We are a month away from the midterm elections, and the American people are poised to hold the party in power accountable. Republicans raised taxes on the American people. They called those taxes tariffs, but tariffs are taxes. Then they supported going to war in Iran, which created an energy supply problem. And whenever you have an energy supply problem, prices are going to go up, because as the price of energy goes up, the price of making things goes up and the price of delivering things goes up.So now prices are higher. And while some individual prices can come down, the overall price level generally does not go back to where it was before. If your groceries went from $100 to $120, slowing inflation does not make them cost $100 again. The American people understand that because they live it. So they are going to hold Republicans accountable.The Republican response may be that President Trump did those things, not Republican lawmakers. That is not the case.When a military officer crosses the yellow line to participate in Officer Training School, he or she accepts an obligation that goes beyond their own behavior. They swear that they will “not lie, cheat or steal, nor tolerate among us anyone who does.” The second part matters just as much as the first. It is not enough to say, “I did not do it.”There is a philosophical idea here that applies. A difference between doing something and allowing something to happen. Those are not exactly the same thing. But if you have the power to act, you understand what is happening, you have a responsibility to act, and you knowingly choose not to act, then that inaction is also a choice. That is what I mean by willful acquiescence.Republicans in Congress may not have voted directly for every tariff or every military action, but they were not powerless. Congress has authority over commerce. It has authority over spending. It has enormous power over war and executive action. They could have acted. They chose not to. So they do not get to say, “That was the president. It wasn’t us.” They chose not to stop him, and now the American people may hold them accountable for that choice.I say ‘may’ which also means ‘may not.’ Because the American voter has another problem. What’s the alternative?The Democratic Party is not exactly popular either. So if Democrats win the midterm elections, they have to be very careful about what they think happened. The American people may vote against Republicans without deciding that they suddenly trust Democrats. Those are two very different things. A voter can say, “I do not trust the Democrats very much, but somebody has to put a check on the Republicans.”That is not an endorsement. That is borrowed power. And if Democrats misunderstand that, they will waste the opportunity.Because the Democrats have a much bigger problem than Donald Trump. They do not have a plan.They can tell us which programs Republicans cut. They can tell us which programs they want to restore. They can tell us what they want to put back the way it was before Trump. But the American people already lived through the way it was before Trump. And then they elected Trump again.So simply going backwards is not a plan. If Democrats win in 2026, restore a few programs, congratulate themselves, and believe America has come back to them, they may lose again in 2028 to another candidate who should never have been competitive in the first place.So the Democrats have to answer a more basic question: Why do we exist?Simon Sinek uses the idea of Why, How, and What. That methodology is useful here. What is the Democratic Party’s Why?For most of modern American history, the Republican Party was fairly easy to understand. It was pro-business. It believed in lower taxes, free markets, deregulation, and a strong military. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Business matters. Markets matter. Economic growth matters. But somebody has to balance the interests of business against the interests of the individual.That was supposed to be the Democratic Party. The Democrats were supposed to be the party that said, “Yes, business is important, but the people who work for that business are important too.”Over time, though, something changed. The Democratic Party stopped looking like the pro-people party and started looking like the pro-government party. That is a major problem, because government is not the point. The people are the point. Government is only a tool.And somewhere along the way, Democrats started to reverse the relationship. The central American philosophy is that the people are independent and the government serves them. But too often, the Democratic approach makes the government the king and makes the people the subjects. You have to qualify. You have to apply. You have to wait. You have to ask permission. You have to hope the program still exists next year.That is backwards. The government is not the sovereign. The people are.That needs to become the Democratic Party’s Why again: serve the people.Then you get to the How. How do you serve the people? By creating a system that makes them more capable of living their own lives. The goal should be autonomy, not dependence. Not dependence on a corporation, and not dependence on the government.The How is balancing the interests and power of business with the interests and power of the individual person. Government is the tool Democrats can use to keep that balance—changing the rules, regulating where necessary, and redesigning incentives so businesses can succeed while the people who work for them also succeed.But the answer is not simply to move more money through the government. It is to design the system so more of the benefit reaches people through their own work, their own wages, their own ownership, and their own choices.And that means Democrats have to think very differently about government programs. If somebody has to come to the government, prove that they qualify, fill out paperwork, wait to be approved, receive some benefit, and then worry that the next Congress is going to take that benefit away, that person may be receiving help. But they are also dependent on the continued permission of the government. Sometimes that is necessary. But it should not be the first answer to every problem.Take wages. If somebody works full time and still does not make enough money to buy food, the first question should not be, “How much government assistance should we give that person?” The first question should be, “Why does a person working full time not make enough money to buy food?”Because if an employer doesn’t pay enough to support the worker, and the government takes money from somebody else and gives it to the worker to make up the difference, what has really happened? The money may be the same. But the philosophical point is different. The worker is receiving part of what he or she needs to live from the government instead of through work. And the government has become the intermediary between the worker and economic independence.There is a better way. Instead of simply making the minimum wage higher everywhere—which ignores enormous differences between places like New York and South Dakota—we should think about how government can help businesses raise wages. Many businesses, especially businesses in rural America, don’t have unlimited revenue. Simply ordering them to pay substantially more may not work.But government can change incentives. It can change tax policy. It can design the rules so businesses have a financial reason, and the financial ability, to put more money into their employees’ paychecks. The point is not the exact mechanism. The point is where the money ends up coming from.Whenever possible, the worker would rather receive that money from his or her employer than receive it from the government. The money may ultimately cost society the same amount. But the relationship is completely different. One creates a worker earning a higher wage. The other creates a citizen waiting for a government benefit. That difference matters.SNAP is a good example. There are people who need help buying food. I am not criticizing those people. Many of them work. That is exactly the point. If somebody is working and still needs government assistance just to eat, then before we build another program, we should ask whether the rules of the economy can be changed so businesses are able and incentivized to pay higher wages. Government should try to make the better outcome the default.The same thing applies to housing. If people cannot afford housing, we can give them money to help pay rent. Sometimes we need to. But that cannot be the entire answer. Why is housing so expensive? Why is it so hard to build more of it? Why do we have rules that make construction harder? Why do we make it so difficult for the next generation to buy a house? If government can change the rules so more housing gets built and more people can afford it on their own, that is better than making people permanently dependent on a housing program.Healthcare is the same. If somebody has a $10,000 healthcare bill, we can build another government program to help pay the $10,000 bill. But at some point we have to ask why the bill is $10,000. The goal should not simply be helping people survive absurd prices. The goal should be making the prices less absurd.That is what I mean by being pro-people instead of pro-government.But there is an important exception. There are needs that we cannot solve by changing incentives. Some people have disabilities that prevent them from working. Some people have medical conditions that will never go away. Some children are born into circumstances they did not create. Some families get hit by disasters. There are people who genuinely cannot provide for themselves.In those cases, government should help them directly, reliably, and without making them feel ashamed about it. There is no better economic incentive that is going to make a person with a severe disability suddenly able to work. That is a need society has to meet.This is similar to what we talked about yesterday. Jesus fed people who were hungry. He addressed the need in front of him. There is a moral obligation to help someone who needs help. But that does not mean the goal is permanent dependence when independence is possible. Feed the person who is hungry. Support the person who cannot support himself or herself. But where people can become independent, design the system to make independence easier.That should be the Democratic Party’s How.And then we get to the What. The What is the actual legislation, the actual rules, and the actual results. Every proposal should have to answer one question: when this is over, does the citizen have more control over his or her own life?Can they afford a house? Can they support a family? Can they move to another job? Can they start a business? Can they get healthcare without being ruined? Can they live in their community without having to continually ask Washington for permission or assistance?That question is especially important in rural America, because Democrats have lost rural America. And they aren’t going to get it back with better messaging.They aren’t going to get it back by sending somebody to a county fair. They are not going to get it back because a national candidate puts on boots and takes a picture next to a tractor. And it is not enough to say there are Democrats in Congress who happen to come from rural states or rural districts.That is not the representation I mean.Rural America needs power inside the leadership of the Democratic Party. People from rural America need to be helping set the agenda, deciding what the party stands for, and determining what policies are worth pursuing. They need people in leadership who can say, “No. That may sound like a good idea here, but that will hurt people where I live.”That also means the Democrats need to develop national candidates who actually come from rural America. Not candidates who visit it. Candidates formed by it.Because the Democratic Party will not regain rural America when it learns how to speak to rural Americans. It will regain rural America when rural Americans once again have enough power inside the leadership of the party to speak for themselves.And that brings us back to this election.If Democrats win in November, they should not celebrate as though the American people have forgiven them. They should understand that the clock has started.They have two years. Two years to build an actual plan. Two years to decide what they believe. Two years to develop legislation and ideas that rural America can look at and say, “That makes my life better. That makes me more independent. That gives me more control over my own future.”Not another collection of government programs. Not another attempt to recreate the country as it existed before Trump. And not another campaign based primarily on telling us how terrible Republicans are.A real governing philosophy.The Why is the people. The How is balancing the interests and power of business with the interests and power of the individual, using government as the tool to maintain that balance. The What is legislation that leaves people more capable of governing their own lives.Protect the people who truly cannot stand alone. Help people who have an immediate need. But where independence is possible, build a system that makes it easier for people to stand on their own.If Democrats can do that, they can regain the trust of the American people. And if they can regain that trust, then they may once again have a chance to make a lasting contribution to American politics.But first they have to answer the simplest question.Are they the party of the government?Or are they the party of the people?SourcesTariffs as taxes on imported goods, their effects on consumer prices and purchasing power, and estimates of how much of the tariff burden is ultimately borne through higher prices: Congressional Budget Office, “The Effects of Tariffs on Inflation, Economic Output, and the Federal Budget”Evidence from household transaction data showing that tariffs are passed through into retail prices paid by American consumers: Federal Reserve Board, “The Unequal Effects of Tariffs on Consumer Prices”Congress’s constitutional authority over tariffs and foreign commerce, and the statutory authorities Congress has delegated to presidents to impose tariffs: Congressional Research Service, “Congressional and Presidential Authority to Impose Import Tariffs”Congressional authority over war, including Congress’s powers to declare war, appropriate funds, and regulate the armed forces: Congress.gov, Constitution Annotated, “War Powers”The War Powers Resolution and Congress’s statutory role in decisions involving the introduction of U.S. armed forces into hostilities: Congressional Research Service, “The War Powers Resolution: Concepts and Practice”The Declaration of Independence’s principle that governments are instituted to secure individual rights and derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed”: National Archives, “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription”The long-term political realignment of rural America toward the Republican Party and the widening Republican advantage among rural voters: Pew Research Center, “Changing Partisan Coalitions in a Politically Divided Nation”Americans’ unfavorable views of both major political parties, including the substantial share of Americans who view both Republicans and Democrats unfavorably: Pew Research Center, “Americans’ Views of the Republican and Democratic Parties”Working Americans receiving public benefits, including SNAP and Medicaid, and the prevalence of full-time employment among wage earners receiving those benefits: U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Public Assistance: Millions of Full-Time Workers Rely on Federal Health Care and Food Assistance Programs”Housing supply restrictions, land-use regulation, and the relationship between constraints on new construction and higher housing costs: National Bureau of Economic Research, “The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability”The unusually high cost of health care in the United States compared with other wealthy countries, including higher prices and administrative costs as important contributors to U.S. health spending: The Commonwealth Fund, “Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System”The federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), including eligibility, benefits, and its purpose of providing food assistance to low-income households: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)”Jesus feeding the hungry and responding directly to immediate physical need in the feeding of the five thousand: Matthew 14:13–21, New International Version, via Bible GatewayThe biblical principle of caring for people in need, including the hungry, thirsty, sick, and vulnerable: Matthew 25:34–40, New International Version, via Bible Gateway Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Beautiful October day. I’m walking in the park for some exercise. The leaves on some of the trees have turned yellow, with small flashes of red. There’s a maple tree that has turned maybe a dark burgundy. Blue skies, white clouds, green grass. The park has quite a few people today. There’s an older guy and a younger guy tossing a football, maybe father and son. And there’s a white butterfly floating across the green grass.My brain doesn’t turn off very easily. I’m exceptionally bad at small talk. Put me at a party with someone I don’t know, and I’m probably not very good at talking about nothing. Maybe these two things are related. Because here I am, walking through a park on a beautiful October afternoon, and what I’m thinking about is immediate need and permanent dependency.It’s a question that sounds simple until you start pulling on it: if part of my taxes goes to feed people, house people, provide medical care, or otherwise support people who need help, does any of that count toward our Christian obligation to give?This is not a question about Christianity as a whole, and it is not an attempt to define what every Christian should believe about government. It is a question about America.You can argue that America is not a Christian nation and still advocate strongly for public assistance to people in need. Or you could argue that the bedrock and basis of America’s Constitution and law is in Christian theology. Either way, here’s