Here.
Wednesday, December 27, 2017
Sunday, December 24, 2017
BOOK LIST CY2017
BOOK LIST YEAR END 2017
Highlights from 2017 reading. (For my business strategy blog, Discoveries in Health Policy, click here).
Discussed are:
Discussed are:
Society and Politics
The
Second Coming of the KKK. Linda Gordon.
Liverwright (2017).
Win
Bigly: Persuasion in the World Where Facts Don’t Matter. Scott Adams.
Portfolio (2017).
The
Vanishing American Adult. Sen. Ben
Sasse. St Martin’s (2017).
The
Second World Wars. Victor Davis
Hanson. Basic Books (2017).
Business and Industry Strategy
The
Power of Little Ideas: A low-risk, high reward approach to innovation. David Robertson. Harvard (2017).
Capitalism
Without Capital: The rise of the intangible economy. Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake. Princeton (2017).
History of Medicine
Flesh
and Blood: Organ transplantation and blood transfusion in 20th
Century America. Susan E. Lederer.
Oxford, 2008.
Community
Genetics and Genetic Alliances: Eugenics, Carrier Testing, and Networks of
Risk. Aviad E. Raz. Routledge (2009).
Hitler’s
American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. James Q. Whitman. Princeton (2017).
Lab Industry
Utilization
Management in the Clinical Laboratory and Other Ancillary Services. Kent Lewandrowski & Patrick M.
Sluss. Springer (2016).
Fiction
HHHH
(2012) and Seventh
Function of Language (2017). Both by
Laurent Binet, translated from the French.
Based
on a True Story, Norm MacDonald. Random House (2017).
* * ANNOTATIONS * *
Society and Politics
The
Second Coming of the KKK. Linda Gordon.
Liverwright (2017).
Gordon tells the American history of the KKK from about 1910 to 1935, which she looks back on as the “second coming” (the first being the Reconstruction Era). Racism promoted by the KKK was respectable in front page news, the KKK could hold happy thousand-member family picnics in the city park,. And Jim Crow laws flourished. Immigration was dialed way back. Gordon’s story includes the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots against Latin-Americans in 1943 while she gives reasons for the decline of the KKK "bubble" through the 30's and 40's.
Gordon tells the American history of the KKK from about 1910 to 1935, which she looks back on as the “second coming” (the first being the Reconstruction Era). Racism promoted by the KKK was respectable in front page news, the KKK could hold happy thousand-member family picnics in the city park,. And Jim Crow laws flourished. Immigration was dialed way back. Gordon’s story includes the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots against Latin-Americans in 1943 while she gives reasons for the decline of the KKK "bubble" through the 30's and 40's.
For me a particularly interesting part of the book lays out
KKK as a business; almost a pyramid scheme in sales of memberships, costumes,
books, and other commissions and incentives. The KK was a business. An incredibly elaborate set of rituals and impenetrable secret terminology
developed, like (e.g.) Scientology and the Masons.
Win
Bigly: Persuasion in the World Where Facts Don’t Matter. Scott Adams. Portfolio (2017).
Scott Adams, the cartoonist famed for Dilbert, studied
Donald Trump’s rise and use of the media closely. In this book, Adams analyzes with great
insight many aspects of the President’s use of communications, word order,
allusion, and distraction. It has 70%
five star reviews on Amazon (265 reviews) as of December.
For a much shorter view of our electoral process, see the parody of a scene that made Episode 1 of the HBO Newsroom series famous. The parody is Jeff Daniels’ “Will McAvoy” take on 2016 election (1.5M views on Youtube, here.) If you don't already know it, there have been 7M views for the original 2012 scene as shown on HBO, here.
For a much shorter view of our electoral process, see the parody of a scene that made Episode 1 of the HBO Newsroom series famous. The parody is Jeff Daniels’ “Will McAvoy” take on 2016 election (1.5M views on Youtube, here.) If you don't already know it, there have been 7M views for the original 2012 scene as shown on HBO, here.
The
Vanishing American Adult. Sen.
Ben Sasse. St Martin’s (2017).
I had the chance to meet Sasse in 2008, when I wrote a whitepaper on genomics reimbursement policy on commission from HHS. Very
sharp guy.
In this book – where he cites Rousseau and Voltaire a lot more than the average Congressman – he discusses an America given to far over to short term wins, tweets, and TV. The showpiece anecdote occurred when he was a college president a few years ago, and a roomful of bright 18 and 19 year olds decorated a Christmas tree up to just above eye level, and quit and left because they didn’t have a ladder. Tip: I enjoyed the audiobook; read by the Senator.
In this book – where he cites Rousseau and Voltaire a lot more than the average Congressman – he discusses an America given to far over to short term wins, tweets, and TV. The showpiece anecdote occurred when he was a college president a few years ago, and a roomful of bright 18 and 19 year olds decorated a Christmas tree up to just above eye level, and quit and left because they didn’t have a ladder. Tip: I enjoyed the audiobook; read by the Senator.
The
Second World Wars. Victor Davis
Hanson. Basic Books (2017).
Just out in late 2017, Hanson (of Stanford’s Hoover Institute)
undertakes a masterful technologically and economically oriented view of how
World War II played out on many fronts. Germans believed their own propaganda and underestimated the impact of
lacking a Navy and lacking good sources of oil.
Podcast by author, here. His integrated but multi-faceted approach reminds me of favorite author George Friedman (wiki here) whose book on 9/11 I read in 2005 and have never forgotten. (E.g., terrorists wanted the biggest planes with only one aisle).
Podcast by author, here. His integrated but multi-faceted approach reminds me of favorite author George Friedman (wiki here) whose book on 9/11 I read in 2005 and have never forgotten. (E.g., terrorists wanted the biggest planes with only one aisle).
Hanson’s work is an important antidote to the
fantasy that with willpower alone anything is possible and reality is – well, not
real.
Business and Industry Strategy
The
Power of Little Ideas: A low-risk, high reward approach to innovation. David Robertson. Harvard (2017).
It’s hard to be entirely original writing anywhere in the
business space, but it’s often helpful to see perspectives well-told and with
new examples.
Robertson first poses a dichotomy between “radical innovation”
(e.g. Uber) and “incremental innovation” (e.g. the 7th or 8th
iPhone). He then builds his book on examples of a middle
path and gives many examples, the prototype being GoPro. GoPro’s cameras were no better, more sporty,
or more durable than Sony’s, but GoPro had an integrated product,
attachment, and social media system that went totally over the heads of Sony
product marketers or engineers. And their GoPro sports camera soared far past the sales of Sony's.
(I directly built on this perspective in writing
a publication this year on “Lab 3.0” in which labs like NAVICAN are hoping to build wide networks of allied products around their genomic offering, such as virtual
tumor boards and virtual genetic counselors and virtual patient navigators toward
clinical trials.)
Capitalism
Without Capital: The rise of the intangible economy. Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake. Princeton (2017).
This is the most exciting business book I have read in several years and I finished it in a day.
Since I was in MBA school in the early 2000s, there have been a proliferation of books on the valuation of “intangible capital” which is historically and thinly recognized as “goodwill” in M&A transactions (as opposed to property and plant and inventory.) What Haskel and Westlake do here is to take this reality and project it forward for its widespread and often unforeseen effects on business and industry structure, sort of a Ronald Coates “Theory of the Firm” through the lens and pivot point of intangible capital. For Haskel and Westlake, intangible property and investments are not just another chapter in a valuation textbook, but rather, a new lens through which to view the economy and its industries. You'll come away with the impression that analyzing an industry or an economy without separately viewing its intangibles is like doing physics without algebra and calculus.
The book has a two minute overview on Youtube, here; see also multiple hour length interviews with the authors such as this one here. For a review in the Guardian, here. For a predecessor book that was a big influence on me in B-school in 2000, Hal Varian's "Information Rules," a classic from 1998.
Since I was in MBA school in the early 2000s, there have been a proliferation of books on the valuation of “intangible capital” which is historically and thinly recognized as “goodwill” in M&A transactions (as opposed to property and plant and inventory.) What Haskel and Westlake do here is to take this reality and project it forward for its widespread and often unforeseen effects on business and industry structure, sort of a Ronald Coates “Theory of the Firm” through the lens and pivot point of intangible capital. For Haskel and Westlake, intangible property and investments are not just another chapter in a valuation textbook, but rather, a new lens through which to view the economy and its industries. You'll come away with the impression that analyzing an industry or an economy without separately viewing its intangibles is like doing physics without algebra and calculus.
