EdCone.com

Some of my best friends are Duke fans. That’s just a reality of growing up in North Carolina. Lately I’ve been feeling bad for these friends.

Not because their coach retired, definitely not because of those two epic losses to UNC, but because in the last chapter of his career – the one-and-done years -- Mike Krzyzewski robbed them of some of college basketball fandom’s deepest pleasures.

Krzyzewski never stopped winning by the ton but in recent seasons his methods diminished the emotional connection with fans that once defined his program. The name on the front of the jersey still fired passion, but it was hard to keep up with the names on the back.

Recruiting two-semester stars meant Duke teams sometimes lacked the cohesion and grit of veteran squads, while fans were denied the slow-burn joy of watching hard work pay off and talent mature into greatness.

Many of these players shone during their months in Durham. They seemed like great kids. But deeper bonds could not form. No way Duke fans bled for Paolo Banchero the same way Carolina fans did for, say, Marcus Paige when their last runs fell short.

The experience was degraded for opposing fans too. An endless parade of reliable villains gave way to two or three brief encounters with guys who had one foot out the door.  

Duke fans know. They confess it in private and lament it pseudonymously at DBR. And they know the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. The o-n-d era has brought Duke (and Kentucky; we’re judged by the company we keep) no more titles than Carolina, fewer than Villanova.

Concern trolling and crocodile tears? Sure, I’ve been a Carolina fan since the days of Bob McAdoo. But it’s no less true. Nothing personal, either. To quote Reddit user SelfSniped “You can hate Coach K and like Mike Krzyzewski.”

Mike Krzyzewski is a family man. Loved by his players. He comforted Valvano and praised Bacot. Big ego, graceless loser? Venial sins. His last visit to the Dean Dome deserved more respect, but excess has been part of fandom since the Nika riots of 532 AD.

Yet “Coach K” the relentlessly promoted ESPN product, brought to you by AT&T and Amex, inspired a nation of haters. I’d guess he really is a molder of character but that’s a tough brand to maintain when the characters you mold move on so fast.

Athletes should be free to accept jobs before graduating. College basketball, much as I love it, is gross and corrupt. Krzyzewski didn’t make the rules, but he went all in on one that compromised his closing act. His hand-picked successor looks ready for more of the same.

The final years do not define a career that saw more wins than anyone else in the business and more titles than anyone not named John Wooden. They still kind of sucked.

Mary Jo Cagle, MD, CEO of Cone Health, breaks down the realities the Covid surge during Guilford County mask debate: "We are being overwhelmed by the sheer volume...To have 41 of our citizens die since Christmas...that doesn't seem very mild to me...41 of our neighbors."(starts 1:09)

“I grew up with a lie, a series of lies,” writes Ty Seidule in Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause.

The retired brigadier general and former head of the history department at West Point eventually stopped believing what he had been taught about the Civil War and its legacy. He wants you to stop believing it too.

Seidule writes with an expert’s assurance and a convert’s zeal. “The names we use matter,” he says, and he is here to name names.

The word “plantation,” for example, with its lingering romantic associations, he eschews in favor of the more direct “enslaved labor farms.”

There was no Union army: “I refuse to use that terminology any longer...The boys in blue fought in the U.S. Army for the United States of America…against a rebel force that would not accept the results of a democratic election.”

And the man he grew up idolizing? “My former hero, Robert E. Lee, committed treason to preserve slavery.”

Seidule knows many people will be impervious to any facts he musters as a soldier and historian, so he weaves the details and documentation through his own personal story: a guy pushing 60 who grew up aspiring to be a Virginia Gentleman in the image of Lee before realizing well into adulthood that the stories he believed were not true.

Those stories were current not only among Southern boys who grew up knowing the name of Lee’s horse (Traveler, duh) or members of the social class that hears the word “Episcopal” and thinks first of the boarding school in Alexandria where Seidule’s father taught.

The mythology that centers Lee the saint and superhero has deep roots across white America and retains the power to influence current events and attitudes toward everything from statues in the public square to voting rights and economic opportunity.

The legend of a noble and blameless Lee has been a kind of moral get-out-of-jail-free card for generations of Americans with soft spots for the Confederacy, a gateway drug in the Lost Cause spiral. That version of history was a purposeful creation.

Seidule traces the narrative to the period immediately after the Civil War, when the tenets of the Lost Cause were first elaborated in a speech by former Confederate general Jubal Early – “the Saint Peter of the Lee cult” – at Seidule’s future alma mater, Washington and Lee.

Within decades these stories were implanted in the national consciousness, even infiltrating the grounds of West Point. “The South lost the war but won the battle for the narrative.”

You know the Lost Cause litany: War for states’ rights, not slavery. Inevitable victory by the populous industrial North, despite unsurpassed generalship by Lee, who was burdened by an unshakeable duty to follow Virginia’s secession despite his personal distaste for slavery.

Seidule the military historian acknowledges Lee as an excellent fighting general, but one who was outmatched by the deliberately and unfairly maligned Ulysses Grant. He argues that the north had real opportunities to lose the war.

