James’s Comments

James’s comments from the History is Not Boring group.

Note: James is not currently a member of this group.

Under a fallen chestnut tree, the village smithy lies... he should have stood under an oak, maybe.

They'd probably have to have a pretty wooden personality... maybe some deep roots in their community too. Not to mention being kind of nutty.

The bark beetles are devastating forests in a lot of North America - healthy trees can resist them fairly well, but drought weakens them and the beetles then kill them. There are major stretches in the mountains here that are brown because the trees are all dead. That, in turn, primes the areas for fires that leave nothing living.

I saw an article recently about a proposal by a wildlife biologist to save plant and animal species whose habitats are becoming too hot, too dry, etc., or are under attack by new parasites like the chestnuts, by transplanting them to places that the same climate change processes have made habitable for them. It's controversial, but it might prevent some extinctions.

Another strange development is that as warming melts more polar ice and pushes polar bears south and habitat encroachment pushes grizzlies and other brown bears north, they're running into each other, and at least one grizzly/polar hybrid (confirmed by DNA analysis) has been killed in the wild. The two species only branched apart about 20,000 years ago and can still interbreed. The photo was interesting - it was white but had some dark fur around its eyes and on its paws, and its head was shaped like a grizzly's more than a polar bear's. They can't decide whether to call it a grolar or a pizzly.

We were on vacation in Raleigh last year and saw a museum exhibit about the chestnut blight - I'd heard of it but had no idea of the scale. Apparently chestnuts were one of the most common trees in North America until then, and they got gigantic. They're not completely gone - they'll start out, but they die when they reach a certain size, not very big. Botanists are still working on cross-breeding them with related trees to come up with a blight-resistant variety. I hope they succeed.

I'd heard something similar about end-of-life medical expenses, and for the way a lot of people die it seems plausible. That trend is probably going to keep going as science keeps producing more amazing, and more expensive, capabilities to treat conditions that used to be untreatable.

End of life... I'd go with irreversible loss of consciousness. At that point you're not really living, you're just a component in a mechanical system, whether it's artificial feeding or more radical "life" support. I think the typical DNR form is a step in a positive direction, because it gives you some options in choosing how you will define the end of your own life.

I've let my family know that if I'm ever in that kind of situation, I'd like to have them take everything usable for transplants and transfusions and cremate what's left behind. At that point I don't believe I'm still in there anymore anyway.

I'm with others on the right-to-die question. I just can't see where someone else has the right to overrule my wishes, or those of my family if I'm unresponsive. If someone else wants heroic measures for themselves, I respect that, but if my quality of life is gone, let me go.

According to a study I saw, there's a very tight correlation between insurance premiums including health insurance and the ups and downs of the bond market, but not much at all with malpractice awards. The insurance companies take whatever capital isn't tied up and invest it, and they move premiums up and down to stay as competitive as they can while still maintaining enough profit margin to stay in business.

The real reasons for the blather about "frivolous lawsuits" are (1) protecting corporate bottom lines (for example, Exxon got away with paying about a day's worth of profit for the Exxon Valdez spill) and (2) undercutting the incomes of personal injury attorneys - who happen to contribute overwhelmingly more to Democrats than to Republicans.

Their firearms, and maybe even more important their ammunition, are definitely manufactured to a higher standard - quality control with ammunition has improved immensely just in the last couple of decades, to the point where basic factory cartridges now are more consistent than the best premium stuff made not that long ago. These days a rifle is not considered accurate unless it can keep a group of five shots (fired when it's clamped in a rest) within one minute of angle (M.O.A.) or better, which is basically within an inch of spread per 100 yards, and a lot of factory rifle-and-cartridge combos will routinely shoot within 1/2 to 1/4 M.O.A. The trick shooters on that TV special were all doing extreme precision stuff at short range, but some shooters are also producing five-shot groups as small as 6 inches at 1000 yards. Of course, that's with massive rifles that weight 30-40 pounds and high-magnification scopes; still, the wind changes back and forth a lot over that kind of distance.

Funny how arbritrary, and how different, standards of sexual behavior are between different societies and eras, and how sure the people who hold each set of views are that they're right because that's just what's natural and moral. Also how much difference there often is between what is publicly professed and privately practiced - for example, Victorian society was so prissy that they put little skirts around the legs of furniture (which they referred to as "limbs" because the very word "legs" was considered so obscene) but behind the scenes, prostitution including child prostitution and pornography were endemic. People are crazy.

Mecham or Blogo - what a choice. Yeccch. I don't know whether Blogo is a racist or fundamentalist - that might be the thing that made one even more horrible; Mecham, as soon as he finished taking the oath of office, turned to the audience and announced that he was dedicating his administration as governor to the Mormon church, and one of the many idiocies that got him blasted was when he didn't understand why black people were offended when he referred to their children as pickaninnies.

