Good morning.
People ask
what I do in retirement. Two activities
that have consumed a lot of my time come to an end this month: helping plan our 50-year high school class
reunion and the book of Krystin's writing.
The
reunion, by all accounts I've heard, was a resounding success. We who planned it were pleased.
The book will soon be available on
Amazon dot com, Diabetes Ignored: Krystin's Life. (It was supposed to be now, but somehow the
margins in the final proof got messed up, so we have to re-do it.) I am *not* suggesting that anyone buy
it. For a paperback, it's
expensive—$35—in part because there are many photos in it and in part because
it's long (my editor and I—mostly my editor—trimmed ~2400 pages down to ~800). I make very little money on it and it would
require far more sales than I expect for me to break even on the cost of
preparing it. But making money was never
the objective. Krystin always wanted to
be published, and while this book is hardly what she had in mind, it achieves
her goal posthumously. It has occurred
to me recently that of all the members of my family, back for as many
generations as I know, Krystin will have by far the most well-documented
life. She'd be pleased, I'm sure, that
something was published that conveys the lessons she wished others to learn;
whether this book is what she would have wanted we will never know.
So now it's
time to get on to the next chapter in retirement. At this moment I have no idea what it will
bring, other than teaching a few people to play bridge and playing the game
myself from time to time. But that is
*not* going to be my major activity in life.
Unfortunately, one minor but recurring activity is
"downsizing," which mostly consists of putting things in xerox boxes
and labeling them "Items for Elliott."
* * *
A response to my last message: "On the topic of valetudinary
conversations, a friend of mine recently noted that encounters with friends of
like age normally begin with the 'organ recital,' i.e., which organs are still
working and which not."
* * *
I forgot to
mention a topic of conversation that arose during our trip to Door County. We somehow got on the topic of sunken ships
and were wondering how many such ships there are in Lake Superior. I couldn't find an estimate for Lake Superior
alone, but the estimates of the number of ships lying on the bottom of one of
the five Great Lakes range from 6,000 to >25,000. "The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum
approximates 6,000 ships and 30,000 lives lost, while historian and mariner
Mark Thompson has estimated that the total number of wrecks is likely more than
25,000." Thompson wrote a book on
the subject titled Graveyard of the Lakes.
Now
contemplate the number of sunken ships in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. World Wars I and II contributed a few. So, I imagine, did European exploration of
North and South America.
* * *
Apropos of
my grousing about restaurant food portions being much too large, this BBC
headline was posted on September 10:
"Restaurants urged to serve us less food."
* * *
I was struck
by a few paragraphs in a short piece written by Michael Shermer titled
"Genes, Environment, and Luck: What We Can and Cannot Control."
Let’s begin with a question: Why do
some people succeed in life while others fail? Is it because they are naturally
smarter and harder working, or is it because they were raised to be ambitious
and disciplined, or could it be that they were simply lucky along the way and
got all the good breaks? For centuries, philosophers, theologians, scholars,
and ordinary people have speculated on these and related questions, for
example, why there are class differences between people, why some people seem
to have more power, wealth, and privilege than others, and what’s the best way
to structure political and economic systems in order to create a fair and just
society in the teeth of such obvious inequalities of natural ability, drive,
and chance.
As with so many issues today, these
are not ideological-free questions. Conservatives, for example, tend to embrace
a Just World Theory of how lives turn out: If you are rich and successful, it
is because you are hard working, intelligent, creative, risk-taking, and justly
rewarded with happiness for your discipline and self-control; if you are poor,
it is because you are lazy, ignorant, unimaginative, risk-averse and duly
punished with unhappiness for your lack of will power and self-persuasion. In
other words, for conservatives, the world is already just, so any injustices
are the result of the natural order of things, which should be left well alone.
People get what they deserve, so a just society is one in which there are equal
opportunities for natural inequalities to form, so let the chips fall where
they may.
By contrast, liberals tend to hold
an Unjust World Theory of how lives turn out: If you are successful, it is
because you were fortunate to be born in a stable family that inculcated into
you the virtues that produce behaviors that translate into hard work,
creativity, and risk-taking, and you were nourished along the way by people who
enabled your success, or at forks in the career road were nudged down the right
path by well-connected friends or family; for those people who did not have the
good fortune to have been born into wealth, stable families, nurturing
communities, and safe environments, we have a moral obligation to alter society
in a manner to level the playing field and to allow all members of our
community or society to flourish to the best of their natural talents.