The rest of the mythos Seidule mauls with documentary evidence. Lee’s attitudes toward slavery, he shows, were standard planter class fare. Every US Army colonel from Virginia besides Lee (along with some of Lee’s own relatives) honored their oaths to the United States.

Seidule hammers home the reality that the Confederate States of America came into existence to perpetuate slavery, using the founding documents and founders’ words with ironclad efficiency.

Readers invested in the motivations of common soldiers will be disappointed; Seidule does not address that question. His focus is the politics of the CSA, not your ancestors or mine, and why Lee resigned his army commission to wage war on the country he swore to defend.

He does offer damning thumbnails of several ardently pro-slavery and often feckless Confederate generals for whom U.S. Army bases are named today, and his brisk sketches of battles and commanders are among my favorite parts of the book. 

I was somewhat less interested in the quick tour of myth-entrenching popular culture of Seidule’s youth -- Song of the South, Gone With the Wind – if only because it was highly familiar to me, a North Carolinian the same age as the author.

(Seidule and I even attended the same summer camp in the NC mountains, a place where becoming a Southern Gentleman was as much a part of the tradition as hiking Grandfather; a fellow camper was a namesake and direct descendant of Robert E. Lee.)

Seidule recounts his awakening to the brutal realities of segregation and racist violence in the towns where he grew up, the sometimes recent history willfully overlooked by a white Southern culture still fixated on an imaginary glorious past.

Repentant and angry at his chosen blindness, he cites writers including Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois Douglass not just as historical perspective but as evidence that the truth was in plain sight all along.

You, though, he lets off the hook. “It’s not as if the enduring myths of the Confederacy are perpetuated by evil people.” (Well, some evil people, he acknowledges.) But the rest of us he sees as manipulated, not malicious.

Many of the arguments presented by Seidule are familiar and established, but he ties together the Lee and Lost Cause mythology with the flow of American history to the present day in ways that are useful and sharp.

Will this slender book -- the facts Seidule marshals and the personal voice in which he deploys them -- convince everyone who believes in the myths of the Lost Cause that they have been misguided? Of course not, as some hostile online reader reviews make clear.

Still, Seidule is hopeful. If he got it, others can too. He describes a talk at W&L’s Lee Chapel that earned him a standing ovation, unthinkable in the very recent past. Win enough battles and someday you win the war. 

"There were quite a number of farmers in the County who were known as ‘Pennsylvania Dutch.’ Some of them still spoke German and it was natural that they should be attracted to my Father. Among them was the Fulmer family who lived on a farm on the Watauga River about three miles from our farm.”

More from the history of my great-great-grandfather's family in Tennessee.

Herman and Sofie and Jacob and Helen spoke German because they were born in Bavaria – Helen just 15 miles from her future husband, Jacob about 40 miles in the opposite direction. Bonds of kinship and proximity established in the Old Country have survived and supported waves of migration since ancient times, and the Jews of the antebellum South were no exception to this rule.

Their families were small-town folk. About 30 generations earlier some of Helen’s ancestors had moved from Lucca, in Tuscany (Rome’s Jewish community pre-dated the birth of Christ; the family name, Kalonymos, suggests an interlude in Greece) to the Rhine valley, where as noted scholars they were to my knowledge* the only branch of the extended family tree to achieve any particular worldly accomplishment (beyond surviving plagues and Crusades and wars and expulsions and massacres and the general difficulty of pre-modern life).

The youngest of 12 children, Herman left home in 1846, at age 17, to join his sister Elise in Richmond; Sofie and Jacob were already there, against the wishes of his father. Herman Americanized the family name from Kahn to Cone and spent a few years knocking around Virginia, trying to start a career. By the time he and Jacob rolled into Jonesborough they had opened and closed a boarding house in Lunenburg County and then failed again in Richmond, presumably learning something about business along the way.

The Fulmers were great friends to their new neighbors. Like the German settlers of Guilford and Alamance counties (you can find gravestones inscribed in German at the old Friedens Church cemetery) they had come down the Shenandoah wagon road from Pennsylvania. John Fulmer, the father, had moved to Tennessee at age 12, around 1805, and remembered a frontier life we can hardly imagine. He fought in the Creek War in Alabama and could point out the spot where the last buffalo was killed near Jonesboro.

Sam Adler: "When he was a young man he would build a flat boat in the Winter and when the Spring freshets came he loaded the boat with the product of his farm, such as Bacon, Flour, Buckwheat, Cabbage, Potatoes, etc. and float down the Watauga to the Holston and then to Ross' Landing as he called the present city of Chattanooga. Sometimes he would have to take his boat as far as the Mussell (sic) Shoals where he could always sell the boat. At this time the Tennessee River was used to market the product of East Tennessee, Boats could be taken through the Shoals, but never brought back, He made many trips and with one exception he would walk back to his farm. My brother Morris asked him why he undertook such hardships and he replied that it was the only way he could earn money to pay his taxes.”

