hudebnik

Just read this opinion piece in the Times, two economics reporters talking about the current state of the US economy, consumer confidence, and how politicians try to address economic problems. They point out that the strategies most likely to Actually Work tend to be boring and long-term, not the sorts of things that get you elected or even re-elected, so politicians are tempted into promising the people ponies and rainbows that they can't deliver, so they get thrown out at the next election and replaced by politicians of the opposite major party with similar unfulfillable promises, and the people come to conclude that both parties are either incompetent or crooked. Which all makes sense.

But I want to examine a different part of their discussion. The University of Michigan has been running consumer-confidence surveys for decades, so they've built up credibility and a solid historical record. And overall consumer confidence in the state of the economy is about as low as it's ever been -- lower than in the depths of COVID, lower than in the depths of the 2008-2009 recession. Which is sorta puzzling: most of the objective measures of the economy are better than they were in those crises, so why are people so gloomy about the economy? Unemployment is historically low, lower than it's been for much of my (60-some-year) life. Inflation is higher than before COVID, but still lower than it's been for much of my life. What are people complaining about?

The reporters toss around a couple of possible answers. Inflation in the past four years has been higher than people under the age of forty have ever seen, so they're facing it for the first time. Maybe people aren't comparing the economy with what it was but with what Trump promised them it would become. And of course tariffs, the Iran war, budget deficits, and corruption are all self-imposed taxes.

I'm personally doing OK in the economy: it's been a long time since I refrained from buying something because I couldn't afford it. (I'm in the top 5% of the US income curve -- rich enough that a Republican tax cut might help me more than it hurts me, but not in the long tail that's gotten immensely richer in the past few decades.) But I feel gloomy about the overall economy too, and not for the above reasons.

For most of the past eighty years, the United States had allies around the world, and was primus inter pares in a rule-based international order that mostly prevented both direct great-powers conflicts and wars of territorial conquest. Sure, we didn't always obey our own rules, but we usually did, and our allies usually did, and the result was often good for all sides. Democracy and freedom worked pretty well, and were gaining ground around the world, with our support. The free market was winning everywhere, even making inroads in formerly-Communist places like Russia and China, and American companies were some of the most successful, largely (though not entirely) the way Adam Smith would have wanted it -- by producing high-quality goods and services at low prices. Sometimes the government put a thumb on the scales in favor of American companies, but it was a light thumb. Each generation of Americans was noticeably better-off than its parents. The US dollar was the world's currency of choice, both for long-term reserves and for settling international trades.

The US military was the best in the world; we would have to work hard to beat Russia or (more recently) China in a direct conflict, but against any lesser foe we would easily win. Our diplomats, spies, and foreign aid were in every country in the world, providing the expertise, intelligence, and goodwill to avoid having to go to war. The US justice system was scrupulously insulated from political influence, and routinely prosecuted opponents and supporters of the current administration alike; Bill Clinton got in hot water for having a brief one-on-one conversation with the Attorney General on the tarmac at an airport. Most of the Federal government was a strictly meritocratic, and fairly competent, civil service, in which your politics were expected to be left at the door. The Federal government supported academic and corporate research, again in a strictly meritocratic way in which non-political officials made funding decisions based on input from peer-review committees. Business-owners really like operating in a nation in which the laws are written down, and enforced in predictable ways, so American and foreign companies alike set up shop in the US (albeit not for labor-intensive things, which they could do cheaper in China or India). Parents from every country on earth dreamed of sending a child to college or graduate school in the US. And of course the fairness and honesty of our elections, while never perfect, was a national point of pride, something people in third-world countries dreamed of achieving.

As of late 2026, all of that is gone. Some of it was whittled away during the first Trump administration, but the second has kicked into high gear, selling off decades of American credibility in two years to enrich the President, his family, and a few of his already-rich advisors. The US has alienated most of its traditional democratic allies and openly allied itself with authoritarian and totalitarian governments. The US has (more openly and baldly than before) declared itself un-bound by international law, un-bound by free-trade agreements it has signed, un-bound by anything not in its own (meaning the President's) short-term interest. Rather than supporting the spread of freedom and democracy around the world, the Trump administration prefers to divide the world among the US, Russia, and China, with each country completely dominating other countries in its sphere of influence, like Mafia bosses dividing up territory without bothering to ask the people living there. Nations that used to depend on the US for military protection, trade, investment opportunities, education, and enforcement of international laws and norms have learned that they can't trust us; they need to fend for themselves or form new alliances that don't include the US or the US dollar. The White House openly welcomes bribery and flattery, so the way for a company to succeed is no longer to produce better goods and services at better prices, but to bribe and flatter the right people in exchange for favorable government treatment. Indeed, that government has now taken substantial ownership or revenue-sharing stakes in at least forty major companies (sounds Communist to me!), which get favorable treatment not available to their competitors who may do better work but aren't allied with the right government officials. Insider trading on government action is not only commonplace but at the core of the President's personal business model.

