SpaceX!!! It's going publlic. Buy!

 A compass that reliably points south is just as valuable as one that reliably points north.

I got a market signal. 

Watch out.

In my career as a financial advisor I looked for exit points, moments when the animal spirits of investor enthusiasm went crazy. High points are evident only when looking up from below, i.e, when it is too late. Still, in 30 years as an advisor and another decade as a retiree hoping that my investments will see me through to the end, I looked for times of maximum mania, when as many people as possible have thrown caution to the wind and decided to get in because the gettin' is good. That is when gettin' out is smart.

Fortunately for me, I have a south-pointing compass. A longtime friend and former brokerage client is that compass. Let's call him Tom. He is busy with his law practice, so whenever he calls me with excitement over something that sounds to my ear almost like panic, I know that the party is over. He is very closely attuned to what will sell to a jury or judge. His alertness to mood is what makes him such a successful and persuasive attorney. It makes him extraordinarily sensitive to political signals. He knew Trump would win in 2016, and said so publicly, against all conventional wisdom when he was thought out of touch. Quite the opposite. He felt the vibe. He connects. That is what makes him a good political compass and a reverse compass on investment mania. He hears the vibe of sure-thing-can't-miss-money and he fears missing out. 

That is the error in being part of the crowd in investments. The crowd is always late. The crowd piles on. When the crowd is frantic with excitement every lemming has gotten into the very last line to march over the cliff. 

He called me a week ago urging me to use any connection I might still have at Morgan Stanley to get him an allocation of shares of Elon Musk's SpaceX. Tom wanted to invest the bulk of his brokerage account money. This isn't a risky investment, Tom said. This is different from other investments because Musk has an edge. Trump is afraid of what Musk could do to him and greedy about what Musk can do for him. Trump is perfectly happy to use the power of the federal government to help his friends with subsidies, contracts, regulatory breaks -- whatever a campaign-contributing billionaire needs. If any of SpaceX's three businesses gets in trouble, Trump will bail it out with contracts or subsidies, so there is a guaranteed floor, backed by the full faith and credit of the federal treasury. Tom is counting on Trump's being willing to trade favors for favors, and that is a very good bet.

We have already experienced a proof-of-concept of Musk's power and Trump's willingness to serve. Musk used his influence on Trump, who used his influence on the indexes to make sure that indexes could include SpaceX almost immediately, against previous policy, and notwithstanding a tiny public float that would otherwise block purchase of SpaceX.  All the passive investors who own investments that track the S&P500 or the NASDAQ 100 indexes in their index funds will be buying SpaceX in huge quantities even though the public float of available stock is small in comparison to the required purchases of the index-tracking funds. Mandatory price-insensitive buying creates a squeeze that forces prices up. It is shady; it hurts investors other than Musk and other early insiders; it breaks longstanding consumer-protection practice. But it makes Musk a great deal of money. See? Musk can't get hurt. Musk has an edge. You can't lose.

So what is wrong with that story? Maybe nothing. Maybe Musk can't lose. Musk could invest $50 billion in the midterms to get the "right" judges and the "right" down-ballot state legislators and county officials elected. They are the ones who count the votes, certify elections, and review the appeals. Musk would earn it back with federal contracts Trump steers his way.

But I have seen this movie before. I am reflecting my experience about market sentiment. Excitement and optimism and puffery work as long as people see things going up. Tom isn't looking at earnings, debts, cash flow, or any other metric of investment value and that isn't the source of his investment decision. Tom is attuned to the zeitgeist. It is go-go-go time for Elon Musk, and people are looking at opportunity. They are cheering a winner. Tom is betting on Musk. Momentum is a delicate foundation and at some point Hans Christian Anderson's little girl shouts that the emperor has no clothes. Something breaks the momentum of hope and people start counting. At some point price matters, earnings matter, and numbers matter.  

Devil-may-care manic enthusiasm is a contrary indicator.

I feel like a sad old killjoy, and maybe I am wrong. But Tom is the most reliable indicator I know of when the party is over. He says Elon Musk can't lose.

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Vineyard update: 11:30 a.m. on Friday

The glamorous life of a vineyard owner. 

By 11:30 I had had enough. Saturday is another day, starting again at 6:00 a.m.

11:30

Vineyard Update: Six a.m. on Friday

I set the alarm for 4:20 a.m. again today.  

