. But we’re not going to put huge amounts of new capital into a lousy business.’
And he knew that the huge productivity increases that would come from a better machine introduced into the production of a commodity product would all go to the benefit of the buyers of the textiles. Nothing was going to stick to our ribs as owners.
That’s such an obvious concept—that there are all kinds of wonderful new inventions that give you nothing as owners except the opportunity to spend a lot more money in a business that’s still going to be lousy. The money still won’t come to you. All of the advantages from great improvements are going to flow through to the customers.”
Is something similar happening with AI? Who will it make rich, and at what cost? To whose ribs will the profits stick?
I’m not sure we could call AI congealed but it is more or less just more and more electricity run through expensive processors. Who will win from that? So far it’s been the makers of the processors, but if DeepSeek shows you don’t need as many of those the game is changed. Personally I’m unimpressed with DeepSeek – try asking it what happened in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
How does Carter’s itself continue to survive? Target’s own brand, Cat & Jack, is right next door on the shelves. Could another company shove Carter’s aside if they can cut the margins even thinner, get the price down to $7? Here’s what Carter’s CEO Michael Casey has to say in their most recent annual letter:
Hard to build the operational network Carter’s has over 150+ years. There will be a challenge awaiting the next CEO of Carter’s as Michael Casey is retiring. Carter’s stock ($CRI) is pretty beaten up over the past year, down 30%. A possible macro problem for Carter’s is that the number of births in the United States appears to be declining.
It is powerful, when I’m changing my daughter, to contemplate my home town, and global commerce, and the people in Cambodia who made these clothes, and the ways of the world.
Helytimes 
