Interesting books, and news items about books and periodicals, particularly with respect to political and social issues. Since May, 2016, many of my larger book reviews have been put on a hosted Wordpress site; so now this blog emphasizes previews, interviews with authors, booklets, large periodical articles, and literary business issues. Note: no one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!
“We Can Protect the Economy from Pandemics.Why Didn’t We?” “A virologist helped crack an
impossible problem. How to insure against economic fallout from devastating
viral outbreaks. The plan was ingenious.Yet we’re still in the mess.”
It’s July/Aug 2020, p. 40.The concept is massive reinsurance for pandemics.He had designed a product.Nobody bought
The article gives the history of Metabiota, the disease
surveillance company he bought in 2013, as a disease surveillance company.That sounds a bit like Avi Schiffmann’s
tracking databases for coronavirus today.
In 2001, ReliaStar, the subsidiary of ING where I worked in
Minneapolis, had reinsured many companies in the World Trade Center in NYC,
which was sometimes cites as one reason for the layoff I finally exited in.
Derek Watkins, Josh Holder, James Glanz, Weiyi Cai, and
Jeremy White explain “How the Virus Won” in a New York Times booklet
today.
The article maintains “invisible outbreaks sprung up everywhere.”Many of them died out.
It also traces the West Coast v. East Coast strains, and
there are some indications that the East Coast version has an extra spike
protein (D614G mutation) that makes it more transmissible.
Some of the outbreaks were attributed to specific spring
break activities, like Mardi Gras.
People in the US don’t seem to accept the self-sacrifice for
the group that authoritarian societies like China demand.
Frank Partnoy examines “The Looming Bank Collapse” in The
Atlantic.The tagline is “The U.S. financial
system could be on the cusp of a calamity. This time, we might not be able to
save it.”
This time the poison is “collateralized loan obligations”
or CLO’s and they don’t contain mortgages or default swaps.But they can be badly undermined by the
collapse of so many “non essential” businesses as it is so difficult for any enterprise
dependent on people coming together for large events or for rapid travel.
The latter part of the article goes into worst case
scenarios, with some virus-like diagrams showing that most CLO’s have failed, undermining
the values of (apparently) most bond funds (even those invested mainly in Triple-A’s).
Tyler Mowery, a screenwriting guru (April 3, 2020),
also advocates bitcoin and digital currency as ultimately more stable given the
upcoming crisis, and cites this thread by Public Citizen.
Vox has republished a November 2018 articleby David Roberts,
“Clean energy technologies threaten to overwhelm the grid: Here’s how it can
adapt.”There are animated graphics by
Javier Zarracina.
It does not appear I had covered this article before.
The original article was motivated in part by the wildfire catastrophes
in California.
It also discusses the legal authorities, which overlap
between state and federal, and the ownership structures of utilities, which in
turn are bunched into three top-down structures: the Eastern, Western, and
Texas grids, which the newer article proposes integrating.
But the capacity to generate power locally (with DER’s, or
distributed energy resources, or “microgrids”) changes the games, and, however
flexible it needs to be, fits in to what is necessary for climate change.
The article does not discuss power grid security, from
cyberthreats to air gaps, or from physical attack or even international (North
Korea). But it makes sense the decentralization could make recovery of power
more feasible after a catastrophe. Taylor Wilson has proposed decentralization with small underground fission reactors.
The July/August 2020 issue of Foreign Affairs offers
four major essays on “The World After the Pandemic” (subscription paywall).
Michael T. Osterholm (University of Minnesota) and Mark Olshaker write “Chronicle from the COVID-19
Failure – Before the Next Outbreak Arrives”, p. 10.This article reminds us that we need to take
the novel influenzas incubating in Asia (H5 and H7 strains of “bird flu”) and
have vaccines ready should they become more transmissible among humans.They argue that a universal flu vaccine is an
urgent national security need. That may be
true of coronaviruses.There is some
evidence that cellular immune resources do remember “similar” viruses that you
don’t have antibodies on the shelf for.
Francis Fukuyama writes “It Tales a State”, (p. 26, which
is a little more testing than Hillary Clinton’s “It Takes a Village” (I never did
a book preview on that, or did I?)
Danielle Allen writes, “A More Resilient Union: How
Federalism Can Protect Democracy from Pandemics”, p. 33 Federalism has meant states managing their
own stay-at-homes, reopenings (although they are making regional agreements
among governors) and rebounds of cases, it looks like now.Federalism is a controversial idea in
political theory of democracy (Vox’s Ezra Klein likes to question it, as has
leftist Carlos Maza).
