Two Sentences Proving I'm Right

This is a fairly unremarkable Daniel Gross column, stating the usual argument that non-core inflation is important and our mechanisms for measuring core inflation are inadequate. But it's really worth reading for the following two sentences justifying everything I've been saying about the Fed recently:

There are sound macroeconomic reasons to believe higher inflation may be a fact of economic life, according to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who discusses the topic in his new memoir, The Age of Turbulence. (Apparently, the editors killed the original title: The Dotcom Bubble Wasn't My Fault. Nor Was the Housing Bubble.)

Sweet. (By the way, I know Gross doesn't write his headlines but he should have stepped in to block this one. It asks, "Why Won't the Government Admit Inflation is Rising?" Gross doesn't answer that question, though the answer is simple and instructive: Social Security is indexed to consumer inflation.)

Iranian Irony

Wow. That's a headline. Thanks for setting that up.

Iran has been in the news lately, hasn't it? This is largely thanks to Ahmadinejad's talent for controversy, though it's a cheap laugh at this point as Ahmadinejad is a study in self-parody. He does legitimately represent some concernable issues - nuclear proliferation and human rights chief among them. Serious issues aside, every time I hear/see this guy it is an uncomfortable reminder of the current, reprehensible state of politics. Let me stir your memory: this guy speaks at the U.N. (along with, admittedly, Hugo Chavez who said "Bush is The Devil." Now this happens to be one point I agree with him on, despite my lack of religious dedication. Clearly Ahmadinejad isn't alone in his playa hatin')!! Nonetheless, the U.N. was formerly an association where matters of serious character were discussed. Of course George Bush speaks there too, so it's hard to wax philosophical about the degeneration of a formerly respected body...

Even More Good News

While I agree with Matt's excellent point in this post that the ideology of radical Islamism will resist modernity for a very long time, there is more good news from the How-Dumb-Are-They Department. Iran has formally issued a booklet at the U.N. accusing Canada of human-rights violations. When I saw the headline in the Winnipeg Free Press I thought it must have been a complaint about the handful of Canadian troops assisting us in various sensitive places like Afghanistan. But no, incredibly it's actually a little 70-page book ("in the name of God," no less!) claiming that there's concern in the international community about Canada's treatment of its own citizens. In Canada.

Really, Li'l Squinty? I mean it reads like an Onion headline! Who can't possibly laugh out loud at "Iran attacks Canada's human rights record" ???

From the schoolyard to Presidential politics to international relations, the weakest of all possible positions is to be an object of ridicule. This is very good news for those opposed to Iran's tyrranical regime.

For God's Sake...

Not real estate yet. That's my first thought about what sort of "contrarian strategy" you ought to pursue. Besides, how exactly would you get into the real estate game? REITs? If you were to purchase actual real estate it would probably be in California, still the most distorted market in the country. But the other markets remain distorted as well.

There are also some hints that in the major metropolitan areas, housing prices may remain depressed due to a reduction in the number of illegals seeking housing. There are anecdotes about Mexicans leaving certain predominantly immigrant communities to return home. But that's mostly a sideshow, I suspect: housing prices are likely to remain depressed for awhile due to other factors too.

The Credit Plague Spreads?

I'm still not sure what to think about this. I'm not alone, it seems, with bulls and bears both arguing their position well: Mild, yet delayed, recession? Downturn? Steady Growth? Credit crunch contained? This article in The Paper of Record does a nice job of summarizing the trends and events that may or may not be contributing to an "economic downturn."

As you know, I have a significant amount of cash sitting on the sidelines sucking up a not paltry 4.25% in a money market account. Do I get back in? If so, how? Contrarian strategy seems to be one play to make. I can't wait, for instance, to get into the housing market in a year or so. Will there be a "flight to quality" as fears of recession loom? Perhaps a utility run as people seek stability and consistent returns. Maybe, just maybe, this is a matter of waiting it out, as our true (and just) long-term inclination suggests. Your thoughts?

Modernity = Homogeneity?

If modernity is the great white-washing of societies (think mass-media) then I agree that Islam's zealots would be hard pressed to continue their fundamentalist and violent rhetoric forever. As the world looses languages and cultural idiosyncrasies to McDonald and Murdochization, the power of niche agendas seems to diminish. We think alike, talk alike, behave alike and obey a larger shared ideology (human rights, free trade) to a greater degree now than ever. This should put downward pressure on fanaticism. This, however, is a long-term trend and one that will not readily eradicate UBL's in our lifetime.

