Put Me In, Coach

"It turns out that nearly half of that team doesn't think I'm okay to be white," [Scott Adams] said, adding that he would re-identify as white. "I'm going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off," he said. "I get called a racist. That's the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you're white. It's over. Don't even think it's worth trying."

"I'm not saying start a war or do anything bad," he added. "Nothing like that. I'm just saying get away. Just get away."
Distributor, newspapers drop 'Dilbert' comic strip after creator's racist rant

Apparently, it hadn't occurred to Mr. Adams that "Black America" isn't a hive mind, and that some Black Americans are capable of holding a grudge.

Snark aside, Scott Adams' response to an opinion poll that asked: "Do you agree or disagree with this statement, 'It's OK to be white'?"; allegedly to assess Americans' embrace of "wokeness." And it illustrates something about the politics of White grievance; namely, it becomes aggrieved at the idea that others have grievances of their own.

It's more or less taken for granted for that for much of American history, many people would have wholeheartedly disagreed with the statement "It's okay to be Black." And, anyone who pays even occasional attention to news media in the United States would understand that there are people who would disagree with that statement today. Including one White man who decided to shoot as many people as he could in a Buffalo supermarket. In a nation where racial discrimination and animosity even persisted as public policy and law into living memory, why someone should be the least bit perturbed, let alone put out, by the idea that a pollster could find a few dozen people willing to own an opinion that White people are not okay is somewhat remarkable. Especially a person as insightful as Mr. Adams' work on Dilbert showed him to be. (Given the size of the Rasmussen poll, if they surveyed Black people in proportion to their share of the population, somewhere in the area of 34 people would have said it's not okay to be White.)

But this is part of how the current Culture Wars in the United States play out; with a bizarre insistence that a community of nearly 50 million people, many of whom have nothing more in common than related skin tones, come to a unanimous agreement that no trace remains of literally hundreds of years of various forms of what is now considered gross mistreatment. But I suppose this is what one should expect from a person who considers the Black population of the United States a "team," rather than a massive collection of individuals.

I understand the Conservative tendency to make the United States the hero of every story that they tell about it. The demand that everyone else make it the hero of their own stories is a little more difficult to credit. But they've gotten away with it for decades; it hasn't occurred to many people to argue it with them.

Inattention

So, over the weekend, the Department of Energy (not my first guess as to who would be investigating) came out with an assessment that the most likely cause of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was an unintentional release from a laboratory in China. However, their confidence in this conclusion is low.

The same people who shamed us, canceled us, & wanted to put us in jail for saying covid came from the Wuhan Lab, not wearing masks and saying masks don’t work, and taking and recommending ivermectin to treat covid are starting to say what we said all along.
Now do covid vaccines.

Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Ga.)

Okay... except for the fact that there is nothing new here. There was already one intelligence agency (the FBI, as I've heard it) that concluded that SARS-CoV-2 most likely emerged as the result of an unintenional lab leak... and their confidence level is higher than that of the DOE.

One IC element assesses with moderate confidence that the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. These analysts give weight to the inherently risky nature of work on coronaviruses.

And this is public knowledge, because the intelligence assessment I just quoted from has been declassified. (And not from Donald Trump just thinking about it...) So why is Representative Taylor-Greene acting as if some new and shocking revelation had just been announced?

Most likely because she'll be able to rack up some political mileage out of it. Because, despite the fact that it takes about 20 seconds to find that the federal government believed that the evidence they had was "not strongly diagnostic of either hypothesis" (that the virus spilled over from animals or was being investigated in a lab and was released) and that nothing the DOE has to say changes that, I suspect that not many people in the United States are going to be bothered to do a bit of reading. Mainly because the response to SARS-CoV-2 is now a matter of politics and, more importantly, partisanship.

