Fascinating how much of what you hear on the demo made it into the final recording; the beautiful chord progressions and piano voicings are already there. To listen to the Aja recording go here.
Found on the great twitter feed of Good Steely Dan Takes.
"If that's the way you want to put it."
"I don't have some 'way to put it'. That's the way it is."
The coin toss scene from No Country For Old Men (2007) contains no raised voices, no weapons appear, and there is no violence but it is one of the most tense and terrifying movies scenes you'll ever see. Javier Bardem won an Academy Award for his performance as the murderous Anton Chigurh (though his haircut deserved equal billing) but just as fine in this scene is Gene Jones as the owner of the gas station who, while making casual chitchat with a customer, eventually realizes he's stumbled into some dark and dangerous waters.
Set in the West Texas of 1980, based on a book by Cormac McCarthy and directed by the Coen Brothers, of whom I am a great admirer, the movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It is an unrelentingly grim film, portraying a brutal, unforgiving universe. It is a fine film, but I left the theater knowing I would never watch it again, though I've seen almost every other Coen Brothers film multiple times. I should have known that going in. Years ago I'd read one of McCarthy's novels, Blood Meridian, finding the writing brilliant but upon finishing vowing I would never read another of his books because his vision of humanity was so bleak.
Along with the full scene below, this link is to an interview with Bardem in which he talks about the importance of Gene Jones to the scene (at 5:35 is when he starts to talk about the movie and then about the specific scene), and this takes you to an analysis of the scene along with background to explain why it is so chillingly effective.
The dialogue is so well done. The contrast between the owner's casual use of words, with that imprecision in grammar we often use when passing the time and just being pleasant, with Chigurgh's literalist worldview, in which everything must be precise; to speak otherwise is meaningless. Yet while Chigurgh insists on the precise meaning of words, the random outcome of a coin toss is just as essential to his view of life.
Imagine in 1966 tuning into a sedate, somewhat corny, Canadian folk music show and hearing a young woman you've never heard of sing this song. In that context Joni Mitchell must have sounded like a being from another planet. It was only in 1968 that she would record her first album. The older gentleman introduced at the beginning is Jimmy Driftwood, who composed Tennessee Stud and the Battle of New Orleans.
I'd seen a photo of Carl Hubbell's arm at rest with the left palm facing out but had never before seen a good photo that captured how his hand looked actually throwing the screwball. Now I know how his left palm ended up permanently facing outwards.
From 1929 to 1937 Hubbell was one of the best pitchers in baseball and over the last five of those seasons was probably the best.
Carl Hubbell throwing a screwball pic.twitter.com/rpt7JWdQCh
— Baseball In Pics (@baseballinpix) January 19, 2022
One of the phases of my explorations into baseball history took me back into the origins of professional baseball in America (I wrote about the origins of the game itself in Madame Blatavsky and the Birth of Baseball). The still-amateur game exploded in popularity in the Northeast and Midwest in the years after the Civil War with clubs being established in many cities and towns. In my reading I came across a discussion of the Pythian Base Ball Club of Philadelphia, a black ball team led by Octavius Catto, which mentioned that Catto died at the age of 32 in 1871. The references to the Pythians and Catto piqued my curiosity and found his biography had been completed by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) Bioproject, a reading of which revealed Catto had been a significant figure, known for much more than his baseball career. More recently I've been making my way through a very long and very detailed biography of Catto, which exhaustively investigates his family background and race relations in Philadelphia, "Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America". Catto's life and death are a reminder that while the white post-war South may have legally instituted (de jure) discrimination and introduced a reign of terror to control the newly freed people, the more de facto discrimination in the Northern states also proved effective in resisting the attempts at assimilation by blacks, sometimes with deadly consequences.
(Right, Catto from SABR Bioproject)
Catto was born in Charleston, South Carolina; his mother a free black woman and his father, born a slave later freed by his master and becoming a Presbyterian minister. Reverend Catto moved his family to Philadelphia, the northern city with the largest black population, in 1848 and during the 1850s young Octavius attended the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY), the city's only high school for blacks where he was class valedictorian. In 1859 he was hired as a teacher at ICY in English, mathematics, Latin, and Greek.
