The French Connection

Just for fun, or because I was avoiding weeding my back flower beds, I got a free trial of ancestry.com and started to trace my roots. I found the usual suspects, a Bavarian, probably a farmer, the English lake country people who were probably third or fourth sons of some wealthy landowner, lots of people from Ireland, both northern and the bogs of the middle. There was one ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary war and a couple who were drafted by the Union to fight in the civil war. They settled in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Chicago when those places were largely wilderness or trading posts. Then I stumbled across the unexpected.

We have a French connection on my paternal grandmother’s side. I started tapping back and back. They were from Reims and left France in about 1793. Huh. That’s interesting. Wasn’t that about time the Terror was sweeping through the country taking out the nobility, Catholic clergy and the elites? Yes, yes it was.

Reims was especially hard hit by the Terror. It is the city where French kings were coronated. It has one of the most magnificent cathedrals in Europe. And it had a thriving industry in weaving.

I followed up on the trail of the French branch and how they got to America. My many greats grandmother was about 18 when she fled France. Like many emigres who made it out during that time, her family probably wasn’t poor. England opened its doors to them with the aliens act. Many ended up in Londonderry Ireland which also prospered in weaving. She met an Irish man who she married and they landed in the US shortly thereafter. In those days, Pennsylvania was still mostly wilderness. They settled in Fayette county, PA, named after the Marquis de Lafayette.

I did a little more digging for what happened to French emigres who fled the French Revolution. It turns out that they were initially supportive of the revolution. Many of them preferred a constitutional monarchy like the English had instead of the estates system and the remnants of feudalism.

The French emigres included a lot of snooty intellectuals who came to America because… I don’t know, they could? It doesn’t seem like they liked us very much. Apparently, they thought we were, unsophisticated people driven by trade and fascinated by foreigners. They in turn, kept to themselves with the French especially experiencing something like PTSD combined with an intense longing for home. This passage in a diary got my attention by the use of one word that described the Americans they met- mercantile:

The mercantile spirit, so widespread, inevitably breeds selfishness; it isolates the person in its grip, leaving them neither the taste nor the time for society. Consequently, what we call "society" does not exist in this city. (…..) Such is the true state of society in Philadelphia: grand dinners and grand tea parties for arrivals from Europe—English, French, and foreigners of every country, class, and character: philosophers, priests, men of letters, princes, tooth-pullers, wits, and fools alike. (1798, 6: 326)

Yep, we weren’t picky about what they were as long as they were foreign, like exotic birds singing a different song.

That word- mercantile. It sounds like I should know what it means. At first I think of a man who sells dry goods, notions and other things in a general store. I get the feeling of ordinariness tending to his business, probably decent and honest but lacking in social graces.

But it turns out the French were describing an economic system. Here’s the AI generated description:

Mercantilism is an economic system from the 16th to the 18th century where governments tried to make their countries rich and powerful by maximizing exports and minimizing imports. [1, 2, 3]

Key Principles

• Favorable Balance of Trade: Nations tried to sell more goods to other countries than they bought, creating a trade surplus.
• Accumulation of Bullion: Wealth was measured in gold and silver reserves.
• Zero-Sum Game: People believed the world’s total wealth was fixed, meaning one country could only grow rich by making another country poorer.
• Colonial Exploitation: Colonies provided cheap raw materials to the mother country and served as captive markets to buy finished goods. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Historical Context and Impact

• Dominant Powers: Practiced heavily by Western European nations like Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal.
• Government Control: States used high tariffs, trade monopolies (like the British Navigation Acts), and subsidies to protect local industries.
• Conflict: The fierce competition for resources and trade routes often sparked wars and fueled the transatlantic slave trade. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Decline

• Critique: Thinkers like Adam Smith argued that trade is a two-way street and that wealth can grow through free markets and labor rather than government hoarding.
• Shift: It faded in the late 18th century as classical liberalism and laissez-faire capitalism took over. [1, 2, 3, 4]

I can take the classical liberalism and leave the laissez-faire capitalism, merci beaucoup.

But doesn’t that description sound like Trump economics? Is Venezuela now a “colony” of the US? Is that why Trump wants to control Canada?

I don’t know. Just making connections.

Or maybe my beneficial TDS comes from my condescending and disdainful French ancestors who thought Americans were a bunch of hicks obsessed with accumulating money.

