Steve’s Newsletter Volume 1: Issue 2
The Littlest Insurgent
In between larger projects, I am always working on silly short stories. My fourth collection will be out sometime in 2026. This short story was inspired by a quip in my parenting memoir, Parenting as a Contact Sport in which I compared babies at naptime to the Taliban. As a linguist, I listened to Taliban during the war in Afghanistan. They were smart, always adapting and overcoming our efforts, similar to my children at naptime. The first draft of The Littlest Insurgent was written from the perspective of a Taliban member dealing with his own child in between fighting. With that war over, I decided to rewrite it from the perspective of a Ukrainian father repelling the Russian invasion.
Dmitri concentrated under the light of a single yellow bulb, in a windowless corner of this two-bedroom flat. He always worked away from windows.
Old habits.
In Donbas he always feared the Russian sniper finding the tiniest bit of light shining from behind the blackout curtains. No such worry in Kiev of course, off the front lines for good. Now he only made improvised explosives attached to cheap drones sent from the West.
His wife Katya worked at the hospital, so Dmitri stayed home with their 2-year-old, Alexei. Alexei was a good baby, all things considered. Except at nap time. Alexei had never been much of a sleeper.
Dmitri was never a great choice for the front lines, but in those early days of the war, he had volunteered. After being badly wounded, he was sent home. His chemical engineering degree from Stuttgart was far more valuable supporting those on the front lines.
But Dmitri realized that working from home is not as pleasant as he thought it would be.
Sometimes he preferred fighting the Russians to wrestling his own baby down at naptime.
There was a time that Dmitri could rock Alexei to sleep, even during the early days of the war when the city was being pummeled by Russian airstrikes. Once, all three of them had rushed to a basement bomb shelter with Alexei in Dmitri’s arms. Alexei had not woken up for the sirens or the rattling impacts overhead.
One day, Dimitri’s gentle rocking did not work anymore.
Then Dmitri learned to rub Alexei’s back in a circular motion.
This worked for perhaps a week.
Suddenly the circular motion that had put him to sleep so easily only made him wiggle away and make funny faces.
Dmitri’s mother suggested warm milk. It worked for a few days, but then Alexei would giggle himself awake from passing gas.
Anything to stay awake.
Anything to avoid naps.
Constantly adapting and overcoming the dreaded sleep.
Today was especially bad.
Dmitri had tried everything, the rocking and the rubbing and the milk. Then he slid his fingers down Alexei’s forehead, forcing the eyelids to close involuntarily. Perhaps the fatigue of the closing eyelids would stick.
No luck.
He sang sad songs.
No luck.
He sang happy songs.
No luck.
He sang silly songs from the toys donated by a church in the US.
No luck.
He tried lying with Alexei, folding his arms around him so that he couldn’t move. Perhaps in struggling to escape he would simply pass out.
No luck.
Each time, Alexei would close his eyes, feigning sleep. Dmitri would slowly stand up, sneak to the door, and hear giggling once more.
Dmitri gave up, just lying on his back and staring at the ceiling for a while as Alexei wiggled.
After a few minutes, Dmitri noticed that the wiggling had stopped.
Alexei was asleep at last.
Dmitri carefully rolled from the bed, not daring to even breathe.
He crept to the door as if avoiding land mines.
He opened the door slowly, not daring to rattle the handle.
He closed it just as gently.
He breathed a sigh of relief, walking back to his makeshift lab beneath the single yellow bulb and examining the circuit board of the drone he was dismantling.
He heard a rustling and the tip tap of tiny toes.
He turned around to see Alexei standing before him with a smile.
Contemporary Observations on the Dangers of Market Efficiency
Contemporary Observations is whatever is on my mind in the weeks leading up to a newsletter. They will usually but not always be tied to my interests in international relations, socioeconomics, and law. Some will be more wonky than others.
TLDR: Having all your eggs in one basket inevitably leads to higher egg prices.
In 1911, Frederick Taylor, published The Principles of Scientific Management. Using his background in engineering, he pushed the idea that efficiency was the ultimate goal of management. Granted, Taylor’s views were not created in a vacuum. At least some of his theories were rooted in the eighteenth-century works of Adam Smith. Further, he would have learned from contemporaries such as Andrew Carnegie’s vertical integration of supply chains.
Still, Taylor remains a force in all modern MBA and management science. Through simplifying jobs, eliminating redundancies, automation, mergers, and a host of other tools, the science of efficiency seeks to produce the most product for the largest audience at the cheapest price.