During the Civil War, Catto actively led recruitment drives that raised several regiments of U.S. Colored Troops for the Union and with the end of the war he plunged into a leadership role, campaigning for passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, as well as undertaking direct action such as a campaign to allow black to ride on Philadelphia streetcars, which ultimately, with the help of his wife, succeeded. The SABR biography provides a detailed, but concise account of his impressive efforts to obtain full civil rights for blacks.
Even in baseball, he was a pioneer, co-founding the Pythians in 1866 and becoming the team's star infielder. According to the SABR biography:
". . . many of the players belonged to the Knights of Pythias Lodge, and thus they became the Pythians (derived from a mythical priestess at the Greek Temple of Apollo). Besides Catto, the Pythian leadership included other prominent blacks who emerged from Underground Railroad families. Club president James W. Purnell worked with abolitionists John Brown and Martin Delany, and vice president Raymond W. Burr was descended from American revolutionary Aaron Burr and was the son of a prominent black activist."
Catto saw baseball as both an activity for black self-improvement and an opportunity to press for integration. Though in 1869 the Pythians played the first game between black and white teams, and continued to do so, the Pythian application to join the National Association of Base Ball Players was voted down. While black ball players were to occasionally play in the professional leagues, a firm color line was established by the late 1880s which remained in place until 1947.
Active politically, Catto led another campaign to get black voters to the polls in the Philadelphia mayoral election in 1871, despite white intimidation. The night before the election, two blacks were beaten and shot (one fatally), by whites. The next day Catto purchased a six-shot revolver and was on his way home to get the ammunition he had purchased when confronted by two white men who had been looking for him. One of the men, Frank Kelly, pulled a revolver and shot Catto three times, killing him. Kelly was eventually tried for murder but despite the testimony of six eyewitnesses (three white and three black), all of whom stated Kelly shot Catto, he was acquitted by the all-white jury.
W.E.B. DuBois later wrote of Catto,
"And so closed the career of a man of splendid equipment, rare force of character, whose life was so interwoven with all that was good about us, as to make it stand out in bold relief, as a pattern for those who have followed after.”
According to the SABR biography:
Even whites were outraged at Catto’s murder in his quest for civil rights. His funeral procession was the largest since Lincoln’s assassination and unprecedented for a black man. Over the three-mile route, tens of thousands of black and white Philadelphians watched in reverence for a fallen hero, as more than 125 carriages paraded by, containing Congressmen, military leaders, local politicians, students, colleagues, soldiers, ballplayers, and fellow civil rights activists.
Catto and his legacy were remembered initially but faded over the years. Over the past twenty years, he has received renewed recognition for his pioneering efforts. In 2017 a 12-foot bronze statue of Catto was dedicated and erected in front of Philadelphia City Hall.
There are times when the passing of someone you never personally knew hits you harder than you would have imagined. Just heard that Terry Teachout died in his sleep at the age of 65.
Terry was a theater critic for the Wall St Journal, wrote monthly in Commentary, the author of Pops, the captivating biography of Louis Armstrong and of the play Satchmo at the Waldorf which I and the Mrs saw a few years ago. He did several movie podcasts with my good friend Titus Techera - I'll always remember their discussions of Vertigo and Night of the Hunter (it wasn't just the analysis, Terry had the perfect voice for the medium), and appeared on the Political Beats podcast discussing one of my favorite groups, The Band. I also read him frequently on Twitter.
He was a talented and insightful writer (his pieces in Commentary were one of the few things that kept me as a subscriber - he'd write about musicians, actors, producers, directors from the mid-20th century, often about whom I knew little but he always made it interesting) but what make me so mourn his passing is the spirit of the man, a spirit that was gracious and generous, always trying to find the best in people, and someone I would have liked to know.
His last few years were personally rough. He found love late in life, but his wife had a severe lung disease and died about two years ago after a lung transplant failed. For some time thereafter he sounded like the saddest man in the world on his twitter feed. But he found love again, announcing he'd found someone special and was clearly enthralled by her. It was wonderful to see him bouncing back. Two days ago, his last tweet announced his new girlfriend's mother had unexpectedly died. And now this.
I have had such a blessed life, full of beloved friends and family, beautiful art, and the best of all possible partners. Gratitude uplifts me.
— Terry Teachout (@TerryTeachout1) December 17, 2020
John Podhoretz at Commentary:
The loss to his loved ones, the loss to the American theatre he both championed as a critic and mastered as a playwright, and the loss to the broader American culture he knew more fully than anyone else in our time cannot be overstated.
