Demonize them, and tax them out of existence


Illustration by ChatGPT 5.2

Paul Krugman’s Substack dispatch this morning, Billionaires Gone Wild, is about how, starting with Reagan, then worsening after Citizens United, billionaires are taking over the world. This is not just an American phenomenon. The lead story today at the English edition of Le Monde is France’s 13,335 millionaires who pay no income tax. France’s Finance Ministry tried to deny that this was true. But further digging confirmed it.

Billionaires can afford propaganda, of course. And they are increasingly buying up the media to turn them into organs of propaganda. Millions upon millions of Americans — who at least can see that their lunch is being eaten — are bamboozled by the propaganda and believe the lie that it’s poor, brown-skinned immigrants who are eating their lunch. Americans are taught to admire and almost worship the rich. How can they be shown who it is who is really eating their lunch?

Right-wing politicians and propagandists use demonization against their political enemies very effectively. Just look at how they treated the Clintons and the Obamas — demonization based upon lies, lies, and more lies.

Progressives have no choice but to learn to do this. And progressives don’t have to lie to demonize the rich. Just telling the truth would do the job. As Krugman points out, it isn’t just that the super-rich are using their power to make themselves richer. They’re also spreading fascism — though Krugman uses milder language: “Unfortunately, their non-monetary goals are often worse than their greed.”

Democracies will never be safe until the super-rich are demonized instead of worshiped and taxed out of existence. Wealth taxes are a start. And something, of course, must be done about the U.S. Supreme Court.

Jon Ossoff: ‘Hiding in plain sight’

All of a sudden, Jon Ossoff, a U.S. senator from Georgia, is on the presidential radar screen.

Keith Duggan, Washington correspondent for the Irish Times, has noticed him: Flickers of Obama: Is Georgia senator Jon Ossoff a Democratic presidential runner? Also Newsweek: Is Jon Ossoff the Man Democrats Have Been Waiting For?

What got their attention was a rally speech that Ossoff gave on February 7 in Atlanta (link below).

Not only is Ossoff qualified, he is not an easy target for Republican demonization. Not only is Newsom from the state that Republicans hate the most — California — he’s also from San Francisco. Pete Buttigieg is gay. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an unapologetic socialist. (I think that Buttigieg would make a fine secretary of state. And AOC has definitely earned her way into the cabinet of the next Democratic president.)

Whereas if Ossoff has any such political baggage, I’m not aware of it. He has the perfect education — Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, and the London School of Economics. The Wikipedia article has more on his past and his political positions. Just imagine having someone in the White House who actually knows something about the world!

Once upon a time, it was a rule with the Democratic Party that there had to be a Southerner on the ticket. Democrats foolishly forgot that.

Ossoff is in rally mode in the video, and that’s fine. But it’s high time now that someone does a sitdown policy interview with him.

Update: Jennifer Rubin also writes about Ossoff in her Substack post today: Undaunted in Georgia.

Here come peak demand electric rates


The insides of an Aquanta water heater timer.

I received a letter from my electric company saying that, starting April 1, they will be switching to a peak demand rate plan. If you’re not already on such a rate plan, you probably will be soon.

Both the letter I received from the electric company, and the information on their web site, was irritatingly vague. It took some time for me to figure out how the peak demand charge is calculated each month. I won’t try to explain it here because the rules will vary from electric company to electric company.

My electric company, Energy United, is a small regional co-op. I tend to trust them more than I would ever trust the energy giant in this part of the country, Duke Energy. Still, a co-op that doesn’t generate any power itself must buy it, and I assume that Energy United buys primarily from Duke Energy. I assume that Duke Energy charges Energy United more for electricity during peak demand times.

The marketing angle is that peak demand pricing “gives you direct control of your bill” and can save you money. Is that true? It’s possible, but only if you avoid pulling a lot of power during peak demand times — winter mornings and summer afternoons.

That won’t necessarily be easy. Winter mornings between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. is when most people are up, re-warming their houses, and making breakfast. And summer afternoons between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. is when cooling systems work the hardest and people are home from work and making dinner.