In the modern era, this pursuit of efficiency has resulted in mega corporations with supply chains spread throughout the entire world. This means that the laptop I am using to write this costs only a few hundred dollars with a supply and labor chain spread across three continents and half-a-dozen countries.
Good for me and my bottom line I guess, but these lengthy supply chains result in the surreally absurd.
Take for example the image below.
“PEARS GROWN IN ARGENTINA PACKED IN THAILAND”
Why the triangular trade? In short, Argentina buys cars and computers from Asia, but doesn’t have much to send to Asia in return. Ships don’t want to return completely empty, so the supply chain finds whatever it can take back just to break even on transit. This means that unripe fruit can be shipped to Thailand, ripening in transit. There, cheap labor packages it for consumption in North America.
Hey, it’s efficient, and with enough high fructose corn syrup, the American consumer chokes down crate ripened green pears without knowing the difference.
So you might ask, if everyone gets their pears, what’s the problem?
The problem is that in eliminating redundancies through long and intricate supply chains, there are innumerable single points of failure. A single break in the supply chain such as an early Pacific typhoon or a late autumn drought in Argentina means no pears on store shelves. Few people think of these things BEFORE the store shelves are empty.
Take for example the 2022 baby formula shortage. After the deaths of two infants using Similac, the FDA discovered Cronobacter sakazakii contamination in Abbott’s plant in Sturgis, Michigan. Unfortunately, the Sturgis plant was responsible for roughly 40 percent of the nation’s baby formula supply resulting in shortages. The subsequent panic resulted many stores being completely out of baby formula for weeks at a time. A little less efficiency would have prevented this. If Abbott had four or five plants spread around the country, this would not have happened. If three companies were not responsible for 90-percent of formula production, this would not have happened.
The same thing is happening now with eggs prices.
The US produces roughly 100 billion eggs annually.[1] However, much of that supply is concentrated among a handful of mega producers such as Cal-Maine.[2] Cal-Maine’s flock of 44.51 million laying hens accounts for more than 10 percent of US egg supply. Yet much of Cal-Maine’s operations are concentrated in a few locations. For example, it only has three breeding locations and two hatching facilities.[3] When those go down due to bird flu, the supply chain is disrupted for months or years to come.
A supply chain that is less centralized means more redundancies. A single site failure doesn’t devastate the entire sector.
What would that look like?
Compare the centralized egg production capacity of the United States with that of the European Union. The largest egg producer in the EU is Avril Group with 10 million birds spread across 337 producers.[4] Cal-Maine has 44 million active laying birds in only 49 locations.[5] Though Europe has bird flu, the total number of culled birds has been significantly less in Europe compared to the US.[6]
European decentralization means redundancies that protect consumers from a single pandemic event. Have egg prices gone up in Europe? Of course. But they’ve gone up a lot less than in the United States.
Progressives have long advocated for decentralization in the sense of buying sustainably and locally. While I don’t disagree with them in principle, the average consumer just wants cheap prices. A supply chain with more redundancy and a little bit less efficiency can ultimately protect consumers while still providing an affordable and sustainable product. Perhaps the progressive message should be looking at market forces as much as they look at things like sustainability.
Bespoke Baby Stuff
I’ve been working periodically on second parenting memoir titled Daddy, Hold My Milk which picks up where I left off in Parenting as a Contact Sport. This was a recent writing from that project. If you enjoy this kind of parenting humor, consider getting a copy of Parenting as a Contact Sport here.
As a millennial, I have come to accept that my personal data is a commodity.
My first introduction to this was the day of my 18th birthday when a Gillette Mach 3 razor arrived in the mail. How did a major company know my birthday? When I took the ACT test in seventh grade, I had to put in all sorts of personal information that the ACT eventually sold to third parties. So, Gillette had my address and my birthday. In exchange for the gift, Gillette purchased brand loyalty and I’ve reimbursed them 100 times over for the trouble.
Later, when I reluctantly joined Facebook, I understood quite well that if a service is for free, then the product is me. (My personal data that is.)
So, if millennials have always been for sale, then as parents, we wittingly or unwittingly often subject ourselves to the same information harvesting and receive a deluge of advertisements for what I call Bespoke Baby Stuff. (Bespoke is a British English term for customized for a specific individual.)
Did you sign up for an Amazon baby registry or a new-mother Facebook page? Did you buy What to Expect When Expecting with your Barnes and Noble store card? Congratulations! That data was sold to third parties who prey on the emotional roller coaster that is life in the months before and after pregnancy.
