Scary new predictions from Nouriel Roubini


Scheduled air traffic, 2009. Wikipedia.

I owe a great deal to Nouriel Roubini. I had been a liberal prepper since 9/11. I was preparing for retirement as the Bush-Cheney financial bubble grew — and grew and grew. If you believed the horsewash and the noise in the media, it was a fine time to borrow money against your house and live it up — new cars, dream vacations, and granite countertops bought with borrowed money. I did not believe the horsewash, and I did the opposite. I got out of the stock market before it blew up. I carefully moved my retirement money out of tax-sheltered accounts, duly paid the taxes on it, and converted most of my assets into usable land and a paid-for house. I actually benefited from the financial crash, because I built Acorn Abbey during the trough of a recession, when materials prices were low and when people were hungry for work and bid low.

But my point is not just that we should be contrarians. Rather, it’s about the importance of beating the bushes for reliable information, especially in uncertain times. Much of the noise in the media comes from people who have lots of opinions, but not a lot of information. And, these days, the Republican Party and its propaganda organs just make up whatever information suits their agenda. Many people haven’t caught on to how their politics and religion can be used to take advantage of them.

But back to Nouriel Roubini. The fact that he was right about the financial crash of 2008 (and that his model was predicting it before 2006) does not necessarily mean that his current predictions will be accurate. But it does mean that he has a good model, and it does mean that we’d be wise to take his predictions seriously. His predictions are very, very scary — a global depression, a period of inflation, and even food riots.

Here’s a link to an interview in New York Magazine: Why Our Economy May Be Headed for a Decade of Depression.

One of the things we need to be trying to model right now is how this pandemic is going to permanently change the way we live. We need to be on the lookout for reliable information about what people are starting to do differently. And we need to pay attention to people like Nouriel Roubini, whose views are based on actual data and whose models are constantly updated. Data from the economic shock from Covid-19 obviously required that Roubini update his economic model. The New York Magazine piece, as far as I know, is the first piece available to the public on Roubini’s post-pandemic model.

Note the comparison to Germany in the New York Magazine piece. More than ever, we need competent government to get through what we’re probably facing.

Sixth Column — Robert A. Heinlein, 1941

Once again, unable to find any new (or newish) science fiction that I wanted to read, I turned to an oldie — Robert A. Heinlein’s Sixth Column, which was first published in 1941.

Of course it’s dated, but part of the fun of old science fiction classics is the nostalgia. It’s recognizably Heinlein, though — snappily and skillfully written, often funny, with lots of good snark that never quite turns into preaching. Old books also remind us moderns that the writers and intellectuals who came long before us often had things figured out that we think weren’t figured out until much later. For example, from a biography of Theodore Parker, I learned that our intellectual predecessors had fully explicated the moral poverty of the Bible and the case against slavery by early in the 19th Century, building on a strong 18th Century base. Or consider the social critiques of Jane Austen, or the prescience of writers such as George Orwell. Voltaire was born in 1694. 1694!

Heinlein, though, was no philosopher. His libertarian notions are tiresome, in my opinion. And though he was once a liberal, Wikipedia says that Heinlein and his wife worked for the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign in 1964. So go figure.

Since I’m a person who wouldn’t give two cents for all the theology that was ever written, I found Sixth Column amusing for its rude treatment of the church. The plot of the novel is that the United States has been taken over and enslaved by Asians, and only six members of the American military survive. To take the country back, these six members create a fake religion. “The average American,” writes Heinlein, “is completely unimpressed by scientific wonders; he expects them, takes them as a matter of course…. But add a certain amount of flubdub and hokum and don’t label it as scientific and he will be impressed.” What befuddles me is that, even though “Amazing Grace” was written in 1772, and even though intellectuals have been shaking their heads at the stupidity and gullibility of the average American for almost as long as there has been an America, we are still surrounded by crackpot religion, crackpot politics, and a technologically amazing global network providing the crackpots with their daily supersized bellyloads of flubdub and hokum, since television — brand new in 1941 — can no longer meet the demand. The master Tweets, and his slaves obey.