The book has a two minute overview on Youtube, here; see also multiple hour length interviews with the authors such as this one here. For a review in the Guardian, here. For a predecessor book that was a big influence on me in B-school in 2000, Hal Varian's "Information Rules," a classic from 1998.
History of Medicine
Flesh
and Blood: Organ transplantation and blood transfusion in 20th
Century America. Susan E. Lederer.
Oxford, 2008.
Community
Genetics and Genetic Alliances: Eugenics, Carrier Testing, and Networks of
Risk. Aviad E. Raz. Routledge (2009).
I read these two books together in January/February 2017,
when I was working on a project that resulted in a two AMA CPT genomic code for
panethnic carrier screening tests. In
Flesh and Blood, Lederer recounts the history of transfusion in the United
States in part – and memorably – against the background of race. (For example, until the early 1970s, and not so
long before I started medical school, all Louisiana blood units had to be labeled
as White, Negroid, or Mongoloid.)
Raz, a professor of health policy in Tel Aviv, does a deep-dive review of how different parts of society shape and respond to and control genetic testing, such as fetal and carrier screening. For example, the uptake of amniotic screening in Israel varies by a huge amount depending on religious group, while the uptake of carrier genetic screening is widespread.
Raz, a professor of health policy in Tel Aviv, does a deep-dive review of how different parts of society shape and respond to and control genetic testing, such as fetal and carrier screening. For example, the uptake of amniotic screening in Israel varies by a huge amount depending on religious group, while the uptake of carrier genetic screening is widespread.
Hitler’s
American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. James Q. Whitman. Princeton (2017).
Although this sounds like a political rather than a medical
book, and it is, I’m placing it with the other two because the Nazi
anti-Semitic race laws were closely and clearly modeled on principles of biology and race.
And the newly minted Nazi laws of the mid 1930s were based on America’s race laws against African Americans, Native Americans, and in some cases Asians. Nazi posters in the late 1930s proudly showed flags of all the other nations with eugenics and miscegenation laws (including prominently the US; see A Mind AtPlay about Claude Shannon, the chapter about the Cold Spring Harbor national eugenics institute.) German anti-marriage laws, anti-education laws, anti-housing laws, anti-professional or anti-employment laws all had legal parallels in the U.S., where they lasted generations longer. In some U.S. states, blacks couldn't join the AMA (which required joining a state association) until 1970.
Racial laws were based on a biological or biomedical foundation and these were half of the German “Blood and Soil” motife: blood meant racial eugenics and soil meant geopolitics.
And the newly minted Nazi laws of the mid 1930s were based on America’s race laws against African Americans, Native Americans, and in some cases Asians. Nazi posters in the late 1930s proudly showed flags of all the other nations with eugenics and miscegenation laws (including prominently the US; see A Mind AtPlay about Claude Shannon, the chapter about the Cold Spring Harbor national eugenics institute.) German anti-marriage laws, anti-education laws, anti-housing laws, anti-professional or anti-employment laws all had legal parallels in the U.S., where they lasted generations longer. In some U.S. states, blacks couldn't join the AMA (which required joining a state association) until 1970.
Racial laws were based on a biological or biomedical foundation and these were half of the German “Blood and Soil” motife: blood meant racial eugenics and soil meant geopolitics.
A footnote led me to find several books by Nazi attorney, academic and theoretician Johannes Stoye (my blog on Stoye here). When Nazi protesters in leafy city parks in the U.S. chant, “Blood and Soil!” it is a direct, dagger-like message coming out of center-of-the-bullseye high Nazism.
For more on American bioracial laws see The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein and the chapter on US race laws in Bowker's "Sorting Things Out." For NPR on race in medicine in 2016, here; for NYT in 2017, here.
Lab Industry
Utilization
Management in the Clinical Laboratory and Other Ancillary Services. Kent Lewandrowski & Patrick M.
Sluss. Springer (2016).
This book is fascinating and especially timely. To interpret the book using a terminology I
tried out in a recent article, the authors insist that a successful lab today must
leave behind “Lab 1.0” (my term; sample in, report out) and become “Lab 2.0”
which is closely integrated into its Accountable Care Organization, Value Based
Medicine, and Value Creation environment.
An interesting exercise is to imagine how little of this book
would have been written 20 or 30 years ago, and to wonder how a third or fourth
edition 20 years in the future might look.
Fiction
HHHH
(2012) and Seventh
Function of Language (2017).
Both by Laurent Binet, translated from the French.
I don’t read much fiction but I stumbled across Seventh
Function of Language and enjoyed it so much I backtracked to HHHH. Laurent Binet is a very creative French
author. I took in both of these novels mostly as audiobooks, and both had narrators that "got" the dry humor. (Amazon offers coordinated ebook and audiobook formats.)
In Seventh Function of Language, Binet parodies the
style of a crime novel where a middle-rank homicide cop on the French force, a
character right out of Raymond Chandler, is confronted with the possible murder
of a French academic linguist from the Sorbonne. A mix of real and fictional characters
intersect (Lacan, Roland Barthes, Sartre, Foucault, etc.) Favorite line (during a winter trip to a
college conference in suburban Ithaca at Cornell: something like: “As usual, Foucault had rapidly found an S&M gay bar in the most unlikely of neighborhoods.”) Another sign of the parody is that the
homicide detective (normally the Sherlock Holmes role) has a lot going over his head, while his
sidekick assistant (a Sorbonne postdoc) picks up or predicts exotically subtle clues four steps
in advance.
In HHHH, Binet’s first novel, you get a full
length historical novel about Nazi leader Heinhard Heinrich, who ruled parts of Eastern Europe during its occupation. But the setting is
a multi level novel where the author’s insecure voice often intrudes on the narrative whether
for a parenthetical sentence or a whole chapter. (As a character picks up a historical letter, the
author apologizes in a footnote that he can’t tell us what the letter says
because he lost his Xerox of it made during his research in a Warsaw archive.)
Based
on a True Story, Norm MacDonald.
Random House (2017).
A riotous and often willfully fictionalized “autobiography”
of the famed comic. Get the
audiobook, read by author. Died laughing. If you like dry humor veering into Alice in Wonderland fantasy sometimes, this is a winner. [Postscript, I must have read in December 2016, as it see it on last year's list too, but I'm leaving it here as well. It has 413 favorable reviews on Amazon.]
NEVER GOT TO YET; FOR
2018…
- Naked to the Bone: Medical imaging in the 20th Century. Bettyann Holtzman Kevles.
- The Sum of Small Things: A theory of the aspirational class. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett.
- Dream Hoarders: How the American upper middle class is leaving everyone else in the dust, why that is a problem, and what to do about it. Richard V. Reeves.
- Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History. Kurt Anderson.
- Moneyball Medicine: Thriving in the new data-driven healthcare market. Harry Glorikian.
- Pair: Shrinks: Untold Story of Psychiatry [Jeffrey Lieberman], and Mental Health Inc. [Art Levine.] Stimulated by hearing about the most effective RCT study of pharmacogenetics in clinical psychiatry, Bradley et al., 2017, here.
In addition, Podcasts
are increasingly relevant and important.
Some tech & business favorites in CY2017 included: In healthcare: a16z, Tech Tonics, Mendelspod; for business in general: Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman, Success! How I Did It,
How I Built This with Guy Raz; HBR Ideacast.
Footnote: Re: Capitalism without Capital, a similar slightly earlier book might be "Knowledge and Power, Information theory of capitalism and how it is revolutionizing our world," 2013, George Gilder. Seen but not read.
___
Backfiles.
https://tinyurl.com/bqbooks2017
Sunday, December 10, 2017
Corny Old Doctor Joke
An old geezer became bored in retirement and decided to
open a medical clinic.
He put a sign up outside that said: "Dr.Geezer's clinic. Get your treatment for $500, if not cured, get back $1,000."
Doctor "Young," who was positive that this old geezer didn't know beans about medicine, thought this would be a great opportunity to get $1,000. So he went to Dr. Geezer's clinic.
Dr. Young: "Dr. Geezer, I have lost all taste in my mouth. Can you please help me ??"
Dr. Geezer: "Nurse, please bring medicine from box 22 and put 3 drops in Dr. Young's mouth."
Dr. Young: Aaagh !! -- "This is Gasoline!"
Dr. Geezer: "Congratulations! You've got your taste back. That will be $500."