Terry possessed an extraordinary talent, all the more extraordinary because his life’s work was a defense of the value, meaning, and profundity of ordinariness. A child of small-town Missouri, he was someone who made a study of every topic that interested him and, with his passion for completeness, achieved a greater level of expertise in matters of high and popular culture than just about anyone in America.
This was part of his own understanding, based on his own experience, that there could be greatness anywhere—in an unknown actor in Idaho, a great director in Oregon, a great scenic designer in suburban Chicago. And indeed, in Terry’s estimation, the single best theatrical experience of his lifetime happened in Glencoe, Ill.—an innovative production of Our Town, the American play that exemplified Terry’s most profound sense of things: He believed the everyday lives of everyday people were as fascinating and as revelatory as depictions of the great and near-great.
Running a corporate metrics program for environmental and safety performance for a dozen years taught me a few lessons and following covid metrics for the past two years has reminded me of those days.
There are a number of factors important in designing and operating a metrics system. Here are a few off the top of my head. I'm sure I'm forgetting a few (age, you know).
1. What is it you are trying to measure?
2. Are there alternative measures that might be more effective?
3. Why are you trying to measure it?
4. What is the value of collecting the data versus the collective effort needed to collect it?
5. How difficult is it to measure accurately?
6. How can you validate the metrics being reported to you for accuracy?
7. What is the criteria for accuracy? Is close, good enough?
8. Who will be the customers of that data? Different customers may use it for different purposes.
9. Are there desirable behaviors you trying to drive with the metric?
10. Could you drive undesirable behaviors or create unintended consequences with the metric?
11. Are you periodically reviewing metrics to make sure they are still necessary and driving the right behavior?
There are two other basic concepts to keep in mind anytime you are measuring and comparing performance on a metric:
Are you using the same measuring stick in all your operations and are others doing the same?
For instance, in the case of covid, is everyone using the same definition of "covid death"? If not, comparisons become difficult.
Note: Even if it is not the "right" metric if all are using the same measuring stick you can still make useful comparisons.
Even if you are nominally using the same measuring stick is everyone counting accurately?
In the case of international covid comparisons, some countries may have deficiencies in their health care and data collection systems that make accurate counting difficult, while others may be deliberating manipulating the data. The global measurement problems with covid are way beyond anything I encountered in the corporate world; The Economist estimates the actual death toll may be up to 3X the current officially reported 5.5 million.
Which brings me to the U.S. metrics around Covid, a situation that has always presented challenges but is becoming even more difficult with Omicron.
Since the start of the pandemic the states have been reporting Covid hospitalizations. Under the CDC definition these include all those admitted, for whatever reason, who are found to have Covid. This is a useful metric in gauging how widespread the pandemic is. However, it does not tell you how many patients have been admitted because of Covid which would also be a useful figure, particularly for the public. In my opinion, both types of hospitalization data should have been reported.
This information has been difficult to find. Over a year ago, I did some research and concluded that about 30% of Covid hospitalizations were for reasons other than Covid. Subsequent studies indicated that, for children, about 40% of such hospitalizations were for reasons other than Covid, a finding that makes sense given children have less serious Covid health outcomes than adults.
Because Omicron is so easily transmissible, the number of cases has increased very quickly and I would expect the number of hospitalizations with covid to increase substantially but the data I've seen from various hospitals and areas in the U.S. and elsewhere is that up to 70% of those hospitalizations are not because of covid.
The scale and pace of the increase is enormous. Globally, the 7 day average pre-Omicron was about 490,000 cases (with the pandemic high being 826,000) while it is now 2,647,000 (source: Worldometer). For the U.S. in early December the 7 day average was 71,000 (with the high in early 2021 at 251,000) ; it now stands at 789,000. It's probably a good starting assumption now that anyone admitted to the hospital for any reason is very likely to have covid, or to get it while hospitalized.
Another complicating factor is that much of the Northeast, Midwest, and Southwest were still in the Delta wave when Omicron hit and since hospitalizations and deaths lag cases by 2-4 weeks it is difficult to distinguish between the two in the metrics (although individual studies have affirmed that outcomes are significantly better for Omicron). In the case of Arizona, the case and testing positivity data show that Omicron hit us the week of December 27 which means hospitalization and, more importantly, mortality data is probably still predominantly Delta related.
