Housekeeping

Hanoi Train Street (Trần Phú), cutting through the city's Vieux Quartier, is neither on the wrong nor the right side of the tracks, but both sides, and lined with cafés where trainspotting locals and tourists gather, often to take pictures of the trains passing at a perilous distance between the rows of tables, and of each other (this picture, from Vespa Adventures, is a lot better than mine). Apparently closed down in 2023 by concerned officials after a near-accident, it is now back in operation.

I really should have said something sooner, but I've been pretty busy with this Vietnam vacation, more packed with planned touristy activities than I'm accustomed to, not that I'm apologizing for that (in fact I'm kind of liking that aspect a lot, especially in Hanoi, a wild city it would have taken us years we don't have to be able to negotiate for ourselves),  but I haven't had a couple of hours together when I could put my thoughts to the current situation since New Year's Eve. We'll be reducing the pace considerably starting tomorrow, and heading for familiar Singapore in a couple of days, and I hope to be posting more substantially again soon.

The Chatbot Did It: Postscript

 

At the Substack.

Newsletter: Palestine Diplomacy

  

New  Substack post.

David Brooks Plagiarism Watch

 

New Substack post:

Executive Karma

 For no reason other than maybe my clumsy old fingers, comments from non-paying readers were disallowed on this Substack post. So I've fixed that.

Elon Musk's Great Replacement

I'll try to post a real post here very soon. Meanwhile this.

Housekeeping

 

I should really let you all know that I'm in a much better state, getting regular physical therapy and recovering well, though I've got a long way to go. My grievance with the hospital now boils down to just one item, their catastrophic inability to communicate, which I guess is a form of the "administrative burden" Brad DeLong was writing about (the day after my accident, as it happens) :

Pamela Herd & al.: Administrative burden as a mechanism of inequality: ‘Ask anyone about their interactions with government, and chances are you will get an earful about a seemingly Kafka-esque experience that they or a family member has faced trying to access vitally important social rights such as health care, income support, unemployment, and food assistance, or a fundamental political right….

Administrative burdens have the odd combination of being both grindingly familiar to us as individuals, and largely unattended as a matter of policy analysis, design, and practice…. One explanation for this failing is the fragmented discourse around them, siloed both across and within academic disciplines and policy areas…

The hospital never in fact abandoned me, they just never let me know. I wasn't getting PT right away because I wasn't expected to be ready for it until considerably later (most patients are too broken to start exercising for at least a couple of weeks; I was ready, in fact, as they could have found out if they'd been paying attention, but they were treating a fictionally average patient). There's a whole series of follow-up visits going on into October I have to attend, but they didn't tell me in advance, just started scheduling them and calling me when that was done. All the medical personnel are very nice, encouraging, and happy to tell me what they know (which is of course limited by the "team" approach; I finally had an appointment this morning with the "Dr. John Muller" who undislocated my finger but never entered my brain, but he still didn't show up—it was an extremely pleasant young woman called "Dr. Miller" that examined me and sent me on my way).

It is, as DeLong's reading suggests, a form of the enforcement of inequality. We commonly think of administrative burden as a rightwing issue, complaints about excessive regulation, and the suffering of businessmen forced to furnish proof that they're not robbing the public or endangering their workers, but it falls more on the disadvantaged, who can't hire the assistance they need to emerge from the process successfully and experience it not as too much paperwork but as sheer neglect: 

My view is that administrative burdens do not vary much across different types of interactions with the government—but that means that you are f***ed if you cannot afford to buy expertise to figure out how to minimize the burdens, or if you find yourself in a place in your life where you have to have a lot of interactions with a lot of different arms of governments. And federalism is an absolute killer.

Thus it is not a mechanism that raises inequality so much as a burden that existing inequality makes much heavier on the poor than on the rich—that insulating themselves from government-imposed administrative burdens is another one of the things the rich can and do buy with their money.

Something I've been too prosperous to experience in recent years (not entirely: I've had some bad and mystifying tax issues connected with Social Security) but remember from my youth and bouts with unemployment insurance and food stamps (back when there were actual stamps) and student loans, in pathetically small amounts (low four figures), that somehow took me decades to pay.

