Monument

 From 1935 by artist Kwase Hasui.  Via Alexander's Cartographer. 

 

Kwase Hasui (1883-1957) was considered Japan's leading printmaker and became very popular in the United States during the 1930s.  Some other examples of his work, from Wikipedia.

 

Not All Disrupters Are The Same

It's said at the end of this post from Assistant Village Idiot, one of the few long time bloggers who has not gone off the rails over the past decade. AVP also makes an astute observation about what might explain the findings he refers to.

RFKJr, among many other myths that he believes*, thinks psychiatric meds are contributing to the high-profile shootings we've been seeing, and thinks we should "look into it." Well, this is only one study in Sweden, but it does have an N=247,420 with robust results. Prescribing ADHD medication resulted in lower adverse "real world outcomes" such as self harm, traffic crashes, and crime. Interestingly, the effect seems to be weakening over time as the number of prescriptions increases. 

In this longitudinal population-based study of 247 420 individuals using ADHD medication between 2006 and 2020, we consistently found ADHD medication to be associated with lower rates of self-harm, unintentional injury, traffic crashes, and crime across all analyzed time periods, age groups, and sexes. However, magnitude of associations between ADHD medication use and lower risk of unintentional injury, traffic crashes, and crime appear to have attenuated over time, coinciding with an increase in prescription prevalence during the same period. The weakening trends for unintentional injury and traffic crashes were not fully explained by changes in age and sex distribution of the medication users, whereas the trend for crime was no longer statistically significant. These findings suggest that the declining strength of the associations of ADHD medication and real-world outcomes could be attributed to the expansion of prescriptions to a broader group of individuals having fewer symptoms or impairments.

My guess on this reveals one of my biases, but it may turn out to be true in this case. A broad range of interventions pick off the low hanging fruit at first, whether this be in medicine, education, economics, or crime. As this success is experienced by the doctors, politicians, or teachers, they try the solution on a wider group that less-obviously fits the the category and surprise! It doesn't work as well on every Tom, Dick, and Harry. The Law of Diminishing Returns. I used to see this in mental health, where an intervention like ECT's would work spectacularly well on some people with depression, but treatment-refractory patients of many diagnoses would eventually end up at the "shock treatment" door, because patient, family, and prescribers were all frustrated and willing to try less-likely interventions.

*The current fallback argument by his supporters are that the CDC and the medical establishment badly needs disruption and he is supplying disruption, so shut up, you liberal weenie. I find this unconvincing. Just because an institution needs to be disrupted does not mean that any particular disruptor is on the right track. Not all disruptions are equally valuable. Saruman wanted to disrupt Mordor, after all.  

RFK Jr is very glib, a plaintiffs personal injury lawyer, and a believer that conspiracies underlay every aspect of society.  There are no honest disagreements.  You are either good or evil.  Observing his technique in interviews over the decades you see him deploying the same approach against interviewers who don't know the details about which he is speaking.  He overwhelms the interviewer by spewing out a long list of studies and findings.  The problem is he starts by fairly accurately referring to two studies, then cites 3 more where he misstates the conclusions, and wraps it up with 4 studies summarized accurately but where there are a dozen other studies with better methodology that reach opposite conclusions none of which he cites.  He does this over and over again. 

The agency he oversees needs disruption and reform but he is the wrong person to do it.  He is not about open scientific inquiry.  When appointing committee members or authorizing studies they are designed to reach the conclusion he wants. 

La Roque Gageac

La Roque Gageac is a small riverside village along the Dordogne River which we first visited in 1977.  Our most recent stop was in 2022 and we hope to return next spring.  We stay in the bastide town of Domme on a cliff on the other side of the river, about a 10 minute drive away (which you can see center-right in the first photo below).

La Roque has only one street on which you can find restaurants, gift shops, and a hotel. Behind are a couple of rows of houses with narrow pathways and all back up by a cliff, pockmarked with caves used as a refuge by the inhabitants during the Viking raids of the 9th and 10th centuries and when other disturbances occurred during the following centuries.