*I’m trying to be as precise as possible, but even the basics can get fuzzy. Sofie’s name is sometimes spelled Sophie, Jacob’s with a K, Helen was referred to in some records as Helena or Ellen. A genealogy website puts the Kahn family in Altenstadt, Hesse instead of Altenstadt, Neu-Ulm, although religious and school records make it clear that the family was established in the latter, in the Iller valley (Herman’s report card says his “mental gifts” were judged “medium” but his attendance was “industrious” and he was a good athlete, an excellent reader, and rated high for Generally Useful Knowledge and Moral Conduct). Where possible I have verified facts and recollections, and where things are hazy I will try to point that out. Corrections are welcome.

“In 1853 they traveled by train to Roanoke, Va., then called Big Lick; this was the terminus of the railroad….They left Big Lick in a 'Carry All,' a covered vehicle on springs and, without any definite location in view, they drove over 200 miles which brought them to Jonesborough, Tenn., where they located.”

“They” is my great-great-grandfather, Herman, and his sister Sofie and brother-in-law Jacob and their infant daughter, Clara. This is the beginning of a recollection written years later by my great-grandfather’s first cousin, Sam Adler.

I like that they had no particular destination in mind. Jonesborough made sense, it was a hotspot on the long road west from Winston and Salem. Maybe the hills of East Tennessee reminded them of their childhood home in Bavaria.

A lot happens in a few pages. They start a business and it prospers. Herman marries Helen Guggenheimer of Rockbridge County, Virginia (that’s them in the photo) and they have their first eight kids, including my great-grandfather. A woman from Indiana shows up at the Adler’s farm, adjacent to Herman and Helen’s along the Watauga River, looking for her husband, a missing Union soldier. Partisan violence wracks the town when the war is over. The kids swim in a chalybeate spring and have kid adventures.

If this lockdown lasts maybe I should write a book about it.

“This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.”

Maybe the best-known verse from Psalm 118, these words are often taken out of context to mean, essentially, “Rise and shine, let’s appreciate this good moment!”

I use it that way all the time, to my children and colleagues, because I am annoyingly cheerful in the morning and it rolls off the tongue and, too, that meaning is not wholly inaccurate.

But there’s a lot more to it. The psalmist has been through some serious shit to get to this day. The moment of joy comes after a lot of pain and loss.

This country is about to see a spike in deaths from Covid-19. It is going to be grim, and then get worse. “They compassed me about like bees,” remembers the psalmist. “Thou hast thrust sore at me that I might fall.”

Eventually this pandemic will be, like the enemies in the psalm, “quenched as the fire of thorns.”

Along the way we need to disdain despair and find joy where we can (in the words of another poet, “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive”). We need to keep working together. We will get to that better day.

Notes:

* This psalm is disturbingly violent, as is much of the Tanakh. A lot of nations get destroyed in the name of the Lord. I randomly read Joshua not long ago and it was like the transcript from a war-crimes trial.

* Michael Munger and I were on WUNC’s State of Things when I dropped a bible verse into the conversation. He said, “Ed Cone, quoting scripture!” Me: My people did write it. Munger: “Well, first draft.” Tooshay, Munger.

* I remember sharing a contextually appropriate moment around the famous verse with Marjorie E. Gooding on the day we planted a tree for Calvin at Haverford.

* What a great poem this is! “All nations compassed me about…They compassed me about; yea, they compassed me about.”

* There’s a fair amount of throat-clearing in the psalms and I sometimes skip to the action so it took me a while to notice that this one is addressed to the house of Aaron, of which I am allegedly a descendant, so just passing it along.

* This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.

We talked robots, AI, and the world's deep unpreparedness for large-scale job displacement on the latest edition of The Future Will Not Be Podcast. 

Also: Universal Basic Income, human nature, and speculation about economic activity in the Star Trek legendarium.

This report from Oxford Economics (I was an editor) shows the impact of robots on manufacturing jobs will hit some regions harder than others. North Carolina is on the danger list, and based on the criteria (lower-wage/lower-skill jobs are most vulnerable) I'd guess the Triad is in particular danger. 

When I spoke last year to MIT professor Eric Brynjolfsson, he called the US educational system's preparation for changes wrought by smart machines "a shameful public-policy failure." We're currently researching one aspect of the education story, more on that soon. 

Some key points from the new report: 

• The research covers only physical robots, so all the chatbots, RPA, and other disembodied AI out there and to come are not included, which is to say it's even worse than it appears.
• The jobs people tend to get when they're chased from manufacturing positions are in construction, transport, and logistics -- three areas vulnerable to the next wave of manufacturing.

This Brookings Institution report ranks Greensboro-High Point as the second-most-vulnerable metro region to job loss due to AI and robotics. Winston-Salem is number six. 

This WSJ article takes a closer look at how those losses might occur in a warehouse/distribution economy. 

Brookings makes a decent effort to discuss solutions, but it's hard to see where the political will to implement them is going to come from.

Last year I discussed this country's readiness for the changes that already are well underway with MIT's Eric Brynjolfsson. He told me, "We should be doing a better job of preparing ourselves. Instead, we’re impoverishing ourselves. It’s a shameful public-policy failure." 

North Carolina and its local governments need to make this a top priority.