These differences in how
conservatives and liberals see the world very much determines their attitudes
toward social policies that effects how lives turn out for the citizens of a
society . . . and these differences account for the different positions people
hold on a number of seemingly unrelated social issues, such as immigration,
health care, welfare, taxes, criminal justice reform, police, and war.
I don't
agree with Schermer's label of a liberal point of view; a more accurate one, in
my opinion, would be along the lines of "Lucky Parents World Theory." If you are lucky enough to have parents with
sufficient income, live in the right place, go to good schools, and inherit at
least modest smarts, you'll likely do well in the world. If you aren't, the odds are stacked against
you. I don't need to elaborate on
Schermer's dichotomy, other than to add that I think in general he's correct,
but I will make this claim: Social
science research for the last 50+ years seems to me to come down squarely on
the side of his "Unjust World Theory." The "Just World Theory" is
ideological, not data-driven. The
research suggests a number of public policies that those with the "Just
World" view find anathema.
In that
same vein, I saw a short excerpt from Robert Bellah's "The Protestant
Structure of American Culture" (2002). "In it . . . , Bellah worries that the
cultural legacy of Protestantism is an individualism that destroys the idea of
the common good and leaves nothing but the thought that 'what I have is mine,
and it's mine because I deserve it, and I have a right to it.'" So one might say that the "Just World
Theory" is also divinely ordained.
Or some would perhaps argue.
* * *
This
research confirms my long-standing suspicion, a suspicion I've held since I was
a grad student in psychology several decades ago. A group of researchers at the University of
Liverpool did a careful study of "five key chapters of the latest edition
of the widely used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), on 'schizophrenia',
'bipolar disorder', 'depressive disorders', 'anxiety disorders' and
'trauma-related disorders'." Their
conclusions were blunt:
Psychiatric diagnoses all use
different decision-making rules
There is a huge amount of overlap
in symptoms between diagnoses
Almost all diagnoses mask the role
of trauma and adverse events
Diagnoses tell us little about the
individual patient and what treatment they need
The authors conclude that
diagnostic labelling represents 'a disingenuous categorical system'.
Or, in different words, "Although diagnostic labels create
the illusion of an explanation they are scientifically meaningless and can
create stigma and prejudice. I hope these findings will encourage mental health
professionals to think beyond diagnoses and consider other explanations of
mental distress, such as trauma and other adverse life experiences." And, "This study provides yet more
evidence that the biomedical diagnostic approach in psychiatry is not fit for
purpose. Diagnoses frequently and uncritically reported as 'real illnesses' are
in fact made on the basis of internally inconsistent, confused and
contradictory patterns of largely arbitrary criteria."
I'm not
railing against seeing a psychotherapist for whatever travails you face in
life. I believe they help. I've known many people (including me) who
have been aided by such professionals.
The confusion and danger lies in analogizing psychiatric difficulties
with measles and mumps.
* * *
In what
might seem the theater of the absurd, except I think it's not, I sent a short
note to the leadership of Securian Financial Group (which is where my U of M
retirement funds reside). I asked if
they were taking into account the possibility that if Mr. Trump wins
re-election, California (or perhaps the entire west coast) moves to
secede. I suggested that New York might
follow suit, and that the threat to Securian (and a large number of other
business entities) was significant. The
reply message was that in their business planning, they try constantly to
monitor situations that affect Securian.
Yeah, sure, but I bet that possibility wasn't part of their
projections. Probably still isn't,
despite my message. But I believe I am
correct to suggest that it is measurably larger than a non-zero probability.
* * *
Based only
on personal experience, after many years I have come to the conclusion that
bankers are generally not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. Apologies to anyone whose a banker who reads
this; maybe you're an exception. I
discussed this point with my friend Kevin, who later sent me this message.
