Let me pause here to acknowledge that Peckham did nothing wrong. They tried to warn their customers about the potential of fraud.

Taflan basically wanted me to know that he was pretty sure what it was that I was looking for and that I probably wasn’t interested in making a lot of unnecessary work. Which I wasn’t. I let him know that I filed a broad request because I had an experience in FOILing the town of Warrensburg in which they denied my request in what I considered a “pedantic and argumentative” fashion. I let him know that I had re-filed a more broad request with Warrensburg which returned a copy of the warning letter from Peckham sent to the Water and Sewer Dept, but that I suspected there might have been another warning sent to Supervisor Kevin Geraghty that was not returned with the FOIL results. Which seemed curious.

I realize I am just starting out and I’m already in the weeds and you probably have no idea what is going on. Quick recap: on July 21, 2025 Peckham Materials (which is a supplier of paving materials) sent a letter warning of a potential phishing scam to all of its customers. 6 months later Warren County fell victim to the exact sort of scam Peckham warned about in 2 transactions, one for $1.2+ million and the other for $2.1+ million. $3.3 million lost, and 9 months later $2.1 million of public funds has yet to be recovered. So this is serious.

The finger pointing on blame started very quickly. An excerpt from a story reported Aaron Shellow-Levine of WAMC on January 9, 2026:

[County Treasurer] Norton says a number of county personnel, including Geraghty and the county’s Public Works Department, received notice in July that there had been attempts to impersonate Peckham Industries to defraud other customers.

Norton says, therefore, with proper communication between county departments and officials, her office could have avoided the scam.

“And that fraud alert that they got should have alerted them. Again, I’m not saying that this department is not without a portion of the opportunity but it’s from the top to the bottom,” said Norton.

Geraghty says he never saw any notification of prior fraud.

“I didn’t know anything about this. I wasn’t told about it I hadn’t read this email until the 24th of December. And that’s why I get a bit excited because [Norton] is indicating that I had it. I didn’t have it. My secretary received something from Peckham and she didn’t share it with me — which we wouldn’t because I don’t write the bills, I don’t handle the bills here,” said Geraghty.

Warrensburg Supervisor Geraghty, Chairman of the County Board of Supervisors made an interesting claim - that he didn’t “have” the Peckham warning letter, that his secretary “received something.” If that is true then the overly broad FOIL I filed with the town of Warrensburg did not return that email warning. Which is curious, because not returning it (if it existed as Geraghty claims) would be a crime of some sort.

At the very least Supervisor Geraghty is pointing to a serious failure of oversight within his administration. A failure to properly supervise. He is being paid to supervise in Warrensburg, he is being paid to supervise at the county, and he is being paid extra as chair of the board of supervisors. And yet, Geraghty’s comments above amount to saying “I didn’t know nuthin, and I ain’t responsible for nuthin.”

But he should have known. A lot of people should have known.

I haven’t gone through all of the emails returned by my most recent FOIL but it seems there were at least 2 received by the county. Other reporting has indicated there were 3. Which is not a large number.

That is exactly the point.

The county DPW was warned on July 21, 2025. It appears from my cursory review that a senior account clerk received the warning and forwarded it to the DPW head Kevin Hajos. So far so good. But then I don’t see a lot of emails from Hajos making sure other departments, such as the county treasurer who ultimately pays the bills, was warned. [Important correction 11:17 am: the account clerk apparently DID NOT forward the email to Hajos until AFTER the fraud was perpetrated. I regret the error. That said, the clerk DID NOT forward a very important piece of information to her supervisor, to the county administrator, or the treasurer’s office as far as I can tell] Of the 800 emails concerning Peckham I’m not seeing a lot of internal emails between July 21 and December when the actual fraud occurred.

Maybe my FOIL wasn’t broad enough to pick them up.

Some people might say that out of 800 emails a few warning letters about potential fraud could easily get lost. I am not one of those people. I think the opposite is the case. Clearly these are not 800 frivolous emails sending out daily jokes and funny cartoons. These are 800 emails with important information concerning invoices and documenting quantities and timesheets of employees. Among this general accounting information a warning letter from a major vendor should have stood out.

It appears to me that there was a systemic failure of government within some towns and within the county government. Treasurer Norton has gotten a lot of the blame and she deserves it. But so far she seems to be the only one accepting any responsibility for the general failure:

“And that fraud alert that they got should have alerted them. Again, I’m not saying that this department is not without a portion of the opportunity [to prevent the fraud] but it’s from the top to the bottom,” said Norton.

The whole point of a Supervisor form of government is that the supervisors of towns supposedly know the granular detail of town government and bring that information to the county which then benefits from their expertise. But this event shows that sometimes the opposite happens, that sloppy leadership at the town level can translate to sloppy leadership at the county level.

Hey! If I haven’t mentioned it before, I’m running for County Supervisor, Queensbury. Most people don’t even know what a county supervisor is, or why Queensbury has 4 of them other than the town supervisor. It’s because Queensbury has 45% of the county population that we get 25% of the representatives on the county board of supervisors. Those numbers are not typos. If you think it makes no sense, congratulations! You are paying attention.

Running for county supervisor is not one of my bucket list items, but clearly Warren County needs change.

Republicans keep telling me that they are the party of personal responsibility, but in my experience with local government that is simply not the case. Republicans have controlled the town and county governments around here for decades. They tell you that they are going to keep your taxes low, then they do things like give themselves a 31% pay raise and vote yes on a budget that raises county taxes 12.8%.

They never take personal responsibility for raising taxes. They always blame something else, someone else, “Albany,” “the Governor” (if the Governor is a Democrat), “Washington” (if the president is a Democrat).

And when they lose $3.3 million in public funds to a phishing scheme, or they hire a tourism director who quits within a few months because in his words he was lied to from the very start, or they vote for $3 million for a tourism promotion that was an utter failure, nobody takes personal responsibility for the failure. They are the good old boys doing good old boys stuff.

On the other hand, I still believe in the power of government to do good, to improve people’s lives, to leave the world a better place for the next generation.

I’m not one of the good old boys. I don’t have fantasies of strangling government in a bathtub. I want government to work.

I need help in getting elected. If you know any Queensbury voters I would appreciate you suggesting they vote for me.

And if you would like to make a small donation to help me get my message out you can mail a donation to:

Mike Parwana for County Supervisor, 137 West Mountain Rd, Queensbury, NY, 12804

I know, old school.

Thank you!

The email from Taflan if you’re curious.

Not true.

First, I said illegitimate inauguration. I’ll settle that before going further. The plain text of the Constitution in Article II, Section One, Clause 8 specifies:

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:— "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

The plain fact is that Donald Trump violated that oath on January 6th, 2021 and therefore cannot legitimately hold any public office whatsoever, nevermind the chief executive of the whole country. Nothing he has done since the inauguration is legitimate governance. I do not care what lawyer, judge, or justice you want to consult, the Constitution is clear and anyone who denies this plain fact is complicit with a rogue regime in violation of the intent of the folks who wrote it.

So we are Under Occupation.

Under occupation suggests a form of warfare. There is no doubt that we are occupied by an authoritarian regime willing to use violence against us. Use your eyes, look at ICE, the American Brown Shirts. A war is engaged against us, a sweeping war that affects us even in the most trivial activities of our daily life.

Here you need to stop and read George Orwell’s 1984 before finishing this post.

When you are under occupation you need to know who to trust. You can’t trust Google. Not anymore.

Like under Hitler, like under Stalin, like under Mao fear drives people who pretend in their own minds to not be evil to be evil.

Of course, Google isn’t a person, but it is run by people, people who have achieved vast sums of wealth, the kind of wealth that most of us cannot imagine, and the kind of wealth that most of us think would protect us from the harm an illegitimate but authoritarian leader might try to use against us. But those people, the people at Google, know about Jack Ma. Jack Ma was a billionaire, one of the richest men in the world, the founder of Alibaba, China’s version of Amazon. One day Xi Jinping, the authoritarian leader of China decided Jack had gotten too big for his britches and Jack disappeared for a long time. Perhaps the richest man in the world at the time was hauled away and wasn’t talked about. Not until he returned many many months later, over a year. After his return to the world of the seen he explained that he had been traveling. While he was traveling the Chinese state somehow acquired a majority share of his company. Jack is still very rich, but he apparently reached some accommodation that allowed him a greater degree of freedom than being disappeared.

Very rich people hate to hear those kind of stories about other very rich people. In the case of the owners of Google perhaps it robbed them of the courage to tell the truth about the Gulf of Mexico.

This is the sort of thing we call Orwellian, when people under occupation by an illegitimate regime led by violent authoritarians accept what we know to be false as fact. It’s especially sad in the case of a business that purports to provide correct information.

But that was a one-off, right? Google wouldn’t do it again, right?

Wrong. Once a coward submits they will submit again.

Meanwhile, over at Apple Maps, you can still read the truth.

Mapquest (remember Mapquest?) may be little, but they are feisty. They did not bend the knee.

I switched my search engine to Duck Duck Go a while ago, back when I began to think Google was being more evil than I could countenance. Duck Duck Go is still providing me real information.

I did a search on my DDG search bar about Google lying. The results were interesting. DDG provided a link to a Google Support page. It seems like I’m not the only one who suspects Google of lying. There were 851 other people with the same question before Google locked the replies.

More lying in the news

In the last day or so major news organizations have reported that the US will be stealing billions of barrels of oil from Venezuela. But they don’t report it that way. They say stuff like “Trump negotiated a deal with Venezuela.”

Let me translate that to you in non-Orwellian English: “the lifelong thief (and pedophile) who has illegitimately occupied the Oval Office and is running the country in the manner of a criminal enterprise has arranged a theft of the natural resources of a country that recently suffered a catastrophic earthquake. A thief has thieved yet again in your name.”

There, fixed it.

[Cue the Flaming Lips song: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Part 1)

Her name is Yoshimi
She’s a black belt in karate
Working for the city
She has to discipline her body

‘Cause she knows that
It’s demanding to defeat those evil machines
I know she can beat them]

On Wednesday evening Jade held a informational press event to publicize the difficulties bottle-return companies have been dealing with for years now, years in which many of these small businesses around the state have been closing, not because the businesses are unneeded, but basically because they are not big enough to command political power. Jade, who was arrested for dumping the equivalent of $1,000 worth of empty beverage cans in front of the New York State Governor’s Mansion in a protest last November held the event to lobby candidates running to represent the area in Albany seeking to bring awareness of what many see as trash but what Jade sees as an indicator of community. She invited local candidates for New York State Senate and Assembly to learn about returnable bottles and cans, and how they affect local businesses and the local community.

Candidates Melissa Seale for State Senate District 45 and John Gunther for Assembly District 114 showed up. Seats set up for State Senator Dan Stec and Assemblyman Matt Simpson sat empty. And that was too bad, because Jade enlisted some good people to come and talk about how her business and others like it make a big difference in communities.

In 1982 New York enacted the Bottle Bill to collect a 5¢ deposit on beverage containers, mostly beer and soda, or pop, depending on where you live in the state. The state, along with the federal government, had been enacting a variety of environmental legislation since the late 60’s meant to clean up our environment and prevent further degradation of the natural world and communities. A nickel wasn’t a lot of money but it was significant enough that most people wanted their nickels back. When the law went into effect on July 1, 1983 the state minimum wage was $3.35/hr, or 67 empty bottles. The 30¢ deposit on a 6 pack of beer or soda (in those days that is how beverages were typically bought, 6 packs, not 12 packs cases of 24 or even 30 at a time) was roughly the equivalent of 6 minutes of paid labor. A system was put in place that would pay businesses a small fee to collect and process empty bottles by the big beverage distributors who were paid the nickel deposits. Businesses got a couple pennies to handle each bottle or can. But it adds up.

The beverage business was simpler in 1982. There was beer and soda, and it felt weird to buy water in a bottle. Things have changed. Now we have a wide variety of alternatives including ‘juices’, hard seltzers, ciders, energy drinks, and even THC drinks. Remember when Jolt cola was a thing? All the sugar and twice the caffeine? Simpler times. Many of those new products were brought to market in ways that slipped the collar of the bottle bill and do not have a deposit. You can see stacks of them in the photo above behind Jade, Melissa, and John. Those are containers that were returned to Jade to be sorted and bagged but for which she did not get paid. It’s a lot of work diverting that much volume from the waste stream in the best interests of everyone and then not get paid for it.

Finally, in 2009 there was a slight increase in handling fee; another 1.5¢ per container. 15 years ago the state recognized that the old fee was not sustainable for an industry that provides a necessary service. But that was 15 years ago. Costs have skyrocketed. Minimum wage in NY was $7.25/hr in 2009; it’s $16/hr today. And inflation…

Jade has supporters who came to speak on her behalf. Dan, from Scout Troop 99 in South Glens Falls, who Jade calls her Bottle Elf, has been working with scouts for 26 years collecting returnables, sorting and bagging them. He’s a big fan of Jade because she will take the volume his group collects. As redemption centers close there are fewer options for people like Dan. Scouts in SGF use the proceeds to fund various charities such as the South Glens Falls Dance Marathon.