Islam: Power of the People?

Matt - you write that the technology that enables the violence of Islamism will also serve to empower people's movements and destabilize governments. Surely. But much of Islamism's threat derives from the great zeal of its adherents and the terroristic violence they inflict. Surely the oppressive theocratic principles that animate Islamism cannot survive an environment of free association and communication, even if many governments in the world cannot either?

Thoughts on Modernity and Islam

I mean to directly engage your idea that "the very force which has made Islamism a threat will also limit, contain, and ultimately suppress it. That force is modernity." Your thesis is well taken - to be a threat you must have some position of power. The Middle East having been emasculated for the past century; its appurtenant religious affiliation therefore equally underwhelming in efficacy, are substantive symptoms of your claim. Technology has proven the mechanism whereby Islamacists have overcome this lengthy impotency. But will it prove a inhibitor of its own progeny's strength?
I believe modernity (if you assign more facets than mere technology to this noun) engenders further violence, not an eventual defeat of it. This is possible because of a fracturing of power between governments (as monolithic entities) and people. Technology is the weapon (power) of the people, militaries are the weapon (power) of government. Militaries, as we have seen in this latest and most grand display in Iraq, are ill-suited to fight the new-age battles. The Chechen revolt being another suitable example. As the distance between the power of people and government grows (as the result of increasingly sophisticated technologies) a natural attempt to reconcile this gap will result in...friction, conflict. It's as if two magnets, now having been energized, are found to be of equal strength and opposing poles. The power of the government formerly omnipresent, now the power of the people maturing to the point where the two forces stand in virtual opposition, bound by mutual desire for omnipotence yet unable to neutralize the opposing force. Locked in eternal struggle for hegemony!

Another Hopeful Sign

Last week I wrote that UBL's use of Azzam the American to craft his speech was a sign of weakness. Today Li'l Squinty spoke at Columbia and said:

“In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.” With the audience laughing derisively, he continued: “In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have this.”

This highlights something that encourages me. I believe - and I bet someone has formalized this thesis, and I'd love to read about it - that the very force which has made Islamism a threat will also limit, contain, and ultimately suppress it. That force is modernity. Islamism works because committed, driven individuals can use technology to coordinate and destroy, and spread the resulting propaganda. It depends on cell phones, text messages, satellite TV, the Internet, and YouTube. But the Islamists will learn that these are communication channels that cannot be controlled. Once you have your population receiving global Qaeda propaganda over the Web, you'll also have them discovering that there are, in fact, homosexuals in Iran.

Another version of that thesis: there will inevitably come a reckoning amongst the forces of anti-Americanism: a time when they discover that in they have more in conflict than in common. One such area is social conservatism; I bet a lot of Columbia students were a little surprised to discover that the Che-like champion of the anti-American cause, whom they were so excited to see, makes Jerry Falwell look like Barney Frank.

Right Message, Wrong Messenger

Lots of talk in the 'sphere about the new book John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." Their thesis is that pro-Israel lobbies such as AIPAC have harmed U.S. interests by forcing the government to take inappropriate positions towards Israel, the Arabs, and the Palestinians. It's clear to me that this thesis is both factually wrong and borderline anti-Semitic (the most obvious reason being that all ethnic groups - and, in fact, all groups of every kind, including commercial ones - lobby vigorously and effectively about every conceivable topic, and it's how America works; and yes I know Walt and Mearshimer acknowledge that, but it's a hand-wave rather than a real response).

There are lots of competent people - political scientists, pundits, lobbyists, foreign-relation experts - qualified and ready to make that distinction. The New York Times unfortunately picked Leslie Gelb instead, and his op-ed is astoundingly audacious. He makes lots of good points against Mearsheimer/Walt, but ruins it all when he hypothesizes that they must have written the book due to "their vitriol about the Iraq war — about being so right while others were so wrong". He says they "should feel very proud, indeed, for their foresight in opposing the Iraq war. Their writings were more on target than anyone’s, and they are justifiably mystified about how the United States could have been so stupid and self-destructive."