The US military, led by a Secretary more concerned with muscles, clean jaw-lines, and dom/sub play-acting than with expertise, strategy, morality, legality, professionalism, or competence, started a war eight months ago with no consultation with Congress, no justification to the American people, no allies, no clear goals, and no contingency plans in case Iran didn't immediately roll over and surrender, and Iran has conclusively beaten us in every way that matters. Unable to beat a mid-sized adversary, the military has turned to blowing unarmed fishing boats out of the water to prove its manliness. The State Department has shut down both diplomacy and foreign aid to many countries that don't interest the President, and actively promotes authoritarian leaders abroad if Trump personally likes them. The Department of Justice, like nearly every other executive department, has been explicitly converted into a partisan tool for revenge against President Trump's enemies. Military flag officers and DOJ prosecutors who, during prior administrations, followed orders and did their jobs in ways that, years later, President Trump doesn't like, have been fired and even criminally prosecuted for it. People who have ever voted Democratic or donated to Democratic candidates are ineligible for promotion. At the same time, any law-breaking is forgivable if it benefits President Trump, or if you bribe or flatter President Trump enough, or if it's a law President Trump has himself broken. Most of the upper echelons of the Executive Branch are led by people with no qualifications for the job except TV-star looks or slavish personal loyalty to the President; many are his former defense attorneys. Major law firms, media companies, and universities, threatened with punishment on no legal or meritocratic basis, have kowtowed to the President and changed their policies to match his personal preferences rather than the law. The administration's hostility to foreigners has cost universities vast numbers of foreign students and faculty, with their associated revenue, research skills, and international recognition. And the Trump administration, after having failed in several attempts to steal the 2020 election, has installed partisan loyalists to oversee elections in many states, and has resolved to take every opportunity to control the outcome of future elections so it can continue grifting, extorting, and giving jobs to its unqualified supporters. No third-world country envies us that; they're all too familiar with it.

In short, my sense over the past year and a half is that, for the first time in my life, the United States is no longer a good investment. It's no longer a rising or dominant power, but one that will never regain the respect and influence it had in the late 20th century; its best days are behind it.

We both got COVID shots a few minutes ago. Did not get flu shots at the same time, since COVID cases and wastewater levels have been rising for a couple of weeks already but flu indicators haven't yet. Hoping for minimal side effects that don't impede us from going to a concert tomorrow night. Nothing else is scheduled for this weekend except decluttering.

Saturday we went into Manhattan for an afternoon showing of "You Had to Be There", a documentary movie about the Toronto Godspell. See, the musical "Godspell" initially opened in NYC in 1971 to rave reviews, and the producers wanted to cash in on its success while the hype was hot, so they started setting up other performing companies in other cities around the world. One of those cities was Toronto, where they held an open casting call with thousands of auditioners, from whom they selected their ten performers, mostly completely-unknown young actors. Including (after a few replacements) some names you might know: Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Gilda Radner, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, Paul Shaffer, Mike Myers, Dave Thomas... a large fraction of the talent that became "Saturday Night Live", "SCTV", and other comic-and-dramatic works of the past fifty years. (One name you probably don't know, Avril Chown, appeared equally talented, but her next project after "Godspell" was a comedy TV series in which she was sexually assaulted, so she left the business.) There isn't much actual footage surviving from the Toronto show, but the documentarians gathered all the surviving members of that cast, along with a lot of others influenced by them, to have them tell stories about how it all happened. Except for Avril's sobering story, it's a heartwarming celebration of friendship, art, and talent.

After the movie, we got dinner and headed uptown to an early-music concert by New York Polyphony, a male vocal quartet we've heard a number of times before. This was the 20th anniversary of their group's founding, so they put together a "best of" concert, mostly 15th and 16th century. As always, their vocal quality, intonation, and interpretation were impeccable. The concert was held in St. Mary the Virgin (aka "Smoky Mary's"), a beautiful church with weird acoustics: any sound anywhere in the nave is equally audible anywhere else in the nave, with no directionality, so if you didn't know the music was coming from those four guys standing near the front, you'd have a hard time figuring it out. And, as we've remarked before at this venue, anything fast or rhythmically intricate, anything other than strict homophony, tends to turn to mud. It was a gorgeous wash of sound, with an occasional comprehensible word.