Sixth Column is extremely politically incorrect, which is another part of the fun. The book police brats at Goodreads have slammed it for that. A “steaming pile of crap,” one Goodreads reviewer wrote. Though some of the reviewers, I must acknowledge, know how to read old pulp fiction in its historical context. One reviewer even wrote, “When we start telling writers what they can and can’t write about we may as well give up reading.”

The year 1941 was 79 years ago. And yet here we are today, actually governed by crackpot con men and crackpot voters who think that a return to the Dark Ages will make us great again. (The Americans of 1941 had Franklin D. Roosevelt. We are backsliding.) Heinlein writes: “These savages and their false gods! I grow weary of them. Yet they are necessary; the priests and the gods of slaves always fight on the sides of the Masters. It is a rule of nature.”

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood — the soundtrack


Fred and Joanne Rogers, circa 1974. PBS photo.

Last night I watched “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” the Tom Hanks film about Mr. Rogers. There’s no need for a review here, and you’ve probably already seen the film. But I did want to comment on the soundtrack, which I thought was extraordinary. It was a lush and varied soundtrack, carefully designed to encourage an emotional response to the film. There is a beautiful — but too short — scene in which Mr. Rogers and his wife, Joanne, are playing a piano duet on separate pianos, in their living room. The scene ended much too quickly, because I wanted to hear the whole piece.

Here’s a link to a YouTube video. The piece is “Bilder aus Osten,” by Robert Schumann.

Maybe it’s because older ears have more difficulty separating signal from noise. But the soundtracks for many movies make movie-watching an unpleasant experience for me (and for Lily, the cat). There is too much noise, everything but the dialogue is too loud, and the dialogue is often hard to follow, because the dialogue gets drowned out in all the noise. It’s such a pleasure to watch a film like “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” with its crystal-clear, well-designed, and ever-so-listenable soundtrack.

Ken writes about Doomsday at the abbey

Ken, who has been a featured author at the Wigtown Book Festival in Scotland for several years, has written a piece for the festival’s web site about being stuck here at the abbey during the Pandemic. Regular readers of this blog will recognize the characters. Please think of it as an interpretation of the American heartland for European readers.

Letter from the Heartland — Ken Ilgunas

What’s happening, May 13

Who will ever be able to forget the spring of 2020 — the Pandemic Spring? Here in this little corner of the world, the strange weather continues. An arctic incursion brought two late frosts. The tomatoes, basil, and squash are hating it (we covered them), but they survived. The cool-weather crops are flourishing. Mustard and kale have been plentiful. Soon there will be cabbage and onions. A building project has kept us very busy for the past week. It’s a much-needed shed up above the garden, with space for the Jeep, the lawn mower, the tiller, and tools. I’ll have photos when it’s done. The news, in my opinion, isn’t getting much better. And everything having to do with Donald Trump is getting worse. But this strange, slow-moving spring is a huge compensation. Now’s the time for scouting the best locations for picking blackberries.

Spring sunset


Click here for high-resolution version.

The weather was strange today. During the night, two inches of rain had fallen. Today the sky was heavy, and the wind was still. All day, there was the sound of rushing water from the stream below the house. At sunset, a break in the clouds near the horizon meant that, though the abbey itself was in shadow, the opposite ridge could still see the sun. Green is breaking out all over, but the trees are not yet in full leaf.

Brochs again


The Mousa broch in the Shetland Islands. Wikipedia photo.

An article in Smithsonian Magazine says that archeologists are planning to build a replica of a broch. Brochs, found only in Scotland, are a kind of prehistoric castle. They are towers with very thick double walls. What a place to live!

I wrote about brochs in a post here back in 2015. I used a broch as a setting in Oratorio in Ursa Major.

In retrospect, it seems odd that I didn’t make an effort to visit a broch (or at least the ruins of a broch) in my visits to Scotland in 2018 and 2019. The best-preserved broch is the Mousa broch in the Shetland Islands — a very long haul north from the Scottish mainland, opposite Norway, but a trip that I’d like to make nevertheless. The Mousa broch, according to Wikipedia, dates to about 100 B.C.