Really, Leslie? Didn't you criss-cross the country trying to sell that very war? Didn't you say (via an old Joe Klein Time article, h/t Atrios):

"I have never seen such unanimity on any foreign policy issue," says Leslie H.
Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who made a speaking tour of
mostly business audiences in the Midwest and on the West Coast in December.
"They want a smoking gun. It doesn't make a difference when I point out that we
have a smoking forest, that it's clear Saddam has these weapons and doesn't want
to disarm."

Mearsheimer/Walt need to be attacked, but not by someone who was active in pushing the war and now tries to associate with the anti-war crowd. (p.s. What's up with that quote? Who says "smoking forest" when they mean "a really big smoking gun?")

Hitchens Endorses Gore

Christopher Hitchens, the quintessential and leading "leftist hawk" on Iraq, has vaguely endorsed Al Gore for President. Clearly this has no practical significance. Anyone who would have voted for Hillary or Barack in the primaries will not be persuaded to vote for Al instead as the result of an article by a figure deeply loathed by most of the left as a traitor.

However it might have significance for Hitchens fans such as myself. It might indicate a uniquely Hitchensesque attempt to reduce or qualify his support for the ongoing Iraq war. Had you told me last week that Hitchens would endorse (however weakly) a politician who had been against the war from the beginning, I would have thought you ignorant. Now I'm shocked. I think it's possible that in noting positively that Gore "was once a stern advocate of the removal of Saddam Hussein" [e.a.] Hitchens is gently and subtly positioning himself to be described the same way someday.

Venezuela Time Change

News junkies know that out of the blue, Hugo Chavez declared that Venezuela would shift its clocks backwards 30 minutes this week. The announcement was made in a radio address. Most people don't care, but at Bloomberg it's relevant because we receive feeds of oil trading activity from Venezuela and there's been a lot of interest in how they're going to be timestamped.

Since we've been watching so carefully, we're probably the first to notice that it isn't going to happen according to schedule, without explanation. This may be very interesting. It may be a very oblique indication that Chavez has so completely lost his mind that his own government is interfering with him. Given that the man survived a coup only 5 years ago, that would be relevant. Or it could just be a sign that Venezuela is becoming an unpredictable rogue state like the PDRK.

Forbes 400: Wait, What?

The combined wealth of the 400 richest Americans is $1.54 trillion.

The Apocalypse

Famous signs:

This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria. --Bill Murray as Dr. Peter Venckman

The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. --Isaiah 11:6

A lioness in central Kenya has baffled wildlife experts by adopting a baby oryx, a kind of small antelope normally preyed upon by big cats. --BBC News

Check out the pic. Of course the story ends when a lion eats the little thing. But maybe that makes it even more a sign of the end of days.

What a Disappointment

Bernanke panders to the Jim Cramer investors - you know, the ones who are passionate about laissez-faire capitalism until their bonuses are at stake, at which point they start screaming for welfare - by cutting the target rate a surprising half-point. Maybe he was locked into cutting by the CW, which held that he would - Bernanke believes in an open and predictable Fed so he might have felt he needed to cut since people expected him to. But instead of a quarter-point, which would have mostly been a nice gesture, he cut a half-point, which starts to raise questions about whether he cares more about his job or his cocktail-party friends. His job is to fight inflation, not to start panicking when the market has a measly 4% haircut. Another disgrace and disappointment from a RINO administration.

Mirror Neurons: Not Relevant Yet

From Slate, an article by Alison Gopnik on how the term "mirror neuron," used to describe the activities of particular cells observed in Rhesus monkeys, is mostly bunk when applied to humans. Excellent and fascinating read, particularly because Scientific American has been taken in by the "mirror neuron myth" repeatedly. Also compare the Wikipedia page (particularly notice that it inappropriately conflates "mirror regions" with "mirror neurons"). Important moral: when Wikipedia is wrong, it is often wrong in ways that are simultaneously important and hard to detect.

A Detailed Explanation of How Sh*t Happens

Barry Ritholtz over at The Big Picture posts an Onion-style humor article about crazy Wall Street debt instruments, and how they get sold. Check it out if you're interested in financial stuff - very funny. A teaser:

"He said to me, 'what's wrong with you, its quadruple A rated, just buy it, what
are you a pussy?' He also said it was going into 'an index', although he didn't
say which one, but I felt that I had to buy it. And that was good enough for me,
bro'."