The following quote is from a book
review of The Big Short from the NYT -
But it took Wall Street chief
executives, a bunch of feckless dolts, to light the bonfire. The Merrill Lynch
C.E.O. Stanley O'Neal, taking a break from his frequent golf games, was
completely surprised in the summer of 2007 when he learned Merrill was stuck
with $48 billion of collateralized debt obligations it couldn't sell. Chuck
Prince, the chief executive of Citigroup, wrote a shareholder letter in early
2007 in which "he devoted precisely two sentences to credit markets,
which, he forecast, without elaboration, would most likely suffer 'moderate
deterioration' in 2007." Farce turned into tragedy in the summer and fall
of 2008 when the chief executives were forced to band together to save
themselves, one another and the system.
Feckless dolts indeed.
And from what I read in the news lately, not much has changed.
* * *
A question that has occurred to me
from time to time was also the title of a recent little piece that I read: "How Far Back in Time Could a Modern
English Speaker Go and Still Communicate Effectively?" by Daven Hiskey.
To go as
far back as possible, you of course have to go to England. Hiskey points out that even today, "there
are a shocking number of dialects of English in England alone despite being a
relatively small area. Some of these dialects are even difficult for a general
modern English speaker to understand fully if the people that are speaking them
aren't interested in modifying their speech so you can understand them." The situation doesn't improve if you go back
in time. If, however, you interact only
with the upper classes, you could go back a considerable way.
English, as
many know, is a random accumulation of influences so there's almost no logic to
it. There is Old English, from the 8th
and 9th centuries. There is
the impact of the Viking invasions during that time as well, adding Old
Norse. Then the Norman invaded, under
William the Conqueror, in 1066, bringing Norman French as the court language;
that French gradually spread and added many words to what became modern
English.
Hisken
provides this example from the 9th century:
Brytene igland is ehta hund mila
lang and twa hund mila brad, and her synd on þam iglande fif geþeodu, Ænglisc,
Brytwylsc, Scottysc, Pihttisc and Boclæden.
In modern English, this translates
to:
The island Britain is 800 miles
long, and 200 miles broad. And there are in the island five nations; English,
Welsh, Scottish, Pictish, and Latin.
The language of the Normans
trickled down to the masses and vice-versa, adding a whole host of words to
English, which starts to give us more of the vocabulary we are used to today.
This and some other changes to the language that occurred at this time all
combined bring us to Middle English, which spanned around the 12th through the
15th centuries, the latter of which is also generally considered to be when the
so-called "medieval times" ended.
The 14th
century is when Chaucer was writing. I
have tried to read him in the original and get nowhere. However, it would have been possible to
communicate on some level, but Hisken reports that language before the
"Great Vowel Shift," which took place "primarily from around the
mid-14th century through the 16th century or so. In a nutshell, this is where
the pronunciation of various vowels in English changed considerably." So before that great shift, even though the
words would have borne some similarity to modern English, pronunciation would
have been quite different, so a conversation would have been difficult.
After the
Great Vowel Shift comes Shakespeare and the King James Bible, which most educated
people can understand. Personally, I
find the KJV of the bible easier than Shakespeare unless I'm reading the
latter. So, especially if you went to
London and mingled with the well-to-do and elite, you'd be able to carry on a
conversation beginning in the middle of the 16th century or after.
Take your
time machine back to the late 1500s and you're OK; much earlier than that and
you'd be confronted with a largely foreign tongue.
* * *
As my
Facebook friends know, our beloved Bela died overnight. Of our three cats—of all the cats I've owned—Bela
had the liveliest personality and even had a sense of humor. He did not eat for 10 days, although he
occasionally sipped water, and, no surprise, slowly lost energy. I took him to the vet three times over that
10 days, but to no avail; none of the meds had any effect on his unwillingness
to eat. The appetite stimulants didn't
stimulate. The only saving grace was
that we were able to give him painkillers, so whatever it was that ailed him at
least didn't cause him great pain. We
were out for the evening last night; when we got home, Bela was barely
responsive to my attention. So I lay
with him on a sofa until 3:00 a.m., at which point he was still breathing but
unresponsive. I went to bed; when we
awoke this morning, he was dead, and in exactly the position I had left him. So we lost a good little buddy. He's now safely buried deeply in the back
yard.
With warm
regards—
Gary
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