Anyway, it’s time to cancel the subscription. Ancestry had records of my French connections going back to Reims in 1695 and farther back than that. But it wanted a stepped up luxury subscription to comb through the French archives in order for me to see them. AI said I could probably comb those French archives for free.

{{Gallic shrug}}

Friday Afternoon Brain Dump

Did you ever get deep in the weeds on a problem on Friday afternoon and realize you there’s no one else on the floor and you’re still typing away on your laptop?

It’s just me, right?

Dang, hard to switch it off and it may have just been fantasia.

On the bus music:

Dune, Eric Cline, Iran

I read Dune in the 80s, right about the time the first movie came out. I liked it ok but I wasn’t compelled to read beyond the first book. I felt Frank Herbert had made his point.

What is that point?

Spice is so much more than you think it is even as a direct analogy. Check this out.

Democrats think that??

Take a look at this chunk from the Washington Post:

Let’s get this out of the way up front. This is a dumb poll that nobody but Trump would ask for.

What I want to know is who is answering this poll? What kind of Democrat? How old are they? 12? At grandma’s house using her relic landline?

Confession: I don’t have a subscription to WAPO anymore and I don’t feel like looking it up in Apple News when I’ve got more important things for my beautiful mind to think about.

Here’s my best logical guess as to what these particular Democrats were thinking:

Term 1, with its two impeachments and an insurrection, was like losing one eye.

Term 2 is like losing the other one.

Was it better when we had only one eye? Yes, yes it was. But if anyone had asked me on January 6 2021 what I thought about Trump Term 1 I would have said:

“I just want my eye back”

Spain, Spain, Bacon, and Spain

If you watch this video to the end, you’ll get it. This is a video of Timothy Snyder giving a lecture on Ukraine at fhe University of Toronto, the Munk school of global affairs and public policy. In this lecture, Snyder tells the history of Ukraine going back to the Stone Age (there will be a mastodon question on the test). He tells a story of richness and migration and ties it all together elegantly at the end. You will be convinced.

These are the kinds of lectures I loved. Snyder is a master story teller, he relates and interacts with his audience, and he tells what sound a lot like dad jokes.

You can skip the first 10 minutes or so of Snyder giving class schedule updates. Then sit back and listen to the fascinating history of Ukraine and realize how much of our own culture we owe to it.

Thots

In the past couple of weeks, the Trump administration has banned the sale of foreign robot vacuums and drones.

Is it because they can be used to spy on US citizens? To do what, exactly?

Or his he thinking that they can be used as weapons?

That last one is curious because since the Ukrainian war began, I’ve been wondering how easy it would be to turn things like robot vacuums into lethal weapons. I’m using MINE for vacuuming floors, thank you very much.

But how small could you make them? Could you make them so small they would be indistinguishable from insects like palmetto bugs? And when all the insects got close enough to each other, could they do quantum sensing and become aggregate explosives?

Not that I would know how to do this but I’m wondering if maybe the Iranians do. Or maybe Trump himself if he wanted to stage a terrorist attack.

These are the things I think about between work and Jane Austen. Just pondering what you’re pondering… on the bus or shopping at Aldi’s. As one does.

It’s up to Gen Jones now.

We’re the generation between Boomers and Gen X. We hate being included with the Boomers because our cultural and financial experiences are uniquely different.

We missed the summer of love, the Vietnam war (well, we saw it on TV with Walter Cronkite as children), the gendered curriculum in middle school and high school passed us by, abortion was always an option for us, college was a realistic goal for anyone who wanted to go. We played on the streets until the lights came on, we rode our bikes all over town and into the woods, we walked to school. We used rotary telephones and kinda knew how to use a paper map. We were the tailing edge of the Wonder Years. The protests were over by the time we knew what they were for.

The thing about being Gen Jones is like being the younger child in a family with a Golden Child. They get all the attention, the nice stuff, the better jobs, pensions. We bought their starter homes with interest rates of 8% or more and were house poor longer.

We were just starting university when Reagan descended upon us and told those of us from lower class families that government had no obligation to help us get through college. He cut us loose to grab whatever financial help remained. He raised a surplus tax on us for our social security at the very second we got jobs after the Reagan recession and then proceeded to cut every governmental program we might have benefitted from. It’s been death by 1000 cuts ever since.

But we still remember eating our Cheerios before school watching NASA launch another Apollo rocket into space. That was when WE owned the space agency and the patents that OUR scientists invented.