Stewart Patrick writes “When the System Fails: COVID-19
and the Costs of Global Dysfunctions”
How can you explain how 17-year-old Seattle high
school student Avi Schiffmann realized in December that COVID that this virus
in China would explode and needed to be tracked?Did
the CDC?CIA?Trump didn’t take it seriously, of course.
Even John Fish (20, involved for a while in a project
to make ventilators cheaply in Montreal, while on his gap year from Harvard)
says he didn’t grasp the gravity of the situation until February.
The young people own this problem now. David Hogg, where are you? Maybe we need to lower the minimum age for the presidency below 35.
Picture: Skyway in Minneapolis (mine, Sept. 2019).
Smithsonian Magazine has anarticle recommending ten
children’s books teaching them about racism and anti-racism.
I don’t know how much into the science it goes
(distance from the equator, ultraviolet and vitamin D).
There is a recommendation for anti-racism, by Tiffany
Jewell, “This Book Is Anti-Racist.”That
would seem to install a since of duty to take action deliberately.
And there are books on protesting, like Julie Merberg,
“My First Book of Protest”.
The books are recommended by the new African-American
History Museum on the Mall.
The Washington Post has a similararticle by Martha Conover.
The video discusses a book “Anti-racist Baby”. There are real questions as to whether babies
are “color blind”.
“A Guide to Allyship: A Guide to ‘Black Lives Matter’
and Why ‘All Cops Are Bastards’”: What Happened on May 25th? -- was suggested to me on Facebook.
This is a Google Doc that is essentially a booklet. It
has been posted by Nicel Mohammed-Hinds on Facebook, but I am not sure if she
is the author.
But the page-booklet certainly grabs your attention.
It does give justification for the idea that some protesting needs to be violent,
and that people who have losses imposed on them need to realize they are
learning what it is like to lose privilege and be like everybody else.Yes, it sounds Maoist.
I don’t encourage anyone to follow this, but you
should know about it and understand where it is coming from.
Breonna Taylor's murder in Kentucky in March sounds every bit as outrageous (maybe even more) but did not get as much attention at the time. Protests then might have stopped the lockdowns.
R.H. Lussin writes in The Nation (paywall), “In
Defense of Destroying Property: We Cannot Conflate the Destruction of
Plateglass with the Violence that Is Being Protested”.
Andrew Sullivan writes in NY Magazine: The Intelligencer, “Is There Still Room for Debate?” and talks about the need for “moral clarity.” To be
woke is to recognize that everything is “oppression or resistance”.At an individual level it is not. But you have to have your own agency outside
of a group or mob. (My William and Mary expulsion in 1961 is a good case in point.)“White Silence = Violence.”But so was my skipping out on a hazing
ceremony.)Sullivan also talks about
Trump’s Plummet.
Concepion de Leon and Elizabeth A. Harris warn authors
seeking trade publishers that major houses don’t seem to treat black and non-black
authors equally (as far as advances and royalties go). The article titleis
telling “#PublishingPaidMe and a day of action reveal an industry reckoning; A
viral hashtag invited black and nonblack authors to compare their pay;
publishers pledged to improve their diversity efforts.”
The article notes activism by Farrar, Straus and
Giroux working on books specifically by black authors (with donation of pay).
The video above by Judayah Murray maintains “Black
books don’t sell’ so black authors self-publish”.
I can imagine the debates to come about inclusion of
black characters in fiction novels and screenplays with “mainstream” or even
other focus like LGBTQ.My own work is
based on my own experiences and perceptions over decades.Yes, I do have some diverse minority
characters (in high places, like in the CIA), but I don’t present an intimate
relationship that I would not have wanted, for example.
There is a question of reading and literacy in some
communities that would otherwise be customers of book publishers.Covid19 has badly damaged efforts to make
independent bookstores (or channels like
Boomtube) more active in this area.
I wanted to note also that I personally don't feel I have a racial or ethnic group identity at all. The alt-right wants to claim one (Charlottesville), but now a writer like Diangelo seems to insist that I have one and don't get to choose not to have one, to accept my share of responsibility for group privilege (?) But I've also gotten that complaint from the right, like why don't I promote Israeli sovereignty for Bethlehem if I am a Christian? That seems to be a problem with "spectator" journalists. If I drive down to Richmond to take a picture of the fallen (Confederate) Lee statute and use it (under my own copyright) in my own neutral "news" blog, then why am I too smug to raise money for their fight or join their protest?