the question. If we use public money to help people in need, should the design of that help reflect the moral logic Christians see in Scripture?I do not know the answer. I am not the Almighty, and I’m not going to pretend that I can settle a theological question Christians have argued about for generations.But I think the question becomes more interesting when we stop asking only whether taxes count as a tithe and ask instead what a tithe, or Christian giving more broadly, is supposed to achieve.The biblical idea of giving was never simply to, “Take ten percent of your income and put it in an envelope for your local church.” In ancient Israel, tithes supported the religious community, including the Levites, but they also helped support widows, orphans, foreigners, and others who were vulnerable.That makes the modern situation complicated.Today, the government performs some of those functions. We pay taxes, and a portion of that money goes toward food assistance, housing assistance, medical care, disability programs, and other forms of public support.So maybe the question isn’t whether government should provide that assistance. If government is using our taxes to provide some of the same kinds of help Christians are commanded to provide, should that assistance follow the same moral logic?And that brings me to two stories.Consider the feeding of the five thousand. Whatever else that story means theologically, there is an extraordinarily simple act in the middle of it. People are hungry, and Jesus feeds them.He doesn’t stop to ask whether they made good choices. He doesn’t set up a job-training program before allowing them to eat. There is an immediate human need, and he meets it.Sometimes compassion is that simple.Someone is hungry tonight—feed them. Someone has nowhere to sleep—give them somewhere safe to sleep. Someone is sick—treat them.Immediate suffering creates an immediate obligation.But there is another category of stories in the Gospels. Jesus heals the blind. He heals the lame. He restores people who had been physically excluded from ordinary life.These people were restored to participation in society. They could move through their communities, support their lives where possible, participate in family and economic life, and become less dependent on others.And they could work. Possibly the most important way to participate in society and be independent, to eat your bread as a result of the sweat of your effort. So those stories suggest a second principle of compassion: meet the immediate need when the need is immediate, but when restoration is possible, structure the help toward restored capacity rather than unnecessary permanent dependency.That gives us a standard by which we can begin judging assistance itself. Does it function as a bridge through a period of need? Does it restore a person’s capacity to function and support his own life, where possible? Or does the system gradually become a permanent structure of dependency?And that question doesn’t apply only to the person receiving assistance. It can apply to businesses, too.If taxpayers repeatedly make up the difference between what a worker earns and what that worker needs to live, then assistance may be helping the worker survive, but it may also be allowing an employer to build that subsidy permanently into its labor model.So both sides become dependent on the system.But there is another side to this. Reducing dependency cannot simply mean reducing assistance. If someone is working and still cannot support a reasonable life, cutting aid does not restore independence. It simply recreates the immediate need.If the goal is restoration, reform has to work from both directions. Assistance should be structured so that people can move out of dependency. But our economy also has to make it possible for someone who works to actually make that move. Otherwise, we are not building a bridge out of poverty. We are pulling the bridge away while someone is still standing on it.So. Have we built a system that needs poverty to justify itself?And if that system perpetuates long-term dependency, then as Christians, shouldn’t we push to reform it so that it better aligns with the logic of the Almighty—meet the immediate need, restore the person where possible, avoid creating dependency, and build an economy in which that restoration can last?And maybe there is some humility required here, too. We have a tendency to believe that, with enough policy and expertise we can design a system better than the moral order we inherited.But we are not wiser than that moral order. It’s hilarious that we think otherwise, but the Almighty will not be mocked.A system that abandons people in genuine need will create resistance, because leaving suffering unanswered violates something deeply rooted in us.And a system that turns temporary help into permanent dependency will create resistance, too, because dependency is not restoration.Maybe the mistake is thinking we have to choose between compassion and independence.Can we build an American system that respects both?SourcesBiblical tithing and support for Levites, foreigners, orphans, and widows: Deuteronomy 14:22–29 — Bible Gateway; Numbers 18:21–24 — Bible GatewayChristian obligation to feed, shelter, and care for those in need: Matthew 25:35–40 — Bible Gateway Bible GatewayJesus feeding the five thousand and meeting an immediate need: Matthew 14:13–21 — Bible GatewayJesus healing and restoring people to ordinary life and community: Matthew 11:2–6 — Bible Gateway; John 9 — Bible GatewayWork, independence, and providing for those in need: Genesis 3:19 — Bible Gateway; 1 Thessalonians 4:11–12 — Bible Gateway Bible Gateway; Ephesians 4:28 — Bible Gateway Bible GatewayWork, provision, and eating by the labor of one’s own effort: Genesis 3:19 — Bible Gateway — “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.”Federal food, housing, medical, and disability assistance programs: USDA — Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); HUD — Housing Choice Voucher Program HUD; Medicaid.gov — Medicaid Medicaid; Social Security Administration — Benefit Types, including Disability and SSI Social Security AdministrationWorking Americans who still rely on public assistance: U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Federal Social Safety Net Programs: Millions of Full-Time Workers Rely on Federal Health Care and Food Assistance Programs,” October 19, 2020 Government Accountability OfficeBenefit phaseouts, effective marginal tax rates, and incentives affecting movement from assistance toward greater earnings: Congressional Budget Office, “How Taxes and Transfers Affect the Work Incentives of People With Low and Moderate Income,” March 17, 2017 Congressional Budget OfficeReligion, Christianity, and the intellectual and political environment surrounding the American founding: Library of Congress, “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic”; Library of Congress, “Religion and the American Revolution” Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

I was cooking the other day when I thought about a lieutenant I haven’t seen in years. I don’t know why. That happens to me sometimes. A memory will just show up. Nothing in particular brings it to mind. I’ll be driving, or walking, or standing in the kitchen cutting onions, and suddenly I’m back in some room I haven’t thought about in years.This one has come back to me a couple of times recently.It was sometime around 2018 or 2019. I was a squadron commander in the Air Force, and one of my flight commanders, a captain and a mother, came to see me about one of her lieutenants. The lieutenant was a woman who had recently had a baby and had been away from normal operational duty for quite a while. I don’t remember the exact amount of time anymore, and I don’t want to pretend that I do.The Air Force had become increasingly generous with maternity and caregiver leave, and by the time this lieutenant was due to return, she had already been away for a significant stretch. Eventually, though, the leave ended. She was expected to come back to duty.In our squadron, duty didn’t mean showing up at an office at eight in the morning and going home at five. It meant going out on a weapons-system alert. Roughly thirty-six hours away from home.The lieutenant told her flight commander that she couldn’t go. She needed more time.She was breastfeeding. More specifically, she said she couldn’t pump enough breast milk ahead of time to leave her baby for the duration of the alert.Her husband was also active duty, but he worked a job that allowed him to be home. He could care for the baby while she was gone. The problem was not that there was no one to take care of the child. The problem was feeding the child.So my flight commander came to me and asked the question commanders eventually get paid to answer: What do we do?Do we send her back on duty? Do we give her more time? How much more? A month? Three months? Until the child turns one? And if nothing changes, then what? Do we simply accept that she cannot perform that portion of the job for as long as she is breastfeeding?I remember the problem because no answer made everybody happy.And I believed the lieutenant. I want to make that clear. I did not think she had invented a breastfeeding problem because she didn’t want to work. I think she had a baby, she was trying to feed that baby, and she was looking at thirty-six hours away from her child and saying, I don’t know how I can do this.That mattered. She had a responsibility for the child.But something else mattered too.Somebody had to go on alert. The mission didn’t disappear because one lieutenant had a difficult family situation. If she didn’t go, somebody else did. Somebody else stayed away from his or her family. Somebody else carried the burden.And suddenly a question that sounds like a personnel problem becomes a philosophical one.If we say everyone can do this job, can we also say some people don’t always have to do all of it? And if we say that, who decides when that is okay?That question is bigger than breastfeeding. But breastfeeding is what makes the question difficult, because biology is not imaginary. Pregnancy is real. Childbirth is real. Recovery is real. Breastfeeding is real. None of those things disappear because an institution adopts a policy of equal opportunity.That is where equality gets complicated.We often use the word equality as though it answers a question. Sometimes it only starts one.There is equality of access. Can you enter the profession? Can you compete for the position? Can you command? Can you serve in the operational role? Can you serve on the combat team?And then there is equality of obligation. Once you have the position, are the expectations the same?That distinction becomes uncomfortable because we like clean moral principles. Treat everyone the same. Accommodate people according to their circumstances. Both sound good until they run into each other.One way of thinking about this is the difference between equality and equity. Equality says people occupying the same role ought to face the same essential obligations. Equity says relevant differences may justify different treatment. The hard part is deciding which differences matter, and how much difference in treatment is still compatible with calling it the same job.Another way of thinking about it is role morality. Certain roles carry obligations that ordinary life does not. A judge cannot decide a case based on friendship. A physician cannot simply abandon a patient in the middle of surgery. A military officer accepts obligations that most citizens do not.That does not mean the officer stops being a mother, father, husband, wife, son, or daughter. It means those obligations sometimes collide.The philosopher W. D. Ross wrote about competing duties. You can have more than one genuine moral obligation at the same time. You can have a duty to your child, a duty to your fellow officers, a duty to the mission, a duty to obey lawful orders, and a duty not to place unreasonable burdens on other people. The fact that one duty is real does not make the others disappear.That is the part that gets lost when we turn difficult problems into slogans.Sometimes two good things really are in conflict.You can even make what you believe is the right decision and still leave something valuable damaged. Maybe you order the lieutenant back onto alert. The squadron is treated fairly, the mission is covered, and a mother believes she has been forced into a situation that makes caring for her infant harder.Something has been lost.Or maybe you excuse her. The mother and baby are protected, but another lieutenant goes in her place. And another time. And another.Something has been lost there too.There is no administrative form that makes the loss disappear.This question also has an interesting history in the American military. For much of the twentieth century, the institutional answer to pregnancy and motherhood was much harsher than it is today. Women could serve, but pregnancy would effectively end that service.One of the important cases in that history involved Air Force Captain Susan Struck, a nurse who became pregnant in 1970 and challenged the policy that would have forced her out of the service. Her case became part of the broader movement away from treating pregnancy as automatically incompatible with military service.That change was important.But it didn’t eliminate the problem. It moved the problem.At first, the institutional answer had essentially been: women can serve, but motherhood may end that service.Then the answer became: women can serve and become mothers.Which immediately creates another question: what happens when the obligations of motherhood and the obligations of military service conflict?That is not an argument against women serving. It is simply the next question.And over time the question became sharper. The military opened more roles to women: aviation, ships, operational specialties, and eventually direct ground combat positions. Each time a barrier came down, the debate centered on equal access.But another question always follows behind it.Does equal access imply equal obligation?Or can equal access coexist with different obligations?And if the answer is yes, how different can those obligations become before we are no longer talking about the same job?This is where historical fights over equality become more complicated than they first appear.A woman like Susan Struck was effectively saying that pregnancy shouldn’t automatically end her military career. I think she was right.But once an institution accepts that principle, it has to turn an individual claim into a general rule. Not because every woman necessarily wants exactly what she wanted. Not because every future mother will make the same decision. Institutions simply cannot operate on individual intent. They need principles.A person fights for the right to remain. The institution recognizes that right. Then, years later, someone else enters under that right and asks for an accommodation the earlier system would never grant.That does not mean the original principle was wrong.It means principles have consequences.Rights create obligations. Access creates expectations. Equality is not complete until we talk about both.There is an old philosophical test that helps here: ask what happens if the exception becomes the rule.Not because exceptions are always wrong. They are not. But because a functioning institution has to know where exceptions stop.Suppose any member with a serious personal obligation could decline an essential operational duty whenever the two conflicted. That sounds compassionate. It may be compassionate. But could the unit function?If not, then you need a limiting principle.Which circumstances justify accommodation? For how long? Who carries the burden in the meantime? At what point does accommodation change the nature of the position itself?Those questions apply far beyond pregnancy.A father can become a sole parent. A spouse can become seriously ill. A parent can require constant care. An officer can be injured. A family can suffer a tragedy.Everybody eventually encounters something outside work that matters more to them than work.And yet some professions exist precisely because society needs people who will sometimes place the obligation of the role ahead of the obligation of the moment.That is especially true in the military.Which brings me back to that lieutenant.She had a baby. She wanted to breastfeed. She said she could not produce enough milk to leave the child for thirty-six hours. Her husband could care for the baby. Her authorized time away from duty had reached its end.Her flight commander came to me and asked: What do we do?I know what I decided.I am not sure I want to tell you. At least not yet.Because the more interesting question is what you would have decided.Do you order her back on duty?Do you give her more time?If so, how much?And what principle are you using to decide?Because whatever rule you create for her has to become a rule you could defend for everyone else.Maybe that is the hardest part of leadership.Compassion is personal.Command cannot always be.So here is the question.If we say everyone can do the job, can we still say some people don’t always have to do all of it?And if the answer is yes, who decides when that is okay?SourcesAir Force maternity-leave policy in effect beginning in 2016—12 continuous weeks of paid maternity leave: U.S. Air Force, “AF Implements New DOD-Wide Changes to Maternity Leave,” February 9, 2016 Air ForceAir Force parental-leave policy adopted in 2018—six weeks maternity convalescent leave, six weeks primary-caregiver leave, and three weeks secondary-caregiver leave; caregiver leave was in addition to maternity convalescent leave: U.S. Air Force, “Air Force Implements New Parental Leave Policy, Secondary Caregivers Given 21 Days,” June 8, 2018 Air ForceContemporaneous Air Force summary of the 2018 policy, including its retroactive applicability and the distinction among maternity convalescent, primary-caregiver, and secondary-caregiver leave: U.S. Air Force, “Air Force Parental Leave,” June 18, 2018 Air ForceThe 1948 law formally integrating women as permanent members of the armed services: U.S. Government Publishing Office, Women’s Armed Services Integration Act of 1948, Public Law 80-625, June 12, 1948 GovInfoHistorical overview of the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, including