For voters in, say, Georgia's 14th district, it doesn't really matter whether Representative Taylor-Greene's Twitter post makes any sense or not. The activist Republican voters that she would need to survive a primary challenge have, as I understand it, already decided that she can do no wrong. The "rank and file" Republican voters have already determined that in a race between her and a Democrat, they're voting for her, and Democratic voters have already decided that she's the worst possible outcome and will vote for whatever Democrat is able to challenge her.

And so this becomes about people deciding that what they already understood to be true is true.

The level of partisanship, and negative partisanship, in American politics is a problem because it gives the already mostly passive electorate even less reason to actually pay attention to the context behind the things that people say. People simply nod their heads when someone makes a partisan attack that they agree with, and go on about their days.

Do You Want Libertarians?

Because this is how you get Libertarians.

Florida state Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book has filed a bill with a host of animal-welfare rules. Such as banning people from allowing their dogs to put their heads out of the windows of moving vehicles.

Given that Florida is currently run by Republicans, this bill has more or less no chance of being passed. Which makes is highly likely that it's what termed a "messaging bill." What I'm less clear on is the message. Because it seems to be that Democrats are every bit as in love with controlling, intrusive government as they're stereotyped as being.

It's possible that there's more to this bill than meets the eye, or that someone could find a way to attach an amendment to this that would make it embarrassing for Republicans to vote against it. But on the surface, it seems to be little more than a means to more closely align Florida Democrats with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. And I don't see any real use in that.

This is, of course, a side effect of the increasing polarization of American politics. As one party or the other finds itself effectively shut out of the legislating process in some or another jurisdiction, their attention turns to virtue signalling. I'm pretty sure that Republicans here in Washington state do the same thing. It just hasn't happened to make enough of a splash for me to pay any attention to them yet.

I presume there are people in the Democratic activist community in Florida who support this sort of thing. They'll come out to help Senator Book win her next primary election contest, and this has the potential to leave Florida general election voters with a bad choice, who panders to the loudest voices among them, and a worse choice, who will simply ignore them in favor of the opposing partisans. The remarkable thing about this is that there is a sizable segment of the population for whom this is their preferred mode of governance. The government the public deserves, indeed.

The Long Form

I have a Label for posts on this blog called "The Short Form." It's a result of being out for a walk, and turning over an idea for a post in my head. Eventually, I'd turned it over so many times that I'd worn it down to the bare kernel of the idea. Finding that kernel succinct and to the point, I posted it, with a little commentary.

Many of The Short Form posts are images. I think because they take up more space that way, and so it didn't seem so much like simply skipping out on posting. In hindsight, I think that was a mistake, because, to a degree, The Short Form is a demonstration of what I wanted this exercise in weblogging to do - make me a better writer. And isn't being able to distill what could easily have been hundreds of words into two sentences a mark of a good (or at least decent) writer? But instead, it felt like a cop-out.

This all came to mind because I was reading a post on Aeon.co about keeping secrets. It's 3,400 words. But a lot of it could have been dispensed with, had the author started with this:

If you keep a secret entirely to yourself, then you are leaving yourself only one avenue to work through the secret, and that is in your own thinking. And, unfortunately, a mind unchecked by others’ reactions is more likely to develop unhealthy ways of thinking. The hard part of having a secret is not that we have to hide it in conversation, but that we have to live with it alone.

One of the best ways to reduce the harm of a secret is to talk to someone about it. You don’t have to reveal the secret to the person you are keeping it from, but I find in my research that discussing a secret with a trusted other can make the world of difference. Someone who will be kind, empathic and nonjudgmental will serve you well here.

To be sure, most of the article prior to this point describes the author's research, and after this point, it's about alternatives to having a trusted confidant. Still, the whole feels about 3,000 words longer than it needs to be to effectively make the author's points.

The internet is effectively infinite (especially when one doesn't have to pay for one's own server space). So I understand the lack of constraint that leads people, including myself, to be unnecessarily verbose. So maybe it's time that I put a little more work into employing The Short Form more often.

The Hard Part

File under: You don't say...