We were young adults when we used the first computers at work. (They were Apples in my case with the flying toaster screen saver, followed by Microsoft everything and Unix, sorry, Linux) We wrote the first webpages, without an editor. Yeah, try that, zoomers. We were the first ones to use ftp to query the soda machine in one of the CMU buildings to see how cold the Cokes were. We were miles away from. It was just fun.

Our experiences have been a lot like the generations that came after us. We are equally screwed. We got shafted by recession after recession and miserable raises and the introduction of meaningless, predetermined performance evaluations. We were the first generation that was forced to put our retirement savings in a global casino. Some of us lost that money and our careers in the Great Recession of 2008 and for years after that. Some of us never recovered.

Now, we are the first generation about to lose the one thing Reagan promised would be there if we paid a little more in taxes every paycheck- social security.

So, we had the best that America had to offer in our childhoods and government really was there to help us with school supplies and accessible Pell grants and cheap student loans even as tuition started to rise steeply while we were still in college and years of student loan payments lay before us. Our futures looked good anyway. The war ended, the oil shocks began but we were assured that by the time we got to now, there would be solutions for peak oil and we’d all have cheap solar panels on our houses like the White House did until Reagan came in and tore it all down.

But as long as we still have the working memory of the before time, we can and should work to bring it back.

Walk to work music:

Best Weekend Quote, August 9, 2026

Sky News to Abdul El-Sayed:

Q – “Trump says you’re full of shit.

Abdul El-Sayed: At least I don’t let mine go in the middle of the Oval Office.”

There’s a whole lot more where that came from at Ron Filipkowski’s Substack Post. Yes, indeedy, these Democratic candidates can be taught. 🤩

********************

Hey, I’m just chillin’ lately, pulling weeds and planning a kitchen refresh. Go outside and play. Summer doesn’t last forever and if anything truly important happens, the civic alerts and sirens will go off.

No matter what, we will vote the Republicans out of office in November and Donald Trump’s ass will be toast. Keep your eyes on the prize.

James Carville loses his mind

Or old man shakes fist at cloud.

I don’t know what’s got into him but im very disappointed in the way he’s carrying on over Abdul El-Sayed’s primary win. For godssakes it’s just one guy. Sure it’s an important senate seat but Carville can’t seem to read the room.

Americans are sick and tired of feeling like a crop that billionaires are constantly harvesting. If you’re working class, you get the impression that it’s their money now and they’re giving you an allowance that they have determined is sufficient to live on and no amount of “hard work” is enough for them.

I just read a job posting that had on the bottom of it a paragraph that stated that this was an “at will” job and the employer not only had the right to terminate your employment under circumstances convenient to it but it also had the right to change your compensation based on whatever criteria. That’s a new one. You get a job, you move your family, your spouse may have to change employers and you find housing you can afford based on your acceptance letter. Then they pull the rug from under you and cut your pay because… what, exactly? It doesn’t say but I’m going to guess that you will have had to be born gifted with exactly the skills they are looking for and never have to call in sick or unexpectedly from home for any reason when you’re expected to come to the office 5days /week.

That’s how insane life has gotten in the working world. Your life and paycheck are at the will of a crazy employer. I won’t say what corporation this is in Pittsburgh but it has a reputation of chewing through employees before this insane posting and regrettably, fhe other employers here follow its example.

This is forcing precariousness on even more Americans. It’s not just the outrageous amount of money we pay for literally everything, it’s that someone else is deciding what you can do with the tiny amount of money left over. Well, we know the answer to this. Obviously, you save it. Save until you can’t do anything else because you will be blamed if you end up too poor to retire no matter what your life circumstances.

And the biggest kick in the teeth lately is all that tariff money, $100 billion of it that was collected as a tax from consumers by businesses who were forced to pay the tariff up front, well that money isn’t going back to consumers who are now paying higher prices regardless of whether the tariff has been rescinded. No, it’s going back to the businesses who already collected the money from us. So, we are getting dinged at one end while businesses walk away with getting double their money.

James Carville can’t put all of the blame on Republicans. It can’t go on that Americans have to take this sh*t from one party and when the other party takes over it either doesn’t aggressively enforce the rule of law (Biden) or doesn’t aggressively protect the livelihoods of Americans (Obama).

Enough of the compulsive bipartisanship that only goes one way. Enough of the centrism. These days, the political parties have been pulled so far to the right that to get back to the center, you would have to go all the way back to Franklin D Roosevelt.