the original limits on women’s participation and combat service: Naval History and Heritage Command, “Women’s Armed Services Integration Act”Naval History and Heritage CommandCaptain Susan Struck’s challenge to the Air Force regulation requiring discharge of pregnant female officers; the appellate opinion describes her pregnancy while serving in Vietnam and the Air Force’s attempt to discharge her: Struck v. Secretary of Defense, 460 F.2d 1372, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 1972 OpenJuristU.S. Army historical discussion of Susan Struck’s case and its place in the changing relationship between motherhood and military service: U.S. Army, “Serving on Two Fronts—Finding Balance Between Motherhood and Military Service,” March 29, 2023 ArmyThe Department of Defense’s 2015 decision opening all military occupations and positions—including direct ground-combat positions—to qualified women beginning in 2016: U.S. Department of Defense, “Carter Opens All Military Occupations, Positions to Women,” December 3, 2015 Defense.govDoD’s implementation of women’s full integration into previously closed combat positions, including its stated emphasis on maintaining combat effectiveness and standards: U.S. Department of Defense, “Statement from Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook on Secretary Carter’s Approval of Women in Service Review Implementation Plans,” March 10, 2016 Defense.govW. D. Ross’s idea of prima facie duties—multiple genuine moral obligations that can conflict, requiring judgment about which obligation carries the greatest weight in a particular situation: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “William David Ross” Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyThe philosophical concept of universalizability—the idea that a moral judgment should be defensible under the same standard regardless of which person happens to occupy the relevant position: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Impartiality,” section 4.2, “Impartiality and Universalizability” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Everybody seems to be scared of artificial intelligence. Or maybe the press makes it seem like everybody is scared of artificial intelligence.AI is going to take our jobs. AI is going to replace artists. AI is going to manipulate elections. AI is going to become smarter than us. Eventually AI is going to destroy civilization.Why are we always doing this?Why do human beings always think civilization is about to end?In my lifetime, first it was nuclear war. We are all going to die. Then the millennium change. Everything is going to stop working. Computers are going to fail. Civilization is going to fall apart. Then climate change. Now AI is going to destroy us all.Before that, people thought Halley’s Comet was going to poison everybody.In 1910, scientists detected cyanogen gas in the comet’s tail. Earth was going to pass through it. People bought gas masks and supposed remedies. Newspapers ran with it. There was real dread that this thing in the sky might kill everybody.Then Earth passed through the tail.And nothing happened.That does not mean every warning is stupid. Nuclear war was a real danger. It still is. Y2K was a real computer problem. People spent years fixing it. Climate change is real. AI is going to create real problems.But we have this habit of moving really quickly from, this could be bad, to, this could end civilization.And I keep coming back to the same thing.Every day has enough worry of its own.Do not tax your life with the forethought of grief.Enjoy the hard work of staying alive while you can.There is that Wendell Berry poem, The Peace of Wild Things. I am paraphrasing it, but it is something like: when I wake at night and worry about my life or my children’s future, I go lie down by the water, among the wild things who do not tax their lives with the forethought of grief.That phrase is just right.The forethought of grief.We do that all the time. We grieve things that have not happened yet. We suffer tomorrow before tomorrow gets here.What happens to my children?What happens to the climate?What happens if the Russians launch?What happens if the computers stop working?What happens if the machine becomes smarter than us?And some of those are reasonable questions. But at some point, you are just paying today for grief that may never come.That does not mean do nothing.Take climate change.Climate change is not going to kill every person on Earth. Do you know what might kill a lot of people? Doing nothing to prepare for climate change.If we need to shore up buildings, improve infrastructure, strengthen the electrical grid, prepare for drought, fires, flooding, storms, then do those things.That is useful.Sitting around worrying that civilization is going to collapse is not useful.Worry is not preparation.And I think AI is the same way.There are reasonable guardrails we can put around artificial intelligence without acting like the machine itself is evil.Start with personal responsibility.No fake lewd photographs or videos using another person’s likeness. That should be illegal.Not because AI made the image.Because you used somebody else’s face to hurt them.If an AI system hacks another company and causes millions of dollars in damage, somebody is responsible for that. “The AI did it” cannot become some excuse that means nobody is liable.A person deployed it. A company built it. Somebody authorized it to do something.Now, I do not think the AI company should automatically be responsible every time somebody misuses a model. That would be ridiculous.If the company demonstrated reasonable guardrails, reasonable security, reasonable efforts to prevent abuse, then no, they should not automatically be liable because somebody found a way around those protections.But if they knew there was a problem, knew their model was being used to do something harmful, had reasonable ways to stop it, and ignored it, then responsibility starts to move back toward the company.That would make AI companies pay attention really quickly.Not because somebody wrote a vague ethics statement.Because there would be consequences.There would be damages.There would be liability.And in a messed-up twist, I am not against the use of AI for military action.I do not think that is contradictory.The military already uses force that would be illegal in ordinary civilian life. The question is who is responsible.If an autonomous or semi-autonomous system strikes a target, somebody in the chain of command still owns that decision.“The algorithm decided” cannot be an excuse.Somebody authorized that system. Somebody gave it the authority to act. Somebody remains responsible.That gets into the philosophy behind all of this.Sartre comes to mind.Freedom creates responsibility.You are free to choose, so you are also responsible for what you choose.You do not get to hide behind the system. Or the institution. Or the role. Or, eventually, the algorithm.John Stuart Mill fits here too.Mill’s basic idea was that people should be left free to act unless their actions harm somebody else. The state should not interfere just because an action is unusual, risky, unpopular, or offensive. The line is harm.That is pretty close to how I think about AI.Do not regulate it because it frightens people.Do not regulate it because it is new.Do not regulate it because somebody can imagine a terrible future.Regulate conduct when it causes real harm to other people.That is a much cleaner rule.If someone uses AI to commit fraud, punish the fraud.If someone uses AI to create a nonconsensual sexual image, punish that.If a company negligently deploys a system that causes foreseeable damage, hold the company responsible.But do not build a giant apparatus around every hypothetical thing the technology might someday do.You will never keep up anyway.And I think the same principle applies to corporations.Corporations have rights. They can own property. They can enter contracts. They can sue and be sued. They have legal protections.Fine.Then they also have reasonable responsibility.You do not get rights without responsibility.That applies to individuals. It should apply to companies.So maybe the philosophy is something like this:Maximum freedom, with responsibility for foreseeable harm.Let people build things.Let companies innovate.Let people use powerful tools.But when somebody gets hurt, ask the same questions we already know how to ask.Who did it?Who authorized it?Who could reasonably foresee the harm?Who failed to take reasonable precautions?Fraud is still fraud.Theft is still theft.Defamation is still defamation.Negligence is still negligence.Calling it artificial intelligence does not make responsibility disappear.And that brings me back to the larger point.Maybe AI could someday create some civilization-level danger.I do not know.But every generation seems convinced it is standing at the edge of the end.Nuclear war.The millennium.Climate catastrophe.Artificial intelligence.Before that, Halley’s Comet.At some point, you have to live.If there is something useful to do, do it.If the climate is changing and infrastructure needs to be stronger, build stronger infrastructure.If AI can be used to make fake sexual images of people, make that illegal.If AI systems can cause real damage, establish liability.If companies put reasonable guardrails in place, do not punish them automatically because somebody misused the tool anyway.Do the work that needs doing.Fix what can be fixed.Prepare where preparation actually matters.And then live.Because every day already has enough trouble of its own.There are people to love. There are things to build. There are things to repair. There are books to read. There is dinner to make. There is work to do.There is a world that is still here this morning.Do not tax your life with the forethought of grief.Enjoy the hard work of staying alive while you can.Tomorrow has enough worry of its own.SourcesPublic fear around Halley’s Comet in 1910, including concern that cyanogen gas in the comet’s tail might threaten life on Earth, and contemporary anti-comet remedies and gas masks: Library of Congress, “Halley’s Comet: Topics in Chronicling America”Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things,” including the phrase about not taxing one’s life with the forethought of grief: Academy of American Poets, “Life Lines: Wendell Berry”“Each day has enough trouble of its own”: Matthew 6:34, New International Version, via Bible GatewayFinding satisfaction in one’s labor during the brief life God gives us, and receiving the ability to enjoy that labor as a gift: Ecclesiastes 5:18–20, New International Version, via Bible GatewayEnjoying life, doing the work before you, and doing it with all your strength while you are alive: Ecclesiastes 9:7–10, New International Version, via Bible GatewayJohn Stuart Mill’s harm principle, liberty, and the idea that coercive power is justified primarily to prevent harm to others: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “John Stuart Mill”; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Mill’s Moral and Political Philosophy”Jean-Paul Sartre on freedom, responsibility, and bad faith: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Jean-Paul Sartre”; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Authenticity”Corporations and other legal entities as legal persons capable of owning property, entering contracts, suing and being sued, while also carrying legal responsibilities and liabilities: Cornell Legal Information Institute, “Legal Person”; Cornell Legal Information Institute, “Artificial Person”; Cornell Legal Information Institute, “Corporation”AI risk management, governance, and reasonable safeguards designed to reduce harms while preserving flexibility and innovation: National Institute of Standards and Technology, “AI Risk Management Framework”; NIST, “Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework: Generative Artificial Intelligence Profile”Cybersecurity risks, vulnerabilities, and resilience issues involving artificial intelligence systems: National Institute of Standards and Technology, “AI Research: Security and Resilience”Autonomous weapon systems, human control, and legal and humanitarian questions surrounding machines that can select and apply force without further human intervention: International Committee of the Red Cross, “ICRC Position on Autonomous Weapon Systems” Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Hey, this is Joel.I’m sitting next to a pile of flowers in the yard.I spent some time this morning taking hops vines out of our hoop house, and now I’m sitting on a bucket, picking the flowers off the vines.A buddy of mine brews beer. Sometimes he gives me some of it, so I’m going to give him a bunch of these.I grow several different varieties of hops in the hoop house. I’ve got some New Zealand varieties, some Cascade, and some Chinook. The Chinook seems to yield better than anything else I’ve tried here at high altitude.If you’ve never smelled a hop flower before, go get yourself a good, fresh West Coast IPA and really smell it before you drink it.That smell is hops.A West Coast IPA is usually very hop-forward, and when you break one of these fresh flowers open, there’s this strong green, citrusy, resinous smell. You immediately think, that smells like an IPA.Except it’s really the other way around.The IPA smells like this flower.My hands are busy, so I obviously can’t type anything. I’m sitting here talking to my phone instead.And with my hands busy, I’ve had some time to think about a few things from this week, even though I haven’t had time to write them down.The first one is cattle.I made a trip this week to the Buffalo Livestock Market up in northern Wyoming, and one of the things that stood out was the number of heifers.For people who don’t spend much time around cattle, a heifer is a young female that hasn’t had her first calf yet. If you want to grow a cow herd, you have to keep some of those young females. You breed them. They have calves. They become cows.That sounds simple enough.Except right now those heifers are worth a tremendous amount of money.An individual heifer can bring something like $2,500.If you keep her, maybe she has ten or twelve or fifteen calves over the course of her life. Maybe keeping her turns out to be a tremendous investment.But maybe cattle prices fall.Maybe three years from now you look back and realize somebody was willing to hand you $2,500 for that animal and you turned it down.And meanwhile, you have to feed her.You have to carry her through the winter. You have to buy hay. You have to buy fuel. You have all the other expenses that come with running a ranch.That was another thing people were talking about at the livestock market. Everybody hopes we get a lot of snow this winter.Snow means moisture. Moisture means grass.And grass matters because hay is expensive.Fuel is expensive.When diesel is expensive, even if there’s hay somewhere else, getting it to your ranch gets expensive in a hurry.So there’s this national conversation about the cattle herd being historically small and ranchers needing to retain heifers so we can rebuild it.But an individual rancher doesn’t operate the national cattle herd.He operates his ranch.He has bills. He has input costs. And he has an animal standing in front of him that somebody is willing to pay a lot of money for right now.Sometimes people ask why ranchers don’t just keep more heifers.Sometimes they can’t afford to.And sitting here picking hops, I realized I’ve got a pretty good example right in front of me.I’ve got thousands of these flowers.Suppose somebody came along and offered me a nickel or a dime for every one of them.At some point, the price might get high enough that I wouldn’t keep any to brew beer myself.I’d sell them.Not because I suddenly stopped liking beer.Not because I don’t know they might be useful later.The price somebody is willing to give me today changes the decision.That’s basically the position ranchers are in.The price can get high enough that you almost can’t afford not to sell the animal you would otherwise like to keep.The second thing I’ve been thinking about is Iran.Part of the reason I think about Iran more than most people probably do is my previous life working around nuclear weapons and strategy.And I keep coming back to the idea that maybe we are just too impatient with Iran.We want problems solved. We want regimes to change. We want countries to behave differently.But Iran isn’t a new country.Persia is one of the oldest civilizations in the world.There’s a story about Alexander the Great that I keep thinking about.Go back to 334 B.C.Alexander is about twenty-two years old. He crosses into Asia with a Macedonian army and takes on the Persian Empire, one of the great powers of the ancient world.And then he starts winning.He defeats Persian armies. He defeats Darius III. He pushes deeper and deeper into the empire.Eventually he gets through the Persian Gates and reaches Persepolis, the ceremonial heart of Persia.Parts of Persepolis are burned.So if you stop the story there, Alexander conquered Persia.He did.But then something interesting starts happening.Alexander begins adopting elements of Persian royal dress. He brings Persian nobles into his government. He brings Persian soldiers into his army. He marries into the Persian royal family. He encourages his officers to marry Persian women.And his Macedonian soldiers hate it.They marched across the known world to conquer Persia, and now they’re looking at their king thinking, wait a minute.We conquered them.Why are you starting to look like them?Persia could obviously be conquered.Alexander did it.But there’s something remarkable about a civilization that can lose the war and still influence the conqueror so deeply that the conqueror begins changing himself.Alexander conquered Persia.And then Persia changed Alexander.I think we ought to remember that.We don’t have to be Iran’s friend.We don’t have to accept Iran possessing nuclear weapons.We don’t have to accept attacks on shipping or attacks on its neighbors through militias and proxies.But maybe we should stop assuming that the final answer is somehow to make Iran into us.We’ve tried versions of that before.In 1953, the United States became involved in the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and helped restore the Shah’s position.Over the next couple of decades, the United States became very closely