After my dad died well over half a century ago, the journal, a slender brown college notebook, that he wrote in during his trip to Europe in 1937-1938, sat on a workbench in our garage for decades. When my mom died which is now more than a decade ago it fell to me as co-executor of my mom’s will to sort, catalog, and distribute her voluminous personal possessions. To accomplish that I spent several days a week for several months going down to St. Louis, staying in her now-quiet house, sorting, cataloguing, and in many casees, photographing her things and placing them in numbered boxes for retrieval. I then organized their distribution among my siblings and myself.

The last place I tackled in my rather dolesome project was the garage. Up in the rafters of the garage I made a discovery. In a large moving box I found all sorts of things I had never seen before: correspondence, magazines, odds and ends from college, and, mirabile dictu, more of my dad’s journals. I immediately recognized what had happened. When my grandmother, my dad’s mother, had died the better part of a century ago, my dad dumped all of the stuff she had been keeping for him in the two-flat on Clayton Ave. that he owned and she lived in into a box and stored it in the garage of our house on Griefield Place. When we moved from Griefield Place to Ladue the box moved, too, to the rafters of our new garage. And there it remained until I disturbed its resting place 50 years later.

Clearly, what had happened is that my dad had filled up many of those old brown journals with his notes from his European trip and, when he filled one up, he sent it to his mother who kept it for him. So I now have quite a number of journals that I never knew existed.

Here’s an example of something I have. After Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938), which evoked an extremely cryptic and guarded notation from my dad, the U. S. Department of State inserted mimeographed flyers into the American Express boxes of all U. S. citizens, warning them to get the heck out of Europe. I have that flyer.

I’ve been putting off going through those journals because it will in all likelihood not be a pleasant task. No sort of preservation was done—they were just dumped unceremoniously into a box. They’re mildewed, covered with mouse droppings and insect casing, and generally disgusting. Additionally, my dad’s handwriting is not the easiest to decipher.

I think I should break down and preserve and transcribe those old journal immediately. After all neither they (nor I) are improving with age. I’m hoping that they hold some of the stories my dad told me: attending a Hitler rally, getting arrested as a German spy in Serbia, his bicycle chain breaking while cycling down an alp, etc. In his own words I mean.

This caption caught my eye in an article in Variety by Patrick Frater, “China Box Office Reaches All-Time Summer Record, With Minimal Help From Hollywood”. The short version is that the Chinese box office, completely unsurprisingly, prefers homegrown movies.

That should serve as a warning for Hollywood. As Stephen Follows documents, the average cost of making a Hollywood “summer blockbuster” has risen sharply over the years. Now it’s $100 million to $200 million. Reportedly, Barbie cost $145 million, Oppenheimer cost $100 million, the latest Indiana Jones installment $300 million, and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning $300 million. Add about the same for distribution and promotion to get an idea of what the picture needs to take in to break even. It should be obvious that these blockbusters can’t depend on domestic earnings alone and, indeed, they typically get about half their box offices from international distribution. But everybody wants their own domestic film industries to dominate their domestic (if not global) box offices.

If you eliminate China and India, the two biggest markets in the world, that imposes a high hurdle for Hollywood movies.

I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen but I don’t think it bodes well for the $1 billion Hollywood blockbuster which you can see looming on the horizon if you squint a little. I would prefer many more lower budget movies tailored for narrower primarily domestic audiences but I don’t believe that will happen. I also note that the coming reality should have some impact on the writers’ and actors’ strike that is presently going on but I doubt that it will.

First, watch the video above. Then consider the following observations by Katherine Blunt, Dan Frosch, and Jim Carlton in the Wall Street Journal:

During the 2019 wildfire season, one of the worst Maui had ever seen, Hawaiian Electric concluded that it needed to do far more to prevent its power lines from emitting sparks.

The utility examined California’s plans to reduce fires ignited by power lines, started flying drones over its territory and vowed to take steps to protect its equipment and its customers from the threat of fire.

Nearly four years later, the company has completed little such work. Between 2019 and 2022, it invested less than $245,000 on wildfire-specific projects on the island, regulatory filings show. It didn’t seek state approval to raise rates to pay for broad wildfire-safety improvements until 2022, and has yet to receive it.

Now, the company is facing scrutiny, litigation and a financial crisis over indications that its power lines might have played a role in igniting the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century. The blaze has caused more than 100 deaths, destroyed the historic town of Lahaina and resulted in an estimated billions of dollars in damage.

I’m having difficulty in visualizing how residents of Hawaii will get along without electricity, Hawaiian Electric could be motivated to clean up its act, or socializing its power generation and distribution would resolve the problem. Also cf. “ComEd Four”.