Put your baby’s face on a mug!
Get your ultrasound images on a t-shirt!
Get a custom sheet set with your little pumpkin’s name on it!
Placenta art! (Yes, it’s a thing and the less said about it the better.)
When I sent the first draft of Bespoke Baby Stuff to my wife, this ad immediately showed up in her inbox.
The new-mom market is valued at well over $50 billion annually. (There is information on the smaller but still substantial new-dad market.)
Were my wife and I immune to Bespoke Baby Stuff? No, we were not.
We have a coffee mug with two of our boys. We have a reusable grocery bag with one kid’s early artwork. There is at least one set of plaster feet in a frame, and all three kids have custom pillow cases with their names on it.
Most of it is harmless. Heck, we even have come to expect and rely on it. On multiple occasions, Amazon knew we were going to run out of diapers before we did. (There is a sinister side to it that I will reserve talking about in a longer piece for a book.)
But sometimes, I just have to shake my head in bemusement.
The most ridiculous thing we purchased was an over-sized towel with our oldest son’s face on it. He was two at the time, quite photogenic, and a ham for the camera. It is a great picture, but does it work on a towel?
Excuse me if I feel weird about sitting on my son’s face on the beach or using his smile to dry off my balls after a shower. He can’t really use it either. If he took it to school, kids would invariably make fun of him. Do we give it as a white elephant gift to an unexpecting grandparent? Do I use it in the dog bed so the dog can have his butt on it? I really don’t know. It just sits in the closet like our little albatross of American consumerism and a lesson learned. One day, I’ll probably give up and use it for mulch.
Yet simultaneously, being exasperated by impractical Bespoke Baby Stuff, I also feel a little guilty.
Our eldest got a lot more Bespoke Baby Stuff than our second kid and in turn, the second kid got more than the third. With each passing addition, we wised up and bought less. This means simultaneously begrudging the fact that our oldest got a towel while still having to explain to the jealous #2 why we didn’t get one for him.
So it goes. The first child is the Guinea pig for every mistake you make and younger siblings pine for you to make the same mistake with them.
A Brief Biography
Steve lives a meandering life that leads him to interesting activities such as cycling across country, working security at the Super Bowl, or running for Congress against Matt Gaetz. He’s currently a professor in Constitutional Law for Purdue Global Law School, but, his goal is to eventually take up writing full time. Steve enjoys ultramarathons, reading, writing, and living in the French Alps with his wife, Lauren and three boys, Wolf, Bear, and Lynx.
After receiving a BS in Journalism from the University of Florida, he enlisted in the Air Force and served in Operation Enduring Freedom as an Airborne Cryptologic Linguist. While serving, he earned an AA in Pashto from Defense Language Institute and an MA in International Relations from American Military University. After a year in Afghanistan as a contractor linguist, Steve earned a Juris Doctor from the Florida State University College of Law. He later returned to FSU Law for an LLM in Environmental Law and Policy.
Steve has eight books on a wide variety of subjects. Check out his Amazon author pagehere. https://www.amazon.com/stores/Steven-Specht/author/B0CJKGT1N2
[1] US Egg Production 101: Everything You Need to Know, Eggs Unlimited, August 19, 2024 https://www.eggsunlimited.com/egg-production-101/
[2] The 60 largest US egg producers in 2024, Egg Industry January 2024 https://www.eggindustry-digital.com/eggindustry/library/item/january_2024/4160291/
[3] Cal-Maine Operating Locations, December 31, 2024 https://www.calmainefoods.com/locations
[4] Mark Clements, The Five Largest Poultry, Egg Producers in Europe, Wattgnet January 5, 2016 https://www.wattagnet.com/egg/egg-production/article/15516246/the-5-largest-poultry-egg-producers-in-europe-wattagnet
[5] Cal-Maine Operating Locations, December 31, 2024 https://www.calmainefoods.com/locations
[6] Sophie Kevany, Avian flu has led to the killing of 140m farmed birds since last October, The Guardian (December 9, 2022) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/09/avian-flu-has-led-to-the-killing-of-140m-farmed-birds-since-last-october. I haven’t found immediately up-to-date numbers for Europe, but this article from late 2022 provides support for my claim. In Europe, including Western Russia, 48 million poultry were killed or culled because of bird flu compared to 53 million in the US. Adjusted for population, that means European numbers are 61 percent lower than US numbers.