Dying in foreign wars or not

On the one hand, it is right that lower income kids have disproportionately borne the brunt of death and and injury in foreign wars and that should be acknowledged and honored. I at times think that, just as Israel's Supreme Court has ruled that the ultra-orthodox Haredim should no longer be allowed not to be conscripted, that it might make sense for America's jeunesse doree to be subject to some sort of mandatory national service, up to and including military service, to bridge the gulf between the privileged and the less so.

On the other hand, it is the network of international trade, diplomacy and statecraft driven by the so-called "global elite" which have managed down the incidence of great power conflict since 1945 but really since 1989 and which have decreased the rates at which anyone has died at all in foreign wars.* This should be recognized, acknowledged and honored as well. 

And also the progress in medicine and battlefield medicine in particular, which have been made possible by the growth of science, medical schools, nursing schools, and of course dedicated and selfless medical personnel who serve in the military. I think it is safe to say that 95% of this is funded by taxpayer dollars (leaving out something for privately-funded pharma advances).

The fact is, that though in the recent decades of "forever wars" military service has been the domain of lower-income and less-educated Americans, very few people have died in these wars. 

(Source: Statista)

Yes there has been a lot of trauma too and a lot of mental health issues and later deaths by opioids coming out of the wars, but overall the years of global order following the collapse of the Soviet Union captained by the dreaded "global elite" and subtended by international organizations aiming at rules-based governance have been relatively safe ones in which to live. So I'm not sure how much if anything needs to change.

The more recent disintegration of any pretense of abiding by a rules- and norms-based order in favor of an entirely "might makes right" world does neither look good nor bodes well. 

* I highly recommend Stephen Pinker's 2017 TED Talk that maps progress on the declining probability of men dying at the hands of other men in war or crime.

Open windows

In the spring we are buffeted by pollen so it's hard to leave our windows open very much, so fall is the true time for living with windows open. It was my dad who inveighed about the wickedness of a world in which office and hotel buildings didn't let one open windows and let in fresh air, and as with many things he was not altogether wrong, he just couldn't fucking shut up about it and stop insisting on being the center of attention all the time, the proverbial smartest guy in the room, which made him difficult to take in any thing except the most measured of doses.

Speaking of which, I looked at the biography of Musk yesterday and decided I needed a little break from that motherfucker and his ilk. Not that we are not reminded of their presence constantly in the media daily. So I decided to take up One Man's Meat, a volume of essays by EB White from the late 30s. My friend Hilary had been reminded of it by reading my blog and it has been in the stack on my bedside table. I've dipped into it but never really caught White's groove, but I stdarted to last night. I'm sure I'll be coming back to it because the article I was reading before I turned off the light was about a visit to the Methodist camp near White's farm in Brooklyn, Maine from one Francis Townsend, whose name rang a bell though I wasn't sure why. Turns out he was one of the driving forces behind the development of Social Security. 

But let me return for a second to Musk. One of his principles in his catechism for product design and manufacturing process design is that every product requirement ("must be able to withstand support 2,000 pounds of pressure" or whatever) should be associated with a name. So that each requirement can be ruthlessly and continually interrogated so that things can be done and made in as efficient a way as possible. He has had results, we must credit him with that. 

By contrast, I read this WaPo article about the guy who runs the nation's military cemetaries and has made them the organization with the highest customer satisfaction rating of any in America. I could say his name but that's not the point. He's not about that. Quite the contrary. He considers it an accomplishment when the origins of the best practices of his organization become so integrated into his organization's way of doing things are forgotten. This, my friends, is a leader. 

Re-equilibrating

60% done now with my first five-day week of work in a month or so. I think I will survive, if only just barely. Beginning to catch up on the Economist issues that came while I was away.

500 points a day on Duolingo has proven to be a reasonable and sustainable level. It works out to 20-25 minutes and keeps me in the Diamond League, where my vanity commands me to stay. I have decided to stop alternating weeks of Japanese with Italian and German and just focus on Japanese for the time being so as to drill the syntax and also the characters properly into my brain. It seems to be going well.

September always presents challenges since it presents us not only with the kickoff of the academic and social years but also but Mary and Graham's birthdays and the attendant gathering organization. Not to mention election season and a 40th high school reunion. For another year I fear it will be the guys' Bulls game which will suffer.

Plus our cats just continue to get older. I will spare you the details.

Life

Turning the page on summer

This morning it was cool enough that, when I came out onto the porch to eat my pancakes a little after 9, I had to switch out my slides for slippers, despite the fact that I was already operating in Danish tourist mode and had socks on under the slides. And had on sweatpants and also one of the classic Be Loud! Sophie long-sleeve Tshirts that have been my constant companions since the onset of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, Natalie came home yesterday for the first time since Christmas, having moved from Juneau to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a week or so back. After a late summer dinner on the porch, we watched The Meyerowitz Stories on TV, a movie Mary and I had never heard of despite its star-studded cast (Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler) and the fact that it's a conscious throwback to the films of the 70s-80s which document the emotional travails of realish people and their families. Not unlike The Holdovers. More of this.

All systems go! 

Breeding Musks

Returning to my discussion of Musk and Isaacson's book about him, we learn a lot about how Musk thinks people should have more kids, and in particular intelligent people, like Musk. At one point in time a child Musk and his rock and roll on again off again girlfriend Grimes are having a child carried by a surrogate who was in the hospital at the same time at the same time Shivon Zilis, an executive at Neuralink (a Musk company), was having twins using some of Musk's sperm. Musk didn't bother telling Grimes about that. Zilis, a Yale grad and mover and shaker venture capitalist before being inveigled into Musk's orbit.

I'm sorry, but all this genius mating with genius stuff smacks of micro scale eugenics, I gotta call a spade a spade. As if our society weren't already adequately set up for "assortative mating" which puts the rich and smart together to mate. It surely hasn't solved our problems.

Overall Musk seems to want to breed superkids so that we can go to Mars to get away with the destruction we have wrought here on Earth. I think it would be a better plan to try to realize the potential in normal kids, most of whom have a kernel of genius somewhere in there if it can only be brought to light, to do a better job here on earth. I think it's a much better bet.

Learning blocks

Some of the time and energy that used to go to my blog continues to be siphoned off by Duolingo. I am of mixed mind about whether that's good or bad.

Of the three languages on which I'm rotating weeks -- Italian and German being the others -- Japanese is by far the biggest lift, and therefore the one that's of clearest value. With Japanese Duolingo's strictly usage-based model shows weaknesses, at least for me, and in the way I'm going about this process. Since it never lines up logical categories (numbers, family members, colors) and teaches you them together, they don't stick that well in memory. I'm sure it would be better if I were to just stay with Japanese week after week, but I don't. Probably I should suspend my practice of alternate weeks and hunker down on Japanese.

But sometimes one needs an Italian vacation. 

Stump speeches and the one and the many

Went out to a political event yesterday evening and heard a friend give his stump speech. I had been surprised at another candidate's event a month or so back when someone said my friend was a great public servant but not a great candidate because he didn't "connect" with voters. 

It's hard to give the same speech night after night and keep it fresh. One thing which struck me last night was the absence of a solid micro-macro tie in. A staple to this kind of speaking (also sermons) is the anecdote about one individual which is extrapolated to the big theme. This makes the whole thing relatable for the listener. I would think that varying that individual from day to day or perhaps week to week or else month to month, would help keep the whole thing fresh. "Yesterday in Kinston I was talking to a young man who said that blah blah blah, and it reminded me..."

I know this has got to be hard, perhaps nigh onto impossible when you are racing from event to event. But that's what struck me. I didn't hear it. Maybe I had spaced out, but I don't think so.

One or many geniuses, or one too many alpha males?

I'm about halfway through Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk, which Rob had praised highly. Overall, it reads like a sequel to Isaacson's bio of Steve Jobs. Each of which seem to bear the moral that extraordinary men should be forgiven their excesses because of what they accomplish. Personally, I'm not so sure about that.

Meanwhile, I happened upon an article about the "Gilbert Goons" of Gilbert, Arizona, a bunch of rich kids who rage across an affluent suburb and beat up nerds and non-members of their gang. Public pressure eventually resulted in some prosecutions and, in recent days, a plea bargain, in the case of a beating which turned fatal.

Meanwhile, in a bookstore in Portland I ran across a copy of There's Nothing for you Here by Fiona Hill, the National Security Council senior Russia expert who figured prominently in Trump's first impeachment hearing. I remembered the book getting good reviews, so I talked Mary into listehning to it in the car on vacation. It is far from light on detail, perhaps she lingers in the weeds excessively here and there (but who am I to point fingers on that score). But overall it's a great story of determination and professionalism by someone from a disadvantaged background who finds herself with a front-row seat to history -- in a position where in a good administration she would have been listened to.

Hill focuses a lot on what she terms the "infrastructure of opportunity" which helped her make it from a poor post-industrial town in NE England to the White House, and how this infrastructure has frayed and become unavailable to many, not just women and people of color but also people from forgotten post-industrial places like her hometown and the post-industrial Midwest and rural regions of the US (and Russia, BTW), the homelands of global populism. I don't need to recount it all. It's worth reading in general, though she has never met a weed she doesn't like and she can and does get lost there. At it's worst her book is like listening to everyone else you know say things you agree with. At those times, it's a waste of time.

As for the Isaacson, I guess it's also worth reading, though I feel a little guilty doing so. It's easy reading, that's for sure. I guess my big question is whether a culture of swaggering male exceptionalism like that which Musk (and Trump) epitomize can fruitfully coexist with a technocracy which seeks to optimize opportunity for as many as possible, as Hill espouses. Certainly her vision appeals to me more. But it's much harder to bring to pass and a much tougher sell.