Kevin Drum reviews the new Republican Party platform.
Tyler Cowen provides an excellent summary of why Trump is winning. And note that by marital status, the most pro-Trump group is divorced men.
Narco-pentacostalism in Brazil.
Alice Munro and the sad fact that many writers are lousy people.
The NY Times lists the 100 best books of the century. Top ten: 1) Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend; 2) Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (a history of black migration to the north); 3) Hillary Mantel, Wolf Hall (my personal number one by far), 4) Edward Jones, The Known World; 5) Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections; 6) Roberto Bolaño, 2666; 7) Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad; 8) W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz; 9) Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go; 10) Marilynne Robinson, Gilead. I'm already listening to one I got off this list and have plans to get to two more, which makes the exercise valuable to me at least.
No, really, stop with the "discovery" of "the labyrinth" on Crete. Just stop. The number of people who have embarassed themselves over this one makes me sad. Shut up about Atlantis, too.
The discovery and development of laughing gas.
Sabine Hossenfelder, Why I am Embarassed to be German, 11-minute video. (Because Germany is falling behind technologically, due to bad political choices.)
Three short posts from The Smell of Water, aka Teeside Psychogeography: Howl Moor on a rainy day, a little discourse inspired by finding a fossil of the type once called a "fairy loaf," and a black and white photoset from a trip to London.
Longish essay on attempts to create a logic machine, from Ramon Lull to LLMs.
Sports-based language imperialism: besides all the other reasons English has spread around the world, there is the fact that so many popular sports were invented in Britain or the US: soccer, rugby, cricket, basketball, volleyball, baseball. On my mind because I watched some of the highlights from the France vs. Germany basketball game, and among the English words used by the German commentators were: turnover, steal, and one, no look, staredown (mit dem staredown), NBA, rebound, high-low (das high-low spiel), possession, fast break, and line-up. Even when the words were German, the phrasing was American basketball: Gute hilfe ("good help"), Ballbewegung ("ball movement"), and so on.
Peter Gray trashes Joathan Haidt's book arguing that screen time and the internet are damaging teen mental health, says there is "very little evidence for such effects." Gray blames school.
Tyler Cowen's conversation with Brian Winter, mainly about South America.
Impessive baskets by Native American weaver Jeremy Frey.
DNA and other analysis of human bones found in an underground cistern at the Maya city of Chichén Itzá says the victims were mostly young boys aged 3 to 6. They came from the surrounding community, and the 64 identified individuals included two sets of identical twins. The twin sacrifices may represent the Hero Twins of Maya myth. (WSJ, Arizona Free Press)
On Christopher Marlowe: "The legend of the Devil’s contract is the most alluring, the most provocative, the most insightful, the most important story ever told."
Ten years ago, the population of starfish on the west coast of the US collapsed due to a still mysterious condition known as sea star wasting disease. This led to an explosion of sea urchins, which eat kelp, and so to a decline in kelp. Vox describes the efforts biologists are making to bring the starfish back.
Depressing piece in the NY Times about elevators in the US, which due largely to regulation are much more expensive than in Europe, and therefore we have fewer of them. Kevin Drum has a summary.
Southeast England is one of the world's richest regions; why is the north so much poorer? Can anything be done about it?
Smithsonian covers Pablo Escobar's hippos from the "menace to the environment" angle.
This week's music is Cassandra Jenkins, a semi-ethereal folk-ish pop-ish singer, somewhere in between Emylou Harris and Enya. Petco, Delphinium Blue, Hard Drive.
Claim on Twitter/X that Russian organized crimed has metatastized since the war began, up 76% by official government figures and possibly much worse. The need to ramp up smuggling obviously helps them, as does the focus of the police on other issues.
Mediazona and the BBC, who publish the most widely respected estimates of Russian casualities, now say that 120,000 Russian military personnel haved died in the Ukraine war. That's more than twice as many deaths as the US suffered in Vietnam and eight times as many as the Soviet Union lost in Afghanistan. At least 20,000 of the Russian dead were criminals, but that still leaves a lot of others, including many officers. Russian Officers Killed in Ukraine has verified 6 major generals, 94 colonels, 244 lieutenant colonels, 473 majors, 716 captains, and more than 2,000 lieutenants.
And the 400,000 (so far) wounded Russian soldiers will be a major drain on the state and society for decades.
No, really, stop with the "discovery" of "the labyrinth" on Crete. Just stop. The number of people who have embarrassed themselves over this one makes me sad. Shut up about Atlantis, too.