In his latest column for the Wall Street Journal William Galston muses about whether the world has already seen “peak China”:

Long-term projections suggest that China’s population, which now stands at about 1.4 billion, will drop below one billion by 2080 and 800 million by 2100. China’s working-age population, which peaked in 2011, is projected to decline nearly a quarter by 2050. Meanwhile, the number of elderly Chinese will rise from 200 million to 500 million at midcentury, and providing for their needs will be a mounting challenge for China’s workers and policy makers.

While these demographic trends will cause issues in the future, current problems are challenging the playbook that China has used to maintain growth in recent decades—infrastructure development, housing production and exports.

Burdened by rising debt, local governments are finding it difficult to sustain their current pace of infrastructure investment. Meanwhile, China’s housing sector looks desperate. Dozens of developers have defaulted on bonds and other financial obligations in the past two years. Last week, Country Garden, one of China’s largest remaining developers, missed interest payments on debt with a face value of $1 billion, sending new shock waves through the sector. The monthly value of new home sales by China’s 100 largest property developers has fallen more than 80% since late 2020. Looking forward, annual housing demand is estimated at between nine million and 10 million units, well below the peak (much of it speculative) of 14 million purchases in 2021.

Let’s visualize China’s demographic situation a little more:

With the regular caveat that we’re working in the dark, relying on China’s reported population which may or may not be correct, I think that population pyramid is revealing.

The major change occurred about 30 years ago, I would assume due to a combination of the “One Child Policy” with China’s currency revision which led to the growth spurt that seems to have come to an end. Jobs became more available and lucrative, particularly for women of child-bearing age; children became an economic liability.

That will really begin to bite in about 30 years, i.e. around 2050. China’s dependency ratio will be unworkable with little way around it unless you’re willing to kill a lot of old people, a move that may prove difficult if there’s anything left of filial piety in that China. A relatively small number of working age Chinese will be trying to support a very large number of older Chinese.

Organized retail theft, sometimes described as “flash rob”, is making quite a bit of news these days. Pamela N. Danziger reports at Forbes:

Smash-and-grab mobs descended on two luxury retailers in the Los Angeles area last week and made off with nearly a half-million dollars in merchandise. The mayhem was caught on camera for all to see, causing shoppers to think twice before setting foot in luxury stores where so much loot is so easily had.

Last Tuesday, 30 to 40 thieves descended on a Yves Saint Laurent store in the Americana at Brand lifestyle center in Glendale. They hit the store around dinnertime and stole an estimated $300,000 in merchandise, escaping in multiple get-away cars. Americana at Brand is a prime retail and dining destination operated by Caruso.

Then, around 4 p.m. on Saturday, a similar-sized mob ransacked a Nordstrom store at the Westfield Topanga Mall in Woodland Hills. This group was armed with bear spray to take out security guards. An estimated $100,000 worth of merchandise was lifted with numerous vehicles ready to speed the thieves away.

In both instances, nobody was caught, though the police reported they had “investigative leads.”

While retailers calculate the direct losses in dollars and cents, it will have a long-lasting impact on luxury shoppers already on high alert from rising crime rates.

And it’s not just happening in California, where shoplifting laws have been rolled back. Major cities nationwide are seeing a rise in organized retail crime with New York, Houston, Miami, Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta and Dallas among the top ten cities most affected.

It’s estimated that organized retail theft accounts for something like $100 billion in losses for retailers per year.

What, if anything, should be done about organized retail theft? The matter has a number of different dimensions including the role of social media, not just for organizing such thefts but in fencing the loot and the role of “crime tourism”, i.e. people coming from other countries for the express purpose of theft.

It was just about 40 years ago that I stood up in a town meeting in Evanston and criticized the plan for a research park, modeled on California’s Silicon Valley or Raleigh’s Research Triangle on the grounds that

1. It would uproot an established black community that dated back before the Civil War
2. It would primarily make money for a handful of developers
3. It would never work because Evanston was too expensive to live in and lacked the transportation infrastructure to make the research park practical

The plan prevailed anyway. Guess who was completely right in his criticism? The plan went ahead and the so-called research park is practically empty.

At The Free Press Adam Popescu reports on Evanston’s reparations plan. Here’s the kernel of the story:

In November 2019, Evanston, Illinois—which is mostly white and wealthy, with a black community comprising 16 percent of its population of 75,000—passed a resolution creating the Reparations Fund and the Reparations Subcommittee.

