The decline of China, explained by population boom

by philg

The Fall and Rise of China, a course by Richard Baum (late professor at UCLA), asks how it was possible for an empire that had been so successful for 1,000 years to fall apart in about 100 years. The decline of China relative to Europe was anything but predictable, in his view, and the real question is why China didn’t continue to lead the world economy.

The professor’s thesis is that population growth doomed China. The Manchus improved the control of floodwater from China’s major rivers, thus enabling more stability in agriculture. Instead of an improved standard of living, however, this lead to a huge increase in what had been a stable population size, from about 125 million to 450 million over 200 years (1700 to 1900). Agricultural productivity per acre did not improve significantly and the cultivated land per person fell, thus reducing both the standard of living for the typical citizen and tax revenues for the government (people at a Malthusian level of subsistence can’t pay tax).

(The doom was accelerated to some extent, according to Professor Baum, by the corrupt and incompetent Empress Dowager Cixi, who ruled China for 47 years and obstructed efforts to modernize the military (partly by stealing money that had been appropriated for that purpose). Without her, China might have had a chance to go more in the Japanese direction.)

I’m not sure that the “overpopulation” answer is correct, but the question seems like the right one to ask. How did a country that was so far ahead of the rest of the world suddenly (when viewed through the lens of history) collapse?

Venezuela certainly didn’t thrive once its oil wealth was divided by a larger population. Chart from the World Bank:

Venezuela was producing roughly 2.5 million barrels of oil per day in 2010 at about $80 per barrel. That would have been $36,000/year in walking-around revenue for a family of 4 if total revenue were divided by the 1960 population of 8 million. Divided by 28 million, though, and revenue per family was down to $10,000 (and don’t forget that Venezuelans had to take care of the Big Guy and his family before oil revenue could be distributed more widely).

Are there lessons for the U.S.? As the U.S. population has grown (10 million in 1820, 180 million in 1960, 333 million today), Americans have gotten fatter, not thinner. We’re not running out of food like the Chinese did. On the other hand, folks who show up in the U.S. expect an endowment of land/housing. The standard of living to which Americans believe themselves entitled is now, absent taxpayer-funded subsidies, out of reach of roughly half of the people who live in the U.S. and the situation gets worse every day (see “Hundreds of Haitians arrive in Massachusetts from southern border lacking housing, health care” (Boston Globe, 10/10/2021), for example: “Advocates scramble to find homes and help for the new arrivals.” (if every Massachusetts homeowner with an “immigrants welcome” lawn sign and a spare room would host just one Haitian, a substantial fraction of the 1.1 million Haitians in the U.S. could be accommodated in just this one righteous state!).)

The NYT, 8/10/2021 says the situation is dire, but Biden’s central planners have a plan to fix this and we just need “a once-in-a-generation effort”. Harvard agrees that Biden, whose name occurs 6 times in this report, will make all of our housing dreams come true. The NYT article cites Japan favorably. Rents in Tokyo are no higher than they were 20 years ago (it looks as though the indices are adjusted for inflation because San Francisco rent is up only 150 percent and New York up only 100 percent). Not mentioned is that Japan’s population, over the last 20 years, is essentially flat (127 million down to 126 million). You shouldn’t need the world’s finest central planners to manage housing for a constant-sized population.

The Chinese, according to the professor, also suffered from insularity. They mostly stopped traveling to foreign countries (compare to our border-crossing restrictions since February 2020). They didn’t keep up with the Industrial Revolution (compare to our current dependence on Asia to fabricate semiconductors). Due to Internet, container ships, and air freight, however, it is tough to imagine the U.S. ever being truly disconnected from innovation centers around the world.

So history may not repeat itself nor even rhyme, but it is still an interesting question to ponder. Why were Michelle Faraday and Katherine Clerk Maxwell the pioneers in electromagnetism rather than physicists in Beijing? Why was it Mileva Marić who explained the photoelectric effect and figured out that gravity distorts spacetime, rather than someone in Shanghai? Why was it Louise-Hélène de Lesseps who created the Suez Canal rather than the Chinese, who had more than 2000 years of canal experience.

Full post, including comments

Philip Roth biography: faith in psychotherapy

by philg

I checked Philip Roth: The Biography out of the local branch of the Palm Beach County Library. One fascinating aspect is the faith that Americans had in psychotherapy, especially Freudian psychoanalysis, in the 1960s. After becoming a bestselling author and National Book Award winner, Roth was paying 50 percent of his income for psychotherapy (for himself, a blonde to whom he was briefly married, and a stepdaughter who came with the blonde).

