09/8/25

Zohran’s Supermarkets

I am vexed by misrepresentations of Zohran Mamdani’s supermarket idea. It always boils down to “someone undeserving gets precious things from you that you don’t want to give, which gives them unearned advantages.” That’s how Reconstruction morphed into Jim Crow, and it has worked reliably ever since, even when dealing with class rather than race. For example, in 2005, Joe Biden whipped up out of nothing the phantasm of “bankruptcy abusers,” rather like Reagan’s “welfare queens,” except that Reagan was able to invoke race and class simultaneously. Point goes to Reagan.

Food deserts are real. There’s a vacant supermarket at the corner of Prospect and 17th Street in Santa Ana, CA, that no large-scale grocer has been able to make work. There used to be a Food4Less supermarket at the corner of Grand and 17th Street, catering to lower-income shoppers, that disappeared. Why didn’t the one on Prospect work, no matter whether it was a Ralph’s or an Albertsons or a Vons or one of their sub-brands?

What most people don’t realize is how low-margin the supermarket business is, maybe 1-1.5% profit. Managers sweat bullets over pennies. There is little room for error. So, under Zohran, the city would guarantee some of that margin, up to 1% in addition to what the market ordinarily puts in. The people wouldn’t get food for free or even at a discount, but they would get supermarkets that stayed in business at the same locations. The compensation structure of the store would remain the same. The owners might get an extra 0.5-1%, and life would be fine.

There will likely be ways to game this, but I think it’s close enough to the original business model to be effective. The city does not own the property or the stores, and it does not hire the staff. It does not control the pricing. The city simply gives the chain/owners enough to make it worth their while to stay open.

09/2/25

A Hard Limit

Today, the charming, independent, modest, comfortable coffeehouse, Kéan Coffee, raised its prices again, and we have reached the upper limit of what we can pay. I don’t think this will improve. I am reminded of a doctor we had, one who didn’t take insurance (common in his specialty), who sent us short notes every couple of months that always said, “Due to costs, I am raising my hourly fee by $35.” My life was in his hands. We had to pay it.

“Due to costs” — what a powerful locution! If only we could use it ourselves! “Due to costs, you will charge us 50% less for our electricity.” “Due to costs, our hourly rate for our services will double.” You can see that I am dispensable and so cannot enforce these kinds of demands. I have the feeling that we will be priced out of many supermarkets, restaurants, and cafés before too long.

09/1/25

Apothegms (1)

If you can’t sleep at night, sleep during the day.
Unless you have the ball, you cannot shoot it.

08/2/25

Quasi-Public Television

Someone’s been anticipating the demise of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. My local PBS station, KOCE, has turned itself into a streaming service. For free, you get the major PBS weeknight programs, with the exception of Masterpiece, plus some of the early childhood programming on Saturday morning and weekday afternoons. (Netflix now owns Sesame Street, sold by Nickelodeon. This digs into the pro-PBS line that “Only public television can make a Sesame Street,” although Nickelodeon dumped it because… only public television can make a Sesame Street.) You probably also get the old “distance education telecourses” familiar to a pre-1990s cohort. For $60/year, you get the deep catalogue of public television. I am sure a lot will be missing on inspection, and I’ll be curious, but it seems largely true. If KOCE truly becomes a streaming service and sells its broadcast license, a lot of items related to physical television can be cut, and I think they are part of what CPB paid for.

The larger question is whether people will donate above and beyond the $60 once they have gotten their money’s worth. Part of the subscription ethos is “providing programming for everyone,” including people in hard circumstances. Now that’s gone. We have a two-tier systems, like it or not. I suppose a further innovation would be still running pledge drives on the $60 paid tier, but then, for $1,000 a year, offer a pledge-break-free experience. That’s the difficulty with having tiers; you have to make existence less pleasant so that you feel the need to upgrade to the next tier. (For example, buying the cheapest airline seats often means boarding last with the “unworthy poor” and paying the baggage fees. For $50 more, I get incrementally greater comfort and less “wealth policing.”) I guess that KOCE thinks the quantity of $60 subscriptions will give them their margin. Perhaps. Good luck to them.

05/20/25

Recurrence 2

In the first decade of the 20th century, Cossacks came to my grandfather’s shtetl from time to time. Without any authority beyond force, they dragged away the young men, who were never to be seen again. This administration has reinvented the Cossacks.

03/26/25

The Secret Life

This all reminds me of Walter Mitty, the finest creation of the blind, truculent misogynist James Thurber.