Sunday morning around 8 AM the contractors arrived to replace the through-the-wall air conditioner that's been serving our dining and living rooms for fifteen years with one of the new "mini-splits", a heat pump that provides both heating and cooling. It is so quiet! We can actually hold a conversation or watch TV without switching the A/C to "fan-only" mode! I had persuaded the contractors to also remove the old air conditioner and fill the hole it left in the wall, but wall repair isn't their specialty, so they didn't have the equipment and materials handy to clean it up properly. So there's a rectangle of plywood on the outside, and a rectangle of sheetrock on the inside, to which we'll need to apply spackle, joint compound, more spackle, and paint. Which isn't all that difficult, and we've done it before.

After the contractors left, we went out for dinner at a Mexican place in our neighborhood, then across the street to the local indie movie theatre to watch "Coyote vs. Acme", which is silly fun (with political overtones about the evil mega-corporation experimenting on cartoon characters in an analogue of the Tuskegee experiments).

Monday. Back to work.

There was a concert of (largely) early music in Staten Island last night. It was a group we'd heard before, at BEMF many years ago, and we weren't impressed, but we figured if they're playing in NYC, let's give them another try. (I'm not naming the group here for reasons that will become clear.) And then we decided we didn't really feel like crossing the Verrazano twice to go to this concert, so we bought a view-live-online ticket and cast it on the living room TV.

Three performers, two male wind players and a female vocalist (and we occasionally heard a tuning note on a wire-strung string instrument, but didn't see it anywhere). For the opening number the two guys were holding gemshorns, which is almost always a bad sign: like krummhorns, they look cool but aren't particularly musically flexible. And unlike a krummhorn, gemshorns have no overall tuning ability whatsoever; whatever comes out is the pitch you're going to get. You can try to tune individual notes by over- or under-blowing, but gemshorns are so quiet already that underblowing makes them disappear, and overblowing doesn't buy you much.

Anyway, they started playing and singing (respectively) an early 14th-century _conductus_, and they weren't really in tune, and they weren't really together rhythmically, and the singer had a heavy vibrato (not used as an expressive ornament but as an always-on default), and we thought "Glad we didn't drive to Staten Island for this, but let's see how they do when they switch to better instruments."

So for the next few pieces they switched to recorders, either solo or duet. Several of the pieces were familiar, like the "Lamento di Tristano" from BL Addl. Ms. 29987, which I've been playing for maybe forty years. The solo recorder player on stage (who appeared about my age) was about as fluent on the recorder as I was in college: lifting his fingers too high, stumbling over cross-fingerings, articulating every note the same way, not shaping phrases, slowing down on the fast passages, all the usual beginner technical failings. There was no music, just a series of notes that he hoped desperately to get to the other end of. The other wind player did a Baroque piece on alto recorder that was technically cleaner, although still not particularly musical. And so on. In another medieval piece with two recorders and a singer, I kept thinking "Are they even listening to one another? They're in three different tempos!" (And no, it wasn't one of those Ars Subtilior pieces intentionally written to sound that way.)

The set list was wide-ranging and eclectic, including a series of several 20th-century settings of Japanese poems (with lyrics translated into English, I think, although the singer had so much vibrato I wasn't sure). But if you're going to perform something tonally experimental and (by classical standards) "dissonant", you have to really nail the intonation and rhythm so the audience knows you meant it to sound that way. And they didn't.

The program closed with a couple of pieces from "The Sound of Music", re-arranged for two recorders and singer. "Climb Every Mountain" sort-of made sense, since in the musical it's sung by an older woman with significant vibrato, but it's such a well-known piece that you have to nail it. And they didn't. I don't remember what other pieces they did from the musical; that's about when I left the room.

On the bright side, it made us think "If performers this bad can book a concert hall and perform in front of a non-SCA, non-Faire audience, surely we can too."

From: FAITH & FREEDOM COALITION
Giving Christians a Voice in Government
3.2 Million Members and Activists

FINAL 64-Day HOME-STRETCH PUSH To Election Day!
To STOP The Anti-American Left From Seizing Control of Congress on November 3rd!