associated with the Shah while he pursued rapid modernization, military expansion, and increasingly authoritarian rule.It’s probably too simple to say America was trying to make Iran culturally American.But we were deeply involved in determining who governed Iran and what direction the country would take.And eventually there was a backlash.The Iranian Revolution in 1979 had a lot of causes. Religion mattered. Economics mattered. Political repression mattered. The Shah mattered. Foreign interference mattered.And out of that revolution came a phrase Americans still recognize immediately.Death to America.Maybe there’s a lesson in that.Iran does not have to become us.We can deter Iran.We can contain Iran.We can protect our allies.We can oppose nuclear proliferation.We can respond when American troops or American interests are attacked.But those things are different from assuming we are going to redesign Iranian society.Even negotiating with Iran is complicated.Iran has several centers of political power. The elected government handles diplomacy and much of the ordinary work of government. But the Supreme Leader has the final say on the biggest national-security questions, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps answers to him, not to the elected president.So when an Iranian diplomat sits across the table from an American diplomat and signs something, the question isn’t just whether we got a signature.The question is whether the person across the table actually has the authority to bind the parts of the Iranian system that have the missiles, the ships, and the guns.Does the Supreme Leader support the agreement?Does the security establishment consider itself bound by it?Will the Revolutionary Guard carry it out?You can have diplomacy happening in one place while military pressure continues or resumes somewhere else.That doesn’t necessarily mean the Iranian diplomats are fake, and it doesn’t mean the Revolutionary Guard is some completely separate rogue government.It means we need to understand who actually has authority before we congratulate ourselves for reaching an agreement.And maybe the broader point is just patience.Patience isn’t the same thing as weakness.Sometimes patience means understanding the civilization in front of you well enough not to expect it to become something it isn’t.Anyway, I’m still sitting here picking hops.They’re going into a silver metal bucket.When I’m done, I’m going to spread them out on a screen, let them dry for a couple of days, and then freeze them.And while I’ve been doing that, I’ve also been thinking about Russia.I read a piece this morning in the Wall Street Journal about something Russia has become very good at doing.Russia takes actions against NATO countries that seem deliberately designed to stay just below the point where everybody immediately agrees an armed attack has taken place.Cyber operations.Sabotage.Electronic interference.Disinformation.Using proxies.Border pressure.Things that can create real damage without a Russian tank necessarily crossing a NATO border.And that creates a strange problem for NATO.Article 5 says an armed attack against one member is considered an attack against all.But real life is messier.Something gets sabotaged.Who did it?Can you prove it?Was it an armed attack?Was it espionage?Was it a criminal act?Was it a proxy?How much evidence do you need before you respond?And if you respond militarily, are you defending yourself or escalating something that was intentionally designed to sit below that threshold?Russia may not just be testing NATO’s military strength.It may be testing NATO’s decision-making machinery.From Moscow’s point of view, the ideal action might be something serious enough to frighten people and impose costs, but ambiguous enough that thirty-two NATO governments spend the next two weeks arguing over what exactly happened.I think we make a mistake if we assume there are only two possible responses.Do nothing.Or go to war.There is a lot of room between those two things.And geography gives NATO some choices.One place Americans don’t talk about very much is Kaliningrad.Kaliningrad is a small piece of Russian territory on the Baltic Sea, physically separated from the rest of Russia.It sits between Poland and Lithuania.Both are NATO countries.Kaliningrad is extremely important to Russia. It is home to major Russian military forces and Russia’s Baltic Fleet. It gives Russia a powerful position in the Baltic.But that geography also makes it vulnerable.It is Russian territory surrounded on land by NATO.And some of the land transit between mainland Russia and Kaliningrad crosses NATO territory.So if Russia wants to operate in the gray zone, NATO doesn’t necessarily have to answer every provocation by firing a missile.There are economic tools.There are diplomatic tools.There are transit rules.There are inspections.There are sanctions.There are ways to increase pressure gradually.You could imagine a ladder.Russia takes some deliberate action against NATO infrastructure.NATO responds by tightening restrictions.Russia escalates.NATO tightens them further.At the far end of that ladder, you could even start discussing suspension of some rail transit.The United States cannot simply close a railroad through Lithuania.It is Lithuanian territory. European Union law matters. Our allies matter.And completely closing access would be a very serious escalation.But that’s exactly why it can matter as leverage.Deterrence works when the other side knows there are things it values that can be put at risk.Kaliningrad is a Russian strength.It is also a Russian vulnerability.And if a new American president really wants to understand Russia, I think one of the first places he or she ought to go is Finland.Go to Finland and listen.Finland shares about 830 miles of border with Russia.The Finns have lived next to Russia for generations.They have fought Russia.They have negotiated with Russia.They have traded with Russia.They have deterred Russia.They built their military and a lot of their civil preparedness around the fact that Russia is going to remain next door no matter who happens to be sitting in the Kremlin.There’s something we can learn from that.Sometimes Americans think distance gives us objectivity.Sometimes distance just gives us distance.If you want to understand somebody, listen to the people who have to live next door to them.That doesn’t mean Finland is always right.It doesn’t mean Poland is always right.It doesn’t mean the Baltic states are always right.But their experience matters.We shouldn’t decide what Russia means from Washington and then call our European allies afterward to explain our decision to them.We should listen first.Sometimes the people who understand a rival best are the people who have had to live next door to it.And then there was one other thing from this week that has almost nothing to do with Iran or Russia.I went to a University of Wyoming football game Saturday.Wyoming played Hawai‘i.We recently dropped our oldest off at the University of Wyoming. Three weeks ago, maybe a month ago.It was great to see them.And it got me thinking about college.A lot of people are worried about college right now.And I understand why.College is expensive.Private universities can be extraordinarily expensive.Tuition has increased tremendously over the last several decades.And young people are looking at those numbers and asking a pretty reasonable question.Is this worth it?I think there was probably a period when too many people treated college as automatic.You graduated from high school, so you went to college.Nobody stopped to ask what you were studying.Nobody stopped to ask what the degree cost.Nobody stopped to ask what kind of job it might lead to.Nobody stopped to ask how much debt you would have when you finished.We should think about all of those things.But I wonder if we’re starting to swing too far in the other direction.Now there’s a growing cultural message that college just isn’t worth it.If you’re seventeen or eighteen years old, I’d be very careful about letting that cultural mood make the decision for you.When everybody starts moving in one direction, that’s usually a good time to stop and ask whether that direction makes sense for you.That doesn’t mean every kid should go to college.Absolutely not.There are great careers that don’t require a four-year degree.There are trades that pay extremely well.There are people who would be much better off becoming electricians, plumbers, welders, mechanics, or entrepreneurs than borrowing a hundred thousand dollars for a degree they don’t need.But the opposite is also true.If you can get a useful degree in a field where there is demand, at a price you can reasonably afford, and you have a good chance of finishing it, that can still be a very good investment.The question isn’t whether college is good or bad.It’s what are you trying to do?What education does that require?What will it cost?And what are you likely to get in return?Don’t go to college just because everybody else went.But don’t refuse to go because everybody around you suddenly decided college is a scam either.Make your own decision.And maybe that’s what all of these things I’ve been thinking about this week have in common.The cattle market.Iran.Russia.College.The easy answer is usually the one everybody repeats.Keep the heifers and rebuild the herd.Make Iran more like us.Either ignore Russia or go to war with Russia.College is always worth it.College is never worth it.But reality is usually more complicated than that.The rancher has to make payroll.Iran has thousands of years of history.Russia understands geography.And an eighteen-year-old has to live with their own decision long after everybody giving them advice has moved on to something else.Maybe the lesson from this week is just to slow down a little.Understand the incentives.Understand the history.Understand the geography.Listen to people who know something you don’t.Then make your own decision.Anyway, I’m still picking hops.I keep looking down at this bucket wondering when it’s ever going to be full.It’s like an infinite bucket.It never fills up.So I’ve still got plenty of flowers left to pick.Thanks to you all for keeping me company while I sit on this bucket and pick flowers.SourcesCattle / heifer retentionUSDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, United States cattle inventory down slightly — Jan. 30, 2026. This supports the small national herd and current inventory context. USDA NASSUSDA Economic Research Service, Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry Outlook: February 2026. This is especially useful because it specifically discusses beef replacement heifers and says sustained heifer retention is needed before the beef cow herd can expand. Economic Research ServiceUSDA ERS, Livestock Production Cycles Affect Long-Term Price Outlook for Cattle, Hogs, and Chickens. Good background on the cattle cycle, historically low inventories, and why low supplies produce high cattle prices. Economic Research ServiceU.S. Energy Information Administration, Weekly Retail Gasoline and Diesel Prices. Useful for the high-diesel-cost portion; national on-highway diesel was above $6.50 per gallon in the week of Sept. 21, 2026. U.S. Energy Information AdministrationAlexander and PersiaAlexander the Great, World History Encyclopedia. Covers Alexander’s effort to integrate Macedonian and Persian elites, the Susa marriages, his marriage to a daughter of Darius III, adoption of Persian dress and manners, incorporation of Persians into the military, and Macedonian resistance to those policies. World History EncyclopediaAlexander the Great & the Burning of Persepolis, World History Encyclopedia. Useful for the conquest and destruction of Persepolis. World History Encyclopedia1953 Iran coup / the ShahU.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, Iran, 1951–1954. A 1954 CIA memorandum explicitly describes the U.S.-approved campaign to remove Mossadegh and replace his government with a pro-Western government under the Shah. Office of the HistorianThe same official documentary collection includes Eisenhower acknowledging that the United States helped bring about Mossadegh’s removal and the Shah’s restoration. Office of the HistorianThere are also contemporary CIA communications describing direct American support for the Shah during the operation. Office of the HistorianIranian political structure / IRGCCouncil on Foreign Relations, The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It explains that the IRGC answers directly to the Supreme Leader and that its command structure bypasses the elected president. It also covers the IRGC’s military, political, economic, and regional roles. Council on Foreign RelationsRussia / NATO gray-zone activityNATO, Collective defence and Article 5. Particularly important because NATO explicitly says an “armed attack” is assessed case by case and that sufficiently serious cyber and other hybrid attacks can qualify under Article 5. NATOKaliningradCouncil of the European Union, EU sanctions against Russia: questions and answers. Useful for the legal and logistical reality of Kaliningrad transit; EU sanctions make specific provisions for goods moving between Russia and the Kaliningrad oblast. Council of the European UnionNATO material describes Kaliningrad as a Russian exclave on the Baltic surrounded by Lithuania and Poland and discusses the importance of civilian and military transit. NATOFinlandNATO material gives Finland’s land border with Russia as about 1,340 kilometers, or roughly 830 miles. NATOCollege costs and valueCollege Board, Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2025. This is probably your best source for tuition, sticker prices, net prices, financial aid, and the long-term cost discussion. College Board ResearchCollege Board’s archive gives you historical reports back through the 1990s if you want to make a precise claim about thirty-year tuition growth rather than simply saying college has become expensive. College Board ResearchU.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Education pays, 2025. In 2025, workers with bachelor’s degrees had median weekly earnings of $1,578 and a 2.8% unemployment rate, with earnings generally increasing and unemployment generally declining as educational attainment rose. Bureau of Labor Statistics Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Thoughts from the week, in podcast conversation form.Joel: The watch is quiet. Dark. Day and night, you don’t know the difference.Joel: Every twelve hours, you set the clock. If it’s more than a second off, fast or slow, it’s out of spec. And you have to set all three clocks at once.Paige: Three clocks, one second. I hear that and feel like it’s important. I suspect you’re going to tell me it didn’t feel that way.Joel: You’re just setting the clock. It’s standard. Wherever we were in the world, we all had to agree on what time it was.Joel: I was a nuclear weapons officer for twenty-one years. For two of them, I commanded one of America’s nine squadrons that keep nuclear missiles on alert and stand ready, day and night. You get used to thinking in a common reference time. Somebody you’re working with could be six time zones away from you, but you still need to know what time it is for both of you.Paige: Zulu time.Joel: Right. You’ll have flashbacks, stories that pop into your head whenever some random event happens. One of those that caught my attention this week was this new Gallet watch. The Flying Officer. It’s only been out a couple of weeks. I haven’t seen one in person and I don’t know that I ever will. I’ve been looking at pictures of the face.Paige: It’s an old name. The first one came out in nineteen thirty-nine. Harry Truman wore one.Joel: Is that right.Joel: There are reference cities around the dial. It’s a twelve-hour face, but when everyone somewhere on the globe operates on a single reference time you’re thinking about a twenty-four-hour day and a twenty-four-hour globe, so two places can share an hour position, twelve hours apart.Joel: London is the reference to start with. Move clockwise, or to the right on the watch face, and it’s like moving east around the globe. Geneva then Cape Town then Nairobi. Go the other way, west into the Atlantic, and you’ve got the Azores. Paige: You’re reading it like a map.Joel: Yes. The globe on your wrist. After twenty-one years it gets ingrained. You think about people being in different time zones. It’s also just an interesting watch.Paige: Fair enough.Joel: Most of that job was waiting, alert. The watch. The capability is there. It’s ready. And the whole point is that you never use it.Joel: That followed me to Leavenworth and to the Army’s Command and General Staff College. Twelve officers in our classroom. I was the only Air Force officer. There was a Marine, a Canadian armor officer, and everybody else was Army.Joel: One exercise we worked through was a thought experiment conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The question was whether we go in, and how much we’d commit to a peacekeeping mission. One of the factions was openly hostile to the U.S. Disrupting our activities in the area. Threatening terrorist attacks. The Marine was confident we should get involved in almost every regional conflict, and that it would be over quick.Joel: Most of the room said yes. I said no. I almost always said no.Paige: Wait. One country punishing people in another. And you said no.Joel: I did. Is it a tragedy? Yes. A vital U.S. interest? No. Would I support partners getting involved? Yes. Independent action? No.Paige: Partners tend to wait for us. Rwanda was a hundred days.Joel: I know. There’s a question of dependency there. And then we’d get to something I thought was important enough. Then what I was willing to accept in casualties was much higher than anybody else in the room.Paige: That sounds backwards. The man who never wants to go is the one who’ll pay the most once he’s there.Joel: Because I was looking at the objective. What were we going to achieve?Joel: The others were more willing to get into smaller conflicts. As a nuclear weapons guy, I’d look at those and think, we’re not going to have a decisive, long-term impact. Our effects need to last for 40 years, maybe even a hundred.Joel: If a major United States interest was threatened, that was different. But those are much bigger conflicts. World wars. Major conflicts involving our partners.Paige: I’ll give you that