Tomas Pueyo has offered another detailed mathematical article
updating his “Hammer and Dance” strategy for controlling coronavirus. That is, “Coronavirus:
Should We Aim for Herd Immunity like Sweden?”
Pueyo argues that the United States (partly because of
its federalism and the political difficulty of doing uniform policies, even
from an authoritarian like Trump) is effectively following a “herd immunity”
approach as many states, particularly away from the coasts, are re-opening
their economies without convincing evidence that they have put the pandemic
under control.
He offers a very interesting chart at the end, color-coded,
showing the progress of each state in number of (confirmed) cases per day. New
York and New Jersey have improved recently because they did take stricter
measures than did, say, southern states.
Pueyo does not believe that the U.S. should or will
return to lockdowns with future waves, but believes states should ban out-of-state
visits by quarantine threats from hot areas.
He offers some sobering discussion of case fatality rate
and infection fatality rate.
Personally, I believe that there are more people getting
“trivial infections” (including those who lose smell for one or two days and
then regain it) where their immune systems do catch it in time, than is being
reported. These are not asymptomatic (which also happens) but fortunately
short-term symptomatic, which usually doesn’t get medical attention and doesn’t
get tested (in the U.S.) Some of this
perspective is based on my own conversations with people in Zoom sessions. I think more attention is needed to T-cell
health (the virus can enter T-cells but cannot reproduce inside them, compared
to HIV).
I also believe that in general countries have not paid attention to the tremendous economic losses or personalized conscriptive sacrifices incurred to citizens caught in "quarantine traps" against their will (when they are not even sick); there is not nearly enough attention to compensating them. It is true that in the US, the various state "stay and home" or even "shelter in place" (a leading term) orders were not as draconian in practice as in other countries, and neither is the contact tracing. Were I in some of the other countries, I probably would have lost my Internet work, which I might not have been able to maintain or been allowed to stay up (and there are indications tech companies in the US are having more trouble keeping up than they have been letting on -- starting with Cox).
Pueyo, born in France, has engineering degrees from Stanford
and is “young” (age 38).I would wonder
if he has met or communicated with Jack
Andraka (now a graduate student at Stanford working on the wastewater issue,
not sure of his future plans yet judging from social media), Avi Schiffmann
(who has developed and maintained one of the world’s largest coronavirus
statistics databases, as a teenager, and also maintains a list of activist and
charitable groups), and, for example, John Fish (previous post). I don’t find a
Wikipedia article for Pueyo, which surprises me.
Picture: Demonstrations in Washington DC, my photo
(June 3).
Update: June 22
Notice his other papers, esp. the one April 1 about the U.S., where he compares the coronavirus to an invading enemy of secret agents.
John Fish presented a video today (“Black Lives Matter”)
where he described some books on the subject.
He also highlighted one user comment, to the effect that the phrase
reestablishes the humanity of black people after it had been systemically stripped
away, by long-established and ancestral structural racism.
I wanted to mention a couple of those books here (even if I
haven’t read them yet, and a lot of my reading recently has been on free speech
issues and more traditional liberty interests).
Robin Diangelo’s book is “White Fragility: Why It Is so Hard
for White People to Talk About Racism”, 2018, 192 pages, Beacon, so it is fairly
short (which may make it easy for me to read soon, once I finish a book on
Section 230!)There is a foreword by
Michael Eric Dyson.
Chapter 1 starts with a section “We don’t see ourselves in
racial terms.”Correct.I am a white gay male. I don’t see my race as
part of an identity, because it was never socially constructed for me.I am supposed to see my sexual orientation as
a source of identity, and that is more complicated. As belonging to a group of
people or new tribe that I owe loyalty to, no, I don’t see it that way.As for a set of values and attitudes toward
people that I grew up with, yes, these ideas did shape my adult identity, as my
adult life went through various episodes over many decades with one episode
linking to the next (and a “new normal”) after some kind of unusual moral irony that
later makes sense.Even this period of Covid
(I have not been ill but was probably exposed at one point – and should be
tested) fits into this sequence of ironies. And ability to resist this disease seems genetic
and biological (as well as circumstantial – avoiding doing certain service
jobs, living in crowded housing) – and will take us back to the same moral
quandary.
