A bully who can easily reverse his 2-vote loss


Phil Berger, president pro tempore of the North Carolina Senate and the most wicked man in Raleigh. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

For fifteen years, Phil Berger has been doing the devil’s work in Raleigh. North Carolina is a purple state, with a Democratic governor but a legislature that Berger has turned into a right-wing instrument of terror. In yesterday’s Republican primary, the unofficial returns showed Berger two votes behind the Rockingham County sheriff, Sam Page, 13,075 to 13,077.

Provisional votes have not yet been processed. There surely will be a recount. Page declared victory, but the media are mostly saying that it’s too close to call.

OK. I’ll call it.

Unless it freezes over, there is no way in hell that Berger will allow a mere two votes to put an end to his power.

One of Berger’s projects was changing the law so that Republicans control the state and county boards of elections by taking away the Democratic governor’s power to appoint members of the state board. The puppet strings from which the state board of elections dangles, not to mention all one hundred Republican-dominated county boards of elections, go straight into Berger’s busy hands. Utter ugliness, Republican style, is guaranteed as Page and Berger continue to fight it out. I’d be very surprised if it doesn’t go to the N.C. Supreme Court, which is dominated by Republicans. One Republican member of that court is Berger’s son, nepo baby Phil Berger Jr.!

Where there is evil to be done, Berger has done it — the “bathroom” bill and the marriage amendment to inflame the culture wars, tax cuts for the corporations and the rich, interference with the state’s universities, the starving of the public school system and diversion of public money to religious schools and private schools, and obscene levels of gerrymandering to send right-wingers to Raleigh and to Washington.

Berger caused himself a lot of blowback with his maneuvers to try to cram casinos down North Carolina’s throat, including a proposed casino in his home county of Rockingham. The sheriff, Sam Page, didn’t like that idea because of all the crime and drunk drivers it would bring. The casino blunder was one of the few times that Berger didn’t get what he wanted, and he opened the door to be primaried. The sheriff is no saint. But if Sheriff Page was able to take Berger’s place in Raleigh, then the political machine that Berger built as the N.C. Senate Republican leader would come crashing down.

There is nothing that any Democrat can do as Berger goes to work to keep his power. The Democratic governor has no power to keep things legal and honest. Republicans own it all — the state and county boards of elections and the N.C. Supreme Court. Thanks to gerrymandering, the Democrat who will run against Berger in the fall doesn’t have a snowball’s chance.

Berger is a case study in Republican ruthlessness. Sheriff Page had better watch out for the payback. I hope he’s got good lawyers. Half the voters in Berger’s senate district want him out. That, too, is going to generate some ugly Republican-style politics in Rockingham County. But I doubt that Berger spends much time there.

Update, Saturday, March 7: The news from yesterday is that, after the provisional votes were counted, Page is now ahead by 23 votes. There probably will be a recount. But now the election is a bit harder for Berger to steal.

What we can learn from our DNA


From the island of Gometra in Scotland. Photo from a trip in 2018. My DNA shows that my ancestors lived in places like this for 4,000 years. Click for high-resolution version.

The most important thing to know before choosing a DNA test is that there are three types of tests. They vary in cost, and each provides different information.

1. Autosomal DNA. About $100. This type of test looks at an individual’s DNA from both parents. It’s most effective for the past 300 to 400 years of ancestry. It estimates ancestry components, such as how much Germanic, Scandinavian, or African ancestry an individual has.

2. mtDNA. About $200. This is maternal DNA. Mothers pass it to all their children, but only daughters pass it on. It helps trace the path of maternal migration and contains information that can be traced thousands of years into the past. It does not provide ancestry percentages.

3. Y-DNA. Up to $500, depending on how many steps you want to sequence. This is paternal DNA. It is passed almost unchanged from fathers to sons. Mutations occur at a statistically predictable rate. It can show migration paths for thousands of years. It does not provide ancestry percentages.

Brick walls

When people research their ancestry through written records, things often get murky a few generations back. In the U.S., courthouse fires burned a lot of birth records and wills. Information on ship arrivals is incomplete. Amateur genealogists make a lot of mistakes. People often hit “brick walls” and can’t reliably trace a line any further.