He put a sign up outside that said: "Dr.Geezer's clinic. Get your treatment for $500, if not cured, get back $1,000."
Doctor "Young," who was positive that this old geezer didn't know beans about medicine, thought this would be a great opportunity to get $1,000. So he went to Dr. Geezer's clinic.
Dr. Young: "Dr. Geezer, I have lost all taste in my mouth. Can you please help me ??"
Dr. Geezer: "Nurse, please bring medicine from box 22 and put 3 drops in Dr. Young's mouth."
Dr. Young: Aaagh !! -- "This is Gasoline!"
Dr. Geezer: "Congratulations! You've got your taste back. That will be $500."
Dr. Young gets annoyed and goes back after a
couple of days figuring to recover his money.
Dr. Young: "I have lost my memory, I cannot remember anything."
Dr. Geezer: "Nurse, please bring medicine from box 22 and put 3 drops in the patient's mouth."
Dr. Young: "Oh, no you don't -- that is Gasoline!"
Dr. Geezer: "Congratulations! You've got your memory back. That will be $500."
Dr. Young: "I have lost my memory, I cannot remember anything."
Dr. Geezer: "Nurse, please bring medicine from box 22 and put 3 drops in the patient's mouth."
Dr. Young: "Oh, no you don't -- that is Gasoline!"
Dr. Geezer: "Congratulations! You've got your memory back. That will be $500."
Dr. Young (after having lost $1000) leaves
angrily and comes back after several more days.
Dr. Young: "My eyesight has become weak - I can hardly see anything!!!!
Dr. Geezer: "Well, I don't have any medicine for that so, here's your $1000 back." (giving him a $10 bill)
Dr. Young: "But this is only $10!"
Dr. Geezer: "Congratulations! You got your vision back! That will be $500."
Dr. Young: "My eyesight has become weak - I can hardly see anything!!!!
Dr. Geezer: "Well, I don't have any medicine for that so, here's your $1000 back." (giving him a $10 bill)
Dr. Young: "But this is only $10!"
Dr. Geezer: "Congratulations! You got your vision back! That will be $500."
Wednesday, December 6, 2017
Monday, November 20, 2017
Unfortunate Juxtaposition Department
Unfortunate Juxtaposition Department
Which is the unfortunate juxtaposition? Charlie Rose and Louis C.K.? Or Louis C.K. leering at 84-year-old Carol Burnett?
Tweet version.
Which is the unfortunate juxtaposition? Charlie Rose and Louis C.K.? Or Louis C.K. leering at 84-year-old Carol Burnett?
Tweet version.
Nonagenarian Documentaries Nobody Should Miss
November 19, 2017
I had a really nice LA experience Saturday night. I had seen a bit of press about a documentary about ROSE MARIE (who played the woman writer on Dick Van Dyke Show). I hadn't paid much attention. Then I saw a listing in LA WEEKLY for a showing at Egyptian Theater with (expectedly) Dick van Dyke and Rose Mary (both mid-90s.) I went up to it. (Though I couldn't drag along any family members.)
The film itself was REALLY good, and titled "WAIT FOR YOUR LAUGH." Rose Marie had an incredible life, from a 4 year old child star to being a big Vegas act in the early 50s to her mid 60s TV career. She's still alert at 94.
The documentary itself was REALLY well done, much better than I expected.
When it was over, a huge roar of applause from the sold-out media audience at the 1920s movie palace theater. Dick Van Dyke and the director were interviewed by someone from LA Times afterward.
The documentary itself was REALLY well done, much better than I expected.
When it was over, a huge roar of applause from the sold-out media audience at the 1920s movie palace theater. Dick Van Dyke and the director were interviewed by someone from LA Times afterward.
Really enjoyable.
Website here
The trailer is here
Other Nonagenarian Documentaries
My longstanding favorite nonagenarian biopic is LES PAUL: CHASING SOUND, Les Paul was a self educated (?fourth grade drop out) electric guitar genius, electronics inventor, and very, very creative musician in the 40s and 50s. Still around when the film was made ten years ago at age 90. I highly recommend. It seems to stream for free on Youtube.
My longstanding favorite nonagenarian biopic is LES PAUL: CHASING SOUND, Les Paul was a self educated (?fourth grade drop out) electric guitar genius, electronics inventor, and very, very creative musician in the 40s and 50s. Still around when the film was made ten years ago at age 90. I highly recommend. It seems to stream for free on Youtube.
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
The Bill O'Reilly and Miscellaneous Lesser Quatrains (October 2017)
Megan Kelly calls O'Reilly
A goon and a jerk,
He says she turned down
His offer to twerk.
No harm, no foul!
Says Bill O'Reilly.
You're less hot, says Megyn,
That John Le Carre's Smiley.
No harm, no foul!
Says Bill O'Reilly.
Leonard Bernstein Centenary -
Lays a trap for musicians unwary.
Nothing brings one to one's knees
Faster than those awful symphonies.
Leonard Bernstein Centennielle
Music from heaven, music from hell.
He wrote the score for West Side Story,
But never for Edward's Amphigorey.
___
Tim Burton just turned 59,
He was an early starter.
But his relationship didn't last
With Helen Bonham-Carter.
Time Burton danced and partied the night -
Strike up the music, strike up the bands.
But the piano's shape was quite a fright
After three pieces by Edward Scissorhands.
_____
Political Comment
___
My poems are getting better and better!
If I enter a contest, I might win a sweater.
I might win a sweater, or even a coat.
And then I'd beam and preen and gloat.
____
Whose woods these are, I think I know
He plays golf in the village below.
He will not see me putting here,
Or driving with his woods so dear.
_____
A goon and a jerk,
He says she turned down
His offer to twerk.
No harm, no foul!
Says Bill O'Reilly.
You're less hot, says Megyn,
That John Le Carre's Smiley.
No harm, no foul!
Says Bill O'Reilly.
You're unpleasant, says Megyn,
And bilious and bile-y.
No harm, no foul!
Says Bill O'Reilly.
Says Bill O'Reilly.
You're less sexy, says Megyn,
Than poo in a piley.
Bill O'Reilly inhabits a swamp primeval.
Where women grunt and sew and weaval.
Where female equality hasn't begint,
And Cupid's arrows are tipped with flint.
Said the women of Fox,
"Bill, stop calling us 'Toots!' "
And they pitched in to buy him,
A swimming pool, and concrete boots.
___
Lays a trap for musicians unwary.
Nothing brings one to one's knees
Faster than those awful symphonies.
Leonard Bernstein Centennielle
Music from heaven, music from hell.
He wrote the score for West Side Story,
But never for Edward's Amphigorey.
___
Tim Burton just turned 59,
He was an early starter.
But his relationship didn't last
With Helen Bonham-Carter.
Time Burton danced and partied the night -
Strike up the music, strike up the bands.
But the piano's shape was quite a fright
After three pieces by Edward Scissorhands.
_____
Political Comment
Drop the bombs and rape and pillage
Every last Potemkin Village.
Cut the taxes for the rich,
And blow the candle on one last death wish.
___
My poems are getting better and better!
If I enter a contest, I might win a sweater.
I might win a sweater, or even a coat.
And then I'd beam and preen and gloat.
____
Whose woods these are, I think I know
He plays golf in the village below.
He will not see me putting here,
Or driving with his woods so dear.
_____
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
The Harvey Weinstein Quatrains
Harvey Weinstein's not so bad -
He's not a cad, the frisky lad.
Just let him grope, or else he'll mope,
And you won't work on any soap.
Harvey Weinstein caught the girl,
and fondled her, and made her hurl.
Massage demanded, nothing got -
He fired her, his parting shot.
Harvey Weinstein, tongue in cheek -
The cheek was hers, it made her shriek.
Harvey Weinstein didn't mind
Harassing every girl he'd find.
He felt there was no harm in trying,
And evaded the police by lying.
From Shakespeare in Love to Kill Bill 3,
Pulp Fiction, Clerks, and Apollo 13.
The Founder, Django, and The Aviator -
They'd all feed Harvey to an alligator.
Harvey Weinstein
Thought himself virile and racy.
But he was creepier
Than John Wayne Gacy.
He's not a cad, the frisky lad.
Just let him grope, or else he'll mope,
And you won't work on any soap.
Harvey Weinstein caught the girl,
and fondled her, and made her hurl.
Massage demanded, nothing got -
He fired her, his parting shot.
Harvey Weinstein, tongue in cheek -
The cheek was hers, it made her shriek.