Some electrical usage is optional, and some is not, of course. Obviously it would be a bad idea to run a clothes dryer during peak demand time. To some degree, we can manage heating and cooling with our thermostats.

Small electric loads such as lighting or televisions won’t add much to your peak demand. The biggies are heating, cooling, dryers, ovens, and water heaters. If those big loads all run at once, your peak demand could be very scary.

Electric water heaters use a lot of power. If a water heater switches on during peak demand times (as is very likely), it will add about 5,000 watts (5 kW) to your peak demand. I estimated that, given my electric company’s rates, if my water heater switched on even just once during the monthly billing period during peak hours, it would add $22 to my bill for that month. Getting control over the water heater is an obvious way to save money. A water heater timer would soon pay for itself.

After talking with the plumber who replaced my water heater a couple of years ago, I decided to install an Aquanta “smart” water heater timer. Amazon has them. They’re not cheap ($164), but the older mechanical timers seem too unreliable and inaccurate. The Aquanta timer can be monitored and controlled from a phone app or from the Aquanta web site.

These new rates seem pretty unfair to working families who don’t have much choice about when they use electricity. For retired people like me, it’s easier. When the new rate scheme kicks in, I’m guessing that a lot of people who weren’t paying attention to the change are going to be shocked when they get their first bill.

Still, it’s entirely rational that electric companies are moving to rate plans that factor in when you use electricity as well as how much electricity you use. Nationally, peak demand is growing faster than overall usage is growing. Yes, AI data centers have something to do with it.


For what it’s worth, here is the letter from my electric company. It’s mostly marketing language, leaving it up to you to figure out how you will be affected by the new rates. Click here for high-resolution version.

What a woke dog whistle sounds like

Paul Krugman links to this video in his Substack dispatch this morning — America will not die in darkness. The video has been watched almost 13 million times. Krugman writes about the video, “A few commenters on this video called it ‘woke propaganda.'”

It must be a terrible thing to be the kind of person who feels threatened by a group of happy young people singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” But they hear the subtext, I think, and even a slow and illiberal mind catches on to the implication that the lion is going to wake up. It’s a woke dog whistle.

Until now I thought that the original of this song was the 1961 version by the Tokens, which reached No. 1 on U.S. charts. But actually the song was composed in 1939 by a Black South African, Solomon Linda. The subtext, I think, has always been there. Linda grew up desperately poor under apartheid.

The theme of Krugman’s dispatch is that fascist blacksliding in the U.S. has been remarkably fast compared with other fascist backslidings. Krugman quotes Steven Levitsky on Hungary: “Orbán doesn’t arrest journalists. And in Hungary if you walk the streets of Budapest or other Hungarian cities, you will not find heavily armed masked men abducting people. That doesn’t happen in Hungary.”

The upside, as Krugman points out, is that the backlash in the United States has been huge and took the White House by surprise. We know now, months in advance, that Trump will try to stop or steal the November mid-terms. We also know now what will happen if he tries. It won’t just be Minneapolis that MAGA will have to reckon with.

Oh great. February.


Click here for high-resolution verson.

Last week’s ice storm was followed by bitter cold, which was followed by a blizzard, which was followed by more bitter cold. There was no mail delivery all last week. Everyone has had to watch out for frozen water pipes.

The only positive thing I can say is that we never lost power here. If we’re lucky, after one more cold night (13F), starting Monday we should return to ordinary February weather — merely semi-miserable rather than miserable.

Good riddance to you and your derp, David Brooks


Source: Wikimedia Commons.

David Brooks, in his column today at the New York Times, writes that he is leaving the New York Times after twenty-two years of conservative derp-mongering.

One of the reasons that Brooks galls me to the bone is that he is incapable of ever doubting that he holds the moral high ground. No matter how wrong he turns out to be, he never questions his conviction that he has the standing to school the rest of us on the righteousness of derp, and to complain about moral decline without a trace of irony.

