Bill Murray's Blog, page 70
January 26, 2018
Weekend Reading
A few items to ponder at your leisure this weekend:
The Feud That Captures the Fight For Serbia’s Future by Valerie Hopkins at World Politics Review
The Untreatable by Gavin Francis in the LRB (on the centenary of the Spanish Flu)
Tiny, Wealthy Qatar Goes Its Own Way, and Pays for It by Declan Walsh in The New York Times
Too Much Music: A Failed Experiment In Dedicated Listening by James Jackson Toth at NPR.org
Michel de Montaigne: On Solitude by Paula Marvelly at The Culturium
Unfriendly Skies by David Dayen at The American Prospect
January 25, 2018
Quotes:
This anti-Music-On-Demand quote gets it right at both ends:
“I don’t want my musical discoveries dictated by a series of intuitive algorithms any more than I want to experience Jamaica via an all-inclusive trip to Sandals.”
Vignette: Congo Border Tales
Just a little thing that happened five or six years ago in Uganda. A Congolese Border Tale:
Whenever I read a story with news like this: “Rebels in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have taken a major border post after clashes with government troops….” I think about a visit to a safari camp in Uganda a few years back, just near the border with Congo. It was small, only ten tents. The proprietor, a stereotypical grizzled white African character I’ll call Dave, said he’d take out three of the tents and only have seven if he had his way but he was only working for the man, just like everybody else.
This place was down along a river, nice location. Oil had been discovered in the ground nearby, but recently enough that not a lot had been done yet; They were still mobilizing to get at it. Just over a ridge was the Congo border.
A four-wheeler drove up and Dave went to see. Came back after a while and told us it was the head of military intelligence for this sector. Said he drops by to buy a beer now and then, but of course the beer’s on the house. The military man makes every visit a “family visit” (Dave sticks quotes up in the air). This time he brought his wife, last time his sister.
I give them some beers, maybe a bite, and we visit a half hour, Dave says. Even though you have to do it, it’s not a bad idea. I mean, it’s calm over there now (thumb in the direction of the DRC), but it only takes them three or four days to cook up a civil war.
Not that this isn’t the safest place you can be, right here. Because it is, he thinks. They’ve got all the oil guys here. They’ve doubled the military presence. Never be the same. Still, it’s good to have a phone number for the head of military intelligence.
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Uganda is one of my favorite of the countries Donald Trump characterized rudely. Really a pretty place with nice, easy-going people. There are more photos in the Uganda Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
January 22, 2018
The Dawn Watch
[image error]Reasonably well-read people will know that Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness after spending time in Congo. Maybe you didn’t know Conrad only made one trip up the river and on returning to Leopoldville, before even leaving the colony, wrote
“Decidedly I regret having come here. I even regret it bitterly….”
Most people will also have the vague knowledge that Congo produced rubber. Maybe you didn’t realize how perfectly nasty that business was.
“You had to go into the rainforest, your feet squelching deep into mud and standing water, hoping not to step on a snake, ears pricked for the rustle of leopards a pounce away. You had to pick out a rubber vine in the vegetable tangle, then shimmy up its stalk to a point soft enough that you could slice it to release the sap. It was faster just to cut a vine in half, but because that killed the vine, the state forbade it. You had to wait for the creamy liquid to drop into your pot, then wait for it to thicken and gum into latex. The easiest way was to smear the sap over your body. Once it dried, you could tear it off your skin (taking your hair or skin with it, if needed) and roll it up into balls. It could take days to fill your basket with enough tough, gray pellets to satisfy the state or company agent.”
Get yourself a copy of The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Maya Jasanoff and you’ll learn much more. Ms. Jasanoff opens and closes the book with some of her travels to research the book, and while those sections are brief I’d have been eager to read a whole book about her own travel.
The Dawn Watch is a fine travelogue/biography and I recommend it heartily.
The Government Is Here to Help. And Here. And Here. And Over There.
Here is a list of organizations funded in full or in part by some level of government that I wrote down while riding between M. G. Marg, a central pedestrian street, and the Hotel Mayfair in Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, India:
Forest Secretariat, Forest, Environment and Wildlife Management
Office of the Principal Accountant General, Sikkim
Sikkim Central Water Commission Office of the Superintending Engineer
Sikkim Government Press
The National Cadet Corps
The Regional Centre on National Resources and Sustainable Development
Office of the Ombudsman for the Area Engineers
Sikkim State Commission for Women
Sikkim Commission for Backward classes
Government of India Geological Survey
East Police District Deorali Outpost
The Office of the Director, Sikkim Fire and Rescue Service
The Sikkim Legislative Assembly
SARAH, the Sikkim Anti-Rabies & Animal Health Program
The Reserve Bank of India, Director’s Bungalow
The Directorate of Sikkim State Lotteries
Sikkim Information Center
Sikkim Welfare Board
Geological Survey of India
The Sikkim Relief Rehabilitation Committee for Tibetan Refugees
The Department of Tourism and Civil Aviation (!, a tall, imposing building)
East District Police, Deorali and Tadong Outposts
Forest Secretariat
State Trading Corporation of Sikkim
Urban Development and Housing Department
Family Counseling Center
Housing Welfare Society
There are a lot of characters in Sikkim, as you can see:
Click the photos to enlarge them. And continue your Sikkim tour in the India Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
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Got time to buy me a cup of coffee?