How insightful were these physician-analysts?

In September 1967, … Roth experienced an ominous malaise that, Kleinschmidt explained, was a psychosomatic manifestation of envy for his friend [William Styron]. Roth denied it: he loved Styron’s novel and was delighted by its success, but Kleinschmidt stood by his diagnosis “right down to the day I nearly died from a burst appendix and peritonitis,” as Roth recalled.”

How did Roth respond to this direct evidence of psychiatry’s lack of explanatory power? By paying Kleinschmidt for an additional 10+ years of therapy.

What did he do with the other half of his money at the time? By order of the New York Family Court, he was paying it to his plaintiff (the blonde). Margaret Martinson had a father who served prison time for petty theft, according to the book. She had two children from a previous marriage that she had broken up via litigation and from which she had a compelling victim narrative to spin (according to the biographer, Roth was a sucker for women who claimed to be victims). She was intelligent and had taken a few college classes, but as predicted by The Son Also Rises, eventually reverted to her family’s overall level of success. The stepdaughter’s valuable relationship with Roth was severed on the advice of Roth’s defense lawyer (since the plaintiff would eventually accuse him of having sex with the girl in order to enhance her alimony claim). One of the topics that Roth discussed with his psychoanalyst was his desire to kill his plaintiff and thereby more than double his spending power. (One reason that Roth was angry with his plaintiff, aside from her continuing bids for increased alimony, was that she had obtained his agreement to marry via fraud. She purchased urine from a pregnant woman and turned that into a positive pregnancy test result, which induced Roth to “do the right thing.”) The topic was being discussed with the medial-psychiatric professional at a tremendous weekly cost right up to the point that the plaintiff was killed in a car accident (1968), thus putting an end to family court litigation that had lasted longer than the marriage and to alimony payments and legal fees that consumed more than half of Roth’s income (he borrowed to pay his lawyers, his plaintiff, and the platoon of shrinks).

Roth avoided remarriage, which, in those pre-child-support-formula days, was a viable wealth-preservation strategy. Roth had sex with a lot of young women, but if they’d gotten pregnant they wouldn’t have been entitled to $millions and couldn’t have made bank like Hunter Biden’s plaintiff. Where did Roth, pushing 40, find women aged 20-23? Teaching at elite universities. It turned out that young female aspiring writers at the time wanted to have sex with a National Book Award winner (and future Pulitzer winner) with connections to New Yorker, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, agents and critics. Given this alternative, they did not want to have sex with their fellow undergraduates who had (a) no money, (b) no connections, and (c) no talent. (Roth actually did help launch the careers of some of his young friends.) Far from discouraging these liaisons, the Chair of the English Department at Penn actually preferentially admitted the best-looking girls to Roth’s oversubscribed class with the idea that sexual relationships would be fostered. (The procurer is described as “gay” in the book, so it is unclear if he is an 2SLGBTQQIA+ victim to be protected or an abettor of Roth’s predatory behavior and therefore on track for cancellation.)

One of the students, Lucy Warner:

Philip Roth never had any children of his own, which is kind of a shame because it would be interesting to see how they turned out and if scribbling out novels is hereditary.

Americans of only moderately high income could live like lords in Europe in the 1960s. Whenever Roth felt like it, he could move to a European capital and live in splendid hotels or apartments. What we today think of as the good life was also much more readily available, e.g., a summer rental in the Hamptons. The writer could be the host of the Wall Streeter, not vice versa.

One area where I developed new respect for Roth is in physical perseverance. He suffered a back injury in the Army (involving a massive potato kettle in the kitchen, not enemy action!) and never recovered. Working at a typewriter was often torture for his shoulders, back, and neck, but he stuck to it until an entire bookcase of works had been produced. This refusal to quit is tough to imagine in our present-day society where almost anyone will quit in exchange for $600/week.