Dear hudebnik,

I am writing to you because your past activities tell me that you are a supporter of President Trump and that you love America.
...
The Left is confident that they will regain control of the House and possible the Senate in 2026. This would be a catastrophe for the Trump Presidency and for America.

If the Left wins back control of the House, the Senate, or both on November 3rd, they would be able to block everything President Trump is trying to accomplish.

And they would resume their relentless investigations, IMPEACHMENTS, and LAWFARE against President Trump and his supporters. Democrats have already filed ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT.

I know I don't have to explain to you what a catastrophe it would be if the "wide-open borders," anti-God, anti-family, anti-America radical Left recaptures control of Congress.

And it goes on like that for four pages. I'm not sure where these "radical Left Democrats" they keep talking about are -- the most left-leaning Democrats in any elected office in the US are proposing things that most civilized nations have had for decades. And "anti-God, anti-family", from the people who have already thrown a million people off SNAP, are scheduled to throw another 10 million people off Medicaid effective 2027, and have probably already killed a million people around the world in the past year and a half by shutting down international aid in the most wasteful, disruptive ways imaginable.

Unfortunately, the return envelope isn't prepaid, so I would have to waste a stamp on these folks to send them a reply. At least they wasted some postage on me.

Thanks to Tim Miller for the video excerpts of Vance's speech in Michigan the other day.

“When you have people who start to say my ethnic group deserves something and yours doesn’t, or that ethnic group is good and this other ethnic group is bad, that is how you erode the very foundations of commonality and common citizenship that we need to continue to have the United States be the most powerful and prosperous nation anywhere in the world.”

“What I see is a man who has sympathy and compassion for people who share his religion, but have nothing for people who don’t. A person who will apologize for a murderer so long as he looks the right way, but will not understand the plight of an innocent child if that person has the wrong faith. And that is the root of this terrible evil, I believe, in the United States of America, that is on the rise. And what I’d ask all of you to do is to reject it in November. Reject the people who try to divide us, one race against the other, one religion against the other.”

“There is something about Abdul el-Sayed that is very, very evil, and it’s on the rise in America today. And it’s people who see themselves not as citizens of a common nation, fighting for every single person whether they’re Jewish or Christian, whether they’re white or black or brown, but see themselves as fighting for one group at the expense of others.”

Oh. My. Gawd. The hypocrisy burns the very electrons with which I write.

Mind you, I agree heartily with every word of that, except for the "Abdul el-Sayed" part -- I haven't seen any evidence of him holding any of those reprehensible views. He's campaigned with some people who might, but it's not clear that he shares them.

But I have very good evidence of (at least) JD Vance, Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller, Markwayne Mullin, Pete Hegseth, and Todd Blanche holding -- or at least acting on -- those reprehensible views. After all, JD Vance first said, on a nationwide stage, that the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio were eating their neighbors' dogs and cats (and then Trump repeated it in a debate with Kamala). Trump, let's remember, started his first term by banning all immigration from a long list of mostly-Moslem countries. Even in his first term, he was never for even one moment a President for "all the American people"; he was a President for his people, the ones who voted for him, went to his rallies, or gave him money, and the rest could go to hell. The whole second-term administration is focused on kicking out as many immigrants as possible, as quickly as possible, without regard to whether they've broken any laws, while simultaneously shutting down all the possible ways to immigrate legally -- unless you're a white South African, or extremely rich, in which cases you get to take the fast lane in. Pete Hegseth has fired, or denied promotions to, dozens of highly-respected generals and admirals arbitrarily, without the slightest evidence that they're unqualified, apparently figuring they must be unqualified because they're black or female, or they once chose to obey orders and the law rather than shut down a DEI project. This administration has forgiven plenty of murderers, drug dealers, rioters, and swindlers who were on the President's side, and hasn't overflowed with sympathy and compassion for the innocent children of Gaza, the orphans of Caribbean fishermen, or the innocent children of deported parents. You can fill in your own examples, of course.

JD, I swear to you on my sacred honor as a patriotic American that I will reject that in November, and every day before and after that until you and your whole vile crew are out of office and (preferably) in prison.

So we can't go to the woods, or a grassy park, for fear of tick-borne diseases; notably the Lone Star tick, formerly confined to Texas and the Gulf Coast, has expanded its range in recent years into New England due to global warming. (That's the one that makes you allergic to red meat. The Lone Star is also more of a hunter than a passive feeder, and it can infect you within minutes rather than hours.)

