griff.works

Below, books read this year.

Originally, my intention was to devote the year to current titles only. This lasted until September when I found newly released titles lacking and cracked open Michael Lewis’ The Fifth Risk which had been laying around unread for a couple of years. Looking back, I feel the experiment was worthwhile and I would recommend it, even though I do not intend to repeat it in 2021.

Not quite in order, and with hyperlinks for those I am most enamored of.

• The Education of an Idealist (Samantha Power)
• Why We Sleep (Matthew Walker, Ph.D)
• Why We’re Polarized (Ezra Klein)
• The Heap (Sean Adams)
• Agency (William Gibson)
• A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America (Phillip Rucker and Carol Leonnig)
• The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (Tony Ord)
• Surviving Autocracy (Masha Gessen)
• Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality (Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson)
• The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency (John Dickerson)
• Capital and Ideology (Thomas Piketty, translation by Arthur Goldhammer)
• Freedom: An Unruly History (Annelien De Dijn)
• The Fifth Risk (Michael Lewis)
• The Sourdough School: The Ground-Breaking Guide to… (Richard Hart, Vanessa Kimbell
• You’re Not Listening (Kate Murphy)
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
• Give People Money (Annie Lowry)
• One Billion Americans: The Case For Thinking Bigger (Matthew Yglesias)
• Washington: A Life (Ron Chernow)
• Urban Jungle: Living and Styling With Plants (Igor Josifovic and Judith De Graaff)
• The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Nicholas Carr)

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TL;DR:

The windmill palm (Trachycarpus fortunei) is one of the hardiest palms available to grow indoors or outside in the garden. This cold-hardy palm is also great for northern gardening climates as it can withstand freezing temperatures as low as 10 degrees. 

It is  a slow-growing plant that will take years to reach its full height of 6 feet indoors. Moreover, this plant is a great choice outside in the garden for water conservation, as it is drought-tolerant and resists pests.

Basically this plant is easy to grow and care for, as it grows well in full to partial sun and adapts well to most climates and soil types. The highly ornamental palm has stiff, fan-shaped leaves that are beautifully compacted and resplendently green, radiating from its stem on a sturdy trunk.

Here is what mine looks like:

For helpful plant tips and other gardening advice, hit me up.

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Follow up to previous post: initial numbers from election night looked like Trump over-performed polling averages between 3 – 5%. My calls for OH, NC and FL went the other way and lo as such, election day became election week. Final tallies TBD due to the closeness of GA and AZ. (and maybe WI — haven’t looked lately)

I’ve been returning periodically to the passage below from Heather Cox Richardson and mean to sit with it a while in the days to come:

This election was not particularly close, but pundits warn that the fact that 70 million Americans voted for Trump and 74 million and counting voted for Biden shows that we live in two very different Americas, and that, for all his talk of unity, Biden will have a hard time finding common ground with Trump supporters.

Pundits suggest that the two different political ideologies in America are about values and principles, but it actually seems that the primary difference between the two camps is between those who are living in a fictional world, created by generations of right-wing media, and those who are living in the real world, the so-called “reality-based community.” According to political historian Rick Perlstein, a scholar of the right, talk radio host Rush Limbaugh has been telling listeners that Democrats have stolen the election, and urging his listeners to abandon the Republican establishment, which did not sufficiently back Trump.

Entertainment personality Alex Jones is more extreme. He showed up to the Maricopa County, Arizona, counting center, where he told the crowd that “The Bidens are Communist Chinese agents” and urged listeners to fight “those scumbag Nazi bastards.” Jones owns a far-right conspiracy theory website aptly named InfoWars. According to an article by Veit Medick in Der Spiegel, about two-thirds of his income comes from the merchandise he sells to combat the conspiracies he talks about.

The Republicans’ alternative reality is quite literally deadly. Although 82% of Trump voters believe the pandemic is at least somewhat under control, today America had more than 122,000 new infections, and more than 1100 people died. An analysis by the Associated Press shows that 93% of the 376 counties with the highest numbers of coronavirus cases per capita voted for Trump.

source: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-6-2020

The emphasis is mine, but in a victory lap where Democrats keep mentioning “Science” in their speeches, and Republican activists are in front of polling sites yelling “fake news” it seems epistemology is an elephant in this room we share.

My prediction for the final Electoral Results in the 2020 race is an immediate Biden win, called on election night; with an eventual blowout margin at 368 e.c. votes to only 170 e.c. votes for Trump.

Biden’s lead nationally–somewhere around 10% over Trump–when coupled with what appears likely to be a record-setting electoral turnout, will translate into Biden taking most of the battleground states, including FL, NC and GA where he is currently ahead in most models — and Ohio depending on who you ask.