A father and son from Troop 61 spoke about their collection efforts. Scout Bentley talked about providing funding for less privileged scouts, helping troop members who could not otherwise afford it to Camp Wakpominee where they can enjoy swimming and archery, trips to a Yankees game, or Gettysburg. The scouts get useful life skills about working together, working towards goals, and how saving small amounts can become big things.

Pastor Josh from Calvary’s Family Life Church [edited to correct the name of the church] spoke about their collection efforts, cans that eventually pass through Jade’s business. His church has built a collection shed and a parishioner volunteers 6 hours a week to sort bottles. The funds gained used to go toward their youth center but now go to community benevolence. $15,000 since 2016.

The loss of places to redeem returnables is already hurting small communities. Peter Olesheski brings bottles to Jade from the Johnsburg transfer station, a 40 minute drive each way.

Jade takes it all personally, the good and the bad.

She has been trying to save her business and the businesses of her friends around the state. Scores of them are closing every year, because the state legislature won’t pass a simple bill, a clean bill, to help fix the problem or at the very least get part way toward a just solution. They could do a number of things. They could put the deposit on beverages that are not currently included in the law. They could increase the deposit from 5¢ to 10¢ and increase the handling fee.

Representatives and the Governor know there is a problem and they know there are solutions but year after year they fail to fix things. They’re like the people who just throw recycleables in the trash to be a problem for someone else, a problem for people in the future to solve. “To see the state not care,” says Jade, and she trails off in frustration.

John Gunther and Melissa Seale, candidates for state assembly and senate listened. Their opponents weren’t there.

John Gunther, who spent a lifetime running a business in Washington County employing hundreds of local people said “My heart goes out to Jade.” He spoke about the importance of small businesses to communities.

Melissa Seale, a nurse and child mental health professional talked about serving families in the area, about how families are struggling with the rising price of gas and grocery bills, and the difficulty of sustaining needed institutions when “things are not getting done” at the state legislature for ordinary people like Jade.

My skeptical nature makes me wonder why things aren’t happening to solve simple problems. It could be something else, but I think it probably comes down to a combination of laziness and greed.

In 1982 the minimum wage was $3.35, 67 nickels. A nickel was about 1 minute of work. Today minimum wage is $16.00, 320 nickels, about 11 seconds of work. If the deposit was raised to 10¢ it would be about 160 dimes, or about 22 seconds of work. Put that way you can see why people might just throw redemables in the garbage, but there are costs to our communities in doing that, as I hope you’ve seen.

The beverage industry doesn’t want to deal with the trash necessary to contain their product, the future waste built into their sales. We call them containers because they contain the product but as soon as the product is gone they are trash. And we have big problems with trash. Trash costs us all money. Big businesses, like Pepsi and Coke, like Budweiser and Coors, make their fortunes by selling you a product wrapped in thrash that is then yours to deal with. They want all the profit, but they aren’t being part of the solution. They are fighting Jade. I don’t know if you looked at the picture of Jade but she isn’t a big person.

Pepsi is working to crush Jade.

State government isn’t any better in this fight. If you think it’s about the money, you’re right. It’s about the money. Every year the state benefits by keeping the uncollected deposits of people who pay a nickel for trash that holds their soda then throw the trash away on the side of the road or in their garbage can. It adds up. About $130 million a year in uncollected deposits goes into the state budget. Since 2009, the last time Jade got a raise from the state New York has collected $2 billion. They don’t want Jade to get any of it, not just a tiny bit that would help her and others in her business or the communities they serve.

New York State is working to crush Jade.

[Cue the Flaming Lips, again:

Those evil natured robots
They're programmed to destroy us
She's gotta be strong to fight them
So she's taking lots of vitamins

'Cause she knows that
It'd be tragic if those evil robots win
I know she can beat them

The significance of that switch is that it saves holding an election every single year (city elections excepted as they are on a different schedule) which one would hope saves some money for local governments, but also it could mean a change in representation in local government because while Republicans tend to be consistent voters in terms of turnout for elections Democrats tend to turn out in greater percentage for congressional and presidential election years than in what were called “off year” elections. The differential can be significant.

I’ve been actively involved to varying degrees in elections for a while. I’ve collected petition signatures or canvassed for candidates every year since John Sweeney was our congressman, or maybe before. 26 years, anyway. And I was chair of the Queensbury Democratic committee starting maybe when Aaron Woolf was running for congress in NY21 (or maybe it was Mike Derrick) until about when Matt Castelli ran. It may not sound like a big deal but Queensbury was the most populace town on New York’s 21st Congressional District, with more than 29,000 residents, so candidates were keen to have the QDems committee on board.

People who are active in the election process get emotionally involved with their preferred candidate. When there are primaries there are inevitably hurt feelings when the favored pick of supporters falls short of the win in a primary. One year we had as many as 14 candidates declare for congress and something like 11 collected petition signatures for the primary. I knew all of the candidates, all were serious people with qualifications to run and each had ardent supporters. To get on the primary ballot candidates need to collect a set number of signatures on nominating petitions. Typically that is done by party committee people along with volunteers to a candidate’s committee, but when there are multiple candidates it can become a logistical problem because voters can only sign one petition per elected office, and people willing to collect signature are a limited resource. An organized campaign with engaged volunteers collecting signatures early has the advantage in that situation harvesting signatures in front of later candidates and getting their name in front of more primary voters. It is a huge advantage in the primary.

Sometimes candidates can’t gather the requisite number of signatures and they withdraw from the primary, or simply do not file their petitions, perhaps for other reasons.

There can only be one primary winner, so supporters of the losing candidates end up with hurt feelings. It’s nothing new, there are always calls for unity after what can be bitter fights to win the primary.

This season Blake Gendebien, a farmer from St Lawrence County, is the primary winner and therefore Democratic candidate. Did I mention he’s a farmer? He talks a lot about being a farmer and that’s gotten to be something of a joke. Not that being a farmer is a joke, but that he mentions it a lot. (Farmers, please! I am not dissing you!) If I were a farmer running for Congress I’d mention it a lot, too. But I’m not; I’m a blacksmith, and I’m running for County Supervisor in Queensbury. I mentioned I’m a blacksmith, right? I’m a blacksmith.

Blake came into the primary with a massive advantage in that he started running for congress in early 2025 because newly elected President Trump suggested he would nominate our current and very nearly invisible Representative Elise Stefanik to be UN Ambassador where she could have been nearly invisible on a much larger stage. And don’t worry, being nearly invisible does not prevent a legislator from collecting their paycheck. Some are wondering if not just being nearly invisible but being actually dead is an obstacle, but that’s a Kentucky thing to worry about.

Anyway, Trump pulled the rug out from Stefanik’s dreams, as Trump does, and there turned out not to be a special election but Blake had raised significant money and awareness so he continued to run. Much later others joined the race for the primary, good candidates with good ideas and very nice people, but the reality is Blake is a decent guy, also a nice person, and he started running the race a year before the new candidates got in.

And he’s a farmer, so he won the primary handily.

You would think that we on the Democratic side would now be turning our attention to the general election on November 3rd because we want to flip this seat, flip the Congress, and provide restraint on a President who engaged in a seditious conspiracy against the Constitution to which he swore an oath of allegiance. Most of us are on board with that. But there are some, a small but vocal number, who retain bitterness in their hearts and don’t seem to like Blake. They go out of their way to find minor points of disagreement, to nitpick individual sentences and words, because they (I’m told there are at least 50 of them - a cabal, as it were) think Blake is mean to Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialist Party.

One of these people recently posted to social media a long rant based on an interview Blake had done with a reporter, a morning radio host (now an ex-host) with an AM radio station located in or near Utica.

Dear reader, I don’t know when the last time was that you listened to an AM morning radio show but odds are that if you do you will hear a lot of conservative blather. This particular station plays Fox Radio news, the Sean Hannity Show, the Brian Kilmeade Show and similar stuff. Naturally an alert AM radio listener living near our northern border with Canada and an avowed Democratic Socialist would be tuned in to hear the 5,000 watt AM station while eating their morning bowl of cereal - with milk. This alert Democratic Socialist was aghast at what they heard, dropped their spoon into the bowl and began typing an angry screed against Blake Gendebien.

A friend shared the post. I read it. Dismissively. And I commented because I wanted my friend to go back to the source material and “do their own research” with a bit of skepticism. I will admit right up front that I wasn’t 100% nice in my comment. What I wrote was “weird take by weird people.”

Like I said, I should have been nicer because some people take offense at being called weird. In my defense, I get called a lot of not very nice things. I’ve developed a thick skin in terms of being called not very nice things, so perhaps I didn’t phrase my comment with the greatest of sensitivity. I need to work at my insensitivity problem. Still, I don’t feel like “weird” is all that bad of an epithet.

Anyway here is most of the text of the report from Bill Keeler of WIBX 950AM (link to the full text here) :

Democratic Congressional candidate Blake Gendebien is making it clear that voters in New York’s 21st Congressional District shouldn’t confuse him with the Democratic Socialists making headlines in New York City and around the country.

In fact, the North Country dairy farmer says some of what he’s hearing from that wing of the political left is “absolutely nuts.”

Gendebien, the Democrat running against Trump backed Republican Anthony Constantino for the sprawling Upstate New York congressional seat, made the comments during an interview Friday on Keeler in the Morning.

It came at the very end of the interview, but it might have been his most revealing answer.

Gendebien has spent much of this campaign presenting himself as a different kind of Democrat. He’s a farmer and small business owner who talks about securing the border, deporting violent criminals who are in the country illegally, protecting Fort Drum and Griffiss, and working with Republicans when he believes it’s good for Upstate New York.

So, what does he think about the Democratic Socialists of America and some of the rhetoric coming from the far left?

“I live six hours away from New York City,” Gendebien said. “I don’t know anything about what’s going on down there. I had never even heard of DSA until a few months ago.”

Then he went a step further.

“I think that some of that stuff is absolutely nuts and I’m not afraid to say it,” he said.

Gendebien also offered a very personal reason why socialism isn’t exactly an easy sell in his household.

“My wife escaped communism as a kid,” he said. “She left Cuba and as a kid escaped communism. I can pretty much guarantee she didn’t do that to be with a socialist or a communist.”

“So I reject a lot of those things,” Gendebien added, “and I’m focused on what’s best for the North Country.”

A Democrat Trying to Separate Himself From the National Party

That answer could become important in a congressional district that has been reliably Republican and strongly supportive of President Donald Trump.

This is what some of my friends are going out of their gourds over, that a reporter on a right-wing radio station cherry picked what he considered sensational news that his listeners would lap up like the milk in the bottom of their cereal bowl. Blake rejects “a lot of those things.” What things? I don’t know.

And despite Blake actually explicitly making a distinction between socialism and communism some of my friends on the left are saying he is conflating socialism with communism.

Frankly, I'm disappointed in the failure of these friends on the left who are falling prey to far-right pedophile protecting oath-breaking bigot protectors. I think they are better than that, and I tell them so. I am sorry I said some of them are weird. I mean, some of them are weird, but not all of them.

I don’t feel like my calling them weird justifies them calling me a Corporate Democrat. I mean, sure, I am a partner in Chicken Coop Forge, Inc., which is in fact a corporation. As Mitt Romney so famously reminded, corporations are people, my friend. But I feel like Chicken Coop Forge is a good corporation, blacksmith run. Did I mention I’m a blacksmith? I’ve been one for over 30 years and in that time CCF, Inc. has brought money into the local economy at least $3 million (I haven’t actually counted) nearly all of it money from somewhere else that is and has been mainly circulated among local businesses.

Still, it hurts to be dismissively called a Corporate Democrat by a friend, a friend who I’m pretty sure did not go for a bike ride with Zohran Mamdani like I did. I guess I’ll get over it. People on the right, Maga people, call me much worse things. I’d repeat some of them just as examples but you, dear reader, likely have too sensitive a nature to withstand reading them. They would ruin your day.

“[The fraud loss]could and should have been avoided, and would have been avoided in a system that worked together better. A system with better supervision.

But wait, there’s more. I suspect that some number of Supervisors should have been aware of the letter from Peckham in their role as town supervisors of towns that contracted with Peckham for highway materials. I’ve filed a couple of Freedom of Information Requests in hopes of finding evidence that Supervisors themselves had or should have had knowledge of the warning letter. I hope to have more information on that in the coming weeks.

If you are thinking that I’m here to indict the system, congratulations, you’ve been paying attention. Because we have a system where town supervisors are elected to 2 separate and often conflicting roles as #1 executive of their town and #2 one member of a board of supervisors whose role is to manage county government. To me that is a system that is designed to fail, but also a system designed not to provide accountability.”

Yesterday a forensic audit of county finances which looked into the fraud loss but also accounting practices more generally in the county government was released. I started reading it last night at 11pm, it is 6:30 am as I’m writing and I haven’t finished reading it, tho it’s not that long. I’ve read enough so far to tell you that the scale of incompetence in our local government exposed in the audit is breathtaking, even beyond my jaundiced expectations. You can read the audit here.

Often I take a long time to get to the point. Not today. But I have several points to make.