Yes, Brooks turned on Donald Trump after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. But never for a minute did it occur to Brooks to doubt his reams of derp. Ever an elitist, he never imagined that 77 million non-elites would fall for what he himself had helped sell them for years. The Republican Party would restrain extremists, he said. The sublime moral fiber and righteous judgment of conservative leaders would prevent castastrophe, he said. As it turned out, Trump didn’t hijack conservatism. He only took it to where conservatism will always go unless something stands in its way. The institutions and elites that Brooks thought would make Trumpist extremism impossible in America instead collapsed instantly, and then submissively carried water for Trump, the law and the Constitution be damned.

The work of center-right discourse is a lot like money-laundering. Brooks’ entire career was about laundering the doings of the cunning and deceitful movement that got us to where we are today. He didn’t do that because he is corrupt. He did it because he is foolish.

Oh sure, his tone was always civil. Many fell for it — the idea that good prose equals good judgment. Over and over again, he got away with normalizing the right-wing movement, providing it moral cover, and scolding the left while ignoring the radicalization of the right. To Brooks, moral rot and moral danger were always to the left and never to the right. He probably was genuinely surprised upon finally seeing that it was just fascism all along.

And it’s not just Brooks. The entire center-right project, in all eras, has been the same, from Buckley to Kristol to Douthat. They all met the ongoing need for flattering self-interest and privilege with high-flown language. One could as easily program a center-right derp generator as a postmodern jargon generator.

In fact I asked ChatGPT to generate a David Brooks New York Times column. The first run sounded so much like Brooks that it probably would have made it through the New York Times’ editors with no changes. I asked ChatGPT to please include just enough parody that even a dense soul like David Brooks would recognize that somebody is making fun of him.

Center-right derp generator, David Brooks version

We are once again at an inflection point, which is to say a moment when everyone feels aggrieved and no one is entirely sure why. The left believes history is a spreadsheet; the right believes it is a vibe. Both are missing the deeper truth, which lives somewhere between a well-run PTA meeting and a pickup basketball game where the rules are politely enforced.

In recent years, we have developed an unfortunate habit of blaming “systems” for outcomes that are better explained by the quiet disappearance of virtues like self-restraint, neighborliness, and reading the room. Yes, economic forces matter — I’ve read at least three books that say so — but no society has ever tax-credited its way out of a character deficit.

What’s striking when you travel the country, as I do between airport lounges, is how hungry people are for moral coherence. They don’t want another policy white paper. They want to know why everyone is yelling and whether it’s still possible to raise a decent child without a graduate seminar in trauma-informed parenting.

Our public life has become performative, our discourse shrill, our certainties strangely certain. Social media rewards the dopamine hit of indignation while punishing the old-fashioned virtues of hesitation and mild confusion. We are all experts now, especially on subjects we encountered twelve minutes ago.

History reminds us — gently, but firmly — that flourishing societies depend on mediating institutions: schools, churches, bowling leagues, and whatever it was people did before streaming services. These spaces teach the essential lesson that freedom requires limits, preferably exercised voluntarily and by someone else.

The way forward will not come from radicalism or reaction, but from recommitment: to norms, to decency, to the radical idea that adulthood involves obligations. Progress begins not when we win arguments, but when we remember how to behave at hotel breakfast buffets.

Chicory coffee


Chicory coffee with chocolate muffins. Click here for high-resolution version.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, before I moved to San Francisco, coffee in the South was pretty terrible. New Orleans, I suppose, was the exception. In those days, my house coffee for many years was Luzianne, which is part chicory (that is, roasted chicory root). Luzianne’s headquarters are in New Orleans. As for San Francisco, it was a wonderful coffee city before Starbucks came along and ruined the world. In the early 1990s, there were many neighborhood coffee shops, with superb Italian-style coffee served in white porcelain.

It was because I was thinking about microbiome health, and therefore inulin, that I ordered some chicory coffee from Amazon. Chicory coffee is shockingly good. I certainly still have my two cups of strong Italian roast coffee in the morning. But, especially in winter, chicory coffee is a fine thing for later in the day. I find it even more comforting than hot chocolate, and it’s easier to make. There is no caffeine.