If I am correct, it’s basically all settled Tuesday night. Either NC, FL, or GA should be called on election night, possibly all three decided by midnight, ET. This is how the evening starts and will have a lot to say about the prospect of a quick result.

En route to final calls for these three States, what I’m looking for early on in the Southeast are indicators that Trump is under-performing his final 2016 percentages, by county, in any Southeastern state that should have the quickest results (looking at Delaware, Tennessee, South Carolina and Florida for this) **once 100% precincts have reported** in any given county. (note: I expect an under-performance)

Of particular interest to me, my home state of Florida, and the largest counties outside of Miami-Dade (which is always the last to report):

County	Trump totals 2016:
Broward County, Florida	31.4%
Palm Beach County, Florida	41.2%
Hillsborough County, Florida	44.7%
Orange County, Florida	35.7%
Pinellas County, Florida	48.6%
Duval County, Florida	49.0%
Lee County, Florida	58.7%
Brevard County, Florida	57.8%
Polk County, Florida	55.4%
Volusia County, Florida	54.8%
Pasco County, Florida	58.9%
Sarasota County, Florida	54.3%

New Hanover County, North Carolina was tagged by Dave Wasserman as his bellwether county for the state and if it’s good enough for Wasserman… well. In 2016, 49.5% of the vote went for Trump in that county, and NC ended up at 49.8% for the Orange one. North Carolina is expected to start off with a blue mirage on election night, with a dramatic red-shift. NC could be called that night. (If it is not, the subsequent votes that arrive through Nov. 12 will likely favor Biden). Biden is up +2 in the FiveThirtyEight model and that should be enough to get it done on election night.

After the Southeastern states are called or around that time, results from Minnesota and Wisconsin should likely be coming in. Biden will win both by morning, but once GA, NC and FL are in the bag, the question is simply how quickly we can get to 270 and have FOX News call the race for Joe Biden. Assuming one is called (MN, lets say) and the other (WI) is still counting, ten electoral votes are in-hand and Mountain states are up.

In this case, either Arizona, Colorado or New Mexico will race to be the Zombie Bite that ends Trump’s presidency. The first to go blue seals his fate, full stop, and guarantees* Biden reaches 270 no matter what was going on, or will go on, *anywhere* in Maine, *anywhere” in Nebraska, or in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Nevada, Texas, Wisconsin, Michigan, Hawaii (good luck!), Arizona (if Colorado is first) or Ohio. (all of these states I have for Biden, minus Iowa and Texas for what that’s worth)

Straight-up, DJT could ‘keep the change’ at that point and it’d still be over. CA, OR and WA are 74 untouchable shades of blue and my guess is that the map that will call the Presidency will look something like this (though I’m betting Colorado is the Zombie bite) by midnight, Oakland time.

Obviously, so long as Biden wins, I’m good; this is more something I wanted to put down ahead of time as I worked through exactly how I expect election night to go and something to explain my thinking to anyone who asks between now and Tuesday evening.

My final map, to compare against eventual results is as follows:

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“We’ve all learned a terrible lesson. As much as we want to believe we can operate independently of politics and it’s all about the science, it took just a few months to  hobble our ability to steer the course of this pandemic. So we can pretend that the politics don’t matter, but we have been kneecapped.”

-CDC Official, speaking anonymously for fear of being fired.

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“Just 60 customers with interests at stake before the Trump administration brought his family business nearly $12 million during the first two years of his presidency, The Times found. Almost all saw their interests advanced in some fashion, by Mr. Trump or his government.”

from 7 Key Findings About Trump’s Reinvented Swamp, NYTimes – Oct 10th, 2020

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Merging the two quotes above, one arrives at a view of the current administration subverting the work of the federal government for their own political benefit, the purpose of which is continued and increased financial gain for the President and his family.

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Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson are two go-to political scientists anyone should listen to if they find themselves suddenly considering the disconnect between the legislation routinely fought for by the GOP–legislation that ultimately provides most of its benefits toward the über-rich–and the economic station that so much of the GOP base find themselves in. Their latest book together, Let Them Eat Tweets, focuses on this disconnect and the struggle the GOP faces in its commitment to ideals that benefit a plutocratic elite within a democratic framework. They do a fair job of it in my estimation and succeed in making their case that the current GOP serves two constituencies of drastically differing sizes: The über-wealthy on one hand, and a subset of the working and middle classes on the other. Republican elites serve the rich by passing legislation reducing tax rates for corporations and wealthy individuals and by repealing regulations protecting common goods (air, water, etc.); they serve the middle and working classes quite differently though – most often through symbolic and vocal gestures like “defending Christmas” and whatever else seems to have traction in the moment. The authors stay true to their academic pedigrees, making their case with data and analysis rather than ideologically-driven bombastic assertion like so much of the nonsense that shows up on the “Social Science and Current Events” sections of most bookstores of late.