The Hardest Part Of Red Flag Laws Isn't Getting Them Passed

This, of course, is true of all laws. After all, the people who are charged with passing laws aren't the people who have to enforce them, or, normally, deal with the fallout. But the point of the article, which is that in order for laws to work, there has to be some trust by the community is well-taken. Or is it?

[Duke University School of Medicine professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences Jeffrey] Swanson told me the little data that exists suggests there’s racial bias in gun removal orders, with Black owners overrepresented.

The tensions between the Black community in the United States and law enforcement are well-known at this point. And part of the reason for this is that there has not historically been a high level of concern about whether the community being policed trusts the people doing the policing or the people passing the laws. Increasing the trust tends to come up in the context of increasing clearance rates through people being more willing to speak to officers after having been the subject of, or a witness to, a crime, but I have yet to hear of it being brought up in the context of the authoring, creating and enforcement of laws.

Which communities are presumed to need to buy into certain laws are which aren't speaks to the general understanding that many people have that certain biases, especially as pertains to race, are baked into the system. While I've often heard anecdotes that minority communities support greater law enforcement in their neighborhoods when there are spikes in crime, the broader question of overall trust is rarely brought up. I suspect that when dealing with something like extreme risk protection order laws, the primary people who understand themselves as potentially subject to the law have the political clout to have it rolled back if they don't believe in it. Communities that don't have the same political force are more likely to be simply steamrolled in situations of the lack of trust.

It's another side effect of the broad lack of unity in American society. To the degree that the White community and the Black community, or the Asian community or the Hispanic community are viable constructs within the population as a whole, where each is considered to have their own interests and challenges, separate from the others, there will be circumstances in which certain communities will need to be consulted under some circumstances, while others are not.

Cast Aside

If we spent half the time not talking about the differences but the similarities between us, the entire planet would have a shift in the way we deal with each other. As humans, we are obsessed with race. And that obsession can really hinder people’s aspirations, hinder people’s growth. Racism should be a topic for discussion, sure. Racism is very real. But from my perspective, it’s only as powerful as you allow it to be. I stopped describing myself as a Black actor when I realised it put me in a box. We’ve got to grow. We’ve got to. Our skin is no more than that: it’s just skin. Rant over.
Idris Elba “Becoming Idris Elba” Esquire Magazine

Dear Idris Elba: You cannot opt out of racism, even if you are a celebrity.

In a recent interview, Elba said he no longer refers to himself as a Black actor because the label put him in a box and an obsession with race can hinder aspirations and growth. He also said racism is only as powerful as you allow it to be. The interview was featured in numerous outlets and was met with much praise.

But here’s the problem: ignoring a leaky pipe doesn’t fix a leaky pipe, just like not talking about racism doesn’t make racism go away. It is by NOT talking about these things that you give more power to these problems.
Paul Lapido LinkedIn Post

Mr. Elba, however, never advocates for “not talking about racism.” He explicitly says the opposite.

When I read Mr. Lapido’s post on LinkedIn, the lack of any links or direct citations stood out for me. I’m familiar enough with the World Wide Web and things posted on it to know that I should look up the “recent interview” in question.

My father once told me a parable, if you will, about the Black community in the United States. He likened it to a cast (and I am told that this is actually the collective noun for crabs) in a bucket. Whenever one crab would start to climb out of the bucket, the other crabs would seek to amputate its legs with their claws, ensuring that it stayed in the bucket. In this way, the crab ensured that none of them escaped the bucket. Now that I’m older, and have learned more about the world, and how people navigate it, I can more easily make sense of the story.

Cross-cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand noted something about social groups: “Groups that are of lower status tend to live in tighter worlds,” where “tight” refers to strict following of social norms. “Loose” cultures, on the other hand, are more laid back. Mark Anthony Neal, African and African-American studies professor at Duke University, also noted this: “I think that’s always been a tension in Black culture, around this idea of America’s rugged individualism and the collectivity of Blackness that was born out of necessity because of segregation. [...] But for folks who are pushed out of the mainstream — you know, Black folks have rarely had the luxury of thinking about just simply being themselves. And I think that’s always going to be an ongoing tension — this idea of America that’s rooted in individualism, that’s rooted in transactional practices. ‘I do this for you and you do this for me.’ Folks who come from a collective standpoint where, ‘I do this for you, but you’re doing this for us’ — that’s a very, very different way of seeing the world.”