Now I'm past the actual horror I wrote about a weekend ago, I'm taking it as an opportunity to think about these matters, and kind of glad of the experience.

Housekeeping note

 

Leg hurting too much 5 hours before next tylenol, too distracting to work at anything, scrolling all boring, nobody around, finally occurred to me I could do half a gummie and some music (Brahms 2nd piano concerto for starters, old András Schiff and Berlin Philharmoniker under K. Petrenko—don't just listen, get a video and watch the solo cello in third movement—tape below feature the incredible Yuja on piano). Very pleased to report you don't have to wait an hour for CBD to kick in, I may not be high yet but my leg doesn't hurt. See you on the other side. Shocked how fast the first 18 minutes of the concerto are done.

Can't believe how disconnected my youthful drug life was from this central German Romantic repertoire, or really any "classical" music at all, 18th to 20th century, big as the music has been in my life. Always took that music straight or with a little beer. Cannabis music was "progressive", usually with electric guitars. But it's lovely for listening to this in ways I feel I should have known, listening to the general shapeliness without necessarily needing to pay very close architectural-style attention, and appreciating very slow cantilena passages with the solo instruments, which the performers love so much more than it's natural for a listener to do. It's over so soon! If you do listen, note in the fourth movement Brahms's affection for the pop music of his own time, sweetfake Hungarian dance music.

Situation Report

Shave! Almost never get a picture of myself that I don't really hate, and I feel I have to post this one just because I don't hate it. Wish the bloody scabs on my forehead had come out more vivid but you can't have everything.

Yesterday at 2:00 am I was sitting on the edge of the couch I'd been sleeping on (it'a a sofa bed, but we'd decided not to bother to pull it out—no possibility of using the actual bed, a three-foot monster as unattainable for now as Everest) in a panic, wanting to travel down the hall for a pee but unable to nerve myself to getting up into the walker from an untried angle. It took two hours, and the kid surfacing from his own room like Dumbo's familiar with the magic feather to convince me it was possible. Waking up this morning with the same urge at a more suitable hour a little before 6:00 (we're pulling the bed out now, but otherwise similarly circumstanced) I was out to the toilet like a bat out of hell, maneuvering the walker through the byways of the little New York apartment (the hall is too narrow to tackle head on, and I have to make my way through it crabwise) with consummate skill, and finished in a couple of minutes.

And that in short is how it has been going. A series of inconceivable achievements, from the first step in the walker, leaving me exhausted for hours, after which they suddenly turn out to be easy tricks I do all the time. Every new skill I need turns out pretty easy to master, even though that first experience seems so overwhelming until I do master it. 

Pain is an issue, mostly pretty bearable but an awful distraction. Sometimes it's altogether gone (hospital acetominophen, and I am definitely going to be following our house horticulturalist's advice, maybe right after I hit post on this, with an edible present from the kids). 

I have to say how lucky I am, with a job that offers decent health insurance and a white man's license to tell people what I want. I congratulate myself on the heroism I bring to taking a pee because there are people around me letting me do that, and I know there are people all over town doing ten times more, unheralded and unremarked.

I'm also convinced (inshallah) that there's some kind of normal for me on the other side of this, and itt's not my time yet to be the old guy in the walker, though if it is I'll try to bring it some grace (there's a particularly lovely old lady on my street who carries her walker-with-seat and her book right around the block with her in the course of a day, following the sun,  and I mean that kind of grace). Anyway, be right back.

 

Accident

 

I had a nasty accident in the subway, pitching down a flight of stone steps and landing at the landing. I must have tripped, I guess, or had a shoe issue. Maybe I was wearing reading glasses and getting a false picture of things a ilttle under six feet away. I didn't exaxtly see it happen, though I did know it was happening (oh shit), and definitely lost consciousness for a good instant there.

I opened my eyes under rhe eyes of cops doing the things they are supposed to do, making an appraisal of the situation and a plan to get me out of there and noticing that I was screaming whenever they touched my left leg (fracture in the femur, right by the knee). They got me into an ambulance which got me to Bellevue, once the fabled East Side lunatic asylum, but a very civilized place nowadays, and I'm not about to make any complaints except maybe on the subject of Mayor Eric Adams, thanks to whom all my meals are mostly plant-based and entirely vegetarian, which is fine with me—far better than any hospital food I've had before, which is not to say good, exactly, but edible enough to ensure I don't starve—but maybe not the best political move Adams could have made.