Tick, tick, tick... 

I asked Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and an expert on digital technology, about our preparedness for what’s about to happen. He responded in pungently non-technical terms. “We should be doing a better job of preparing ourselves. Instead, we’re impoverishing ourselves. It’s a shameful public-policy failure.”

 

My day job has me thinking about the impact of AI on jobs, and our lack of preparation for it, so I wrote a newspaper column on the topic. You can read the whole thing after the jump.

The very best people will be advising our President (below, a repost from the not-distant-enough past):

Larry Kudlow, July 17, 2007:

Simply put, this is the greatest global stock market boom in history.

What we are witnessing here, in virtually every corner of the globe, is the success and the spread of unbridled free market capitalism...free trade, the free flow of capital, and the robust free exchange of information.

...And it's not over yet.

Larry Kudlow, August 15, 2007: "I want [the Fed] to buy subprime mortgages."

So much for his faith in unbridled free markets.

"The greatest global stock market boom...not over yet." (click chart to enlarge)

Well, at least we can still count on that "robust free exchange of information"...right?

Nouriel Roubini: "This increased financial uncertainty is in part due to the increased opacity and lack of transparency in financial markets."

Jim Boeheim stopped yelling at kids to get off his lawn long enough to make a half-assed peace offering to Greensboro on WSJS. But even then the Syracuse coach repeated a couple of his dumber ideas about why the ACC tournament, in which he is now 0-for-3, should abandon its traditional home court: “It’s about what is the best place in terms of getting exposure and getting near recruits, and those are the major cities.”

Exposure? Maybe back when players wore canvas shoes, but in the era of ESPN and the internet, no.

And recruits and their parents all across this big country have the iPhones and the televisions too, so, also, no. (Even in the days when print was king and the tournament never left North Carolina, great players from New York somehow found out about the league.)

But what about the original claim by Boeheim, who has never won an ACC tournament game, that there isn’t much talent around Greensboro in the first place?

I put together an all-time starting five from the Triad: Chris Paul, Lou Hudson, Bob McAdoo, Danny Manning, and Curly Neal. (Shout out to my favorite current Tar Heel, Theo Pinson, and my friend Wayne Robinson). 

Let the list cover the state of North Carolina and it quickly gets very long and very deep (including a strong candidate for college GOAT, David Thompson, and overall GOAT Michael Jordan).

Anyway, Sydney and I went to the semis last night in Brooklyn. It was exciting to emerge from the subway and see that cool new arena, and the Barclays Center was a nice place to watch a ballgame (at least until the Tar Heels hairballed up that fat lead). I didn’t even mind taking out a mortgage to pay for our hot dogs and beers, but the overall vibe had no more to do with ACC tradition than the pre-expansion players from Louisville and Miami who were inducted at halftime as league legends. It felt sterile and corporate and deracinated.  

I am not at all unbiased. As a GSO native and life-long ACC basketball fan, I believe deeply that the tourney should be held in our coliseum with great regularity. North Carolina is the geographic center of the conference, and has more schools in the league than any other state. Greensboro is a great host, and tradition matters, and, too, I have won exactly as many ACC tourney games as Jim Boeheim.

I left a weekend showing of Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World,Werner Herzog’s meditation on the internet era, thinking about this post and podcast by Dave Winer.

Herzog is a non-techie who worries about what the net is doing to people. Dave is a techie who worries about what people are doing to the net. They were kind of made for each other.

Questioning the content of Lo and Behold is like critiquing the plot of someone else’s dream, and Herzog shares a spellbinding vision. But the documentary’s ten chapters are light on the actual user experiences that give the net its addictive pull—things like the power of social media and the democratization of creative expression. These are subjects to which Winer, an inventor of blogging, brings a doomy spin that would fit in well with the rest of the movie.

The podcast explains Dave’s concern for the fate of the World Wide Web. He’s afraid that this beautiful commons is being strangled by Facebook, which does not allow people to post work produced outside its walled garden directly onto its pages, complete with embedded links, simple text styling (e.g., bold and italic type), titles, and MP3 enclosures. Dave’s a realist who knows Facebook isn’t going away any time soon. He just wants to co-exist. “It’s the place where people go to read stuff,” he says in the podcast, “So why can’t I get my blog posts over there in full fidelity?”

The stakes are high. “We’re going to watch the web die a slow death at the hands of a juggernaut,” he says, sounding very much like a character in a Herzog documentary. The use of hyperlinks, which he calls “the most basic innovation of the web” is in peril. “Without Facebook supporting linking, it’s basically dying.”

It doesn’t have to be this way, he says. A technical fix is simple, and the business opportunities for Facebook are enormous if it can capture the creativity of people who prefer to work on the open web. That last idea is already a recurrent theme in Lo and Behold—Herzog is fascinated by the net’s ability to harness brainpower far beyond institutional borders, from online students outperforming Stanford undergrads to gamers helping crack the codes of molecular science.