This also means that covid deaths may become harder to assess. To be precise, because so many of those hospitalized and in ICUs will have covid, determining whether covid is actually the factor, or a contributing factor to those deaths will become more difficult and I think there will be more people in that category. Since those dying with a positive covid test are most likely being added into the death count, we may see a duplication of the confusion between dying with or because of that we've seen with hospitalizations. As it stands, with the current definition probably around 20-25% of covid deaths are with covid. Many countries other than the U.S., such as the UK and Germany, also use the same reporting standards.(1)
In the near-term I think this issue with how we report the metrics will make it more difficult to determine what is actually happening on a daily basis and will add to public confusion.
In any event, if you're old folks like us, or have risky health conditions, get vaccinated, including your boosters. Though we've discovered it will not prevent infection as we originally thought, it still greatly reduces your chances of bad outcomes. Of that there is no doubt.
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(1) While there is some uncertainty in calculating covid deaths because of v with, I wanted make sure my views are clear. Since early in the pandemic I've seen claims that most covid deaths are with, not because of covid. This is false - I've never been able to confirm any such claims. Also, whatever uncertainties there are about the covid metrics, it turns out that flu metrics (to which people minimizing the risks of covid like to make comparisons) are even more uncertain and, in my view, more likely to be too high than covid metrics as I discovered looking at the CDC flu methodology back in April 2020.
You may be cool but you'll never be James Brown standing next to his private jet cool. pic.twitter.com/abTDLihc7s
— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) January 10, 2022
And you never sang with Pavarotti!
By John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-93). Until recent years, the English artist had languished in obscurity as his reputation declined after the Victorian era. Today he is regarded as one of the finest nightscape and townscape painters.
Saturday night, on the Clyde in Glasgow
Robert A. Kaster, The Appian Way: Ghost Road, Queen of Roads (2012; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 101-103:
Marcus Tullius Cicero is unavoidable in my line of work, and not the sort of man who provokes mild emotions in those who make his acquaintance. Loathing and affection are the only choices. By now I have spent enough time in his company, through teaching and writing, to work past the first of those feelings and arrive at the second. Certainly, he is everything that those who loathe him say: an egotist who was impossibly high-maintenance as a friend; often blinkered and bloviating as a statesman; moody, inconstant, and self-dramatizing as a man; and—what finally did him in—not nearly as clever a political player as he thought he was, or as his enemies actually were. Yet he was also a loyal friend in his turn, and witty company, a man who (I think) really did try to do what he thought was right, and who along the way wrote some of the best prose ever composed in any language, with the same impact on the future of Latin that Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible have had on English. But above all he left himself exposed and accessible, and that is the thing in the end that moves me beyond simple respect.
A chief reason Cicero is so easy to loathe is that he left so much of himself on view. We know him better than we can know any human being in Western history before Saint Augustine, because no one in the West before Augustine left so large a written legacy of such a personal kind. The texts, and the body of commentary that has grown up around them, fill ten feet of shelving in my office, and my collection is not especially large: speeches, rhetorical treatises, philosophical tracts, and above all the correspondence, over twenty years' worth, that he carried on with family, friends, and enemies. Of course most of the writing is carefully calculated, intended to present the writer in the best possible light in whatever circumstance prompted the writing: that is one of the jobs that rhetoric is supposed to do, and Cicero was a master of the craft. But even though the writing may not offer a transparent window on his soul, it does give excellent access to his lively mind. You see the wheels turning, you come to understand the move that's being made and anticipate the move that's coming next, and in so doing you reach across more than twenty centuries in a way that is exhilarating and moving.
I've referred to Cicero (106-43 BC) in a number of posts, most recently in Mastering the Tides of the World, and even wrote about his birthplace. Last year I read and wrote about Cicero And His Friends: A Study of Roman Society in the Time of Caesar, Marie Louis Antoine Gaston Bossier's study from the late 19th century, a book which prompted me to liken Cicero to the John Adams we see in the Jefferson-Adams correspondence of 1812-26, and I've read Robert Harris' trilogy of novels about Cicero's life and the last years of the Republic.
Coming across the quote from Kaster at Laudator Temporis Acti (the source for the Official Motto of this Blog - "The Value of Useless Knowledge") spurred me to think further about my interest in Cicero and, more broadly, in the Roman Republic and Empire. For Cicero himself it is, as Kaster points out, that we can see him fully formed as an individual person in a way unlike other figures before him, and for several centuries thereafter (Augustine writes more than 400 years after the death of Cicero). Certainly his writings seem, to an extent, relevant regardless of date, and his personality, with its strengths and glaring weaknesses evident in a way we can only infer in his contemporaries. But that relatedness can only go so far and, in that respect, ties in with my interest and perspective on Rome.