At night, the hospital becomes a symphony of irritating electronic noises, from the random bleep or bleat to the occasional full-scale melodty. This became the subject for me of a non-lucid dream on the first bight. "Methought", as dream reporters used to say, I had the computer on and was following all those sounds as notifications. I actually told the  night nurse about this in the morning: "All those noises are on the imternet!" "You were dreaming," she said, correctly.

And Fox Shall Have No Dominion

Posted a response to the settlement of Dominion vs. Fox News on the Substack Wednesday, a little bit depressed along with Steve, and forgot to notify you all here, immersed as I was in the vileness of Milo and Ali and the rest of them, but anyhow it's at the above link, and I think it's got at least half an idea that might be of interest, and to which I might return sometime. If you haven't seen it, you could have a look.

Also on the Substack, a little housekeeping info: I'm still not completely sure what I want to do with it, or exactly why, except that it has to do with the broader project of detaching myself from the Twitter, as Elmo's mismanagement gets to be more and more of a problem—in the latest, celebrating his favorite holiday of 4/20, he took away all the blue checkmarks of verification from those who were verified, while keeping it for the marks who had ponied up $8, so now they are all like the imperial cronies who purchased baronies on the cheap from Napoleon III, so that the check is now literally an indication that the possessor is nobody, like the unfortunate Mr. Turd:

A Bridge Quite Near

Xiamen City, Fujian, China, formerly known as Amoy, as seen from fortified shores of the closest piece of Taiwan, on the Kinmen islands, formerly known as Quemoy. Photo by Reuters via Taipei Times.

The previous post originally went up under the headline "A Bridge Too Far", which couldn't have made a lot of sense (I've changed it). 

The headline belonged to a different piece that got longer and longer and more and more essay-ish and ended up in the Substack, where, as ever, you're welcome to have a look. The Bridge is a conservative intellectual you've never heard of—neither had I before yesterday—called Elbridge A. Colby, who's running the Republican Party's increasing anti-Chinese paranoia.

Trouble With a Capital T

 

Spooky things are happening in the world of social or semi-social media, not just at Twitter. I saw this note about Facebook's Instagram platform today

Instagram "removed" one of my stories from 2 years ago that showed one of those old timey KKK warnings for Africans to not go to communist meetings because it "violates guidelines" and barred me from using paid branding tools lol is there a purge on the horizon?

— Flying Chaucer (@lelianadelrey) April 8, 2023

and in fact last week I went through something similar myself at Blogger, the Google subsidiary that generously provides this space for free to me and Steve and Roy (Alicublog) and huge numbers of people like us to expose our thinking to public notice; I had three old posts "unpublished" on grounds that it had been flagged by some anonymous user and found on review to violate Blogger's "Malware and Virus Policy", which is weird, because I'm not aware of passing on any malware or viruses at all, though I can imagine being found offensive from time to time to some sensitive soul and getting in trouble with the community guidelines that way.

Housekeeping

 

From the Cerrahiyetü'l Haniyye (Imperial Surgery) of Serafeddin Sabuncuoglu (1385–1470), the first illustrated atlas on surgery, and the last major medical treatise from an Islamic source, composed in Turkish in 1465; from the collections of the Millet Library in İstanbul-Fatih.