First, county treasurer should not be an elected position. Anybody who meets age and residency requirements can be elected treasurer - a point the current treasurer made herself before she was elected, in a way: “[w]hile I am fortunate enough to be running unopposed in the upcoming November 7th election, I wanted to share with you my personal and professional background, both of which make me uniquely qualified to serve you.” The quote is from a Sun Community News story you can read here. More from that story.

As your Treasurer, I pledge to promote:

1) Transparent Financial Management: I will maintain transparency in all financial matters, ensuring residents have access to up-to-date financial information and understand how their tax dollars are being utilized.

2) Fiscal Responsibility: I will work diligently to ensure that the county budget is balanced and fiscally responsible.

3) Process Improvement: I will analyze processes and procedures, identifying opportunities to reduce waste and improve efficiency in financial operations.

4) Collaboration: I understand the importance of collaboration with other government entities, community organizations, and stakeholders to achieve financial goals. I will work hand-in-hand with all to make informed decisions that benefit everyone; and

5) Accessibility: I will be accessible to the residents of our community to gather input, answer questions, and address concerns about financial matters. I have an open-door philosophy and I hope you stop in and say hi, ask questions and share your ideas and your concerns.

After having read the financial audit the ironies in those statements are glaring. County treasurer is a plum job. It pays well. I haven’t looked it up but I’m told it pays around $150,000 a year. That number could be off by tens of thousands, but it is a 6 figure job. It is a serious job with enormous responsibility that in my view should not be an elected position and Christine Norton, an endorsed Republican, proved that.

I hear gossip. Gossip I’ve heard is that on snow “powder days” county treasurer Norton could be seen skiing at Gore Mountain which is a 40 minute drive from the treasurer’s office at the Warren County Municipal Center. I was stunned that the person didn’t take a picture of her and post it to social media and was told that the treasurer gets to make their own hours and go skiing or whatever else they want even as the Office goes without supervision. In my view it is absolutely fair to shame elected officials in jobs with tremendous responsibility. It is a form of accountability. What does it say to ordinary workers that their elected boss gets to go play while they have to drive through a snowfall to punch the clock.

But I’m not here to indict Christine Norton, not alone anyway. Her predecessor, Republican Mike Swan, my neighbor, also failed. He failed to institute policies that would have prevented the $3.3 million loss.

Next point: where was the county administrator? The Administrator should have been overseeing the treasurer’s office.

Next point: where were the county supervisors? They are the elected representatives of the public whose job it is to protect the public and public resources. It is my contention that the Supervisor form of government is inherently a conflict of interest, that people elected to supervise their town government - people with basically the same requirements to get elected as the treasurer - are also supervising county government. I harp on this point a lot: we need to change county government to a County Legislature system, but that is a point to expand on another time because unlike Christine Norton I have to get to work soon. She gets paid whether she’s working or skiing. I don’t. I have to get jobs done so I can bill my customer.

I’ll have a lot more to say about this but for now I want to point out that the Town of Queensbury has similar problems of lack of professional management oversight. A couple of decades ago when Dan Stec was supervisor he eliminated the position of town comptroller whose job it was to provide financial accountability. Why did Dan Stec do that? Hard to know, except that without restraint and accountability the supervisor has a free-er hand to move money around in ways that the public will almost certainly never know about. We’ve seen results of that lack of oversight, as an example in the David Decker fraud. You can read about that fraud here.

The good news for Queensbury this year is that we have a professional accountant, a CPA, Jean Lapper running for Queensbury town supervisor. Jean has the skills to provide solid oversight of town finances until there can be better management re-instituted in town government. Her opponent simply does not. And we’ve seen the failures that can happen without good oversight and accountability.

At the county level we also need people elected who will not be part of the Good Old Boys, the go along to get along crowd, the people who failed to provide necessary oversight to the treasurer’s office, and the people who have to this point failed to accept responsibility for their failures.

Jean Lapper will be an asset at the county board of supervisors as well. If you think that is my endorsement of Jean you are 100% correct.

Quick reminder: Mike Parwana is also running for County Supervisor from Queensbury. I endorse him too!

Finally, here’s a little fable I wrote back in February about the fraud, because I’ve been paying close attention.

You can’t handle a heeler.

Seriously, if you have seen the adorable Bluey cartoon about a family of Australian Cattle Dogs, also known as Heelers (either blue or red depending on the color of their coat), or Cattle Dogs, or Cow Dogs, you have been exposed to a sanitized image of a heeler.

They are not Aussies, Australian Shepherds, which are a different breed entirely; shepherds not herders in the unique way that heelers are herders. Aussies tend to be very nice, sensible dogs with good manners. Same continent, very different dogs.

The thing with heelers is that they were bred in the Outback of Australia to be smart, tough, durable, and relentless. Breeders accomplished this by breeding wild native Dingo with domesticated herding breeds and a pinch of cat for some extra attitude. Heelers are sensible in the sense that if you need a dog who will take being kicked by a cow and the dog thinks that getting kicked is great fun and the game is just getting started, heelers are sensible. The original breed was used to round up uncooperative cattle from dense thickets of what Australian’s call the bush. They are a compact, heavily muscled breed and prone to feeding themselves on things you would much rather not know about. Or rolling in them. Exhibit A: Sophie Tucker, a blue heeler swept off the family boat in rough seas off the coast of Queensland, Australia. Her family searched but lost track of her in the waves and eventually gave her up for dead. Heelers will break your heart like that, but 4 months later they got a call from forest rangers. Sophie had swum 5 nautical miles to St Bee Island in the Great Barrier Reef and survived on her own until rangers trapped what they described as a ferocious dog then found her owners to come and get her. You really have to watch the heartwarming video. Seriously, click the link.

Heelers have a mind of their own. They know exactly what you want, often before you know it yourself, and they have an opinion about your desires. They’ll do as they’re told if it suits them, or they’ll use their cat powers and completely ignore you even as they stare directly at you with a “not happening” expression. They are not people pleasers.

They will give you the stink-eye.

They are bossy. They think you should do what they want when they want you to do it.

They are mouthy, both in biting at your ankles to herd you, which is how they got the name heeler, from nipping at the heels of cattle to move them when they don’t want to be moved, and mouthy in back-talking you when they refuse to do what they are told.

They are relentless little know-it-alls.

They are the fun-police because they do not want you having fun unless it involves them. Do not attempt dancing in their presence. Or doing anything that seems frivolous. Frivolity is forbidden.

There is a joke: God gathered the various breeds of dogs to bestow attributes. He sat upon his thrown and looked down at the German Shepherd. “You and your descendants,” He said, “Will be loyal and courageous.” The shepherd thanked Him. God gazed next on the Golden Retriever, “You and your descendants will be friendly and trainable.” The Golden licked his hand in appreciation. God looked next on the Cattle Dog but before God could say a word the Heeler cut him off, “You’re sitting in my chair.”

Given all that background, it may be no surprise that we’ve had several heelers. Our current heeler Badger is our 4th. I say “we” and “our” but I had very little say in getting any of them. Technically, my partner has owned all of them because I haven’t been ready to commit to keeping a dog. A dog could be swept away at sea and your heart would be broken. All sorts of things could happen. Despite not actually owning the dog I’m the one who takes the dog to the veterinarian because my partner finds it traumatizing to take the dog to the vet. It’s traumatizing because heelers have to go to the vet a lot. It’s not that they’re prone to disease, rather, they are prone to doing reckless things that get them injured. Like falling off boats or getting kicked by cattle. To the vet a heeler is known as “job security”, and the reason for medium sized muzzles.

So like I said, I’m not getting a dog, but if I were to get a dog I would never get any dog but a heeler. Because despite their many problems (and each heeler has its own unique sets of problems), despite their maddening stubbornness and back-talk, they are great dogs to have if your lifestyle allows you to be with them 24/7 and they can get a lot of exercise. And if you have the tolerance of a saint, which I do not but I’m slowly being trained.

Heelers are chock full of self-esteem, and they are loyal to their people.

A heeler has got your back. Like 17 year old mostly blind and deaf blue heeler Max who stayed with a 3 year old lost child protecting her and keeping her warm overnight before leading searchers to the child in the morning. Again, read the story.

Or read this story about Cami who stayed with her 82 year old owner who was lost in the woods keeping her warm in near freezing temperatures and leading rescuers to her.

A you can learn a lot from a heeler. Like from this meme about heelers.

Our heeler Fletcher had a philosophy that I found endearing. To those who were friendly Fletcher would be friendly, but to those who wanted a fight Fletcher would fight. He didn’t seem to care which way it went, but I suspect he secretly enjoyed a fight a little bit more.

It seems like a simple but good approach to life.

So far we haven’t had a situation where one of our heelers has had to save our life. Not that we know of anyway. I expect Badger is up to the task if it comes down to it, despite all evidence to the contrary so far.

Sometimes people talk about Blue Dog Democrats. I don’t think they’re actually talking about Blue Heeler blue dogs because I’ve never seen a blue heeler with a political opinion. That’s not stuff they care about. But if I met a politician anything like a blue heeler I’d be all for them.

Dr. Leach has a long history of service in our community, is a good cook, and keeps a koi pond.

“Dr. Leach was the co-founder and past president of the Adirondack AIDS Task Force in the 1980s and 90s, the founder and past president of the Glens Falls Medical Mission and its Project Guatemala in the mid-1990s, the developer of the Glens Falls Mask-a-teer Task Force in the first year of the COVID pandemic, and co-founder and past president of the Adirondack Welcome Circle. He currently serves on the steering committee of the Healthcare Coalition for the North Country, on the board of directors of the Glens Falls Symphony and as the chairman of the Adirondack Regional Immigration Collaborative.” A brief bio at the end.

This essay was previously published as a commentary in the Adirondack Explorer magazine.]

Warner’s Knapsack

Fort Ticonderoga has a wonderful museum. Among its greatest

treasures is a linen knapsack that belonged to a patriot in the

Continental Army, Benjamin Warner. It was on his shoulder through

the first three years of the American Revolution - including through

the terrible winter campaign of 1775-76 to try to make Canada our

14th colony.

The Northern Continental Army was underfunded and badly

underprepared for that campaign. Troops had no uniforms, not

enough boots or overcoats, not enough food. The winter was cruel.

They became malnourished and hypothermic. And were so

weakened that smallpox exploded among their ranks.

The campaign ended the next spring in ignominious defeat. Not so

much by the British - they only killed 60 American soldiers. It was

smallpox. It killed over 1,000 and kept killing during the frantic retreat

as the remains of the badly diseased army staggered down from

Montreal to Lake Champlain and the relative safety of the forts at

Crown Point and Ticonderoga.

The knapsack saw it all.

The 250th birth year of the United States is a great opportunity to

think about what our troops experienced back then. Now more than

ever, such reflection seems critically important. Because grasping

something of the almost unbelievable hardships they fought through

may help us to reevaluate what our nation means to us…and may

help us to decide whether it is now worth our fighting for.

So, imagine what it was like. Desperate men staggering along,

whipped and scared and hungry and exhausted, watching comrades

fall around them, and starting to feel the symptoms of a disease that

carried a 50% mortality rate. Then, if they made it to Crown Point, to

be sent to the under-prepared hospital at Fort George, where so

many suffered so badly and died in the filth and stench, lying on the

bare floor with maybe just a blanket, attended by so few healthcare

providers who had so little to make their illnesses any more bearable.

You know what happened next. One year later, George Washington,

in his considerable wisdom, made the difficult decision to immunize

the army against smallpox. Our first public health mandate.

Many historians think Washington’s decision was among the most

important he made. Because it saved the Continental Army from

further decimation by smallpox. Moreover, it gave the farm boys the

reassurance that they could join the army without fear the disease

would strike them down. Recruits tumbled out of the countryside,

joining the ranks of the many veterans who had signed back up. The

Continental Army was rebuilt, rallying around the ideas that bred the

Revolution and birthed our nation. And around General George

Washington.

On day one of his second presidency, Donald J. Trump issued an

executive order to stop all foreign aid. Secretary of State Marco Rubio

immediately followed up by suspending all programs, including the

U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID. Then DOGE

began the mass dismissals of employees and cancellations of all

contracts for food and medication.

So USAID, which had kept so many alive in roughly 120 war-torn and

impoverished countries, abruptly folded.

Since then, millions in those countries have been sent into something

analogous to the Canadian winter of 1775-76. No food. Rampant

malnutrition. No clinics left open. No medications. Surges of illnesses

spreading. Including untreated HIV/AIDS, which is exploding back to

the pandemic it was.

Conservative estimates are that since the dissolution of USAID, some

700,000 people have already died, 2/3 of them children. Literally

millions will continue to die for the same reasons in the next years,

folks with flesh and blood and dreams just like you and me.

True, what is happening over there does not seem to impact us

directly here in our North Country communities. But of course it does.

We are all human beings. We all care for children.

Moreover, this is a small planet; those are our neighbors. Diseases

may show up here. And political changes are weakening us because

of the destruction of USAID, no matter what walls we think we have

put up. Our soft power and prestige have gone to hell. Russia and

China are already taking advantage of the situations we have so un-

thoughtfully provided them.

What would George Washington think about all this, what would he

do? Our current leadership doesn’t seem to have anything like his

wisdom.