Harvey Weinstein didn't mind
Harassing every girl he'd find.
He felt there was no harm in trying,
And evaded the police by lying.
From Shakespeare in Love to Kill Bill 3,
Pulp Fiction, Clerks, and Apollo 13.
The Founder, Django, and The Aviator -
They'd all feed Harvey to an alligator.
Harvey Weinstein
Thought himself virile and racy.
But he was creepier
Than John Wayne Gacy.
Friday, October 13, 2017
Simchat Torah 10/2017
Beverly Hills synagogue closest out High Holy Days 2017, with Simchat Torah and a lively Klezmer Band, live-streaming online in the Shabbat Music Artists Series. Don't miss the: Pizza and pie.
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Sunday, October 8, 2017
Two Creative Novels by Laurent Binet
Author is Laurent Binet, a French author who has now published two novels. In both cases I listened about 70% as audiobook and 30% as reading as I had the Kindle joint text/audio option. In both cases, the English translations by Sam Taylor are a delight.
THE SEVENTH FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE is a comic novel in which a gruff French detective is investigating the death of Roland Barthes in 1980, who was actually killed by a laundry truck, and actually after having had lunch with Francois Mitterand. Unfortunately, all the persons of interest are semiologists, linguists, philosophers, existentialists, etc, which drives the policeman batty. He gets a postdoc assigned to him, it what is clearly a sidekick type role like Dr Watson. However, here it is the postdoc who is the "genius" making brilliant detections like Sherlock Holmes. The two also have cause to roam about Europe, Rome, Venice, attend a conference at Cornell, etc. One of the characters develops a suspicious around 2/3 through that he may be a character in a novel.
HHHH was his first novel. Ostensibly, it is a detailed historical novel about how two fighters in the Czech resistance actually assassinated the Nazi leader for Prague, Reinhard Heydrich, who was also an author of the Holocaust plan. However, the author spends variably a LOT of time talking to the reader about what he is doing, how his research is going, and so on. Sometimes a chapter is all in the voice of the author, and sometimes the voice of the author just shows up once in the middle of a chapter in a parenthetical. (Along the lines of, "I couldn't find out the name of the bridge they are crossing, despite weeks of research." "I can't quote the letter he is handing him, because I lost my xerox of it after I left the Warsaw archive last year.") HHHH is not a "comic" novel but it is an interesting and creative one.
I believe a movie was made based on HHHH but it is a normal "straight" movie only about the actual events in 1942 or 43.
Footnote
Another novel where the author talks to the reader, primarily in footnotes, is The French Lieutenant's Woman, (book 1969, film 1981). It was made into a movie and in the movie, they recreated this double perspective by having the characters be actors in a movie, so half the film is "inside" the historical movie and half the time is "the actors" talking to each other or off the set.
St Boniface (1908) in SF as a Homeless Shelter
This fall, I rented an office in the WEWORKS building at Sixth and Market in San Francisco - only a block from a huge upscale shopping center and cineplex yet adjacent to the Tenderloin skid row area.
Heading to the office, a taxi inbound on Golden Gate Avenue brought me past St. Boniface, a 1908 church reconstructed just after the 1906 earthquake. I walked back two blocks to see it. It's a beautiful large church, filled with impressive arches, carved pulpit and turn of the century stained glass. Amazingly, it was also filled with sleeping homeless people occupying nearly all the pews.
Called the Gubbio Project (here), homeless people can sleep in the church from 6 am to 2 pm each day. Yes - that runs right across the daily 12:15 mass, too.
It was deeply affecting and moving - really, unforgettable - to see the church used this way. It almost took my breath away.
The parish dates to 1870, when a small wooden church was built for the German immigrant community as St Peter and Paul. (Growing up, my mother's German Catholic church in Iowa was also St Peter and Paul.) It was replaced once with a larger wooden church, and then a fine brick church was built in 1902 and promptly destroyed by the 1906 earthquake. Today's church was built in 1908. In recent decades, the church passed into the hands of the Franciscan order and is today called St. Boniface. It's at 133 Golden Gate Avenue, a block east of Sixth and Market.
___
WeWorks is a real estate venture valued at $20B and has over 100 locations internationally. Their second SF center, opened in 2014, renovated the L-shaped shell office building that surrounds the 1920 Golden Gate Theater at Sixth and Market in SF. It's two blocks south of the Union Square Hilton and, as mentioned, just a block or two from St. Boniface. WeWorks' business model is typically to convert three to six stories of office space into easily rented glass offices, variably for 1, 2, 4, or up to 20 people. WeWorks now has 14 centers in the Bay Area, 12 in SF itself. That suggests as much as 42 floors of executive office space rented out in small parcels in as little as a few minutes by incredibly upbeat, helpful staff.
____
For a 2002 article on the Franciscans' work in the Tenderloin, here.
Heading to the office, a taxi inbound on Golden Gate Avenue brought me past St. Boniface, a 1908 church reconstructed just after the 1906 earthquake. I walked back two blocks to see it. It's a beautiful large church, filled with impressive arches, carved pulpit and turn of the century stained glass. Amazingly, it was also filled with sleeping homeless people occupying nearly all the pews.
Called the Gubbio Project (here), homeless people can sleep in the church from 6 am to 2 pm each day. Yes - that runs right across the daily 12:15 mass, too.
 |
| click to enlarge |
It was deeply affecting and moving - really, unforgettable - to see the church used this way. It almost took my breath away.
The parish dates to 1870, when a small wooden church was built for the German immigrant community as St Peter and Paul. (Growing up, my mother's German Catholic church in Iowa was also St Peter and Paul.) It was replaced once with a larger wooden church, and then a fine brick church was built in 1902 and promptly destroyed by the 1906 earthquake. Today's church was built in 1908. In recent decades, the church passed into the hands of the Franciscan order and is today called St. Boniface. It's at 133 Golden Gate Avenue, a block east of Sixth and Market.
___
WeWorks is a real estate venture valued at $20B and has over 100 locations internationally. Their second SF center, opened in 2014, renovated the L-shaped shell office building that surrounds the 1920 Golden Gate Theater at Sixth and Market in SF. It's two blocks south of the Union Square Hilton and, as mentioned, just a block or two from St. Boniface. WeWorks' business model is typically to convert three to six stories of office space into easily rented glass offices, variably for 1, 2, 4, or up to 20 people. WeWorks now has 14 centers in the Bay Area, 12 in SF itself. That suggests as much as 42 floors of executive office space rented out in small parcels in as little as a few minutes by incredibly upbeat, helpful staff.
____
For a 2002 article on the Franciscans' work in the Tenderloin, here.
Sunday, September 17, 2017
Saturday, September 16, 2017
The T.S. Eliot Poetry Melangerie of Quatrains
T.S. Eliot mixed
Meth, heroin, and coke.
Thought his poems might improve
If he had a stroke.
__
T.S. Eliot's poems
One step above doggerel,
One step below tripe,
The meaning foggerel.
__
Oft did T.S. Eliot say
That he would eat his hat -
To write a poem just half as good
As Casey At The Bat.
__
There once was a maid of Nantucket,
Who rode the seas in a bucket.
Her poems were rare,
And less than fair,
But still better than T.S. Eliot.
__
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
T.S. Eliot wrote
This one too.
__
T.S. Eliot read the book,
And wailed an anguished "Oh no!"
"For I write poetry half as good
As awful Victor Buono."
__
T.S. Eliot fled
The U.S.A. frantic;
Later his accent drifted
East of Mid-Atlantic.
__
T.S. Eliot
Read the news,
And processed it,
And hated Jews.
__
T.S. Eliot, sadly,
Read "Ash Wednesday" badly.
___
Bonus Poem
Harry Dean Stanton
Finally dead.
He let eternity
Go to his head.
__
,,,And Summer Flops of 2017 Summarized
The movie BAYWATCH
failed to leaven;
It made less money
Than "Gates of Heaven."
Monday, August 28, 2017
Only in LA: Staged Reading from the Rodney Dangerfield Institute
Only in LA...the Rodney Dangerfield Institute holds a theatrical staged reading of the classic script of BACK TO SCHOOL. The Rodney Dangerfield landmark was released in 1986.
Click here to see PDF ad. 9/6/2017.
Dangerfield was memorialized with a plaque in Queens in August, 2017 (here).
Sunday, August 20, 2017
Freud's Myelin Stain: Did He Lie About It?
