Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
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.
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.
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 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, 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.
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.
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!
After several calls to the hosting provider (GoDaddy), I think I finally got an accurate diagnosis on what has made this blog unreachable at times during the past four days. It was a denial of service (DoS) attack.
I have upgraded the hosting level to get around the problem. Previously, the IP address of acornabbey.com was shared with a great many other domains. Thus a DoS attack on one of those domains would effect all of the many domains that are sharing a server and a TCP/IP address. The upgraded hosting plan includes a unique TCP/IP address for acornabbey.com.
I should emphasize that it was not acornabbey.com that was the target of the DoS attack. This domain was just collateral damage. If you’ve had trouble reaching the blog recently, I apologize. We should be out of the woods now (but we’re still Into the Woods. 🙂 )
Minneapolis is becoming a preview of what Americans will do if they have to. The video of what the people of Minneapolis did to the right-wing “influencer” Jake Lang ought to show Trump and MAGA what decent Americans think of their ideology, and what decent Americans will do if that ideology goes beyond the toleration of free speech to violent troops in the streets:
The right-wing comments on the New York Post video are interesting. For example: “Ah yes … the peaceful and tolerant left at it again.”
They still don’t get it if they think that there is no limit to what Americans will tolerate.
The true believers in the White House don’t seem to see the risks in Trump’s threat of new tariffs to punish Europe over Greenland. Greenland increasingly looks like the red line. Buy Greenland? They’re not selling.
If Trump actually sends American troops into Greenland, then how does he expect to stay in power with all the forces that would then be allied against him? — the American people, in the streets; Europe and Canada, with damaging economic sanctions; and, if we’re lucky, the American Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court actually enforcing the Constitution.
What would it take for the American military to stop taking orders from Trump? The true believers in the White House have already shown that they’re terrified that the American military might not take illegal orders.
I was just a young whipper-snapper journalist when I read Wallace Carroll’s Persuade or Perish (1948). The book was based on his experience as head of the U.S. Office of War Information from 1942 until 1945. The book’s theme is that even wars cannot succeed without persuasion.
I don’t think that we Americans have forgotten what we learned from the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement of the 1960s. People in the streets can do a lot, but there’s also a lot of persuading to be done. Think Woodstock. And today we have more options than just protest songs. The Greenland video below is a fine piece of persuasion — both persuading people that they have the power to resist, and warning Trump and MAGA that trying to impose fascism and own the hemisphere definitely will not be a cakewalk.
Screen shot from Apple’s 1987 video about Knowledge Navigator. The resolution of the old video is poor, so I asked ChatGPT to redo the image, then I scaled the image up using Adobe’s Firefly tool. Click here for high-resolution version.
If there was a moment when I became a lifelong Apple groupie, it was 1987, when I attended an Apple marketing event in Charlotte, North Carolina. The event was to promote Apple products for publishing. Apple, along with Adobe, already knew in 1987 that their products would become essential in the publishing industry. During my career in publishing, I spent many hundreds of thousands of dollars on Apple and Adobe products for the newspapers I worked for. The costs were easy to justify, because the new tools for digital publishing were so much less expensive than the systems they replaced.
At that event, Apple showed the Knowledge Navigator video. It was like a dream — Steve Jobs’ dream. Could it ever happen? If it could happen, how long would it take?
Ironically, Apple fell behind on AI systems. Siri was an industry joke. But all of a sudden, everything is now coming together to make Steve Jobs’ dream a reality — an AI assistant with a video avatar, with access to your telephone and email, knowledge about who you are and what you do, the ability to do real-world research, and even the ability to generate pictures and video.
The rumors are that Apple will release a new version of its HomePod this year, with a screen. It is thought to be closely integrated with a new Siri powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. I am hoping that Apple will surprise us by including a talking video avatar for Siri, with your choice of avatars (whom you might or might not name Siri). A talking video avatar for AI is going to happen soon. It would be ever so cool if Apple did it first. And if Apple does it in 2026, then it will have taken 39 years for Steve Jobs’ dream to become a reality.
ChatGPT’s imagining of what an Apple video avatar might look like.
There was some sort of problem yesterday (January 15) with this blog’s hosting service (GoDaddy). The blog was either down or partially down from around 2 p.m. until 9 p.m. EST. GoDaddy was very vague about what caused it. But it may have had something to do with the the fact that Monday’s post “One of ours, all of yours” went viral. Hits on the blog were around a hundredfold higher than usual. My guess is that people all over the world were alarmed by Kristi Noem’s press conference. But information about it was hard to get, because the media ignored it. So people searched and doom-scrolled. The heavy hits on the blog came from DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo search, and Google.
I’m not entirely convinced that the problem is completely solved. I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a comment if you’ve tried to connect to the blog and encountered a problem.
Social media, I understand, is buzzing with interpretations of just what it was Kristi Noem meant by the words “One of ours, all of yours” on the podium during a news conference in New York on January 8, after Renee Nicole Good was killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis.
Some social media posts say it’s a Nazi phrase related to the Lidice massacre. Some say the phrase has something to do with the Spanish Civil War, and some say the phrase originated with Q-Anon. Neither I nor ChatGPT can find any good evidence for any of those citations.
Still, there are two important questions: Just what did Noem mean? And why did the mainstream media ignore it?
I think I can guess why the media ignored it. It was just another act of sanewashing. That such a phrase was actually used by an American cabinet secretary who commands thousands of men armed to the teeth should have provoked dozens of op-eds asking what it means, especially since pretty much everybody took it as a threat. Instead, crickets.
Noem, you’ll remember, is the person who wrote in a memoir about killing a puppy and a goat.
The phrase is intentionally vague. That’s to provide deniability. Is there a way to interpret it other than as a veiled threat of disproportionate retaliation?