UBL's Idea Man: Azzam the American

This is what passes for an American, apparently, in the mind of al Qaeda:

The Telegraph reports that U.S. intelligence has singled out Adam Gadahn (the only American formally charged with treason in connection with the GWoT) as the speechwriter for UBL's latest video. That's why it reads like the script for a campus rally or an Edwards campaign appearance rather than an Islamist diatribe. This is, again, good news. If you need the douchie pictured above to come up with ideas for you, you are not a credible threat - period. There are many other credible Islamist threats, but the release of this hokey jokey video may mark the point where we may stop worrying about UBL himself.

Everyone Must Read This

I agree word-for-word with every single thought in this article by Fred Kaplan. It is an extremely well-argued piece on the worst single failure of this president, the most galling single indictment of him - his total, baffling failure to enforce his own personal order regarding the disbanding of the Iraqi army. This was a particularly awful failure because it did not involve any difficult decision, any complicated issue, any substantive facts: having already made a crucial presidential decision, when it was publicly reversed he took no action. This is objectively incompetent.

New UBL Video: What Year Is It?

Osama, as has been widely reported, has a new video. Over at Hot Air, Allahpundit has a transcript. A particularly relevant line:

This is why I tell you: as you liberated yourselves before from the slavery of monks, kings, and feudalism, you should liberate yourselves from the deception, shackles, and attrition of the capitalist system.

OK, what year is it again and what enemy are we facing here? Is UBL honestly appealing to, um, Socialism and Enlightenment?? This is actually encouraging news. First, socialism lost. Repeatedly. Nothing could make me happier than Osama hitching himself to that wagon. The spectacle of an Islamist reminding the West that it threw off the chains of theocracy is also encouraging. Both of these appeals reflect a shocking and heartening stupidity on the part of Osama: he claims to be on the side of Socialism, which lost; and he claims to be on the side of "freedom from monks," which was indeed the winning side; but he isn't on that side, but on the side of the mullahs. It's nice to be reminded by the architect of the Islamist war that civilized nations have a habit of shaking off the dominance of monks and mullahs.

With all the griping we do about the stupidity and apparent insanity (that is, detachment from reality) of our own leaders, it's nice to get a hint sometimes that maybe the other side's leaders are even more afflicted. (See also this Slate piece about laughably bad modern Russian propaganda).

A Little Counterintuitive to Me

Via Citigroup's Tobias Levkovich, citing the BLS's Consumer Expenditure Survey, h/t Daniel Gross at Slate: the top 20% of Americans by income exhibit greater consumer spending per year, on average, than those in the bottom three quintiles (the bottom 60%) combined. I know we've heard about the increasingly top-heavy distribution of income repeatedly (there's an interesting interactive graph that both illustrates and moderates this phenomenon). But I hadn't realized to what extent that translated into consumer expenditures. I think that the enormity of Walmart, through which 9% of all such money flows, made me believe that most consumer spending was driven by Americans with "ordinary" incomes.

Anyway, this statistic was very interesting to me, but I don't want to comment right now on its significance one way or another.

Pretty Surprising

I wrote earlier in the week that gerrymandering (e.g., in California) is a huge problem and we'll need federal action to fix it. Well, I'm still quite sure that's right, but it looks like Ahnold has finally (somehow, impossibly) pulled together a coalition of politicians willing to shoot themselves in the foot in the name of principle! This is a good development. Looks like Pelosi, who has been a phenomenal disappointment (FISA expansion? Farm Bill? Great steaming heaps of time wasted on "sense of Congress" resolutions?) will, unsuprisingly, try to get in the way.

Larry Craig

I have to count myself among those who are saying, in the wake of the Larry Craig scandal, "how is that a crime??" First, let me clear some fluff out of the way: Craig needs to get the hell out of office for multiple independent reasons. Chiefly, in my mind, though it hasn't gotten a lot of play in the 'sphere, is the reason the gov't used to give for monitoring its agents and officers: risk of blackmail. (This was back when there were a few shreds of competence scattered around the federal government). All it takes is one 'anonymous' partner to notice that the head frantically bobbing around his crotch is a U.S. Senator and you've got a powerful legislator literally by the balls. Other reasons include reliability: the man pled guilty and then pretended he was railroaded into it; (really? a Senator doesn't understand a citizen's rights?) and it turns out that he deliberately set himself up to back out of resigning, too! He's also a raging hypocrite etc.