I want to be at the Vineyard promptly at 6 a.m. so I can join my nephew to work in the vineyard. I want to get started in then the cool of the morning because the forecast is for 90 degrees in the shade by mid-afternoon. The vineyard has full sun. 

The immediate job at hand is to unhook the two wires that are currently attached in notches on the T-posts that suspend the trellis wires that support the vines. The wires are three inches apart when in the notches. The job is to open up that space and shove the rangy grape vines up into that space between the wires, and then re-attach the wires, which squeezes the vines into a slender, mostly-vertical plant, at least temporarily. Grapes are enormously vigorous plants, at least in the pumice soil at my farm, so vines will burst out of their confined space as the season progresses, but they are still somewhat contained and supported.

Wire in the notch

Before

After

How they look end of season. No longer looking squeezed

In posts I published last summer I mentioned my nephew, Liam Flenniken. He is age 18 now.  He is staying at the farm house this summer, once again doing vineyard labor to earn money to pay for college at Oregon State University, which he will start this fall. He is the 6th generation working on this property, purchased from a Donation Land Claim owner in 1883 by my great grandfather, Stephen Nealon. That makes Liam the great, great, great grandson of the farm's founder, a Union Army veteran. Liam does not aspire to being a vineyard worker. He wants to fly airplanes.

Buried in the mass of leaves are the two wires

A experienced vineyard worker from Valley View Vineyard, Adelberto Paz, gave Liam and me a lesson on the best way to do this job. It is hard work, but not complicated. Like much farm work, it is repetitive. One lifts up the floppy vines and pushes them toward the middle, re-hooks the wires. Again and again. There are 6,000 plants on my eight acres.

I last reported on the vineyard describing the April frosts. The plants looked pretty rough on April 21 with the frost damage to the Pinot Noir buds and leaves, but the damage was spotty, and in two weeks the plants had ample buds. It turned out to be a false worry. The fans that stirred the air did their job. It turns out that the bigger problem I face is managing vine growth. My soil may be too fertile. Workers needed to thin the nodes that would bear fruit -- 12 person-days of work. Ideally the fruit-bearing nodes are spaced four inches apart to give room for the grape clusters and until they were thinned they were too close together.

On May 22, a son of the owner of Valley View Vineyard, Colin Wisnovsky, came to the vineyard and did the first of two fungicide sprays. He is conscientious about suiting up to avoid the sulpher-based spray.

I don't have photograph of me at 6 a.m. yesterday, nor this morning, nor for the next six or eight days working with Liam to squeeze the vines between the wires. I am writing quickly and pushing Publish.

I also lack photos of me mowing the weeds so there is a "lawn" of green between the rows of grapes for most of the vineyard. Nor do I have photos of me covered with pumice dust from tilling the dozen or so rows that I need to till rather than mow. Nor do I have photos of me spraying an herbicide at the base of the plants to control weeds. (The herbicide is an alternative to the Roundup brand herbicide I want to be able to tell grape buyers that it is a Roundup-free vineyard.

Classmates at the college reunion asked me about my Pinot Noirs. Willamette Valley Pinot Noirs have an international reputation and wine connoisseurs wondered when they could buy a case of my wine. Answer: Not for at least a year, and probably two.

Some Willamette Valley Pinots have a small mixture (under five percent) of Southern Oregon grapes because our hotter summers create riper grapes and therefore dark fruit flavors and color which improves their wines. Wines labeled being from "Oregon" not "Willamette Valley" can have any amount of Southern Oregon grapes. My hope is that my grapes will stand alone labeled as coming from the Rogue Valley -- a wine region with a still-small, but growing reputation. My hope is that my wine will get labeled as being grown on100 percent pumice soil, a point of distinction.

I will ask Liam to take a snapshot of me this morning at 6 a.m. to send to the Oregon Department of Revenue to send with a message, "darned right it's work."

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Jon Ossoff is running for president.

Graham Platner has a message that is catching on: America is really screwed up.

Jon Ossoff has a better one: 

"Our national greatness flows not through our blood or our genes, but from our ideas. [Crowd sounds rise from applause into a roar] Americans are not a race, but a people [pause] united not by our ethnicity but by our shared convictions, and THAT is what makes us exceptional."