As is, the movie gives us plenty to think about: How the guys who built the internet seem like characters from The Right Stuff by way of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; Chuck McGill syndrome; the amount of very interesting footage of Elon Musk that must have ended up on the cutting-room floor. Just watching Leonard Kleinrock mark up a chalk board— Herzog’s sly reminder that the technology he portrays as essentially magic is really math and engineering – was worth the price of entry.

But it would have been better with more about the ways people actually use the net for creative endeavors, and Dave Winer’s story would fit right in. Maybe it will make the director’s cut.

[cross-posted at the Oxford Economics Thought Leadership blog]

When I joined the Cone Health board five years ago, the goal of being ranked in the top 10% of all US hospitals seemed ambitious.

These days it just seems normal. Not saying I had much to do with it, just that I've had a front-row seat and it's been really great to watch.

Two recent ratings put our local healthcare system near the top nationally. One comes from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the other from US News & World Report. 

It's wise to approach lists and ratings with caution. Many are nothing more than clickbait. And hospitals may be especially difficult to evaluate. 

But the CMS and US News ratings, while not without their critics, are serious and well-regarded efforts. And scoring high on both of them at the same time is something of a reality check. Cone CEO Terry Akin and his team really are doing great things in our community.

Greensboro likes to talk about its problems, and we've got our share, but there is good news too about our next economy. Healthcare is a big part of that story, and years of planning and effort at our homegrown health system are paying off.

Hot-button social issues weren’t on the agenda when I spoke recently at an economic development luncheon in Hamilton County, Indiana.

Except, they kind of were.

The topic was our Workforce 2020 study and its implications for the cluster of fast-growing cities just north of Indianapolis. One key point, reinforced by our cities research team, was the importance of diversity in the workforce and in communities. 

And there’s the rub. Diversity is plenty political these days--especially in Indiana, where last year businesses helped force the legislature to amend a law unfriendly to LGBT citizens, and in my home state of North Carolina, where the same tensions are playing out now in a storm of negative national press, canceled events, and protests by corporations and individuals.

But I was invited to (very Republican) Hamilton County to talk about extending the momentum that’s made it the envy of the Midwest, and diversity had to be part of that conversation. My approach was a practical one, essentially a riff on the Civil Rights Era meme about business-friendly Atlanta being “a city too busy to hate.” Maybe I sermonized a little, not on political questions (is the long alliance between social conservatives and big business in the US fraying?) or my own views on LGBT rights (a moral imperative), but as a guy from one basketball-loving flyover state to an audience from another one, trying to map some common ground.

Which comes down to this: Among the distinctive capabilities of healthy urban economies, says our cities team, are reputation and “social, legal and cultural norms that promote a combination of trust and stability on the one hand and innovation and risk-taking on the other.” It’s hard to see how Indiana and North Carolina are helping their cities on those fronts. Meanwhile, businesses have work to do: Our survey found that only one-third of global executives think they are prepared to lead a diverse workforce. 

The mayor of one reliably conservative city gave me a nod from the crowd. People seemed eager to talk about the issues, although maybe those who disagreed were politely ignoring me. At best it was a baby step down a long path, but it felt like we were moving in the right direction.

cross-posted from the DJB

 

Today I’m signing a petition to add Eric Fink to the NC Senate district 26 ballot.

Then I'm going to send him some money.

You should do one or both of those things too if you want change in Raleigh on issues like jobs, education, and the environment; oppose the costly and immoral HB2; and/or think even the most powerful politician in North Carolina should not run unopposed.

Fink needs about 5,000 signatures by early June to challenge incumbent Phil Berger. He figures a credible campaign will cost at least $80,000, and he could really use $15,000 of that now.

I’ve seen a lot of quixotic campaigns over the years but this one seems different from the average declare-and-disappear version. Fink, an Elon Law professor, is smart, tough, and committed. He’s got a legit campaign manager (Lauren Jeffries, who helped put Nancy Hoffmann on GSO city council) and the backlash over HB2 should help his fundraising and visibility. “I don’t believe in protest campaigns,” he told me. "I'm running to win."

He knows that's a very long shot for a democratic socialist in district hand-drawn to elect Republicans. But he’s also playing the long game in a way NC Democrats, who failed to mount even token opposition to Berger, need to emulate. “I want to get people mobilized and organized so that if I don’t win, someone else won’t be starting from a dead stop in two years or two years after that.”

Watching the former labor lawyer debate Berger would be a lot of fun. So would making Berger spend a little time and money back in the district, which includes all of economically-distressed Rockingham County and an oddly-shaped, GOP-flavored chunk of Guilford.  

A strong opponent of HB2 -- the disastrous legislation that limits anti-discrimination protections and restricts local wage rules, all wrapped in fear-mongering over who pees where – Fink says he hears plenty of opposition to the hastily-passed law. “A lot of people see HB2 for what it is, a smokescreen for an attack on local government and people’s right to sue.”  But his core issues are “restoring education to what it was, and creating the kind of jobs that pay real living wages and sustain a community. When I ask people what they care about they say education and jobs, jobs and education.” He also wants to talk about environmental issues like the threat to clean water of coal ash and fracking.