The August 20, 2017, New York Times reviews a new biography by Berkeley's Frederick Crews on Freud, with the indicative title: Making of an Illusion. (NYT here, Amazon here.) His book has a couple pages based on obscure medical history research I did during my postdoc and residency 1990-1994.
Crews' book has several footnotes to meeting abstracts and an unpublished white paper from that period by me (I also published an obscure book chapter on it.)
In this blog I provide a summary of my experience, what I found, and a cloud link to the white paper.
For an overview, click on figure:
Sigmund Freud wanted to be famous from the beginning of his medical training.
One route to success around 1880 was brain anatomy, and fame was guaranteed to anyone who invented a major new method. Freud claimed in 1883/1884 to have invented a major new reliable method for brain anatomy - but it proved unreliable and was forgotten. Of interest, at the very same time he was publishing the method as highly reliable, he was complaining to his finance Martha that it was very difficult and unreliable. The gap between his published claims and the reality would have leaked out by the time he was coming before a promotion committee. With his science career closed off, he switched to clinical care and clinical research.
I know the story because I worked on a closely related microscopic method around 1990 and spent a couple years assembling a large archive of obscure German anatomy papers on the topic. The tale merits a couple pages in a new 2017 biography of Freud.
_____
In 1990, I worked on a gold chloride brain tissue stain similar to one Freud worked on.
In 1989/1990, I did a postdoc with Prof. Ann Graybiel at MIT where we worked on heterogeneous zones in the basal ganglia, called striosomes. I made some innovations on a gold chloride myelin stain which had been developed variously by Freud, Fleisch, and Gerlach in the 1870s and 1880s. triggered by a new paper on a gold chloride myelin stain that had just appeared in 1990.
Freud? Freud's first goal, as is well-known, was to be a famous laboratory scientist, and only barriers to promotion led him to a subsequent clinical career. His laboratory work focused development of invertebrate nervous systems, and included an independent publication on the value of his improved gold chloride fiber stain.
Working in Prof. Graybiel's laboratory, using the gold chloride stain, I showed that the primate striatum had clear, myelin-based striosomes using this technique, although the figures were essentially occult with conventional myelin stains like luxol fast blue. I found that the stain was made more reliable by addition of trace hydrogen peroxide. In this sense, I felt my method with hydrogen peroxide and gold was an improvement on a gold chloride method published by Lawrence Schmued in 1990; Schmued noted the idea of gold chloride fiber staining (though uncommon) had an older history (see his 1990 paper here) but did not mention the particular citation trail that led to Freud and Gerlach. (Schmued also holds a patent on this technique).
In 1992-1993, I collected lots of obscure 1880s German medical literature on the topic. My work appeared in some abstracts and finally in a 1994 book chapter from a basal ganglia symposium. The book chapter notes the history of gold chloride fiber stains dates to 1872, and was essentially revived (briefly) by Freud in 1883. (The published 7 page 2004 book chapter by Quinn & Graybiel is in the cloud here.)
What's Not in My 1994 Book Chapter
While in my neuropathology fellowship at UCLA in 92-93, I spent a lot of times in the library archives and had quite a trove of 1870s and 1880s articles, mostly in German, which I may have lost over the decades in one or another household move.
The main finding of interest was that in Freud's letters to his wife from 1883/1884, he talks about how difficult and tortuous the gold stain was, but in his publication at the same time, he describes the stain as highly reliable and always working.
Freud's lab career came to a very rapid end. This was a pivotal event in his life, and created Freud the Clinical Psychiatrist as opposed to Freud the Neuroanatomy Researcher. He could have been turned down for many reasons - anti-Semiticism, or favoritism, or maybe his research to date was just unimpressive. However, a feasible reason for his failure at promotion might have been that his stain, published and touted by himself as highly reliable, proved to be highly unreliable, and this would mark him as a braggart scientist who overhyped his benchwork and was not worthy of promotion. It's speculation, but the puzzle pieces could be arranged that way.*
Now in August 2017, I've dug up my 1994 Word manuscript and offering it to the Cloud, for what it's worth.
After seeing the new Crews book and reviews, I recalled that over 25 years I appear to have lost my treasured box of 1990-era photostats of 1880-era original journal publications. And my heart skipped a beat today when I was uncertain if I still had even one an electronic copy of my rough, 1994 manuscript, which I had shared with Crews some years ago. I found one on my wife's computer, dated 2004, which would be very minor revisions of my 1994 manuscript.
The word document about Freud's possible scientific fraud is an awkward document. Half of it tells the story of the 1880s use of gold chloride myelin stains, including some speculation on Freud's misbehavior, and then half talks about the use to show striosomes in primate basal ganglia. That said, here it is, as a Word document, in the cloud.
The full Freud-Martha engagement letters (he wrote a multi page letter nearly daily) for 1882, 1883, 1884 are now published in 3 dense German volumes, "Die Brautbriefe, Vols 1,2,3," 1500 pp, Gerhard Fichtner et al., 2011,2013,2015, Fischer Verlag. I haven't fully studied yet.[**]
______
TO LEARN MORE...
___
Also archived in the cloud is a 2004 web publication on Freud's neuropathology contributions, by David Galbis-Reig, here.
____
* The short blunt form would be that Freud hyped and misled in his publications about his benchwork, was found out, and it got him sacked.
[**] E.g. in Brautbriefe vol 3, page 108, 29 Jan 1884, we read, "Ende dieser Woche hoffe ich die Abfassung der methodischen Mitteilungen in zwei Sprachen beendigt zu haben." (By the end of this week I hope to have finished the composition [Abfasshung] of the methodologic communication [article] in two languages.)
In this blog I provide a summary of my experience, what I found, and a cloud link to the white paper.
For an overview, click on figure:
 |
| click to enlarge |
Summary
Sigmund Freud wanted to be famous from the beginning of his medical training.
One route to success around 1880 was brain anatomy, and fame was guaranteed to anyone who invented a major new method. Freud claimed in 1883/1884 to have invented a major new reliable method for brain anatomy - but it proved unreliable and was forgotten. Of interest, at the very same time he was publishing the method as highly reliable, he was complaining to his finance Martha that it was very difficult and unreliable. The gap between his published claims and the reality would have leaked out by the time he was coming before a promotion committee. With his science career closed off, he switched to clinical care and clinical research.
I know the story because I worked on a closely related microscopic method around 1990 and spent a couple years assembling a large archive of obscure German anatomy papers on the topic. The tale merits a couple pages in a new 2017 biography of Freud.
_____
In 1990, I worked on a gold chloride brain tissue stain similar to one Freud worked on.
In 1989/1990, I did a postdoc with Prof. Ann Graybiel at MIT where we worked on heterogeneous zones in the basal ganglia, called striosomes. I made some innovations on a gold chloride myelin stain which had been developed variously by Freud, Fleisch, and Gerlach in the 1870s and 1880s. triggered by a new paper on a gold chloride myelin stain that had just appeared in 1990.
Freud? Freud's first goal, as is well-known, was to be a famous laboratory scientist, and only barriers to promotion led him to a subsequent clinical career. His laboratory work focused development of invertebrate nervous systems, and included an independent publication on the value of his improved gold chloride fiber stain.
Working in Prof. Graybiel's laboratory, using the gold chloride stain, I showed that the primate striatum had clear, myelin-based striosomes using this technique, although the figures were essentially occult with conventional myelin stains like luxol fast blue. I found that the stain was made more reliable by addition of trace hydrogen peroxide. In this sense, I felt my method with hydrogen peroxide and gold was an improvement on a gold chloride method published by Lawrence Schmued in 1990; Schmued noted the idea of gold chloride fiber staining (though uncommon) had an older history (see his 1990 paper here) but did not mention the particular citation trail that led to Freud and Gerlach. (Schmued also holds a patent on this technique).
In 1992-1993, I collected lots of obscure 1880s German medical literature on the topic. My work appeared in some abstracts and finally in a 1994 book chapter from a basal ganglia symposium. The book chapter notes the history of gold chloride fiber stains dates to 1872, and was essentially revived (briefly) by Freud in 1883. (The published 7 page 2004 book chapter by Quinn & Graybiel is in the cloud here.)
What's Not in My 1994 Book Chapter
While in my neuropathology fellowship at UCLA in 92-93, I spent a lot of times in the library archives and had quite a trove of 1870s and 1880s articles, mostly in German, which I may have lost over the decades in one or another household move.
