I just said, “I don’t give a fuck” at a faculty meeting. How’s your day going? Jennifer Taub @jentaub Law Professor and author of the new book BIG DIRTY MONEY (Viking 2020). Penguin paperback edition comes out September 28, 2021. Northampton, MA

I feel like I’ve been stuck since last spring. I still have no idea why I ended up anemic and in the hospital. In one way, I should be relieved because I seem to be on the mend, but it bothers me that nobody seems to know the source of the problem. It feels like a strangely familiar throwback to when I owned, over the years, several old – mostly 50s-60s – cars. I’d be pulling away from a stoplight and the car would hiccup, maybe the lights would go out, maybe the engine stalled, but just for a moment, then it went away, or came back, whatever is the direction of Whew, what was that? and everything would seem just fine. And everything would be fine but, in the back of my mind, I knew that the hiccup wouldn’t be a one-time hiccup. Still, what to do? It is very hard to find, let alone fix, an intermittent problem when the problem is away, so I’d just keep drivin’. And pretty soon it would just seem like my imagination. And that is pretty much what I’m doing now.

I am still stuck at the Met Gala; thinking about what this Met Gala means, and wondering if it is a reflection of a world that seems to be undergoing a titanic change. Well, maybe not a changing world, but a changing United States, anyway. I keep reading that the Met Gala is the biggest and most influential fashion event – get together? party? – of the year, and it probably is but, this year, it is also staggeringly not the traditional White male patriarchy. That surprised me. The guests at the Met Gala are not the same influential people that are at the Opara or the Symphony, the people at this gala are way more diverse, culturally, and racially (although not, seemingly, financially).

Fashion is strange, it is a multibillion-dollar business and it is also an art. At least the people in the business at the high-end, consider themselves artists. Artists who want to make money, artists who want to become famous and end up at the Met Gala, and this year, at least, a large number of them, maybe a preponderance, are people of color. Having people of color at the table where decisions are made, that, I think, represents real change.

Another change is the use of the word fuck. The word has always been with us but it used to signify that the user was crude and disreputable, at best. In a movie, any character that said fuck more than once was sure to be a bad guy. Now, fuck has joined ain’t as a signifier that the speaker -especially if the speaker is a woman -is sophisticated, refined even, but edgy.

Another thing, even after it became legal, that carried a more than slightly disreputable vibe is marijuana. A year and a half ago, just before we all quarantined, Michele and I were in LA and ran across a cannabis store on a fashionable shopping street. It was named gen!us and the whole front wall was glass showing the entire, well-lite store and any buyers buying cannabis. I was shocked that it was so undark-allyish. About a week or so ago, there was an front-page article about the ten best upscale cannabis stores in Southern California and I was surprised, once again, that gen!us didn’t even make the list.

As an aside, I had remembered the article but couldn’t find it when I Googled Best cannabis Stores in LA. I finally did find it but it didn’t show originally because it was called The 10 best SoCal pot shops worth seeing in person right now. Calling them pot shops and saying worth seeing in person, now that’s a change. End aside.

What hasn’t changed is that I’m still getting emails from the former guy that read like scams, Steve, I just spoke with my father and I have an important update to share with you. Given how critical of a role you’ve played in our efforts to SAVE AMERICA, he could really use you on our team as an Official Trump Cardholder. Trump Cardholders will go down in history as the Patriots who SAVED AMERICA from Joe Biden and the radical Left, and we really want YOU to be a part of it. If you join today, we’ll even send you your very own PERSONALIZED Trump Card.

One last thing that hasn’t changed is that Sir Lewis Hamilton is still winning, today he became the first driver to win one hundred Grand Prix (only three other drivers have won 50 races). Congratulation to Lewis the GOAT.