Roth was a passionate Democrat who died in 2018, during the rule of the hated dictator and before he could enjoy seeing Joe Biden deliver his promised victories over both coronavirus and cancer. New Yorker tapped Roth’s spleen in 2017 (Roth was 84 years old at the time):

Last week, Roth was asked, via e-mail, if it has happened here. He responded, “It is easier to comprehend the election of an imaginary President like Charles Lindbergh than an actual President like Donald Trump. Lindbergh, despite his Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities, was a great aviation hero who had displayed tremendous physical courage and aeronautical genius in crossing the Atlantic in 1927. He had character and he had substance and, along with Henry Ford, was, worldwide, the most famous American of his day. Trump is just a con artist. The relevant book about Trump’s American forebear is Herman Melville’s ‘The Confidence-Man,’ the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel—Melville’s last—that could just as well have been called ‘The Art of the Scam.’ ”

Trump isn’t a Nazi, exactly, but he is inferior as a human to a guy who had, according to Roth, “Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities.”

“I was born in 1933,” he continued, “the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I’ve been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”

COVID-19 lockdown proponents can certainly thank FDR for pointing out that the Constitution’s guarantees don’t apply any time that an executive declares an “emergency” (see Korematsu v. United States, in which the Supreme Court agreed with FDR that #AbundanceOfCaution was more important than the purported rights of Japanese-Americans to own property and live outside of detention camps).

“As for how Trump threatens us, I would say that, like the anxious and fear-ridden families in my book, what is most terrifying is that he makes any and everything possible, including, of course, the nuclear catastrophe.”

In other words, Roth foresaw that there would be a military catastrophe during Trump’s administration, maybe nuclear or perhaps a peasant army would defeat our military and its puppets in a foreign capital. Do we give Roth credit for this? He was off by only seven months and even Nostradamus didn’t hit all of the dates precisely.

In the age of 77-inch OLED and streaming everything, could there ever be another Philip Roth? How many people have the patience to read serious novels? Who here has read anything by Abdulrazak Gurnah, for example, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021? Which author on the current Amazon list of best-selling fiction is in the same league as Philip Roth?

Related:

Full post, including comments

Is Elon Musk one of the bigger winners from inflation?

by philg

Elon Musk gets paid more if Tesla’s market capitalization, revenue, and profit (using the fraudulent EBITDA number) rise, but the goals seem to be stated in nominal dollars, not real (inflation-adjusted) dollars. From Fortune:

Plainly the biggest driver of Tesla market cap is the baffling inability of mainstream car manufacturers to deliver a competitive product (they can’t even give us dog mode, a handful of lines of software for which an 18-year-old spec exists!). But what if investors are expecting the dollar to lose half or more of its value over the coming years of rule by Democrats? They’re throwing money into stocks, including Tesla, just to avoid holding the same type of cash that the government is printing like crazy. The revenue targets are easier to meet now that used car prices are rising (up 45 percent over a one-year period says New York Times).

How many other top executives are going to get a huge tailwind from inflation if this kind of nominal-dollar compensation plan is the norm?

Related:

Full post, including comments

Should governments hire and pay workers to check vaccine papers outside restaurants?

by philg

“In-N-Out closes in San Francisco over refusal to enforce vaccine mandate” (Guardian, 10/20):

In-N-Out burger has become the first restaurant in San Francisco to be temporarily closed for failing to enforce the city’s vaccine mandate. City officials made the move on 14 October after the burger chain said it won’t force staff to check that customers were fully vaccinated before allowing them to dine inside the restaurant.

“We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government,” Arnie Wensinger, the company’s chief legal and business officer, said in a statement. “It is unreasonable, invasive and unsafe to force our restaurant associates to segregate customers into those who may be served and those who may not.”

Do we say that In-N-Out Burger is boldly #Resisting the San Francisco city government’s demand that they check vaccine papers for each would-be customer? Or maybe we say that In-N-Out Burger is weakly hesitating to do the right thing?

Let’s ignore the question of whether the policy makes sense given that COVID-19 vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission (and, in fact, might increase infection/transmission because vaccinated people will take more risk than the unvaccinated). That leaves us with a big question: Why would it be restaurant workers’ job to perform this police-type job? If the government makes it illegal for people without vaccine papers to eat in restaurants, shouldn’t the government station “vaccine wardens” just outside the restaurants and pay these wardens? (They can be armed with guns, since Americans love the idea of government workers with guns, or simply tightly connected to nearby armed police officers who can use force as necessary.)

Alternatively, automate the process, as I suggested in August: How can city vaccination requirements be enforced without RFID chips in residents’ necks? The government owns the city sidewalks from which people walk into restaurants in urban areas where vaccine document checks are now required. As a condition of continued employment, the government can install RFID chips in working citizens’ necks (migrants and those on welfare would be exempt, as with current vaccine requirements). Scanners overhead the sidewalk outside restaurants could notice if anyone unvaccinated is going in and then automatically deduct a fine from the working citizen’s paycheck. Receipts from fining the unrighteous could be used by cities to acquire original Hunter Biden paintings for municipal buildings.