ReplyDeleteThe second link in this bit is a duplicate of the video on Germany.
Southeast England is one of the world's richest regions; why is the north so much poorer? Can anything be done about it?
ReplyDeleteIf the North was its own country, it would have the 27th largest economy on the planet. It's not so much that the North is poor, but the Southeast (and London in particular) is disproportionately rich.
So where does all that extra wealth come from? Other countries. We're talking a region that is an international banking, finance, and business center; an international pharmaceutical center; an international aeronautics center; an international media and entertainment center; an international education center; et cetera, et cetera.
The UK's GDP is 82% comprised of service industries, and the Southeast specializes in that area, with many of its most profitable services being international ones.
But in contrast, the North is much less populated and much more rural, and focuses much more heavily on agriculture, resource harvesting, and manufacturing - industries that by nature have smaller profit margins, and markets that are primarily geared toward supplying the domestic market rather than international trade. Most of what gets grown or made in the North gets used within the UK - and the total amount being produced is only a portion of what the country as a whole consumes, and so foreign imports make up the (substantial) difference.
Britain is a small country, with less than ideal geography. The North actually does pretty well for itself considering that fact. But the Southeast is flush with excesses of foreign wealth that the North simply cannot attract.
If you cut off Britain entirely from the rest of the world, the Southeast would rapidly grow poorer as they would have no one to sell their services to, while the North would actually be enriched due to increased demand for their production of physical goods that were once supplied by other countries.
And the 400,000 (so far) wounded Russian soldiers will be a major drain on the state and society for decades.
ReplyDeleteI mean, they would be a major drain if we weren't talking about Russia.
The article you link to makes some hysterical claims.
"Above all else, the Russian state has to financially support the families of fallen soldiers in perpetuity. Many of the wounded (to say nothing of the dead) will permanently be out of the workforce, and even those who return to it will require lifelong mental and physical health care."
It's adorable that the authors of the piece think the Russian state is going to financially support the families of fallen soldiers even temporarily, much less in perpetuity.
They make much ado about how the totality of the one-time payments ostensibly owed to soldiers is already a pretty large chunk of cash - but they fail to address the fact that the Russians themselves have been complaining through the entire war that such payments rarely ever actually get made, and countless surviving family members have more or less given up hope of ever seeing a single ruble, expecting all of it to get lost in the bureaucracy and corruption of the Russian governmental system. It's possible that some day, Russia will actually keep its promises and pay off the war widows... but it won't be any time soon, and there's a very real chance that it's never.
Unfortunately for the Kremlin, it will not get off the hook with one-time expenses, at least if it wants to provide an adequate level of medical care for veterans.
Again, it's cute that they think they Kremlin wants to provide an adequate level of medical care for veterans.
Why in the world would the Kremlin want that? Why wouldn't they just do what the Russian system has done since the time of the Tsars, and flagrantly neglect their veterans, who might grumble, but who ultimately are too afraid or too powerless to do anything about being abandoned, and who will instead seek bitter solace in the bottoms of vodka bottles?
Russian are notorious for their unique and overpowering brand fatalism, known as "avos'". They tend to be astoundingly cynical, expecting almost everything to turn out for the worst, and far more often than not being correct in those expectations. They tend to attribute success or failure not to merit, or hard work, or even to wit and cleverness, but simply to sheer dumb luck.
In the Anglosphere, we have the saying "Do or die"; in the Russosphere, they instead say "Do and die". Even if you do everything right, the expectation is that eventually your luck will run out, and it'll be your turn for misery. Even when you find success, the overwhelming Russian attitude is still that "You die today; I die tomorrow". Happiness to a Russian is not just fleeting, but doomed from the very start.
Russian veterans and their families will angrily decry the Kremlin for neglecting the wounded. But they will do so with the innate understanding that nothing will come of their protests - they will be allowed their moment to shout angrily at God, and then will be expected to return to toiling in misery. The serfs are willing to curse The Tsar's name, in part because they know it's pointless and nothing will change either way.
***
The article goes on at great length, producing a whole slew of conjectures on how much it would theoretically cost the Russians to take care of their veterans - and all of it is an absurd waste of time, because the Russians WON'T take care of their veterans, and anyone who is familiar with Russian society should know that as an absolute truth.
The Kremlin isn't worried about the costs, because it's simply not going to pay them.