With my fascination with history going back to childhood, Rome has always loomed large for me, with its unique place in western history. It's a combination of fascination, recognition of its achievements, and the sheer expanse and duration of its domination imposing, on its own terms, a period of peace and stability not seen before and which disappeared in the wake of its collapse. Moreover, as it moved from Republic to Empire it proved adaptable in creating a devotion to a common culture out of a patchwork of religions, tribes, and other groups as described in this post. But it is not a desire to replicate or restore such a system and I am as fascinated with the costs of the republic and empire as with its achievements.
The classical world of Greece and Rome, and Cicero, while the source of some of the key ideas that have powered Western thought over the centuries, also represents a very different ethos from the modern world. The classical historian Tom Holland gets at this in his most recent book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World :
The more years I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, so the more alien I increasingly found it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. For a millennium and more, the civilisation into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with — about how a society should properly be organised, and the principles that it should uphold — were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of 'human nature', but very distinctively of that civilisation's Christian past.
Holland's point is that even the non-religious in the West have absorbed basic concepts of the universality of all people from the Christian tradition, in fact the very basis of the Western concept of human rights, something which did not exist in classical thought. In advancing his thesis he does not downplay Christianity's contradictions and failures over the centuries but rather emphasizes that the aspirational starting places in classical and Christian thought are completely different. I'm still mulling over Holland's thought-provoking book, which I recently read.
I write this as a non-Christian. I'm Jewish. On my first visit to Rome in 2006 I walked under the Arch of Titus, the Roman Emperor and conqueror of Jerusalem; the man responsible for the destruction of the Second Temple, located on the Temple Mount, and the subjugation of Judea. As you pass through the arch you can't help but notice it is decorated with carvings of religious artifacts looted from the Temple and being carried away in triumph by Roman soldiers 
and if you are walking from the Forum through the arch you will be looking at the Colosseum, built in part with the labor of Jewish slaves captured in that war (66-70 AD). The Emperor Hadrian (117-38 AD), a devotee of Hellenism and enemy of the Jews, decreed a temple honoring the gods of Rome should be placed on the vacant Temple Mount as a demonstration of Roman power, a decree that prompted one final great revolt, finally suppressed after three years, resulting in the banishment of all Jews from Jerusalem and the surrounding area and changing the name of the province from Judea to Palestine. Starting in the 4th century the Eastern Roman emperors placed increasing restrictions on Jewish life in Palestine, until finally in the aftermath of the great Roman-Persian War of the early 7th century, the triumphant Emperor Heraclius proclaimed the Jews would be forcibly converted. Before this could be undertaken in a large scale manner, an unexpected threat came out of the desert, sweeping the most prosperous part of the Roman Empire and all the Persian Empire away. The limited and scattered fragments of information that survive indicate those Arab tribesmen were supported by the Jews of Palestine.
So no big summation here, just some thoughts prompted by Cicero. And I'll keep writing about Rome. Speaking of which . . .
UPDATE: Found via Laudator Temporis Acti another quote from the Kaster book which captures my attitude:
Whereas earlier generations of British scholars and intellectuals tended to admire the Roman Empire as a forerunner of their own, the consensus in postimperial Britain has shifted, and there now seems to be broad agreement that the Romans were bastards. My view is that the Romans were what they were, and that understanding what they were does not advance by taking an attitude toward them, especially when the attitude is one of moral superiority.
Between 1972 and 1980 The Spinners placed seven singles in the Top Ten. The million selling hit Could It Be I'm Falling In Love was the second. Composed by Melvin and Mervin Steals and recorded at Philadelphia's Sigma Sound Studios. The producer on all The Spinners 70s work was Thom Bell, one of the originators of the Philly Soul Sound of the late 60s and 70s. Along with The Spinners he also produced The Delfonics and Stylistics.
My favorite Spinners single is Rubberband Man, the subject of a prior post. You can't stop moving once that song starts!
(From Astronomy Picture of the Day)
The video below shows the separation of the James Webb Space Telescope from the Ariane 5 launch vehicle provide by the European Space Agency. Just over a minute in you can see the Webb's solar array deploy.