Here I am at In-N-Out on the way back to Reno from Burning Man 2014, thus earning me the Playa name of “Double Double.”

Update, November 1… Swiss police use concrete to block access to Covid sceptic restaurant (The Local):

Police in Switzerland have placed several large concrete blocks in front of a bar in the canton of Valais after the bar owners repeatedly refused to enforce the country’s Covid measures.
After the owner of the Walliserkanne restaurant in Zermatt (Valais) failed to comply several times with the obligation to check the customers’ Covid certificates, local police took a drastic measure of installing cement blocks in front of the entrance.

Covid certificates – which show that someone has been fully vaccinated, recovered or has tested negative to the virus – have been required to eat and drink in indoor areas in Switzerland since mid-September.

Both owners were arrested by the police on Sunday morning.

A fine of up to CHF10,000 can be levied, while jail time is also possible in aggravated cases.

There’s a photo too:

Full post, including comments

German and Swiss restaurants refuse to accept CDC cards as proof of vaccination

by philg

I was chatting with a pilot friend who returned to his native Germany recently and reported that he’d been unable to get into restaurants. “They refused to accept my CDC card as proof of vaccination,” he said, “because they said it was too easy to forge one.”

I mentioned this at a pilot gathering in Palm Beach and one of the guys at my table said, “the same thing happened to me in Switzerland. Nobody would accept the CDC card.”

What papers do you need to show? “It’s called a European vaccine certificate,” my German friend explained. “You get this from a pharmacist [QR code with some text] then load in app or if you are old show on paper. It’s tied to a Europe-wide database and issued by the local CDC equivalent. It can only be put into the database by authorized pharmacists and some other designated officials, but not doctors.”

So enjoy your trip to Europe, but if you got vaccinated in the U.S., don’t plan to be indoors at museums, restaurants, etc.

Full post, including comments

Biden and the Democrats try a Great Leap Forward?

by philg

The Fall and Rise of China, a course by Richard Baum (late professor at UCLA), has an interesting section on the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962). Essentially the Chinese economy didn’t produce enough to give the government the resources that was required to meet the leaders’ objectives. Without any analysis or claims that the measures they were taking represented a likely optimum, the government introduced one policy after another in hopes of increasing the amount of money flowing into the capital. The Chinese Great Leap Forward had a big emphasis on infrastructure, albeit not subsidized child care as “infrastructure”, but dams and other massive civil engineering works (these ultimately proved to have been poor investments).

The parallels aren’t perfect. Mao was trying to create a society in which every able-bodied person worked; the U.S. is a work-optional society in which ever-more people can get paid for not working (child support plaintiff, means-tested housing/health care/SNAP/Obamaphone beneficiary, alimony plaintiff, stay-at-home parent, SSI or TANF recipient, 1.5-year unemployment check recipient, etc.). Americans these days get upset when they hear about powerful people having sex with the less powerful; according to the professor, Mao, then in his 60s, partied with teenage girls every night (bedroom with oversized bed (since multiple teenage girls would occupy simultaneously) next to a dance hall).

The high-level picture seems similar. The proposed corporate tax rates are not being set based on the idea that they will lead to a optimum balance of economic growth, competitive positioning with respect to Europe, and revenue for the government without discouraging effort and investment. The new rates are justified with “we need the money”. We’ll assess capital gains tax against people with $1.0001 billion in assets, but not those with $0.99999 billion (it would be a lot simpler just to eliminate the charitable contribution deduction so that the super rich couldn’t avoid taxation by stuffing money into foundations).

Readers: Do you think there is a parallel here?

(Also, if the federal unrealized capital gains tax on billionaires goes through, why can’t the billionaires simply move to Puerto Rico for 183 days per year and pay 4% income tax instead? Could it be that this is the way the Democrats pull Puerto Rico in as the 51st state? If all of the billionaires move there to escape the new 20 percent haircut (and why won’t California add 13 percent on top?), isn’t the most obvious solution to make P.R. a standard part of the U.S. and therefore subject to conventional federal taxation? Or maybe the Feds will say that the tax still applies even for those who flee to Puerto Rico because the gains happened while the targets of the tax were still living within the 50 states.)