Happily, a democracy’s power comes from we-the-people. In this, our

250th birth year, we mustn’t give up. We must insist that our

legislators make difficult decisions for not just the betterment of the

US, but for our world.

Benjamin Warner fought through that terrible Canadian winter and

then though tough battles in New York and New Jersey. He did not

give up. The knapsack, worn but still remarkably intact, never left his

side.

In his final instructions, he passed it on to his son and his following

progeny. Those instructions end with these words: “And whilst one

shred of it shall remain never surrender your libertys to a foren

invador or an aspiring demegog.”

Richard P. Leach, MD

July 10, 2026

Link to ARIC’s website: https://aric.network

This Times Union story provides some information on ARIC, though it is over a year old and events on the ground have changed significantly since then. https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/adirondack-communities-respond-ice-enforcement-20775774.php

Bio:

“Dr. Richard Leach is an Internist, Infectious Disease consultant, and Travel and Tropical Medicine expert, now retired and living in Queensbury where he tends his gardens.

He graduated from Dartmouth College with a BA in English in 1965, then from the University of Rochester’s School of Medicine and Dentistry with an MD in 1971. After medical school, he trained in Internal Medicine at the Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown for 3 years, then studied Infectious Diseases for 3 years at the University of Kentucky’s Medical Center in Lexington.

He moved to Glens Falls in 1977 and set up his private practice in the Irongate Center and the Glens Falls Hospital. He served as the GFH’s Infection Control Officer and Hospital Epidemiologist. He was the Medical Director of Warren County’s Department of Public Health, the consultant to its Tuberculosis Program and the director of its Travel Medicine Clinic.

Dr. Leach was the co-founder and past president of the Adirondack AIDS Task Force in the 1980s and 90s, the founder and past president of the Glens Falls Medical Mission and its Project Guatemala in the mid-1990s, the developer of the Glens Falls Mask-a-teer Task Force in the first year of the COVID pandemic, and co-founder and past president of the Adirondack Welcome Circle. He currently serves on the steering committee of the Healthcare Coalition for the North Country, on the board of directors of the Glens Falls Symphony and as the chairman of the Adirondack Regional Immigration Collaborative.”

Roughly 4 months ago I wrote about a severely damaged portion of Corinth Road that I deemed to be a threat to public safety. I brought it to the attention of the head of public works in Warren County Kevin Hajos. Good news, the worst of the deteriorated roadway was repaired a few weeks ago ahead of the scheduled 2027 resurfacing.

Some of you who do not know me will think that I am going to take credit for this, that I’m here to pat myself on the back. Others of you who know me well will probably think the same thing.

In my defense, I will say that you are all absolutely correct. I am totally taking credit for putting your safety first, and I am going to pat myself of the back! Pat, pat, pat!

But also I want to give credit to Kevin Hajos for looking at the situation and doing the right thing for the safety of the people who travel that road, and also for the taxpayers who fund our infrastructure. He deserves recognition and a pat on the back. Thank you Mr. Hajos.

If you are a big fan of pavement and you want to read my previous Note about the road surface in an obscure but fairly heavily travelled portion of Warren County, NY you can read it here:

Another quick update, this one on the situation of the $3.3 million fraud suffered by Warren County last December. No, we have not recovered the $2+ million that is still parked in other banks around the country and which our county government has no use of, but I have received another update to my January 28, 2026 FOIL request for information on the recipients of a July 21, 2025 letter from Peckham Materials warning of the exact scam Warren County fell prey to.

You will recall I have copies of other FOIL requests to towns in the county which establish that numerous county supervisors should have known and should have passed on the warning to the county administrator and other county supervisors in order to prevent financial loss of taxpayer money. In my view this failure is an indictment of systems of local government which silo or ignore important information that should be shared in the best interests of citizens.

Why have a Supervisor form of county government if the town supervisors are not up to the task of protecting county residents by sharing important and relevant information? And if you think Mike Parwana is using this issue in a self-serving way to get himself elected as a County Supervisor for Queensbury, well, you’ve got me again! I am utterly predictable! Vote for Mike Parwana!

Anyway, here is the update to my FOIL which is just another email saying they aren’t fulfilling my FOIL yet.

Mike

I’ve been involved in the paper industry virtually all my life. I was 14 in 1967 when my family shared a tri-plex apartment house (circa 1869) on Warrensburg’s mill pond with Matt Reynolds, Union Steward at Decora in Ft Edward (a paper converter). At his kitchen table we’d read through the company’s offers and compose the union’s counteroffers in contract negotiation. In later years we’d talk pulp chemistry at his job with Finch. I’ve never held a union book myself but continue to respect the power that union labor provided working people.

For my paper trail, I was along for the ride with Sandy-Hill Iron & Brass in Hudson Falls as it changed letterhead to Sandy Hill Corp then Tampella and lastly Valmet (First as a draftsman and ending as a development engineer for this paper machinery builder - where I came to know your partner). A multi-year stint in machinery research & development with Glens Fall’s Valcour Imprinted Papers (which variously became Astro-Valcour, Tenneco, Bührmann-Tetterode, Pactiv and now is Pregis). At mid-life I moved into field technical sales-support of paper machinery beginning at Mark McCollister’s Webtech in Glens Falls which connected to an international position with Fibron (Vancouver, BC) then becoming Voith Paper. Lastly, I hung my own shingle as S. Bederian, Technical Services. In these experiences I had occasion to work intimately with a myriad of paper manufacturers throughout the Americas and Europe. My motto (the same as the Texas Rangers): “One riot, one ranger”.

I’ve witnessed the evolution of this industry (over almost 60-years) and the effect of consolidation on the small towns that host its mills.

Your recent posting on the changes occurring within Glens Fall’s local mill (Finch Pruyn) struck a chord. The path I’ve seen all too often: purchase by outside venture capitalists, bust the union, break up viable assets (power generation, raw material sources, production facilities, distribution & markets) each to be sold separately. Paper-mill unions used to have some sway in such corporate misbehavior, but our 40-year slide away from the New Deal and the near death of organized labor is coming to roost in Glens Falls. You cannot produce fine paper to high-quality standards from purchased pulp. The sad tale of the decline and closing (2023) of the Androscoggin Mill in Jay, ME gives some insight of viability using purchased pulp. Sad to say I’d anticipate the same for Glens Falls within 5-years.

A friend keyed me onto a Dave Matthews Band appearance playing “Papertown”. It’s a ballad based on a feature-length documentary executive produced by Matthews chronicling the closing of a century old papermill in the heart of Canton, NC (a small mountain town). The documentary Papertown is directed by Jeremy Seifert and co-directed by Benjamin James Roberts.

Papertown does not currently have a public streaming release date, wider digital rental availability, or broad theatrical distribution. Maybe it should be scheduled into the Glens Falls area.

Link to Dave Matthews appearance:

Steve Bederian PE

10 August 2026

We locals were proud of Finch, Pruyn because they were local, they were owned by families in our community and they employed a heck of a lot of people over generations in well-paying jobs. It is true that they were one of the worst polluters in the state (all DEC permitted pollution of our water and air that we accepted as a cost of good jobs) and that recently, at the time, they had survived a labor strike which had devastated the union and caused friction in the community. That left a bad taste in some people’s mouths and there was some speculation that busting the union was a necessary prerequisite for selling the mill to private equity types, but most were comforted by the fact that it had been a family business from the start and that the family was positioned to run the company long into the future, continuing to provide plenty of good jobs for workers and tidy profits for the owners.

I know some people in logging and in the local wood products business. Our friend Joe Belanger (now deceased) was a life-long logger having started working in the woods of Canada when he was 12 or 13, before chainsaws and mechanized log skidders. He liked Finch, Pruyn, or “Finch and Pryun” as he called them. They were fair to deal with, unlike (in his opinion) International Paper. He moved down with his uncle’s family from Trois Rivières to work as an independent contractor for Finch, but also selling logs to local sawmills and others depending on the type of wood to get the highest value possible. Joe was a hard worker, which is basically the same thing as saying “logger.” Along with his logging he developed property, built ponds or “pounds” as he called them in the more authentic impoundment sense, bought, sold, and traded logging equipment, married a local girl and raised a family.

Logging isn’t a mainstream life, but it’s a good life for someone who likes to be out the door before dawn most days of the year, being in the woods all day in rain or snow, the hot and the cold, and coming home after dark with cash in your pocket.

Joe liked cash.

Because logging got increasingly expensive over the years requiring large investments in trucks, and skidders, excavators, and road graders (because loggers have to build roads through the woods to harvest their product), and these days feller bunchers that take some of the labor and danger out of the business. And it is a dangerous business. Logging and tree work is the most dangerous work in America, far more dangerous than being a police or fireperson. But we have a lot of loggers in the region because we have vast forests and a lot of independent-minded people who accept the difficulties, insecurity, and danger for independence and for profit.

People like Joe had a bad feeling about Finch breaking the union, and they were right to worry. The local family sold the mill to investors who named themselves Finch Paper, LLC.

That was in 2007, roughly 20 years ago. I’m working from memory here so I might have some details off a bit but the deal was basically 3 parts, the mill itself, the power generation plant within the mill, and the woodlands.

The 60GWh power plant was sold to Brookfield Power with a long term contract to supply power to the mill. There was a a whole property tax issue that sprang from that but it’s a story for a whole other day.

The 161,000 acres of woodlands were sold to the Nature Conservancy for $110 million with the stipulation that Finch could harvest timber for 20 years. Doing a little quick math - sale in 2007, 20 years, recent announcement that Finch would soon stop pulping its own wood, carry the zero, divide by 1 … that gets us a result of 2027! And we are well into 2026! So 20 years! Who would have guessed?

So, least surprising BREAKING NEWS in local BREAKING NEWS history: Finch has “heroically” determined to stop buying timber to concentrate on it’s core business and will use pulp purchased in the open market because it will apparently provide them better product and more flexibility.

In the old days, really not that long ago loggers used horses to harvest timber. My veterinarian, Dr John at Glens Falls Animal Hospital once told me about going with his boss, Dr Wiswall (from whom Dr John and his brother eventually bought their practice) to treat the horses at a logging camp on Finch, Pruyn lands deep in the woods outside of Blue Mountain Lake. They spent the whole day traveling and treating animals for not much money, but that isn’t the point.

Nor is the following invoice from Dr Wiswall for extracting my mother’s favoritest-ever horse, Trinket, from a well. But it’s a fun piece of ephemera to throw in here.

The point is that the logging business is deeply rooted in the culture of the region, and for true locals, whether through long familial ties or simply appreciation of our historical legacies the money isn’t always the point of everything.

The other point is that loggers are familiar with horses and they can tell horse shit when they hear it from investors who came here from wherever and bought Finch, Pruyn by splitting the company of some of its major assets and keeping the paper mill for a song. (Who knows? Maybe they never even brought a dollar to the sale? I couldn’t possibly know that sort of thing.) The idea that the end to purchasing of pulpwood at the Finch mill came as a surprise is horse shit. Horse shit that was baked into the original sale, so to speak, 20 years ago.

What is disturbing is that it seems as if nobody in the local economic development world prepared for this eventuality.

I have another friend Bob, and that is really his name, I’m not making up a character here. Bob has been a logger, which means he is a logger. Once a logger, always a logger. He was talking with my partner Jeannette recently about the sale. I’m not going to fact check Bob’s numbers because they weren’t meant that way but I’m guessing they are a good rough idea of how to think about this situation. According to Bob, Finch takes around 55 or 60 truck loads of pulpwood a day. Roughly 13 cord of wood per truckload. That’s around 200,000 cord of wood per year. I have no idea of the value of a cord of pulpwood but if firewood is going for around $400 a cord, cut split and delivered, let’s say that a cord of pulpwood is $200. That’s $2,600 a load or $40,000,000 per year to independent loggers in our local communities. Again, my numbers may be wildly off, but you start to get a sense of an industry that exists in the margins of society that you probably never think about. Even if you’re an economic development official.

If you’re an old logger close to retirement maybe this is a good time to sell. Logging equipment is expensive. Maybe you could bring in a quarter million of more on your used equipment and along with your savings and the other side work you engage in you could have a nice retirement. But if you’re a younger logger, maybe 35, you’ve invested a half million dollars in a used truck, a used feller buncher, maybe a small dozer, an equipment trailer, chainsaws, safety equipment, a shop with mechanics tools to fix the inevitable necessary repairs … the end of pulp operations at Finch are bad news. It means your product is suddenly harder to sell.

Over the decades we have lost markets for local timber. International Paper in Corinth closed around 2002. There are fewer small sawmills than in past decades but there are some around like Mead’s and Cersosimo Lumber. There is the plywood mill in Whitehall (where I worked under the original owners Clay, Dick, and Roy) building the mill. There is the IP mill (or whatever its name is now) in Ticonderoga, or Ti as we call it. But I haven’t heard any talk by the economic development folks over the last 19 years in planning for new businesses that would help local loggers and timberland owners maintain value of their product and their labor.

It’s pretty likely that prices will go down which will make logging as well as holding timberlands for the value logging them less lucrative. For you and me that means local people get poorer. That isn’t good. Not for anyone.