And we can't go swimming in the ocean for fear of flesh-eating bacterium Vibrio vulnificus, which although formerly confined to the Gulf of Mexico, has expanded its range in recent years into New England due to global warming.

Moving to Canada is sounding more and more attractive. (Yes, they've got billions of mosquitoes, but they don't carry tropical diseases.)

Absolutely fascinating essay in the Times about the East India Company, its effects on India, Britain, and the United States, and parallels today, by historian William Dalrymple.

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is set in a near-future world dominated not by multi-national, but quasi-national, corporations, which not only do a profitable business but control substantial territory from their various "franchulates" -- a portmanteau of "franchise" and "consulate", as though a McDonald's had diplomatic immunity from regulation by the United States. But as Dalrymple points out, companies acting like nations and nations acting like companies isn't just a near-future phenomenon, or even a present-day phenomenon, but one going back at least 300 years, and we can learn useful lessons about the phenomenon by studying its past and present incarnations.

Since getting back from Pennsic, I've scrubbed some of the dried-on mud off the tent walls, and some of the cherry-flavored bird-poop off the tent roof, and painted four more blue stripes on the roof, and applied another coat of waterproofing spray to the whole roof. Still up: hem the tent walls, extend the door panels so they reach far enough to be toggled closed, add stake-loops at the (new) ends of the door panels, replace or move some toggle-loops at the shoulder, ...

Still need to get the car and the trailer inspected. Baking bread today.

Meanwhile, D. has repaired several smocks and braes, and made some progress on a bias-cut linen dress that we've had to piece fiercely because we got the last few yards that the seller had, and it's a large printed pattern that limits how you can cut and seam things.

Friday, yesterday, and today are the Historic Harp Society conference, which is being held entirely by Zoom. There have been several fascinating talks: Nancy Thym talked about her experiences learning to make gut strings, Linda Marie Zaerr talked about the use of harp in storytelling (extracting fascinating evidence about performance practice from 13th- and 14th-century lais and stories, including the Roman de Silence), and so on.

Since the start of Trump's second term, he's had a habit of posting internationally-important, market-moving news (e.g. about employment numbers, oil prices, bombing campaigns, etc.) on his Truth Social account, presumably a few minutes after investing in those market movements himself but before any official government publication or traditional outlet hears about them. Which means that Wall Street investors, foreign governments, etc. are obligated to subscribe to Truth Social, putting money in Trump's pocket, so they get that news ASAP.

The new twist, as of yesterday, is that Truth Social will charge between $60,000 and $100,000/month for "premium accounts" with slightly-faster, machine-readable notification of Truth Social announcements. (There are articles in WSJ, FT, etc. mostly behind paywalls.)

The obvious target audience is algorithmic traders, who already make a point of setting up offices as close as possible to the Stock Exchange so they can shave a few milliseconds off their responses to stock movements. All of those algorithmic traders are now obligated to pay the President's company another $2K-3K per day in order to avoid losing bets to other algorithmic traders who did pay up and therefore know the news a few milliseconds sooner. Foreign governments probably aren't worried about the news on a millisecond scale, unless they're also algorithmic traders, but depending on how much faster the premium feed is, they too might feel an obligation to pay Truth Social for that early access to the President's 2 AM rants on the off chance that they contain something that matters.

Donald Trump has always had an instinct for finding as many ways to make money as possible, so this isn't all that new.

It's also another example of Trump's go-to negotiating tactic, developed over many decades: assert a dominant position in the dom/sub hierarchy before negotiations even start, so the other guy expects to lose and is more likely to give in to my demands. Sometimes this means refusing to admit ever losing any contest (e.g. the 2020 Presidential election, not to mention dozens of lawsuits), so you can maintain the image of "always winning". Sometimes it means intentionally arriving at meetings late so everybody else has to wait on you, demonstrating that you're more important than they are. Sometimes it means demanding that your underlings publicly swear to things that you and they know aren't true, to prove that they'll do anything for you. Or demanding that private companies give you expensive presents and "legal settlements" with no legal basis, to prove that they acknowledge your ability to help or hurt them depending on your mood. Sometimes (as in "The Apprentice") it means dragging out the drama of your completely arbitrary announcement until the last possible moment, to reinforce in everybody's mind that their lives depend on your whim. The President measures his importance by how many people are waiting on his words, no matter how nonsensical or arbitrary -- indeed, if people are waiting with bated breath on the most trivial and nonsensical things I say, that's an even better proof of my importance.