Jon Ossoff is running for president. This is the crocus; this is the gathering storm, the first clear signs of a move. We see it in the big theme, the staging, the camera angle. He isn't running just for reelection to the Senate. He is presenting himself as a national leader confronting a big theme in contrast to Trump's big theme. Trump is making the U.S. about preserving a traditional heritage of ethnicity, language, and religion. Ossoff says we have a creed of life, liberty, and happiness; equal justice all; and one nation, indivisible. The big stuff.

I am very OK with that. I have been waiting for candidates photographed from below like this one, the Democratic alternative to Trump with a raised fist, having survived the assassination attempt.

There is a path for Ossoff. He has taken the qualifying steps. He won a Senate seat in Georgia in 2020, right after Joe Biden narrowly won the state of Georgia. Ossoff is running for reelection. He has to win in order for him to move forward, but if he wins he solves a problem for Democrats. They need a leader and they are nervous that the one who has seized the spotlight is unelectable anywhere but in bright blue places. Gavin Newsom, for better or worse, is California. Rich, dynamic California. Rich and expensive. California of the homeless people on the streets, California of seven-dollar gasoline, California of million-dollar-plus fixer-upper starter-homes, California of Silicon Valley and Hollywood and electric cars and renaming schools named Abraham Lincoln because Lincoln didn't do enough to empower Blacks.

Ossoff is reassurance. Trump took us to the edge and Democrats will feel relieved if they get through the Trump era with our democracy together-enough that we can hold a 2028 election. Ossoff is back-to-normal. Trump is change; Newsom is a different change. Ossoff is a sigh of relief from change: a moderate from a reddish state, southern but the new South, not the old Alabama-Mississippi unreconstructed South. If Ossoff can win there, and he did once and maybe twice, he can win in Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona.  

My sense is that is where the country will be. Let's just be Americans again. 

Ossoff talks about patriotism and common values. You find clips of him shot like this one. He isn't as good at stirring oratory as JFK, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama, but he is talking grand themes. Maybe he will get better. 

Ossoff is Jewish. That may be a deal-killer with some in the antiSemitic populist left and right, and Jewish backers feel betrayed by him. He voted to oppose some funding of weapons for Israel. Prominent donors pulled their support and tried to recruit popular governor Brian Kemp to run against Ossoff. Kemp chose not to. Democrats don't know what to do about Israel but being on the side of restraint, pointing out the damage to Gaza, as Ossoff did, is probably skating to where the puck is going. Even Trump said it: Everyone is unhappy with Bibi Netanyahu now. Israel has squandered a brand that took decades and millions of lives to build.

There are two varieties of angry within Democrats. One kind of angry is blue-collar, populist anger. Graham Platner expresses it in an articulate way that Democrats who groaned through the Biden presidency are thrilled to hear. Someone who talks! He seems manly and confident and straightforward, even as he describes his errors and redemption. Platner is one direction for Democrats.

There is another kind of anger: progressive, seize-the-moment, reform-America anger. Blue state/blue district politicians have it: AOC, Jazmine Crockett, Elizabeth Warren. These are people who are disappointed with Presidents Clinton and  Obama, believing they could have done more. Biden campaigned as a moderate but governed as Elizabeth Warren, and if he just hadn't been old and inarticulate and hadn't blown his campaign, we might be consolidating those gains, not reversing them and much more. There is angry appetite for a fighter who will be both true blue and nationally popular and win forty states with a "give them hell" progressive message.

Ossoff will disappoint both those groups. Ossoff is a purple state politician with Republicans in state and local office. He may be too moderate to win a Democratic nomination. He is the opposite of edgy. And yet Democrats chose James Talarico, not Jazmine Crockett in Texas, so maybe Democrats want consolidation. Progressive Democrats want a governing majority; they must be able to win in states like Ohio, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Tennessee, Texas, Nebraska, Montana, and both Dakotas. It used to be possible.

Trump clarifies the stakes for Americans. Democrats want to nominate someone who can win.

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Low IQ

Trump keeps doing it, and his supporters seem OK with it. 

He calls Black people "Low IQ."

He has used the phrase "low IQ" in reference to U.S. Reps. Maxine Walters, Hakeem Jeffries, and Jasmine Crockett; Vice President Kamala Harris; Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson; the podcaster known as Charlamange tha God; and Somalis as a group. This week Trump added ESPN host Stephen A. Smith.

