ndrosen

There was a recent article in The Atlantic (with which I did not entirely agree) on why Great Britain is now below Mississippi in per capita income. The journalist had been to Manchester, and mentioned Andy Burnham, who is now the prospective Labour Prime Minister. It turns out that Mr. Burnham is an advocate of land value taxation, which he supports as an alternative to the current rates (property tax) and stamp duty. This should be a change for the better, if Parliament will support the reform, and, an important practical consideration, if reasonably accurate assessments exist or can be made on schedule.

Mr. Burnham identifies as a socialist, which I do not, and it appears that I would have some substantial disagreements with him. Then again, if I were British, I would not be much inclined to support the Tories, with whom I also disagree, and who gave an unimpressive performance when they were in power.

Today, there was an online meeting of people who had known the examiner and supervisor referred to as John Doe. I spoke a few words; other people said other things about him. Someone told the gathering something I don’t believe that I knew: When an examiner whom I will call James Zoe was separated from his wife, and out of their home, John Doe let Jim Zoe stay in his house for an extended period. A great guy.

I do have something else to report: at the beginning and end of the meeting, some kind of psychologist or HR official gave a presentation in therapyspeak. I shouldn’t mind her saying that we could contact the Employee Assistance Program if we needed help, and providing contact information, but the way I saw it, she blighted a normal, natural human thing, gathering to reminisce about a deceased friend, by giving instructions about how we might feel and what we should do, all in stilted, unnatural language. And after all, we had lost a work friend, not a spouse, a mother, or a baby; it was annoying to me when she assumed that we might well need professional help. Offering people a sympathetic ear or a shoulder to cry on is proper and human; talking to adults experiencing ordinary grief as if they were likely to be hopelessly fragile is not to my taste, and, I suspect, may make people more fragile and less able to bear up under normal sorrows.

An additional amendment has appeared, so I now have three applications on my Amended docket. I have nothing on my Expedited docket.

I finished an Office Action on what was my oldest Regular New case Thursday evening, but due to some computer issues, I was unable to post it for credit. I hope to do that Monday, when the computer service desk technicians and the Information Technology Resource Persons should be back on the job.

Meanwhile, there has been a change in the procedure for deciding which new applications get priority, so my current oldest Regular New application is something different, and I’ve started work on that. I would have worked on a second application anyway, although not on this particular one.

I remember reading an essay by Irving Kristol, many years ago, in which Kristol urged his readers to ignore certain views or people (I forget exactly), and followed that with the sentence, “Thomas Paine, an English radical who never understood America, is especially worth ignoring.” I had my doubts, but wasn’t well enough informed to compose a defense of Paine (who, be it noted, may have had his merits while still not really understanding America).

Matthew Harwood has written an encomium of Thomas Paine as a worthy thinker ahead of his time, consistently anti-slavery, pro-market, and anti-poverty, a bourgeois radical who was on the side of private property. And here it gets interesting, especially to a Georgist; Harwood further notes that in Agrarian Justice Paine came out for social insurance, which some radical liberals (in the older sense of the word liberal) oppose or at least think should be strictly limited. Harwood writes, “But Paine didn’t see his proposal as welfare. He saw it as every individual’s natural inheritance from common land being cultivated and taken out of common use. “It is not a charity but a right,” he wrote, “that I am pleading for.”

Most people today, whether they admire Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad, or Donald Trump and his crew of fascists, or even if they identify as libertarians/classical liberals, do not give much thought to the distinction between land and what is produced by human effort. Paine and at least some others of his time did.

Anent which, one of my Georgist friends has sent a link to a piece in someone’s substack which also has things to say about the Declaration of Independence and about Thomas Paine.

I am glad that the Supreme Court has ruled that the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment means what it says, but somewhat disappointed that the decision was not unanimous.

Thursday evening, I stopped at Barnes and Noble on my way home from the Patent Office to pick up my copy of the latest book authored by the estimable Jo Walton, Everybody’s Perfect. I am trying to finish an Office Action by Saturday at midnight, so I have virtuously refrained from beginning to read the book. I trust that this abstinence will not need to last forever.

On Tuesday, I went to the dentist to have my two temporary crowns replaced with permanent crowns,and all went well. That is, except that the dentist spotted decay in other teeth, so I’m going back to get either two fillings, or a filling and a crown.

I brush my teeth, I floss, and I use a water pick, but I guess that sometimes, especially with advancing years, things just go wrong anyway. In Paleolithic times, I would probably be dead by now anyway, so the condition of my teeth wouldn’t matter.

Now off to work.

This week, I bought raspberries and plums at the farmer’ market, together with various vegetables. My total at the Twin Springs Fruit Farm stand came to $16.71. I told the cashier that 1671 was one year after the rampjaar, disaster year, for the Dutch, when the French invaded, a number of Dutch cities surrendered, and the Dutch opened the dikes and flooded much of the country to prevent the French from advancing further. He was impressed, and said that the Salem Witch Trials were also around then. I told him that I didn’t have a date, but I thought that the Salem Witch Trials were a few years later.

I was right about that; the hysteria about supposed witchcraft was in 1692, but I was wrong about the Rampjaar; I looked it up, and that was in 1672, not 1670, as I had thought.

When I boarded a Metro train a couple of evenings ago, the other man in the car asked me whether I was a comedian, and seemed to think that I was, maybe on TV. (There was just one other man that I recall; since I was gong in towards DC at an hour when most riders would be headed further out into Virginia, the train wasn’t crowded.) I told him no, I was a patent examiner, not a comedian. When he pressed me, I spoke of how I had performed at a talent show at the end of my senior year in college. I was a physics major, and went on to graduate school, but I did tell jokes that drew some laughter; I didn’t win an award.

I don’t know why this man took me for a comedian, or decided to play with me by pretending that he did. It was just one of life’s odd encounters.

I saw something online in Quora about how thirteen year old Bobby Fischer defeated an adult chess master, Donald Byrne, by sacrificing a queen, which led me to the Wikipedia article on Professor Byrne. I knew him when I was a child, my parents being great friends with him and Mrs. Byrne, and remember being told how he had a position as an English professor at Penn State partly because he was a great chess player (if I was ever told specifically that he coached the University chess team, I don’t recall it). I also remember the two Byrne offspring, both boys years older than I was; at one point, they, or one of them, gave me their Lego collection, which they didn’t want to play with any more, and I had fun with that. Those were the old days when a child could make his own constructions from general-purpose Lego bricks, and use his imagination.

I remember that at one point, my parents sent me over to the Byrnes’ house specifically for Professor Byrne to give me a chess lesson; one of his sons was also involved to some extent. I played chess as a child, and may have been the best player at Easterly Parkway Elementary School, but I never studied it systematically to become really good at it.

The article mentions Donald Byrne’s death from complications of lupus (and I remember that when he and his wife Madge came over, my mother was very careful to provide food for him without salt). I remember that he went to a hospital elsewhere for an operation, I think a kidney transplant, and at first we hoped that this would help. I definitely remember a cheery, humorous card from him at the hospital, but then came word that he had died.

He may not have been world-shakingly great and famous, but he was important enough to qualify for a Wikipedia article, and personally important to those who knew him. Rest in Peace.