The thing we have needed for a long time are people of vision, people who looked at the big picture in our region. When people talk about laser focus on this or that I wonder about all the things you can’t see in laser focus. I don’t know how that sort of focus works because I get distracted by things at the periphery of my focus, and then I want to look at them. Maybe it’s an ADHD thing.

Anyway, it seems like “we” in our business community have forgotten about where the wealth in our local communities originated, the forests, the mills, the wood products, the people willing to bust their ass to bring value to our communities. The people who probably never wore a suit to a business meeting but delivered the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars of local resources that literally grow on trees to our economy.

Where are the economic development folks who a should have been working to diversify the wood products industries and markets to keep local folks working well into the AI future? Maybe some of them have heard of “new” technologies in wood products like mass timber.

Mass timber, as the name implied uses a lot of wood (I think that I have established that we have a lot of wood) to make building products that can replace steel in multi-story buildings. Maybe it’s a technology, one of many, we want to explore in our economic development efforts.

I know there are naysayers who will think that nobody would want to move here to build such a business, but I happened to have known people exactly like that! Did I mention Clay and Dick Thomason, and Roy (and I’m sad that I can’t remember Roy’s last name, because I really liked him) who moved to Whitehall from Kalispell, Montana in the late 70’s and built a plywood mill from scratch? Those people exist.

It seems to me that if someone could see opportunity in a small community like Whitehall we can find other people of vision to do similar things in other local communities, and in doing so stabilize our local economies, our populations, and grow wealth from the ground up.

Kind of like a tree.

While turkeys everywhere gobbled excitedly at the announcement, Macy’s is considering cancelling the big parade for fear of Middle Eastern terrorists loosing giant cartoon figure balloons in Mamdani-land.

In an effort to mollify Islamists the NCAA announced a change in name from the Orange Bowl to the Hookah Bowl. “Salaam! Peace be upon you! The game will feature special Sharia Law rules. Points can only be scored by the team facing Mecca and all glory will go to Allah instead of God. I mean, same immortal, but we want to use a more inclusive name.”

The National War on Christmas Museum located in North Pole, New York applied for grants to build a new wing dedicated to memorializing the expected Thanksgiving losses, “we are calling it the Turkey Wing. We’re excited. New visitors will be gravy.”

Neither Jesus nor Santa Claus returned repeated emails seeking comment.

Several years ago I was driving on a road through the woods when a tree fell and destroyed my van. (Unlike other situations I might invent for this newsletter this story is 100% true.) Lucky for me I braked hard and ducked to prevent being seriously injured. And I wasn’t except for a small cut on my toe that came from the glass that was everywhere in the vehicle including in my shoe. Several people later suggested that I might have avoided the falling tree if I had put the pedal to the metal and zoomed under the falling tree, driving away laughing at the tree’s feeble attempt to crush me. I have to admit that the tree planned and executed the attempt to kill me nearly flawlessly so the tree knew I was not driving an EV with instantaneous delivery of horsepower. The tree knew I was driving a 4 cylinder Ford Transit Connect Van that had the tremendous responsiveness of an aluminum rowboat.

I bring this up because in the aftermath of what I contend was the murder of Renee Good, a mother, a poet, and an American living in the neighborhood she was killed yesterday, I’ve seen numerous responses from people insisting that Ms Good was trying to run over law enforcement with her Honda SUV, her mom-car.

Below is an example of differing points of view.

I have no idea what sort of self protection training officers receive before they are sent out to enforce our laws. I hope that the basic training includes the admonition to (step #1) get out of the way of a moving object, but from what other people have stated many people think the first response should be to start shooting. I have never been in the position of carrying a handgun when a potentially dangerous incident was occurring. If I had a handgun when the tree fell in front of me I could have drawn my gun, rolled down my window, and shot the tree. But I don’t think that would have been an effective response.

I’m trying to imagine other similar scenarios. Imagine climbing the slide on Santanoni Mountain and a large rock dislodges above me and starts rolling at me with great speed. I could draw my handgun and shoot the rock ending the danger. Or perhaps a runaway horse is galloping straight at me. I could pull out my handgun and shoot the horse, ending the dangerous situation. It all sounds so perfectly reasonable.

Other sorts of safety equipment become redundant when there is an option of a handgun. Imagine an ice fisherman out on a lake when the ice gives way. Rescuing him would be a potentially dangerous situation to law enforcement officers so shooting him might be a good option. It would save on the cost of wet-suits and airboats, tho if he were really far out in the middle of a lake it might be hard to hit him with a sidearm. Maybe you’d need to call in the SWAT team.

Is Pete Hegseth related to Luigi Cadorna?

There are people in this world who are slow to grasp change. They get an idea in their head about the way things should be done and despite all evidence that the world does not work in the way they see it they cling to their misguided notions. Luigi Cadorna was just such a man.

Cadorna was a general in the Italian Army, Marshall of Italy, and Chief of Staff of the Italian Army during World War 1. Luigi (I can call him Luigi because he’s long dead and there is no chance of him sending me to the Italian front) was a distinguished man, a count from Sicily in what was at the time the fairly new country of Italy having been amalgamated from numerous kingdoms, principalities and other states in the 1860’s. He had a fairly inflexible way of thinking about how things should be done. Occupying a position in the military/government similar to the job description Pete Hegseth holds in the US today, Luigi was in a position to put his ideas about manliness and war fighting into effect.

Marshall Cadorna thought men should be men, real men, and the collection of illiterate peasants who made up most of the Italian army at the time did not meet his standards. He was a dignified person who would have been mortified to strip down to a t-shirt and shorts to show his men how to do half-assed push-ups, so in that respect he differed from Pete Hegseth, but he had backward and outdated ideas about military strategy and tactics that had little connection to the way war was actually being waged, so in that they were a lot alike.

Cadorna bought into a concept of “sacred egoism” and wrote a military strategy paper basically proposing that a full frontal assault was pretty much always the best approach to war. Full frontal assault is manly. It sounds cool to other guys in the room when you are playing Risk, or some other manly game of war strategy and tactics. High T individuals love full frontal assault.

When World War 1 started Italy wisely stayed neutral because they were really in no shape to fight a war, but the sacred egoism guys kept working at the political leaders of the time, eventually convincing them that the Austro-Hungarians and Germans would quickly fall from a full frontal assault quickly taking Vienna, and then collecting spoils of war including much of what is now Slovenia and the Dalmatian coast of Croatia including a lot of exclusive islands Ivanka Trump could only dream of developing.

The only obstacle to that plan was trench warfare.

While the concept of full frontal assault had been around since before hoplite phalanxes, trench warfare was sort of a new concept. It was like an inverted Great Wall of China but with barbed wire. A lot of barbed wire. Chances are that your conception of trench war comes from the western front in the Low Countries and through French farmlands to the mountains of Switzerland. Flat trenches on flat land. The reality of trench warfare on the Italian front of Austro-Hungarian Slovenia war a lot more like the Swiss Alps. The Austrians were dug in along an extended ridge line with multiple rows of barbed wire fencing spaced down the steep slopes to the relatively flat ground the Italians planned to attack from.

Against that basically impenetrable defensive line Marshall Cadorna planned to use overwhelming force of men with bolt action rifles, 60 lb packs, and pure Italian spunk. And manliness. So Cadorna, being basically a Sicilian Pete Hegseth, ordered a full frontal assault. Thousands of men charged uphill at the tremendous speed that men running uphill with a bolt action rifle and a 60 lb pack can run. And the only thing besides gravity that could slow them down were the many lines of barbed wire for which the first wave were prepared, carrying bolt cutters instead of rifles. The only other thing that could have slowed them down would have been machine guns.

Did I mention machine guns?

Since about the time Luigi Cadorna had developed his thoughts on full frontal assault machine guns had become a big thing in warfare. So the first line of guys carrying the bolt cutters were mowed down before they had a shot at cutting the wire.

The Italians were slaughtered. They took about 10,500 casualties in the first assault. Not that they didn’t give the Austrians a hard time. A lot of Austrians died as well. Cadorna took that as a silver lining, so some time later, after regrouping and letting his men rest, catch their breath, bury their dead, and tend to the wounded he ordered another full frontal assault. He probably figured it couldn’t go worse than the first try.

He was wrong. This time he lost about 40,000 men. Again, it’s always good to look at the bright side, and the bright side was that his enemy surely must be running low on ammunition.

A few days later he ordered another full frontal assault. Up the hill. Against the barbed wire and the machine guns. The Austrians were horrified at the slaughter they were inflicting on the Italians. They shouted to the Italians to stop, to turn around, “we will not shoot you in the back. Go home.” Maybe the Italians thought that was a trick, that the Austrians really were running out of ammo.

They weren’t.

This time the Italians took 45,000 casualties. And it would not be the last full frontal assault Luigi Cadorna would order, because he had a theory. "…the current war can only end through the exhaustion of men and resources, and Austria is closer to reaching that point than we are. It is terrifying, but it is the way it is." And he wasn’t totally wrong. Eventually the Axis powers ran out of men and material. After around 20 million people died and another 20 million were wounded.

At this point I want to remind you that Italy did not need to enter the war. In fact, nobody needed to enter the war. Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, sure. That was not very nice, but there was no shortage royalty roaming around Europe looking for a throne to sit on. Maybe the lesson here that we never seem to learn is that a criminal action shouldn’t be justification for a war. It never seems to work out well for ordinary people, even when the criminal act is heinous. Even when it is September 11, or October 7th.

The other thing is that we really should be more content with the things we have and not seek to take stuff from other people, even stuff that is really nice, like the Dalmatian coastline which is not only nice but is lasting. Nothing like barrels of oil that you can just burn and it disappears into the atmosphere.

And the other other thing is that we shouldn’t place our trust for defense and safety in the hands of people with simpleminded sacred egoism and dreams of High-T homoerotic glory, with no apparent willingness to consider that the tactics and machinery of war is always a step ahead. People like him should never be in a position to make life and death decisions.

Not “I ❤️ NY,” tho that’s a catchy slogan.

No, really. I love New York. It’s a wonderful state.

There are some nabobs of negativism around her who are constantly talking us down. I don’t appreciate that. A lot of them are local elected officials. Pretty much all are Republicans.

Apparently the complainers weren’t listening to Mr. T when he was the celebrity muscle at pro wrestling events in the 80’s in Glens Falls when the civic center was the Civic Center and the WWE was the WWF. “Be proud of your home town!” Mr. T admonished a fan who was badmouthing Glens Falls for being boring.

When Mr. T speaks people listened.

We could use a guy like Mr. T around here about now to set certain people’s attitudes right.

For instance the kind of person who might be serving on the Warren County Board of Supervisors who says that people are leaving New York State because of high taxes but who benefits from a pay raise that supervisors voted for themselves of 31.7% in 2024, increasing their part-time salary $6,318 from $19,932 to $26,250. For context, supervisors in Washington County were making $23,000 and in Saratoga county they were making $22,000. These are the kind of people who are saying New Yorkers are leaving the state for lower tax states. They are also the same people, largely Republicans, who voted for a 7.42% budget increase in 2024 and a 12.8% increase in 2025.

Remember that these are Republicans, I noted that, right? Republicans, and that outside of Glens Falls Republicans massively dominate the political landscape around here, as they have for … well, basically forever. So if there has been a local tax increase in Warren County it is because Republicans voted for it. The same kind of people who are telling you that everyone is leaving New York State because of high taxes.

Don’t make me say it again, local Republicans are directly responsible for every increase in your local taxes, unless you live in Glens Falls. A few years ago they wanted to increase the county share of sales tax by 33.33%. You can be sure I opposed that one and the way they manipulatively insisted it was only a 14% increase. It’s a regular thing some of them do - feed the public skewed perspectives on information and assume people won’t check their facts.

It’s also true that some of those local complainers are state legislators who do very nicely in terms of pay. New York Legislators are the best paid in the nation at $142,000/yr plus per diem of $203. New York has a full time legislature, but some states have a part time legislature and some a hybrid model. The average full time leg salary is $82,350. The average hybrid leg salary is $41,110. And the average part time legislator earns $18,449 - which is less than a Warren County Supervisor salary in 2024, before the pay raise.

In Florida a legislator earns $29,697 per year plus $247 per diem for a maximum of 60 days. In Texas it’s $7,200 plus $221 per diem.

Given those sorts of numbers I would think local Republicans would want to shut their mouths about high taxes in New York State because it seems like they are huge beneficiaries of taxing the public. But, no. They have no shame. They cash every check.

So here’s the thing, the whole notion that “everyone is leaving New York because of high taxes” is a complete sham. When people tell you that other people are leaving New York to move to low tax states it is not true. Not in the aggregate.

The fact is (get ready) people are not leaving New York!

Not in the way these blowhard naysayers are intimating.

Sure, people are leaving New York. People have always left New York. In the history of this country New York has been the greatest donator of migrants to other states. It has also been, until relatively recently, the greatest recipient of immigrants. That is the greatness of New York. People come here, or are born here. They learn. We teach them. They move on. Sometimes come back. I mean, if they’re not dead. We’re fine with bringing people home for burial but if they’re dead and traveling here even I don’t want them. I have my limits.

I have done this myself. I mean, move away from New York and return, not die and walk back.