Carville KNOWS this. So why is he throwing a tantrum that these Democrats are embracing socialism? The country has been tending that way for about 20 years but always have to bow to these student body president Democrats.

A couple of weeks ago, Elisa Slotkin, the OTHER Senator from Michigan, put out a short video on YouTube about a bill she wanted passed that would protect the auto industry from cheap foreign EVs. And you know, I could maybe get behind this if the American auto industry hadn’t decided to stop making American EV’s a year after Trump came back into office. Slotkin isn’t thinking about the consumer who are now stuck paying $40k for a car that they don’t completely own anymore (you have to subscribe to use you heated seats). There is no resiliency into the system in case of an oil shock and no choice for Americans who actually believe in climate change. Slotkin thinks she’s doing us all a favor because we’ve protected Ford and GM from having to take risks and evolve.

THAT’S the kind of Democrat who is dragging us all down, James. It’s not the obvious flakes like Fetterman whose stroke and AIPAC money is scrambling his brains. Yes, he’s a problem but the Democrats have always had a spoiler in its midst. The bigger problem is the Democrats who reflexively do the Republicans’ bidding and act like they’re doing us favors.

Don’t even get me started on Obama’s legacy and all of the things that weren’t on his legislative agenda once he was bought by Wall Street.

We can’t go on like this, James. It’s unsustainable. We’ve had enough of being fleeced, shaken down, trampled on and insulted by rich old men and tech bros.

So, get a grip. One DSA senator isn’t going to cause the world order to collapse. The idiot in the White House and his sycophants from both parties are going to do that.

Would I prefer that they call themselves something like the Four Freedoms coalition in the Democratic Party? Yes. It would have been the same damn thing as Democratic Socialism but it has precedent in America.

Now, go read a book or watch a Disney movie and calm down.

What about the rest of Trump’s supporters?

Check out this video by Lucas Bean about how MAGA voters think like children.

Let’s try to differentiate between the MAGA voters who indulge in perversity, that is doing the unexpected, socially disruptive, oppositional, or contrarian mostly to get a rise out of people. Perversity could mean something illegal but we’re not referring to that not are we talking about breaking the rules, thinking outside the box in art or innovation, for example.

So hardcore MAGA voters are perverse. I think we’ve been looking for a way to differentiate them and that fits for me in explaining the “do or die, Trump all the way he can do whatever he wants because it pisses off the libs and I want to get away with saying what I’m really thinking, libs will be dominated, Stephen miller is my guru” MAGA voters. They’re the resistant 30%.

What I think the video is referring to above is not that hardcore MAGA doesn’t think like children but the casual MAGA or Trump voters do. This tracks with my own personal experience growing up in a religious cult and my observations on the scapegoating mechanism.

(IYKYK)

In the cult I was raised in, materials, talks and assemblies were conducted in a way that a fourth grader could understand them. In fact, some of the publications were used in talks where there is a question from the speaker and the answer is in the footnotes of the page they are on. So, if you can read at a fourth grade level, you could always ALWAYS get the answer right. There is praise for getting the answer right in a public setting.

Everything is simple. The end of the world is coming, you need to get off the fence, here are the rules you need to follow, the world outside our group is bad, associating with people in the world is bad, higher education will stumble you, step out of line and you will be obliterated for eternity.

Simple. Stick to that and you’ll be fine.

In the video, Lucas Bean explains that it is crucial for people in movements like MAGA to not think abstractly. The rhetoric must be kept very simple and childlike. This is not because the people who join MAGA are not able to think abstractly. It’s because they are too lazy to do it. They want someone else to do their thinking for them. So accepting simple explanations for why they are struggling to make ends meet, for example, is just easier.

When MAGA voters in a study are forced to think abstractly, they are capable of shifting their political beliefs. But abstract thinking is hard to maintain if you’re not already disciplined to do that.

That’s why Trump loves the poorly educated and why fundamentalist cults don’t like their members to go to college. Higher education trains people in abstract thinking. Do it enough and you become resistant to simple slogans that will ruin your life and your country’s reputation.

PSA of the day: if I were a casual Trump supporter and starting to feel confused and disappointed by Trump, I’d hang out more with my lib friends and family members and stay off social media and Fox News and other Trump friendly media until the midterms are over. Trump’s media machine knows you are susceptible to simple statements, it has profiled how you think, it knows how to trick you and it will target you to make you confused. Your lib friends will just talk you to death but will not hurt you.