Launched on December 25, the Webb will take about a month to reach its permanent position, almost a million miles from Earth (more than three times further than the distant from Earth to the Moon). That position is designed to be near equilibrium between the gravitational pull of the Earth and Sun.
The Webb will be able to peer much deeper into the universe than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, and with greater clarity. Effectively, it will be able to see much further back in time, closer to the birth of the universe. Can't wait to see the pictures and learn about the new discoveries.
Originally posted in 2015 and intended as a meditation on how history is remembered or misremembered rather than a discussion of evolutionary theory. At the time I wrote it there were still some efforts to insert creationism into public school curriculum. That effort seems to have ceased, but evolutionary biology now appears under assault from different quarters so thought I'd repost with some edits.
Rather than the often repeated adage that the victors write the history of an event, the story of anything is actually determined by the unswerving adoption of one version of it, and the telling of that version by a determined cadre of writers. In time, the version with the most persistent adherents becomes the “truth.” – David & Jeanne Heidler in Henry Clay: The Essential American (2010)
It is no infringement on their freedom of conscience or freedom of speech to say that, while as individuals they are at liberty to think as they please and say what they like, they have no right to demand pay for teaching that which parents and the taxpayer do not want taught.
Now, it came to me, as this interesting man talked, that the Constitution of the United States had been made under the dominion of the Newtonian Theory. You have only to read the papers of the The Federalist to see that fact written on every page. They speak of the “checks and balances” of the Constitution, and use to express their idea the simile of the organization of the universe, and particularly of the solar system — how by the attraction of gravitation the various parts are held in their orbits; and then they proceed to represent Congress, the Judiciary, and the President as a sort of imitation of the solar system. …
Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop. All that progressives ask or desire is permission — in an era when “development” “evolution,” is the scientific word — to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine. [emphasis added]
If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading … Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibility of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.The prior edition of Hunter’s textbook had contained language specifically citing biological deficiencies of African races.
“until we can convince the common man of the fact of evolution … I fear we cannot convince him of the profound ethical and religious significance of the thing we call eugenics.”
". . . if taken seriously and made the basis of a philosophy of life, it would eliminate love and carry man back to a struggle of tooth and claw."
“May I express the earnest opinion that not five percent of the ministers in this liberal denomination have any sympathy with Mr Darrow’s conduct of the case.”Edwin Mims of Vanderbilt University, another supporter of the ACLU, wrote:
“When Clarence Darrow is put forth as the champion of the forces of enlightenment to fight the battle for scientific knowledge, one feels almost persuaded to become a Fundamentalist.”The jury quickly returned a verdict finding Scopes guilty. Bryan offered to pay the $100 fine, and the local school board offered to renew his contract for another year, but Scopes decided to go to graduate school, attending the University of Chicago and becoming a petroleum engineer.
Never a fan of the Grateful Dead, but in the early 70s they put out a couple of albums that had three songs I've always loved, Uncle John's Band, Friend of the Devil, and best of all, Box of Rain.
Come hear Uncle John's Band by the riverside
Got some things to talk about, here beside the rising tide
Elizabeth Holmes' conviction on four fraud counts reminded me of this post from about a year ago about four non-fiction books I enjoyed that could be read in pairs and serve as the basis for interesting discussion by a class or reading group.
First up:
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
Cardiac Arrest: Five Heart Stopping Years as a CEO on the Feds' Hit-List by Howard Root
One of these books illustrates numerous failures of our systems, including that of the federal government and the FDA in preventing fraud.
The other book illustrates numerous failures of our systems, including that the federal government and the FDA in allowing the pursuit of vendettas against innocent individuals.
All
of which leads to a discussion of how better to prevent fraud while
also discouraging abuse of the regulatory and enforcement process by government officials.
Bad Blood is the astonishing tale of Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, and enterprise that collapsed in fraud and failure and with Holmes currently facing a criminal trial. The book is written like a thriller and is hard to put down - I read the whole thing on a cross-country flight.
With her striking personality and appearance Holmes attracted fervent admirers and supporters who didn't closely inquire into the underlying technology of her company. She cleverly recruited an extremely prestigious, and old, board, but one which had little knowledge of the technology involved; people like Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, James Mattis, former Senator Sam Nunn, former Secretary of Defense William Perry.