If they fail–and I think they do on the following point–it is because they have written a book that will only be read by those who have the least to gain from their insights. Their thesis, that the GOP relies on a culture-war obsessed base to fuel the machine’s ability to defund and destroy programs benefiting the majority of Americans in efforts to reduce taxes on the very wealthy, is well-tilled soil. From G.William Domhoff’s Who Rules America? to Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, to any of the latest rounds of titles dealing with the impact of Identity and Partisanship on electoral politics (see: Sides, Tessler and Vavreck’s Identity Crisis or Klein’s Why We’re Polarized), I feel like I’ve been reading this book, or some version of it, for the last twenty years. What it offers that the others do not however, is essentially a closer (although not limited) view on the recent events of the last four years or so. But this is not a new phenomenon. The names have changed, but the trends are long-standing.

The failure in writing to their audience goes beyond the authoring of a book that simply dunks on the folks not reading it (although to be clear, these are solid dunks, impeccably argued and sourced and true). Implicit in their larger argument–explicit in exceedingly limited measure to be fair–is that Democrats should be doing more to focus on the economic and social concerns these currently republican constituencies are focused on. By not calling the party or its members out they do a disservice in my opinion; criticizing the GOP is not enough – more must be sought from the Democratic party and at least a few more pages can reasonably have been expected by the authors on the point.

When one views parties as simply massive coalitions among differing stakeholders and classes, it is hard to imagine how the Democratic party folds in rural Georgian voters who currently fly TRUMP 2020 flags in their front yard with BLM protestors in Portland demanding police accountability and seeking equal protection under the law. But then, that is the role of a party. To be a big enough tent to get the things done that need doing — not just to narrowly win the occasional election. What Hacker and Pierson have done here is successfully explain how similarly disparate parts of the electorate–a minority with enough money to fund the party, and a majority with the numbers to make winning elections possible–are effectively catered to by the current GOP, with enough success to still be relevant. What I hope to see in the future is a Democratic party that has found better ways to attract a much larger coalition to govern effectively going forward.

Equally valid, a hope exists that the GOP and its allies either abandons their commitments to the plutocratic elite or shifts their focus to focus on substantive legislative efforts that truly benefit the working and middle classes in this country, ceasing the culture-war lip-service that debases so many of their voters and diminishes the political discourse in the country while doing little to nothing to address the growing inequality in America, or address the challenges that must be confronted for the country to remain a truly indispensable nation in the world. So long as the current model works however, there is little motivation for the GOP to change.

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last full listen: West Coast Grooves, Guthrie Govan

currently reading: Freedom: An Unruly History, Annelien de Dijn

all new to me.

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Almost inarguably, Thomas Piketty is among the most considered voices in the global discussion around socioeconomic inequality these days, and the contributions in his latest book, Capital and Ideology, are a clear enough justification for that fact. In his latest book, Picketty, an economic historian, catalogs and assesses the various mechanisms and beliefs justifying social and economic inequality–the inequality regimes—established and used in various societies–across the globe–from (give or take) the 14th Century to the present. He couples this assessment with objective analysis of the present and offers a fair bit of insight into how the understanding of this past may be useful today.

The scholarship is profound. Coming in at a little over 1,000 pages the book does not limit its focus to the history of inequality of Piketty’s native France, or even to Europe. Significant portions of this book cover the slavery economies of Haiti and other Caribbean Nations, The American South, Brazil, even Britain’s involvement in the trade of enslaved people. The treatment is not brief and in reviewing each instance for the unique characteristics of how inequality was established, discussed, and mainly justified, effort is taken to extract the lessons arising from each. While no work can be exhaustive on such topics, the care is apparent and the insight Piketty provides on these societies was illuminating to me in so many more ways than I can take the time to elaborate. The moral justifications of European Imperialism in Africa are discussed–not just along the Atlantic coast, but in North Africa and extending into the Middle East (Asia) as well–with a particularly insightful explanation of how the preceding military adventures between the countries of Europe simultaneously equipped these ‘colonial’ powers in their pursuits and prepared the economic impetus (if not moral justifications) for all that was to be done. From Africa, Piketty simply rounds the horn and spends time focusing on the role of the British in India and the profound and lasting effects this involvement created via caste and other mechanisms before proceeding to China and the Far East to discuss both the inequality regimes found there and those imposed by the European powers of the era.

And this is only the first 400 pages.