being able to intervene isn’t a reason to. But decisive is a high bar. Haven’t you walked the tunnels the North Koreans dug under the DMZ?Joel: I have.Paige: Nothing was decided there. No treaty. An armistice, signed in nineteen fifty-three, and two armies still looking at each other across it. By your test, Korea was a waste.Joel: No. It wasn’t.Paige: Seventy years of Seoul.Joel: Okay. Then decisive is the wrong word. Maybe durable. Does it last. Korea has. And we’re still paying to make it hold. That’s a cost I’d accept, for an ally, for a result that lasts that long.Joel: But there’s a cost to every one of those. When you use resources in one regional conflict, you don’t have them for something bigger.Joel: And we start from an extraordinary position. Oceans on both sides. No neighbor about to invade and subdue us. That gives us room to be patient.Joel: America will never lose a war, because nobody can come here and conquer us. Just this week we signed a security agreement with Denmark and Greenland to increase our presence on that critical piece of geography while denying China and Russia access. Further protecting American security interests in our region.Paige: Hold on. There’s a jump there. Keeping the homeland secure and winning a war abroad are two different things.Joel: I agree that’s a logic jump. What I mean is that no other country is going to subdue the United States on our shores.Joel: When we go somewhere else to fight, of course we can lose. We have a long logistical trail. We are at a disadvantage sustaining what we’re doing. And we can have enormous difficulty achieving our objectives.Paige: Which puts the weight back on the objective. What counts as success, and can the force we’re using produce it?Joel: Exactly. Our strength is in restraint. In having the capability and not always exercising it.Joel: Take Iran. We’ve been at war with Iran since the last day of February. Going on seven months.Joel: I was thinking about Cyrus the Persian this week, and how far back that history goes.Paige: About twenty-six hundred years.Joel: They aren’t going anywhere. Whatever we do over there, they’ll be living there when we’ve gone home.Paige: The country isn’t going anywhere. This government might.Joel: It hasn’t yet. We can blow things up. We’re blockading their ports right now. We can do a lot of things to hurt Iran. If we don’t get a durable American result out of it, what have we achieved?Joel: And I don’t think Israel’s immediate survival was at risk before this started. So why start a war when survival isn’t at risk?Paige: Let me make the case straight, because somebody should. A government that says Israel shouldn’t exist was enriching uranium well past what any power plant needs, even though they had never made a bomb. If the test is immediate survival, then with a bomb, immediate comes after it’s too late. You of all people know what one weapon does to a small country.Joel: I do. One weapon on a small country is a tragedy. But the state will survive.Paige: A lot of that country lives around one city.Joel: I know what I’m saying. If Iran ever used one, the world would stand against them. Israel would survive. That government wouldn’t. And it has spent more than forty years making sure it survives. That’s not a government looking to die. And remember, Iran never built a bomb. Our own intelligence says they had a weapons program and shut it down in two thousand three. Year after year, the same people said they hadn’t restarted it. It’s not in their best interest.Joel: And we had limits on them. Inspectors in the buildings. We walked away from that in twenty eighteen.Paige: The inspectors didn’t stop them from arming Hezbollah. Or Hamas. Or the Houthis.Joel: No. And Israel has been dealing with that. It has plenty of capability to defend itself, which America continues to support. I don’t see it as a threat to the survival of the state. And what’s the alternative? That we should preemptively attack every state that threatens a partner? Paige: Then we disagree about where the line is.Joel: We do. But wherever you put the line, you still have to answer what the war achieves. How do we end this on terms favorable to the United States?Joel: This conflict in Iran could go on for a dozen years. I don’t think we can count on them giving up because we’ve made them suffer enough.Joel: People under bombs don’t quit. London didn’t. Hanoi didn’t. Tokyo didn’t. They dig in, and they blame whoever’s dropping the bombs. Over there, suffering can even be seen as legitimacy. As righteousness. The more pain we inflict, the more of it the regime gets to claim.Paige: They quit in nineteen eighty-eight. Khomeini took the ceasefire with Iraq. He said it was like drinking poison, and he drank it.Joel: After eight years.Paige: After eight years.Joel: That’s my dozen.Paige: And a family burying a son doesn’t feel what the government tells it to feel.Joel: Fair. They aren’t one thing. But look at what each side will put up with. Our prices go up, and we vote out the party responsible. Their people are dying. Their oil isn’t moving. And they’re still shooting at our ships.Paige: One of their lawmakers said it this month. America is far away, so America doesn’t see this war as existential. They do.Joel: So we can’t assume more missiles buy more of the outcome we want. We may just be spending our strength.Paige: I don’t have an answer to that one. So name the outcome. Favorable terms could mean a lot of things.Joel: Ships moving freely through the Strait of Hormuz. A predictable Iranian government that doesn’t threaten other countries in the region. I think that’s it.Paige: Is the strait still ours to care about? Jimmy Carter said we’d go to war for the Gulf. Vital interests. That was nineteen eighty, and we were buying their oil.Joel: We produce so much of our own now. I don’t know that the Middle East is as important to us as it was.Paige: Oil trades in one world market. The strait closes, and the price goes up at a pump in Wyoming. We watched it happen this year.Joel: So we still have an interest.Paige: And everything you listed is a change in behavior. None of it requires Iran to like us.Joel: I don’t think we get past the hostility. The regime’s, at a minimum. We’ve meddled in their affairs too long for them to forget it.Paige: Then a deal has to work with the distrust still in it. And we have to offer something that makes keeping it worthwhile.Joel: I don’t know what we have to offer that we’re willing to give up. Are we going to pull all our bases out of the Middle East? We’re not going to abandon Israel because Iran wants us to.Paige: Those are enormous asks. There are smaller bargains. Money for specific limits we can check. That’s your Kennan essay. A country that’s profiting from an arrangement has something to protect. Friendship not required.Joel: No. And I’d take something like President Obama’s agreement again. Ease the economic pressure in exchange for nuclear limits and inspectors. We should be willing to accept terms like that.Joel: What I don’t hear much of is the Iranian side. What do you think they’re looking for?Paige: Whether the benefit is dependable. We left the last agreement in twenty eighteen, and the inspectors said they’d been keeping it. We want to know they’re keeping the limits. They want to know that keeping the limits gets them what they were promised.Joel: Yeah. Go on.Paige: So it’s a question about us. Can we hold a bargain through a change of presidents? Your patience applies to keeping a deal, not only to making one.Joel: What does dependable mean to you?Paige: Something they can use. Picture being told you can sell oil, but no bank will process the payment, because the bank thinks sanctions are coming back. Permission on paper. Nothing in the account. Dependable doesn’t mean unconditional. It means the terms for keeping it or losing it are clear.Joel: What they say in public is a lot bigger than that. Tolls on tankers through Hormuz. Lift sanctions. Our bases out of the Middle East. And the hostility to Israel existing isn’t going away.Paige: Some of that’s an opening bid. Some of it they won’t move on. We don’t know which is which, and we can’t assume.Joel: And we still have to make it hold. I think that takes other actors. I go back to the DMZ. Somebody standing in between.Paige: Korea’s an odd model. That command is American-led. It isn’t neutral. But the idea travels. A third party both sides accept, so nobody has to take the other’s word.Joel: Yes.Paige: Then the monitors report our violations as loudly as theirs.Joel: I think that’s a result of this war we won’t be able to avoid.Paige: And it has to hold after the people who signed it are gone. Ours and theirs.Joel: Right.Paige: Let’s go back to the Zulu time thing. What happens to the clocks when you go off watch?Joel: Somebody else sets them. Every twelve hours. Paige: And if nothing happens?Joel: Then it was a good watch.SourcesGallet Flying OfficerGallet & Co. “Flying Officer Automatic 40 — AG1701131C1A1.” 2026.https://www.gallet.com/ca-en/watches/flying-officer/flying-officer-automatic/AG1701131C1A1/Hodinkee. “The Gallet Flying Officer.” August 2026.https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-gallet-flying-officerU.S. Nuclear ForcesCongressional Research Service. U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces: Background, Developments, and Issues, RL33640.https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33640.htmlKorea and the ArmisticeUnited Nations Command. “Armistice Negotiations, 1951–1953.” The 1953 Korean Armistice established the DMZ, Military Armistice Commission, and Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission. United Nations Command — Armistice NegotiationsUnited Nations Command. “Military Armistice Commission — Secretariat.” Current information on administration, monitoring, inspections, and enforcement of the Korean Armistice Agreement. United Nations Command — UNCMAC SecretariatIran’s Nuclear Program and the JCPOAInternational Atomic Energy Agency. Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran, GOV/2025/24. June 2025.https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/25/06/gov2025-24.pdfOffice of the Director of National Intelligence. Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities. National Intelligence Estimate. 2007.https://fas.org/publication/nie_on_irans_nuclear_program_n/U.S.–Iran ConflictCouncil on Foreign Relations. “Confrontation Between the United States and Iran.” Global Conflict Tracker. August 2026.https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/confrontation-between-united-states-and-iranCenter for Strategic and International Studies. “Iran and the Emerging Security Order in the Middle East.” 2026.https://www.csis.org/analysis/iran-and-emerging-security-order-middle-eastInstitute for the Study of War. “Iran Update Special Report: U.S. and Israeli Strikes.” February 28, 2026.https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-update-special-report-us-and-israeli-strikes-february-28-2026/Congressional Budget Office. Estimated Costs of Operation Epic Fury. September 2026.https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2026-09/62756-Iran.pdfStrait of Hormuz and EnergyU.S. Energy Information Administration. “World Oil Transit Chokepoints.”https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/special-topics/world_oil_transit_ChokepointsInstitute for Energy Research. “New EIA Report Shows Extent of Hormuz Oil Disruptions.” 2026.https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/gas-and-oil/new-eia-report-shows-extent-of-hormuz-oil-disruptions/The Carter DoctrineCarter, Jimmy. “The State of the Union Address Delivered Before a Joint Session of the Congress.” January 23, 1980. The American Presidency Project. This is the address in which Carter declared an attempt by an outside power to control the Persian Gulf an assault on U.S. vital interests that could be repelled by military force. Jimmy Carter — 1980 State of the Union AddressArctic and Greenland SecurityReuters / The Guardian. “US and Denmark Reach Security Deal After Trump’s Threats to Take Over Greenland.” September 18, 2026.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/18/united-states-denmark-greenland-securityStrategic Bombing and CoercionPape, Robert A. Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

The shovel rings. Every year a couple or three fence posts rot along the front lane. Enough moisture gets in the wood and maybe a beetle or two, and the Earth wants to retake what it will. Everything eventually, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. She has a couple of spare fence posts in the barn. Not too many anymore. She shifts other posts to unbury them, and dust and soil puff up, catching in her nose. She carries one out and lays it on the ground next to the leaning post. It’s heavy enough that she can’t carry it and the tools and she has to go back to the barn for those, a shovel, pickaxe, post hole digger. She lays them next to the fence post. She puts on her gloves to protect her hands while she frees the three cross rails from the stubborn upright. Tough yellow tan leather, turning black at the fingertips. Each rail has a screw holding it to the upright, red dust lining the metal edges. She removes them one at a time and wiggles the upright side to side pulling them away from their slot. They stack there, still attached to the side post beside the rotting upright. Then she gets to the rotting fence post. First to remove it. The best way to make progress is just to break it. So she rocks it back and forth, pushes on it with her weight, until it gives at the base. Gray decay sifts into the grass. With the post removed, she gets to work on the rotted wood under the soil line. The shovel makes quick work at first, each bite of the shovel bringing up soft, rotted wood. Before long, the digging has her breathing hard as the hole deepens. She stops to rest, then works the pickaxe through pockets of stubborn wood. At intervals, she leans over and reaches in, feeling for the bottom of the rotted post. Often her hand meets packed earth, only to find more rotted wood just beneath. At last, her hand finds the bottom. She clears as much rotted wood as she can, sorting it from the soil piled beside the hole. Then she lowers the new post into place and shovels enough saved earth around the base to hold it upright. She sets the level against the wood and nudges the post till it stands true, unlike the last one, which still leans a little crooked. Only then does she fill the hole and tamp the earth firm around the post. When the upright stands true, she reattaches the three rails, driving each screw into the fresh wood. Then she gathers her tools.Half a world away, in Sumatra, another shovel bites into the Earth for a cinnamon tree.That evening, in the kitchen, she dusts the scraps of leftover pie dough with cinnamon. Her daughter’s favorite. The spice rises sharp in the air as she slides the small cookie sheet into the oven. While the scraps bake, she blind-bakes the pie crust and prepares the filling. She makes the dough with lard and butter, flour, salt, and water, lard for flake, butter for flavor, salt because salt makes everything better. Rolled thin on the counter over a dusting of flour, wrapped around the rolling pin, draped over the blue fluted pie dish. Foil to line the bottom, then the pie weights to stop the bubbles. Into the oven.She collects the other ingredients from the cupboard: pumpkin pie filling, Libby’s. Sugar, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, flour, condensed milk. She grabs eggs from the counter, fresh from the chickens in the yard. Pumpkin. Her favorite.The directions say to mix the dry ingredients separately, but she knows it doesn’t matter. She opens the can of pumpkin and uses a spoon to scrape out the last bits. She adds the eggs. She adds the dry ingredients straight to the pumpkin and eggs, gives everything a good stir, then pours in the condensed milk and mixes it again.About now the timer sounds. Potholders to grab the pie dish, foil and weights out, pie dish back in to finish the blind-bake.The next morning, pumpkin pie for breakfast. Out of the fridge comes the whipping cream. Two cups into the mixer, then sugar and vanilla. She starts it on low so the cream doesn’t splash out of the bowl, then turns it up to high until the stiff white peaks. The whisk turns faster than her hand could manage. She watches the cream thicken, stops the mixer, lifts the whisk to check. Peaks.She puts a dollop of the whipped cream onto her coffee, her favorite treat, then some onto the pie. She savors the vanilla in the cream, the bite of cinnamon and ginger mixed with the pumpkin, and heads into work.At work, the accounting sheets are waiting. Each needs checked and then checked again. There are more sheets than she has time to go through carefully.She opens a conversation with an AI. She details precise instructions. What she needs to check, what a mistake looks like, what should agree with what. Together they work on a piece of Python code to go through the documents one at a time.The first try isn’t quite right. She changes a term, explains it again. They try another approach. She runs the code, checks what it finds, changes the code, goes back to the conversation. A couple of hours pass this way.Eventually, it works. The code moves through the sheets finding the mistakes that need her attention.She gets to work fixing them.At a desk nearby, a mathematician works through a problem he has struggled with for years. He knows where he gets stuck. He can get partway to an answer, but the next step depends on something he hasn’t been able to prove. Every approach brings him back to the same place.He’s tried changing his starting assumptions. He’s tried approaching the problem from other directions. There are papers on his desk with passages underlined, calculations in the margins. Books and old computer programs he keeps because he thinks he might find the answer there. Some of that work belongs to people who have been working on the problem longer than he has. Some will never work on it again.He opens a conversation with an AI. Types the problem, gives it explicit details, explains where he gets stuck.The AI says it’s thinking about it. Gives an answer back. He reads it chewing on a pencil. For him to get to a final solution he has to prove every line, and he can’t get past the third. He goes back to the AI and