Beneath Sobs

the ease with which Bakari Sellers
thinking of his children
asks
what do they do if
and then names
George Floyd killed slow by the knee on his neck 

and then
Brionna Taylor shot sleeping 

and then
Ahmaud Arbery hunted in a "good old fashioned Georgia lynching" is
a social fluency in 2020.
it is one of the languages spoken by those with their eyes open
there are fewer verbs in this language
all violent
fewer colors, mostly black
the language can be faked but
it is best understood when
heard beneath sobs 

It's Time for the End of Health Insurance

My brother is about to lose his job. He'll join the record 16 million who have started down that path in the last three weeks.

It's the only formal job in his household, so he, his wife, and my two nephews are passing through the antechamber of a fragile-by-decree democracy into its great hall.  It's in that room, with the soaring frescoed domes and neolithic stylings, that wealthy America hides its signature trap door.

The trick is failure by and of design.

Letter to the Future XVII - The Sweet Quiet of Negative Success

"If you need to be right before you move, you will never win."

Dr. Michael Ryan, Exec Director, WHO

on the lessons from Ebola

15 March 2020

Dear Future -

Today, New York City announced an 80% increase in cases, in 24 hours. The curve of our detection capacity is, finally, starting to chase the curve of contagion. At 3,000 or so confirmed cases today, we have every reason to expect 10,000 by next weekend, as our national testing capacity comes online. Settling down to a 25% day over day increase for 31 days would mean an increase of a factor of 1,000 a month from now. The unofficial national motto has become 'flatten the curve.'

The Socialization of Risk

March 16, 2020

Let's talk about socialism - specifically, the socialization of risk. 

We're likely about to be asked to bail out the riskiest elements of the American energy sector. Others - like airlines and cruises - will line up after it.

A lot of human beings are looking down the barrel of job loss because of what's unfolding in markets. In energy, it's already savage. Oil sells for less than break-even production prices for a majority of the American energy market and Saudi Arabia is peacocking, saying it can knuckle-by at these levels for years. From Bloomberg:

COVID-19: A New Paradigm

5 March 2020

When asked on Monday whether he would declare a federal state of emergency in response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the COVID-19 disease, which would free up federal funding to try to head off a national contagion, President Trump said no. It hadn't risen to that.

At a press conference Monday, it was unclear as to whether Medicare and Medicaid would cover medical services intended to detect and treat the coronavirus. Didn't rise to an emergency declaration of support there either.

Before all that, though, Monday morning Trump was pushing Fed Chairman Jay Powell to cut interest rates to allay markets. The President, as always, had an eye on stocks.

This morning, the Fed appeared to fold. It made an emergency cut to the fed funds rate of 0.50% from 1.75%.  The rate cut may have tickled the President, as he is in service to capital markets. But the Fed sees something brewing.

Everything is Here

she places two wet lips on my ear
how can she be that close, to me
blows a whisper into me; i am inoculated and
it blossoms
builds and unfolds in the manner of exponents
the clouds of new stars
she is leaving with her mouth
new words in me,
covering the domed ceiling of my cave
with something ancient and pictoral,
she makes clear what she does not care for
only in what does not grow from
what she leaves in me.
everything else is here.

Escaping Bogota

It's not a positive indicator when an airport worker at the mouth of the check-in line hears your destination, lets you pass, and then yells to their colleague and points at you.

You are The One they've been waiting for.

The woman at the counter looks very worried. She retrieves my reservation and leaves several times, disappearing quickly in one direction only to reappear some minutes later speed stepping the other way. Eventually she turns over my passport to read, looks at me and says "but this is a diplomatic passport."  She leaves again, extra worried.

The Deepfake Decades

An executive I know told a room of junior officers:

all communication is manipulation. 

It was a mentoring session and its retelling made my hair stand up. It sounded like a thing Patrick Bateman would say to someone just before disappearing them into the walls of a 5th Avenue penthouse.

American Psycho

I thought of it when I saw Bill Hader transmorph yesterday. For a second, on an old Letterman reel, he laughed like Tom Cruise. But not like Tom Cruise. He was Tom Cruise. For a sorcerous blink, Tom Cruise bubbled up like a gollum made staccato in Hader's giggling. More than Hader's usual Merlinic voice throws, this was straight black magic.

The Women Holding the World Together

“…take our fate into our own hands.”

- Chancellor Angela Merkel

I started writing this piece two years ago. I felt it had missed its train on account of my lollygagging. Today, we're back on the station platform; this time we won't miss it.

But let's go back.
It began in Venezuela.

Doorway George

George
had laid down
in the apartment breezeway
It was fucking cold,
and I was a little
drunk.
I made
him
eggs,
he slept on the
floor, next to my
air-mattress,
and, well, I watched
him all night,
for fear he'd
kill me in my sleep,
and rob me of my
dried beans or
air-mattress pump.