Full post, including comments

Inflation would be 10 percent per year if house prices were included

by philg

Ever wonder what the inflation statistic would be if it included some of the big purchases that people actually make, e.g., houses? A Wall Street economist, Joe Carson, recently wrote a piece on the current inflation situation:

Including house prices in the official consumer inflation statistics would lift the reported figure to roughly 10% and rival the early 1980s. Still, excluding the non-market shelter index from the official price statistics shows consumer price inflation running as hot as it did during the oil price spike of 2008. Both represent the fastest increase since the early 1980s, illustrating the breadth and speed of the current inflation cycle.

Other measures of inflation have already exceeded the reported figures of the early 1980s. Core intermediate prices for materials and supplies, which are part of the monthly producer price report, have jumped over 20%, well above the high readings of the 1980s.

If official government inflation is 6 percent, is it reasonable to say that 4% more would be added if actual house prices were included? From the same piece:

The initial signs of a new inflation cycle appeared in the housing market. In 2020, during the pandemic, house price prices rose 10%, according to the Case-Shiller. That was more than three times faster than the gain of the prior year and the most rapid increase since 2013. Some have argued that high and rising prices are self-correcting as buyers balk at the high prices. Yet, after increasing 10%, house prices posted a 15% increase, and the latest data shows a record 19.5% increase in the past year.

19.5 percent in this one component does seem as though it could translate to 4 percent for prices overall.

House prices in our neighborhood are so high that one homeowner has subleased the backyard to a research facility:

Related:

  • “Owners’ Equivalent Rent and Price Stability” (PennMutual): In 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) made a change to an integral component of inflation indexes. The adoption of owners’ equivalent rent (OER) to estimate shelter costs meant home purchases would no longer be considered a consumption expenditure but instead a capital asset or investment. OER is determined by a monthly survey of consumers who own a primary residence. The survey asks how much consumers would pay to rent instead of own their home. OER represents approximately 25% of the Consumer Price Index and 12% of personal consumption expenditures (PCE). … Why has OER exhibited such stability versus market-based measures of shelter costs? Economists have observed that owner-occupied rental estimates tend to be “sticky” relative to market-based rental costs. Homeowners tend to underestimate rent appreciation during expansionary periods and overestimate it during recessionary periods. … The idea that home purchase costs are not an expenditure but an investment is likely difficult to understand for first-time homebuyers confronted with unaffordable housing options.
  • What if you want to live in your car (on “camping mode”) instead? Tesla prices were up about 10 percent in the past few months and went up another 5 percent today (Reuters)
Full post, including comments

Shut down Facebook for public health reasons?

by philg

Facebook has been in the news lately due to testimony at the Senate by Frances Haugen (imagine how much better off the company would be if they’d never hired him/her/zir/them!). From “Here are 4 key points from the Facebook whistleblower’s testimony on Capitol Hill” (NPR):

Haugen has leaked one Facebook study that found that 13.5% of U.K. teen girls in one survey say their suicidal thoughts became more frequent after starting on Instagram.

Another leaked study found 17% of teen girls say their eating disorders got worse after using Instagram.

About 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse, Facebook’s researchers found, which was first reported by the Journal.

From Harvard’s McLean Hospital, “The Social Dilemma: Social Media and Your Mental Health”:

The platforms are designed to be addictive and are associated with anxiety, depression, and even physical ailments.

A 2018 British study tied social media use to decreased, disrupted, and delayed sleep, which is associated with depression, memory loss, and poor academic performance. Social media use can affect users’ physical health even more directly. Researchers know the connection between the mind and the gut can turn anxiety and depression into nausea, headaches, muscle tension, and tremors.

We’ve been willing to suspend or eliminate what had been considered fundamental and/or Constitutionally guaranteed rights in hopes of reducing the death rate tagged to COVID-19. Children couldn’t go to school for a year in American cities; adults couldn’t gather despite a First Amendment purportedly preventing the government from restricting their right to assemble. The potential loss of life-years from social-media-induced teen suicide is larger than whatever we might have saved via coronashutdowns (even if we assume that lockdowns and masks had some effect, COVID-19 was killing people at a median age of 82).

Why not declare that social media represents a public health emergency (Harvard re: racism as a public health crisis) and make Facebook, Instagram, et al. illegal in the U.S.? (order that ISPs block access to their IP addresses, accept a bit of leakage from Americans getting in via VPNs from the Free States of Russia, Scandinavia, etc., maybe require some FATCA-style rules so that companies are required to screen out American citizens regardless of VPN use)

Recent envy-provoking posts from Facebook friends… let’s call this one “I went to the Rolling Stones with friends while you were bored at home.”