I really don’t think I see others in racial terms either, except
in the special compartment of contemplating, entirely in mind, the idea of an
intimate partner. But not in terms of otherwise productive social interaction. I mainly care about
whether someone can communicate fluently in the same language (regardless of what they
look like, and that would be true of gender, even fluidity, too).Yet, I must say, with people who grew up in
inner cities (or for that matter, rural people who may be on the other side of
political extremism) I have no proximity (an idea Bryan Stevenson has talked
about) and no communication with.But
this has no connection to “group identity” in my mind.The idea of tribe is not of much use to me
personally. I have to admit, I think I have cognitive empathy, but relatively little emotional empathy with a lot of people.
I looked quickly at the later chapters on Amazon. Yup, the “repair”.I can say that in the workplace, back in the
1990s, a couple of “black” employees did share with me their concern about
hidden discrimination (and mentioned the police issue) and said I could “pass”
without attracting attention and they could not. That sounded odd.One of the men said he thought I lived with
my mother (because I was not married). I was shocked at his assumption (I had
my own apartment, paid my own rent – but mom, widowed, was still in the nearby
Drogheda house. But ten years later, in mom’s last years and after my own
retirement, I would be living with her, so his assumption about me, in a time
travel sense, wasn’t completely wrong after all. )
Then there would be litigation in the company, from a black
person who was fired. I actually gave a deposition. It was dismissed.But it was apparent (even to the lawyers)
that different employees had very different ideas about personal responsibility,
family loyalty, and even racial identity which, for white people, was like
empty space in the universe. Another idea comes to mind, that a decade before (in Dallas) I had worked for companies that wanted to move further north into the wealthier suburbs with "better" school districts, reinforcing the idea of redlining and de facto segregation (structural racism indeed).
Another book (besides Bryan Stevenson’s “Just Mercy”, which
I have already discussed in my blogs) will be Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim
Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, 2020, the New Press,
352 pages.An obvious point is going to
be, this war on drugs, with libertarians want to end, and which seems so set up
to entrap black people, given the way the world still works 150 years after the
end of slavery.Stevenson’s book and
movie did examine the self-prepared conclusions about guilt, and lack of presumption
of innocence in practice.
Another friend of mine, filmmaker Ford Fischer, will read John
Hendrix’s “John Brown: His Fight for Freedom”, from Abrams Books for Young
Readers, 2009, 40 pages about Harpers Ferry, to a grade school class (online)
soon.This brings up a curious event
that happened when I visited there on my birthday in 2013, and again last
December (after a train wreck there, picture above) but I won’t go into that here.
I have to say, I don't "do things" with the idea of solving a problem just for people belonging to a group; I don't follow intersectionality in my own thinking, and I don't really see people as defined by group identity in a way that is psychologically meaningful. So there is no way I can, in good faith, set out to practice or publicly promote "anti-racism", as some kind of quid pro quo for my other speech. I need to warn people about that, the way this issue is playing out. Is there such a thing as being "non tribal"? Is that like being an inert element on the Periodic Chart, or a metal that is relatively non-reactive? Is that like living "orthogonal" to other people rather than in their same plane?
There are related posts here Jan 1, 2020 and Feb 7, 2020 (about
Booktube). Some films (besides "Just Mercy") I have reviewed (on Wordpress blogs) that relate to this include "D.C. Noir", "Always in Season" (about Leon Lacey), "Waves", and especially "Queen and Slim" where a police profiling incident in Cleveland leads to catastrophe. If there was ever a time to finish the late Gode Davis's film "American Lynching" (which I have some connection to and which I think PBS more or less controls now), it is now. Yes, I would help with that.
In 10th grade English, starting in the fall of
1958 at Washington-Lee (now Washington-Liberty) high school in Arlington VA, we
first read “Julius Ceasar” (Shakespeare) and then took on “the novel”, that is “Silas
Marne: The Weaver of Raveloe” (1861) by George Elliot (Mary Ann Evans).
The plot in this relatively short novel is rather intricate
and deals with the misfortunes of a relatively modest man Silas, who is framed
for crimes and loses his savings.In the
middle of the novel, he rescues a small girl (Eppie) from another tragedy and
raises her.Becoming a parent while
otherwise childless himself (and not have ever had the chance to have his “masculinity”
validated in more usual ways) becomes an existential challenge which he
accepts.
I can remember quizzes and I think we had two tests on the
novel (just like we did for the Shakespeare).Later we would move on to reading short stories.
I do remember that many of the quiz questions involved Eppie
and the lost cache of gold, and some of the other familial relations in the
novel.I think that on the final exam
there was an essay question concerning stepping up into parenthood.(The teacher was a young male and former
football player but quite articulate.) Given the course of my life since then, it
sounds a but ironic.
The novel does lend itself to audiobooks. See also Dec. 6, 2012 posts.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
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