To succeed he'll need some unlikely allies. “I’m reaching out to more moderate Republicans and saying, ‘There may be a thousand things we don’t agree on, but we agree that this legislature is taking our district and this state in the wrong direction.'”

Fink has lived in Greensboro for nine years, signing on at Elon after a career in private practice in Philadelphia and a fellowship at Stanford Law. He’s already been campaigning in RockCo and sounds excited to spend more time on the trail. I hope you will help him stay on it.

There was a big crowd on Thompson Street yesterday afternoon, itching to get into Washington Square Park for the Bernie Sanders rally.

Every so often we would advance a few steps northward. Then we would stand around for a while longer. The sidewalk was packed with later arrivals headed south toward the back of our line.

Nobody seemed to know exactly what the drill was and there was concern that the park might not hold us all, but this was one of the kinder and happier crowds I've been in. It was more like waiting for a Dead concert than waiting for the 2 train. 

You could hear music coming from a sound system in the park. Disco Inferno ftw. One guy with signs claiming that Jesus Loves Guns and Jesus Loves Trump said Sanders was the antichrist. Was he for real? People were not sure but he made no dent in the positive vibe. Another guy wore a onesie with big photos of Sanders' face all over it.

After more than an hour we made it to 4th Street, where two more huge lines converged and the cops shepherded us into another line that went most of the way to Macdougal before looping back toward the single open entrance to the park near Thompson.

The area around the fountain was packed, so we stood on a bench that gave us a clear view of the stage set up in front of the arch. People kept on coming.

The recorded music gave way to the first speaker. A whiff of good weed blew by. A doctor, Paul Song, railed against "corporate Democratic whores." The crowd responded to his anger without seeming to get angry themselves. 

A musical interlude with Vampire Weekend. The sunlight waned and it was not quite warm enough.Tim Robbins (not bad).Tom Duane (great). A union guy shouted "fuck Verizon." Nina Turner said her grandmother told her you need three bones -- wishbone, jawbone, backbone. Rosario Dawson (OK). Finally, Spike Lee, mercifully brief but an effective hype man for Sanders.

The candidate spoke. He named names (Walton, Koch) and covered a lot more ground than the flaccid Wall Street-oriented NYT article reported, but really at this point in the campaign his speech was less interesting to me than the young, passionate crowd that turned out for it. We could have never made it off Thompson Street and gotten a lot from the shared experience. 

Even the Times noticed: "Sanders supporters at the rally said they thought the intensity of support for the senator could lead to an upset victory on Tuesday, similar to his win in Michigan last month." Not sure I'd take that bet, but that's why they open the polls. 

Apparently this is going to take a little more than Facebook outrage, people.

We are this and have been for a while.

Raleigh routinely big-foots local governments. Usually it's at the command of big business. Now this. 

Not saying activism on the internet is useless, but if it's all you're doing, it is.

#SorryYeahWeKindOfAre

At the DJB, an attempt to debunk some Millennial myths. 

Guest-starring Elijah, with links to GSO's own Jonathan Campbell and Church World Service refugee program, and a shout-out to Steph Curry. 

In some real ways the concept of "Millennials" is BS in the first place, but that doesn't keep people from posting all manner of foolishness about KIDS TODAY. 

Some key points: 

• This whole generational fingerprinting meme is suspect. 
• People change over time.
• They weren't all alike in the first place
• Walls exist only where we build them.
• Millennials live in the world their elders made.

You can read the details here.

"Optimistic that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word." Obama SOTU ftw

Really, Mike Barber?

Your response to a detailed article about racial disparities in traffic stops, searches, and arrests for minor infractions is to question the numbers and bitch about the NYT running the story? 

Your own police chief accepts the data, and the fact the article ran in the Times first is an indictment of our hollowed-out local daily, not the story itself. 

Also, the article is clearly about a national phenomenon, not just a random shot at GSO. 

Your remarks are an embarrassment to this city. 

As I said the other day, GSO should move now to suspend arrests for possession of small amounts of marijuana and for r/o/d an officer.

Good to know Nancy Vaughan is talking about GPD's relationship with the citizens it is meant to protect.

Now Greensboro should suspend arrests for small amounts of weed and r/o/d an officer, and make sure Chief Scott is serious about addressing the imbalance in traffic stops. 

Here in North Carolina’s third-largest city, officers pulled over African-American drivers for traffic violations at a rate far out of proportion with their share of the local driving population. They used their discretion to search black drivers or their cars more than twice as often as white motorists — even though they found drugs and weapons significantly more often when the driver was white.

Officers were more likely to stop black drivers for no discernible reason. And they were more likely to use force if the driver was black, even when they did not encounter physical resistance.

Notes:

• History in a nutshell: "This was the first Southern city to pledge to integrate its schools after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, although it was among the last to actually do so."
• Charlotte/Meck's ratio of contraband found to searches of black drivers is ugly even compared to our own. 
• Always good to see the local daily NYT provide this kind of in-depth reporting on an important issue.

 How do you mourn something when the world doesn’t acknowledge your loss?