My surname is Dalton. Records show pretty reliably that the first male Dalton arrived in Tidewater Virginia around 1699. His first name is not known for certain, but he’s known as “Timothy 1.” No one has ever been able to find records about exactly where he came from. For me, that’s a brick wall. We do know that his descendants migrated up the river valleys to the Charlottesville area, and then southward down into the Blue Ridge Mountains, where my father was born.

I recently bought an upgrade at FamilyTreeDNA to do the maximum possible sequencing on my Y-DNA. I waited more than two months for the results. The raw data is complicated, but now we have AI tools to help us interpret it. I use ChatGPT.

Because I have a great many genetic connections with Ireland, for some years I though that Timothy 1 might have come from Ireland. The new information from more detailed sequencing changes the story. Timothy 1 almost certainly came from northern England, probably Lancashire or Yorkshire. There are still a good many Daltons there.

Celtic to the bone

But here things get really interesting. I will never know their names or anything about their lives (other than what can be surmised from where they lived). But because Y-DNA is particularly useful for studying migration paths, we know where they lived for more than 10,000 years.

My paternal ancestors, then, were Celts. They arrived in Britain long before the Romans — around 2,000 BC.

Where were they when the wheel was invented, around 3,500 BC? They were almost certainly in the grassy steppes of Russia north of the Black Sea — maybe Ukraine. Much earlier, they migrated out of Africa and gradually spread across Eurasia. It was about 4,000 BC when they migrated through Turkey.

Thank you, wheel

It was the wheel that helped enable their migration westward into Europe. By 2,500 BC they had reached Germany and Poland. They probably crossed into Britain around 2,200 BC. Until Timothy 1 left for the American colonies, they lived in Britain for 4,000 years, most of that time in northern England. They were in Britain for the final stages of the building of Stonehenge.

Because of my love of languages and the history of language, the migration data allows some pretty accurate guesses about the languages they spoke. Working backward: English → (Early Modern English) → Middle English → Old English (Anglo-Saxon) → Brittonic Celtic (Cumbric/Common Brittonic; closest living cousin is Welsh) → Proto-Celtic → Proto-Indo-European.

Curse you, Iona

When were the poor souls Christianized? They probably were Christianized around 650 AD (or CE, as we now say). There were monasteries (such as Lindisfarne) that spread Christianity into northern England. It was in 635 AD when Saint Aidan came from the island of Iona (in Scotland) to found a monastery. I visited Iona in 2019, and I hated the place for the atmosphere of smug righteousness that clings to it. It was almost as though I realized, from somewhere deep in my genes, that the monastery at Iona had something to do with beating Christianity into my contentedly pagan ancestors.

They survived, obviously

Plagues and wars brought an end to many family lines. Between 1347 and 1351, the Black Death killed roughly 30–50% of England’s population. In some regions, mortality was even higher. My ancestors would have witnessed and survived the Norman Conquest — 1066. They probably took the Dalton surname between 1,200 and 1,400.

I can’t go home again

My first trip to Ireland was in 1996. As I explored the country lanes of County Kerry, drove over the mountain of Carrauntoohil, and looked out over the Atlantic toward Skellig Michael, again and again I had the feeling — this is home. It was some years later before I explored and thoroughly hiked similar terrain in Scotland. I’ve been all over England and much of Wales. As much as I love the Appalachian Highlands, it’s Ireland and the British Isles that feel most like home to me. Cows, the scent of the cool springs where milk is stored, cows in green pasture, heaths and bogs, the Atlantic crashing against rocky cliffs, potatoes, cabbages, oats, barley, hot soup, warm bread — I do believe these things are somehow implanted in our genes.

I’d move back there in a flash, if I could. But the realities of the modern world make that impossible. Timothy 1 could get on a ship and sail to America with no legal niceties to stop him. I can go back and visit, but the legal niceties are such that visas are good for only six months of a year.

If I could go back in time, I’d go find Timothy 1. He probably was a carpenter and small farmer. He probably didn’t inherit much. He probably heard that Virginia was a wide open land of opportunity (which it was). But I’d say to him: Please don’t do it, Timothy.

Note: ChatGPT 5.2 analyzed my DNA data and helped with the research for this post.

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.