July 13, 2021 – things have normalized enough in New York City for me to go right back to worrying about dumb stuff. What do I mean by this? 👇🏽

• Covid death rates are way down in NYC, and it’s been months since I’ve seen a refrigerated cadaver truck

• Movie theaters are open – I recently watched a Quiet Place 2 at Regal Essex

• Every single one of my friends and family members has been vaccinated

• Most people walk the streets without masks, and this is now accepted as normal

• Maskless jiu jitsu randori has been on for more than a month

• Restaurants let you enter and sit down to eat a meal, even use the bathroom

• The Park Slope Food coop is returning to member labor

• The public library lets people inside now to just sit and read books in the air conditioning

Things I am concerned with now – 7/13/2021

• Is Putin behind the shit in Haiti?

• Hordes of radicalized dumb-as-dogshit white Christian extremists running amok in America – people who are just a hair away from denying the sphericality of the Earth. It’s one thing for these goobers to cluster around the parking lots of Dairy Queen discussing how many children have been trafficked by top Clinton aides through the underground tunnels below pizza restaurants; quite another for them to be in state legislatures and the US Congress, deciding on how the internet should function or how much money to dole out to the space program.

• When will human cultures decisively fork along the basic axes of WEIRDness (eg: acceptance of the scientific method, evidence, the rule of law, liberalism, abstract versus kin-based codes of morality, etc.)?

• Extreme weather – 121° in British Columbia resulting in billions of dead shellfish, nonstop droughts and fires in the US west coast, dying of the great barrier reef, etc…

• Cultural literacy ought to be a precondition for full membership in a society. We don’t need to enforce it at gunpoint, but it should be encouraged and respected. Every American needs to be fluent in the same slim set of basic facts so that any stranger can safely assume you are not a total fucking moron. Nowadays, you can’t even reliably assume that all AMERICAN COLLEGE GRADUATES understand what a molecule is, or what is meant by the phrase when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox.

• When will there be another mass shooting?

• When will all the shit heads get vaccinated?

• When will my family and I be able to take a real vacation; one that doesn’t involve jets of cortisol coursing through our bodies? aka… does airplane travel now have no fucking redeeming qualities?

• High school is coming up for the girls

• My personal stress level is ticking up and I can’t pinpoint the cause. I’m convinced it is responsible for a measurable decrease in my aerobic fitness (according to Garmin)

• There is not much to be excited about at work – so many smart people are now gone

• Are the tiger mosquitoes going to stage a comeback this August?

• Is my upcoming coop shift going to be terrible?

• My kuzushi is shit – how bad has my judo gotten?

• Will I ever fully rehabilitate my shoulders and back? I swear, my shoulder rotation conjures the image of metal grinding against pavement

• Am I going to get my first cavity? There is something weird happening to one of my bottom teeth.

• My reading speed is garbage. I still haven’t finished Homo Deus

• Eric Adams is going to be the next mayor of NYC, and I hope he doesn’t screw stuff up

• The NY State Tax authority bastards will do anything to avoid dispensing a refund

• Am I really the only person who simultaneously supports in and believes the following…

  • High income earners should pay higher taxes

  • Corporations are not people, and should pay higher taxes

  • The US is brimming with racists who occupy all kinds of important positions, and too many people are in abject denial of that reality. The topic of bias (and its implications) should be studied and picked apart by data scientists, taught in schools, and openly discussed as an apriori feature of our brains. Bias is a feature, not a bug.

  • Devotion to political correctness is on balance, fucking terrible; and utterances like systemic racism and defund the police are opaque and unhelpful

  • People who immigrate to the US ought to be able to demonstrate that they understand and support a few basic liberal values: freedom, tolerance, etc. (the same standard should be applied to those born in the US)

  • Police departments should be de-militarized, body cameras should be the rule, and cops who violate the law should go to jail

  • Cops should be given wide latitude in the use of deadly force when shit goes down for real

  • There ought to be an inescapable 2 year minimum national service requirement for all Americans, and this should not be limited to military service.

• I am receiving strange signals from my body that Jeff Bezos must be stopped