Thanks to the good folks at Triad City Beat for allowing me to contribute this column about Warnersville -- what really happened to Greensboro's oldest African-American neighborhood, how the city ignored its legacy, and why it all still matters.

You want to find a root cause for the distrust in Greensboro politics, you could start with the gutting of the old commercial district along Ashe Street, Warnersville’s main drag. You want some subtext for the uproar several years ago over the sale of the old JC Price School, understand that the building where generations learned to read and write was one of the few physical legacies of the community left standing.

You can see a short version of the documentary here; I hope the full 12-minute film is online soon.

It's not hard to imagine ways that actual redevelopment might have worked. The short-term costs would have been higher, but the long-term payoffs much greater. 

Things missing from this N&R article about a class-action suit against major airlines for (allegedly) fixing prices: 

• Data on prices to and from GSO
• Comparison of GSO prices with RDU and CLT
• Economic impact on this region of expensive air service
• Interviews with people who opt to fly from other airports because of the price differential

Weird extraneous detail: The local litigant is a "member of the Cone family." It's true -- we had dinner together last night! -- but hard to see the relevance to the real story. 

A short video about the Warnersville community and the impact of urban "renewal" on this historic Greensboro neighborhood; narrated by James Griffin, created by Lisa Scheer, Harvey Robinson, and Carolyn de Berry, edited by Peter Cramer.

A ton of time and effort has gone into getting the Warnersville story the attention it deserves, but it is paying off.

The focus in the future is on keeping you well rather than just treating you when you are sick. Cone Health has been an early leader in this transformation and we believe the communities we serve are reaping the benefits. If the trend holds, this is a story of national consequence.

Terry Akin is careful to avoid overstating the case based on limited evidence to date, but he makes it clear that early returns from the Triad HealthCare Network ACO are encouraging in terms of the most important metrics -- patient outcomes and community health -- as well as the non-trivial matters of cost and efficiency. 

Accountable Care Organizations may draw political fire because of their association with Obamacare, but as a general approach they are no more controversial than the proposition that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That's why stuff like readmission rates and chronic-care management matters so much. If this can be done at scale and sustained over time, it will be a very big deal. 

Here's the N&R article by Taft Wireback cited in the op-ed.

(Disclosure: I consulted with Terry and his team on this op-ed in my role as a CH trustee.)

I wrote a lot of newspaper columns over the years. Some have aged better than others.

Kind of proud to have published this one in my hometown newspaper way back in 2003: "People who don't approve of gay marriages shouldn't have them." 

Before I dislocate a shoulder patting myself on the back, let me be clear that any ahead-of-the-curveness on my part was rooted in the courage of friends, family members, and many others who lived their lives fully and openly at a time when it was much harder to do so.

They led and they inspired. I just wrote it down.

All these years later, what a happy moment for this country. 

If you were to argue that transience is Greensboro’s most enduring trait I would concede that you had a defensible position. Moving on is as much an American habit as overuse of the past tense is a Southern one, and we live them both. The general from whom we borrowed our name was just passing through on a business trip and favorite son O. Henry, like other celebrated natives in his wake, got out as soon as he could. Our best-known nickname, the Gate City, advertised a rail junction as the “gateway to the South”; thanks for coming, bye-bye. The same value proposition lay behind the huge Overseas Replacement Depot during World War II and the construction of the interstates and an air-freight hub. We brag about our GPS coordinates in terms of proximity to the mountains and the beach, and even the geological designation of piedmont is defined by the region next door. 

From an essay I contributed to the book 27 Views of Greensboro: The Gate City in Prose & Poetry. The release party is at 4 p.m. this Saturday, April 18 at Scuppernong Books on S. Elm St. There will be readings! You should go. 

Was the 1979 Klan/Nazi-CWP shootout a massacre?

Sure it was, by some formal and vernacular definitions. 

I have used the word "massacre" to describe the event, and although I didn't remember doing so I've been informed by Google that I called it "the Greensboro Massacre" on at least one occasion (before the T&R thing got going, but after I'd changed my own POV on the topic). 

But Allen Johnson is right about "the power of words to shape how we view an event," and that has to influence the choice of words on the proposed historical marker.

"Massacre" in this context is more than a vocabulary word. It's a political term that tends to mean "the killing of a lot of good guys by bad guys who suffer far fewer losses." (And, yes, it can be a massacre even if the alleged good guys are armed). 

So the problem here is that a lot of people are reluctant to implicitly define the CWP as good guys, even though most agree that the other side was bad. 

I'd be OK with "The Greensboro Massacre" if the text that followed was not going to be some Tweet-length summary that couldn't possibly capture the facts about the day and all the players (including the role of law enforcement, which gets left out of the story way too often). 

So I'd go with "The Greensboro Shootout."

Elsewhere, Lex makes a good point about Mike Barber "ridiculing and diminishing the tragedies in the lives of others." I doubt that was Barber's intent, but it plays that way, so maybe he can broaden his thinking a bit. 