More Trouble in Turkish Cyprus
Earlier this month I published the post Erdogan & Northern Cyprus, in which I admitted ignorance about the aggressive Islamification of Turkish Cyprus. Now that it’s on my radar, I have found new news in the Washington Post today, which may be behind a paywall for you, so here is the first bit:
NICOSIA, Cyprus — The editor of a left-wing Turkish Cypriot newspaper on Monday accused Turkey’s president of instructing supporters to launch a violent attack against his publication’s offices over criticism for Ankara’s military offensive into Syria.
Sener Levent said his newspaper Afrika won’t be silenced in calling out Turkey’s policies either in the breakaway north of ethnically-split Cyprus or elsewhere.
This has to be seen in light of Turkish President Erdogan’s Afrin moment, obviously. The question now, in both incidences, is where will Mr. Erdogan stop. The so-called international community should have something to say on Afrin, though I continue to search in vain for a White House response. In Cyprus, the question is, is Mr. Erdogan is content to merely boil frogs, or does he mean to cause real trouble?
For a little bit of a longer view, here is Cypriot hopes for unification are on life support, but not doomed from theconversation.com.
January 21, 2018
Photo Safari North
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In his work as a landscape and advertising photographer based in Hamburg, Jan Erik Waider tells me he spends up to half of each year on the road, much of it in the Nordic countries. We all benefit from his time investment.
Click through and enjoy Jan Erik’s portfolio. I think it’s beautiful.
January 20, 2018
Vertical Takeoff
Workhorse 737s can strut, too.
Populism, the Future of Jobs and the UBI
An automated bartender pours your beer at Narita airport, Japan
Here is how populism works, in Ian Buruma’s crisp description: “Resentment feeds off a sense of humiliation, a loss of pride. In a society where human worth is measured by individual success, symbolized by celebrity and money, it is easy to feel humiliated by a relative lack of it, of being just another face in the crowd. In extreme cases, desperate individuals will assassinate a president or a rock star just to get into the news. Populists find support among those resentful faces in the crowd, people who feel that elites have betrayed them, by taking away their sense of pride in their class, their culture, or their race.”
“This has not happened in Japan yet,” he says, where “self-worth is defined less by individual fame or wealth than by having a place in a collective enterprise, and doing the job one is assigned as well as one can.”
For example, “People in department stores seem to take genuine pride in wrapping merchandise beautifully. Some jobs – think of those uniformed middle-aged men who smile and bow at customers entering a bank – appear to be entirely superfluous. It would be naive to assume that these tasks give huge satisfaction, but they offer people a sense of place, a role in society, however humble.”
This is one reason Japan has skirted some of the problems of neo-liberalism, he thinks, along with some other less savory reasons like “corporate interests, bureaucratic privileges, and pork-barrel politics….”
Removing any sense of community in the name of efficiency, Buruma believes, has been the road to neo-lib perdition. (His example: “Thatcherism has probably made the British economy more efficient … by crushing trade unions and other established institutions of working-class culture.”)
•••••
Buruma ties populism (in Japan, at least) to job satisfaction, and while debate over populism rages everywhere on the internet these days, talk about jobs seems to come (as it ever was) mostly from the left. What once was a debate centered narrowly on the loss of jobs due to automation has now opened up to include the very future of work. It’s a subject that has caught my imagination. I’ve compiled a list of relevant articles and websites below the fold, in case you’re interested.
Quartz has opened up a dedicated section about the future of work.
Here are a few articles:
What kind of jobs will the robots leave us
The end of work as we know it?
Persistent Precarity. The making of a generation
What happens when the jobs dry up in the new world? The left must have an answer
Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs
The idea of Universal Basic Income is on the table, too. UBI is a system in which “all citizens (or permanent residents) of a country receive a regular, liveable and unconditional sum of money, from the government. Payment does not require the recipient to work or look for work, and is independent of any other income.” Thought leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are offering early qualified, tentative support. Here is an introductory video:
And here is a list of books, for further reading.
Finland has a UBI experiment underway in which 2000 people receive a basic income of €560 for 2017-2018. Kela – The Social Insurance Institution of Finland, explains the program here.
There are divergent views about how it’s going: A basic income for everyone? Yes, Finland shows it really can work and Why Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Isn’t Working
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Got time to buy me a cup of coffee?