It was not until March 2021 that the city pledged that it would set aside funds for its first round of reparations, and it was a far cry from the plan favored by many Democrats in Washington, which would allocate $800,000 to every black household in the country for a total cost of at least $10 trillion. But it was the first time any jurisdiction in the United States has attempted—in any formal, financial, or legislative sense—to look back over the long, winding course of American history and to do something about the country’s often sordid treatment of African Americans. Not just with speeches or gestures or monuments. But with money.

and

Reparations in the city have done practically nothing to lay the seedbed for the “intergenerational wealth” its supporters envisioned. That’s because the city could afford only to allocate $400,000 for its first round of recipients, meaning only a tiny fraction of Evanston’s black community has received any money: out of roughly 12,000 black residents in the city, only 674 have applied for reparations, and out of those 674, only 59—total—have received them.

The story of what happened in Evanston and the first reparations law in American history—and what might soon happen in other cities considering similar measures—is the story of what the most contentious public policy issue in the country looks like when it is actually put into practice, when ideals meet reality, when vision meets bureaucracy.

Is the lesson of Evanston that reparations can’t work? Or that the city didn’t go far enough? Or that, in trying to do something—anything—it actually made things worse?

Although slavery was never practiced in Evanston, the town has a lot to make reparations over and you don’t need to go back to slavery (see above). Racially restrictive covenants were a commonplace right into the 1960s.

I think this article by Betsy McKay in the Wall Street Journal about the new class of drugs including Wegovy and Mounjaro is confused. Here’s the meat of it:

The success of the powerful new class of diabetes and weight-loss drugs shows how important chemistry is to determining a person’s weight. The brain is the body’s chief chemist, regulating appetite and making it difficult for many people to shed pounds and keep them off. The brain determines how much fat it wants people to carry, according to years of research bolstered by the new drugs.

The amount is like a setting on a dial, or what many researchers call a “set point” or “defended fat mass.” The brain maintains the dial setting or set point by regulating how much a person eats. Ozempic, its sister drug Wegovy and another, Mounjaro, lower the dial setting, or set point, in effect by acting on the brain to reduce hunger and make a person feel full sooner, some obesity researchers say.

The new set point lasts as long as a patient is on the drug, they say. Patients who ate a lot before they started taking one of the drugs feel less hungry and fill up more quickly—sometimes after one slice of pizza when they once ate the whole pie.

“This is not about willpower or personal choice,” said Dr. Florencia Halperin, an endocrinologist and chief medical officer of Form, a virtual medical weight-loss clinic. “This is about your brain driving behaviors.”

to which I respond so what? It’s easier for you to maintain a healthy weight than it is for me because your brain doesn’t send your body the wrong signals. That does not render it healthier for me to be overweight. It just means that it’s harder for me than it is for you. Life isn’t fair.

Furthermore, these drugs have all sorts of side effects possibly including pancreatitis, allergic reactions, kidney, stomach, and gallbladder problems, even some forms of cancer.

And there’s a distinction between serious obesity and losing five or ten pounds every so often. We have no idea what on again off again usage of these drugs will do on a longitudinal basis.

Taking drugs so you can avoid self-restraint is the very definition of gluttony. Gluttony is one of the Seven Deadly Sins for a reason. That reason is that it reflects a relationship with material things that is disregulated, out of control.

Virtue is a habit. You cultivate the virtue of self-restraint by practicing it. If you don’t practice it, you won’t magically restrain yourself.

The reason I don’t post about Trump is simple. I don’t intend to vote for him. I’m content to let the cases work their way through the courts. I don’t want him to “live rent-free in my head”, to quote an advice columnist.

Well, here’s a title I never expected to see in The New Republic: “15 Reasons Why Trump Should Be Favored Against Biden in 2024”. That’s the title of a piece by Brynn Tannehill there.

That’s a bit misleading. Here are his first several bullet points:

1. Americans perceive the economy as bad.
2. Trump probably won’t be in prison at the time of the election because these trials take so long, and he faces the possibility of being out on appeal even if he does go to trial.
3. Nothing says you cannot run for president from prison.

Those don’t illustrate why Donald Trump should be favored over Biden so much as that it’s not impossible for him to win.

Unlike progressives I think I understand why Donald Trump has such a following. It’s not fascism, racism, or any other -ism other than, possibly, elitism on the part of the progressives. He’s tapped into a broad discontent with the imperious and condescending air being assumed by the denizens of Washington, DC. Call it the “Deep State” or whatever else you care to but it’s real and it’s dangerous.

The problem I see is that Trump will not or cannot deliver on dismantling it. As evidence I would submit the four years of his presidency.

My problem is that I don’t want either Trump or Biden to be elected president. I think they’re both low characters and corrupt. You can’t get blood from a stone. Or as the New Testament puts it a bad tree can’t bear good fruit.