But if he wasn't Larry Craig, but, say, Harry Craigson, local barber, could freedom-minded people really be comfortable with this arrest? Read the report! I don't really want to dig into the details, though I certainly will if anyone doesn't follow my reasoning. But basically Craig put out a few mild feelers to see if the officer was interested in a random encounter (in a bathroom known for such things); the officer responded with appropriate signals; and then as an only-marginally-bolder move, Craig moved his fingertips back and forth under the stall. Arrest! Misdemeanor disorderly conduct! I am not comfortable with that. Far too statist and totalitarian. There was absolutely nothing wrong with what Craig was doing per se, anymore than making eyes and suggestive poses in a bar to proposition someone is disorderly. (Note that such advances are often unwelcome, but we don't arrest people for making them unless they don't back off after being told.) Are we really such a nanny state now that we can't even expect adults to tell very mildly assertive perverts to back off??!

As a very interesting historical comparison, consider how the Navy sought out secret bottoms in its ranks around the 1920s. This is fascinating (via Aaron Belkin at WaPo, h/t Ramesh Ponnuru at the Corner):

In 1919 the Navy hired "decoys" to frequent the lobby of the YMCA in Newport, R.I. Orchestrated by officers at the local Naval Training Station, the cleanup campaign sought to eliminate gay men from the ranks. Following an introduction, decoys would accompany their suspects to a hotel room and then have sex. At least three dozen sailors and civilians were arrested, and many ended up in jail. According to conventions of the day, if men confined themselves to masculine behaviors and sex roles, they could engage in sex with other men without inviting accusations of being gay. Because perversion was seen primarily as a function of effeminate mannerisms and passive sexual tastes, government decoys could have sex with gay men with impunity as long as they assumed the active position during those encounters. Or so the Navy assumed.

When the 1919 sting operation ensnared a local minister, the Episcopal Church fought back, and what had been a local operation became a national scandal that almost ended the burgeoning political career of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was then assistant secretary of the Navy.

There were a couple reasons I wanted to post that: one, I think it's just fascinating; and two, I think it's another reminder that to convict someone of a sexual offense we usually require going pretty damn far down the road towards sex. Also compare how prostitute stings work - you need to negotiate and agree to a price for a specific sexual service before a crime is comitted.

We Need an Amendment

Nick Gillespie (editor-in-chief of Reason, a libertarian-to-left 'zine) has written a review of Matt Bai's new book "The Argument". Bai covers national politics for The New York Times Magazine. Reader(s) of this blog who trust me can take my word for it that these two are leftist thinkers of the highest regard and pedigree; but the snippets of their resumes I described above should seal the deal for those who don't.

Everyone knows that there's a groundswell in the Democratic party, a "netroots"-organized (though not equivalently "-funded") push to move the party back to its progressive roots. Gillespie assumes this as CW, though Bai does go through the trouble of exhaustively documenting the phenomenon. This is universally seen as a good thing, democratic in the positive small-'d' sense of the word. But Churchill was right and so Bai probes, with extensive reporting, the issue of whether the Democrats should become more "progressive." Bai notes that the intellectual heavy-lifting that formed the foundation of the original Progressive movement is nowhere in evidence today. Instead, the 'roots appear to believe that a political philosophy arising from the Industrial Revolution and refined during Vietnam and the Cold War can guide us well today. Bai points out that it can't, and that instead of crafting a true new philosophy for the modern Left, the 'roots have decided that no ideas since the Great Society were worth having and the only issue is which tactics and strategies should be used to elect politicians who put a 'D' after their name.

The result? Well. Gillespie highlights the farm bill passed by the current Congress. It has absolutely no intellectual justification at all. Democrats used to pass such stuff under standard Progressive justifications of supporting the common man, the farmer, the man of the soil, laboring the earth to feed and strengthen America. Then the Republicans came to power and passed the same bills, unabashedly to consolidate their political power in farm states and buy votes. Now the Democrats are back in power, and we know that:

• Farmers are prospering due to high crop prices
• Very few American workers are farmers, and practically none are working "family farms"
• Farming is environmentally harmful; and though alternatives are on the horizon, farm subsidies suppress those alternatives
• Farm subsidies are regressive, transferring wealth to the very rich

So the Democrats pass a bigger farm bill. What to make of this? Gillespie and Bai conclude (based, worry not, on lots of other evidence too) that the Democratic Party has about as much intellectual coherence as...well, as the Republican Party.