explains the mistake, walks it through his reasoning. Another answer. This one a different route that arrives at the same difficulty. He checks each step again anyway.Over the next several days, he returns to the conversation. Sometimes it helps him work through a calculation. Sometimes he spends an hour finding out why a suggestion won’t work.Then the AI suggests a way of writing the problem differently.He copies it onto paper. Works through the first line, then the second. He tries a simple example whose answer he already knows.It works.He tries another. Then he goes back over what they have taken for granted, looking for something that slipped through unnoticed.For the first time, he can see a possible next step.There’s still work to do. He needs to know whether the approach works beyond these examples. He needs other mathematicians to look it over. A promising afternoon is a long way from his end goal.But he turns to a fresh page.We say she dug the hole by hand. We say she made the pie from scratch. And she did.But where does ‘by hand’ or ‘from scratch’ begin?She used a shovel. Somebody made it. Before someone could make the shovel, someone made steel. Someone extracted iron ore from the ground. Someone figured out how to turn it into something useful. They needed furnaces, fuel, equipment to move the material, tools to shape it, people to do the work. Every one of those had to be made or fed, too.And the handle. A tree had to grow. Somebody cut it, moved it, dried the wood, shaped it to fit the shovel, and shaped it so that your hand could hold it.Whatever fastens the blade to the handle has its own need: a pin, a screw, adhesive. How do you make resin from scratch? For every one of them, if you follow their trail backward, there’s more work. Even if she could obtain everything herself, every ingredient, she would still need to know what to do with them.Somebody makes every material. Somebody else discovered how. Somebody learned through years of mistakes what would work. What would hold together? What would fail or rust faster?We could learn what they know, but we don’t have time to live every one of their failures. She doesn’t need to know the history of metalwork. Other people have worked that out, and they gave her a tool she can hold. Most of their names don’t survive.People observed things long ago, before there were papers to publish or patents to file. They tried something. They remembered what happened. They showed somebody else. Knowledge traveled through a family or a community across generations. It could be lost, discovered again, changed by somebody who noticed something others missed.In the kitchen, she measures flour. She didn’t grow the wheat or grind it. If she had, she would use knowledge someone else taught her: when to plant, what to save for seed, how to recognize grain ready for harvest, how to turn it into flour, and how to make flour into something worth eating.The cinnamon arrived in a jar from Sumatra, halfway across the world. In that jar, there are people who grew and harvested it, people who prepared it, people who moved it from one part of the world to another, and behind their work is knowledge that they didn’t have to discover for themselves.When she turns on the mixer, she watches the cream turn into soft and then stiff peaks and decides when it’s ready. She can use the machine without knowing who built its motor or how they did it. She can take the cream out of the refrigerator without knowing how to make a refrigerator.And we still say that she made whipped cream from scratch.Then at work.She knows the result she needs, opens a browser window, explains how she needs to check them. The first version fails; she changes the code, and it fails again. She changes her instructions; it fails. She works through it over and over, tries again, until she achieves her goal. What part of that effort belongs to her? It’s a legitimate question. But we should ask the same question about the shovel, the flour, the refrigerator, the language she uses to explain the problem she has.The question, really, is: what does it mean to do something by hand?Human achievement depends on more human experience than any one person could ever accumulate. We start ahead of the finish line, beginning our lives with answers other people long dead spent their lives finding, and many spent their lives failing to find.Let’s pull on this thread some more and think about another facet of AI that no one is talking about: justice.It’s one of our six national goals, and it means equal treatment under the law, but it also means that a boy or girl who grows up in a trailer and is willing to put in the work can become great.And for AI especially, it’s not really a governance effort because it’s private enterprise. But let’s think about the effort in the context of: does it align with one of our national goals?We’ve already talked about how knowledge is inherited, but access to that knowledge isn’t equal. Some people grow up with great teachers or great professional connections. Their parents have connections, their friends have connections, or they have people who can explain how to start something. Others have ability and ambition, but they don’t have these connections or the guidance.Circumstances narrow our choices in life. If a boy or girl grows up in a trailer and they are curious and willing to work, their circumstances shouldn’t decide how far they can develop their abilities.AI as a tool creates another way to learn and attempt things and to build knowledge and skills that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise. It’s a place to ask questions, request more explanation about something, practice unfamiliar skills, build something useful.New abilities also create new opportunities. It can help finish a project, get a promotion, or develop new skills they can showcase to an employer or customer.AI isn’t an end-all, be-all. But it offers concrete steps toward the goal of an ordinary, worthwhile life: to love your work, raise your family in a safe neighborhood with good schools, and eat and drink with those you love.So let’s judge the technology not solely by the chatter, but by whom it enables and whether it advances our effort toward achieving a national goal.America exists to protect and enable the weak, not the strong. And to do so, we must take deliberate effort to empower those born with nothing who are willing to work to become great.So, what’s better?Human achievement only?Human achievement enhanced with AI ability? And a question we need to ask. There are answers we need for tough questions. When will we get to those answers alone?If one day the answer to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem about fluid motion helps us better model solutions for a changing climate, would we ignore the result?Postscript.My stories are mine. For this piece, I read into a microphone and used AI to transcribe for me. And yes, I use the hell out of it to help me write Python code.Around twenty-five hundred years ago we were thinking about the progress of knowlege: 8Ask the former generation and find out what their ancestors learned,9 for we were born only yesterday and know nothing, and our days on earth are but a shadow.10 Will they not instruct you and tell you? Will they not bring forth words from their understanding?” Job 8, 8-10, NIVSourcesSteel production, iron ore, fuel, and the materials behind manufactured tools: World Steel Association, “Raw Materials”; World Steel Association, “The Steelmaking Process”Indonesian cinnamon from Sumatra and the people involved in its production: McCormick Science Institute, “Cinnamon”; McCormick, “Empowering Women in Indonesia’s Cinnamon Supply Chain,” March 8, 2023Human knowledge accumulating through social learning, innovation, and transmission between people: Maxime Derex and Robert Boyd, “The Foundations of the Human Cultural Niche,” Nature Communications, 2015Returning to dust: Ecclesiastes 3:20, New International Version, via Bible Gateway; the wording “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”: The Book of Common Prayer (1662), “At the Burial of the Dead,” Church of EnglandLearning from earlier generations and the limits of one person’s experience: Job 8:8–10, New International Version, via Bible GatewayHow new ideas and technologies spread through communication, social relationships, and adoption over time: Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, fifth edition, Free Press, 2003Navier–Stokes equations, fluid motion, and the Millennium Prize problem: Clay Mathematics Institute, “Navier–Stokes Equation”; Charles L. Fefferman, official problem description, “Existence and Smoothness of the Navier–Stokes Equation”Mathematicians working with AI on fluid equations, building on earlier human research, and questions about credit and unpublished work: Tristan Buckmaster, public statement on his collaboration with Levent Alpöge and interactions with OpenAI, September 2026OpenAI’s claimed Navier–Stokes solution and its account of the research process and concurrent mathematical work: OpenAI, “On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem,” September 8, 2026Fluid-motion equations in numerical weather prediction and modeling systems used for weather and climate: Met Office, “History of Numerical Weather Prediction”; Met Office, “Unified Model” Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Taking stairs down two at a time from the giant stone building, music thrumming in her AirPods. She rounds the corner and her pace slows to a walk. The Commuter Express is still there, leaving the city. Three-tone white and green and blue, blue cloth seats, standing room only, people in suits and dress shoes. Above the windshield, Backlick Three Ninety-Five lit up in yellow.A twenty-six minute bus ride to the commuter lot. I-95 and then the parkway.The doors fold shut and then the hiss of air brakes. A young man moves his bag away from the seat next to him, but she reaches up to grab the strap hanging from the ceiling and braces for the turn onto the on-ramp. Eyes forward.She’s twelve hours in. During the darkest time of the year this is her favorite moment of the day.As they crest the top of the hill, a glowing river of red on her right. The HOV lane rules say minimum three passengers to get away from the gridlock, and most cars don’t have three. Their brake lights shine as far as she can see, the bus passing them one after another after another. Next stop, the commuter lot. The bus empties in less than a minute. Her car is close, she parked at five-forty this morning.On the way home, she stops at the supermarket. Less than ten minutes now to save the peace of a weekend morning with her coffee and the still of the screen porch, cardinals calling from the tree line and squirrels that chitter in the great woods that line the creek. Vegetables, potatoes, take and bake sourdough. Then the meat counter for some beef. Even the ground is more than seven dollars a pound.The world has gone mad.HeifersBefore he can even get a toe to the wood floor she licks his foot. He walks out of the bedroom in the near-dark, and she’s already jogging a circle on the rug next to her food bowl. He puts a scoop in the bowl and hits the coffee grinder button as he walks through the kitchen. She finishes her portion, licks the bowl clean, and still beats him to the door. While she is outside he goes back to the coffee. Ten after five he hits ‘Brew’ and the coffee maker starts to gurgle. Out the sunroom window the sky to the east is a deep pink going yellow at the edge. Jesse is back at the screen door, ready for her treat. Red heeler, white Bentley mark on her forehead, nails ticking on the tile when the door swings. She wolfs the treat down in one bite and runs through the house ready to jump on anyone not out of bed yet. He drinks the coffee with some cream. Only one cup anymore. Jesse is back now; she watches the sparrows flit from tree to tree in the dim light.He grabs his felt with the cattleman’s crease. By six he’s in the pickup with the window down, diesel turbo whining along the two-track up to the north pasture to check water tanks. The tank on the north end runs off a solar well he put in four years ago, and the float sticks sometimes. Today the float is fine. The grass is not. He borrowed eleven thousand dollars through a USDA program four years ago to drill that well. For a cattleman, water means grass. It opened up enough ground to add forty pairs on a section that used to just grow sagebrush. He’s looked into what a second one for the east side would cost more than once. Another sixty pairs, maybe, if the grass would carry them. Imagine walking in to talk to a banker for a loan. Do you have any collateral? Sure do. It’s grass that I’m hoping will survive the drought.The north pasture is grazed short and has been brown all year. He asks Jesse aloud if they’re going to see any snow this winter. Then the math. How many head, how many acres, how much fuel will cost to truck hay in at more than five dollars a gallon for diesel.The math says what it said last year. Keeping cattle means losing money.The pickup idles through and he counts heifer calves. Steers already a check coming regardless. This year’s crop looks good. The kind you want to keep.He turns the radio up when the cattle market report comes on in the background. Heifer calves bringing between four-fifty and some near four-seventy-five a pound. He glances through his heifers.Near four seventy-five a pound means the calves in front of him are twenty-five hundred dollars. Apiece. Or he could lose money to keep them.Then the news. The announcer says the United States would import three hundred thousand metric tons of ground beef to be sold at twenty-five percent below current market prices. The president’s voice says the deal would reduce prices for American families while we work to rebuild the cattle herd and help our ranchers.He shakes his head and turns the radio back down.He looks at a heifer calf.If he keeps her there’s no check in October. She eats hay all winter, and the diesel to deliver it costs more than the hay. Then hope she breeds next summer, lose money again next winter, and then still wait another year. If. If. If. If she breeds. If they get enough snow to grow grass. If the coyotes don’t find the newborn. If all that happens, two springs from now she might put her first calf on the ground.But he still hasn’t made any money. For that to happen that calf would still have to grow, get weaned, and sell for a profit. This is twenty twenty-six. He could get paid in twenty twenty-eight. Somewhere around twenty-thirty, that calf is beef.He has a choice and he doesn’t like either option. He could spend money buying hay and paying veterinary bills and hope for luck for four years but that means losing money and a ranch that loses money doesn’t stay a ranch. Or he could put a check for twenty-five hundred dollars in his pocket right now but every year he does that his cattle herd shrinks and then makes less and less money every year and the ranch doesn’t stay a ranch.And the radio just told him the government will do everything it can to make the cattle market no longer profitable.He spends the rest of the day checking calves and water tanks with Jesse. Around the time he’s wrapping up he remembers a story his dad told him. His dad loved Reagan, always telling these old stories. 1989, just two months before the Berlin Wall fell, Boris Yeltsin visited a grocery store in Houston, Texas. He roamed the aisles of Randall’s, shaking his head in amazement.He said if ordinary Russians ever saw an American supermarket, “there would be a revolution.”He wonders what happens to the supermarket if ranchers can’t grow their herds.They’re headed back for supper. Outside the window the heifer calves are strung out along the creek in the last light, grazing down by the water. They’re worth more money than any calves in the history of this ranch, every one of them a check he can’t afford to cash, and can’t afford not to.We’ve Been Here Before, But We Were Coming From the Other DirectionNebraska, 1934.The Dust Bowl. America was five years into the Depression. Roosevelt had been president a little more than a year. Washington was inventing agencies faster than most people could learn their initials. None of them could make it rain.The grass had been gone two years. A rancher couldn’t keep an animal he couldn’t feed, and what he couldn’t keep, nobody wanted to buy. A calf was worth less than the corn it would have taken to fatten it, and the corn wasn’t growing either.The Drought Relief Service started buying cattle. Not to eat. To get them off land that couldn’t carry them anymore. Four dollars a head for calves, around a hundred dollars today. Ten to twenty for cows and steers, two fifty to five hundred. More than the packing plants could take. What they couldn’t take, trucks drove to pits we had already dug. Close to one in five of the cattle the government paid for were buried in the ground they’d been trying to graze. There are two ways for a country to spend money on beef it doesn’t have.There were ninety-two years between cattle pits in Nebraska and the meat counter in Northern Virginia. Then: not enough grass and water to grow too many cattle. Now: not enough cattle, and not enough grass and water to grow more.So. Two ways for a country to spend money on beef it doesn’t have.First, fast. Last week, Washington announced it would import up to three hundred thousand metric tons of foreign ground beef without the usual tariff. A ninety-day supply, priced twenty-five percent below market value.This isn’t necessarily wicked, a country buying beef. But let’s be honest about what that leaves us with when the ninety days run out. Not an extra acre of grass. Not a foot of pipe for water. Not one bred heifer standing in the snow we are praying for this winter.And another good question for this approach. Where did that beef come from? A calf that crosses a state line in America has an official tag and a history so USDA can ensure a safe food supply. Born here. Moved there. If it comes from a Western brand state, looked at by a brand inspector before it leaves the state. We know much less about beef imports. The second way. Slow. Painfully slow. Grass, water, and heifers.Grass. In August, a Republican from South Dakota and a Democrat from Minnesota introduced a bill to pay landowners to put marginal cropland back into permanent pasture. Up