Re malpractice, there's an apparently true story about a person who was due to have surgery on one of his legs who took a marker and wrote "This leg!" on that leg and "Not this leg!" on the other.

I've known too many arrogant and high-handed MDs who did really stupid things (my father was one) to trust them based on their being MDs. I remember when one of my grandfathers was dying of cancer - they kept him alive, in agony, for weeks after he and the whole family wanted them to let him go. That still rankles, as does a situation leaning the other way with my mother - she was not immediately terminal and was still young (63), but her doctor told us that he thought we were wasting his time and resources by expecting him to keep treating her, because her heart was in bad shape; it was like a mechanic telling us he thought it was dumb to keep working on a car with high mileage. Cold as stone. The charge nurse read him the riot act, but he didn't grow a heart, he just got more careful about what he said. If I'd had the power, I'd have taken his license and sent him to work in a sewer.

I tend to give more respect starting out to nurses, osteopaths, chiropractors, and nurse practitioners. I've had some excellent doctors including the ones I have now at the VA, but I'm always suspicious until they prove they're competent and decent.

Yeah, but Paul wants to reverse Roe v. Wade, so apparently he only holds that belief some of the time. He's written some ugly racist and homophobic stuff, too. He reminds me of my state's former governor Gary Johnson - I agree with him on drug policy, but not on much else.
As far as cringe-inducing politicians at the state level, I lived in Arizona when Evan Mecham was governor there, and I don't see how anybody could do much worse - he made GWB look like a genius and made Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond look sensitive and tolerant on race. And when he got impeached after he won the election, for embezzling funds from his campaign to prop up his failing car dealership, he tried to set his brother up as the fall guy to take the blame. During that time, if you were from Arizona and visiting another state, as soon as people heard where you lived they were likely to start laughing and ask what in the world we'd been thinking when we elected our lunatic governor.

If I had a time machine, I'd drop in on Einstein while he was a bored patent clerk thinking about physics when work got slow.
I'd like to see the battle of Midway, too, especially that short span of time when American pilots sank four Japanese heavy carriers, three of them pretty much simultaneously. The whole balance of power in the Pacific war changed radically in one day; it probably shortened the war by at least a year or two and thereby ultimately saved a whole lot of lives of American military people and both servicemen and civilians in Japan.

Yes, those quick-draw duels in the street were actually rare enough that when one did take place it was big news - there were a lot of shootings (and stabbings, and beatings, etc.) in some places, but the shooters typically sneaked up on their victims. A lot of them weren't very good shots, so they often fired from close enough to touch the other person.

I have read of people performing trick shots so accurate they seem impossible, and I saw a documentary on the History Channel recently in which several professional stunt shooters did some astonishing things on camera. One guy repeatedly tossed aspirin tablets into the air and hit them - the high-speed camera playback followed the aspirin and clearly showed the bullet hitting it.

It wasn't in that league, but one of my brothers won a long-range event in the annual all-Marine Corps matches in 1989 or 1990, I don't remember which year. With an M14 with iron sights, no scope, he had to start in a standing position; down at the target line someone stuck a head-and-torso sized cardboard silhouette stapled to a pine 2x2 up above the berm and started walking - the shooters didn't know where on the line the target would come up or which way it would go. The person holding the target went about 50 feet at normal walking speed - about ten seconds - and then pulled it down. During that time the shooter had to go from standing to prone, adjust his sling on his arm and adjust the windage on the rear sight, and hit the silhouette before it dropped out of sight. The part that impresses me is that they were shooting from 1,000 yards. The standard USMC rifle course only involves shooting at 200, 300, and 500 yards - a lot of people can put ten out of ten rounds into that torso silhouette from 500 yards (you get ten minutes) but that 1,000 yard line is well over half a mile from the target, the target is moving, and you have ten seconds.

I've read that Alexander was bisexual too - in his time and culture, that wasn't unusual. Funny that they'd get upset about that, but then I've never understood that whole thing of glorying (or feeling embarrassed) at what one's ancestors were or did. I used to know a guy who was really enthused about the Vikings - loved to build scratch wooden models of their ships and so on; he would talk about how his people were Vikings - another friend would always laugh and say, "Paul, your people are a bunch of dairy farmers."

Best summation of that whole thing I've run across was a quip by Robert Heinlein, saying he'd once met a little lizard who boasted of being a brontosaurus on his mother's side.

In a documentary about J.R.R. Tolkien we were watching last week, they said that Tolkien believed that the King Arthur story was not really English but was a transplant from France.