342/350 cases in the Duke outbreak were vaccinated. We absolutely have to shift messaging away from “vaccines mean you won’t get COVID” to “vaccines mean you won’t die alone in an ICU bed.” Tweet by KSV @KSVesqI help companies comply with employment laws. Mom to two fantastic girls (and one pug). Color commentary for @steve_vladeck. Co-host @inlocoparentsAustin, TX

“They want to convey not just authority, but intimidating authority,” said Katherine L. Kuzminski, a military policy expert at the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington,

I’ve been in a bad mood for the last couple of weeks, bouncing back and forth between anger and depression over the state of our environment, although, I’m learning that turning the news off does help. When I was in my late twenties, the slogan “Don’t trust anybody over thirty” became popular, popular, at least, with people far enough under thirty to feel safe in saying it. Now those same people seem to be saying, “Don’t trust the new young activists, they are too radical.” I think that they were right in the first place; “Don’t trust anybody over thirty, we talk a good game but we know we won’t be around when the check for our splurging off the failing environment comes due.”

In the meanwhile, the twenty-year anniversary of 9-11 came and went. I’m surprised at how little I’m emotionally affected by 9-11, Michele and I were in Italy and we both feel like we missed one of the seminal events of the last fifty years. Yeah, we saw it on TV – over and over and over again, ad nauseam – like everybody else but we were watching from Italy, in a different emotional world.

Google tells me that it was California’s Senator Hiram Johnson who first said, “The first causality of war is the truth.” Johnson was a Republican and an isolationist and I guess I am an isolationist also. I’m reluctant to say that because isolationists had such a bad name during my formative years, growing up in the aftermath of World War II. But I am an isolationist; I think that our almost constant state of war is destroying our country and has perverted our government. The mainstream media likes war and has promoted it from, at least, the time Hearst and Pulitzer used their papers to push us into war with Spain over the fabricated charge that Spain sunk the battleship, USS Maine.

Now, everything we hear or read or are shown about the Taliban for the last twenty years screams that the Taliban are irrationally evil, especially in their relationship with women. All of that may be true but they won an essentially bloodless war. Heavily outgunned, the Taliban just strolled into power, so they must be doing something right. As the Taliban strolled in, thousands of Afghanis, the ones that had bet on the wrong side, ran the other way, trying to get out of the country.

Looking at all the pictures of those refugee families coming into the US, my first thought is what a culture shock it must be. But, thinking about it, these are people, for whom the new Afghanistan was working and most of them are probably better educated and way richer than the average refugee. The United States, – alone, not counting other countries and NGOs – poured $145 billion into Afghanistan, much of it in easy to lose cash. Afghanistan’s government was corrupt even before that money was thrown at what we considered Afghanistan’s problems, willy nilly, and the $145 billion didn’t all go into road repair and building schools, much of it went into people’s pockets. Accordingly, most of these refugees are rich, educated abroad, and more worldly than I had been giving them credit for and I suspect that they will do well in the so-called first world.

I’m vaccinated and I’m trying to get a booster to be more vaccinated, but I am also starting to come to the realization that the Covid vaccines which we thought were so magical are actually making the pandemic worse. The Covid vaccine might prevent you from getting Covid in some cases – maybe even most cases – but the biggest advantage seems to be that it increases our odds of not becoming seriously ill or ending up on a ventilator. ABC did a poll of 50 hospitals in 17 states and came up with 94% of the people in ICU wards were unvaccinated because unvaccinated people get sicker than vaccinated people. The vaccine minimizes the effects of Covid, but it doesn’t always prevent people who are exposed to Covid from getting it and then spreading the COVID-19 virus to others. In the meanwhile, we vaccinated people, thinking we are safe, get together inside with other vaccinated people some of who may or may not be infected. That’s the problem, if one of us is infected, it is less likely that we will know we are infected if we are vaccinated and, it seems to me, that will make us more likely to spread the disease.

To leave with some good news, although good news may not be the right way to put it, news that made me smile is probably better. Yesterday, I started seeing pictures on Twitter of celebrities dressed like they were going to a costume ball, and it soon became obvious that this was the evening of the Met Gala, a major fashion event in New York. This is not something I would normally be familiar with, but I am because Lewis Hamilton goes every year, posting pictures on his Twitter feed, and, you know, he’s Lewis Hamilton. The Gala is all about fashion, one of Lewis’s passions (along with driving very fast cars very fast). If you don’t know what the Met Gala is, think about the Academy Awards Red Carpet without the Academy Awards. This year Lewis bought a table and invited seven young Black designers. At a cost of $30,000 per ticket, that’s a lot of money; talk about putting your money where your mouth is, this is it.