Trump is saying aloud an idea that floats in the zeitgeist, that White people are smart, effective, and hard-working, and that Blacks and Hispanics are inferior, criminal, and lazy, a burden to the country. Trump says that DEI hurts the people who have genuine merit, Whites. 

It goes beyond "dog whistle." I am uncomfortable with it. A former reader and active commenter on this blog, a White male attorney, echoed Trump in comments on this blog, repeatedly calling Kamala Harris "low IQ."  I pushed him off the blog by calling him a pathetic nepo-baby who graduated from a third-rate law school practicing in a distressed small-town dogpatch, a loser compared to Kamala Harris whose achievements far outshined his. That worked. He unsubscribed.

Harvard's demographic make-up has changed over the past 55 years. It is a new America, especially visible in supposed meritocracies where bright type-A ambitious people get educated. I estimate that the Harvard I attended in the late 1960s was 88 percent White, 10 percent Black. Of the Whites, maybe 20 percent were Jewish of Ashkenazi heritage. The other two percent were Asians and Hispanics, born in the U.S. 

Current students are perhaps 35 percent Asian. Graduate students in STEM fields appear to have an even higher Asian component. It is an international university now.

In the unscientific survey of 350 people in my college Class of 1971 that I described on Monday, 60 percent said we wanted Harvard to continue to use race and ethnicity as a factor in admissions. Twenty percent did not, and 20 percent were unsure.

I voted yes. Race and ethnicity are salient enough issues that I want the university to manage its ethnic and racial makeup. Leadership capabilities, emotional intelligence, persuasiveness, originality, courage, conscientiousness, and grit are all valuable qualities in a person, a worker, and a citizen. They aren't subject to objective meritorious scoring.

Trump is stuck in an imagined past, voiced by Ronald Reagan, with his trope about the Black "welfare queen" and the idea of White male disadvantage. Trump's premise is that objective "meritocracy" would favor his team: White Americans. Maybe not. The people who baffled me by presenting their research on mimicking human thought with artificial intelligence were not White. Two were from South Asia (India); one was from East Asia (China.)

For decades the winners of the International Mathematical Olympiad reflected the rivalry between high school whizzes from China and South Korea. The U.S. finally rose to earn second place honors, with this U.S team. Notice anything?

A different team won first place in another competition in the United Kingdom:

Trump, who is widely suspected of having had someone else take his admission test to the Wharton School, and who was judged by a former professor as the worst student he ever encountered, is expressing an idea of objective White superiority that may run into an uncomfortable reality. White MAGA racists do not want meritocracy. They want a comfortable return to an America that is default-White, with White privilege being so assumed that it is invisible. That train has left the station. Immigration has made us a multicultural, multiethnic nation. Trump said he wants more immigrants from Norway, but Norwegians aren't coming here. They have it good in Norway. 

The path to domestic tranquility isn't going to be a retreat to supposed objective "merit," but it isn't hard quotas, either. Or maybe even "soft quotas." A norm of "strict fairness" and objectivity is better for building strong institutions, but institutions need to be conscious of different skillsets. It is an imperfect solution because it requires judgment and finesse. Former NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar made the point with a metaphor that I think Harvard is looking for in its admissions, and which probably should be the policy for the U.S. military and other institutions now being purged of DEI by Trump. Abdul-Jabbar wrote that a team consisting solely of the "best" players, all seven-foot-plus centers with team-leading scores, would lose every game. They would have a hard time getting the ball to center court because it would be stripped from them by quicker guards. A championship team has a mix of abilities from the best players with different sizes and skillsets.

Trump has no interest in making Abdul-Jabbar's point. He wants to provoke White resentment. But a wise Democrat might voice it.

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Rigged! Rigged! A Republican Lost! It's rugged!

"I believe we have the Most Dishonest Election of any Country, anywhere in the World President DONALD J. TRUMP"
          Truth Social post, June 4, 2028 at 11:52 AM

Trump is being Trump. He is erratic, willful, authoritarian, lawless, corrupt, and dangerous. But Trump is mortal. We will survive Trump. 

But will we survive obedient and frightened Republicans in positions of power if Trump insists they do as he demands?

Can we trust any Republican in local, state, or federal office if he or she comes under the demanding gaze of Trump.