He apparently didn't like French culture much. Maybe an aftereffect of his devastating experiences in France in WWI - he got there just in time for the battle of the Somme, and to be there when just about all his close boyhood friends were killed in a fairly short span of time.

I don't remember the source, but I read years ago that World War I killed so many French men, ironically the youngest and healthiest, that after the war the average height of adult French males was four inches shorter than before the war. I also remember reading that people in Japan tended to be small due to limited diet, and that after the country opened up to trade with the rest of the world and people's diet got more varied and included more protein, they started gaining an average of a few inches per generation. They still averaged a lot smaller than Americans when I was there in 1977 and 1978, though. A friend named Dale (who was a body builder and martial artist) and I were on a train from one city to another, and a little gang of teenage wannabe hoodlums (complete with greased duck's-ass hairdos, bad skin, and faux leather jackets with red balls painted on the backs) came swaggering into the car we were on, shoving people just to be shoving them. We were leaning on the wall on both sides of the doors, having given up our seats to some elderly folks, so they walked past us without seeing us - their leader heard Dale snicker, whirled around and found himself staring into the center of my friend's chest a few inches away. It looked as if he wrenched his neck jerking his head back to look up from there to Dale's face. They left.

Americans are definitely getting fatter; for the last few years it hasn't been unusual to look around in an elevator or in line at the grocery store and realize that nearly everyone in sight is obese. Another sign is the rising incidence of early-onset diabetes in American children and adolescents.


Looking at things like old suits of armor, clothing, weapons, tools and so on, it seems as if people really were smaller in some places but not in others. There were a lot of Vikings who would stand out as unusually tall and robust even today.

Unless my memory is off, they tried to pass it under Johnson but couldn't quite get the votes - I seem to remember some controversy about Richardson centering on whether he would advocate for it or sign it if it passed, and a point in his campaign being that he did support it.

We are indeed losing staffing and resources for law enforcement - federal support for first responders kept eroding year after year under Bush, and in addition to the more visible outright loss of jobs, agencies have been hurt by the fact that a lot of cops, firefighters, and EMTs are also military reservists or National Guard members and have been repeatedly forced to be absent from their jobs because they were deployed.

Another advantage of legalization of now-illegal drugs would be that people could seek treatment without, essentially, having to identify themselves as criminals.

Re Afghanistan, I fear you're right. Every outside force who tried to control it back to and including the army of Alexander the Great has failed and lost a lot of people doing it. Unless I'm misreading the news, the Taliban are gaining strength and power again despite anything we're doing to try to prevent it. The mountains there are the equal of the jungles in southeast Asia in terms of rendering a lot of our high-tech weapons irrelevant, and the only way to really subdue true believers like the Islamic fundamentalists is to kill them all, and that is something the American people, thankfully, would not stand for. The only other option is, sooner or later, to leave, as we finally had to in Vietnam.

Probably because the side of human nature with which they deal, police and corrections officers tend to become deeply, darkly cynical and to draw hard-and-fast us-and-them distinctions between criminals and other people, and to be dogmatic about enforcing the rules because they're the rules without examining whether they're justified. Even as they enter the field, the psych tests indicate that the people drawn to enter those fields tend to be more prone than most to think in absolutist all-or-nothing terms (ironically, so do a lot of the people they arrest and lock up. The two psychological profiles are very similar; the main difference is in their attitudes toward authority.)

Their agencies often have concrete stakes in the so-called drug war, too. A lot of their funding may be based on it, and they use vehicles and property confiscated from dealers and users. A friend of mine (a former cop, ironically) told me about an experience during a vacation. He and a friend were traveling cross-country, on expensive motorcycles. They had stopped for lunch and a man came up and started asking whether they wanted to buy any drugs, or knew where he could get any. They said no, but he wouldn't go away; my friend said he knew right away it was a sting and he was pretty sure their motorcycles were the main target - he had to yell at the guy to leave them alone and threaten to call police himself before the man would stop. I see cops here driving around in some muscle cars I suspect weren't bought by their department, fiscal realities being what they are, but were confiscated.

There's also the fact that a lot of legislators here are from the kneejerk conservative parts of the state and have a reflex response to the mention of 'drugs' (of course, they don't consider alcohol a drug) that made it a struggle even to get a measure through to allow medical use of marijuana for cancer and HIV sufferers, though it did pass due to a democratic majority and support from a Democratic governor.

