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If you are in a world of Kings and Monarchies, you might take it for granted that Royalty is in place for (perhaps) Divine reasons. God made it so, and so it must be. And if Royalty misbehaves, that’s God’s will and we should be clever in not being noticed by them, lest we incur their displeasure.

If you live in a colony founded by Royal Decree, and you are far away from the displeasure of the dreaded Royals, you might start to Think Differently. It seems arbitrary and capricious that people, of highly variable talents and character but who are of a particular bloodline of someone who won a war a long time ago, get to be rulers Just Because.

You might, if you were a somewhat Deep Thinker, wonder about what gives a Government the Right to Govern. And you might conclude that it is the Consent of the Governed.

Okay. And that gets us to the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions.

Now, say you live in a World of Democracies. You are a member of an Ethnic or Cultural Group and it seems to you as if the Interests of your Ethnic or Cultural Group keep being ignored or denigrated by the Democratically elected Government. If you are in the Minority, you try to get everyone in your Group to vote. If that is not sufficient, you try to persuade members of other Ethno-Cultural Groups to vote with you. Perhaps you need to increase suffrage, perhaps you need to persuade disenchanted members of your Group to have Hope and to behave Optimistically. Perhaps you need to tell your Story in such a way that other Groups see themselves in your Story.

So far so good.

Let’s say you are in the Majority while this is happening. Normally, things Go your Way because you’re in the Majority. You have the Power to dictate How Things Go. Any Minorities that want to Live a Good Life can vote with you. You get to decide which Minorities are OK and which are Not-OK.

But a new consensus is forming and your numbers are shrinking and suddenly Democracy seems to bring other people’s and groups’ interests to the fore.

What is the Former Majority to think about Democracy now? Suddenly it doesn’t look so obviously Good.

In many countries, Syria and Russia, for instance, minorities govern. There are sham Elections, because Elections Are Good, but those who support the interest of the Minorities Always Win. Right-thinking people scorn those systems. The Sacred Vote! One Man One Vote!

As someone clever said about the Arab World: One Man, One Vote, this one time.

In America, far-Right White Supremacists have always been deeply suspicious of our Sacred Constitution. After all, it never mentions White people. It does have the 3/5ths business, so, OK, but it does not guarantee that White Men shall always be In Charge.

Looked at that way, from the Point of View of disenchanted White Men, Democracy and universal suffrage could be seen as an insult, just a sneaky way to take their (God-Given) privilege away and give it to the Less-Deserving.

Yes, it all sounds depressingly familiar.

If you are a member of an Ethno-Cultural Group that enjoyed Dominance in a Democracy, but your numbers are dwindling, it is conceivable that Democracy might seem to have Worn out its Welcome. Yes, it was a wonderful, and Philosophically Satisfying, way to have power in the land, but now there must be Other Ways. So maybe deny others the vote, make it harder to vote, have Judges who declare that maybe “voting” is not something absolutely everyone needs to do. Get Intellectuals to Opine on the topic.

After all, nobody is being oppressed by a King, that’s a long-ago battle. Now we are just grasping at power.

And that’s how it ends.

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I’m a native New Yorker. My wife isn’t, but lived all her young adulthood there and is as committed to the idea of New York as any convert. She and I were both in theater there, often at the same theaters but at different times, so we didn’t meet until the 90s, when I moved to Los Angeles.

Often we sigh and say how much we miss New York… and then correct ourselves—we miss New York in the 70s and 80s, not New York now, debilitated as it is from money poisoning. Making a living is for losers—they want to make a killing. Commercial rent is jacked up not by 10% but by 100%, 200%, more, there is no top. And if space remains empty, the political and tax system support that. Once vibrant streets in the West Village are ghost towns, not because of Covid—this is from way before Covid—but because of rents. I suspect, but don’t know, that this is at least partly because landlord families are losing ground to hedge-fund and Wall St landlords who feel zero stake in the life of the city and the culture around them, and only respond, AI-like, to simple numerical metrics.

We may be seeing a return to cheap rents as Covid-19 hollows out cities and telework keeps people at their desk even in a remote location. Soon, some say and I hope but don’t dare believe, cities like New York can be places where people interested in collaborating on projects that don’t make all that much money can congregate and thrive.

These projects will seep into the culture and create a new, fresh American culture, which will replace the one we have now, decadent and rotting into the ground, and whose fate is to be compost for what comes later.

Oh, that’s fancy!

