It is no secret that California really needs significant rain, and the clock is ticking toward spring and summer fast. If you were outside yesterday, you might think summer was here already.

This year’s weather has been quite variable. There was record rainfall in October which affected the walnut harvest. November was completely dry. December brought record snowfall and significant rain to the valley. January and February have returned to the dry pattern. Great for cycling, not so good if you like to take showers or irrigate orchards.

Facebook has started doing something kind of clever in an effort to keep people clicking away. They offer you ‘memories’ of posts you made on a certain day in previous years. Here is a sample:

February 2013 looks like the beach weather we are currently enjoying while simultaneously feeling guilty for doing so and worrying about the drought. February 2019 looks like an ice age is coming and glaciers are returning to the Sierras. February 2017 looks like God decided to break his promise to Noah never to destroy the earth with a flood again.

Three Februaries, three extreme weather events. The same thing can happen in March. Years back before Facebook there was a drought ended by a ‘March Miracle’ of late season record rain and snowfall. It was a great year for the water supply and a terrible year for cherry growers. Those lazy bees just didn’t want to get their stingers wet. I don’t have any ‘Facebook Memories’ of that year, but I know our line of credit got a workout with no cherry crop to sell.

Sometimes I think that ‘professional’ educators are going out of their way to make writing a blog the easiest thing in the world. Consider:

One Connecticut school is under fire for handing out a “Pizza and Consent” assignment, where eighth-grade students were given a handout stating that pizza can be used as a “metaphor for sex,” which instructed students to list their favorite and least favorite pizza toppings “in relation to sex.”

“Here are some examples: Likes: Cheese = Kissing,” the assignment states. “Dislikes: Olives = Giving Oral,” stated the assignment given to eighth graders within the Enfield Public Schools.

“Now that you know this metaphor for sex, let’s explore your preferences! Draw and color your favorite type of pizza. What’s your favorite style of pizza? Your favorite toppings? What are your pizza no-nos? Now mirror these preferences in relation to sex!,” the assignment states.

Now if you think I am making this up, here is a picture of the pizza diagram, all ready to be topped (from below?) with sexy metaphors.

A veritable tabula rasa, a blank canvass to express the divine and disgusting aspects of human sexual behavior. Brought to you by public schools and paid for with taxpayer dollars. In 8th grade too! Grammar and writing skills and arithmetic are out, and associating erotica with mozzarella is in.

Can you believe that ‘professional’ educators created this stuff? They think The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn needs to be banned but a discussion of peccadilloes and preferences is completely appropriate.

Now eating pizza and the participating in the metaphorical activities associated with the toppings are my idea of a perfect day. When it comes to pizza, Stoker and I are in complete agreement: Pizza Guys. We get the regular crust with tomato sauce, topped with pepperoni, yellow onions, and fresh green peppers. We will sprinkle on Parmesan but never dried red pepper flakes. Other toppings are acceptable, but these are our favorites. However we would never tolerate anchovies. And pineapple is blasphemy.

When it comes to the using toppings as metaphors, I’ll just say that whatever Stoker wants, and whenever she wants it, is fine by me. I didn’t need a ‘modern’ 8th grade assignment to know that.

Last week, the Washington Post spoke with several economists who listed their ideas on how to solve the economic issues facing the nation. One idea listed for the White House to “combat inflation” was price controls. The idea was suggested by the Roosevelt Institute’s Todd Tucker, in which he argued that the time may be at hand to “destigmatize” concerns over price controls.

“To ensure that the wealthy do not bid up prices for essential items, the time is now to begin destigmatizing greater democratic control over price levels,” Tucker concluded.

You might think economists know a lot. They have complicated mathematical models and theories (Pareto Optimality, anyone?) and can be seen making predictions and proclamations on television with great confidence. They speak in a kind of code. Terms like ‘money supply’, ‘quantitative easing’, ‘deficit spending’, ‘currency fluctuation’, ‘excess demand’ and ‘the federal funds rate’ come tripping off of their tongues.

Of course the track record of these economists in predicting what is going to ensue is not so great. They can always blame this on ‘exogenous shocks’ which means that some variable that the economic model does not take into account changes suddenly and dramatically and disrupts the equations. Covid is a perfect example. But since life itself is kind of a series of exogenous shocks, the usefulness of economists is mostly a moot point.

Really, economists do not know so much. But one thing they do know is how to create a shortage. And that is for the government to set the price of a commodity or service below the ‘market price’.

