… hear me roar … and then turn around and whine because some cis-male said something, or looked something, and I feel so … so threatened! Look, girls…ladies … possessor of a vagina or whatever you want to be addressed as this week in vernacular fashion; can you just please pick one attitude and stick too it? Frankly, this inconsistency is embarrassing the hell out of me (sixty-ish, small-f feminist in the long-ago dark days when there was genuine no-s*it gender inequality in education, job opportunities and pay-scales to complain about and campaign for redress thereof). This is also annoying to my daughter, the thirtyish Marine Corps veteran of two hitches. The Daughter Unit is actually is very close to losing patience entirely with those of the sisterhood who are doing this “Woman Powerful!-Woman Poor Downtrodden Perpetual Victim!” bait and switch game. So am I, actually, but I have thirty years experience in biting my tongue when it comes to the antics of the Establishment Professional Capital-F Feminist crowd.
Deep Thoughts
The End of the World?
Sarah Hoyt thinks not.
When I was thirty one, I sat on my back porch on a lovely summer day, reading Reason magazine. The issue was devoted to debunking global warming. And suddenly, like a weight lifting, I realized there really wasn’t proof. That it wasn’t preordained that my generation would be the last to have a decent life on Earth. That my kids and grandkids (I only had one kid at the time, and he was still nursing) wouldn’t necessarily be doomed. That the future wasn’t all doom and gloom.
Since then I’ve been skeptical of the end of the world prophecies.
The Liquidation of Markets
Every weekend I read Barry Ritholtz’s recommended reading and there are a lot of gems in there. Recently he posted this Credit Suisse graphic about markets at the turn of the 20th Century by market share and compared it with 2014 on the topic of global equity investing.
In his article he mentioned the fallacy one might fall into as a UK equity investor in 1899… why bother investing in the USA when the UK market is so much larger? And then this line of thought ends up missing the huge growth in US market share over the next century.
However, the real issue here isn’t the relative change in market share by the different countries; it is the fact that almost all of these markets were entirely extinguished at one time or another by political, economic or military events that wiped out the investors.
Middle-Aged Ruminations About Mid-Life Crises, Self-Esteem, and Too Much Rumination
Generalizing from his own experience, Jonathan Rauch finds evidence of a U-shaped happiness curve in life:
I was about 50 when I discovered the U-curve and began poking through the growing research on it. What I wish I had known in my 40s (or, even better, in my late 30s) is that happiness may be affected by age, and the hard part in middle age, whether you call it a midlife crisis or something else, is for many people a transition to something much better—something, there is reason to hope, like wisdom. I wish someone had told me what I was able to tell my worried friend: nothing was wrong with him, and he wasn’t alone.
I’m skeptical.
Book Reviews – 2014 Summary
Last year I reviewed quite a few books, including several that IMO are extremely important and well-written. Here’s the list:
The Caine Mutiny. The movie, which just about everyone has seen, is very good. The book is even better. I cited the 1952 Commentary review, which has interesting thoughts on intellectuals and the responsibilities of power.
To the Last Salute. Captain von Trapp, best known as the father in “The Sound of Music,” wrote this memoir of his service as an Austrian submarine commander in the First World War–Austria of course being one of the Central Powers and hence an enemy to Britain, France, and the United States. An interesting and pretty well-written book, and a useful reminder that there are enemies, and then there are enemies.
That Hideous Strength. An important and intriguing novel by C S Lewis. As I said in the review, there is something in this book to offend almost everybody. So, by the standards now becoming current in most American universities, the book–and even my review of it–should by read by no one at all.
The Cruel Coast. A German submarine, damaged after an encounter with a British destroyer, puts in at a remote Irish island for repairs. Most of the islanders, with inherited anti-British attitudes, tend toward sympathy with the German: one woman, though, has a clearer understanding of the real issues in the war.
Nice Work. At Chicago Boyz, we’ve often discussed the shortage of novels that deal realistically with work. This is such a novel: an expert in 19th-century British industrial novels–who is a professor, a feminist, and a deconstructionist–finds herself in an actual factory. Very well done.
Menace in Europe. Now more than ever, Claire Berlinski’s analysis of the problems in today’s Europe needs to be widely read.
A Time of Gifts. In late 1933, Patrick Fermorthen 18 years oldundertook to travel from the Holland to Istanbul, on foot. The story of his journey is told in three books, of which this is the first. This is not just travel writing, it is the record of what was still to a considerable extent the Old Europewith horsedrawn wagons, woodcutters, barons and castles, Gypsies and Jews in considerable numbersshortly before it was to largely disappear.
The Year of the French. The writer, commentator, and former soldier Ralph Peters calls this book “the finest historical novel written in English, at least in the twentieth century.”