But New York is a disaster now. Its culture was embodied in the people who lived there and who left because of rents, maintained at an artificially high level by oligarchs parking money and by a Wall St mentality, driven by numerical metrics and divorced from any kind of human experience.

Even, though, at its most optimistic—the city empties out a little, rents ease, oligarchs complain about reducing value and decamp to seasteads, and artists can move back to the city—I wonder if it will, over the next few generations, become a fountainhead for American culture anything like it used to be.

In the 60s there was already a culture shaping across the country, so when it focused and concentrated in New York, it was a vibrant, transformational event. Post-war prosperity combined with a still-extant (soon to die) cultural egalitarianism that the whole world admired.

That’s gone now.

I can’t go on. I’m too vexed and upset… I’ll never be able to go home to NYC, and if I could (if rents dropped a LOT), it’s a cultural nothing.

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Corporations—the AI we’ve been living with for centuries… As Cory Doctorow writes in Skynet Ascendant: We humans are the inconvenient gut-flora of the corporation. They aren’t hostile to us. They aren’t sympathetic to us. Just as every human carries a hundred times more non-human cells in her gut than she has in the rest of her body, every corpora­tion is made up of many separate living creatures that it relies upon for its survival, but which are fundamentally interchangeable and disposable for its purposes. Just as you view stray gut-flora that attacks you as a pathogen and fight it off with anti­biotics, corporations attack their human adversaries with an impersonal viciousness that is all the more terrifying for its lack of any emotional heat.

Elon Musk’s stated fear of AI seems ironic in that he is such a corporate creature, and corporations behave exactly how he describes AI in such apocalyptic terms. But that is exactly what is happening, not only to cities, but most visibly there, because cities are were value and capital are most concentrated. Yes, a family that owns a few buildings—like my old landlord and his Greek immigrant family; they started with a diner and ended up owning a few dilapidated buildings in midtown, one of which I lived in for 17 years—would form a corporation which owns the buildings; but that is qualitatively different from a financial corporation whose management decides that the ROI they need to justify their bonuses is waiting in real estate and rental properties rather than boring old equities, bonds, and complex derivatives thereof.

I’m not clear on the difference, but I suspect, as with most things, that it’s a gradual difference, a sliding scale, rather than a nice, simple toggle switch. My old landlord wasn’t a financial corporation with no view of what was in the world except certain select metrics, blind to culture and human life, and chewing through humanity to get the coins in our pockets, then pulling the hair and buttons from its teeth. But he did live in Long Island City among his ethnic and religious counterparts, and I don’t think he cared personally all that much about people like me in Manhattan. So he did that thing that landlords do, which is to send in unlicensed contractors to do horribly destructive work on the building for years and years, in the hopes of either driving us out one by one, or, better yet, provoking a tenant lawsuit, the result of which is that the building would be condemned and … we’d all be driven out at once.

So was he better than a hedge fund landlord? He was, if only that I could actually talk to him and he would respond, and he was answerable. Also, he didn’t have megabucks to spend on lawyers to salt the soil around his enemies. He had one awful, but not THAT awful, lawyer whom we used to see in court.

Better would be Art Stabile, the lefty Catholic who lived down the block, who owned the building he lived in and rented out the apartments to young (Catholic mainly, I believe) international students. He had a stake in the building, the street life, and the world from which he earned his living. I don’t know who owns his building now…

Cities become prey to certain cultures. Los Angeles was for a while a creature of Hollywood. The dreams and desires of those who worked in entertainment were the legitimate dreams and desires. Others were… less interesting. Hollywood includes artists and craftspeople, so Los Angeles has always been receptive to artists, though somewhat contemptuous of those who don’t—or, the suspicion is, can’t—sell out.

New York is under the spell of Wall St and has been since the 80s. But Wall St’s culture itself has changed and dragged the city behind it, helpless in its wake. And information technology has supercharged its ambitions, so that, while years ago, it would have been a chump’s game to invest in rental real estate, because management was complicated and expensive, today, rental real estate is pretty good for a return.

I go back to the first episodes of Planet Money—when it was good, when it was important, before they did inane “brand stories” about Hydrox vs Oreos and “ain’t business grand.” The inception of Planet Money was a This American Life episode called The Giant Pool of Money. Investors used to park money in Treasury bonds, but interest rates were lowered to speed up the economy. This meant the T-bills yielded less. So all those smart guys ‘n’ gals on Wall St (really mostly guys, especially then) turned their Ivy League-honed minds to where else they could invest.