Chicory root is a rich source of inulin. I’m not sure how much of it survives roasting, and how much of it is infused into the coffee. But some of it is. And, like coffee, chicory is a good source of antioxidant phytochemicals.

As for porcelain cups, the idea of drinking coffee out of a paper cup is horrifying. Also horrifying is the idea of stopping somewhere for coffee in the morning. Furthermore horrifying is what people pay for terrible coffee in paper cups, when homemade coffee is much better and and much cheaper.

I bet chicory coffee would make a fine espresso or cappucino. One of these days I’ll probably break down and buy an espresso machine.

Jonathan Rauch finally calls it what it is

Jonathan Rauch, in a piece posted this morning in The Atlantic, finally — finally! — has forced the mainstream media to say that, yes, Donald Trump is a fascist.

I regret that this piece is behind a paywall, because it’s something that everyone should read. And probably everyone in Washington will read it. If you have a subscription to Apple News, The Atlantic is included.

Here I must hasten to add that Jonathan Rauch is one of my oldest friends. We go back forty years and have always remained in touch. In fact he’ll be a visitor at the abbey in early March when he is in North Carolina for a speaking enagagement in Charlotte. My micro press, Acorn Abbey Books, has brought out new editions of two older books by Jonathan that had gone out of print — Denial and The Outnation.

Jonathan is considerably more conservative than I am. We’ve had our tense moments in political discussions, but that has never impaired our friendship. I will admit that I recently said to Ken that Jonathan is always right — it’s just that he’s always ten to twenty years behind. Conservatism does that to people. (Jonathan has described himself as center right.) Jonathan and I have the same journalistic DNA. We worked for the same newspaper many years ago, the Winston-Salem Journal. Jonathan was one of the many ivy league graduates who flocked to the Journal for their first jobs after the Journal won a Pulitzer Prize. I was a whippersnapper copy editor and soon saw that Jonathan wrote perfect copy that needed no editing. He is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and is the author of ten books.

His piece should get a great deal of traction, partly because of The Atlantic‘s reputation, and partly because everyone in Washington knows who Jonathan is, and they know that he is no leftist.

I hope Americans are now ready to go into full resistance mode, horrified and energized by Trump’s recent outrages, from Greenland to Davos to Minneapolis. Jonathan’s piece, I hope, will increase the confidence of Democrats in Washington and shame those Republicans in Congress who are still capable of shame. In her Substack dispatch this morning, Heather Cox Richardson quotes G. Elliott Morris, who pointed out that it would take only 23 Republicans to get Trump out of the White House — three in the House and twenty in the Senate. It seems pretty obvious that anyone who has the power to actually stop a fascist president, but doesn’t, is also a fascist.

We all eat for two

Note: The microbiological information in this post comes from ChatGPT 5.2. Because AIs can be wrong (though they’re very good at science), I’ve asked another AI — Claude — to fact-check ChatGPT’s facts. As always, I don’t allow ChatGPT to write for me. I use it only for research.

For a long time, I’ve been working on improving my microbiome. Only in the past decade or two have we really learned how important this is for health. But articles in the media rarely provide information or advice other than to eat a varied, balanced diet with fiber and to eat fermented foods such as yogurt, kefir, and sauerkraut. But I wanted to get technical and go beyond that.

What one learns, I think, is that we all eat for two — ourselves, and our microbiome. The typical American diet is aimed at feeding oneself (though poorly) while the microbiome is left to starve. The trick is to feed both ourselves and our microbiome with the same foods.

Here is a list of the nutrients that our microbiome needs:

1. Resistant starch. Sources: Some legumes (especially lentils), not-quite-ripe bananas, cooked and subsequently chilled starches such as potatoes and pasta.

2. β-glucans (a viscous fermentable fiber). Sources: Barley and oats.

3. Inulin and fructo-oligosaccharides. Sources: Leeks, onions, garlic, chicory root.

4. Pectins. Sources: Apples, pears, plums, carrots.

5. Hemicelluloses (partially fermentable structural fibers). Sources: Whole grains, beans, lentils, cabbage, root vegetables.