What is this ‘market price? you may ask. I could get all wonky on you and speak of demand curves and supply curves and functions and marginal cost of production equaling marginal price. But since a picture is worth a thousand words, take a peak at this diagram and you’ll get the idea:

Let’s take a real world example using one of Stoker’s and my favorite commodities: Côtes du Rhône vin rouge. The typical bottle that finds its way to our Raley’s market sells for about $12. At that price Stoker and I will purchase a bottle a day, to keep the Covid away. Remember my last blog? Got to keep stocked up.

Now $12 is the free market price, balancing production and consumption. Stoker and I would pay much more, but because there are consumers who will switch to something else at a higher price, we don’t have to. Similarly, there are producers who are willing to produce the wine for less than $12, but they don’t have to accept less. The market price balances the value of the product to the last consumer with the production cost of the last producer. In Econ speak, the market clears when Price = Marginal Cost of Production = Marginal Value to Consumer.

Now let’s say that the government determines that this $12 price represents a case of the ‘wealthy‘ bidding up the price of an ‘essential item‘ and so decides to exercise ‘greater democratic control over price levels‘. They decree that henceforth the price of a bottle of Côtes du Rhône vin rouge will be a more Equitable $5. Selling it for more is now a crime.

This well intended action will have consequences. Demand will increase, because now some people who don’t want a bottle at $12 will be quite happy to pay $5 for it. And supply will fall, because only the most efficient producers will be able to make a profit at $5 per bottle.

The result of this market disruption is that the economy moves from a point of Pareto Optimality to a non Pareto Optimal point. Consumer Surplus and Producer Surplus are both reduced, and everyone is less well off (aka ‘poorer’) than they would be had the government not gotten into the price setting business. Oops, I did get a bit wonky there. Guilty as charged.

If you think gas lines, bread lines, lines at the meat counter or in the Côtes du Rhône vin rouge store are a good idea, just write your congressperson and tell them you think high prices are unfair, inequitable, and perhaps even racist. And that the government needs to set the prices at a reasonable level. Life is only fair when everyone can afford everything and we are all economically equal. Equally poor…

“Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities” (1 Tim 5:23).

The Covid Vaccines do not seem to be doing a great job of preventing people from getting Covid. I know several people who got all the shots and still got the virus. And we hear nearly every day about another celebrity or politician or sports star who has been double jabbed and boosted coming down with the virus. The latest is Elton John, who had to cancel his concert in Dallas. My friend Kent and his wife had plane tickets and hotel reservations to see the show. They were lucky that Sir Elton cancelled one day before they left.

Note I did not say that vaccines are useless. All I said is that they do not stop people from getting Covid. There are too many counterexamples to deny that is true.

Stoker and I are both double vaxxed and boosted, which may not be enough to vanquish the virus from Brumby Road. But Côtes du Rhône Vin Rouge to the rescue!

The study discovered that those who consume five or more glasses of red wine a week had a 17% lesser risk of catching the virus.

Finally a Covid prevention program I can support wholeheartedly! Five glasses a week? No problem! Let’s ‘make assurance double sure’ and just say two glasses a day to be safe. A sacrifice Stoker and I are willing to make in the fight to stop the spread.

Unfortunately, if you are an IPA type, the news is not so good:

However, the report had some bad news of pint lovers. It revealed that those who drank any amount of beer and cider were at a 28% higher risk of getting Covid.

So if you are a beer drinker, you are being as socially irresponsible as the unvaxxed or unmasked. 28% higher versus 17% lower? That is a 45% difference. I expect Dr. Fauci to hold a press conference immediately calling for a big reset in American’s drinking preferences. Do the socially responsible thing and pull a cork today…

The 1970’s were the decade that I changed the most. In January 1970 I was 14 years old and in 8th grade. Ten years later on New Year’s Eve 1979, I had just finished my first year of employment with a consulting firm in Washington DC. During those ten years I graduated high school and university. I fell in love twice and got dropped by both women, causing me much angst. But now I’m so grateful for those two, because they paved the way for Stoker and a subsequent 39 years of marital harmony.

The 1970’s were a pretty traumatic decade for our country. There was the Vietnam War. Oil boycotts and gas lines. Iranian students took hostages at our embassy, a crisis that lasted more than a year. Inflation in the US reached 15%. By the end of the decade President Carter urged us to deal with the energy crisis by putting on a sweater and lamented our “national malaise”. Good times!

The 1970’s are well behind us, but for me ‘Age 70’ is just ahead. And many of my cycling buddies have either turned 70 or will shortly. The latest is Dean, who crosses that threshold today. So yesterday 4 of us decided to join him in a 70 mile bike ride to commemorate the occasion.

