Tuesday, October 24, 2023, Delray Beach, Florida


Notes From My Journal

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Back in LA, and Happy to Be Here

K and I were in LA this weekend visiting four of our grandchildren and their parents. Every time I come here, I have the same thought: Despite everything that’s wrong about LA (high cost of living, high taxes, high crime, and an extra-high degree of Wokeness), the city has so much going for it.

The landscape is beautiful. Mountains in the distance. Foothills at your doorstep, The ocean and the desert less than an hour’s drive away. And the climate is almost ideal. Warm (but rarely hot) in the daytime. Cool (but rarely cold) at night.

When you are in LA, untethered by business meetings and the like, it’s impossible not to feel the tender comfort of its climate or the arresting beauty of the surrounding mountains. And if your reference is NYC or South Florida, as mine is, it’s all the more wonderful.

And there’s much more.

LA is, of course, the entertainment capital of the world. But that’s not what makes it an entertaining city. Rather, it’s the fact that it is a sprawling network of dozens of diverse working-class neighborhoods, each one offering up its food and culture to just about anyone that wants to explore.

And if neighborhood exploration isn’t your thing, LA has the usual city attractions. Big, beautiful parks and big, impressive museums, foodie-restaurant strips, wineries, bike and hiking trails, as well as the Hollywood Hills, Topanga Canyon, Santa Monica, Venice Beach, the Sunset Strip, and, if baseball is your thing, the Dodgers.

For many residents, the best thing about LA is the ability to escape the city. As one said, “To go from sea level and craziness to 8,000 feet and solitude is what keeps me here… and sane.”

That’s what is good and great about LA. What isn’t good is, as I said, the high prices and rising crime. We were in an upscale store yesterday that typified this contradiction. The store was beautifully designed. The product line was all one could want. The service was attentive. But there was what looked like garage door mechanisms on the inside of the plate glass front windows.

“What is that for?” I asked the woman attending us. “It’s to keep people from breaking in at night and clearing out our inventory,” she said.

Some Ethnic Generalizations 

We are staying once again in the Glenmark Hotel, which is located in Glendale, a neighborhood of 200,000 people, of which 80,000 are Armenian.

14th Annual Armenian Independence Day festival in Glendale, Sept. 17, 2023 

That, for me, is a very good thing. Glendale’s vibe is 60% California and 40% Armenia. What the hell does that mean?

When I’m in Glendale, I don’t feel like I’m in Armenia. (I have never been in Armenia.) I feel like I’m in America. But a better, safer, more civilized America. And that’s because of the Armenian culture. Which is, in all the fundamental aspects I have observed in the half-dozen times I’ve been here, more civilized than the culture that contemporary America has come to embrace.

Glendale reminds me of Baltimore’s “Little Italy” (where I had a commuting apartment in the early 1990s). It felt rich in its native culture and much safer and more civilized than most of the rest of Baltimore, but with all the benefits (and there are some) of being a denizen of the city.

And the Armenian people here remind me of the Polish people, which I wrote about Sept. 12.

They are proud and dignified. They don’t defer to Americans, because they don’t want to see their culture descend to America’s culture. But if you behave with the courtesy of an Armenian, they will treat you with the respect and courtesy they have traditionally given themselves.

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Arts & Letters

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A Day at the Races with Charles Bukowski

We spent Sunday with the kids on Octoberfest Day at Santa Anita Park.

I’m not sure why it was selected as a good venue for the grandkids, but it was. I’ve seen only two equine racetracks in my time, and neither was all that impressive. But this one is big and beautiful. And, as it turned out, offered a host of family friendly activities in the enormous oval space inside the mile-long track.

The weather was perfect. The racetrack itself was beautiful. And the horses were magnificent. I thought immediately of the great Charles Bukowski and his love of racing. He could go to this track (which debuted in, I think, 1934) or the Hollywood Park Racetrack, which was his favorite, since it was easier for him to get to.

In his essay “Goodbye Watson,” Bukowski mused about how it helped him as a writer:

with me, the racetrack tells me quickly where I am weak and where I am strong, and it tells me how I feel that day and it tells me how much we keep changing, changing ALL the time, and how little we know of this.

and the stripping of the mob is the horror movie of the century. ALL of them lose. look at them. if you are able. one day at a racetrack can teach you more than four years at any university. if I ever taught a class in creative writing, one of my prerequisites would be that each student must attend a racetrack once a week and place at least a 2 dollar win wager on each race. no show betting. people who bet to show REALLY want to stay home but don’t know how.

my students would automatically become better writers, although most of them would begin to dress badly and might have to walk to school.

I can see myself teaching Creative Writing now.

“well, how did you do Miss Thompson?”

“Host $18.”

“who did you bet in the feature race?”

“One-Eyed Jack.”

“sucker bet. the horse was dropping 5 pounds which draws the crowd in but also means a step-up in class within allowance conditions. the only time a class-jump wins is when he looks bad on paper. One-Eyed Jack showed the highest speed-rating, another crowd draw, but the speed rating was for 6 furlongs and 6 furlong speed ratings are always higher, on a comparative basis, than speed ratings for route races. furthermore, the horse closed at 6 so the crowd figured he would be there at a mile and a sixteenth. One-Eyed Jack has now shown a race around in 2 curves in 2 years. this is no accident. the horse is a sprinter and only a sprinter. that he came in last at 3 to one should not have been a surprise.”

“how did you do?”

“I lost one hundred and forty dollars.”

“who did you bet in the feature race?”