And not only is Black American culture “tight,” especially by the standards of some other communities in the United States, but many Black people have difficulty understanding that some people live in, and have adapted to, looser worlds. Like Idris Elba. And even he hasn’t gone completely off the reservation, as it were (although Mr. Elba is a Briton, rather than an American). He simply has come to a conclusion that any number of other people, including Mr. Lapido, have come to: “that talking or worrying about racism every 5 minutes is exhausting and counterproductive.” But Mr. Lapido, like many Black Americans, is of the opinion that the path to a just world in the future is to remind people, time and again, of the injustice of the present.

But the rub lies in the fact that those Black people who have made it, for the most part, have not taken that path. Idris Elba didn’t get to where he is by constantly talking about how unjust he expects the world to be towards him.

For a lot of Black people, however, that feels like someone who managed to escape the bucket looking down on them. Someone who has made it is now turning his back on the collective, since he needs nothing from them. Which, while understandable, is a shame, because it closes off what could be multiple productive avenues of tackling the problem. Would steering more conversations towards what we have in common fix the situation? I have no idea. But I suspect it’s unlikely to make things any worse. And not because they can’t get worse; nearly the entirety of the history of the United States is a litany of “worse” when it comes to race and racism.

Mr. Lapido is calling for Mr. Elba to “return” to the fold of a chorus of voices, all singing from the same hymnal of past injustice and requests (or demands) for recompense. It is, basically, a recitation of the effects of the social distance that has been created between White and Black America. Mr. Elba, on the other hand, believes in simply closing that distance, and in doing so, forestalling future injustices. What sets them apart is how they perceive that distance, and how it acts on them.

In my own experience, I have come to the conclusion that racism, like so many other things, is a box. But the way it acts of people varies. The farther one is able to climb up the social ladder, the less racism is a box that others impose on one, and the more it becomes a limit that one places on oneself. Hence, Mr. Elba’s statement that he stopped describing himself as a Black actor because he realized that it placed him in a box. Because at the level he’s at, the petty grievances of some studio executive are unlikely to be a problem for him. After all, he has a remarkable variety of film roles to his name, and is in high demand. Is this the reality of people scraping to get by in America’s urban housing projects? No; for them, the box is very different. Its walls are made of the expectations and reactions of the more affluent people around them; the people whose choices very nearly entirely dictate the trajectories of their lives. When Amy Cooper called 911 to falsely report that birdwatcher Christian Cooper threatened her (Remember that?), she had done so with the understanding that she would be believed, and he wouldn’t. (Why she held this expectation when she knew the interaction was being recorded is another matter.) The video was all the evidence anyone needed, and Mr. Cooper came out of the situation none the worse for wear, but it’s generally understood that without it, things could have gone much worse. Mr. Elba can acknowledge that without having to live it on a daily basis.

But the relative tightness of Black culture in the United States demands collective actions. And it pushes, hard, against people who, for whatever reason, take it into their heads to go in a different direction. When I was young, I saw it as a fight that didn’t need to happen. Now that I’m older, it seems unavoidable, because Black culture is unlikely to loosen up enough to be at peace with those who defy the groupthink anytime soon. Still, the waste of energy is lamentable.

Sight Unseen

Having watched the Super Bowl on Sunday, I saw the "He Gets Us" advertisements.

Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York)

Do you think open borders is biblical?
Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA

I'm not sure that either of these two did.

Personally, I found the spots to be rather dull, perhaps because I'm neither a religious skeptic or cultural Christian, who are, as I understand it, the target audience. But I also didn't find them even potentially harmful, perhaps because I'm not a committed partisan.