Can I trust gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazen or state Senate candidate Brad Hicks to be honorable and truthful if Trump insists they do the opposite? Maybe Drazen and Hicks do not intend to be corrupt; I hope they don't. If elected, they will be under enormous pressure to produce what is necessary for a result that pleases Trump on any issue that interests Trump. There can always be a pretext. It need not be true or even plausible. What is necessary is the result: Give Trump what he demands. 

What issues?  

---  Certify an election where Trump or any other Republican candidate loses.

---  Certify any election done the way Oregon votes, with mail-in voting. 

---  Support Trump in ending health insurance subsidies that allow tens of thousands of Oregonians to afford health insurance that protects them and keeps rural Oregon hospitals solvent.

Drazen was a chief sponsor of a bill to end mail-in voting.

Brad Hicks' website is a triumph of vague generalities with no substance whatever. He says he is in favor of common sense.

The only clarity in the website is the ease and prominence of making a donation: https://www.hicksforsenate.com  I consider such a website worthless, but it is a strategy that may work: Say nothing and bury the district in paid ads.

James Madison presumed that the ambition of others would counter the ambition of an autocrat. That is an error in this era of political factions. Ambition requires they ratify the ambition of an autocrat. Trump has already announced that the California election in which his recommended candidate came in third, not second, was totally rigged and corrupt. It does not matter that the election results in Los Angeles are consistent with pre-election polls. Trump does not need to be accurate or even plausible. He has a fixed result: If he or his preferred candidate loses, the election is rigged. 

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson falls into line, a signal to House Republicans. Johnson doesn't need evidence. He acts on "instinct" to conclude that Trump's desired result is the correct one.

Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it is impossible to prove. But think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here.

Trump ignores recounts and audits, even when done by Republicans. The Meet the Press interview with Kristen Welker is the latest iteration. She pushed back on Trump's claims about the 2020 election and the California vote. What evidence, she asked?

All I have to do is look, and I listen.

She said that isn't evidence, and Trump switched to accusations and insults.

You’re either crooked or you’re stupid. You play right into their hands with this crap. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged.

Then Trump walked out of the interview.

Must a Republican governor or state senator succumb to pressure, insults, and accusations of being a RINO traitor? We saw what happened to Senators John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy and Rep. Thomas Massie. We see what Trump is saying now about Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who is being "weak" on California by claiming incompetence, not fraud.

Cheating is something, obviously, you have to prove. I would characterize a lot of the way California does things, including elections, as incompetence. 

Thune is in the doghouse because the Senate is not ending the filibuster and Thune has not fired the Senate Parliamentarian who issued rulings that impede Trump's agenda.

Republican South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Nancy Mace, currently a U.S. representative, insisted on opening up the Epstein files. She wrote on Twitter/X, 

I know I put the likelihood of an endorsement on the line when I demanded transparency on the Epstein files. I demanded it because you deserve the truth -- ALL OF IT

Trump has endorsed Mace's opponent.

There is a test to see if one's local Republican candidates have the courage to resist Trump: See what they say and do now. Twice over a two week period I have contacted my Republican Congressman Cliff Bentz to see if he has any comment or criticism on the $1.776 billion giveaway from Trump's own IRS. Isn't this outrageously corrupt? No response from Bentz. 

Has either Drazen or Hicks said one word in opposition to anything whatever that Trump demands?

If they cannot show independence of Trump's influence, we cannot expect them to resist Trump if he tells them to ignore the Oregon votes in the 2028 election and to refuse to certify any election in which the Republican loses. Or anything else Trump demands.

Either we are electing those state and local officials, who will exercise independent judgment, or we are electing puppets taking orders from Trump.

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The "Me Generation" in transition.

"As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin′
And the first one now will later be last
′Cause the times, they are a-changin'"
          Bob Dylan, The Times They are a Changin' 1964

Our generation has been saying "Me. Me. Me." since we were born in about 1949, in the front bulge of the post-war Baby Boom. We are about 76 now.

A college classmate said we had our turn and should get out of the way.

In 1966, Time magazine, which used to be a big deal, decided that young people under age 25 were the "Person of the Year." That decision was also was a big deal.

Our generation is a cultural and political phenomenon, at first because of our size and vitality; now because we are transitioning out of our positions of authority. 

I spent a week engaged with that cohort.

Readers of political news have been reminded of the "Thucydides trap." Graham Allison, professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, in a warning -- understood by Chinese President Xi Jinping but misunderstood by U.S. President Donald Trump -- refers to the conflict described by the Greek historian Thucydides. Sparta was the incumbent great power. Athens, a trading nation, was the rising power. Their interests collided. and they went to war. The USA is the incumbent power in decline, being repositioned by China.