to twenty million acres under ten or fifteen-year contracts. Sunlight turning land into more grass to grow the national cattle herd. Water. We need more water across the West, and taking more from the Colorado River and aquifers isn’t the solution. If we put marginal crop ground into grazing land, those acres need a fraction of the water draw irrigated row crops need. And the Colorado: a hundred-year-old agreement promised states could take more water than has flowed in the river in decades. Last week, Washington changed those rules. Nevada already sued, arguing that the new decision would leave it with less than half the water it already uses. Nobody’s building a pipeline or a desalination plant by November. No quick solutions, so we better get to work.Heifers. Somebody has to feed her and take care of her, starting from the fall she isn’t sold to the fall her first calf brings a check two years later. Ask any other American small business the country relies on to skip revenue checks on half of their inventory for two years, and every one of them will go out of business. So ranchers need resources. Low-interest loans and tax credits to keep beef heifers. Marry the credits to the ear tags and brand inspections that already exist, so nobody collects on a heifer that quietly went to market. And put an end date on it. A bridge, not an entitlement. When we rebuild the herd, let it die.Then comes the hard part. We wait.The market isn’t broken. The price of calves is real: there aren’t enough of them. Anyone standing in front of a meat case promising lower beef prices by November is making a promise cattle biology doesn’t support.Cheap beef means abundance. Abundance means more cattle than the market wants to pay for. That’s the market working.Cheap beef means:Heifers. Water. Grass.SourcesU.S. cattle herd at a 75-year low, ground beef averaging $6.69/lb in Dec. 2025, Argentina beef tariff-rate quota raised to 80,000 metric tons: The White House, “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Ensures Affordable Beef for the American Consumer,” Feb. 6, 2026; Federal Register, Proclamation 11010, “Ensuring Affordable Beef for the American Consumer”Trump executive order removing tariffs on beef, coffee, and tropical fruit, Nov. 14, 2025: PBS NewsHour / Associated PressNCBA CEO Colin Woodall statement opposing Argentina beef imports: The Center Square, via Yahoo NewsDOJ meatpacker price-fixing investigation, Executive Order 14364, Dec. 6, 2025: Wikipedia, “Executive Order 14364”Nevada v. Department of the Interior, Colorado River Record of Decision lawsuit, Aug. 24, 2026: Office of Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, press releaseColorado River Record of Decision and Final EIS, governor statements: Office of Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo; Office of Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo1934 cattle purchase program, packing plants, condemned animals: Wikipedia, “Drought Relief Service”8.3 million cattle purchased, $111,546,104 cost, 1.5 million condemned: Wikipedia, “Jones–Connally Act 1934”High Plains aquifer system, southeastern Wyoming extent and use: USGS, Scientific Investigations Map 3180; USGS, Fact Sheet 2011–3106, “Groundwater Quality of Southeastern Wyoming”Status of the High Plains aquifer in Kansas, 2023: Kansas Geological Survey, Technical Series 25Ogallala aquifer depletion rates, Texas High Plains: Texas A&M, Ogallala Aquifer Program; Texas TribuneIrrigated vs. non-irrigated water use, Texas High Plains crop-livestock systems: Zilverberg et al., “Integrated Crop–Livestock Systems in the Texas High Plains: Productivity and Water Use,” 2014 Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

College girl. Blonde in a bright green shirt holding a clipboard, asking names and questions. Welcoming committee.What’s your major?Chemical engineering.Oh, you’re one of the smart ones.The van pulls forward through the maze of cones and kids wearing shirts that say “Unpack Your Future” that stand ready with laundry carts to take your life’s treasure into the unknown.Who will you meet on your journey?Through the great halls of stone and brick. Unknown sounds and the faces and voices of those someday familiar.Will you take the long road home? Or the shortcut? The shortcut looks like the way home. Your first meal at the feast. Your first night in a strange room.Act I. ArgosChristmas Eve. The long night and the wind howling pelting snow sideways against the windows and the drifts that bury the paths and block the roads. Dreams of tunnels and forts and marshmallows dripping with chocolate.Bedtime in the far north. Two bathed now in pajamas and blankets, snuggled in with the old gray dog.Time for a story. The older is at the edge of story time and some nights he wants to listen and some nights not and days move on.Tonight, a new tale. Not an Odyssey. A tale of an Odyssey told from home. Those who remain behind.The reader starts with the title. “Argos. The Story of Odysseus as Told by His Loyal Dog” by Ralph Hardy. Book One. Chapter One. “On the Stupidity of Sheep.”The two giggle.The sheep refuse to find shelter from the storm. Their wool smells. Argos, the great hunting dog born of bear and wolf, their protector. Wet.Chapter One ends: “Some men did return to their homes from Troy to tell the tale. But my master and his men have not. The mountain eagles circle higher and higher, riding the rippling currents, looking for him as I have asked, but see him not. The seagulls I have ordered to fly over every ship to see if my master is enslaved report nothing. Even the vultures, which smell death everywhere, are silent. And so I believe he lives.”February.Smoke in the kitchen. The microwave door hangs open and the smell of burnt oatmeal goes all the way up the stairs. The boy stands back from it with the look of a man watching his first ship sink. Windows open. Ten below outside. The whole house breathing cold air until the smell surrenders.What’s done is done. The house stands. Later we laugh and carry the old microwave out into the snow drift and the smell inside it will never go away.That night, bedtime. Pajamas and blankets and the old gray dog.Book One. Chapter Sixteen. “Tales of Hades:” “I pray that…you set me on a pyre there and burn me with my armor….Do this for me, or I am cursed for eternity.”Honor by fire.Some nights he listens from the doorway. Tonight, he is under the blanket.March came and with it great snowstorms. First we dug tunnels tall enough for a boy to stand in. The roofs sagged and the mound slowly shrank.The book was nearly done now.Bedtime. The reader went up the stairs the way they had all winter. The two bathed and in pajamas under the blanket. The reader had to coax one out to listen, the book was nearly done. The old gray dog circled twice and lay down with his head on a leg.The last chapters. Odysseus returns at last, a stranger in his own home; only one creature in all of Ithaca knows him. Argos. Act II. LessonsTroy. The Trojan War. The legend Homer told took place around twelve hundred years before Christ. He told the tale around five centuries later.Homer begins near the end.For ten years, Greek warriors laid siege to a city that would not bend to their will. Troy’s location wasn’t an accident. It sat at a decisive point to control key geography. The straits didn’t cause the Trojan War, but they are why the city mattered. Then the trickery of the horse. Warriors inside the gates. The city slept. In the dark, the warriors climbed out and opened the gates for the army waiting outside. Houses burned through the night. Men who had names the day before, dead in the streets. They took women and children. Odysseus wasn’t watching Troy burn from a ship. He was inside the horse and inside the walls when the city fell. By dawn, the Greeks had destroyed the city.So. The war is over. There was a way home, and some of the other kings took it. He could go directly home, but there were other matters. Men he was tied to, arguments to settle, other things pulling at him, other routes to consider.Odysseus has a choice. The first: Go to class. Do the work. Come home when you said you would. Save some money. Keep the promise. Stay married. Train when you don’t feel like training. One foot in front of the other, the next step and then the next. None of those things feel heroic while you’re doing them.Or the other: the road that looks shorter.And so begins the Odyssey.Their first stop, a city called Ismarus. It had nothing to do with Troy, but they attacked it anyway. After the assault, Odysseus told the men it was time to go. For ten years there had been a time for war. Troy had fallen. That time was over. But there was food and wine and things to steal and divide, and they stayed too long. By morning, more men had come down from the country and they had to defend themselves. They fought all day, and by the time the Greeks got back to sea, six men from every ship were dead.There is a season, a time and place for everything. A time when your parents woke you up, reminded you where to be, knew where you were at night, and caught some of your mistakes before they became expensive. That season ends.Then an island where three of the men ate the lotus and forgot why they were trying to get home. Not who they were, really. They didn’t forget everything. Just the part where, somewhere across the water, there was another life they were supposed to want and get back to.They forgot.They didn’t want to leave.Odysseus had to drag them back to the ships crying and tie them down.Remember why you came.One of the great treasures in life is to find work you love. Don’t trade that away because something is easier or safer or more pleasant that makes you forget what you wanted in the first place.When you are young, you want to burn the world to the ground. Remember.Then the cave. The men find cheese and sheep and food, and they want to take some and get out. Odysseus wants to stay and meet whoever lives there, and that turns out to be a bad decision he could not have forecast at the time.The Cyclops comes home, rolls a stone across the entrance, and eats two of the men. Later he eats more. Odysseus gets him drunk, tells him his name is Nobody, blinds him, and the surviving men escape when the Cyclops lets the sheep out.It works. They’re back on the ship. They’re leaving.But Odysseus can’t stand that the Cyclops doesn’t know who beat him. So Odysseus shouts his real name and where he’s from.Turns out the Cyclops is Poseidon’s son.You don’t need to tell people how smart you are, how talented you are, how hard you work, how much potential you have. Don’t announce yourself. There’s plenty of time for people to know how great you are without you telling them. People will discover that on their own.Then the King of the Winds. He gives Odysseus a bag with every wind trapped inside except the one blowing toward Ithaca, so only the wind that will carry them home is free.For nine days they sail. Odysseus stays awake at the helm until he can’t take it anymore and falls asleep. When he does, they are close enough to Ithaca to see the fires of their home burning on shore.But the crew has been watching him guard the bag, and out of envy they decide it must contain treasure he hasn’t shared with them. They open it.All the winds come out at once.Odysseus wakes up and watches his home disappear over the horizon because the men he trusted thought he was hiding gold from them.They end up back where they started. You will meet people who have more than you. More money. Better grades. Better connections. There is always someone at the dance that is prettier than you. Maybe they earned it. Maybe they didn’t. It doesn’t matter. Envy will make you destroy your own voyage trying to open somebody else’s bag.Then the giants.Eleven ships go into the harbor. The giants rain rocks down from the cliffs. None come out. The one ship that stayed out of the harbor cuts its line and gets away.Time and chance happen to us all.You will make good choices and still have terrible things happen to you. Keep going. Next, Circe, daughter of the sun god. When Odysseus’s men reach her island, she welcomes them into her house, gives them food and wine, drugs them, strikes them with her wand, and turns them into pigs. Odysseus forces her to turn them back.And in a weird twist, they stay on the island for another year.They fight no battles. There’s no rowing, no storms, plenty of food to eat and warm beds.Eventually, the crew has to convince Odysseus that they should probably go home.There will be times when you need to stop, recover, change your major, take an easier semester, sleep, heal, enjoy yourself. None of those are failure. But eventually, you should probably get going. Then he goes to the land of the dead because Circe tells him that the way home now requires directions from people who are no longer alive. His mother is there, and she wasn’t dead when he left.He asks her what happened and learns that she died while he was gone, grieving for him. He tries to put his arms around her. There’s nothing to hold. He tries again and again.Twenty years is a long time.There are people waiting for you—their lives keep going while you have your adventure. Things happen to them, too.Next up, the Sirens. Odysseus has heard rumor from Circe of what their song does to men, but of course he still wants to hear it. So he comes up with a solution. He has his men put wax in their ears so they can’t hear the song, and then he has them tie him to the mast so he can. Crazypants.He tells them beforehand that no matter what he says, they are not to untie him.When he hears the song, he immediately wants loose. He begs, pleads, orders them, fights the ropes. They keep rowing and tie him tighter.Sometimes you know or suspect that you’re not going to make a good decision. Don’t put it off. Decide while you’re thinking clearly what you’re going to do when the circumstances make thinking clearly difficult.And, maybe Odysseus shouldn’t have listened to the song at all.You don’t have to figure out how close you can get to failure without being ruined. Maybe just put wax in your ears and keep rowing.Then a monster on one side of a passage and a whirlpool on the other. The whirlpool will destroy the ship and kill everyone on it. The monster will take six men.Odysseus knows this before they enter the strait, but he can’t tell the crew.He chooses the passage where six men will die.Some of you will do inherently dangerous things. All of you will face tough choices.Another island, where there are cattle belonging to the sun god. The instructions are simple: don’t eat the cattle.Odysseus tells the crew and makes them promise, and they promise they will not eat the cattle.But then storms keep the ship on the island. The food runs out. Odysseus goes off by himself to pray, and he falls asleep.The men have a choice: they can die from starvation, or they can risk the wrath of the sun god.They kill the cattle.When they finally leave the island, Zeus destroys the ship, and every one of the crew dies except Odysseus.Eat your bread with joy, drink your wine with a merry heart, and enjoy the hard work of being alive while you can.All the men who left Ithaca with Odysseus are gone. He survives, holding onto wreckage.And the lesson here, which isn’t really part of the story, is that everybody who takes the shortcut thinks they’re going to be the one who survives it.Maybe only one of you will make it.Then Calypso and the seven-year wait. She is more than a beautiful woman on an island paradise. Immortality, eternal youth, love, food, sex. Anything he wants. Except for the one thing. He sits by the sea, crying for home.The gods tell her to release him and he builds a raft and goes back onto the water and Poseidon destroys it.One day you might get an offer that seems like paradise, at least from the outside looking in. Judge well—there is no perfect offer, always a tradeoff, hidden or known. More money or stress or health risk or time away from family that will start their own Odyssey before you expect it. Is it worth it? Maybe yes and maybe no. Only you can decide. Do it with your eyes open.Twenty years after leaving Ithaca, Odysseus drifts ashore there asleep. And home isn’t the place he left.Men fill his house, eat his animals, drink his wine, and court his wife because they think he is dead. His son has grown up without him. His father is old. His mother is gone.Odysseus has spent the whole story trying to get home and when he finally gets there he goes in as a beggar.Nobody recognizes him.Well, almost.Except for Argos.When you go on your Odyssey, you can’t go home to the place you left, because neither you nor home waits in place.Act III. For Those of You Leaving Home in this SeasonAs you go out into the world, The Lord bless you and keep you;Make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;Turn his face toward you and give you peace.To those left behind, we remember Argos and the blizzard.SourcesRalph Hardy, Argos: The Story of Odysseus as Told by His Loyal Dog, Harper Collins, 2016: Google Books, ArgosTroy, archaeological site at Hisarlık, location near the Dardanelles, and traditional Late Bronze Age setting of the Trojan War: UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Archaeological Site of TroyHomer, approximately eighth century B.C.; Homeric epics recorded in roughly their present form around 750 B.C.; Iliad covers only a small portion of the ten-year siege; Trojan Horse and Sack of Troy preserved in the wider Trojan epic tradition: Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Lore About the Trojan War”Homer, Odyssey, Book 3. Division of the Greek leaders after Troy and the choices surrounding their return home: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 3Odysseus and the Greek warriors inside the Trojan Horse and the sack of Troy: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 11Ismarus and the Cicones; the Lotus-Eaters; Polyphemus, “Nobody,” Odysseus revealing his name, and Poseidon: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 9Aeolus and the bag of winds; the Laestrygonians; Circe and the transformation of the men into pigs; the year spent on Circe’s island: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 10Odysseus in the land of the dead; Tiresias; Anticleia, Odysseus’s mother; and the dead who cannot be embraced: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 11The Sirens; Scylla and Charybdis; the cattle of Helios; destruction of Odysseus’s final ship and death of the remaining crew: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 12Calypso; Odysseus held on Ogygia; his longing and weeping for home; offer of immortality; construction of the raft; Poseidon’s destruction of it: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 5Odysseus carried home asleep by the Phaeacians and set ashore on Ithaca: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 13Argos recognizes Odysseus after twenty years: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 17“There is a season” / “a time for war, and a time for peace”: Ecclesiastes 3:1–8: Bible Gateway, Ecclesiastes 3“Time and chance happen to them all”: Ecclesiastes 9:11, NKJV: Bible Gateway, Ecclesiastes 9:11“Eat your bread with joy…drink your wine with a merry heart,” and the enjoyment of life and work: Ecclesiastes 9:7–10, paraphrased: Bible Gateway, Ecclesiastes 9:7–10“The Lord bless you and keep you…make His face shine upon you and give you peace”: Numbers 6:24–26: Bible Gateway, Numbers 6:24–26 Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Moths circle the streetlights in the mostly empty lot. Blacktop. White parking lines. Road noise. Pickup doors slam shut.They’re supposed to park at the back of the lot. Nobody who would care is here at eleven, and they’ll be gone before Beth gets in.She’s at the door, counting heads. Everyone calls her Lou.