I've had plenty of conversations with Christians over the years, given that so many people in the United States identify as such, and so the message of "no matter what you think of as 'good,' Jesus fits the bill," isn't new to me. Frankly, I'm somewhat surprised that the Servant Foundation/The Signatry settled on that message for their advertising campaign, given how common it is. Apparently, I'm not the only one; several commentators have suggested that there should be more of a focus on the divinity of Jesus and messages of salvation. But I suspect that the Servant Foundation feels that would be preaching a bit too much to the choir.

In any event, I wonder about the openly political critiques of people Representative Ocasio-Cortez and Charlie Kirk, which seem to be aimed more at their conceptions of who is sending the message, as opposed to what the message actually is. As the political parties and their messages drift farther apart and become more mutually hostile, I suspect that this sort of suspicion will fall on more and more of the mass media, as "if you're not openly with us, you're clearly against us," becomes a more broadly accepted way of viewing the world.

Moving In

It is a truth, generally acknowledged, that any vacant land in Seattle, not surrounded by copious and secure fencing, will become an encampment for the homeless absent a consistent law enforcement presence.

I drive near this site on my way to and from work, on those days when I go into the office, and I noticed that the fencing that had blocked it off from the street had been partially removed a few weeks ago. Walking by earlier in the week, I noticed that these RVs and tents had set up shop in the space. I suspect that it won't be too long before something is built on the space, so this camp is going to be as transient as many of the others, but the relative speed with which people moved in speaks to the depth and breadth of the housing shortage in the Seattle area.

One Track Minds

One of the downsides of negative partisanship is that, eventually, people start to lean into it. That is to say, they seem to act as if they want to drive people away from their position. Consider the following, culled from LinkedIn:

In 2020, some forty-five thousand people died from firearm-related injuries. Which was substantial, but not remarkably higher than previous years. Is it really that inconceivable that someone might decide that tens of thousands of deaths might be prevented every year if the public no longer had access to firearms?

I could understand a "Second Amendment absolutist" concluding that the number of people who are killed (and injured) each year who aren't engaged in any sort of government-sponsored acts of tyranny are an acceptable sacrifice, and that those deaths are simply a price that must be paid for an armed and vigilant society. Presumably, this "Foundation for Economic Education" (which seems more like a right-Libertarian think-tank than an educational foundation) believes just this (although I suppose they could have bought into an Infowars-adjacent mindset that presumes that some substantial part of the reported gun violence rate is part of hateful plot to subjugate the United States), so why not own it? Why not simply come out and say that attempting to do away with the public's right to keep and bear arms in order to save lives is not worth the potential consequence?

As an aside, I scrolled through the "Foundation for Economic Education's" LinkedIn posts. Nothing on police violence. Not that I really expected anything. For some reason local law enforcement, who often cite concerns that members of the public might be armed in cases of lethal force that later turn out to be unjustified, are exempted from "the government" when there is talk of creeping tyranny, despite the fact that they are the people most often tasked with enforcing laws.

In any event, it's difficult to imagine anyone other than a committed partisan honestly buying into the idea that about twenty-thousand homicides and twenty-five thousand suicides are such a trivial number that no-one in "the government" might come to the conclusion that it's worth doing something about. Instead, gun control has to be nothing other than part of some hateful conspiracy to subjugate the public.

While it's true that sometimes, people disagree with someone's position out of hidden self-interest or motivated reasoning, sometimes, a position is unpopular with certain segments of the society because it comes across as manifestly irrational. For my part, I myself am a proponent of a much more limited role for government than what the United States currently has; but I'm also observant enough to recognize that the United States has the government it does because a fairly substantial subset of the population understand that it works for them. After all, this "Foundation for Economic Education" apparently can't even be bothered to acknowledge that the United States has a problem with violence (given that it has, far and away, the highest intentional murder rate of advanced, industrialized nations), let alone offer anything approaching a solution. While I'm pretty certain that the authors of the Bill of Rights realized that allowing an armed public would result in the wrong people being shot from time to time, I'm not sure they would have signed up for the level of violence in the United States today, had they foreseen it.