The main finding of interest was that in Freud's letters to his wife from 1883/1884, he talks about how difficult and tortuous the gold stain was, but in his publication at the same time, he describes the stain as highly reliable and always working.
- Was he gilding the lily (so to speak) in his publications, hoping for promotion to go through, before anyone found out his stain was unreliable, which is how he described the stain to his wife?
- Or do the letters to his wife describe his tortuous research path, but however, he truly believed he had found a reliable method as recorded his published manuscript?
- The short timetable between the letters and the journal submission make this less likely.
- Did the unreliability of his gold myelin stain contribute to his rejection for tenure, one of the most pivotal events in his career path? Could this have cast him as a "self promotion and hype guy" rather than as "reliable researcher?"
Freud's lab career came to a very rapid end. This was a pivotal event in his life, and created Freud the Clinical Psychiatrist as opposed to Freud the Neuroanatomy Researcher. He could have been turned down for many reasons - anti-Semiticism, or favoritism, or maybe his research to date was just unimpressive. However, a feasible reason for his failure at promotion might have been that his stain, published and touted by himself as highly reliable, proved to be highly unreliable, and this would mark him as a braggart scientist who overhyped his benchwork and was not worthy of promotion. It's speculation, but the puzzle pieces could be arranged that way.*
Now in August 2017, I've dug up my 1994 Word manuscript and offering it to the Cloud, for what it's worth.
After seeing the new Crews book and reviews, I recalled that over 25 years I appear to have lost my treasured box of 1990-era photostats of 1880-era original journal publications. And my heart skipped a beat today when I was uncertain if I still had even one an electronic copy of my rough, 1994 manuscript, which I had shared with Crews some years ago. I found one on my wife's computer, dated 2004, which would be very minor revisions of my 1994 manuscript.
The word document about Freud's possible scientific fraud is an awkward document. Half of it tells the story of the 1880s use of gold chloride myelin stains, including some speculation on Freud's misbehavior, and then half talks about the use to show striosomes in primate basal ganglia. That said, here it is, as a Word document, in the cloud.
The full Freud-Martha engagement letters (he wrote a multi page letter nearly daily) for 1882, 1883, 1884 are now published in 3 dense German volumes, "Die Brautbriefe, Vols 1,2,3," 1500 pp, Gerhard Fichtner et al., 2011,2013,2015, Fischer Verlag. I haven't fully studied yet.[**]
______
TO LEARN MORE...
- Book Chapter from 1994. The short and formal publication without any speculation on Freud's intentions is: Quinn B & Graybiel AM (1994) Myeloarchitectonics of the primate caudate-putamen. In: Basal Ganglia Vol. IV, Advances in Behavioral Biology Book Series. At Springer, here.
- Pages in the cloud, here.
- Couple Pages from Crews 2017. I've uploaded a couple pages of paragraphs of the story as newly published in Crews 2017, which I think is within fair use of the 500 page book...
- Crews book pages on the topic: here.
- Nerdy Deep Dive Version. The lengthy and informal Word manuscript version, full of obscure citations and including speculation on Freud's misbehavior, follows:
- Quinn, Myelin Stains and Myeloarchitectonics: A neuropathologic historical vignette from Freud's laboratory, and modern applications in basal ganglia research.
- HERE.
- Zip File of Very Old Papers.
- Two of Freud's gold chloride papers, three by Upson in the same era, a review in 1937 by Jellife, and some BQ notes, in a zip file here.
- More Freud-Bernays letters have been released in German 2011-2015 than I had access to in 1992-4. (Brautbriefe, Vol 1-3, e.g. here, vol. 4-5 planned.) Vol. 2 covers to December 1883 and Vol. 3 covers 1884, the periods of the gold chloride adventures. Images may also be available at Library of Congress. I have the books on hand in my home.
___
Also archived in the cloud is a 2004 web publication on Freud's neuropathology contributions, by David Galbis-Reig, here.
____
* The short blunt form would be that Freud hyped and misled in his publications about his benchwork, was found out, and it got him sacked.
[**] E.g. in Brautbriefe vol 3, page 108, 29 Jan 1884, we read, "Ende dieser Woche hoffe ich die Abfassung der methodischen Mitteilungen in zwei Sprachen beendigt zu haben." (By the end of this week I hope to have finished the composition [Abfasshung] of the methodologic communication [article] in two languages.)
Friday, August 18, 2017
Judy Garland as Biracial, Mickey Rooney in Blackface (Waitin' for the Robert E Lee)
We may lose some of the statues of Robert E Lee, but song and dance are preserved in blackface on Youtube. Click here for music and dance.
"Down on the levy, in old Alabammy...."
___
The charming first female singer in the clip is Virginia Weidler.
The Robert E Lee big band number above, is an expansion of an earlier smaller scale Rooney/Garland blackface act, here.
 |
| Blackface and Biracial (mulatto) |
___
The charming first female singer in the clip is Virginia Weidler.
The Robert E Lee big band number above, is an expansion of an earlier smaller scale Rooney/Garland blackface act, here.
Interpretation Through Poetry (Fragments)
Tweets scuttling across our brains like ragged claws.
We've been rolled, we've been rolled,
I will wear my trouser belt around my neck
until I'm cold.
I saw the worst minds of my generation made bold by madness.
A Coney Island of the Mindf---s.
Marx predicted the decline and fall of capitalism, but adds, jeez, you guys are being ridiculous about it.
French demand tearing down the Burgers of Calais, the old bastards.
British neo nazis hold torch rallies on St Crispin's Day, celebrate Anglo victory over the genetically inferior French at Agincourt in 1415.
Italian neo nazis tear down Michelangelo's David.
Taliban feels left out, nothing left to tear down.
War never solved anything. Another round of War over here, it's always Ides of March somewhere.
The Fog of War broke in on little cat feet. Barbarians at the Watergate.
North Korea could quickly escalate into another Vietnam, except with more of the "bombing them into the stone age" part.
Issues executive order, "Tear down Statue of Liberty; two can play at that game," by the way, a phrase he just made up.
Into the Valley of Death rode the 700 Club.
In America, anyone or anything can become president.
Robert E Lee doing a very good job and getting a lot of attention lately.
Under a real Neo Nazi presidency, they would improve the interstate highway system.
We've been rolled, we've been rolled,
I will wear my trouser belt around my neck
until I'm cold.
I saw the worst minds of my generation made bold by madness.
A Coney Island of the Mindf---s.
Marx predicted the decline and fall of capitalism, but adds, jeez, you guys are being ridiculous about it.
French demand tearing down the Burgers of Calais, the old bastards.
British neo nazis hold torch rallies on St Crispin's Day, celebrate Anglo victory over the genetically inferior French at Agincourt in 1415.
Italian neo nazis tear down Michelangelo's David.
Taliban feels left out, nothing left to tear down.
War never solved anything. Another round of War over here, it's always Ides of March somewhere.
The Fog of War broke in on little cat feet. Barbarians at the Watergate.
North Korea could quickly escalate into another Vietnam, except with more of the "bombing them into the stone age" part.
Issues executive order, "Tear down Statue of Liberty; two can play at that game," by the way, a phrase he just made up.
Into the Valley of Death rode the 700 Club.
In America, anyone or anything can become president.
Robert E Lee doing a very good job and getting a lot of attention lately.
Under a real Neo Nazi presidency, they would improve the interstate highway system.
Monday, August 14, 2017
"Blood and Soil" Really Is A Core Nazi Concept
In the past month in the U.S. there has been increasing quotation of "blood and soil," as used by US-based alt-right groups. You may see it casually referred to as a Nazi concept - but what did it really mean? For many readers the three words are probably next to meaningless (although Wikipedia gives a good overview, [0].)
If you go back to original German 1930s writings, some of which are available in English, you realize that "Blood and Soil" was a fundamental, chilling, and scary Nazi concept.
In plain English, the phrase has little intrinsic meaning. Every nation has people with "blood," and every nation as "soil." OK, so, yes, blood-and-soil.
But by "blood," or Blut, Nazis very specifically referred to their "scientific" concepts of race, including the predetermined racial inferiority of Jews, blacks, and the disabled. And Boden (or sometimes Erde) - variably translated as "land" or "soil" - embodied the greater senses of nation, politics, and economics, e.g. geopolitics. It meant far-right political nationalism, hatred of adjacent countries and their "different" land and people.