Turns out mortgages were just sitting there being valuable. So they proceeded to process them via the alchemy of high finance—tranches, derivatives, derivatives on those derivatives—until a small number of folk made a lot of money and many, many people lost their homes in the Great Recession.

They have no stake in Main St. Just like with Tyson (of the Foods), Wall St parties are so much more fun than those annual BBQs they use to keep their staff happy with their low pay and shrinking benefits.

After the Depression and WWII, there was, for a brief while, a time when the nation’s culture was egalitarian. All Americans (let’s not get crazy; not Blacks really, and not women, not really) were equal, and your boss could live in your neighborhood. He might have a pool and you might not, but big deal! You were all equal, you were all Americans.

But (see Piketty) that was an anomaly, brought on by a confluence of disasters and FDR. Now we’re back to the status quo ante. And, while other nations still strive to emulate America in the 60s, America is turning its back on that and looking to the 1880s.

I don’t like it. No sir, not one bit.

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Wouldn’t you like to take a relaxing stroll along the oldest freeway in the world? It’s not the busiest freeway – that would be the 405 – but it’s still three or four lanes of hurtling steel. Along the east edge of the southbound side of this old freeway is a path for pedestrians, between the junction to the 5E and Amador Street. Every time I drive past, I wonder who it is intended for. I’ve never seen anyone on it.

Is, or was, the City of Los Angeles so concerned for pedestrians that it provided this odd little walkway to get across the LA River? If you need to cross the river on foot, you could always go to North Broadway, and cross there on a handsome, well-maintained, sidewalk.

I grew up a New York pedestrian; I first crossed the street unsupervised in 1960 at the age of 4 — I wandered off while all the adults were arguing about who was late and who was being a nudge. By the time they noticed that I was gone, I had already wandered into traffic on West End Avenue. They all came pouring out onto 72nd Street screaming my name. Someone shouted, “there he is!” and ran after me and scooped me up. It was very gratifying and exciting.

In the 60s and 70s, New York streets were dicey, and I developed street instincts, like 360-degree awareness, crazy-person avoidance, youth-looking-for-a-fight detection, and continual monitoring for escape routes.

This last skill would make me avoid this walkway along the 110, because there’s no way to run if two rival gangs approach each other in a deadly standoff. At least on the Broadway bridge, you could run perpendicularly into traffic, and take your chances with the trucks.

I’ve been commuting from West LA to Pasadena for five months ten years now (and for an additional eleven months about two years ago), and I’ve become obsessed with these strange, ramshackle staircases that go down to the freeway, snaking through the brush. Some of them, like the one on Solano Avenue, seem to serve the purpose of allowing pedestrian traffic to cross the freeway. There’s a school nearby, and it makes sense to let the students who live just 150 feet across the freeway walk across. Google Maps seems to think you can do that, but when I look at the satellite view, I don’t see a path. When I drive past, I get a glimpse of a railed-off walkway… I’ll just have to go there and take a look.

I see how you can walk to Amador St, which crosses above the northbound side of the 110, and then under the southbound side. But where’s the fun in simply walking along an ordinary street, when you can walk on a barely used, falling apart, dangerous narrow path that is separated from speeding traffic by a chainlink fence? And that’s probably populated by fringe elements of society?

Maybe I could even do it with a nice camera around my neck? Hmmmm… That’s so smart!

As far as I can tell there are four ways to get onto this mysterious walkway (click on thumbnails for full-sized pictures):

• 

  The entrance on Amador Street (see pic) – that one looks the best maintained, and like it might actually be intended for use. The entrance to the ramp is visible in the satellite view; you’d climb the ramp, then switch back, then you’re right on the freeway.

• 

  The staircase rising from Solano Avenue (red arrow), near the elementary school, right by a blocked-off on-ramp (green arrow) which went from a city street into the fast lane in the space of about 20 feet; it must have been a bloodbath until they fenced it off.

• 

  The extremely weird staircase (see pic) which goes down to the fast lane of the 110N, just before the tunnel south of the exit to the 5N; why is there a staircase there? Has ANYONE ever used it? There is room for a single car to park out of traffic, so somebody had some kind of plan… Maybe, just maybe, if you broke down right exactly there it would allow you to flee; but if you broke down even 20 feet away, I don’t see how it would help. I would love to know the chain of reasoning that led to its construction; someone had to allot money for this thing.