6. Legume carbohydrates (galacto-oligosaccharides + resistant starch). Sources: All beans, lentils, chickpeas.

7. Polyphenols. Sources: Berries, cocoa, coffee, tea, olive oil, red cabbage.

Note what is missing from the list above: Meat. Meat, we now know, has very little or no food value for the microbiome. In fact, meat-eating shifts the microbiome toward inferior types of microorganisms.

Also note that the foods listed above are the foods that are almost certainly missing in a diet of fast foods and processed foods.

It’s quite a wonderful thing, really, that all of these foods are abundant and cheap. Historically, the people with the best diets would have been people living in the country with farms and gardens. In times of plenty, at least, country people would have had an excellent diet.

Many of the most common health problems closely correlate with diets that leave the microbiome underfed. These health problems become chronic, and they cause us to age more quickly.

As I’ve said here many times before, I’m a barley evangelist. Bread is one of my favorite foods, but white wheat bread has very little to offer the microbiome. In fact most of it is absorbed upstream (as empty calories) and never reaches the microbiome.

It may take some determination to wean oneself off of wheat and switch to barley, because wheat and everything made from it are such appealing foods. But barley is more versatile than we might think. Pearl barley is much better than no barley, but the best barley is hulled barley, which is a whole grain. It’s possible to buy barley flour, but I greatly prefer to buy organic hulled barley and grind it myself. Below is a photo of my vintage Champion juicer with the mill attachment. I use it every day.

We all would benefit from detailed discussion with an AI about our diets, our health issues if any, and how we might better feed not only ourselves, but also our microbiome. It’s entirely possible that both of ourselves will want the same supper.

Must Americans be taught a lesson?


Thomas Mann. He warned Germany, but they didn’t listen. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

If Trump stays on his current course toward global catastrophe, then he must be stopped. If Congress, the courts, and the American people fail to stop American aggression, then who can, other than Europe?

The 77 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump have no understanding of how what is happening in the world today recapitulates what happened in Germany not that long ago.

With Trump’s threats against Greenland, his obvious intention of ceding Europe to Putin, and his also obvious intention of putting down the Western democracies and divvying up the world for rule by autocrats, Europeans are in a terrible bind. They have been there before, and they have not forgotten it.

Are we getting dangerously close to a situation in which the world must defeat Trump because Americans won’t?

According to ChatGPT in research-assistant mode, half a million people left Germany between 1933 and 1945 when they saw where Hitler was taking Germany. Many of those were Jews. About 30,000 were political and intellectual exiles. Thomas Mann was one of them. As early as 1933, he moved to Switzerland. In 1939, he emigrated to the United States.

From America, Mann wrote a series of radio addresses to the German people that were broadcast into Germany by the BBC. Twenty-five of those radio addresses, from 1940 to 1942, are available in the public domain. As far as I can tell, the complete set of radio addresses in an English translation are available only in book form, recently published by Camden House: Thomas Mann’s Antifascist Radio Addresses, 1940–1945.

Here is an excerpt from Mann’s address to the German people in May 1941. We Americans are now in the same predicament.

***

I tell you at the moment of your greatest — or perhaps not yet greatest — exuberance, that it will not be accepted, not permitted. Do not believe that you only have to establish iron facts before which humanity will bow in due time. It will not bow before them, because it cannot bow before them. However scornful, bitter, and doubtful one’s thoughts may be about humanity, there is, underneath all wretchedness, a divine spark in it, undeniable and inextinguishable, the spark of the spirit and the good. Mankind cannot accept the ultimate triumph of evil, untruth, and violence — it simply cannot live with them. The world resulting from a Hitler victory would be not only a world of universal slavery, but also a world of absolute cynicism, a world which would find it totally impossible to believe in the higher and better in man any longer, a world which would belong completely to evil and be subject to evil. There is no such thing; it will not be tolerated. The revolt of humanity against a Hitler world filled with the utmost despair of spirit and good — this revolt is the most certain of all certainties; it will be an elementary revolt before which the ‘iron facts’ will crumble like plaster.

The desperate revolt of humanity against Germany – must it come to that? German nation, how much more must you fear the victory of your leaders than their defeat!