ndrosen

Lately, I’ve been getting junk emails inviting me to Trump’s inauguration. Just make a contribution, and I’ll be entered into a drawing for an invitation to come to Washington, with my airfare and hotel stay covered.

For one thing, since this is from Trumpworld, I have no confidence that they’re actually going to give anything to any lucky winner. For another, if I wanted to attend the inauguration, I could spend the night in my own apartment, and take the subway into DC.

Some time ago, I bought some clothes at Macy’s, and saved the receipt. On May 13, I took a look at the receipt, and thought, “This was more than a month ago, and I don’t believe that I’ve seen a bill.” I called the number for the local Macy’s store, discovered that I owed $214 and more (the more apparently being interest and penalties), and authorized a payment from my checking account for the $214 worth of clothing. I was dealing with an automated system, and I don’t think it even gave me the chance to pay the whole account balance.

Not too long after that, I received a bill for over thirty dollars, a twenty-nine dollar penalty, and five dollars or so in usurious interest. I called the Macy’s toll free line, managed to get through to a human being, and explained the situation, saying that so far as I was aware, I had not received a bill in the previous billing cycle, lost in the mail, perhaps; I said that I would pay in full if required, but asked that the penalty be remitted because I had acted in good faith, and not seen a bill. I said that I would pay the interest charge.

The woman with whom I spoke assured me that both the penalty and interest were canceled, and that I owed nothing, for which I thanked her. I checked the account balance this morning, and confirmed that it was zero. Thank you, Macy’s, you have dealt with me more than fairly.

Bari Weiss (whose views, as I understand it, are not entirely those of a typical member of the Federalist Society) received a standing ovation for a speech she gave before that organization. The link is to a transcript. I would have stood up to applaud as well.

And now, back to sleep, I hope.

When the shuttle bus let me out at the Pentagon City Metro station on Friday morning, I saw some people milling around; I started to head for the escalator down into the station, but someone said that a police officer had said not to go down, so I didn’t. I saw a couple of policemen with rifles halfway across the street (it’s a wide street with islands in the middle), and then they came and told us to go inside, so we walked into the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and thence into the Pentagon City shopping mall.

A little later, I saw a squad of armed police officers run through the mall, and down toward the station. I was sucked into conversation for a while by a woman Jehovah’s Witness (the JWs often have a display outside the Metro station, or sometimes down in it). I told her that I had known a Jehovah’s Witness in college, that he had given me a book to read, and that I had not been impressed.

Then it was announced that the police had the suspect in custody, and we could go down and catch our trains, so I arrived at work only twenty minutes or so later than expected.

I’m about to go downstairs to catch the shuttle bus to Pentagon City, and I hope that there won’t be the same kind of excitement today.

As I was waiting for the shuttle bus this morning, I saw a plane, and a man outside with me said that it was Air Force One. This afternoon, I searched on Bing, and learned that President Biden had flown from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland to Wilmington, Delaware this morning. I don’t know just where in Maryland Andrews is, or how its runways are oriented, but I suppose that Biden’s plane could have taken off from a runway not pointed directly at Wilmington, and done some turning over Northern Virginia to reach its destination.

That doesn’t necessarily prove that the plane we saw Air Force One, but it may have been.

Lately, some spam has been getting through to my work email (I’ve been reporting it, which I hope will lead to improved exclusion of junk emails). One particular email caught my interest because it began “Lieber Herr,” and continued with a spiel in German, so I practiced my rusty German trying to understand it. As it turned out, the German version was followed by more or less the same thing in English. Supposedly, there’s a super-rich investor with billions to invest, and if I can find a few good corporations for him invest in, he will pay me a small percentage of his total investment as a commission.

I wonder whether the email was designed to fleece Germans, or whether the German text was meant to give dupes the idea that there actually was a European billionaire involved. Jedenfalls habe ich etwa Deutschubung bekommen!

As background, I am a skeptic, and I was at the age of sixteen. When I was sixteen years old, I accompanied my parents and younger siblings to France, where we lived for some months in a house in Castagniers, a village in the hills above Nice, while my father was a visiting professor at Nice; this was in the late winter and spring of 1981. The house was rented from a British (I think Welsh) couple who were away for a time. Fortunately, there were plenty of books in the house, and I remember reading things ranging from Medieval Welsh poetry in translation, to Conor Cruise O’Brien’s States of Ireland, to How Green Was My Valley and its sequels. One other book that I read was about the prophecies of Nostradamus, written by a pair (I think) of people who believed that Nostradamus had really foreseen the future, and that at least some of his predictions were sound, and had come true.