• 

  Finally, the last entrance I can see is if you get on North Figueroa Street, where it crosses the Los Angeles River, walk south along the east side of the road, then turn sharply left along the ramp going from the 110N to the 5N (you have to turn left; your only alternative is to dive into oncoming traffic); keep walking, and then where the ramp meets up with the 110N, there is a spiral staircase climbing up to the walkway along the 110S. NOTE: None of that is true anymore. The old bridge was demolished and the ramp from N Fig to the off-ramp from the 110 is just gone. From what I can see, the only way to get on the spiral staircase is to get to the walkway at Solano or Amador, then walk along the southbound 110 until you get to the top of the staircase. As far as I can tell, the bottom of the staircase goes exactly nowhere now. Well, there is a walkway a few hundred yards along the ramp to the 5, ending in a tiny landing or plaza which, amazingly, is not a homeless encampment.

Please note that all of this can be considered more or less dangerous and I don’t recommend it to anyone.

That said, I can’t wait to try it.

There’s an interesting piece on Lifehacker about defunding the police. In brief — there’s nothing the police do that can’t be done better by social workers and EMTs. The writer, Rachel Fairbank, says, what if your car is stolen, and when the thief is caught, turns out they’re a drug addict? Treatment! Well, yes, I agree completely… but caught by who? And what if they’re not a drug addict, but just enjoy the thrill of thievery, have poor impulse control, and are kind of sociopaths? The writer, in the comments, sounded impatient with these petty cavils.

The myopia of the piece is the assumption that all crime is driven by victimhood of some kind, instead of just some crime (she doesn’t address white-collar crime; doubt she would say they are victims). While I’m not an expert on the USSR, I believe the premise there was there could be no crime because nobody was a victim of the class system, so if there were anything that looked like a crime, it had to be mental illness and they were incarcerated in (what we heard were) horrific asylums. Or, of course, they were exiled along with dissidents, to Siberia.

I think there is a reluctance, not just in this piece, but in others on the topic, to acknowledge any situation whatsoever in which an armed peacekeeping force would be needed, because it’s like leaving the door ajar — you give an inch, they take a mile. And any talk of “reform” is mocked because “reform” tends to go nowhere, due to police unions and the fear of the white power elite of losing their armed guards, the police. There is also a sort of understanding that the only people who call the police are like that lady in Central Park, just trying to punish a black man. The author says, and repeats in the comments, that since there are some people who aren’t comfortable calling the police, there shouldn’t be police.

So, rhetoric is being slung. Maybe it’s helpful, if it leads to meaningful change. But if anyone is interested in meaningfully changing the criminal justice system — as in demilitarization (among other things, the elimination of that military program that gives surplus gear to police); the absolute end of the War on Drugs (which would weaken the heavily armed cartels one of the excuses police dep’ts give for needing military-grade weaponry); and (my suggestion) getting rid of “partners”, rather assign teams at random, along with a third party who is an independent recorder (with a 360° camera on a staff in addition to body cams) and a psychiatric social worker — I haven’t read any in the popular press.

Note — that last suggestion could be effected with gig-economy technology — assembling a team on the fly from several independent sources.

Another angle that is not discussed much, but would contribute to making society better for all and reducing the toll of poverty and, arguably, the level of violence, is a harm reduction and fault tolerance philosophy in legislation. There are many programs for helping the poor, but they seem to be as hard as possible to invoke, as if, sure, we’ll help, but we’ll make it easy to get wrong and full of draconian rules. This contributes to the constant chaos in the lives of the bottom 30% or so. The whole philosophy of setting up administration so that if you’re 5 minutes late for an appointment, you lose your benefits is hostile and sadistic.

⁂

Everyone has had the flu and knows that while it’s unpleasant they got over it. (The people who died don’t have an opinion.) It’s hard if you don’t respect math to understand that the big difference is that if you have the flu (see the vox.com explainer at https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/3/18/21184992/coronavirus-covid-19-flu-comparison-chart) you’ll maybe infect one person. With CV19, you would infect over 2 people.
So, the math-naive mind thinks, twice as many people get infected. Big Deal! It’s all Political! No, because you don’t multiply by two, two is the EXPONENT. You square the number. It isn’t 10,000 (doing nothing), and it isn’t 20,000. It could be 100,000,000 (doing nothing). Taking steps such as social distancing and universal testing, you can make a big dent in that, but it’s still terrible. But in America, both of those are hampered. Social distancing, because Freedom™ and Devin Nunes telling people to go to a “pub” (really? a pub? is he English?).