“ACTIVATE THE GOLDFISH!”
“GOLDFISH ACTIVATED, SIR!”
“INITIALIZE PROTON PUMP INHIBITOR!”
“INITIALIZED! WE ARE COMING ON TARGET!”
“3… 2… 1… BOMBS AWAY!”
“DIRECT HIT, SIR!”
“WELL DONE ALL AROUND!”
“NO SURVIVORS, SIR. GREAT JOB!”
“PRAISE THE LORD!”
“THE LORD IS A MAN OF WAR!”
“WE ARE ALL MEN OF WAR.”
“PREPARE THE BILL!”
“BILL CALCULATING, SIR… WE’VE GOT IT. TOTAL IS $18 MILLION.”
“BILL THEM!”
“PRINTING THE INVOICE… FOLDING… INSERTING… LICKING… SEALING…”
“IT’S DESTINY, MEN!”
“STAMPING… POSTING… BILL AWAY!”
“THE BILL IS AWAY!”
“WE ARE MEN OF WAR AND DESTINY.”

01/26/25

Recurrence

Paraphrase of Viktor Klemperer: in 2016, we thought we were in Hell; in 2025, it’s clear that we were living in Hell’s merest vestibule.

01/20/25

It all falls away

First, Elon Musk gives the Nazi salute at the Trump inauguration ceremony.

Elon Musk cheerfully gives Nazi salute at Trump Inaugu

Then the ADL attempts to say that this was not a Nazi salute.

ADL X post justifying Musk's Nazi salute

This is utter gaslighting. ADL has spent most of its history gathering intelligence on antisemitism, calling it out publicly, and working with government to wipe it out. ADL has identified the “awkward gesture” in high school students, militia members, and prison gangs and has designated it as a Nazi salute. Musk is evidently too rich and powerful to be called to account.

Musk’s vocal support of AfD, the German hard-right “neo-Nazi” party, of course, has no bearing on interpreting the “awkward gesture.”

My guess is that Musk’s damage control PR team drafted the entire post and handed it to the ADL for unaltered reproduction.

It also appears that I have inadvertently been contributing to a phishing operation that has been illicitly using the ADL logo since 2014. I may have to contact the FTC… Wait, never mind.

01/6/25

Farewell, Old Blue Thing

A rather gory slip-and-fall has meant the retirement of my college sweatshirt. It is not a bad thing. All these years, it has gotten unwanted attention. Perhaps I will find a Pierson sweatshirt, and if any inquire, I will say that I went to Pierson College, a small, residential liberal arts college in Southern Connecticut that has seen better days.

11/29/24

Logic For Our Age

You will admit all this in a moment, Ctesippus, if you answer my
questions, said Dionysodorus. Tell me, have you got a dog?
Yes, and a brute of a one, too, said Ctesippus.
And has he got puppies?
Yes indeed, and they are just like him.
And so the dog is their father?
Yes, I saw him mounting the bitch myself, he said.
Well then: isn’t the dog yours?
Certainly, he said.
Then since he is a father and is yours, the dog turns out to be your
father, and you are the brother of puppies, aren’t you?

Plato, Euthydemus, 293e et seq.

11/6/24

An urgent sonnet

“It is possibly later than you think,

It is likely later than you think,

It is usually later than you think,

It is somewhat later than you think,

It is considerably later than you think,

It is a whole lot later than you think,

It is sometimes later than you think,

It is a good deal later than you think,

It is always later than you think,

It is by all odds later than you think,

It is surely later than you think,

It is certainly later than you think,

It is definitely later than you think,

It is undoubtedly later than you think . . .”

(Merrill Moore, from _M: One Thousand Autobiographical Sonnets_ (1938)

11/6/24

Comme disait Simon Leys

“Dans sa vieillesse à Vienne, exilé volontaire de son cher Beloeil – que «l’humeur, l’horreur, l’honneur» l’empêchaient seuls de revoir –, Ligne connut la pauvreté. Des témoins de l’époque le décrivent, vieillard hirsute et sans perruque, et qui «puait fort». Il avait aussi un âne, un mouton et une chèvre qui chaque matin grimpaient sur son lit pour mendier du pain.”

10/28/24

Accuracy in Analogizing

Some people have taken to referring to a certain overweight golfer as “America’s Hitler.” After endless Hollywood dramatizations and History Channel re-enactments of the Third Reich, that designation drapes him in a certain unearned glamour of evil. It would be more accurate and appropriate to call him “America’s Milosevic.” And yes, it can happen here. Don’t let it.

09/26/24

More fun with AI, #2 in a series

I fed Book I of Plato’s Republic to the Adobe AI Assistant, and got this:

The text discusses the concept of the end and excellence of organs, such as the eyes and ears. It emphasizes that fulfilling an end requires possessing one’s proper excellence, as seen in the example of sight for the eyes. The text highlights the importance of each organ’s specific excellence in achieving its end.

Next time, I’ll try Joe Sachs instead of Jowett.