“One-Eyed Jack. class dismissed.”

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News & Views

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Hamas vs. Israeli Killing: Is There a Moral Equivalence?

I was going to write an argument on the moral equivalency of the Muslim killings versus the Israeli killings in the current conflict, a topic that’s been debated daily on the Internet since Hamas attacked and slaughtered Israeli citizens on Oct. 7.

I was going to say that, whereas I agree with something one of my colleagues wrote (“The grief a Palestine mother feels over the murder of her child is no greater or less than the grief that an Israeli mother feels about the murder of her child”), one cannot reasonably argue that the purposeful beheading of an infant in front of its mother is morally equivalent to the death of a child killed by an Israeli rocket that hits a nearby “military target” of some kind, even if the Israeli commander that gave the go-ahead to bomb that building knew that some number of non-combatants, including children, would be killed as “collateral damage.”

Further, I was going to posit that there is a difference (an important difference) between the morality of an individual’s actions and the morality of the actions of an organized group.

One of the differences is that organized groups often have beliefs, principles, and codes of conduct that are definitively stated in declarations, constitutions, mission statements, and the like. Using this moral compass, I don’t see any moral equivalency between Hamas’s position in this war and that of the State of Israel because Hamas’s stated belief is that Jews are, by the nature of their infidelity, sub-human. And that a good and virtuous Hamas Muslim is one that murders Jews in a holy effort to vanquish Israel and rid the world of Jews.

I was going to say that self-defense is as close as one can get to a “human right” that virtually every state, and even every religion, agrees on. That principle justifies Israeli’s retaliation for the attack, but it doesn’t give Israeli carte blanche to eradicate not just every Hamas soldier but every Palestinian man, woman, and child living in Gaza. And although there have been some reactionaries on social media taking that stance, the State of Israel has not. Quite the contrary. It is making a public effort (if only for its own sake) to try to reduce the “collateral damage” done to Palestinian non-combatants.

And finally, I was going to recount a few things I witnessed when I was living in Africa that made me understand, in a way I will never forget, that there is a great range in terms of human decency between some cultures and others. That at one end of that range there are cultures one could fairly describe as civilized, and at the other end cultures that can be justly described as barbaric.

That was going to be the thrust of my argument. But just before getting to it, I read the following essay in the WSJ about what Dostoevsky might say. It provides yet another layer of ethical complication in trying figure out what is or is not morally justified behavior in war.

Click here.

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Health & Wellness

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Three New Takes on America’s COVID Response 

* He Doesn’t Sound Like a Conspiracy Theorist! Dr William Makis, who has been labeled by Big Pharma as a conspiracy theorist, and whose essays on the mRNA COVID vaccines have been criticized as fallacious by “Fact Check” (a bought-and-paid-for Leftist lobbying group), talks here about increased reports of the harmful side effects of the vaccines. I don’t know enough about this hot, new argument. But, judging by his demeanor and his presentation, he doesn’t seem like a nutcase to me. What do you think?

* Professor Denis Rancourt on All-Cause Mortality. This research scientist has been questioning the information we’ve been getting from the government since the beginning of the COVID outbreak. Here, he talks about all-cause mortality rates and how they help us understand the debate.

* Diary of a Vaccine Devotee. If you are a big believer in the safety and efficacy of the mRNA vaccines, you won’t find this funny. But if you have doubts, you might enjoy it, as I did. (If you don’t know anything about the vaccine debates, be prepared. You may find this disturbing.) Click here.

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Worth Considering

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Unpleasant Advice That Works

“During my eight years in college, I spent many thousands of hours reading about economics, politics, and philosophy. Since high school, I’ve spent over ten thousand hours writing. When young people ask me ‘How can I be like you?’ my first thought is, do ten times as much.

“Ten times as much of what, exactly? The answer is usually: Whatever you already think the crucial ingredient is. ‘Why can’t I get ahead in my career? I strive to study and emulate my role models.’ Great idea. You just need to multiply your effort by a factor of ten. ‘How can I save my marriage? I’m really trying to make my spouse happy.’ Again, a great idea. You just need to multiply your effort by a factor of ten.” – economist Bryan Caplan via Scott Young’s blog, 9/27/23

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Fun and/or Interesting

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Quick Bites: Rethinking Slavery… Reconsidering Virginia Woolf… Child Abuse and the Catholic Church… Joe Rogan’s Secret… Another Insurrection Thwarted

  1. The long history of slavery. For most of my life, I thought of slavery as something that began in America, with white people enslaving people of color. It wasn’t until I started reading about slavery in my 40s that I discovered I knew nothing about its history. In this short clip, Candice Owens provides a brief introduction.
  2. Dazzled. Bewitched. Enchanted. I’ve never read more than a smattering of Virginia Woolf’s fiction because I decided, in college, that her writing was too “experimental” for me. Yesterday morning, however, I came across this in Letters of Note from Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s lover, that persuaded me to reconsider.
  3. Stephen Fry on child abuse and the Catholic Church. Click here.
  4. What’s Joe Rogan’s secret? My theory: His authentic curiosity about such a wide range of topics. The curiosity helps him ask good questions. And the range of his interests is staggering. The combination is what made him the highest paid and most successful interviewer of all time. Here’s an example.
  5. Another insurrection?Hundreds of people rushed into the US Capital complex Oct. 18 and remained there, chanting and ranting. For a moment, Capital Police thought it could be Jan. 6 all over again. But when they realized the crowd was there to support the Palestinian terrorists, they reclassified the event as a protest and relaxed. Click here.
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