Bai has lots of juicy anecdotes, which serve to reinforce the growing belief among voters that the 'roots have an unpleasant flavor of elitism to them. (This is extremely dangerous for the Democrats, not because the elite rich are bad - I happen to think they've got a lot of good things to say - but because the Democrats open themselves to easy, demoralizing charges of hypocrisy because much of their agenda is based on the presumption that the rich are out to harm you. Republicans have always been the party of the rich, but what happens to this country when large numbers of voters realize the Democrats are too?) For example, Bai reports from a Hollywood party where "the host, the billionaire Lynda Resnick, declared from the top of her Sunset Boulevard mansion’s spiral staircase, 'We are so tired of being disenfranchised!'"

The conclusion? Actually there is a very practical conclusion. This country is very clearly in need of a powerful third party to f*k things up - not by winning outright, of course, as that's impossible, but by getting enough seats in Congress that no majority caucus exists to pass an organizing resolution and we get some quasi-parlimentary politics operating. The fact that that is also impossible given current laws should scare the s*t out of everyone. So the practical conclusion is: we must liberalize our election laws. Currently there are two major obstacles to fixing this country: and they are NOT "Democrats and Republicans," as we must not blame our problems on the inevitable presence in the political system of corruption and rent-seeking. The real obstacles are those which prevent the people from fixing things themselves; and those two obstacles are gerrymandering and ballot access laws.

Gerrymandering and ballot access laws; there is a patchwork of state laws regulating these things that has gotten to the point where we need federal constitutional action. I think a very apt analogy is the Articles of Confederation which governed the area of the 13 colonies from independence in 1783 until the new Constitution was ratified in 1790. The Confederation government could not collect revenue directly. The states were expected to collect taxes and make contributions, which sounds ridiculous but really isn't; the U.N. operates that way, for example, and seems to limp along all right. And in fact they did provide a decent amount of revenue; it was just realized that the system was unworkable and could not possibly expand to govern the growing country. We're at the same point now with regard to election law. Each of the 50 states has ceded to each of the other states the power to govern how the national representatives with power over all of us are selected. In California and Texas, for example, which send enough delegates to Congress literally to decide the course of the nation, gerrymandering and ballot signature requirements mean that it is a legal and statistical impossibility for a new party to field a candidate. My point is that this affects us all very profoundly - if California wants to rig its own legislature (as it has), let it do so, but why on earth does a tiny handful of classic smoke-filled-room politicians sitting in Sacremento get to govern this nation?

Elections for federal office should be under federal control - soup to nuts!! That means above all the lines of Congressional districts; but it also means ballot access requirements for federal office; the selection, purchase, and operation of voting machines; voter ID requirements; etc. This will require a Constitutional amendment, but I think that aside from the Bill of Rights that was basically a part of the original Constitution, no amendment other than the 14th[1] was ever so urgently needed. How would this work, exactly? I envision that the Bureau of the Census would be given authority, overseen by an independent nonpartisan panel (such things actually exist - look at the widespread respect for the Federal Reserve and the GAO), to draw the district lines (this detail wouldn't be in the amendment, which would just give the power to Congress, but there would probably quickly be a permanent law establishing the real mechanism). Envision a world without gerrymandering! This would be real, legitimate, nonpartisan, democratic reform.

[1](extra-credit assignment: wrap your head around the fact that right up into the modern era there have been serious states-rights arguments against the very passage of the 14th amendment, blissfully pretending that the little armed insurgency down Dixie way somehow had no effect on any the rights of the states busily engaged in slaughtering the duly commisioned Army of the United States)

After a long absence...

I hope the reader(s) of this blog will forgive me my long absence. In the last few months I have changed:

• My city and state of residence
• My job
• My marital status

These items have distracted me greatly, but throughout I've felt guilty about not posting to this blog. It's not like history stopped happening - although it certainly did slow down, as it always does in mid-to-late summer. I hope to keep a closer eye on it going forward.