The actual fact is that New York has gained population consistently for its entire history tracked in decennial census except for the period between 1970 and 1980.

It is true that in the 5 years since the last census, conducted at the very beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic, estimates indicate New York has lost perhaps 119,000 or maybe 200,000 residents. But the idea that the population loss is due to residents fleeing to “lower tax” states is specious. Even the Census department indicates NY gained 1,000 residents last year. That’s between July 2024 and July 2025.

The reality is that we lost at least 83,000 NY lives to Covid.

At the same time, migration to NY dropped significantly due to the worldwide pandemic. And nationwide our population replacement, babies, are not coming as fast and furious as they did when some of us were young. Our temporary loss in population is a fluke, and basing predictions of future needs on that mistaken assumption is disastrously foolish. The actual economic indicators are that we have stable population on average, with good potential for growth - even against the headwinds of inept national economic policy.

It is absolutely true that people move away every year. Young people go away to college, or join the military. People move for jobs, they move for adventure, they move for their health, or to be near family elsewhere. Or they move in retirement. Heck, we even had a guy who moved into New York as a child, found some golden tablets (because New York is that kind of a place), then moved west where his followers eventually founded the whole darn state of Utah - which happens to be one of the fastest growing states percentage-wise.

That is the greatness of New York. No other state comes close to that kind of thing.

Sure, plenty of states have, or had, mineral wealth and drew get-rich-quick schemers. California, Nevada, Montana, South Dakota, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado … they all had gold or silver or copper or even uranium. But gold tablets? The people needed to extract that wealth? No, they did not have that. That human capital was supplied mainly by New York and people who moved there from New York. At least until Asian immigration became a bigger thing.

Here in reality world the reality is that the United States as a whole is in a period of very slow growth. Very few states are growing very fast. The ones that are seeing high percentage growth are mostly small population states where relatively small increases in real numbers make for a large percentage increase. The exception is Texas that unlike most other states in recent years has experienced fairly large immigration growth, largely Mexicans. Florida, as well, has continued to experience immigration growth, a lot of them are Cubans. A lot.

And while other states have gained population New York State continues to be an economic powerhouse with a larger economy than Florida and the highest per capita GDP of any state.

To people fleeing New York because of taxes to low wage states with poorer public services I have a word, “goodbye.” And good luck, because I’m a New Yorker and I’m generous. Decent New Yorkers are a generous people. And nice, and kind. We hold no schadenfreude for people who move to places with high humidity, tornados, hurricanes, lots of wild pigs, and snakes. That’s not who we are.

So remember, the people who tell you everyone is leaving New York because of high taxes are the same people raising your taxes and giving themselves a 31.7% raise.

Do not listen to them.

As Mr. T might have said, “Don’t be a fool, fool.”

I say that as a grandparent who’s been to his granddaughters’ elementary school talent show. Every year there are kids whose talent is to sing a contemporary popular song, maybe a Taylor Swift song. Judging from their performance they did not commit the time to actually learning the song. They stand in front of the gathered crowd of peers, parents, grandparents and teachers, microphone pressed to their lips they hum their way through most of the song until the chorus comes along and they belt out those few words with all the emotive power of Taylor herself, if not the actual melody.

Don’t get the idea that I’m picking on little kids, because I’m not. It’s just that they’re charmingly oblivious to the fact that despite feeling like they know their favorite song inside out … they don’t know squat.

I get it. They have heard the song a hundred times and in their head they know every nuance, every chord change, every plucked note of lead guitar and one nanosecond after each word of the lyrics is sung it comes out of their mouth. So they feel like they know the song to perfection. Clearly, in their mind, they have no need to print out the lyrics and commit them to memory, or find a karaoke machine and give it a practice.

I love those kids. I admire their pluck, their eager naïveté. When they struggle through to a finish I give them a hearty round of applause. Because they are me. They are all of us. We are Dunning-Kruger together in ordinary life.

Which brings me to sports. I’m a big fan of sports, the athleticism, the strategy, the nuances of play. What a year for sports it has been! We’ve had the World Cup being played right here in America, which is a place that actually includes Canada and Mexico. For those of you who may not be big sports nuts like me the World Cup is an international soccer competition that comes around every 4 years pitting teams of various nationalities against each other to see which team can kick a ball (no using of hands!) into the opposing team’s goal. I know that sort of detail because I’ve actually played the game in gym class something like 50 years ago.

Anyway, because it’s a really big deal, and because I’m a big fan of sport in general I watched several games. Typically I pick up on nuances of various sports from the announcers who are paid to actually know the rules. Unfortunately my access to viewing games was Telemundo, a Spanish language broadcast. Given enough viewing time I am confident I would learn a bit of Spanish and then pick up on some of the few rules I didn’t understand, but I didn’t have the luxury of time. So it was a surprise to me, after having watched a couple of games all the way to the end at 45 minute only to end unceremoniously with teams running into the locker rooms and me going to bed, to find that games last 90 minute. And then the clock keeps running and they play past the end of the game for some random amount of time. Also, sometimes a guy with a gold and yellow checkered flag will wave off what was a clearly scored goal. Which seems a little unfair. But the World Cup was a lot of fun and I learned how to row like a Viking, and that Scotland was forced into a tiny corner of Europe so they wouldn’t drink all the available beer.

The other thing I enjoyed about the World Cup was the amount of drama built into the sport. The acting is superb! I mean, I saw guys who did a pretty good job emulating Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar assassination scene after being gently pushed in the back or tripped during the inevitable fight for the ball. They would writhe around in agony like a 3 year old in the cereal aisle at the grocery store when their mom told them they could not have Fruit Loops.

I think the acting is my favorite part of the sport.

But the World Cup wasn’t the only major sporting event to watch this summer. There was also the Tour de France, which is a big bike race that runs in stages all around France for 3 weeks. I think most Americans would be surprised to find out that the top 3 most watched sporting events worldwide are the Olympics, the World Cup, and the Tour de France, or the Tour as big fans like me knowingly call it. And 2 of those sports were happening at the same time this summer!

While the Olympics and World Cup are bigger in eyeballs they only happen once every 4 years while the Tour happens every year with 3.5 billion viewers worldwide tuning in for 3 weeks. Surprisingly that is bigger than the Stanley Cup, or the NBA finals, the World Series, or even the Super Bowl.

The funny thing is, the guys riding the Tour, basically a hundred miles or more most days, find the time to follow their national teams in the World Cup. Because the riders at the Tour are a mix of nationalities, many of which were prominent contenders in both events.

While the Tour riders are following soccer they are not picking up on the drama of the World Cup. They don’t know how to play up getting hurt. You will see them hurtling at 30 miles an hour (48 kilometers per hour in French) in a pack of maybe 40 riders handlebar to handlebar (we call that a “peloton” which is a French word that I have learned because I watch a channel broadcasting the Tour in English) and suddenly one rider falls then a whole cascade of other riders flip, tumble, fall and grind to a stop on the pavement in a tangle of legs, bikes, ripped Lycra, blood, and skin. As quick as the crash, riders jump up collect their bike and if it is still rideable they hop on pedaling furiously to catch the riders ahead on the parkour. Team cars with spare bikes and wheels pull up and mechanics jump out of the car grabbing the correct spare bike for the individual riders involved in the crash and deliver it to the bleeding rider who jumps on, gets a push from the mechanic and heads down the road in pursuit with words of encouragement in their radio earpiece “ride, you crazy bastard, ride!”

In the best case all of the riders have returned to the chase, but if not medics have arrived to patch up the fallen and diagnose a likely broken collar bone. Because it is almost always a broken collar bone, like the one 2nd place rider Jonas Vingegaard suffered in a recent crash. And while these guys are tough it is almost impossible to compete at an elite level with a broken collar bone so in many cases the rider will withdraw on the spot.

Vingegaard was quoted after his spectacular crash at 40 miles an hour sliding into a concrete curb, “luckily it’s only a broken collar bone.”

In yesterday’s Tour stage - a grueling 171 kilometers with 5450 meters of climbing, that’s 106 miles and 17,881 feet of climbing - American Sepp Kuss (and is that a great name or what?) was on his own at the front within a few kilometers of winning the stage when he crashed on a downhill coming out of a tunnel through the mountain. An American hasn’t won a stage at the Tour in over 5 years and that last winner was, in fact, Sepp Kuss! Sepp jumped back on his bike and struggled back to pace, the broken tooth he had suffered earlier in the race apparent in his grimace of pain. But he was still ahead! Until he crashed again perilously close to a hundred meter cliff. Again he climbed back on his bike and rode on but this time Richard Carapaz had passed him. The wind had left his sails and he was passed again just short of the finish, his legs spent, his arm a smear of blood.

But 3rd! 3rd is not bad on the hardest stage of this Tour, and all the drama of the crash and the other crash. It will be a finish long remembered.

Anyway, what I intended in this Note was a compare and contrast between the very different venues of these 2 concurrent world sporting phenomena. The World Cup is held in massive stadiums holding tens of thousands of cheering fans surrounded by massive parking lots, people from around the world massed together to witness the spectacle and cheer their teams. 11 venues in the US and some in Canada and Mexico. 4 of the US stadiums are privately funded, one costing $1.93 billion. The others have benefitted collectively from roughly $2 billion in public financing. All of the venues benefit from other public resources such as public transit, and road infrastructure, access to water and sewer, public safety expenses such as police and emergency medical services.

The municipalities recover costs through various means such as ordinary taxation, special taxes such as hotel occupancy taxes, increased rates for public transit, even special sales taxes.

It’s a lot of money for what is a private business, because that is what the World Cup is, a private business. Sure, it seems like a socialized celebration of human desire to excel at sport and to grind your rival teams into the dirt, but it is a private business. AND, it’s a socialized celebration…

So is the Tour de France. Yes, it is a private business. But it has no stadium, per se. It has all of France. It has seascapes and majestic mountains, the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Massif Central - I mean, volcanoes! It has the wine making regions, which to be fair is pretty much all of France. It has chateaux, cathedrals, and monasteries, rivers, limestone cliffs with caves inhabited and decorated 40,000 years ago. It has kilometer after kilometer of scenic farmland, and it has quaint villages, and cities. And it has Paris, where the tour ends today.

While France is famously socialist, and you can stand pretty much anywhere along the course to watch the tour, you can mingle with elite riders and get literally inches away as they ride legendary climbs fanatically cheering your favorite riders and all the others as well - because there is incredible respect all around between competitors and fans alike - the Tour is a business. Various municipalities compete to be the start or finish of a stage. They pay good money to host, from tens of thousands of euros to a hundred thousand or more. But there is a payoff of a different sort than the big stadium sporting events. You can see the Tour essentially for free. They will drive through the course ahead of the race and throw swag at you, like a bucket hat or a polka dot King of the Mountains jersey. The riders will throw you an emptied water bottle as they ride by especially if you’re a kid, or you have a nice sign supporting your favorite rider. That stuff is a form of gold in memories.

The whole goddamn Tour is a postcard for French tourism. It’s like it’s in the name. You cannot watch the Tour without wanting to be in France. To stand for absolutely free by the side of a road and watch as the cyclists flash by, then you return to drinking your espresso, or your wine, and perhaps take a bike ride yourself immersing in the beauty and culture of France.

2 sports much the same, but with very different approaches to the same ends.

Ordinarily I would try to add more context in a Substack Note but you can look at the raw data ( link to the Federal Reserve report )and punch some numbers yourself:

The economy stalled in the last quarter in terms of wealth generation, total wealth remaining at $174.01 trillion.

Adjusted for inflation that means we are (as a whole) poorer than the quarter before.

When compared to the last quarter of Biden total wealth grew 7.3%, which is a bit ahead of inflation. But that increase isn’t evenly distributed. The top 0.1% gained $2.45 trillion in wealth. The top 1% gained $4.99 trillion which is more than the total wealth of the bottom 50% of families, $4.27 trillion.

The top 10% hold more than 2/3 of all wealth (67.9%), $118.26 trillion; compared to $55.75 trillion of the bottom 90%, and just 2.5% held by the bottom 50%.

The top 0.1% in terms of wealth hold $25.07 trillion. The next 0.9% $29.96 trillion. Together they hold about double the amount of our national debt.

The top 10% hold nearly 4 times ($118.26 trillion in wealth) than the national debt which keeps rising even as the wealthiest have had their taxes reduced regularly over the last several decades, but especially so in the last 8 years and into the future.

The wealth group in the middle, those in the 50-90% group along with a large segment of the bottom 50% who hold only $55.75 trillion or less than 1/3 of total wealth (32.1%) are being squeezed the most allowing the wealthiest to buy more yachts.

Luckily life has presented me with an exchange that I’m going to copy and paste to give readers a sense of the world I inhabit in the dark recesses of the internets where I am apparently some sort of Dark Knight figure the most tedious sort of Batman villains seek out to spar with.

So here is an exchange from the comments in a Front Page note written by Ken Tingley about Aaron Woolf. You don’t need to know anything from that column, just that it was a simple comment I made:

Me:

Many people look but don’t see.

When we want to distract a 3 year old we point and say “look”? A lot of politicians do that.

When a parent or a teacher wants to encourage learning they say “see?”