Government's solutions to people's problems are often sub-optimal, but they're something. Which tends to be more than doctrinaire critics of government offer. But then again, it's easier to complain about someone else's solutions than to create them oneself.

They Started It

Did some Congressmen behave badly? Perhaps. But as with kicking Members off committees, the Democrats set the precedent. Being horrified when a Congressman screams “liar” during Obama’s presidency was reasonable. But today the Democrats do nothing but lie and insult Republicans. Every chance they get.
David Strom "Nancy Pelosi fans complain Republicans have no decorum"

Mr. Strom doesn't define what he means by "precedent," and so there's no way to understand why Representative Joe Wilson's (R-South Carolina) outburst wasn't one, yet Nancy Pelosi (D-California) tearing up her copy of then-President Trump's speech was. Other than, of course, simple partisanship, which is unable to ever see one's own side as having done anything wrong. After all, Mr. Strom conveniently leaves out the fact that by the time then-Speaker Pelosi tore up her copy of President Trump's speech, the two of them had been feuding for months. and one of President Trump's common go-tos was (and is) hurling insults at his political opponents; the practice had started during the primaries for the 2016 election. It's one of the reasons why so many people were slow to take him seriously. Picking the specific cherry of Speaker Pelosi's action seems to be very short sighted.

But I'm not a Republican partisan, and thus I'm not in David Strom's, or Hot Air's, target audience. Accordingly, any critique from me is simply proof that I'm not a right-thinking American. Eventually, however, I suspect that the political parties will start to wholeheartedly own their behavior, and people like Representative Taylor-Green will run on their willingness to display open and unprovoked disrespect to the people that they understand their target constituents dislike, distrust or fear. It would certainly be more honest than the disingenuous blame game that goes on right now, where neither side has any rational incentive to simply lay their cards on the table.

This is, I suspect, because the American public as a whole understand incivility to be appropriate when, and only when, there are grievances. And so each side goes looking them (not that they have to look very far) and plays them up in order to portray themselves as the put-upon victims of the evil Others on the far side of the proverbial aisle, who, due to their (often cherry-picked) bad acts, deserve to be mistreated. As long as the downward spiral is controlled, it will perpetuate itself, because both parties, and their followers, perceive it as being in their interests. And as long as segments of the public are willing to grant attention and/or money to people willing to tell them that they're the victims in all of this, there will be no shortage of voices proclaiming that selective memories are accurate reflections of the greater reality.

Dispassionate

"There are so many people on the streets. Why don't we have more compassion in the world?" someone asked me. "After all, it doesn't cost anything."

"It does when it actually changes something," I replied.

Seattle's seemingly inescapable homelessness problem is often chalked up to a lack of compassion, an assessment that I, personally, don't subscribe to. I think that people in Seattle have a lot of compassion for the homeless. What's lacking is the willingness to pay the costs that converting that compassion into solutions would entail.

A co-worker recently married, and he and his wife are buying their first home. While I don't have the exact numbers (as they are, after all, none of my business) the couple can expect to pay about two million dollars for the home, and the financing, assuming that they stay in it long enough to pay it off. For that home to become wealth (generational or otherwise) it's going to have to appreciate enough to keep up with the money that they're paying the current owner and their bank. There's no real path to both that happening, and solving the problem of local homelessness.

Sure, one could posit that someone builds a large number of homes and somehow manages to reserve them for the exclusive use of the legitimately homeless, but that doesn't strike me as a particularly realistic outcome, mainly because it would take a remarkable charitable endowment to fund. A better plan would be to remove some (if not all) of the artificial constraints that have been placed on the ability to create sufficient housing stock, like the Growth Management Act, which has been understood for years now (by everyone except rabble-rousing politicians, it seems) to have pushed up housing prices well beyond what one would otherwise expect.