Testing… I have a belief. This is my belief. Pharma companies could have come up with testing kits very fast and we could all be tested (or better, have been tested) right away. But PE firms and hedge funds and investment managers who control pharma companies expect massive returns. And until they can make a kit for $8 and sell it for at least $8000, they’re not going to permit the manufacture. Why should they take a loss? A “loss” being defined as accepting <1000x profit margin. Also, as we learned from the Story of  Sen Burr (R-who cares), the heads of the government knew the seriousness early. When Democrats said it was bad, it was decried as a hoax, even as the  Republicans were selling their stocks in hotels and buying up stocks in facemasks.

A crash serves those with large cash reserves. Remember in 2016, DJT said that the housing crash was a great opportunity? Well, this is a great opportunity too. What’s a “crisis” for you and me is just a “fire sale” for PE firms. So it’s actually in their interest to foment crises.

Wasn’t there a movie trope of the villain being an arms dealer who wants to stoke conflict so as to sell more weapons? It’s like that.

Evil is not different in kind from regular behavior. It can just be different in scale. Exponential instead of arithmetical.

Who Will Defend the American Family? was the title in print. Online it is, Where Are the Socially Conservative Women in This Fight?

I am not an editor… well, not a newspaper editor. I am a technical editor. One of my jobs is to read articles intended for academic journals and tell the authors how they might be improved. While I am not expert in their various fields, I can tell them, as a well-read layman, if something does not make sense to me. I then ask, is this intentional? Would you prefer if it did make sense to a reader like me, or is it fine as it is for its intended audience? If the former, we try to rephrase it. If the latter, I go home early, modest middle-class paycheck in hand.

[Full disclosure: I did work at the NYTimes one summer, as what they referred to then as a copyboy. I wasn’t interested in journalism, particularly, but loved being behind the scenes at a vastly complicated and prestigious enterprise. I work for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory now (a NASA center), and get the same kind of kick being backstage where they make space miracles.]

I don’t know if that is what New York Times Op-Ed editors do. Maybe they identify some thought leader or pundit or VIP, and tell them, You’re an important person, we’d like to include you on our broadsheet. Here’s X column inches, do with them what you will. Fill ‘er up! Maybe a copyeditor goes over it for typos and simple grammatical errors. This is what we at JPL call a low level of edit (LoE; we love our acronyms at JPL). At a higher LoE, the editor might shoot an email to the author, call them on the phone, or meet them in person for a latté or a Chardonnay (this is, after all, the tony New York Times). They might say something like, Love the piece! Really tight and punchy. (You should always start by praising something.) Then they might ask, In the third graf (I believe this is newspaper slang for “paragraph”; jocular misspelling was popular in the 20s — see “oll korrect” for OK), you make a statement that I didn’t understand. Could you unpack it for me?

Or the editor, at a very high LoE indeed, might say, can you sum up your point for me in a single sentence? If you can, maybe that text ought to be included in the article. If you can’t, maybe we should give you another week or so to think about it. I’m sure we can, in the meanwhile, find a polite conservative to defend us against charges that we don’t feature any conservatives. (Yes, that will help, undoubtedly. Always does.)

No, I don’t know what a New York Times Op-Ed editor does. But if I were editor, I would have asked Ms. Andrews (odd honorific, given the content; wouldn’t she prefer Mrs. or Miss?) the following questions:

In the fifth graf (or would a real newspaperperson say “graf 5”? Don’t know… Have to watch “The Front Page” again), you say, “Dissenters from the feminist line are more likely to be motivated by a libertarian commitment to equal treatment of the sexes than a socially conservative commitment to gender roles as an affirmative good.” Could you clarify for me how a libertarian commitment to equal treatment of the sexes manifests itself? If it is what it sounds like, it means nobody actually has to treat women equally unless they damn well feel like it. So, in other words, status quo 50s. Or am I missing something? Do you feel that at some point, we did not have the liberty to treat the sexes equally? Can you give me a for-instance?

In the sixth graf, you write, “She believed she was protecting women from having a feminist agenda they did not agree with imposed on them against their will.” Helen (may I call you Helen? Oh, okay, Mrs. Andrews then)… Mrs. Andrews, I think our readers would benefit from some clarification here. What would be the mechanism for this agenda to be imposed on them? Would they not be allowed to be a girly-girl? Is some leftist, feminist version of the muhtasib (Saudi morality police) going to tell them to wear jean overalls and wipe off their makeup? Or are they prevented from being a housewife and homemaker and forced to work in the factories, side-by-side with leering men? I’m just not clear on the mechanism of this agenda imposition. Pls clarify.