As the book progresses, history retains its overall dominance in Piketty’s narrative, while social science increasingly begins to contribute to the work. Grounded in the past, salient aspects from others’ scholarship are added to flesh out a fuller understanding of the dynamics at play in these various societies as the years pass. The book is not precisely chronological, however, it is astonishingly organized, particularly in light of its impressive breadth. “A mile wide but an inch deep” is a phrase often heard in areas where breadth is mentioned as a virtue, but that phrase does not belong here. The book is not a page-turner exactly, but it is not remotely a slog either. It is fascinating. There are over a thousand pages of text in the hardback, so — y’know…it takes time — but it is not dull and it does not belabor. The assertiveness of its statements comes from the work–scholarship that book shows–and not from the exuberant voice of an author clinging to moral sentiment to make his case.

But morals are not divorced from the text either. Moral impulse pervades the spaces in between as it were, and in a few instances moral questions are contrastingly put forth boldly for the reader’s consideration. There is no shortage of points for consideration, but two main assertions of the book are as follows:

First: Inequality Regimes are as old as dirt, and just about as varied. Every civilization we have ever created had some form of inequality, and that inequality was justified in some way by a dominant worldview (an ideology) that explained just why it was right and proper that certain folks had so much and others had so little (if anything). The justifications for inequalities, both within and between civilizations, are cloaked in various forms depending on the era and the society: divine providence, the mission-of-civilization, economic necessity, the inhumanity of the subjected, natural order, meritocracy, or some variation of nonsense relating to Horatio Alger and his goddamned bootstraps. In every society, those with more socioeconomic power–not necessarily those with the most, but often a plurality of factions that benefit from the inequality regime–align to maintain a belief that this inequality is justified. The poorest have always deserved it; the reasons just happened to change depending on the time and place. Without an ideological justification to explain inequality, the system would be in danger of collapse.

Second: There is no reason why any particular justification should be tolerated. Objectively, these inequality regimes are ideologies and Ideologies do not arise from some immutable truth revealed to those who just-so-happen to benefit the most from them. History has many switch points, often found in crises, per Piketty, and the individual trajectories of so many civilizations and the ideologies they employed (and employ today) are the product of the decisions made yesterday and the ones we all make going forward. As fervently as anyone may wish to argue to the contrary, positing that any particular truth objectively justifies societal inequality, independent of history, does not withstand scrutiny.

Of particular interest to me was Piketty’s discussion of political structures in the modern era – roughly since 1980. “…inequality has increased in nearly every region of the world since 1980, except in those countries that have always been highly inegalitarian,” he writes. He goes into a fair bit of detail in the recent political developments of France, Britain and the US, but he finds a common thread in each, coining (unless I missed the attribution) the terms “the Brahmin Left” and “the Merchant Right” to speak to broader trends transnationally. I confess that by the time I reached these ideas, I fully expected most of the book’s focus to be on The Right(TM) as the instigators and primary defenders of inequality. However, that is ludicrous in hindsight and–as stated “does not withstand scrutiny.” I only mention it here to affirm my own susceptibility to bias.

Piketty spares no page count though in laying out the failures of the Left and the complicity of those left-of-center–like myself–who having attained a certain degree of comfort owing to the benefits of (economically rewarded) education–reinforce the system, basically in collusion with the others benefiting from the system. Put simply: this is not a book about The 1%; this is not a book about left versus right. This is a book that does not shy away from the role the top several deciles of any socioeconomic order enjoy or at least reify to the detriment and peril of the remaining population, even accounting for the fact that these factions may not work hand-in-glove or even productively on many other matters. The work Piketty does on this point, much of if focussed on “the Brahmin Left” is commendable and personally, I feel a debt of gratitude for his focus on it.

There is so much research and so much said in this tome, but there is no reason for me to sum up Piketty’s conclusions – he does a fine job himself in the last few pages, a chapter surprisingly titled: Conclusion and there are plenty of reviews available elsewhere. I will say that as someone holding no academic background in history (outside of undergraduate general education requirements) or any background at all in economics–the journey is well worth the ride for all thousand pages. The expanse and scope of the scholarship illuminated much for me and connected numerous dots filling in more than a few gaps in my education — notably on ideas and topics not even mentioned in the book, just through its voluminous context. It is a fine book to pour through, bringing what you already know to the pages within. There is so much information inside, that I suspect it would inevitably provide contexts for a greater epistemic grounding for much that you already arrived with.

I cannot recommend the book enough.

Piketty, Thomas. Capital and Ideology. The Belknap Press of Harvard Press. 2019. pp. 1093. $39.95 (Hardcover). ISBN: 9780674980822

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