Our Wonderful Irreverence

I love the Fourth. Today is for our independent streak and the curve of my appreciation for what history has stacked on the shoulders of American independence has pretty dramatically steepened in the last few years.

Of course, the stone legend structure of our founding has rightfully become cracked in places, and flaky. To recognize the true original condition of our freedoms we have to face dual truths - our freedoms were heralded into existence by a slaving society; we built our capitol with the yoked labor of slave pits; we held the promise flood of suffrage to a trickle for more than a century.

Rumor of Tools

rumors abound
about a tool
buried in our yard

I Hope You Learned to Dance First

i don't know how to write about you
you tiny ones that slip my hands and spin away

you are runners, i wager
foot to dirt on those high paths you 
lean into the dark hill trails and you're pulled away
before the light can get you to us

Letter to the Future XVI - Wonder on the Bridge

“Octonions are to physics what the Sirens were to Ulysses.” 
- Pierre Ramond, particle physicist, University of Florida

===

The story relates a picture of William Rowan Harrison strolling the Royal Canal with his wife, in Dublin, on an October afternoon in 1843, when some trap door in his head fell open and he slipped inside the room where quaternion groups live.

These are the mathematical constituents Einstein would use to model his universe; they are the result of cleverly pairing complex numbers, who themselves are the joints and joists of quantum mechanics.

Harrison beheld his equation and dashed to the nearby Broome bridge, so dazzled I imagine, that he carved the equation into stone, lest it prove flighty.

I mean to write about mathematicians more often.

I imagine their high hat triplet, their Jay-Z split syllable roll, to be fitting tangents to curves in four dimensions, or something of the sort.

Social Security: Why are we ignoring $1.2 trillion in Earnings?

Data: Social Security Administration. Chart: author.

Income earned beyond $128,000 per year is not taxed for social security. That's about $1.2 trillion, or 17% of national income.

On your paystub you'll find a line labeled "FICA" or "OASDI" (Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance Trust). That's your payroll tax and it makes you a sustainer of one of the most powerful social safety nets in world history.  With that tax on your earned income, you and your employer help to keep older folks out of the sort of poverty that crushed retired Americans before it was established in 1935 by FDR (Social Security), and then complemented by Medicare in 1965.

Consulate Murders and the American Standard

A journalist was kidnapped in his own consulate.

Emerging reports - which American officials have surely had for days - describe audio tapes provided by Turkish intelligence which record Saudi journalist, legal American resident, and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi being beaten and tortured to death in some back room of his consulate in Istanbul, likely just adjacent to hallways down which functionaries typed away at their desks, approving visas, making tea.

To Minnesota Men

Minnesota men have a real opportunity this fall.

There is a heavy finger tapping on our eyelids. It's telling us to wake up. With expletives.

We have a choice. A challenge of consequence to match any other we've faced.

It's not pointing at us and saying, "you're a rapist."  It's not saying, "you're garbage, because you're a man."

It is saying that, for millennia, the women around you have been raped. For millennia, the men around you - often out of your sight but within it as well - have treated women like trash in the street.

Recognize the moment that you're in, Minnesota men.

The landscape of being a man in 2018 is complicated, no doubt. Men you love have behaved badly.  You can see them in your mind and, despite their transgressions, you want good things for them.

It's likely, just based on the numbers, that you have behaved badly.  You can see that in your mind, too.

But this is the moment. A moment to see that even if your hands are clean, holding up the world as it is, you're holding up a world that gives men 25% more for the same day's work. That world punishes professional women for getting pregnant. That world appoints men to our highest seats of power, who have visited nightmares upon our neighbor women.

I have a mother. A wife. A sister. Grandmothers, god rest them.

But I won't tell you a bit about them. That they're family, in this moment, shouldn't matter.

Because, it's your family next to me. It's the stranger's family. The women around you now, those people tapping on your eyelids, are reason enough to change this.

We can start by electing these women, come November.

Thumbs Down in High Chambers

Last year in the early movements of the Trump administration, the GOP was working on its six-dozenth attempt to disassemble the Affordable Care Act, which had helped reduce the uninsured portion of America's population from 18% in 2010 to 10% in 2016.

The Republican draft bills between the House and Senate imagined robust tax cuts for high earners offset by cuts to insurance for poor kids and the elderly, along with the allowance of insurance plans that would pool together already-sick people, effectively circumventing the Obamacare protections for patients with pre-existing conditions. February townhalls nationwide were blazing.

Closing the Trickle-Down Tap: Capital has an ally in the White House

In December of 2017, the United States borrowed a trillion dollars and gave it to the country's top earners.

Letter to the Future XV - Black Holes & Heroes

"It was a magical time, 

when the universe,
channeled through Hawking, 

paid a visit to Cambridge."

Frank Wilczek, MIT

===

Dear Future,

It's time we had a talk about heroes.