Mohamed Bouazizi, Pierre Damas Bel

Yesterday, Pierre Damas Bel jumped in front of a truck and died. He was 20 years old. He was a student at Wright State University, an honor student in high school, a soccer player and in ROTC. Any one of us parents would be proud to know him.

He was also Hatian, a target of this administration. He came here with Temporary Protected Status. Trump wanted to send these Haitians back to Haiti. The US Supreme Court gave him its blessing.

He was forced to wear a gps ankle bracelet. This kid, the least likely person to need one or have a violent criminal record, couldn’t play soccer with the gps boot on. And he couldn’t wear his new ROTC uniform. He was bullied relentlessly by his classmates who were likely from MAGA families.

I have two quotes to ponder today:

This is what we are up against. This is what the casual Trump voter didn’t understand.

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

O’Brien’s monologue, 1984.

But we don’t know the end of our story.

“‘Despair, or folly?’ said Gandalf. ‘It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy!’”

A 20 year old, no matter which country he’s from, should never give in to despair. You do not know what your future holds.

Don’t forget that Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor who had his wares confiscated by government officials, set himself on fire to protest the autocratic regime in Tunisia. He was 26 years old when he self-immolated and died on January 4, 2011. On January 14, 2011, the President of Tunisia, Zin El Abedine ben Ali stepped down. A lot happened in 10 days.

Dolly: Our Best American

I was in an elevator at work when I heard about Dolly. She had big hair, bodacious ta-tas and lots of eyeliner, she said, because all the fancy girls in the nearest town were like that. It wasn’t until later that she realized that those ladies were probably prostitutes. By then, the look was who she was, not what she did.

She had a lovely soprano and a gift for songwriting. I suspect that’s where most of her wealth came from. Think about how many times Whitney Houston sang “I Will Always Love You”. Dolly wrote that. Or 9 to 5, she wrote that.

I thought about the best song as a tribute to Dolly who said, “Daddy was Republican, Mama was a Democrat, and I’m a hypocrite.” But Dolly didn’t need a party affiliation to sing about her roots or her love for people. She helped give us the Moderna vaccine. That right there is a testament to her intelligence, curiosity and love of humanity. It probably also made her incredibly rich but she gave her money away instead of hoarding it. Moderation in all things is what Dolly seemed to be about. Except for her body maintenance. Honestly, I had no idea she was 80.

She was one of Americas best exports as shown in this brief video of her singing “Coat of Many Colors” in a pub in Ireland. Odd that she chose this song from out of all her hits but it exemplifies what a little girl in Appalachia loved best and how all people should be treated with dignity and respect no matter who they are or how poor they may be.

Here’s the short version.

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. 🤩

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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.