We started in Linden with our fellow Stockton Bike Club members for the Jenny Lind Pancake ride. We rode to the Jenny Lind Odd Fellows Hall for their fundraising pancake breakfast. Coffee, tomato juice (Bloody Mary jokes abound) eggs, sausage or ham, and two hotcakes for $7. This is one of our favorite mid ride refuel stops for certain!

That got us to mile 20. Instead of back tracking to Linden we headed south towards Milton. The five riders who decided to ‘go long’ were Birthday Boy Dean, Kent (age 66), Bill (70+), Marlin (70+) and me (65). Kent had laid out a route which was basically the Pedaling Paths to Independence Ride backwards. That would get us to 62 miles, and we would add a short Linden loop to get to the required total.

When we got to the intersection of Hwy 26 and Duncan Road, we had 62 miles in the books. It was time for me to apply my local knowledge of the roads to get us to something close to 70 miles, but certainly over that magic number. No one wants to roll around a parking lot for 3-5 minutes to get the odometer to turn over. I did a pretty good job; we did a little loop and pulled into the Orlando’s parking lot with 70.7 miles on our Garmins.

The miles=age tradition on our birthdays gets a little more daunting each passing year, but Dean had absolutely no problem with 70, and since I’m only 65 I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to manage 66 miles come next June. I hope I have companions like these gentlemen to accompany me. No pancakes though, my birthday is at the end of the month and the Odd Fellows breakfast is the second Sunday. Can’t have everything…

From Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins:

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not.
Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm.
There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay?

Tom Robbins wrote Still Life With Woodpecker in 1980, and I read it as soon as it came out in paperback. I’m old enough to remember when the hardcover ($$$) edition came out first, and the paperback followed later when the money that could be extracted from hardcover sales became a trickle instead of a river. And e-books hadn’t even been conceived. Kindle and Amazon were decades away.

Significantly, I read it about the time Stoker and I started to date. Well before we got married. When we did get married in 1983 we set out on a journey to try to answer this ‘only one serious question’. We may not have found the exact solution, but we have made a good first approximation.

This year we celebrate our 39th anniversary, and for some reason this number seems so much larger than 38 did to me a year ago. Heavens, we are approaching 4 decades together!

Despite a pretty good track record at finding the answer to the only question that matters, I am always on the lookout for tips and techniques that could aid in promoting marital harmony. For instance, I recall this advice from Robert Heinlein’s novel Time Enough For Love (1973). His character, Lazarus Long, kept a notebook of what he learned during his long life. His succinct advice for a happy marriage: “Rub her feet”. Husbands, take my word for it, that one works.

This week Pope Francis chimed in. He says the three most important words in a marriage are the ones in the headline below. He forgot “Yes” which is what successful husbands and wives both find themselves saying a lot, even if they would rather say ‘no’.

From a Belizean street market to the Vatican, advice to answer the one serious question.

Then there was the advice from the pastor of The Living Word Church in San Pedro Town, Belize. We saw his TV sermon on the local access cable channel in our air conditioned hotel room with an ocean view. We really rough it in the tropics.

The Church still exists and they are on Facebook!

Stoker (actually this is pre-Stoker, since this was in 2004 and our tandem days were all in the future) and I were sipping Belikin Beer and listing to this wise man tell wives “The husband is gonna drink the water. If he don’t drink water on the property, he gonna go off the property. You gotta make sure he stay on the property to drink the water”. He had similar advice for the husbands, saying “If you don’t stay on the property to drink you gonna get tainted water and bring it home to the wife and your family and the property and poison the well”. We were pretty sure he wasn’t talking about hydration…

Lazarus Long, Pope Francis and the Belizean pastor have all offered good advice. And Stoker and I are going to try to keep finding the answer to the one serious question. Here is one possibility: Get a pizza to go from Pizza Guys. When I pick it up and choose the flavor of the free ice cream that comes with it, I pick Stoker’s favorite. When she picks up the pizza she chooses my favorite flavor. Select your spouse’s favorite flavor, and that will make love stay…

Someone suggested that I drop the subject of masks. I certainly aim to please my 10 readers, so how about opera? The one Jeopardy category I occasionally do well at. We’ll start with Un Ballo in Maschera…

Only kidding folks. There was a time before we started tandem riding that Stoker and I spent quite a few nights at the opera. And afternoons too.