Surgery yesterday went extremely well, by the way. Looks like I may not have to do the other eye, I've gained so much function already. I was surprised and initially a bit freaked out to learn that they don't knock you out—my GP kind of lied to me about that, or seriously didn't know. They give you an extremely relaxing medication with IV, but you're conscious, and your eye is obviously open. But the thing they could have explained to me, which I am going to explain to you, is that your fear is based on a childish misunderstanding: I was assuming, unconsciously, that my open eye would be watching what was being done to it, and that's not true. You're not in fact seeing anything, at first because there's nothing visible going on, because it's lasers, not tiny scalpels or scrapers, that are going the work of scrubbing away the cataract, and soon enough because your eye is completely disabled—there's no lens enabling you to "see" anything at all. Your optic nerve does what it can with the light signals it's getting, but they don't add up to anything like an image, and as they're installing the new lens, that turns into a real psychedelic light show, too bright to be quite comfortable, but kind of beautiful all the same; I was looking at three lumpy objects in the lower part of a field, swelling and changing colors, from a pale lemon to a vibrant purple, to some kind of electronica soundtrack, too, of the machinery's noises, some of them pitched including one that sounded a lot like a good old Hammond organ, a real (though abstract and inconclusive) fragment of melody. It was spectacular. Then they tell you it's time to close the eye, and when you open it again, under the transparent plastic shield they've taped over it, you just see the room, already a little sharper than it was when you came in.

Meanwhile

I won't give names or photos or links to the press coverage, but I have to say my Israeli nephew and his partner were at Saturday's giant demonstration in Tel Aviv against the Netanyahu plot to keep himself out of prison by taking away the independence of the judiciary, and she was among the arrested, for allegedly biting an officer's finger; "You have to ask," she commented afterwards, "what his finger was doing inside my mouth in the first place." She lost two teeth in the scuffle, and was eventually released from custody.

Housekeeping: On his blindness

John Milton dictating Samson Agonistes.

 

Posting at Rectification Central has really slowed in the last few months, for what may be a couple of reasons, one of which is that my eyes are in really terrible shape—old people's cataracts, in both of them—and it's taken a ridiculous amount of time, since early last October, to make an appointment to fix them. You know how they told us if we had socialized medicine everybody would have to wait months and months for urgent medical care like all those poor people in Canada? Well, it turns out not only, as you all know, that that doesn't actually happen in Canada, but it has happened here without any socialism.

The symptoms for me are very different than the myopic blur I've had especially in the left eye for practically all of my life, and aren't corrected by glasses; it feels as if the field I'm looking at is divided into dozens of transparent planes parallel to my face of which I can only focus on one at a time. Going down stairs is scary, because I'm not sure if the next step is exactly where it seems to be, and I find myself  clutching the bannister like Trump; and when I'm reading, online or off, type keeps disappearing from the plane I'm looking at to the one behind it, especially if it's small, or in an alphabet or writing system other than the roman alphabet, which is hellish at my job, where I have to look at quite a lot of Chinese and Japanese in addition to the occasional bit of Bulgarian or Greek or what have you; and worse if the light is not quite right, too bright, too dark, or too contrasty, which is most of the time. Researching the blog posts out of my 40 open tabs, with all their different fonts and degrees of brightness, is the hardest part, and slows me down so much that I get bored with a topic long before I've finished, or get scooped and there's no point in finishing. And the corollary thing is that the more aware I've been of it since the diagnosis in October, the blinder I feel, 

Long story short, I'm getting the left eye done on Monday, at last, the right eye at some undetermined point soon after, and supposedly will see some immediate improvement, and maybe we can get back to normal. But I'm thinking of myself as taking a break from now (and still on Twitter, unwilling to surrender to Noel Skum—dark mode makes a serious difference in what I can take anyway).

Thy Hand, Great Anarch! Two kinds of stupid

 

I

Apparently President Putin has spent the last four days raining death and destruction on Ukrainian civilians not because it's some kind of military strategy—wrong, it's of no strategic value at all—and also not because he just has too much weaponry and is trying to use it up, like trad Catholics using up all the animal fat in the house on Pancake Tuesday, but out of fear of people in his orbit who are even more rabid than he is. It's the "more serious" response he was promising last month if Ukraine continued refusing to be conquered:

“Recently, the Russian armed forces have inflicted a couple of sensitive blows. Let’s assume they’re a warning. If the situation continues to develop like this, then the response will be more serious,” he said.

Though there's nothing serious about it, other than that he seems to be seriously afraid of his own puppets:

So what is it to you?

It is my birthday, shared, as some of you know, not only with Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr., but also Intellectual Dank Web philosopher Benjamin "Ben" Shapiro.