It is a metaphor for my generation. We are the incumbent declining power. We shared reunion space with younger people doing miraculous things with new technologies and making fortunes doing so. I attended seminars on what is happening with AI. Young PhDs with South Asian and East Asian ethnicities, explained their breakthroughs. I was utterly baffled. Ibunderstood nothing other than they were making fortunes from their work. The Class of 1981, ten years after us, donated $500 million as their 45th reunion gift.

The exit of the early Baby Boomers in politics is visible with Joe Biden and Donald Trump, both visibly impaired, and with U.S. Senate candidates in their late 70s facing generational challengers, e.g., Janet Mills in Maine and classmate Chuck Schumer in New York. Some classmates pass the torch; in Southern Oregon, classmate Jeff Golden chose not to run for a third term in the Oregon Senate. Some classmates who are tenured professors are hanging onto their positions; some are taking emeritus status. Entrepreneurs told me with excitement that their companies were launching new products. Business people still operate their businesses, but they tell me they are less hands-on. Lawyer classmates are still taking cases, "slowing down," but keeping busy servicing long-time clients. Others have let go. Ones who worked in government share stories of their disgust over the firing of the inspectors general and other inside-agency checks on corrupt behavior, including giveaways to Trump's friends and donors. Cronyism is now policy; be part of it or leave.

Members of the Harvard Class of 1971 were sent a survey in preparation for the reunion; 350 out of 1400 people responded. The survey isn't remotely scientific. It isn't representative of a generation and isn't even representative of leaders who led institutions in academia, medicine, law, politics, journalism, entertainment, finance, and business. But it is a snapshot of something, i.e, Harvard graduates still alive at age 76, who felt engaged enough with the university to respond to a 100-plus question survey.

About 56 percent of us have fully retired; age 70 was the median and mode for when we retired. 

Most of the people who work do so part-time, one-to-30 hours a week. Some 16 percent of the class say they work full-time; a few of them work 50-plus hours a week. The bulk of the people who work report that they earn between $100,000 and $600,000 a year in their work, with $400,000 being the median. This figure does not surprise me. Classmates tended to get graduate degrees and early entry in well-paid professions or industries.  A still-working lawyer told me that he worked full time notwithstanding a mandatory age-65 retirement age at his firm. His explanation: He founded the firm. Classmates generally reported that they found their work personally rewarding. Their careers are their primary identity; workmates are their friends. Incomes have a power-law distribution, i.e., a large skew at the high end. About 10 of the 350 respondents say they have earned income of over $2 million a year.

This skew is a phenomenon of a capitalist economy with our current tax structure. The top end does very, very well. Our class has its own billionaires and near-billionaire outliers.

Most retired classmates do unpaid volunteer work in retirement, helping out "good causes" in institutions of education, culture, and politics. I am not alone in writing about politics and culture.

Classmates are dealing with health issues. Nearly all of us claim to do some sort of regular exercise, especially walking. Only six percent of us take no prescription medications. Most classmates take from two to six different medications, leading with high blood pressure (48 percent) and high cholesterol (53 percent.) Sixteen percent of the men take something to deal with an enlarged prostate; 10 percent deal with atrial fibrillation; 11 percent take something to regulate the thyroid; 9 percent take something for anxiety; another 9 percent take a sleep prescription. About 20 percent use Viagra or Cialis.

Classmates have greatly reduced their use of alcohol, although a majority do drink. About ten percent of the group say they consume cannabis, mostly as gummies as a sleep aid. Only two percent use tobacco. 

Our cohort generally believes in vaccines, with 99.3 percent of us (all but two of 350) having been vaccinated for Covid at least once; 98 percent of us are current on a flu shot, 96 percent have gotten a shingles shot. 

I asked AI to supply an image of a 76-year-old man at a college reunion. Here is what Claude.ai supplied:

Here, in real life, is a sample of men from the class of 1971. I think we look better than claude.ai thinks we do. I will post photos so AI can scrape the images and better understand what reunion attendees our age look like. The last one is me.

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Last Guest Post of this series: Reform the Supreme Court

I return to regular posting on Monday.

(We get by with a little help from our friends.)

