North Carolina in the news


North Carolina, where I live, is normally a backwater. But two things have put North Carolina in the news recently. The first is the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene in the North Carolina mountains near Asheville. The second is the possibility that Kamala Harris will win in North Carolina on November 5. Trump won North Carolina in 2016 and 2020.

It seems that everyone including the media expected the worst damage from Hurricane Helene to be in Florida and areas farther south. But the storm dumped more than 20 inches of rain in some areas of western North Carolina. In those mountains, the streams and rivers often run through narrow valleys, and that’s where the flooding occurred. I live about a hundred miles east of the heavy rain, and it wasn’t very bad here. But a neighbor, who also is the chief of the local volunteer fire department, is among the crews who were sent into western North Carolina to help with rescue and cleanup. He is spending that time helping to recover the bodies of people who drowned, and he says that the final toll will be much higher than what is being reported at present. The state has told people to consider all roads in western North Carolina closed. Even Interstate 40 was partially washed out. The video of the flooding is horrifying, with such things as an entire hospital partially submerged and people standing on the roof.

Trump, and all the Republicans on the North Carolina ballot, are going to be dragged down by the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, Mark Robinson. Robinson is such an idiot and such a psychopath that even some Republicans can see what he is in spite of the usual Republican adoration of idiots and psychopaths. Some polls have Robinson running 14 points behind the Democratic candidate for governor, Mark Stein.

Voters in North Carolina sometimes split on statewide races. For example, though Trump carried North Carolina in 2020, North Carolina elected a Democratic governor in the same election, Roy Cooper. Republicans were so terrified of Robinson dragging down the Republican ticket that they tried to get him to withdraw before they decided to double down and back him. North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes are likely to be critical in the 2024 election for president, maybe even decisive.

My unscientific and unquantifiable reading is that North Carolina is very likely to go for Harris. I think there is more Trump fatigue and more Trump remorse than the polls can capture. Republicans who are tired of Trump, or even sick of Trump, have to keep quiet about it or they will catch MAGA hell. I suspect that quite a few women will lie to their menfolk about how they vote. The right-wing North Carolina legislature usually cooks up some sort of bonkers culture war issue to inflame Republicans during election years, such as the “bathroom bill” of 2016. This year there is nothing like that. This year Republicans, poor things, are not quite sure what they’re supposed to be raging about.

As in 2020, this year I’ll be a poll observer for the North Carolina Democratic Party. Early voting in North Carolina starts October 17. In those states where Republicans are motivated to steal elections, lots of lawyers from out of state come in to help keep an eye on things and to stand in the way of Republican attempts to mess with the election. The state party operates a “boiler room” of lawyers in Raleigh who monitor the voting in each county through a system of volunteers. Online training for the volunteers is required. There’s a hotline, and an app, that the volunteers use for reporting to Raleigh. North Carolina statutes allow for poll observers who are permitted inside the voting area. They can listen to (though not interfere with) the interactions between poll workers and voters. They can watch the machines that tabulate the ballots and take photos of the tabulator screens before the polls open and after the polls close so that the number of ballots cast can be monitored. If poll workers turn a voter away, poll observers can follow the voter out of the voting area and inquire about what happened. If a poll observer thinks that poll workers are not following the law, they can politely intercede with the poll’s chief judge — and call the boiler room. I’ll also be attending the meetings of the county board of elections during the canvassing of the vote required by North Carolina law.

In my county, which Trump won by 78 percent in 2020 and 77 percent in 2016, Republicans have very little motive to try anything sneaky. But all of North Carolina’s 100 counties will be monitored by Democratic volunteers and the boiler room in Raleigh. If the vote is close, there is no limit to the dirty tricks that Republicans will use to try to steal the election. Democrats, at both the state and national levels, are very aware this year that Democrats need to win by such large margins that Republicans would be unable to steal the election, even with help from the Supreme Court, which will be slobbering to step in and hand it to Trump if Republicans can find a reason.

The Night Manager



Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine and Elizabeth Debicki as Jed Marshall

It’s shocking how much time I spend (and waste) scrolling through the streaming apps on my Apple TV looking for something fit to watch. How does so much junk get made? Who watches it? One of the most useful categories, actually, are the “trending” categories, or “Top 10 This Week.” If something is “trending,” I move on. It’s pretty much guaranteed that I won’t like anything that’s “trending.” Please pardon my snobbery, but I’m a refugee from popular culture, not a consumer of it.

And then a few days ago I came across a rare jewel on Amazon Prime Video. It’s the six-part BBC series “The Night Manager.” It’s a spy thriller, based on a novel by John le Carré, that was first shown on BBC One in 2016. I have no idea when it came to Amazon Prime Video.