In some dark lair a character who fancies him or herself as “W Tucker” read my comment and waited 24 hours to spring into action, smashing the Reply button (and you can save yourself some time by only reading the first sentence of the response then pick up reading where I beigng my commentary again):

The Quibbler:

If the phrase “most people look but don’t see” highlights the difference between mere observation and true understanding. Then your following statements do not follow from the metaphorical interpretation of the phrase.

Your statement “When we want to distract a 3-year-old we point and say “look”? A lot of politicians do that.” While that statement may be true, in phrase “most people look but don’t see”, there is no attempt at distraction, no attempt to deceive just a lack of understanding of what has been observed.

Also, your statement “When we want to distract a 3-year-old we point and say “look”? A lot of politicians do that.” Are you equating the attention span of those who listen to politicians to the attention span of a 3-year-old?

In your statement “When a parent or a teacher wants to encourage learning they say “see?”” In the phrase in question the part “but don’t see “is a reference to a lack of understanding. Learning is acquiring information while understanding means grasping the meaning and connections. If the information acquired is wrong or incomplete they would have learned although there would be no true understanding.

You statement “When a parent or a teacher wants to encourage learning they say “see?”” is rather vague. So, if a teacher asks a student “did you see the ball game” they are encouraging the student to learn what?

You will note the Quibbler asks a lot of questions. (Okay, I knew you’d read the whole response despite my warning) It is a technique often used to incredibly boring effect by a lot of “conservative” types on the internets to occupy the time of those of us who are (admittedly) dumb enough to engage with them in the first place.

In my defense, I try to assume people who engage with me and comment are people of good will who are truly seeking understanding, so I give them some latitude, but by the same token I am perfectly aware that this particular troll (and I’m just going to say it, because this is trolling behavior - asking a lot of questions just to make me jump through hoops or do their homework for them) waited until most readers had moved on to the next day’s thing and wouldn’t actually read the thread.

I’m not playing that game. I am, after all, a Dark Knight of the Troll Realm, a sort of Bat Man, having earned the name by batting away a lot of nonsense trolls throw at me.

Me:

Many.

“Many people…”

Some people read but don’t comprehend. Some of them don’t have the capacity to comprehend, others simply don’t really want to try.

“‘I see’ said the blind man, when really he didn’t see at all.”

BIFF! SOCK! POW!

Look, if you want to engage in a thoughtful and meaningful discussion do not misquote the person on the other side. That is simply a non starter. If I use the word “many” do not change it to “most.” I try to use language that accurately represents the thought I’m trying to convey. Misquoting is anathema. Anathema is a word I used because it means a certain thing.

The Quibbler counterpunches, wildly missing the mark, because the Quibbler lives in a world full of mirrors and sees themself in everything:

I see, you want to quibble over what portion of people look but don’t see.

OK. Then explain how the quantity affects the meaning of the phrase.

I drop a truth bomb and leave the Quibbler to stew:

“I see, you want to quibble..” is pure projection.

You cannot even accurately quote what is right in front of you. You could copy and paste.

Instead you incorrectly quote me and wish to hold a debate about perception and understanding.

You are an example of the problem and it’s too bad there will be very few people to read the exchange. I suppose you escape shame through anonymity.

Is there a point to this seemingly pointless note I am writing about a tedious exchange with a tedious person?

Yes there is! Because there is always a moral to my comic book stories: There are little used phrases in the English language (and I suppose most other languages have similar phrases) like “you’re right,” or “my mistake,” or “oops, how silly of me!” Those phrases go a long way toward finding common ground in a meaningful exchange of ideas. When someone will not admit a simple mistake or simply gloss over it and continue their argument you know you are dealing with The Quibbler, a villain of many faces, many nom de plumes.

Or is it noms de plume?

The Quibbler will have a firm opinion.

For example:

I get the feeling something similar was happening in the June 26th edition of the Lake George Mirror in a story Vacation Home Tax Threatens Lake George’s Evolving Economy by Paul Post, specifically in quotes realtor Dan Davies of Cleverdale (Lake George) based Davies-Davies Associates Real Estate attributed to potential customers about a proposed luxury second home tax. According to the story, “Three or four potential clients have already shied away because of the proposed tax, he said.”

Davies explained the motive behind the proposed tax: “They’re looking for tax revenue. We got it kicked out of this year’s budget, but I have big concerns that this tax is coming to most of upstate. They’re going to pound it down our throats.” [And here is the part I want to focus on] “It will have a dramatic effect on upper-tier real estate.”

Are you clutching your pearls yet? I would if I had any pearls.

And who is this “we”?

I don’t suspect Mr. Davies of making up a story, but I wouldn’t put it past his clients to stretch the truth a bit on occasion. If you are not familiar with Davies and Davies Associates they regularly deal in very high-end real estate. It’s fun to just look at their ads for available property and dream about owning a Lake George lakefront property. For instance, (me looking at their real estate ad) here’s a LAKE HOUSE RETREAT, ARCHITECTURAL MASTERPIECE [cleverly] priced at $4,998,000. It’s enticing at that price because $5 million is a little more than I could spend, but I didn’t just fall off the turnip wagon. I know that $4.998 million is only $2,000 short of $5 million. And while I could come up with $2,000 the rest might be a problem for me.

But wait! here’s a nice place, LAKE GEORGE WATERFRONT, “[t]otally renovated retreat on quiet Harris Bay!” “Exceptional turnkey lakefront living at an incredible value!”

You know me, I like a good value, and this turns out to be only $1,849,000.

That almost seems reasonable by comparison. Possibly some local family is being forced by high taxation to sell their long-held family camp at a fire-sale price. So I do a little research on properties in Harris Bay on the Warren County Community Map website.

The pics above illustrate what might be a similar property having sold in 1989 for $1,540 and currently owned by the well-known local family LG Investments. $1,540 was worth a lot more in 1989 than it is today.

You should click on the pics.

To my surprise a very large proportion of lakefront homes don’t seem to be “family homes” at all! Many are held by some version of a family trust. A bit of quick research shows trusts are The Wealthy’s Secret: How to Use Family Trusts for Tax Savings. From that link I learned that wealthy people find ways to reduce their tax “burden” transferring that “burden” onto the shoulders of people who can’t afford to buy a lakefront home.

Many other property owners are Limited LiabilityCorporations (LLCs).

Mitt Romney reminded me once that “corporations are people too, my friend,” but there are several advantages for corporations in limiting tax liabilities that are not available to ordinary home owners so it makes sense if you have the kind of money to form a corporation. This particular LLC that I picked somewhat at random isn’t coy about what they’re up to. They’re named LG Investments LLC, with addresses in New Hampshire and Las Vegas, Nevada. If the corporation is to be believed (and why would a corporation lie) their lake house is an investment, a way to diversify their holdings, which must be significant because they can buy property I could only dream of owning and still pay the taxes and buy groceries.

Anyway realtor Davies goes on to note that last year’s market was the best he’s seen in 36 years, and that “[t]here is still a tremendous influx of money coming from the New York City metro area. I’ve never seen values like they are currently.”

While all of that sounds great for a guy who makes his living taking a cut from property sales, what he’s worried about is illustrated by a proposal from state Senator Patricia Fahy (D-Albany) to create a tax on higher value residential properties that are not primary residences. Senator Fahy seems to be a highly effective senator having sponsored and passed something like 40 bills. As a comparison, my Senator Dan Stec is a highly ineffective public servant having passed zero bills. In his defense, he has snipped a lot of ceremonial ribbons.

It doesn’t seem like Mr. Davies is a big fan of the concept of owners of our highest value properties paying a little bit more property tax to fund necessary services in communities where they are not permanent residents.

Senator Fahy’s proposal would allow local communities to collect additional tax revenue on expensive second homes with a number of stipulations. Municipalities would set a taxation rate between 0.5% and 4%, and a minimum threshold value for which the tax is applicable between $2.5 million and $5 million. The revenue from the tax would be divided evenly between the local municipalities and a fund that would in turn spread the proceeds to cities, towns, and villages across the state north of New York City. So rural towns without high value tourist properties would also benefit.

For example, the minimum value and percentage would provide $12,500 in additional tax revenue on a non-primary residence worth $2.5 million. $6,250 would stay local and $6,250 would get divided between hundreds of other local municipalities.

It could, in effect, be a limiting factor on the escalating rate of property values. If I were a realtor making my living as a percentage of total sale price I might not be thrilled. The additional tax would be a disincentive on speculation and investment.

But it would be an incentive on establishing primary residency if you happen to be a person and not a corporation.

We could sweeten the deal for primary residents of homes of any value by pairing the new tax with a tax rebate on all primary residences. State Senator Michelle Hinchey (D) has proposed such a concept, tho what follows isn’t necessarily exactly what she proposes. Any home that qualified for a STAR tax rebate could get an additional county tax rebate, perhaps an additional 5 or 10% of the total tax. For instance, if your tax bill was $1,000 and the rebate was 10% you would get back $100. There could be limits on total rebate or a reverse gradation tied to higher value homes perhaps eliminating the rebate for homes at the threshold value for the high value home tax.

Again, this would be an incentive for local home owners tied to a disincentive for housing speculation as the rebate would allow for a slight increase in regular property tax without unduly burdening local residents.

Do not think I am not sympathetic in some degree with Mr. Davies. (And I mean that sincerely even tho I can sense you rolling your eyes at me) Davies is concerned for his community. He talks about how the graduating class is half the size now as when he went to school.

I have similar concerns.

The reality is that while property values have exploded most of our small towns have severely lost population. There are far more homes, 2nd homes, and Short Term Rental properties than there were decades ago even as there are fewer families and children. Class sizes are much smaller even tho we have a wonderful quality of life, clean air, clean and plentiful waters, and access to all sorts of outdoor recreation year round.

While Mitt Romney was absolutely correct, corporations are people, they are a different kind of people who do not procreate in the same way that flesh and blood people do. So the little baby corporations don’t need diapers, and healthcare. They don’t learn to ride a bike or eat a hot dog or take a dip in the lake. They don’t attend the elementary school, or graduate from high school. You don’t play on a soccer team with them. They don’t ride the school bus. You won’t see them at Stewart’s.

What they do is take a tax write-off for local property taxes. They employ accountants and attorneys to minimize their tax burden, and most important of all, they provide a means of passing wealth from one generation of wealthy people to the next in ways that minimize funding our collective government and in the long term preventing a large portion of individual wealth from ever being subject to taxes that ordinary people with modest incomes and modest homes cannot avoid paying.

They seem very nice at a party, I mean, how could you be angry at your neighbors the Family Trusts.

Family.

Trust.

They have a very friendly name.

50 years ago my dad, a Muslim immigrant from Afghanistan became an American citizen.

It was unnerving driving. I couldn’t wait to get home.

In the near distance I saw flashing vehicle hazard lights and tapped the brake. The car immediately began to skid and I quickly let off the brake but it was too late. I was already sliding. Luckily I wasn’t going fast and on a gentle incline, so I skidded to a halt well short of a pickup truck with a cap on the back parked by the side of the road. A lanky young guy in work boots, jeans, flannel shirt, and a baseball cap who had been standing and waving his arms for me to stop gingerly walked over.

I got out of my car nearly falling on the accumulating black ice.

“Black ice,” said the stranger.

“Yeah,” I quipped.

“There’s no getting over the mountain without studs or chains. We’re waiting for the sand truck.” He gestured to the truck where his wife and young child waited in the cab of the truck but the rear was stuffed with various household items. “I got a scanner. Sander is on the way. Shouldn’t be too long…uh-oh…”

His attention had shifted from me to the road behind me. I turned to look and I could see headlights approaching along the road at a dangerous rate. It surprised me that I didn’t hear the car engine but as it drew nearer I could hear spinning of tires and sound of gravel as the car jerked from one shoulder of the road to the other and spun several donuts heading straight at us. The young guy pushed me hard and we both fell into the ditch at the side of the road as the out of control vehicle spun over the spot we’d been standing then careened into the ditch on the opposite side.

We quickly got up and ran to check on the driver. But there was no driver. “There’s nobody driving,” said my astonished friend. Then a figure rose in the back seat stretching as if waking from a deep slumber. We opened the rear door and the man climbed out.

“Where am I?” he asked with a heavy accent that sounded vaguely British, but not exactly. I couldn’t place it.

“You’re Elon Musk!” Exclaimed my new friend. Then he got angry. “You can’t drive around on self-driving mode like that! It’s not safe! It’s a danger to others.”

Musk ignored him, pulling out his cell phone. “No signal!” He poked at the screen, “no Starlink! Guys? Where the hell am I? Who are you?”

“I’m Joe. Look, we’re not going anywhere until the sand truck comes. We can probably push you out, but you gotta drive. You can’t do this in driverless mode.”

Musk got behind the wheel while Joe and I got in front of the car in the ditch ready to push. “We’re gonna have to rock it. Put it in reverse and go gentle, then let it roll forward, and go reverse again. Okay, GO!”

Musk stepped hard on the accelerator and the wheels quickly spun deep ruts. There was no way we were pushing him out. Joe looked at me and whispered “Elon Musk is the shittiest driver ever.”

He probably was right.

“Well,” said Joe “I could pull you out but I don’t have a chain.” He looked at me, “do you have a tow strap?” I didn’t.