I was deeply gratified by this, from a friend:

RIP

Dear blogfriend Peter Hochstein, known to you all as The New York Crank and in the comments as Etaoin Shrdlu, died April 9 this year, apparently of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, at what must have been around 80 or 81  (he graduated from Antioch in 1961). I just Googled him this morning, wondering why he hadn't posted anything at his own blog or anywhere else since March, and found his brief obituary at the Antioch website.

Another blogfriend, MBouffant, sent us a link to a very fine blog obituary (bloggobit?) by Jill of Brilliant at Breakfast, which I hope everybody will read. He was a superb writer, with a droll fantasy under an old ad man's discipline (he could never write anything without a clear-cut shape), and a kind though cranky person, and we'll miss him forever. His last post, from just three weeks or so before he died, was a particularly good one, dark and funny, which somehow helps me hope with Jill that his passing was quick and peaceful.

Not With a Pang But a Simper

Update: The original version version of this post was deleted by Blogger during a long moment of weirdness at the platform, after a complaint, they said at various points, that it might contain a virus or malware,. or represented a phishing attack. So I posted this version, eliminating a couple of hyperlinks I thought might be the problem, if there actually was a problem, which there apparently wasn't, since they have now reinstated it, or rather allowed me to reinstate it. 

 Both versions have attracted great comments, so I'm leaving both of them up.

 

Recently I took a friend with no more than a University of Chicago history B.A. and a seven-figure salary writing 800 words a week for the middlebrow New York Times to listen to some intellectual talk. Insensitively, I brought him to a conference at Bryn Mawr College, where students are well-steeped in doctrines of intersectionality, "white fragility", anti-racism, and all the rest. Suddenly, I saw his face grow dark and panicky as he looked at the schedule and its unfamiliar words like "heteronormativity", "cisgender", and "patriarchal". Quickly, I asked him if he wanted to go somewhere else and with a fearful gesture he assented and we went instead to the local Y, where we listened to a nice talk about five ideas from social psychology that can help you turn your life around.

Yes, it's David F. Brooks acknowledging that maybe  his conservative friends ought to lighten up a little bit on the wokeness threat ("How Wokeness Ends"), in the first place because it's a case of the curate's egg, good in parts:

Rectification Central Adds a Voice: Welcome Redhand

After years of commenting (I've lost count of the number, but it precedes the big comment crash fairly early in the blog's history) I've finally decided to accept Yas's kind invitation to post on a regular basis. Before I do so, I figured I'd "out" myself by letting you know who I am and what I do and give you a sense of the kind of content I plan to offer here.

Like Yas, I'm very much "A grizzled Boomer," perplexed and disturbed by the direction our Country has taken under Republican rule, and compelled to comment on it. I'm proud to say I was born in the Bronx in 1949, into a totally ethnic Irish immigrant family. (My Russian wife insisted I take a DNA test, and it showed a genetic strain traced literally 99.9% to Ireland: no surprise really given my grandparents' names on both sides of the family.)  I'm an O'Neill, which explains the handle "Redhand."  The angry centurion avatar I use is a hat tip to the time my family spent in Rome in the late Sixties where my Air Force pilot father was assigned after spending a year in Vietnam.

I spent three years in the Navy after college in the early Seventies, went to law school, and became a lawyer in 1977. I worked twenty years as in-house counsel for a defense contractor in New Jersey, ultimately becoming the General Counsel until I "left corporate life" in 2001 when it was clear that I was incompatible with the Company's new CEO.

Going back to my family's immigrant roots, I decided to reinvent myself as an immigration lawyer after 9/11, and haven't looked back since. I've practiced in Morristown, NJ for many years, and have no plans to retire.

As you might imagine, the Trump years were a nightmare. I think it's best summed up by incoming DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorka's press conference on March 1, 2021, when he stated:

"I think it is important to understand what we have inherited, because it defines the situation as it currently stands. Entire systems are not rebuilt in a day or in a few weeks. To put it succinctly, the prior administration dismantled our nation’s immigration system in its entirety." [My emphasis.]

Most of my content will be immigration-related; it remains a cutting-edge issue in American society and politics, but I'll also occasionally comment on cultural issues, both here and abroad.  I'll continue to comment, and look forward to further fascinating discussions at this remarkable place.