 

The Cisco Kid Goes To War

The Cisco Kid was a half hour TV series broadcast from 1950 to 1956 of which I have a vague recollection watching as a youngster.  Starring Duncan Renaldo as the Kid and Leo Carrillo as his sidekick Pancho, as Robin Hood-type outlaws, it was based on a 1907 short story by O. Henry.  Apparently it was the first TV series to be filmed in color though, at the time, I didn't know it because we, like everyone else, had a black and white TV (I never owned a color set until the mid-1980s).

The Cisco Kid is also the title of a million selling hit song from 1973 by the band War, which commenced with these lyrics:

The Cisco Kid was a friend of mine
The Cisco Kid was a friend of mine
He drink whiskey, Poncho drink the wine

 

War began as a group of musicians in Southern California.  Linking up with singer Eric Burdon (formerly of The Animals) they produced the hit, Spill The Wine, in 1970.  Splitting from Burdon the following year, War went out to have a series of hit albums and singles during the 1970s.

The Cisco Kid is from The World Is A Ghetto, the best selling album of 1973, which also contains the beautiful title song.  War had a very tight rhythm section, which with catchy melodies and lyrics, resulted in a lot of chart success.

Other songs worth a listen by War include Slippin' Into Darkness, Low Rider, and Why Can't We Be Friends (with the immortal lyric, "I know you're working for the CIA/They wouldn't have you in the MAF-I-A").

A lot of the riffs and rhythms in War's songs have been covered and sampled by many other artists and used in movies and other shows. 

Outback

Chris Arnade writes of his travels, mostly walking, through the world, with a focus on avoiding downtowns and tourist spots, observing how life is lived for "regular" and particularly in the U.S., by those who are struggling.  His substack is Chris Arnade Walks The World.  It provides a very different perspective than your usual travelogue.  He's also the author of Dignity: Seeking Respect In Back Row America.

Chris recently returned from Australia and just published Alice Springs, Townsville and Crossing the Australian Outback.

The outback is like an extreme version of America's flyover country, and most Australians literally do only fly over it. When I announced my original Sydney-to-Townsville-to-Alice Springs bus route, I was struck by how many people had strong negative opinions about both places, especially Alice Springs, despite never visiting them. I began jotting down their responses, and by the time I left Sydney, over a hundred people had warned me against going, about ten were neutral or positive, and only five had actually been to the outback.

This was like the cartoonish US stereotype of an out-of-touch coastal urban elite, but in this case, the opinions weren’t confined to the elite, but to almost everyone of every class who lives within fifty miles of the dense (for Australia) southeastern coast.

On Alice Springs:

Since everything I was told had been proven wrong, including that the bus ride would be a little slice of hell, I arrived in Alice Springs close to convinced it would be a little slice of heaven, a festival of desert felicity, complete with kumbaya circles of Aboriginals dancing and singing with their now reformed and newly tolerant colonial masters. Or maybe I was going mad, and delusional, from thirty hours without sleep in the unforgiving landscape.

It however wasn't a little slice of heaven, at all, and by the end of the first day I realized that the only thing that everyone who had warned me, had gotten completely correct, was that Alice Springs is, to use Australians favorite vernacular2, a shithole. A shithole of majestic landscapes, and wonderful people, but still a shithole. 

Read it to find out why. 

An Irreconcilable Conflict Of Principles

"His Majesty's Government have thus been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles... For the Jews the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine". 

- Ernest Bevin(1), British Foreign Minister, February 1947, explaining to the House of Commons why Britain decided to terminate the Mandate for Palestine(2) and refer the matter to the United Nations. 

I recently learned of this statement for the first time watching a Podcast by Fleur Hassan-Nahoum(3) in which she interviews Israeli politician Einat Wilf.  I've been able to confirm the accuracy of the quote and the exact language.

 

The first 6 minutes of the podcast are invaluable because it provides a succinct explanation of the reason for the conflict, though I recommend listening to the entire thing. 