Blood and Soil. For the Nazis, in the 1930s, the simplistic and simple sounding phrase was a doorway to horror. "Blood" rose into the national German conversation followed by anti-semitic laws banning mixed marriages, then genocide. They didn't kill six million Jews to punish them; they killed them because of bad "blood," a "bloodline" that had to be eliminated from Germany and the soil of its newly conquered lands and the same "blood" of the chant "blood and soil." Listen closely for several uses of the word "blood" in this dramatization of the Wannsee Conference (3 min; here). "Soil" rose into the national German conversation, and then the takeover of the Sudetanland (the Germanic part of Czechoslovakia), Austria, and finally war with Poland. And eventually, Germany and the neighboring countries lay in rubble.
Blood and Soil comes to life for us in the books of Johannes Stoye. Johannes Stoye was a workaholic attorney in Leipzig who produced in the mid 1930s three large works that aimed to bring other countries to life for German readers via the Nazi viewpoint - works on the U.S., on the British Empire, and on Spain. Stoye presented these foreign nations for his German readers through the dominant National Socialist interpretation and lens. Interesting that some of the books were also translated abroad.
Stoye's first book, about the USA, USA Lernt Um! (1935), was never translated but is available in used copies in German on Amazon (here).[1][2] The title means "the US is retrained or retooled" and the subtitle says the book is about the FDR "revolution." It was for German readers, showing them how to view the USA through Nazi eyes and come to the correct conclusions about the people and politics of the USA. To give you an example of his viewpoint, Stoye presents the then-horrifying Dust Bowl as the result of unfettered American liberal capitalism that was uncontrolled by the State. Stoye then states that the Dust Bowl crisis will improved quickly by a powerful, centralized new U.S. government with FDR as Leader. [3] For Stoye, the New Deal wasn't so much about "jobs for poor people" as "making the State really big and really powerful under a mighty leader (FDR) and that's good."
Stoye's second book The British Empire was published first in German, then in English translation in 1935 and revised in English in 1936. Thus, "The British Empire" is far more accessible for most American readers. Stoye's preface to the second edition says that the first English edition had sold well and was well-received in major English newspapers (there was also a French edition.)
Stoye also wrote on Spain's economics and politics, but I have never seen this one [4]. Stoye was prolific from the mid 1930s into the early 1940s; he appears to have died in 1948 in a Russian concentration camp.[5]
In his books, Stoye describes his approach - which is the Nazi approach, not just Stoye's - as "geopolitical," bringing countries into focus one by one through the true lens that is provided by a systematic dual analysis of the nation by Blood and Soil thinking.
Stoye's "The British Empire." Regarding the U.K. and "blood," he acknowledges that Great Britain is made up of multiple "races" (Anglo Saxons, Viking invaders, etc), but largely proceeds as if its national character was genetically determined.
Regarding "land," Stoye views geography as fundamental to politics and progress, which is true in many ways. Having established both "blood" and "soil"as his "lenses," as as the only valid way to assess a nation, Stoye then gives us 300 pages of analysis of Great Britain and its British Empire. (No doubt Stoye also was seeking parallels between the recent global British Empire and the planned future Third Reich German Empire.)
In conclusion, Stoye's book "The British Empire" is a living historical example - in English and easily available in used copies - of what the Nazis meant by "blood and soil" or "blood and land."
_____
"Blood and Soil" in the April 2016 NYT. See an essay by Kevin Baker on the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s. Today, the Immigration Act is usually overshadowed by the contemporary Civil Rights Act. Baker remarks that the U.S. Immigration Act of 1965 (which turned us away from racial quotas) as "the opposite of blood and soil" thinking. Baker's article is here. I would guess that Baker's offhand "blood and soil" remark - an allusion to Nazis - probably went over the heads of many readers.
_____
[0] Blood and Soil: What it means; in English. If you take the effort to find it, Wikipedia does a pretty good job with the phrase "blood and soil," here.
[1] Johannes Stoye. I became aware of Stoye's work in early 2017 when I was reading the book, Hitler's American Model, by James Whitman of Yale. Overall, Whitman's book describes how 1930s Nuremberg race laws in Germany were modeled on our own US race laws of the time and earlier. Whitman provides a single footnote to Stoye's "USA Lernt Um." (Another model for Nurenburg may be Germany's own earlier race laws as had been developed when Germany had African colonies around 1900; here). I got a used copy of USA Lernt Um and then an English translation copy of The British Empire.
[2] The title USA Lernt Um! is based on the verb: Umlernen (Lernt um!] means to retrain or to take a new view. The subtitle "Sinn und Bedeutung der Roosevelt-Revolution" sense and significance of the Roosevelt Revolution.
[3] In framing the arrival of FDR to rescue us from the Dust Bowl, Stoye sees FDR as a "powerful leader" who amassed governmental authority unto himself, and Stoye in 1935 saw that as a good thing. (See also the conservative 2006 book, "Three New Deals: Why the Nazis and Fascists Loved FDR," by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, here.)
[4] The Spain book was called, "Spanien in Umbruch: Leistungen und Ziele der Franco-Regiering," or Spain in Revolt: Methods and Goals of Franco Regime. Here.
[5] This Google Books page suggests Stoye was really a book mill, apparently with sister books on Japan and France as well.
A source called World Cat lists Stoye's lifespan as 1900-1948 and lists about a dozen books in total, click here.
If you take the card catalog's lifespan of 1900-1948 and then google it with the name Johannes Stoye, you hit a gravestone index website, here.
Stoye is listed as being as being buried in a "Speciallager" of the "NKWD" and together these mean that he died in a Russian concentration camp during the postwar Occupation, that is, a camp where the occupying Allies separated Nazi proponents from the rest of Germans.
Other than this, I have been unable to find any proper biography, even a paragraph, of Stoye.
A note on translation. Stoye himself, in British Empire, within a few pages says alternately "Blood and Soil," "Race and Soil," "People and Soil." There are also variances in German: at least one recent German book is titled"Blut und Erde" rather than the more common "Blut und Boden." Contemporary 2017 newspaper article in the US almost always used the term "Blood and Soil."
Representing something by a small symbolic part is "synecdoche," e.g. "soil" represents "national" and "blood" represents a race of people and their genetics. Here, the use of simple nouns for these political concepts also functions to downplay the significance of the ideas being signaled. A commonday word, "Blood," is a dog whistle reference to racial purity = racial genocide + murder of the mentally handicapped adults and children.
___
Historic book reviews on Stoye include here and here and here.
For an earlier work with some parallels to Stoye's style, here.
If you go back to original German 1930s writings, some of which are available in English, you realize that "Blood and Soil" was a fundamental, chilling, and scary Nazi concept.
In plain English, the phrase has little intrinsic meaning. Every nation has people with "blood," and every nation as "soil." OK, so, yes, blood-and-soil.
But by "blood," or Blut, Nazis very specifically referred to their "scientific" concepts of race, including the predetermined racial inferiority of Jews, blacks, and the disabled. And Boden (or sometimes Erde) - variably translated as "land" or "soil" - embodied the greater senses of nation, politics, and economics, e.g. geopolitics. It meant far-right political nationalism, hatred of adjacent countries and their "different" land and people.
Blood and Soil. For the Nazis, in the 1930s, the simplistic and simple sounding phrase was a doorway to horror. "Blood" rose into the national German conversation followed by anti-semitic laws banning mixed marriages, then genocide. They didn't kill six million Jews to punish them; they killed them because of bad "blood," a "bloodline" that had to be eliminated from Germany and the soil of its newly conquered lands and the same "blood" of the chant "blood and soil." Listen closely for several uses of the word "blood" in this dramatization of the Wannsee Conference (3 min; here). "Soil" rose into the national German conversation, and then the takeover of the Sudetanland (the Germanic part of Czechoslovakia), Austria, and finally war with Poland. And eventually, Germany and the neighboring countries lay in rubble.
Blood and Soil comes to life for us in the books of Johannes Stoye. Johannes Stoye was a workaholic attorney in Leipzig who produced in the mid 1930s three large works that aimed to bring other countries to life for German readers via the Nazi viewpoint - works on the U.S., on the British Empire, and on Spain. Stoye presented these foreign nations for his German readers through the dominant National Socialist interpretation and lens. Interesting that some of the books were also translated abroad.