My first exposure to opera came from the 1980’s film Amadeus. Prior to that all I knew about the subject was from a Marx Brothers’ film and the famous sports quote attributed to NBA coach Dick Motta; “The opera isn’t over until the fat lady sings”. Sexist, weightist, and body shaming by today’s wokeness standards of course.

Amadeus piqued my interest, and the next step was to see a television production of Don Giovanni on PBS. That hooked me. We went to see a our first live performance, a production of Cosi Fan Tutte by Townsend Opera Players (TOPS), a local company in Modesto. Cosi has what I still think is the most beautiful music of any opera.

It is hard to believe how much Stoker and I got into this. We were season ticket holders and fairly big donors for TOPS. Ditto for Stockton Opera. I was even on the TOPS Board of Directors for a while. We also bought season tickets to Sacramento Opera. We bought tickets to 4 operas each year at War Memorial to see the The San Francisco Opera, a world famous company. We even took consecutive summer vacations in Santa Fe to attend a couple of performances by Santa Fe Opera in their spectacular outdoor theater.

When we were going to attend an opera I was unfamiliar with, I would read the story and pay attention to the characters before the show. At a production of Idomeneo in Santa Fe, I came to realize not everyone did the same thing. There is a moment of high drama in the last act where Ilia intervenes to offer herself for sacrifice to the Gods instead of Idomeneo. Her dramatic entrance, throwing herself on the sacrificial altar, was met with laughter from the audience. I cringed.

We drifted away from opera. First we stopped going to SF, because it was too much hassle. I got more into cycling which made Sunday Matinees less attractive because I wanted to do club rides most weekends. And evening performances never ended before 11 pm, which seemed much later than it did when we were in our early 40’s.

But what really put me off was a performance of Cosi in Sacramento. Cosi has wonderful music, as I said. It is also a ‘cautionary tale told with humor’ about men and women, and how one lover is interchangeable with another. But the director of this production decided to turn it into something resembling an episode of the TV show ‘Friends’. This is a PG rated blog, so all I will say is that a lot of the singing took place while kneeling and looking at someone’s waistline.

Socially staid types like me have to be tolerant if we are to enjoy the beautiful music and moving stories of opera, since most of the attendees are of a more liberal mindset. I left my politics, which are not left, at home. But I decided that this excessively lurid treatment of Cosi was too much. So our last live opera was the same as our first. As Mimi sings in Act III of La Boheme, “Addio, senza rancor“.

On my first visit to Raley’s since Newsom’s new mask mandate, the store policy was clear. Not just a small sign posted on the door either; someone with very good chalk calligraphy skills had been at work.

Remember the TV commercial you see every holiday season “Clap on (clap clap), Clap off (clap off), The Clapper! ? Reminds me of the masking situation…

Compliance in Raley’s was pretty good. Only a few bare faces, the usual 20% with mouths covered but nostrils open, and the rest of us, including me, completely covered. Notice I do not say ‘protected’.

My next trip into a grocery was at Orlando’s in Linden. Our bike club ride stopped there on Sunday after riding 20 miles from Lodi into the south east wind. Orlando’s is only about 12 miles from my Morada Raley’s.

If Orlando’s had a ‘Masks on” sign posted it was in very small print. But I covered my face anyway and walked in. It was a shock. There were two clerks, both all smiles greeting customers. I could see their smiles! I looked around and could find nary a customer with any face covering anywhere.

Except for one of my fellow riders, who not only was masked up but was sporting a real N95 medical version. I’m not really great friends with this rider, but I don’t want to have any unnecessary arguments in person. So I stayed masked up, risking ridicule from the locals who were ignoring the mandate.

The masked rider paid for his coffee and went outside as I was pouring my coffee and choosing my sandwich. With the possibility of being nagged by the masked man gone, I opted to join the rest of the Linden residents and take off my mask and smile at the clerk who was in such a good mood.

Our little group of brave riders, risking wind and rain predicted for early afternoon, sat together outside in a covered patio, unmasked, sipping coffee and eating energy bars (I had a sandwich instead). I seriously doubt the virus was less a menace where we were than inside the store. If it was actually any kind of menace in either place. But mask protocol/mandate says masks on inside except when eating/drinking, while masks off outside is okay. Patio qualifies as ‘outside’, methinks.