Carreyrou also explains that Holmes being a woman helped persuade most in the media not to inquire too closely into the details. Instead she was promoted as a role model and rock star CEO by credulous media and her Board members, Perry telling the New Yorker:
"She has sometimes been called another Steve Jobs, but I think that’s an inadequate comparison. She has a social consciousness that Steve never had. He was a genius; she’s one with a big heart.”
Carreyrou also becomes a subject in his own story. He began covering Theranos as a Wall Street Journal reporter, became skeptical about the company and Holmes, and began writing critical stories. The author discovered that Theranos and Holmes went to the Journal's publisher, Rupert Murdoch, a $100 million investor in Theranos, asking him to stifle Carreyrou, but Murdoch refused to do so.
Cardiac Arrest is written by the CEO of a medical device company in Minnesota that was investigated by the FDA and the Justice Department which ended up indicting him for alleged criminal violations of. Howard Root resigned as CEO to fight the charges, which went to trial where a jury acquitted him on all charges.
The book chronicles Root's increasing disbelief as the matter escalated into a criminal case and goes through in detail every step of a process which is truly mind-boggling in its complexity, and through which the prosecutors were clearly abusing their powers. Above all, the discretionary power the government has to destroy someone's life is laid out for all to see as we see the stress on Root as the years go by. A powerful tale and one that I have sympathy with having twice had encounters with federal criminal prosecutors during my career. As the great novelist George V Higgins advised:
If there is one thing a defense lawyer knows, it's that the government can get you if it wants to. Any government. Federal, state or local. Law-abiding private citizens do not believe this until some government sets out to get them, and they have to pay good money to a man like me to fight for them, but their disbelief is like unto the very dew of May; it evaporates fast. Along with their bank balances, cheerfulness, and the order of their lives.
Next:
Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama
My Grandfather's Son by Clarence Thomas
I suspect I am one of the few people to have read both of these books.
Let's leave aside politics for a bit. I quite enjoyed Dreams From My Father, the story of a biracial young man, who at times harbors a lot of anger, raised in unusual circumstances in Hawaii, graduating from elite Northeast universities and deciding to move to Chicago, become fully "black", and work as a community organizer. It climaxes with his visit to Kenya to connect with the relatives of his deceased father and finds them to be the usual mix of humanity; kind, crazy, difficult, loving, accomplished, lost.
My Grandfather's Son is the tale of a young man growing up in the segregated South as the descendant of slaves, in an isolated black community that spoke its own dialect. He unflinchingly portrays the difficult relationship with his father and the transformational relationship with his grandfather who made him the man he became. He attends elite Northeast universities, deals with rage against white people, initially struggles in his career, and develops a drinking problem.
In light of the striking similarities and differences in their lives, and where Obama and Thomas ended up, reading the books in tandem would generate fascinating discussions about their respective family and social backgrounds and their personalities which led them to follow their respective paths.Having seen a few episodes of Jeremy Clarkson's car shows we decided to give Clarkson's Farm a go. It's quite different but very enjoyable. Since 2008, Clarkson has owned a 1,000 acre farm in the Cotswold Hills of central England (a stunningly scenic area I bicycled through in 1978 and have fond memories of). The setup is simple. The farmer who managed the acreage retired in 2019 and Clarkson decided to take on the job himself. The show follows him through one growing season - fall 2019 to the fall of 2020 - in eight episodes. A simple premise but, of course, complications ensue; one of which is that Clarkson knows nothing about farming and its challenging realities, the second is the arrival of Covid midway through the show.
Clarkson has no problem poking fun at himself and looking like an idiot even while giving others grief with his bluntness (a carryover from the car shows) and has assembled a wonderful "real" cast around him. Kaleb, a 19-year old farmer who works closely with him, is not shy about giving Clarkson a piece of his mind, and ends up the star of the series; Gerald, 72 years old, completely unintelligible and hilarious (Mrs THC and I would crack up every time he started talking), Cheerful Charlie, the unflappable agronomist, farm manager, and finance guy, who always arrived with bad news, and Clarkson's girlfriend Lisa.
There is a lot of humor with Clarkson also revealing a bit of his vulnerable side, which we have rarely seen before, but most of all this a love letter to the English farmer which makes us appreciate the difficulty of their life, the unceasing work needed to maintain a farm, and the absolute dependency on the weather which spells the difference each year between success and failure. I think that was Clarkson's real purpose in making the show.