We know pretty much nothing about the brochs other than what archeologists can tell us. To me, one of the most intriguing factoids is that the people who lived in the brochs imported wine and olives from the Mediterranean. It is fascinating to imagine what kind of lives they must have lived. They clearly were rich, or at least had something to trade. They had excellent ships and seafaring skills. They were sophisticated in that they knew, and desired, what the Mediterranean had to offer. Yet they preferred to live up against the sea on their rocky, northern islands. I think I would have liked them.

Elbow patches

I caught a virus on the Isle of Harris last summer. This virus causes an obsession with collecting tweed. It starts with one’s first Harris tweed jacket. But it doesn’t end there. Oh, no. Before you know it you’re scouring eBay for more, discovering in disappointment that there are only so many colors of Harris tweed. (If you ever see a burgundy Harris tweed jacket in men’s size 40, or a deep forest green, or a deep midnight blue, please let me know. But I don’t think you’re likely to see one.)

And though it starts with Harris tweed, soon all tweeds become interesting. There are many fine tweeds. My last acquisition — a cream colored tweed made in the U.S.A. — has elbow patches. This is my first jacket with elbow patches. Now I’m afraid I’ll start collecting jackets just for the elbow patches.

I learned from Googling that elbow patches have an interesting history. The elbows of jackets wore out first, so worn-out elbows were often patched with leather. Then the patched-elbow look became popular — even a status symbol — and new jackets came with patches. Elbow patches are sometimes called “professor patches.” Gardening, you see, or shooting, didn’t wear out the elbows. But sitting at a desk did. Hence: professor patches.

It would take some hardcore desk-sitting to wear out tweed elbows, because tweed is very hard to wear out. I feel sure, though, that J.R.R. Tolkien wore out many tweed jackets against the desks and armchairs of Oxford. But the most common type of damage to vintage tweed jackets, from what I’ve seen, are rips and tears in the lining where the sleeve attaches to the shoulder of the jacket. That’s from putting on jackets carelessly and straining the seams. That’s one reason, of course, that the linings of jackets are always smooth and silky: the jacket slips on easily over whatever else you’re wearing. The method that I like to use for putting on a jacket is to reach straight up with both arms after my arms are in the sleeves. Then the jacket falls down onto the shoulders nice and neat.

In Googling for the history of elbow patches, I saw that some guys are worried about whether elbow patches are out of style. Good grief. Who cares whether elbow patches are out of style? How could anything that is good and practical ever go out of style? This is why I collect 7-ounce cups and saucers in heavy porcelain, and that’s why guests are always befuddled when they ask me for a large mug, and I say that, oh dear, I just don’t seem to have any. After making a show of thinking for a second, I heroically reach into a top shelf and just happen to discover one large mug. They are grateful. But those guests who are here at least for a weekend soon abandon the big mug and instead start using 7-ounce cups and saucers in heavy porcelain. It doesn’t take long for them to come around.

These days, for outdoor recreation, “tech” clothing is the thing — quilted coats, and synthetic fabrics that stretch a little and dry quickly. Tweed, which is always wool, is said to smell like wet dog when it gets wet. But I don’t care.

These days, we are encouraged to buy “thrifted” clothing rather than new things, for environmental reasons. Most clothing, though, is not the sort of thing that will last for decades and that retains value. But apparently people can’t bring themselves to throw away old tweed, because after twenty years it may still look new. Much of it ends up on eBay.

One of these days I’m going to find one in burgundy, forest green, or midnight blue.

April 20


The photo is from 7:50 p.m. Supper is over, and the kitchen has been tidied up after the wreckage of a wok supper.

I am so lucky not to be cooking for one — or gardening or orcharding for one — during this quarantine. There is a certain reluctance, as suppertime approaches, for those who are not in the kitchen to wander into the kitchen and ask, “What’s for supper?” A better practice, I think, is to pretend you’re a bistro and put out a sign.

Spring continues to slowly unfold in the cool weather. And what a spring it is.


The spiderwort just started blooming.


First rosebud!