Numerous “My kids are smiling, healthy, and happy, while yours are bratty, congested, and sulking” (variation: “My kid got into the elite college from which your kid was recently rejected”) and “I am on vacation somewhere beautiful while you are stuck at work wearing a mask 8 hours/day.”

Related:

Full post, including comments

Art Institute of Chicago reenacts Glengarry Glen Ross

by philg

“Art Institute of Chicago Ends a Docent Program, and Sets Off a Backlash” (NYT):

Museum officials decided that one area in need of an overhaul was its 60-year-old program of volunteer educators, known as docents, who greet school groups and lead tours.

So last month the board overseeing the program sent a letter to the museum’s 82 active docents — most of whom were white older women — informing the volunteers that their program was being ended. The letter said that the museum would phase in a new model relying on paid educators and volunteers “in a way that allows community members of all income levels to participate, responds to issues of class and income equity, and does not require financial flexibility to participate.”

The new plan calls for hiring paid educators — Ms. Stein invited the volunteers to apply for those positions — and then developing a new program over the next few years. In 2023, she wrote, “unpaid volunteer educators will be reintroduced via a redesigned model” that includes updated protocols for “recruitment, application, training, and assessment.” She offered the departing docents museum memberships.

A number of museums have been trying to address how to get more people of color into the hiring pipeline, in part by removing financial barriers. Organizations like the Minnesota Alliance for Volunteer Advancement encourage nonprofit and government organizations “to engage volunteers who reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of the communities they serve.” And there have been widespread calls for salary reforms, since systems that rely on unpaid volunteers and interns tend to favor those who can afford to work for little to nothing.

And a 2020 article in Slate headlined “Museums Have a Docent Problem” described what it called “the struggle to train a mostly white, unpaid tour guide corps to talk about race.”

(i.e., Karen is fired)

It might sound bizarre for an institutional that is constantly asking for donations to fire a huge volunteer staff, thus giving the appearance of having money to burn. On the other hand, David Mamet is from Chicago, so it makes sense that a Chicago institution would re-enact the famous Alec Baldwin scene from Glengarry Glen Ross in which the real estate salesmen are required to reapply for their jobs. “Put. That. Coffee. Down. Coffee’s for closers. … The good news is you’re fired. The bad news is all of you have just one week to regain your jobs. … First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.” (If the parallels are not obvious, see highlighted sections above where docents can re-apply and also where museum memberships (“steak knives”) are offered.)

Here’s the clip, in case you’re wondering about how to resolve any HR issues within our own enterprise …

Remember: “A loser is a loser.”

(I wrote the above post just before Alec Baldwin shot and killed Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust.)

Full post, including comments

My most recent Obama moment

by philg

An acquaintance who is a Hilton Platinum member was able to give an unworthy person Hilton Gold status and she selected me. At the time, I said “Now I know how Barack Obama felt when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Here’s a more recent example of unearned status/credit:

Dear Philip,

I am seeking permission to use your quote from a Schinn article as an epigraph in my upcoming book, [title regarding children, climate change, and their tender feelings]

Thank you in advance for all you do,

[author]

“Children can be frightened if they don’t know there are adults who care about climate change and are trying to fix problems. It can help battle the sense of helplessness and powerlessness.” -Philip Greenspun (Shinn, 2020)

Regular readers of this blog know how important I think it is when a frenetically consuming American speaks sincerely about his/her/zir/their pure intention to “fix problems” and heal our beloved planet. The best way to raise critical awareness is to apply a climate change bumper sticker on a 6,000 lb. pavement-melting SUV.

The quote seems to originate in “Your Guide to Talking With Kids of All Ages About Climate Change”:

Wendy Greenspun, a New York–based clinical psychologist engaged in climate issues. … Children can be frightened if they don’t know there are adults who care about climate change and are trying to fix problems,” notes Greenspun. “It can help battle the sense of helplessness and powerlessness.” Let them know that there are, in fact, millions of adults who are working to protect kids, to answer our own questions about climate change, and to figure out the steps we will take to get to where we need to be, together.

Millions of adults working to protect kids and billions of adults working to burn fossil fuels as fast as time and budget permit!

I thought that readers would appreciate my moment of Climate Sensitivity Glory!

Full post, including comments