Stoye's first book, about the USA, USA Lernt Um! (1935), was never translated but is available in used copies in German on Amazon (here).[1][2] The title means "the US is retrained or retooled" and the subtitle says the book is about the FDR "revolution." It was for German readers, showing them how to view the USA through Nazi eyes and come to the correct conclusions about the people and politics of the USA. To give you an example of his viewpoint, Stoye presents the then-horrifying Dust Bowl as the result of unfettered American liberal capitalism that was uncontrolled by the State. Stoye then states that the Dust Bowl crisis will improved quickly by a powerful, centralized new U.S. government with FDR as Leader. [3] For Stoye, the New Deal wasn't so much about "jobs for poor people" as "making the State really big and really powerful under a mighty leader (FDR) and that's good."
Stoye's second book The British Empire was published first in German, then in English translation in 1935 and revised in English in 1936. Thus, "The British Empire" is far more accessible for most American readers. Stoye's preface to the second edition says that the first English edition had sold well and was well-received in major English newspapers (there was also a French edition.)
Stoye also wrote on Spain's economics and politics, but I have never seen this one [4]. Stoye was prolific from the mid 1930s into the early 1940s; he appears to have died in 1948 in a Russian concentration camp.[5]
In his books, Stoye describes his approach - which is the Nazi approach, not just Stoye's - as "geopolitical," bringing countries into focus one by one through the true lens that is provided by a systematic dual analysis of the nation by Blood and Soil thinking.
Read Actual Scary German "Blood and Soil" Mentality
Tranlated into English and Straight Out of the 1930's:
I've put a few pages of Stoye's 1935 The British Empire,
in the cloud (here).
Tranlated into English and Straight Out of the 1930's:
I've put a few pages of Stoye's 1935 The British Empire,
in the cloud (here).
Regarding "land," Stoye views geography as fundamental to politics and progress, which is true in many ways. Having established both "blood" and "soil"as his "lenses," as as the only valid way to assess a nation, Stoye then gives us 300 pages of analysis of Great Britain and its British Empire. (No doubt Stoye also was seeking parallels between the recent global British Empire and the planned future Third Reich German Empire.)
In conclusion, Stoye's book "The British Empire" is a living historical example - in English and easily available in used copies - of what the Nazis meant by "blood and soil" or "blood and land."
- Blood meant racial characteristics and how you defined racial superiority and control of other races.
- Soil meant national boundaries - boundaries you build a wall around. And Lebensraum - living space - expansion of the good blood of Aryan people onto more land.
So the next time you see Neo-Aryans drop the phrase "blood and soil," it is a true call-out to Nazi ideals and political philosophy, and closely tied both the racial genocide and aggressive militarism.
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"Blood and Soil" in the April 2016 NYT. See an essay by Kevin Baker on the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s. Today, the Immigration Act is usually overshadowed by the contemporary Civil Rights Act. Baker remarks that the U.S. Immigration Act of 1965 (which turned us away from racial quotas) as "the opposite of blood and soil" thinking. Baker's article is here. I would guess that Baker's offhand "blood and soil" remark - an allusion to Nazis - probably went over the heads of many readers.
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[0] Blood and Soil: What it means; in English. If you take the effort to find it, Wikipedia does a pretty good job with the phrase "blood and soil," here.
[1] Johannes Stoye. I became aware of Stoye's work in early 2017 when I was reading the book, Hitler's American Model, by James Whitman of Yale. Overall, Whitman's book describes how 1930s Nuremberg race laws in Germany were modeled on our own US race laws of the time and earlier. Whitman provides a single footnote to Stoye's "USA Lernt Um." (Another model for Nurenburg may be Germany's own earlier race laws as had been developed when Germany had African colonies around 1900; here). I got a used copy of USA Lernt Um and then an English translation copy of The British Empire.
[2] The title USA Lernt Um! is based on the verb: Umlernen (Lernt um!] means to retrain or to take a new view. The subtitle "Sinn und Bedeutung der Roosevelt-Revolution" sense and significance of the Roosevelt Revolution.
[3] In framing the arrival of FDR to rescue us from the Dust Bowl, Stoye sees FDR as a "powerful leader" who amassed governmental authority unto himself, and Stoye in 1935 saw that as a good thing. (See also the conservative 2006 book, "Three New Deals: Why the Nazis and Fascists Loved FDR," by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, here.)
[4] The Spain book was called, "Spanien in Umbruch: Leistungen und Ziele der Franco-Regiering," or Spain in Revolt: Methods and Goals of Franco Regime. Here.
[5] This Google Books page suggests Stoye was really a book mill, apparently with sister books on Japan and France as well.
A source called World Cat lists Stoye's lifespan as 1900-1948 and lists about a dozen books in total, click here.
If you take the card catalog's lifespan of 1900-1948 and then google it with the name Johannes Stoye, you hit a gravestone index website, here.
Stoye is listed as being as being buried in a "Speciallager" of the "NKWD" and together these mean that he died in a Russian concentration camp during the postwar Occupation, that is, a camp where the occupying Allies separated Nazi proponents from the rest of Germans.
Other than this, I have been unable to find any proper biography, even a paragraph, of Stoye.
A note on translation. Stoye himself, in British Empire, within a few pages says alternately "Blood and Soil," "Race and Soil," "People and Soil." There are also variances in German: at least one recent German book is titled"Blut und Erde" rather than the more common "Blut und Boden." Contemporary 2017 newspaper article in the US almost always used the term "Blood and Soil."
Representing something by a small symbolic part is "synecdoche," e.g. "soil" represents "national" and "blood" represents a race of people and their genetics. Here, the use of simple nouns for these political concepts also functions to downplay the significance of the ideas being signaled. A commonday word, "Blood," is a dog whistle reference to racial purity = racial genocide + murder of the mentally handicapped adults and children.
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Historic book reviews on Stoye include here and here and here.
For an earlier work with some parallels to Stoye's style, here.
Monday, August 7, 2017
Kakistokleptocracy
While there are 2M Google hits today for Kleptocracy (government by thieves), and a lesser but still notable 164,000 hits for Kakistocracy (government by the worst), there are only 8 for Kakistokleptocracy.
Monday, July 31, 2017
"Dumb and Dumber" Taking Over Wall Street Journal?
The July 30, 2017 WSJ has an article by Andy Kessler on "The High Cost of Raising Prices," arguing that too many business kept raising prices on a shrinking consumer market in a desperate effort to maintain revenue.
He may have a point.
But one of the examples that leads the article is way off base, I think.
The article opens:
Most investors love companies with pricing power. Me? Not so much. Consider the life of a wealthy expat who asked a broker to show him the most expensive apartments in Rome. The first, at €20,000 a month, was a dump. So was the second, at €18,000. Yet the third apartment, at €16,000, was well-maintained, with gorgeous views of the Italian capital. Sensing confusion, the broker explained that the first two apartments had sat empty for months—and the owners kept raising prices to make up for the lost rent.
Sound familiar? The U.S. Postal Service has seen first-class mail volume drop from a peak of 103.7 billion letters in 2001 to 61.2 billion last year. It raised rates from 34 cents to 49 cents to make up the difference. Movie tickets sold in the U.S. peaked at nearly 1.6 billion in 2002. Last year only 1.3 billion were sold. Meantime, average ticket prices jumped from $5.81 to $8.65.
Um, excuse me, but 1.3B tickets at $8.65 is $11.2B dollars. And 1.6B tickets at $5.81 is only $9.2B dollars. So you make MORE money at $8.65 tickets. I'm using nominal dollars - but so was Kessler. It's like saying somebody used to sell 10 units at 10 dollars, and now he only sells 8 units at $20, so he's stupid. At the least, the movie ticket example (comparing prices 15 years apart, which accounts for almost all of the price change) is irrelevant to where he starts, the Italian apartments with quarterly escalating prices until they are unrentable.
Overall, Kessler may have a theme, but the movie ticket example isn't it. Didn't a copy editor have the math skills to realize the movie ticket example is boneheaded?
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Footnotes.
In real dollars, $5.65 in 2002 in $7.68 today. So using nominal dollars to compare prices that are 15 or 20 years apart is inept.
Kessler might have been thinking that the extra 0.3B people in 2002 might have had extra profits on their sodas and popcorn - but there's no clue he expected the reading to be making that leap.
Other factors in the movie example could include a changing marketplace, with huge increases in alternative entertainments, giving up a wedge of the cheapest market to migrate to the upper wedge of higher price market might be the best tactic. Or patrons might respond to bigger nicer theaters, which are more expensive, but without which ticket attrition might have been much worse. (There may have been A/B tests that $8 tickets are more profitable than $6 tickets, for example, which goes against the thesis that price increases are the actions of clueless management, like the italian apartment owners.)
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