The screenplay is flawless. The cast is superb, especially Olivia Colman as a not-so-posh Foreign Office manager with a north-of-England accent who just won’t quit, no matter what those above her (with accents much more posh, a kind of class struggle) do to try to stop her. Tom Hiddleston’s effortless sophistication (is that a requirement in a British spy thriller?) is fascinating to a provincial American like me. He came by his sophistication and his accent naturally, though. He was born in the Westminster district of London and has Eton and Cambridge on his résumé.

There are six one-hour episodes in the series. A season two is now being filmed (I was not able to find a release date), and I believe that a third season has been approved as well. The second and third seasons will go beyond the book by Le Carré, but the screenwriters of “The Night Manager” are so good that I’m confident that they’ll pull it off.


Olivia Colman as Angela Burr

A personal AI road map for the present



Chat GPT: Please make a lifelike image of a stray cat walking along a street in Edinburgh, near Waverley station and the Walter Scott monument.


Ready or not, artificial intelligence is going to become a part of your life. Where we are now with AI reminds me of where we were in the 1980s with the internet. There were early adopters (like me), but eventually everybody was going to have it.

First, a disclaimer. I have been an Apple groupie for 35 going on 40 years. Thus I lean toward Apple products and discount (and even disdain) competing offerings from, say, Microsoft or Google. I also know next to nothing about Android devices, though I do have a Android phone that I keep as a kind of emergency backup for my Apple iPhone. So, Apple.

In the months since AI became the next big thing, I have been in exploratory mode — not spending much money but trying out AI’s to try to get a feel for what they’re good for and where they’re going. With the release last week of Apple’s new versions of Mac OS (version 15, Sequoia) and iOS (version 18), we have a pretty good idea of what Apple is going to do. Apple is going to have its own AI called Apple Intelligence, and Apple is going to partner with Chat GPT. Thus, for me, the course into AI adoption for the present is pretty clear — use the AI features built into Apple’s new operating systems, and combine that with a subscription to Chat GPT (which has a free version as well as a more advanced version for individuals that costs $20 a month).

Making images with an AI is a lot of fun. But, to me, it’s texts that really matter. The $20-a-month version of Chat GPT allows you to upload and analyze texts, though it’s not clear to me how long Chat GPT retains those texts. We won’t know until next month, when Apple releases new versions of its OS’s, what Apple’s capabilities with texts will be. However, it seems to be that Apple’s AI will read everything on your computer, including all your emails, and will know about you everything that can be learned about you from what’s on your Apple computer and your iPhone. I’m good with that, because Apple is making firm promises about privacy.

To be ready for what’s coming with Apple AI, you may need to upgrade your hardware. But that gets complicated, because sometimes AI’s run “on device,” and sometimes they run “in the cloud,” with queries uploaded to servers somewhere over the internet, and the responses downloaded to you, which means that you can use AI’s without having the newest Apple hardware.

Given that AI is in your future, your decisions really are about what you want to use it for and how much you’ll have to pay for it.

The cosmology of Giordano Bruno



Source: Wikimedia Commons


Heresy. S.J. Parris. Doubleday, 2010. 448 pages.


I want to talk not so much about the historical novel by S.J. Parris as about Giordano Bruno and why he deserves our attention 424 years after his death (burned at the stake for heresy).

I’ll quote from the Wikipedia article:

“He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended to include the then-novel Copernican model. He practiced Hermeticism and gave a mystical stance to exploring the universe. He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets (exoplanets), and he raised the possibility that these planets might foster life of their own, a cosmological position known as cosmic pluralism. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no center.

“Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges of denial of several core Catholic doctrines, including eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation. Bruno’s pantheism was not taken lightly by the church, nor was his teaching of metempsychosis regarding the reincarnation of the soul. The Inquisition found him guilty, and he was burned alive at the stake in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori in 1600.”

Giordano Bruno’s life shows us how some people (a tiny minority, usually) can be right about many things many years before it can be proven. And then there is the ugly corollary: Some people can be wrong about many things (a huge majority, usually) many years after those things have been proven false. It’s important to keep in mind that, though Bruno had a scientific mind, it was philosophy, rather than science, that he was doing with his theories. Bruno’s philosophy, though, was grounded in the best science of his time.

Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres had been published in 1543. Copernicus, who used telescopes and mathematics, was doing science. Even though it was philosophy that Bruno was concerned with, he was not just wildly speculating. The reasoning involved in forming scientific hypotheses is always disciplined by the rigors of philosophy. This is as true today as it was in Bruno’s time. Today’s cosmological theories come from a collaboration between scientists and philosophers of science.

The history of ignorance is as horrifying as the history of knowledge is inspiring. From the Wikipedia article on Bruno:

“The Vatican has published few official statements about Bruno’s trial and execution. In 1942, Cardinal Giovanni Mercati, who discovered a number of lost documents relating to Bruno’s trial, stated that the Church was perfectly justified in condemning him. On the 400th anniversary of Bruno’s death, in 2000, Cardinal Angelo Sodano declared Bruno’s death to be a “sad episode” but, despite his regret, he defended Bruno’s prosecutors, maintaining that the Inquisitors “had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common good and did everything possible to save his life.” In the same year, Pope John Paul II made a general apology for “the use of violence that some have committed in the service of truth.”