Then we heard the sound of a vehicle approaching. It was an Amazon delivery van. The driver pulled up along side, “do you guys want me to call for help?”

“No. You don’t have a tow strap do you? I could pull him out if I had one.”

“I don’t think I have one, but I can get one. Do you want one?”

“Well, uh, sure but…” stammered Joe But the driver was busily poking at his cell phone. “There, I have one on order.”

“On order?”

“Yeah, it’ll be here in,” he checked his phone, “in 11 minutes.”

Joe was confused. “How is that?”

“Amazon drone service. I have special access.”

Joe looked at the guy intently. “You’re Jeff Bezos.”

“Dammit!” Bezos exclaimed, “don’t tell anyone. I’m trying to go incognito. Hence the delivery van.” He pointed behind him with his thumb.

“I don’t believe this,” said Joe, “first Elon Musk, now Jeff Bezos! Who’s next?”

Jeff Bezos looked surprised, “Elon’s here?”

“Hi Jeff,” Elon greeted from in the Tesla.

That’s when we heard another vehicle approaching. A weaselly looking guy got out and joined us on the side of the road. It was Sam Altman. “Jeff! What the hell are you doing here?”

“I would ask you and Elon the same thing.”

“Elon’s here?”

“Hi Sam!” said Elon, still inside the car.

“So, Sam, what are you doing here?” Bezos knew Sam Altman didn’t deal well with confrontation. He’d just come out and say what it was he was doing.

“I’m up here buying up properties to diversify my holdings. Lakefront is great property for increasing value. But I’m buying up the little towns too, house by house, through various LLC’s, living trusts, and other corporate entities. I have hundreds of them to keep the locals from getting suspicious.”

Joe was listening intently. “Did you buy 36 Hophorn Drive?”

“Who’s he?” asked Altman.

“Nobody.” said Elon.

“Well?” asked Joe.

“This is a little uncomfortable, I mean, it’s possible I did without really knowing … oh, alright. Yes, I bought it.”

“That was our home!” said Joe. “I mean, it wasn’t ours, we can’t afford to buy a home, but we rent it. Or we used to. Landlord sold it and evicted us. We’re taking the last load of our stuff out … “

I thought Joe was about to start crying

“Well,” said Sam Altman a little sheepishly, “I wouldn’t have had you evicted, but I can make the rent you were paying per month in a couple of weekends as a VRBO, or Airbnb.” He shrugged, “it’s not personal, it’s just the invisible hand of the market.”

“You think small, Sam” interjected Jeff Bezos, “Direct waterfront is where the big money is.”

“Yeah,” said Sam, “But there are limited numbers of available properties at any time.”

Bezos scoffed, “Ha! Like I said, small thinker! I scout out the best properties in my delivery van - it’s the perfect cover - and find a whole bay that I want to buy up.”

“But that can be dozens of properties, maybe hundreds.”

Bezos continued as if speaking to a child. “I have a deal with Peter Theil and Palantir. We do a complete analysis of the finances of the owners of those properties, their holdings, their exposure to market pressures, and then develop a plan to crush them. I’ll short sell every stock they own and pretty soon they are willing sellers!” he exclaimed triumphantly. “I love crushing millionaires. They go through life thinking they’ve made it, that they’re invulnerable. But they’re not. I love the look on their faces when they lose everything. Sam, my friend, you are pathetic. Crushing insignificant people like this poor guy” he pointed at Joe, “this, what’s-his-name over here.” He spoke as if Joe wasn’t listening, but Joe was listening.

“Wait a second you…” started Joe but just then Elon called out triumphantly “I’ve got service! I texted 911! Help is on the way! I’m a genius! I’m highly effective!”

That’s when the scanner in Joe’s truck chirped to life calling volunteer firemen and other emergency services to the scene. Joe gave a dejected shrug, walked over to the back of his pickup and began rummaging around. He pulled out a reflective fireman’s coat and hat and put them on.

“I’m a volunteer fireman. I was planning on resigning, turning these in since I lost my home and we have to leave town.” He glared at Sam Altman who shrunk a little.

“Look,” Sam said, “like I said, it’s not personal. Everybody told me you and your wife June are very nice people, active in the community, serving on the school board, volunteering for community events. I even bought one of your wife’s brownies at the bake sale last month. Okay, that’s a lie. I didn’t, but it sounds good to seem like I’m part of the neighborhood. That’s the thing though, it’s a very small town with very few students. Per pupil costs are very high. I will save a tremendous amount of money if all the kids leave town and we can close the school. I mean, it’s a wonderful investment incentive that you little people work so hard to keep property taxes low for second home owners - I mean, as an incentive for investment that’s great - but if I can eliminate school taxes the value of my investment goes through the roof! Next we have to get rid of the older residents. They’re a drain on healthcare. I mean, I’m not a monster! I don’t want to kill them! Let them move to the City. Let Mamdani care for them and we can eliminate the county nursing home and the health center. That’s a big savings in unfunded Medicaid mandates. We can save a lot on taxes here if we just try to be a little more efficient.”

Joe shook his head sadly and went back to his truck where he grabbed a flashlight and began repetitively waving it up and down as a warning against whoever else might show up. We began hearing sirens in the distance, and caught flashes of red emergency lights down the road toward town.

Then we heard the whirr of a drone which dropped out of the sky depositing a small box at Jeff Bezos’s feet. “Joe! Here’s the tow strap you ordered.”

“I didn’t order no tow strap.”

“I believe you did,” replied Bezos “Here, I have a voice memo on my phone. It’s a good deal, only $22. Free delivery! On my account. Tax exempt!”

“No.”

“Alright, I’ll make it an even $20.”

“Oh, screw it,” said Joe, reaching for his wallet and pulling out a twenty he gave it to Bezos who snapped the bill and stuffed it in his pocket. “Just to shut you up,” said Joe.

A DOT snowplow equipped with chains pulled up coming from the south spreading a sand/salt mixture.

Police cars began to arrive followed by volunteer firemen in hose and pump trucks along with 3 ambulances.

A state trooper captain showed up, “Where’s Mr. Musk?” he spotted the Tesla in the ditch and hurried over. “Mr. Musk, are you okay?”

The Fire Cheif came over to Joe. “That was a quick response Joe! Good job. I’d heard rumors you were gonna resign from the company.”

“Well, I’ve been meaning to talk to you. We been forced out of our home,” he shot a look at Sam. “I guess we’re moving and I have to quit.”

“I’m awful sorry to hear that. We’re so short of members. We can’t respond half the time …”

The firemen had pushed Elon’s Tesla out of the ditch. All the vehicles formed a short parade and began driving south on the now-safe road. All but me and Joe and June and their kid.

I didn’t know what to say. “Well, thanks Joe. Good luck, I hope things work out. You go first, I’ll follow you.”

“No,” said Joe. “Go ahead. We’re in no hurry to be anywhere. We’ll catch up.”

And that’s where I left Joe. I saw him in my rear view mirror taking off his fire gear and stowing it in his truck.

I’m the fish who turns left when the rest of the fish turn right and while I’m wondering where everybody went the shark is coming up behind me. Fortunately, I’ve managed every time to say “not today, shark, not today.”

Or maybe my childhood wasn’t exactly as dangerous as swimming with sharks, but I’m trying to make a point here so just go with it.

There are both spoken and unspoken signals in the world around us, in a society, in a culture. Signals about all kinds of things. Maybe I’m not the best explainer of this sort of thing because I’m not a native speaker, but because I’m not I am aware of the problems of understanding.

Which brings me to Pride Month. If you’re not from here you may find the concept of Pride Month as, well, as a little bit odd. I don’t know this from actual experience but what I’ve been taught in school is that the United States of America is a wonderful place full of acceptance for people of all kinds, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of teaming shores, people of all sizes, shapes, colors, and ways of being. America is the most wonderful of all nations because we are a caring and decent people accepting of difference. That’s why people around the world look up to us and want to be just like us.

In the spirit of being as helpful as possible to people not from here and who, therefore, are not familiar with our innate American acceptance of gay culture I’d like to provide some indicators as an aid for those who have not grown up in this particular culture and able to recognize the signs innately. For some of you this is information you know without me having to explain. If so you can stop reading here. For the rest of you still reading I hope this information will be very useful.

The basic thing that people need to understand is that the gay/straight question is not a dichotomy. It’s not a division. It’s simply a way of focusing our attention. Other cultures do this in their language by using gender associated pronouns which can be confounding if you aren’t born into the culture. For example, in Romance languages everything is defined by gender. That is no surprise because those are “hot blooded” people. You know, Italians, Spaniards, and the French. Those people are always thinking about sex, because sex is built into their language, their sensibility. Everything is either el or la, le or la. It’s like the words are getting naked on the page and exposing their genitals. English is not like that. Thank god! For that we need emojis of eggplant or peach. Why eggplant or peach I don’t know. It defies understanding; it’s just the way it is.

But our attention to gayness and straightness is much more subtle and with a spectrum, sort of like a rainbow. Things aren’t black and white, male or female. We appreciate the subtleness of reality, as in how the colors of the rainbow blend seamlessly from one color to the next. Gayness and straighteness is like that, and weirdly some of the gayest stuff is also the most straight.

That subtlety is what makes it so hard for people from other cultures, more homophobic cultures, to appreciate how accepting we are of gay culture, of how much we embrace it.

The problem for those other people (and honestly, count me as one who started out that way, not fully understanding our national appreciation of difference) is that they do not have the finely tuned Gaydar of America. For those of you who may be new to this, gaydar is like radar except for identifying gayness. And that is what this newsletter is about. Helping you to identify the underlying gay culture that pervades our society.

Sometimes we are lucky in that Americans will fairly often tell you straight up what is gay. They will say “that is gay!” You should keep a notebook and quickly write that stuff down for future reference. Recently on the Fox network (gay as fuck) in a panel discussion one host declared “fudge is gay.” Good information! I wrote that down in my little notebook. But then they went on to discuss pickles on cake. Pickles on cake is apparently not gay. Good to know.

Pectin is straight, tapioca is gay.

Cuisine is a pretty good indicator of gayness. Cuisine is, of course, gay, food is generic tending toward CIS gender or “straight” culture. Dinner is straight, supper is gay.

There are some pretty obvious general indicators.

A barbecue grill is straight while salad is gay. Some salads are more gay than others. Crudités is gay, veggie platter is straight. Meat salad, known as either antipasto or charcuterie, which sounds pretty gay, is in fact not.

Various meats are either more or less straight. Beef is straight, lamb is gay. Remember, it’s a continuum.

Tofu is gay.

Tofurkey is like the turducken of gayness; gay inside of gay wrapped inside gay. Hotdogs, while phallic, are neither straight nor gay. Bratwurst, kielbasa? Homoerotic. Gay. Natural casing sausages are not only gay, they’re uncircumcised.

While grilling is straight baking is gay. But as I’ve noted, there are degrees. Pie for instance is either gay or straight depending on the thickening agent. Pectin is straight; tapioca is gay.

Sports

NASCAR is straight; professional wrestling is gay. Mixed martial arts (MMA) is gay as fuck.

Hockey used to be straight, but due to a certain homoerotic TV series it is now gay. Or maybe it’s trans. (BTW, TV series are straight, Netflix/cable series are gay)

Football, straight; Soccer, gay.

Gymnastics, gay; ice skating, ice dancing, ballroom dancing, all gay. Hip hop dancing, straight.

Alpine skiing straight; Nordic skiing, gay - with the exception of biathlon which sounds gay but is totally straight. Bobsled straight; luge, gay.

Music

Taylor Swift, straight; Noah Kahan, gay.

Queen…do not make me finish the sentence.

Hair metal bands Def Leppard, Twisted Sister, Kiss, etc … gay.

Prog rock gay; David Bowie straight. (I know, I don’t get it either) Iggy Pop, straight. Alice Cooper, straight.

Bruce Springsteen, straight; Bon Jovi, gay.

k d Lang, (weirdly) straight; JD Vance, gay.

From that we can infer some things about:

The Alphabet

We see that the letter k is straight, while J is gay. In general consonants are straight while vowels are gay. But of course there are exceptions. Q is obviously the gayest letter while letters R, S, and especially Z are straight. X is so straight it’s gay. Y is, of course, the sometimes letter. Trans.

Colors

Obviously, pink is gay while black is straight. But pink clothing on a woman is straight while black clothing on a woman is either straight or gay depending on the clothing.

Clothing is a very complicated subject in terms of gay and straight and requires a subscription to Vogue (gay) to parse.

Countries

France, gay; Japan, straight. Germany straight by day; gay by night. Scotland straight, England gay. Ireland straight and gay depending on which one. South Korea, straight; North Korea, gay.

Misc

Submarines, gay; destroyers straight. Rockets and missiles, gay; land mines, straight.

Need I go on?

By this point I think you’re probably getting an intuitive feel for this gay/straight taxonomy and you can begin appreciating how pervasive but helpful it is in our day to day lives. I hope you can put all this information to good use moving forward (straight; moving backward, gay)

If you find any of this offensive do not blame me. It’s just the way things are in America based on observation and empirical evidence.

It’s not like I made it all up.