One of the controversies in addiction treatment is the approach called harm reduction. In harm reduction, you encourage people to completely give up the use of addictive substances, but at the same time you recognize that there are people who won't do that, or won't do it yet, and you try to reduce the harm caused by the behavior to society and to them. One example is the kind of needle exchange program that seeks to lower the transmission rates of HIV and hepatitis among IV drug users; methadone maintenance for heroin addicts is another; the idea of the designated driver is another. After working in the field since 1987, I believe it makes sense, but there's a lot of resistance from the same kind of moralistic thinkers who preach 'just say no' and are unwilling to countenance anything except total elimination of a problem. There's been a recent innovation in harm reduction related to gambling here, a voluntary one on the part of some of the Native American casinos, in response to studies showing a strong connection between compulsive gambling and domestic violence; the casinos contribute funding toward DV treatment programs. As Jim noted, laws against prostitution don't eliminate it, they just drive it into the shadows and make it harder to get at for law enforcement. As the old saying has it, you can't (successfully) legislate morality. If the government couldn't even get most people to drive 55 mph, what makes anyone think they're going to give up behaviors with a much stronger pull than speeding, that are harder to catch, just because a law tells them to? I learned early on in raising kids that you don't make a rule that (a) the kids don't want to obey and (b) you can't enforce; it just teaches them to be disobedient and sneaky and reduces their respect for your authority. We have to pick our battles.

I wasn't a fan of Governor Johnson here in NM overall - he ran a corrupt administration (as has Bill Richardson in turn) and the corrections system was even more callous and brutal under Johnson; but I agreed with him on decriminalization of drugs. It makes sense to bring it into the open, regulate it, tax it, and use the proceeds for treatment, education, and programs to help kids avoid getting started.

A big part of the problem with the 'war on drugs' is that as it stands now, too many people in the system have a stake in maintaining the status quo. Dealers don't want it legalized - it would deprive them of a lucrative business. A lot of law enforcement agencies would lose a huge chunk of their resources, and some of them depend on confiscations from alleged users or dealers (often with little or no due process to protect against abuse) to get property they then use or sell, like vehicles and real estate. It reminds me of the situations in the middle ages where kings or lesser rulers would at times declare someone who was rich and vulnerable a heretic so they could seize their property.

I also volunteered at a treatment program in the city jail here for awhile, and I saw the same denial. People will cling to the idea that they aren't addicted because they don't get in trouble every time they drink or use, even though they are drinking or using every time they get in trouble. I would try to point that out using the analogy of a food allergy - if I knew that there was, say, a 1 in 4 chance I'd break out in a rash if I ate strawberries, I'd stay away from them. If I didn't, it would be a sign that I had a problem with eating strawberries. Any time a person does something risky knowing the possible consequences, he or she is saying that they want to do whatever it is enough that the possible consequence is an acceptable price to pay for it. You can't change that with a law; you sometimes can with education and treatment.

Several years ago the federal government did a study in California, the very state that's in the news now because they've lost control of their court-to-prison conveyer belt and are criminally overcrowded and understaffed.
Looking at the problems most inmates have with alcohol and other drugs, the feds found that every tax dollar invested in addiction treatment and rehab saved we the people five dollars in reduced expenses for police, probation/parole folks, and building, staffing, and operating all those prisons.

We currently have over 2 million Americans in jails or prisons - the U.S. imprisons a larger proportion of its people than any other country.

While they're in, we marinate them in a toxic sludge of violence, ethnically separated gangs (they don't have to join a gang, but they don't have to have people that will jump in if he is attacked.

Education programs drastically cut recidivism; less that 1% of American prisons today have educational centers or offer any kind of class.

With addictions, we can set up a "therapeutic community" program; the inmates are in a separate housing unit , with stricter rules than the rest of the prison. Ideally, we'd get someone two years before he/she got out. We spent the time in large group sessions (20 people +), and with two of us counselors, we split the inmates down the middle (actually we split the list, as splitting the inmates wouldn't have gone over well. So they all get group every day and a 1 on 1 session with one of us, plus recreation time at the gym.There's homework in and out of class, too.

The normal recidivision within 3 years of release is about 70%. For inmates who've completed any kind of counseling or education, that drops to between 50

I'm with Jim on this one. Stop sending people to prison for doing things that rate maybe a fine if anything.

Any time! One of the things I like about Goodreads is the sense of community among most people. I took a look, and there are nine categories with somewhere around 10,000 groups, and each group can have multiple strings on specific subjects like this one, so you could probably spend the rest of your life exploring and not have seen a lot of it.

Yes, Pat, you could call it a room - a thread is an ongoing conversation on a particular topic, with any number of participants contributing comments and questions. This string is about presidential biographies, so the readers who plan to have a discussion on Lindbergh are starting a new string for that subject. You can browse existing strings (they are listed within groups from the menus at the top of the screen) or, within a suitable group, start your own strings.