The service of truth?? Even today, popes still don’t get it. It was its monopoly on dogma that the church was serving.

But about the novel. S.J. Parris has written a series of seven novels about Giordano Bruno. They’re mystery novels. The first in the series, Heresy, is set in Oxford in 1583. (Elizabeth I had come to the throne in 1558.) I had just finished reading all seven of C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels, the last of which is set in 1549. The Shardlake novels left me very much in the mood for staying in that period. S.J. Parris is a pseudonym for Stephanie Jane Merritt.

I have not been able to find much material on how Stephanie Merritt did the research for her Bruno novels. I doubt that she was as thorough as Sansom was with his Shardlake novels. But there is this quote from Merritt on her web site:

“At university I specialised in medieval and Renaissance literature and got to know the writers of the Tudor period, which was how I discovered Bruno’s story. For a while I was tempted to go into academia in that area, so I think I always had a desire to write about that era in some form. But I’m glad I found a way back to it through fiction — it’s a lot more fun having the freedom to imagine myself into that world.”

Bruno was right about a great many things. Even his panpsychism is taken entirely seriously by cosmologists today, though some contemporary philosophers argue that it was pandeism that Bruno advocated rather than panpsychism.

Vegetarian pimento cheese


Peppers in the garden continue to produce until frost. In fact they love the return of cool weather. A neighbor gave me some beautiful sweet red peppers. They’re not bell peppers. They look more like fresh pimento peppers — thick-skinned and sweet. I’ve used the heck out of them, because there are more where those came from.

Even if you make pimento cheese from scratch with good ingredients, you’re doing no favor for your lipid profile, what with the cheddar and the cream cheese. The New York Times ran a classic recipe for pimento cheese earlier this year. Yum.

I make a vegetarian version with mashed tofu and seasonings such as brewer’s yeast (also called food yeast) and turmeric or curry powder. There’s no substitute for the mayonnaise, though, I think.

Next time I’ll roast the pepper on the grill before I chop it.


That yellow-flower time of year



Tickseed sunflower

I call September that yellow-flower time of year. As soon as September arrives, yellow flowers appear all along the roadsides here in the Blue Ridge foothills.

And there’s another thing that arrives in September — bread season. The kitchen, at last, is cool enough to want to use the oven. My first loaf of the season was barley bread. It’s about ten parts barley flour to one part gluten flour, plus salt, a teaspoon of yeast, and water. As long as you add gluten flour to the barley and keep the dough warm, it will rise, even though barley flour is a little harder to work with than wheat. I grind my own barley flour from organic hulled barley. You can get the barley — and grain grinders! — on Amazon. My grinder, though, is a classic Champion juicer with a mill attachment.


Barley bread with fixin’s

A valid centrist narrative does not exist



Source: Wikimedia Commons

Some of the most smug and la-la-foolish people doing great harm in the world these days are the so-called centrists. They think that they are ever so superior to and smarter than the lowly “partisans” to their left and right. But once the right has descended into fascism, depravity, and false reality, a defensible center can no longer exist.

And yet that is where the mainstream media are today. Particularly guilty are the New York Times and the Washington Post, because, as the only newspapers of record left standing, they have a particular responsibility to the truth. The New York Times, having led the crusade to get President Biden to end his campaign for a second term, is now flagrantly applying its double standard to its coverage of Donald Trump. The Washington Post has shown some signs of rethinking its double standard, but the New York Times has not. The Times continues to translate Trump’s babblings into English, covering up what is increasingly obvious — that Trump’s mind is not all there.

Responsible people on the left are now calling out the centrist media for this, for what good it will do. The centrist media haughtily ignore criticism from the left, even as they are terrified by criticism from the right. Heather Cox Richardson directly quotes Trump’s incomprehensible ramblings about child care, as does Sara Libby in the San Francisco Chronicle and Rebecca Solnit in the Guardian.

There is something sentimental about the New York Times’ delusions. It is as though the Times has convinced itself that America today is still a place like Walter Cronkite’s America, a place where a single trusted voice could reach pretty much the entire country. Cronkite was host of the CBS Evening news for 19 years, from 1962 to 1981. He was often called the most trusted man in America. The New York Times craves that kind of trust but supposes that lying to cover for a depraved right is the way to get it.

I have only one comforting thought about this. It’s that historians understand quite well what is happening in the United States today. History will get it right. The malignant failings of the media will be a part of that history.


Here, verbatim, are Trump’s babblings about child care:

“Well I would do that. And we’re sitting down. You know I was somebody. We had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that because—look, child care is child care. It’s—couldn’t, you know, it’s something you have to have it—in this country you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to—but they’ll get used to it very quickly—and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have—I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about Make America Great Again, we have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it.”