08/6/24

Model Collapse

Research into AI model collapse has been around for at least a year. Still, this article in Nature, although slightly daunting to me as a humanist, has now cemented the phenomenon. AI that is trained on texts from AI steadily worsens. It’s a little like having a friend who gradually gets soused as he consumes sequential bottles of beer in the course of an evening.

The difficulty for the AI-mongers is that they have uncritically scraped every English word possible from every Internet source that will let it (and often from sources that don’t want to let it). AI-related companies have persuaded the world that AI can compose and reason in the place of humans, and that no one need know. At the same time, they are desperately trying to figure out how to distinguish AI writing from human writing while constantly scraping more data. They are Nestbeschmutzers, foulers of their own nest.

But this needs an example, and Drs. Ilia Shumailov, Zakhar Shumaylov, Yiren Zhao, Nicolas Papernot, Ross Anderson, and Yarin Gal have provided us with a fine one indeed, worthy of Borges:

Example 1. Example of text outputs of an OPT-125m model affected by model collapse—models degrade over generations, for which each new generation is trained on data produced by the previous generation.

Input: some started before 1360 — was typically accomplished by a master mason and a small team of itinerant masons, supplemented by local parish labourers, according to Poyntz Wright. But other authors reject this model, suggesting instead that leading architects designed the parish church towers based on early examples of Perpendicular.

Outputs:

Gen 0: Revival architecture such as St. John’s Cathedral in London. The earliest surviving example of Perpendicular Revival architecture is found in the 18th @-@ century Church of Our Lady of Guernsey, which dates from the late 19th century. There are two types of perpendicular churches:.

Gen 1: architecture such as St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome or St. Peter’s Basilica in Buenos Aires. There is no evidence that any of these buildings were built during the reign of Pope Innocent III, but it is possible that they may have been built during the reign of his successor, Pope Innocent.

Gen 5: ism, which had been translated into more than 100 languages including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, Lithuanian, Estonian, Finnish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Croatian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz.

Gen 9: architecture. In addition to being home to some of the world’s largest populations of black @-@ tailed jackrabbits, white @-@ tailed jackrabbits, blue @-@ tailed jackrabbits, red @-@ tailed jackrabbits, yellow @-.

Jackrabbits of all colors, we salute you!

08/1/24

Anti-De-Platforming

Donald Trump’s encounter with the National Association of Black Journalists yesterday reminds us of the purpose of debate and dialogue. Mutual back-scratching is all very nice, but what’s valuable about a public forum comes to the fore when liars and bullshitters are put on the spot.

I’m not perfect. I too have joined crowds waving signs in opposition to some malevolent public figure’s visit to campus. I felt disgust at the idea that the institution I serve was lending some of its prestige, and handing a probably not too small honorarium, to somebody whose claims I thought were contradictory to the whole idea of free inquiry and equality of persons. Racists, gerrymanderers, stackers of the deck, that sort of people.

But the offense I took at those invitations would be greatly mitigated if institutions would agree to a set of rules for appearances by Highly Controversial People.

HCPs must know that by entering a public forum, they are agreeing to have their ideas and assumptions questioned. Those who invite them are put on notice that any flattering treatment the HCP receives must be balanced with an equal share of time allotted to an antagonist. Or better yet, as soon as the visit is announced a sign-up sheet must be opened for questioners. Each questioner will have, let’s say, three minutes. Not to scream at the HCP or to grandstand, but to point out contradictions, faulty evidence, a lack of attention to consequences, or other flaws. The HCP’s answers to these questions will go into the public record.

Somebody may anticipate that the sign-up sheet can be stacked with pro-HCP voices, thus nullifying the act of critique. This potential problem can be dealt with to some extent by subjecting the order of appearance of questioners to a lottery. And if there’s a scramble to get on the questioners’ list by voices pro and con, surely this only enhances the value of having the debate, and the public record of the responses will show pretty clearly who’s pitching softballs and who brought their best game.

In his appearance before the NABJ, the large orange man revealed his weaknesses so abjectly that the event even restored my faith in dialogue. Bravo to the uncompromising questioner, Rachel Scott. Let this event be the example in our minds next time the temptation to de-platform arises. Create the conditions for actual questioning and we may all learn something.

07/23/24

Peak Grauniad

A headline in the Guardian, the daily paper that seems to address a fairly well-read, internationalist, and left-leaning public and moreover doesn’t operate behind a paywall, today seemed to encapsulate its style, its readership, and its personality. Until further notice, we have reached peak Grauniad.

“I Deeply Regret Riding an Elephant on Holiday” by Chris Packham tells you, first, that he has the sort of money that enables you to go to exotic places where you might ride elephants; and moreover, that he’s the sort of conscientious dude who feels bad about it afterward. The subtitle goes on: “This Year, We Should All Make the Ethical Choice,” elevates his regret into exemplary preaching to “all” of us who might be similarly well-heeled and similarly tempted. You feel better about yourself just reading the headline. Why, I, too, might be in the position of go on the sort of holiday where I might meaningfully refuse to ride an elephant! In fact, I’m refusing to ride an elephant right now, sitting in my back yard in Chicago! What a good person I must be!