Flashback to Mr. Sun saying much the same thing many years ago: 

You look out the window and in front of you a chaotic scene of attack, retreat, gunfire, and death plays out in your neighborhood. You scream for your daughter to get down and take cover. Later, you comfort her but the color of the day, week, and who knows how much more has darkened. She's seen things you never wanted her to see. You feel a sense of failure and guilt over not being able to protect her. Something valuable was lost.

I know a lot of you find this whole slow and sometimes retrograde journey dispiriting. I don't. There has been genuine movement toward wider understanding and even reconciliation over the years. The long arc is bending in the right direction, and the marker -- should it ever go up -- is part of that process.

This press release news article about ArtsGreensboro comes complete with info on how to support the group's fundraising campaign, but doesn't mention the N&R's pay-for-play deal with AG, as promised for bought stories.  

So are we to assume that this particular gusher is just straight news? 

It doesn't really matter, since you can't read it without wondering how the business relationship influences coverage, and concluding that there's really no difference at this point between one type of story and the other.

Will other non-profits get this kind of coverage when they launch campaigns?

FWIW, I couldn't be happier about all the good news reported in the piece.

I just wish I felt better about the publishing process.

"There's a perception of market failure."

Rarer than unicorns, I know, but still. 

NYT looks at Wilson's muni broadband and the possibility that the FCC might override the great state of Time-Warner Cable's law against public networks. 

Meanwhile, GSO should be supporting the Cityfi proposal. 

When Josh Marshall refers to "the quality of the race [Hagan] ran," what exactly does he mean?

The endless negative ads that left even supporters weary?

The failure to veer from the DC playbook and take a stand on something other than "Kochs bad, er, War on Women!"?

The inability to tap into the very real dismay with Raleigh that has motivated many North Carolinians for two years?

Because those are the qualities I saw in the race she ran.

It's possible that Kay had almost no shot last night, given the way things broke across the country. But she damn sure wasn't winning with that campaign. 

I read TPM for outside-the-bubble thinking. This analysis I could get from network teevee.

Slide I saw at a conference today: "Broadband leads GDP growth and job creation."

Happy to see new energy behind the long and so-far fruitless effort to convince GSO's econ dev and political leadership to get on board with this now-obvious concept. 

If/when the Supreme Court decision trickles down to NC I'm going to ask Lisa to gay marry me. We've had a nice 25-year run under the old rules, but you gotta keep things fresh.

Also:

Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down...

---Orson Scott Card, 2008.

Looking forward to the follow-up column, presumably to be filed from a bunker in the hills.

Seriously, I would have much preferred to see North Carolina vote in favor of this basic recognition of human and civil rights. A1 was not our best moment.

At least Greensboro got it right. 

A large and positive decision at this weekend's Cone Health leadership retreat to move ahead with a new Women's Hospital on the MoCo campus, and to remake our behavioral health program as well. Details here.

This is an opportunity to take the much-loved program at the current WH and create something even better, making GSO a center for women's health.

Big investment, big commitment by CH. Happy to be a part of it. 

Kay Hagan should hold a press conference outside of MoCoHo and demand to know what Thom Tillis means when he talks about repealing Obamacare. 

Does he want to go back to screening out people with pre-existing conditions?

Kick young adults off family policies?

Uninsure the millions who have gained coverage?

Undo the success of the ACO program, which is making a big difference here in GSO?

If not, what's his plan for keeping the stuff people like, and paying for it?

Not that Tillis talks much about ACA anymore. After months of positive news, he can't afford to be pinned down on what his alleged repeal plan would really mean. You have to dig at his campaign site for Obamacare bashing.

But Kay's site also avoids the issue. She's running a three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust campaign and is afraid that the law's lingering stigma will hurt her.

Which it will, if she and/or Democratic supporters don't get the message out.  

Triad HealthCare Network, the Accountable Care Organization created by Cone Health and local physicians, is getting great results.

According to numbers released yesterday by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, THN is a top ten performer nationally in terms of money saved and shared savings returned.

This is a big deal.

ACOs are a key part of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. They are intended to save money and improve care by coordinating efforts between different parts of the healthcare system. For example, instead of waiting for a diabetes-related problem to send someone to the emergency room, doctors and nurses use monitoring and outpatient services to keep the person healthier on an ongoing basis. This kind of medicine ends up being cheaper and more effective. 

After certain thresholds are met, the savings are split between Medicare and the ACO.

THN met its marks for quality, and saved $21.51 million, of which it gets back $10.54 million. This is good for patients, for our local health system, and for the Medicare budget. 

It's not easy work, and most ACOs did not qualify for money back in the latest period. It could take years for this to really pay off at the national level, at least in comparison with total Medicare spending. Credit THN and Cone leadership for recognizing the value of this program early, and executing well. 

(Standard disclosure: I'm a CH trustee.)

If you had asked me to name the wealthiest town in North Carolina, I would not have guessed that the correct answer (according to this) is Marvin. 

More here and here. Looks like a lot of well-off people moved in pretty recently. 

They say this like it's a good thing: "Residents benefit from low Union County taxes while still enjoying all the conveniences of prime shopping, dining & entertainment at Blakeney, Stonecrest & Ballantyne Village."

So it's in NC, but not really of NC.