I was not persuaded. Sure, some of his prophecies corresponded well to actual events in later centuries, but if you write enough predictions in often ambiguous languages, and without dates and details, you will score some hits even if you don’t have the gift of prophecy. Other predictions were less clear; I remember saying to my mother that if you assume that when Nostradamus said Armorica (Brittany), he meant America, and when he wrote Arton, he meant NATO, a near anagram, and when he wrote about Hister defending Poland and Hungary, he referred to Hitler attacking them, then you could take a number of his verses as a guide to twentieth century events, but this required arbitrary, ad-hoc assumptions.

Even the authors of the book admitted that some of the predictions were wrong, including, “When there are red roses in France, there will be blood in the Vatican.” This was in 1981, remember, when Francois Mitterrand was elected President of France, the symbol of his Socialist Party being a red rose. Later that spring, after I had read the book, Mehmet Ali Agca shot and wounded Pope John Paul the Second, and I remember some newspaper or magazine article mentioning that believers in Nostradamus saw this as fulfilling that prediction.

Weird. I still don’t believe that Nostradamus foresaw the future, but I have to admit that the conjunction of events is weird.

On Friday the tenth, I walked a mile or so to the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation’s current headquarters, where I did some reading in the Francoise Rosen Reading Room while the Schalkenbach staff were mostly busy getting ready for the Board of Directors meeting. Then Joshua Vincent, the executive director of the Center for the Study of Economics, came by, and we talked about CSE’s business and plans, and ate lunch in the kitchen (he ordered delivery from Mamoun’s, a Middle Eastern restaurant which I remembered seeing near the Nassau Inn).

Then he drove home, and I paid a visit to the Princeton University library, together with several other Georgists. I had thought that we were to see Henry George’s death mask, but that was not quite the case; a couple of Princeton University Library people, Daniel Linke and Adrienne Ruzynski (unsure of spelling), had prepared a display of several death masks and life masks, including a life mask of Abraham Lincoln, and death masks of Walt Whitman, Thomas Paine, and (supposedly) Dante Alighieri. What they had of Henry George was a bust made from his death mask by his younger son, the sculptor Richard Fox George. After viewing those, we went back upstairs to the Library’s ground floor, and toured a display on alchemy.

After that, I took a nap in my room at the Nassau Inn, and then went to Schalkenbach reception at a local restaurant, Mediterra, where I ate some tapas, indulged in a glass of beer, and talked with various Georgist friends, including new people who weren’t on the Schalkenbach Board back when I served there.

There was an article in the Wednesday Washington Post’s Style section about non-white wedding gowns, including brides wearing black. This was just a fashion choice, not a matter of a woman getting married for the second time, or of feeling unworthy to wear white because she had already shared a bed with her boyfriend. By the way, before Queen Victoria got married in a special white gown, a woman would normally marry wearing the best ordinary dress she had.

This reminded me of reading Dear Abby when I was a child; the letter I remembered was probably from the mid-1970s. A woman wrote to the advice columnist saying that she was going to get married, but worried about whether she could wear white, since she had been raped once, and was therefore not a virgin. Abby assured her that if she had been raped, she was still morally pure (I think that Abby italicized the word “morally”), and could properly wear white. I agree with the answer.

I do feel that we’ve lost something these days, because, although virgin brides (and grooms) do exist, people very often shack up together, get engaged, and get married, in that order. While the mores of an earlier time no doubt led to some problems, so do the marriage and non-marriage customs of today. For one thing, the loss of family stability is not generally good for children, and the higher percentage of children born out of wedlock is not cause for rejoicing.

I took annual leave for the day, and spent a big part of the morning filing my federal and Virginia income tax returns.

Then I walked to the Post Office, since I didn’t have any stamps for overseas letters in the apartment. I bought a few, as well as mailing a check to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. A bit of historical irony: my paternal grandmother was chased by Cossacks growing up as a girl in a shtetl in what is now Lithuania; Ukraine’s national anthem boasts of Ukrainians being the Kozak (Cossack) nation; and now the Ukrainians are heroes of mine, and I have written a check to help them defend their country, as well as contributing to aid for Ukrainian refugees. Slava Ukraini!

Later, I participated in the No Strings Attached Book Club; we discussed Poul Anderson’s novel, The High Crusade, which I had suggested at our last meeting. It’s short and good-humored, in contrast to some of our other books.

Then I joined in an online Georgist Zoom session, planning this summer’s Council of Georgist Organizations meeting in Albany.

For dinner, instead of cooking, I ordered takeout from Atilla’s Restaurant, a Turkish place about half a mile away. The bread was hot when they gave it to me, and good once heated again in my oven. The humus and the tabouleh were good, and the stuffed grape leaves weren’t bad; they also threw in a free sample of cacik, yogurt with cucumber.