The library and the ELC theater (the Cliff) have a deal where we pay for the Swank license and we can sponsor films there. Last night was the first one: Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin. Like most biopics, it overly dramatized the course of a life into scenes, fiddled with a few facts, and added some colorful if improbable things. But it got a lot right, and I found it powerful and moving. I love that Bonhoeffer's experiences with the black churches of Harlem while he was at Union Theological changed his whole idea of what a church should be. After 2 hours and 12 minutes of Nazis on the big screen, I did not stay for the discussion I asked Doug Fox to lead. It would not have had such impact if we had watched it at home, with snacks and distractions. Good films are meant to be watched in the dark with strangers. One thing they moved from its actual time after the war to within the film's timeline was Martin Niemuller's famous speech: "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist..." The story was shockingly timely. Substitute immigrants for Jews and it's the same story.

The other way we partner with the ELC is that our AirBnB suites provide lodging for performers in exchange for tickets for our volunteers. Mr. Sun with the great Darrol Anger performed on Thursday to a good crowd. We were in the presence of master musicians making blue grass jazz.

Two trips to Portland this week let me test charging the EV on the road. At LLBean we plugged into fast Rivian chargers. In Augusta at the Comfort Inn, it was fast Tesla superchargers. That was a bit more complicated as payment must be through the Tesla app and you have to tell it where you are are what post you are using. Superchargers have NACS adaptors for non Tesla vehicles. I can also buy a NACS (North American Charging standard) adaptor for use at regular Tesla chargers. Highway travel will not be a problem, but away from the interstate, fast chargers are few and far between. We actually have enough range to go to Portland and back without charging, but I was humoring my range anxiety. The PlugShare app lets us find the chargers, check in that we were there, and leave comments.

Lewis spent about a third of the book on the history of money and how money works with central banks and exchanges. This was good because as a programmer I know about the encryption and distributed nodes part of cryptocurrency; I just didn't understand how it could be money. I like buying things with cash, simple, anonymous but not digital. Crypto is an attempt to make a digital version of cash where there is no intermediary, like a bank. Transactions are between individuals with no central control or transaction monitoring. I reviewed my knowledge of hashing and public-private key encryption, learned about block-chain ledger. The design of the BitCoin network of thousands of nodes all copying transactions into blocks and adding them onto a block-chain is mind numbingly complicated probably by necessity because everyone is verifying transactions and building blocks at the same time according to a strict protocol but with no outside-the-system verification. So the protocol and the software are controlled by a few people, but the participants are equal and anonymous. The value of BitCoins and other crypto currency is volatile, so that at present it is best thought of as a digital asset rather than money, but I can see how it might be the money of the future if they can overcome the excessive power required to mine it. I don't know how far away quantum computing is, but when that arrives, encryption may have to be rethought as a way to secure things. BitCoin Exchanges trade fiat currency for crypto and take a fee. That must be how Trump's crypto grift works.

If it's subversive, I'm in. Great Bill McKibben quote: "If you want to upend the balance of political and economic power on this earth—and we should, because grotesque inequality is deeply wrong—then there is no place better to start than by changing the way we make electrical power. Turning to the heavens for our energy instead of to hell is a profoundly subversive act."