This is how I have chosen to navigate mask-etiquette situations for now. Take my cues from what the people around me are doing and do likewise. Go thou and…

Facebook can be like staring at the aftermath of a car crash. You are horrified at the tragic scene but you can’t look away…

Still there are parts of FB I really like. Kid pictures, pet pictures, food pictures, travel pictures. There is a handy feature to block posts from political promoters, so you only have to see nonsense from groups like “People for Left Handed Rights and Right Handed Lefts” only once. And to my FB friends, if you are sharing posts from these types of hucksters, let me ask why? And assure you no one cares what the “Society for Chihuahua Size Equity” thinks about anything.

Recently FB has started reminding me that “I have memories” and then shows me posts I put on my timeline on this date in previous years. There is a certain melancholy aspect to this. Stoker and I are almost always smiling, which you can see because we are not wearing masks. And we are often far from home, in France or on a cruise or a cross country train trip, which isn’t happening now either.

But a couple of my FB friends, who are real life friends too, have pushed the envelope by posting scatological information:

I’m not quite sure why these two, who I have allowed to remain anonymous, decided to publicize their porcelain, but they did. Should I post pictures of the next septic tank pumping on Brumby Road? Or blog about it? I admit I will do almost anything to attract readers and followers and ‘likes’. But Stoker tells me to make poopsie if I must, but leave her out of it…

Economics was given the moniker “The Dismal Science” by Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle was said to have been inspired by T. R. Malthus’ gloomy prediction that population would always grow faster than food, dooming mankind to unending poverty and hardship. The accuracy of this prediction is typical of economic forecasts to this very day.

John Maynard Keynes famous economist and deficit spending advocate, opined that “In the long run we are all dead”. Certainly true, and a cheery thought to consider this holiday season. Feeling a little too good celebrating with loved ones? Keynes can fix that.

Food shortages don’t seem to be much of a problem, but rising prices, aka “Inflation” are much in the news these days. Here is a graph of the CPI for the last 60 years.

Since July the CPI has been running up about 5 to 7% year over year. This is much higher than the relatively price stable years from 1990 to 2021, but it pales in comparison to the inflation experienced in the US from 1974 until 1984. For a time in 1979 the US had inflation approaching 15%, which is getting close to hyperinflation levels. See Germany post WW1, when workers actually got paid twice a day so they could go out and spend the money before it became even more worthless. People needed wheelbarrows of currency simply to try to purchase bread.

Those were great times, from 1974 to 1980. Gas lines and oil embargoes and price controls. Mortgage rates got to 19% or so. That is not a misprint. Money market funds and short term Treasuries were yielding about 10%, but the purchasing power of your investment was still going backwards.. Unemployment was high, housing prices soared, and a new economic term entered the lexicon, “Stagflation”. The famous Phillips Curve shifted all over the place, and the dismal science was living up to its reputation.

Of course, everyone thinks that the CPI significantly understates the ‘cost of living’. Mostly because right now gasoline and heating oil and natural gas and electricity are all more than 30% higher than last year. Grocery prices are up almost as much. Medicare Part B premiums are going up 14.5% in 2022, and while I haven’t seen the cost of my supplemental policy yet I imagine it will go up at least that much. Somebody has got to pay for all these free COVID tests and vaccines.

Economists have plenty of explanations for why inflation occurs, but none of them work unless there is some underlying increase in the money supply. Here is the accounting identity that becomes a theory with a few assumptions. And you know what they say happens when you assume something…

Central to monetarism is the equation MV = PQ. … The equation suggests that if V is constant and M is increasing, there must be an increase in either Q or P. Accordingly, monetary policymakers can control inflation by allowing the money supply (M) to grow no faster than the desired rate of economic growth 

Now what happened in the United States, and indeed in most developed economies, is that when the pandemic hit and businesses and economic activity were shut down, governments ‘created money’ (don’t get me started on that one, we’ll be taking Gold Standard next) to try to stave off a depression. Didn’t work; I’ve been depressed since this thing started and it’s getting worse.

M went up. A lot. Remember those $1500 deposits that showed up in your checking accounts? There was lots of money being magically created and distributed. You could even apply for funeral cost assistance if the victim died from COVID! See my blog article https://freehtt.org/2021/05/05/death-discrimination/

All this created money was going to chase a relatively fixed amount of goods and services. In the short run (not the fatal long run) the supply of goods and services is pretty much fixed. It takes time to adjust production schedules and logistics and deliveries. Assuming Q fixed and V constant, then M goes up and so does P. Presto, inflation!

I have no idea if inflation is going to continue or not. The Federal Reserve has indicated they are going to raise short term interest rates 2 or 3 times next year to try to slow the growth of the money supple and price inflation to the ‘healthy’ level of 2-3%. But if you are going to the gas station or grocery store, brace yourself.