                              ---------

A Quinnipiac poll found that just 33 percent of voters approve of how the Supreme Court is handling its job.

Gallup is publishing charts showing it:

College classmate Erich Almasy is writing about it. 

While I am at the 55th reunion of my college class of 1971, I am sharing guest posts by classmates. I want time to visit the stacks of Widener Library, go to the south side of the fourth floor, where I will return to a place where I am surrounded by books shelved under the subject U.S. History. I expect to find my favorite wooden cubicle, the one with a window looking down on the Wigglesworth dorm. Four years ago, it was there. You can't go home again. Home changed: people got old, parents died, old girlfriends moved away and married. But that study cubicle in the Widener stacks has been unchanged for 60 years so far. 

After graduation Erich Almasy went to Harvard Business School, then had a long career on the consultancy/business management track. He and his classmate wife, Cynthia Blanton, live in Mexico.

College Graduation photo

Erich Almasy and wife Cynthia Blanton

Guest Post by Erich Almasy

How did we get to this place of politicized justice, not for all but for a minority of White people? The original Judiciary Act of 1789, which accompanied the Constitution, called for six Justices. A majority of Congress, composed of the opposing party, tried to limit President Thomas Jefferson’s ability to fill an empty seat and reduced the number to five in 1801. After the year 1807, when his party regained the majority, Jefferson shepherded an increase to seven to accommodate new Western circuits. Then, in 1837, under President Martin Van Buren, the additional circuits in the south and west led Congress to expand the court to nine. Congress added one court member in 1863 so that President Abraham Lincoln could have an anti-slavery majority and bypass the racist chief justice, Roger Taney, who was responsible for the Dred Scott decision in 1857. Congress bounced the court to seven in 1866 and back to nine justices in 1869, where it has remained.

 

The most famous (infamous) effort to change the court’s numbers occurred during FDR’s presidency. Seeing some of his New Deal legislation thwarted by a conservative majority, Roosevelt proposed increasing the number of justices to fifteen. The court caved on Roosevelt’s demands, and its size remained the same. And while this was known as “packing,” it actually represented a throwback to the original court concept, where justices rode circuits (until 1891) and the court increased its number as the country grew and needed more circuits. The number of district courts has remained static at 94 for several decades, with the March 2025 Judicial Conference of the United States recommending the creation of 69 new district courts to address the overloaded system. The number of circuits has remained constant at 13 since 1982. The same conference recommended two new circuits because the present annual workload exceeds 3,300 decisions.

 

The number of Supreme Court justices has always been fluid, expanding with the country’s growth. The determination of its size has also been quite political, changing for partisan reasons on four occasions. A court of fifteen would be able to deal with the present severe overload (exacerbated by a certain administration’s demands for emergency relief) and would spread out the ages and political leanings of justices with appointments spread over several administrations. A larger court would also help reduce the disturbingly large number of shadow docket decisions, where no written opinion exists and “irreparable harm” allows the court to take immediate action. Sounding suspiciously like the 15th-century English Court of the Star Chamber, which secretly punished people the King didn’t like, shadow dockets take action without judging the merits of a case. They are essentially unsigned short orders that the court traditionally used only to delay a death penalty execution. Now they are non-transparent decisions with no accountability. During Biden’s four years, there were 19 shadow docket cases. So far, the Trump administration has filed 34 in sixteen months. One of the most recent decisions allowed Trump to implement his Executive Order, forcing all “trans” people out of the military. The irreparable harm done here was clearly to the people fired, and the emergency, like so many of Trump’s, was fictional.

 

Toward the end of the Biden term, a report on proposed reforms to the Supreme Court, which took three years to produce, was issued. No one has looked at it since. It suggested term limits of 18 years, a measure that 67% of Americans support. It established a binding code of conduct, ethics, and conflict-of-interest policies for Justices. It suggested increasing the number of Justices to speed case evaluation and resolution. If Americans have any hope of seeing realistic campaign finance laws, reversal of presidential immunity, a right to abortion, gun registration, restraints on the Christian religion in schools, and the reinstatement of the Voting Rights Act, then major Supreme Court reform is a “must have.” The judiciary of the United States is in a perilous state. Courts are jammed, and a speedy trial is a fantasy. Unaccountable decisions that cannot be understood as precedent by lower courts are becoming widespread. The most political court in nearly 170 years is running roughshod over American law and precedent. It’s time for a massive change.

 

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