Surprisingly, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was also there, sitting at the head table. She and her partner were specifically invited by the Met and their tickets, I read, were comped. I’m very happy to say that AOC had the cajones to stay on message but I’m not surprised. AOC is one of the bravest, if not the bravest, politicians I’ve ever seen, always willing to talk truth to power. Willing to walk into a room of extraordinarily rich people and tell them they should pay taxes.

While Anna Wintour is the main poobah of the Gala, there were four co-hosts, poet Amanda Gorman, Timothée Chalamet who plays Paul Atreides in  Denis Villeneuve’s new Dune movie, Grammy-winning singer Billie Eilish – who wore an Oscar de la Renta gown on the condition that the designer would no longer use real fur – and tennis champion Naomi Osaka. They are all under thirty which may be why AOC was invited. To circle back, fashion seems to be an industry that is willing to trust people under thirty. I hope the trust people under thirty sentiment catches on. We need to listen to young people to save the world, it is becoming obvious that we, the older, supposedly more mature generations, are not going to do it.

Finally, Happy Wednesday and Congratulation to Governor Gavin Newsom for surviving the truly stupid, wasteful, recall.  

I

Public reason requires that the moral or political rules that regulate our common life be, in some sense, justifiable or acceptable to all those persons over whom the rules purport to have authority. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, October 24, 2017 

True story: I’ve been throwing a lot of birdseed on the ground lately. One of the nasty side effects of any drought is that less foliage, especially grasses, means less seed. With less seed available in the wild, more birds come to our yard looking for food. The birds are going through the seed in the birdfeeder more quickly and, as soon as I toss a large tumbler of birdseed on the ground, all kinds of ground feeders show up; their hunger making them braver. The Juncos are always the first to show up and then the local Steller’s Jays. Recently, they have been joined by several gentle Mourning Doves, and, then tentatively, a couple of families of quail, the little downy puffballs of spring now as big as their parents.

But the biggest eaters, by far, are two squirrels – neither Michele nor I are any good at identifying squirrels so there may be more than two but there are only two at a time, and they are slightly different – who Michele has named Hoover and Lux. A couple of days ago I threw some seeds out, and Michele laughed at Hoover who was immediately there, sucking up seed. She said something like, “Hoover, you are a pig, hoovering everything up.” Michele’s phone said, “Why isn’t the narcissist hoovering me?” We were both shocked, where did that come from? And what the hell is hoovering, anyway? If you’ll Google hoovering, it will tell you hoovering is a manipulation tactic that someone might use to suck you back into a potentially toxic relationship. Michele said, “Holy shit, that’s me and Veronica!” It was almost instantly obvious to both of us, it exactly describes what she had been talking about for the last two or three weeks.

Several years ago, Michele was asked over to a woman’s house in a nearby town and that evening, over dinner, she told me how isolated this unhappy woman was. Over the next couple of years, Michele visited the woman probably about once a month, even taking her to the hospital for a minor procedure when there was nobody else, but, increasingly, Michele has come home feeling used and slightly put down. Recently, Michele has drifted away because the relationship seemed increasingly toxic, and Veronica would call and ask Michele to come over for some reason, the last couple of times it was to get some vegetables which Veronica had a surplus of. Then Michele got mauled by a couple of dogs and, when she told Veronica she was hurt and couldn’t come over, the calls stopped. It was hurtful and Michele wondered out loud why Veronica didn’t call anymore. Now we know.

Another true story: a week or two ago, I got an email suggesting a book from a little-known – to me, at least – publisher, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. My first reaction was, Yes! I want that book, right now and that sort of took me back. I rarely have that sort of reaction, that joyously extreme. I asked Michele if she could guess what the book was about and, and then realized that couldn’t have possibly guessed and either could I have. This book is so perfect and so far out of left field. I bought it immediately.

As an aside, my first thought was that this must be a scam and I didn’t want to answer an email I hadn’t solicited or know the sender, so I didn’t click through the email. I googled the publisher and bought the book that way. End aside.