But that, even more so than an economic slowdown, would kick the legs out from under current home prices; at least once construction really ramped up. And while people working to pay off high mortgages may not have a lot of excess resources to spend, it's a safe bet that they'll spend what they can in order to avoid taking a substantial loss on their homes. Because why would anyone expect them to do anything else? Simply to bring local home prices in line with the national average would mean cutting them by nearly 50%. Asking someone to forego nearly half a million dollars to benefit someone else is always a hard sell. And the longer the problem persists, the higher price of homes rises, the greater the sacrifice that people would need to be asked to make. That's a high bar to clear in the name of compassion.

And so nothing happens, outside of complaining and political grandstanding masquerading as public policy.

If the point behind democracy is to have governments act in accordance with the will of the public at large, it's worth remembering that like any other sovereign, the public is not accountable to anyone for what it collectively wants. Its demands don't need to be workable, or even realistic.

The high price of housing in the Seattle area has the effect or making people feel financially straited (often with good reason). This, in turn, makes the ever-increasing costs of a genuine solution even less palatable. And so the cycle continues.

In the end, I think that interrupting (let alone ending) the cycle of increasing home prices putting people on the street and leaving them little means of leaving it again is going to come down to luck more than judgement. Something will begin to pull people away from high-cost cities to lower-cost ones. Maybe it does so quickly, and home prices collapse, or it does so more slowly, and prices drift, rather than plummet. Either way, the solution is likely to come from the demand side of the equation, where compassion need play less of a role.

The Way To Someone's Heart

Being an ineligible bachelor, I have no real use for Valentine's Day. So I typically forget about it (literally) unless someone reminds me that it's coming up. This year, that someone was my bank. Under a stereotypically sugary picture of a couple canoodling over cups of coffee (or maybe hot cocoa), I was told that I'd get cash back on purchases for the month, and bonus points for spending money in the following (among others):

• Jewelry and watch stores
• Candy and chocolate stores
• Restaurants
• Florists and flower shops
• Bakeries

For most people, I suppose, this sort of messaging is more about getting them to use a particular credit card (namely the one issued by their bank) for purchases that they're already going to make. And I guess there is no harm in that. I did find it interesting that in order to receive the cashback, I'd have to spend more than $1,000 on my card this month, given that the average for Valentine's Day spending is somewhere in the area of $170. Of course, the expectation isn't that I'd spend the full $1,000 buying gifts for a significant other, but the email does sort of suggest that maybe I should.

I don't think that I saw this sort of message last year, so I'm curious about how the decision to solicit credit card spending from customers was reached. Maybe inflation worries have prompted people to pull back on their spending (even though conventional wisdom says that in a "high-inflation" environment, it's better to spend sooner, rather than later). Maybe it's just because other businesses are also looking to attract some of the $25.9 billion or so that people are expected to spend this year.

In any event, the message is wasted on me. But still, I'd like to know how well it works overall.

Chillin'

There are, to be sure, places where you might expect this sort of thing to happen in the Winter. Texas, however, is not one of those places. The ice was mainly a problem as I understand it, because of the trees that it brought down. Locals told me that the streets were, for the most part, okay, with the exception of bridges (which don't have the Earth to insulate them from below).

Since the hotel I was staying at was only a couple of blocks away from the office and there were no old, large trees in the area, the ice was a rather fascinating inconvenience, rather than an active hazard.
 

Or Not To Be Like

I was just in Austin, Texas, for a few days. If those days were any indication, their winters are about as random as ours. Either that, or freezing rain is out to get me.

In any event, once everything thawed out, I took some tine out over lunch to drop in on a local bookstore. On the way there, I found this discarded cardboard sign:

Inviting, it isn't?

Given the fact that I live in the United States, most of the people I know identify as Christians, and this sign (at least how I read it) speaks to something that many of them have in common; the idea that the mundane world and the people who inhabit it are wicked and depraved. And thus, not worth emulating. It is, I suppose, part of the nature of the faith; if one believes that mortal life is completely in the thrall of a supernatural Adversary, then the everyday world has little to recommend it.