 

 

Einat Wolf is a former Labor Party politician, serving as an advisor to Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres in the 1990s and later as a member of the Knesset.  In 2011 she left Labor and is now unaffiliated politically, though she opposes Benjamin Netanyahu.  In 2012 I attended a talk by Wilf at Yale University.

 

The reason I found the first part of the podcast particularly interesting is her discussion of how, as she describes it, her "hypothesis" of how to achieve a two-state solution proved to be incorrect, and what she now believes the correct hypothesis to be which, as she states, is encapsulated in Bevin's 1947 statement, from a time before Israel existed and before there were any refugees. 

 

Her original hypothesis led her to support the Oslo Accords and the Camp David peace proposal and other two state peace proposals, which were ultimately rejected by the Palestinians.   The events of the 21st century have led her to conclude that the Palestinian cause is based on the total negation of Israel, rather than being willing to accept a two-state solution, refusing to allow Israel to exist as a Jewish state, under any terms.

 

Wilf's point has only been reinforced since October 7, 2023.  The Western academic, progressive, and NGO mob supporting Hamas are not doing so in support of a two-state solution.  They want Israel eliminated.  They are not hiding it.

 

Her transformation since the 90s is similar to mine.  Realizing the risks of Oslo but optimistic that the peace process would succeed.  In retrospect, Oslo was a disaster for Israel because it got the peace process backwards, believing that small "confidence-building" measures would lead to peace, rather than insisting that the big and fundamental disputes be resolved before proceeding to confidence building measures that would eventually allow a full and lasting settlement to be implemented.

 

Nonetheless, the 2000 Camp David talks, the unilateral withdrawal from South Lebanon the same year, and in 2005 from Gaza, along with Prime Minister's 2008 peace proposal, were all attempts to reach peace.  All were rejected and instead there was the Second Intifada from 2001-3 in which 1,000 Israelis were killed and the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2006.

 

The result was the political destruction of what was once a political powerful Israeli peace camp.  At this point there is not much difference between Israeli parties regarding national security.  While there is much internal disagreement over how to bring the current war in Gaza to a close, virtually no one in Israel thinks a two-state solution along the lines proposed at Camp David is practical any more.  I'll add that I have no idea what the right strategy is regarding Gaza at this point.  My only observation is that Netanyahu's strategy seems increasingly more focused on maintaining his political coalition than in ending this phase of the conflict.

Wilf's argument in her recent book, The War Of Return, is that the actions of the United Nations, and of Western Nations, and the peculiar nature of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has led to the inability to resolve the conflict.  UNRWA created a unique category of refugee for Palestinians, unlike that of the tens of millions of other refugees around the world created in the wake of WW2.  UNRWA has become a facilitator of Palestinian rejectionism.  

 

The only way to create even a chance, however slim, for a peaceful solution is to dissolve UNRWA, and for the Western nations to stop trying to solve the conflict and leave it to the Israelis and Arabs to work it out if they can.  

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(1)  Ernest Bevin was a socialist and became foreign minister in the first Labour cabinet at the end of WW2.  A fervent anti-communist he was instrumental in the establishment of the Marshall Plan and in the creation of NATO.  He was also an anti-Zionist.

 

(2)  The Mandate for Palestine was granted to Britain at the peace conference after WW1.  It encompassed the territories of today's Jordan, Israel, West Bank, and Gaza.  In 1922, Britain split the Mandate into two sections.  One, constituting the bulk of the territory, became Jordan and the British installed a Hashemite Arab monarch.  Jews were forbidden from living in this portion of the mandate.  The other parcel was what is known as Palestine.  During the period between the establishment of the mandate and 1948, Jews living in this region referred to themselves as Palestinians or Palestinian Jews, while the non-Jews referred to themselves as Arabs.  In his 1947 speech Bevin refers to Arabs, not Palestinians.

 

(3)  Fleur Hassan-Nahoum is a Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem.  She is descended from a Moroccan Jewish family and is an opponent of Benjamin Netanyahu.