In the seventh graf, you state, “By making it easier for women to pursue success in the workplace, we have made it harder for them to do anything else.” Again, I understand your statement, but it raises the question (not “begs the question”; remember, I’m playing the role of a New York Times editor here, and I would know to avoid that error), I say, it raises the question of how exactly have we made it harder? What is the mechanism?

[Don’t mean to be coy… it may indeed be harder for women to avoid the workplace now than when America Was Supposedly Great Before. I’ll get to that. I’ll give you a hint: it’s the same reason that people (men included!) work more than one job. Second hint: Stagnant wages! It’s because of Wall St! Oh, dear… I blurted it out. See, all that “shareholder value” sucks capital away from serving other stakeholders like labor, the community, and customers.]

Immediately after, you aver (important not to repeat words, but hard when you have to keep asking the same question over and over), “Pressing the brake on the trends set in motion by the feminist revolution would leave women more free to follow a diversity of paths.” Again, you claim that a given cause has a particular effect, but the mechanism by which that cause leads to that effect is murky, at least to me. Can you explain?

In the 11th graf, you get, I think, to your point: “When mothers started entering paid employment in large numbers in the 1970s, it led to a bidding war over middle-class amenities that left everyone paying more for the privilege of being no better off than before. In the prior graf you have cited houses, education, and healthcare as those amenities that have gone up in price. Is that what you mean? Really? That women in the workforce has made healthcare and houses and a college degree more expensive? Is it because working women buy second houses? Do they need more college education? Do they get sick more, thus raising the demand and driving up prices?

See, I thought healthcare got more expensive because of Wall St guiding investors to publicly-owned hospitals and insurance companies, thus demanding higher profits. I thought the culture among executives (male, mostly) was to outdo their brethren by demanding higher compensation and competing for fickle investor dollars.

I thought housing got more expensive because Treasury notes stopped delivering returns that were satisfying to investors, so they had to look for other investments and came upon mortgages. This led banks to issue vastly more, and increasingly dubious, mortgages to fill that crying need, which led to a housing shortage which led to higher prices and a bubble.

Education… I don’t know. Maybe if women stopped demanding education, colleges would charge less? Honestly, I’m not an economist. If only there were a Nobel-prize winning economist around who could explain this!

In the next graf (I can’t keep counting them for gods sake. You do some work for a change.), you claim, “In the bottom tier, marriage is disappearing as lower-income women have too few men with solid jobs to choose from and as the growing number of men without regular work…” You seem to be hinting, without stating it explicitly, that there are so many jobs to go around, and if a woman takes a job, she is taking it from a man and then she won’t be able to find a husband who out-earns her. What’s funny (funny strange, not funny ha-ha) is that conservatives make the argument that technology will lead inexorably to more jobs. So, robots in the workplace good, but women bad?

More to come… I need a break, and it’s a long article. Not only that, but I’m at a disadvantage — in my family, all the women worked, back to my grandmother. She was an actress, so some of you might quibble with the word “work,” but trust me, it’s strenuous. She was also quite the breadwinner. I don’t have my grandparents’ books, but both she and my grandfather (whom I never met; he died in ’44 while she lived 35 more years) made a pretty good living in German show-business, until the Nazis (and, TBH, talking pictures) put a definite crimp in their employability and they chose to come to Hollywood over being gassed, shot, burned, and shoveled into a mass grave by a leader who just wanted to make Germany great again. Also, the climate in Los Angeles was sunnier than in Berlin.

My mother’s mother was a homemaker and did not work at a job, unless you count being beaten by a drunk husband as “work”, and then dying from a hemorrhage during pregnancy. Such an enviable, easy life to be a homemaker and housewife!

My sister worked (retired now) and my mother worked (as an actress, so that “is acting work” question lingers) and my wife works.

In progress:

What is preventing a woman who wants to be a homemaker and a housewife from fulfilling her destiny? Can she not find a husband who has a job? In this economy with such low unemployment? Money’s tight? Well, then do without frills like data. Get a landline but no internet or cable. Eschew cell phones. That will save you 100s of dollars every month. Your husband can work, no doubt at a job where he wears overalls (but no shirt), and his muscular torso can be limned against the setting sun as he heroically contracts cancer from working without safeguards, like a Real Man™.

I mean, nobody is stopping you.