The author spares no effort to reassure us of his “ethical” qualities. He was confronted with the dilemma– ride the elephant or not?– because he was taking his “stepdaughter Megan, who was only a child” to see tigers somewhere in Africa or Asia, and elephant-back was the only way to do it. Points for being such an exemplary stepdad! Making a kid happy is generally blameless. Thus the ethically suspect ride was a means to a noble end, forced on them by circumstance. So you should be ok, Chris! Exempt. Nothing to declare. In the category of excusemanship, you rule.

Further points rain on our author for pausing to explain the exploitation of animals to young Megan and taking the elephants’ agency seriously to the extent of “visit[ing] the place they were kept, rather than just jump[ing] on them at the side of the road.” Well yes. One doesn’t just “jump on” an elephant– or anybody else. “The fact of the matter is that those elephants were probably working exclusively for our gratification – and that is not OK.” But do you have proof that they were ill-treated, or does abuse just go with being an elephant in that unnamed country that you chose to visit? Is an elephant working as a tiger observation platform necessarily worse off than an elephant who hauls lumber or builds roads? If the only place for an elephant is a wildlife reserve, did Mr. Packham go round to interview the farmers who live next to wildlife reserves and might have feelings about the role of animal tourism in enabling other kinds of exploitation?

It is terribly hard to be a 100% harmless person in a world of many people and organisms with clashing priorities. But it is awfully easy to brag about being a lucky-yet-virtuous person and to pose as an ethical model and authority, especially before the morally-aspirational clientèle of that paper, whose regular reader I am, but often with a cringe.

07/21/24

Divorcing

I’ve been away for many months. Forgive me. The cascade of things-to-do, plus an incapacitating disgust toward social media and the stuff it vehicles, have kept me off the interwebs. But as always, when “somebody is wrong on the Internet,” I see the Bat-signal in the sky and jump for my cape and tights. Perhaps to regret my precipitousness later.

The stimulus: People harshing on J. D. Vance, the Theocratic Absolutist candidate for Vice President, because he wants to eliminate no-fault divorce (along with a lot of other essential things) though he is a twice-divorced man.

The accusation of hypocrisy lacks subtlety. There is not necessarily an inconsistency between his personal experience and his policy stance, if you stop to think about it from the right angle: Namely, that his prior divorces were quite possibly brought by his former wives. (I don’t know this as a fact, I am just surmising, because I don’t have a strong enough stomach to go digging for the legal paper trails.)

Thus what he is against is not divorce per se, but wives having the power to demand divorce from unendurable husbands. Of which he, in my reconstruction, may have been one. So now that “Gotcha!” would swerve into an “Aha!”

I have a funny tale to tell. A friend who was undergoing a divorce– as plaintiff, not as respondent– was faced with an extremely obnoxious opposing counsel who constantly ran up the bills by making frivolous accusations, demanding irrelevant depositions, not showing up for mediation meetings, and so on. My friend was sitting in his lawyer’s office one day when a call came in. Guess who? The obnoxious opposing lawyer’s wife, who was desperately seeking a capable lawyer to divorce his sorry ass and shake him over the money basket. My friend listened with delight and barely suppressed laughter as the wife described at length the horror of living with that jerk, slob, dimwit, creep (and other salty naval expressions), until his lawyer said, amicably and politely, that it wasn’t a case she could get herself involved in because of current litigation.

The thought of how deeply the jerk lawyer’s wife hated him buoyed up my friend during many hours of painful and unnecessary interrogation.

I can’t help seeing Vance and all his companions in misfortune in the same light. I hope their exes are living their best life, as folks say.

07/4/24

Prayer for Our Country

“Our God and God of our ancestors, we invoke Your blessing upon our country, on the government of this Republic, the President of these United States and all who exercise just and rightful authority. Instruct them out of Your Law, that they may administer all affairs of state in justice and equity, that peace and security, happiness and prosperity, right and freedom, may forever abide among us.

Unite all the inhabitants of our country, whatever their origin and creed, into a bond of true brotherhood to banish hatred and bigotry and to safeguard the ideals and free institutions which are our country’s glory.

May this land under Your Providence be an influence for good throughout the world, uniting men in peace and freedom and helping to fulfill the vision of thy Prophets: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall men learn war any more.” “For all men, both great and small shall know the Lord.”
Rabbi Morris Silverman, Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book, 1946

This prayer may again, as before, change early next year. The first line will be, “O God and God of our ancestors, we invoke your blessing on all who exercise just and rightful authority.”

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