There is an old joke about a golfer who didn’t shower after his round of golf, I’ll call him Budd.
Every Saturday, Budd played golf with a group of friends and after their round of golf, he would go directly to the bar while his buddies went to the locker room, showered, and changed, before joining him for a round of drinks. Because they were often alone, Budd and the bartender become quite friendly. One day the bartender asked him,
“Budd, you seem like a meticulous guy, why don’t you shower after your Saturday round? It seems out of character.”
“ Well, Biff, I’ve got a small penis and I’m a little embarrassed to be seen naked in the shower.”
“Oh. does it work?”
“Do you mean, ‘Can I have sex?’ Yeah, sure”
“Uh…How would you like to trade for a dick that looks good in the shower?”

When the Americans invaded in 2001, the Taliban did not control the entirety of the country. Twenty years later, as the US departs, the Taliban control all of Afghanistan A Tweet by Yalda Hakim @BBCYaldaHakim Anchor and Correspondent. Host of BBC World News’ Impact with Yalda Hakim.https://yaldahakimfoundation.org

Fuck right off with your pat answers blaming one party for Afghanistan and exonerating your favorite politician. This is a generational failure, and they’re all to blame — Biden, Bush, Trump, Obama, all of their generals, all of them. A Tweet by Noah Shachtman @NoahShachtman Soon: @RollingStone. Back in the day: @thedailybeast, @Wired, @ForeignPolicy, @BrookingsFP. no************@********il.ch Wherever

What’s happening in Afghanistan currently is a humanitarian crisis. Let’s be clear: there has never been, and will never be, a U.S. military solution in Afghanistan. Our top priority must be providing humanitarian aid & resettlement to Afghan refugees, women, and children. A Tweet by Rep. Barbara Lee @RepBarbaraLee Progressive Democrat representing the #EastBay. Promoting justice for all, peace, & human rights. @ProChoiceCaucus Co-Chair. Washington, DC and Oakland

I’m genuinely shocked that the Taliban took over Afghanistan so quickly. It took the North Vietnamese two years to take South Vietnam after we left, the Taliban have done it as fast as they can drive from provincial capital to the next provincial capital to, now, Kubal. After about 2011, it seemed obvious to me that we were not going to be able to win this war but, judging from my reaction today, I must have still believed the propaganda. I had no idea that, after twenty years, we were leaving with the so-called official Afghan Army comparatively that much worse off than when we got there.

We are constantly told that we have the best military in the world, but, it turns out that we have a military that only looks good in the shower. We may have the most high-tech, best-equipped military in history but we still can’t win a war. We outspend everybody, we even spend more than the next nine nations put together and we haven’t won a war since 1945 (unless you count Korea and Iraq in which, I guess, we weren’t actually trying to win, just to push the enemy back to where they started which we did, and Grenada.) For twenty years – and still counting – we were told we were winning this war and we weren’t. Don’t get me wrong, we can still win battles, we can still kill more of them than they can of us, we just can’t actually win the war.

If that sounds too harsh, if you think it’s a political problem, if you think the military’s hands were tied, whatever, then why didn’t the generals say, “We can’t do what you want without more men, more school teachers, more tanks, more whatever…” But, for twenty years, no general did that, they took the job, all of them. Either they knew they couldn’t win under those conditions and said “Fuck it, it’s a promotion and I’m going to go to work as a lobbyist for Lockheed/Martin anyway.” or they were too stupid to understand the problem. I’m going to go with the second option. I think that our military leadership is a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Our military leadership, probably from about Colonel up, had no idea that the Taliban were winning the war, our military leadership thought they were doing great.

The Taliban got stronger while we were fighting them and nobody seemed to notice. The grunts must have noticed but the brass were so confident that they didn’t listen to them. Nobody even made plans for getting out of Dodge on the outside chance that the Taliban might win. The other analogy that comes to me is that of a narcissist. The military, and probably State Department, leaders were so sure that they were – and still are – right and doing well that they only listened to the Afghan toadies that told them how great they were. Surprisingly, shockingly, actually, we didn’t learn anything from the Vietnam disaster.

Now we are being told that the problem is the Afghan senior leadership which is corrupt. Sure, that’s a factor, but the big problem is that it is our leadership that is corrupt. Our entire military system is corrupt, including Congress, who thinks the answer is to increase the budget by twenty-five million over the existing 778 billion budget. It’s sickening, infuriating, sad, and sort of terrifying. Happy Monday.