“I need you to go get Charlie,” she says. “He was supposed to be here an hour ago.”No problem.Charlie lives in a trailer park pretty close. Tires on gravel. Sideways glances. He bangs on the dark trailer door and waits. Quiet inside. Does it again. After a couple minutes Charlie opens the door, eyes bloodshot, smelling like too much of something.“I’ll be right behind you.”The kid leaves. When he gets back she’s still at the door.“He’ll be here,” she says. “He always comes.”Trucks back up to the dock. Boxes come down the rollers. Cardboard stacks up faster than anyone breaks it down. Most of the crew is new. Maybe they’ll last the week.Charlie comes in at midnight and works the line like a man paying something off. Nobody says anything.At the first break she’s smoking and eating a sandwich. Lettuce packed separate. Bread spread thin with dressing.John sleeps in the corner of the break room. Loud snores. He jerks awake, then nods off again.Above the time clock there’s a board with the stock price on it. Employee ownership plan. Somebody on day shift writes the new number in every day. “That’s not much mayonnaise,” the kid says.“Miracle Whip. If I could afford mayonnaise, I would spread it thick,” she says.He looks at his own sandwich. Eats the rest of it slower.At seven the doors open onto full daylight. The crew walks out squinting. Engines start across the lot, one after another. They pull out and head toward town and bed.He turns west, towards Midway, the sun in his mirrors. His shift at the dairy starts at seven thirty.Act I. KeysLou’s ring of keys opens nearly every lock in the store. A key to the high valuables cage, the office, the cardboard compactor lockout. She carries them on a metal clip hung over her belt. When she walks the floor, you hear her coming.She keeps a copy of the schedule on a sheet folded in her back pocket. Not her schedule, because she has that one memorized. Everyone’s schedule. Her handwriting, all capitals, pencil.She schedules break times, teaches new workers how to unload trucks and run pallet jacks, moves people around based on who calls in.The store stays open until ten. Night shift starts at eleven. She arrived by nine, through the auto-open doors in pale jeans, shirt tucked in. She walked with highkneed purpose, denim falling straight to white sneakers. Pencil ready. The evening crew has their aisles faced and the dock swept before she comes through.Just before eleven o’clock, she’s at the door to let everyone in. Five tonight. Charlie, John, the kid, a new guy, and a woman who started Tuesday. The truck’s already backed in.She takes the paperwork from the driver and signs it on her leg.The night is orderly. Trailer, then the rollers, then her first Virginia Slim. Pallets to the floor, everyone split aisle by aisle, freight on the shelves, cardboard broken down flat and baled. Then the orders. She’s quick to jump in and fix a jam or rebuild a corner of a pallet herself so a new guy can watch. Then she hands him the next box. She explains to him, “A new truck every night. Nothing to stay in the stockroom, no back inventory. Six hundred boxes in, six hundred boxes onto shelves, cardboard baled, empty dock by seven, and another truck tomorrow.”This summer the kid is new to nights. He’s been with the store for a couple of years on evening shift, and he picked up a second job on the university dairy for the summer. When he got moved to nights she asked him about his schedule. Night shift, off at seven, dairy until five, sleep until ten, five days a week.“That’s not much sleep,” she says. She looks at him like he’s missing something obvious.Once every couple weeks the kid isn’t there at eleven. If the truck is full and the crew is short, she’ll call. If the truck is light she’ll let him sleep until one before she calls.When a truck pulls away she might sneak a puff outside the cone of the dock light. The moths shoot across the light in a streak.Around four the night gets long. Whoever’s dragging worst finds her coming down their aisle with a mini candy bar. She doesn’t say anything about it.The woman who started Tuesday asks her how long she’s been here.Nineteen years, she says. Nights for sixteen.A few nights later the woman asks about her hours.Lou takes the sheet out of her back pocket and looks at it.Thirty-two this week, she says. Forty next week.She folds it back up.Get a thousand hours in the year and you qualify for the profit sharing, she says. You still have to be here at the end of the year.The woman says okay and goes back to her aisle.One night she’s showing the kid how the order system works. He asks her why she doesn’t switch to days. Assistant manager, an office with a door and a chair.That job takes a degree, she says. She scans the barcode in front of an empty shelf to place an order. I’m fifty.Act II. The CrewCharlie arrives just after Lou most nights. He clocks in and heads straight to the dock to check out what the truck has brought him that night. He jokes with the college kids who are going home. The kid only has to go to his trailer once. Nobody brings it up.He works the west side of the store, toys and tools and home goods. He’s fast. Somewhere in the middle of the night he’ll say something the kid thinks about on the drive to Midway. One night, breaking down boxes: why would you worry about something that hasn’t happened yet? Then he tilts the bale of flattened cardboard on a pallet and gets the jack.Nights suit me, he says.John falls asleep whenever he sits down. Lou gives him jobs that keep him on his feet and moving. Clean and polish the floors, move pallets. When break time is up, they wake him up and tell him it’s time to go.That’s just John. Then one night in July, he’s different. Awake. Smiling when he comes through the door, talking during break. He tells everybody he got a machine that helps him breathe when he sleeps. Says he slept eight hours and can’t remember the last time he felt this good.He looks ten years younger. He eats his whole lunch without falling asleep.Along with Lou, they’re the regulars.The day shift is the lifers, evening for the college kids, nights for those caught in between. The crew turns over all summer. A guy who wanted a job with air conditioning. A lady who needed a paycheck, then she was headed to Springfield. They’re friendly and they work hard. Then Lou crosses their name off the schedule.The woman who started that first Tuesday lasts six weeks. One night she just stops coming in.She didn’t quit because she hated anybody. Nights are hard on your body. You work while you’re supposed to be sleeping and you sleep while you’re supposed to be working, and most people’s bodies can’t take it.Every so often a new person will ask: how long does it take your body to adjust? Opinions all around. Two weeks. A month. Six.The answer for some of them? Never.At three in the morning the store hums with noise from the fluorescent ballasts, John running the floor polisher, scrub pads turning circles on the tile, Charlie making the cardboard baler groan in the backroom. The whole town is dark, moths shooting across the parking lot lights, and they’re moving boxes in this lit-up one-hundred-thousand-square-foot metal box. Freight moving from a trailer to a shelf so a woman can buy diapers for her baby at seven a.m. One night a new guy asks about the sign by the time clock. Employee ownership. What’s the dollar sign written in marker?Lou explains. You sign up to buy company stock, they take money out of your check. For every dollar of stock you buy the company puts an extra fifteen cents into your account.Charlie says he thought about it, but he can’t eat stock.John says he signed up once and a doctor’s bill changed his mind.Nobody asks the kid.Lou puts her cigarette out and they go back to work. The stock price on the sign goes up just a little every week, all summer.By August, Lou, John, and Charlie are the only people who have been there longer than the kid.Act III. The BobcatThe sun is low on the horizon. Morning near Midway.He steps on the back of the bucket and into the cab. Safety restraint down, key on, and the diesel engine putters to life. Bucket up, tilt down to check the pins, everything checks out. Most of the day is in this Bobcat. Mixing feed in the auger, evening out the corn silage row, unloading alfalfa bales off semis, cleaning the freestall barn. Almost everyone who works on the dairy is a college kid, except for the manager and the guy who can fix everything.Throughout the day, the college kids talk. Did you hear Sean got a sweet job up in Minnesota?Then the milk parlor, clean the udders, mastitis check, milk machine, clean again. The Holsteins give more milk, the Jerseys more milk fat. The Food Science majors who work in the ice cream parlor on campus will use it to make Tiger Stripe, golden French vanilla with a dark Dutch chocolate ribbon. Gold and black.What do you think of the fall study abroad program in the Netherlands?In the afternoon somebody asks what he’s doing next year. After you graduate? I’m going to be a senior, but I’m not sure yet. I might go back to working with beef cattle. Or I might apply to vet school.Somebody says that’s cool. The talk moves back to Sean’s job.They hose and scrub the milk parlor down when they’re done milking. He drives east toward town, sleeps from five thirty to ten.At eleven, Lou is at the door, counting heads.Act IV. AugustTwo weeks left in the summer. Classes start soon, and the store trades the college kids of summer for the kids of fall. David asks to see him one morning after the shift. White button-down collared shirt, dark pants, black shoes. Assistant manager. They meet near the high valuables cage. “How have you been doing?” he starts. Good.No, really. Beth told me about the dairy. Nights here, days there. We think it’s too much. The kid says he’s been getting along.A flash of concern on David’s face. Classes start in a couple weeks, right? Take those weeks off. Your job will be here when you get back. You’ll go back to evenings. The kid jokes the first thing he’s going to do is sleep for days. Then he asks who fills in on Lou’s crew.Don’t worry about Lou. We’ll make sure she’s good. She knows what’s going on.There is no last night. The shift before the meeting was it. Nobody knew except for Lou. He sees her again in the evenings, at nine o’clock, passing. He walks the store, checking the facing before they turn the shift over to her and John and Charlie. She never says anything about the summer.That year, evening shift helps nights unload the first truck before they leave. PostscriptThanks for joining me for The Night Shift. I’m Joel Douglas, and I believe in America.Every bit of this story is true. That summer I was nineteen. The store was the Walmart in Columbia, Missouri, on Nifong Boulevard. The building is a Hy-Vee Grocer now. The dairy is the University of Missouri’s ‘Foremost Dairy.’ The only place you can buy Tiger Stripe ice cream is Buck’s in Eckles Hall. They have very limited hours.The night crew is real. I changed most of the names. The mayonnaise exchange is near word for word. When summer ended I worked there another year. When I graduated, the district manager offered me a spot in the assistant manager training program. Assistant manager, then store manager, then maybe district. The job that takes a degree. I was twenty and I had one, and I had to turn him down. I already had an Officer Training School slot in the Air Force.The rules said they couldn’t make the same offer to Lou.On my way out the store manager told me if I stayed on the books a couple more weeks, I’d vest in something called profit sharing. I couldn’t stay. I believe she kept me on the books anyway. That June a check came for five hundred and seventy-five dollars, and I didn’t know what it was.Employee ownership was different. You could choose to buy stock out of your paycheck and the store kept the stock price on the sign next to the time clock. For every dollar of stock you bought, Walmart added fifteen cents to the same account. A fifteen percent match. Unheard of for 401Ks today. No degree or credit check or anything. You just had to choose to do it, and that probably meant you needed money left over at the end of the week.About one in four Walmart associates buys stock. Charlie told you why. You can’t eat stock.Now the philosophy.Dennis Kelleher said on a podcast that the bottom 50 percent of Americans, about 165 million people, hold 2.5 percent of the wealth of the country. It’s the Federal Reserve’s own quarterly data.Let’s think about the statistic first. The bottom half’s wealth has gone up, not down, for the last thirty years. Many of those are the youngest Americans who haven’t had time to own much.If we judge across history, Americans are extraordinarily prosperous.Owning wealth is different. Many Americans pay rent for shelter. Their health insurance is tied to a job. Their Social Security keeps them alive, but they can’t sell it or leave it to their kids. Security is important, but it isn’t the freedom of choice that comes with ownership. A paid-off truck means you can take another job. Home equity means you can move. Savings mean you can tell a boss no. A retirement account means more of your future is yours. Just like Lou explaining the store. Boxes come in, night shift puts the goods on the shelves. Nothing in the back room, no inventory. Another truck tomorrow. We designed economic security the same way. Benefits arrive just in time, are consumed, nothing remains. Then we act surprised the ownership column reads 2.5 percent.So. Instead of using it as ammunition for political theater, should we try to change it?Justice. One of our six national goals. Setting conditions so a kid born in a trailer can love their work and eat and drink with the people they love. Food on the table. Heat in the house. In turn, a house to put the table in.Is that enough? Should we make Americans buy stock? When bills are tight and a man picks up a second job, would we order him to buy equities with money he needs to pay a doctor’s note? That would violate another national goal: liberty.Lou never chose to be an owner. Sam Walton enrolled her automatically into profit sharing. The rule did it for her. Let’s recognize it’s not just the choice. It’s tough to pass judgment on someone who can’t afford to buy mayonnaise.But if we are serious, there are three principles that would move more Americans into the ownership half. None of them orders anyone to do anything. They are either automatic or a choice.One. Make ownership easier.Two. Make saving the default. Automatic.Three. Stop government rules that punish people for saving money.Three examples to go with them. An offer for first-time homebuyers: a three percent interest rate on a HUD loan, three and a half percent down, one time, owner-occupiers only, investors excluded. Combine this with building and zoning incentives.Auto-enrollment retirement accounts that you have to opt out of. Congress has proposed these accounts many times through bipartisan efforts.Raise the SSI asset limit and index it, so people can actually save money to buy something. To move more Americans into the ownership half, we have to break the chain of just-in-time benefits.I don’t know what happened to Lou. She’d be about seventy-seven now. I hope more than twenty years of profit sharing went home with her.I hope she’s sitting down to supper with people she loves. Mayonnaise spread thick.Eat your bread with joy.Drink your wine with a merry heart.Enjoy the hard work of staying alive,The Almighty takes pleasure in your pleasure.SourcesBottom 50 percent hold 2.5 percent of U.S. wealth: Federal Reserve, Distributional Financial Accounts; FRED series WFRBSB50215, Share of Total Net Worth Held by the Bottom 50%Dennis Kelleher, Better Markets: bettermarkets.org. Podcast episode here. Wealth by age of family head: Federal Reserve, Survey of Consumer FinancesAssociate Stock Purchase Plan. 15% match on the first $1,800, more than 400,000 participants, plan offered “for almost 30 years,” Sam Walton on share accessibility: Walmart, “Walmart Announces 3-for-1 Stock Split,” Jan. 30, 2024U.S. associate workforce (approx. 1.6 million): Walmart, AboutWalmart Profit Sharing and 401(k) Plan annual reports: SEC EDGAR, Walmart Inc. Form 11-K filingsSSI resource limits. $2,000 individual / $3,000 couple, unchanged since 1989: Social Security Administration, “Understanding SSI — Resources”SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act: S. 1234, 119th Congress; H.R. 2540, 119th CongressAuto-enrollment retirement accounts: S. 1526, Retirement Savings for Americans Act of 2025, 119th CongressFHA loans, 3.5 percent down: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Let FHA Loans Help You”Buck’s Ice Cream, Eckles Hall, Tiger Stripe (French vanilla with Dutch chocolate ribbon): University of Missouri CAFNR, Buck’s Ice CreamForemost Dairy Research Center: Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station, Foremost DairyEcclesiastes 9, New King James, paraphrased. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe