The sadness of the hills

Watching the vidoes and pictures from western North Carolina in the aftermath of Helene fills me with sadness not just on account of the harsh reality of climate change but also because it strikes a region that will likely be carried by an asshole of world-historical proportions, a man so idiotic that he would debase the office of the Presidency mocking an autistic Swedish teenager. Yes Greta Thunberg is pretty extreme, but not without cause. 

I will continue to manage down my meat and petro-fuel consumption.

One wonders if the slowly-festering crisis in home insurance will eventually be the thing that wakes the Right up to what is going on. Kyla Scanlon lays it out well here. It's probably reasonable to think of this crisis as a component of the carbon tax we've never been able to push through legislatively.

Public and private spending, and the election

I was thinking of writing on a more refined topic around the question of public and private goods but started looking into the question of government spending as a % of GDP. There are lots of ways to slice and dice the question, it's not simple. I haven't had (and will unlikely soon have) opportunity to kick the tires of the graph below, taken from Wikipedia, but it accords with what I read and see elsewhere. Click on the image to expand and see details if you need to.

Right now it feels like that government's role in the overall economy, generally, is at a pretty high level historically. Americans have tended to want to trim it down. Which is why we have tended to have alternating regimes of Democrats who build it up (perhaps excessively), followed by Republicans who tear it down (perhaps excessively). 33% seems to be a rough equilibrium point around which we oscillate.

Right now lots of Republicans seem to be feeling this and are willing to tolerate Trump's excesses to do some tearing down. Democrats ignore this tendency at their peril. 

The problem is, of course, that the existential problems we face (global warming, an unstable geopolitical situation, populism) call for steady-handed leadership and significant public expenditures. Democrats need to make this case rather than run around trying to promise shit to people that we can't deliver. Unfortunately, taxes need to rise even for people with incomes around $200k and spending needs to fall. The upper middle class needs to participate. It has the means, just not the will.

Once more trained by pets

When pets die people post pictures of them on their social networks of choice containing pious testimonials about the love and joy the little animals had brought to them and their families. All true. We love our two cats, Rascal and Leon, and will be very sad when they are gone.

That said, the process of caretaking their later years is less rosy-tinted. We have been covering our couches in blankets and towels for what seems like years now to protect them against various cat emissions. We have limited the cats to the public part of the house, barring entry to the bedrooms, after a couple of poops in rapid succession on a rug in Graham's room. The rug in our rec room came up months ago after a couple of incidents. And now the one in our dining room is next. Mary had said we should take it up a couple of days ago but I resisted. Then I woke up today with not one but two little gifts left for us on the rug. Mary was not happy with me and my resistence, to say the least, and the terrible part of it is that she was (sigh) right.

This will likely provide Mary with another excuse to not have guests over.

Earlier in life I had thought about how having pets and needing to feed them, walk them, clean up poop, come home early, prepared young people for parenthood. Now I am seeing that having them later in life trains us to take care of our spouses as we move towards the exit.

Stem, NC

With Mary out of town with friends, I canvassed solo yesterday for Brian Cohn for NC House and Terrence Everitt for NC Senate in the town of Stem, NC. Home to all of 960 residents, Wikipedia tells me that Stem is famous for having its high school basketball team beat UNC sometime in the 30s when they went down to Chapel Hill as spectators but then the opponent, maybe Davidson, was unable to get there because of snow. So the boys from Stem (including apparently a 22-year old ringer) took on the Tar Heels and won.

There is no official record of this having happened. Certainly the university did not send its crack archivists to ensure that the memory of this was preserved for all of eternity.

Honestly I read about this when I got home but I really wish I had known about it so I could have asked some of the older people about it, especially the old white guy who was offended that I had made him interrupt his Sunday afternoon NFL watching just so he could slough off an annoying Democrat. Then again, that guy had no interest in discussing the fact that the road that he lived on was named after his family, and he lingered at the door and watched as I got in my Prius and drove off, so he might no have been drawn out by any topic of conversation whatsoever.

Other than that, amongst the 960 residents of Stem were a surprising assortment of different folx, including transplanted Yankees. One woman was from Nutley, NJ. Her daughter had worked for Trump and she swore he was a good man who cared about people, having been a "good husband to three women," despite cheating on them. Beyond that she was very open to hearing about Democratic candidates and certainly wasn't going to vote for Mark Robinson. Really a lovely woman in her own way.

Then there was the Jehovah's Witness who summed up their theology as not even trying because the Lord would sort it all out in the end. An interesting spin on the school of though ushered in first by Parmenides, that since all is One change is impossible.

Distance and proximity in syntax processing

It is interesting that I can quite easily assimilate how radically Japanese syntax differs from English syntax. At least at the elementary level where I am operating, verbs always go at the end of the sentence  (with or without an interrogative particle), temporal adverbs and/or statements go at the beginning, descriptive adverbial phrases in the middle, direct objects come right before the verb.

By contrast, differences between German syntax and English are much harder. Remembering to put temporal adverbs right after the verb, before indirect and/or direct objects, for example, takes a lot of focus. Also putting verbs at the end of dependent clauses, though that was eased back in the day by learning to sing the prepositions that make clauses dependent (aus, ausser, bei, mit, nach, zeit, von, zu) to the tune of the Blue Danube. Unfortunately, DuoLingo doesn't offer that kind of tip.

Almost certainly, accepting the difference of German syntax takes much more effort than that of Japanese because my native English syntactical instincts are butting their little heads in all the time when I'm dealing with German. Some little voice in there is saying "I got this" when in fact I don't.

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.