Michael Kennedy’s A Brief History of Disease, Science and Medicine is now available on Kindle.
It joins Michael’s more recent book, War Stories: 50 Years in Medicine, which is a fascinating and informative read.
Personal Narrative
Racial Meditation
For me, the very first although not the most momentous disappointment in the accumulated collection racked up throughout the Obama administration was the realization that there would be no line drawn under the old bug-bear of racism with regard to those of us as a friend of mine during my assignment to Greenland in the early 1980s put it with the year-round dark tan. Yes, said friend was black, Afro-American, a person of color, or whatever the approved term is these days. (You kids, get off my lawn! Oh … I don’t have a lawn.) My friend was a totally middle-class young woman, the daughter of professionals, who like me, had grown up without ever personally observing much in-your-face unmistakable racial antagonism or prejudice. It was merely something that had happened to other people, a fair number of decades ago; at worst howlingly illegal, at best, rude. We were in the habit of walking together every Saturday, around the end of the Sondrestrom AB runway to the Danish side of the base, there to enjoy a cup of tea and a pastry in the SAS air terminal cafeteria.
Oh No, Not This Again
A funny thing happened to me last week. My two daughters and one of their boyfriends asked me what I thought about the recent menacing words being traded by the Most Esteemed Great Leader (or whatever he is being called these days) of North Korea, and President Trump. Honestly I had been out of the loop, helping deal with a death in the family. After doing a little catching up online on the situation I just said to them “oh no, not this again”. They looked a little, well, questioning at old pops. I just said – “Ugh – I have been hearing about the fiery end of the United States from some idiot in North Korea for the last 40 years. It gets tiring. He won’t do anything. We should sink the Pueblo next time he spouts off”.
That got them thinking. For a bit, anyways.
Jordan Peterson: 12 Principles for a 21st Century Conservatism
If you are not familiar with the videos of Dr. Jordan Peterson, you should acquaint yourself with them, and him, forthwith.
This one is a good introduction to the style and substance of the man.
Peterson starts talking about 18 minutes in, after a lengthy and rambling introduction which you should skip.
If two hours is too much here are shorter snippets:
The consequence of trying to build imaginary utopias out of real human beings.
Stop saying things that make you weak.
Proven differences between men and women.
Go out and make something of yourself.
The temptation of victim identity.
Peterson on starting an online humanities university.
The twelve principles from the video are as follows:
1. The fundamental assumptions of Western civilization are valid.
2. Peaceful social being is preferable to isolation and to war. In consequence, it justly and rightly demands some sacrifice of individual impulse and idiosyncrasy.
3. Hierarchies of competence are desirable and should be promoted.
4. Borders are reasonable. Likewise, limits on immigration are reasonable. Furthermore, it should not be assumed that citizens of societies that have not evolved functional individual-rights predicated polities will hold values in keeping with such polities.
5. People should be paid so that they are able and willing to perform socially useful and desirable duties.
6. Citizens have the inalienable right to benefit from the result of their own honest labor.
7. It is more noble to teach young people about responsibilities than about rights.
8. It is better to do what everyone has always done, unless you have some extraordinarily valid reason to do otherwise.
9. Radical change should be viewed with suspicion, particularly in a time of radical change.
10. The government, local and distal, should leave people to their own devices as much as possible.
11. Intact heterosexual two-parent families constitute the necessary bedrock for a stable polity.
12. We should judge our political system in comparison to other actual political systems and not to hypothetical utopias.
Summer Re-run: Granny Clarke
(A summer rerun from my other blog – a diverting reminiscence of California and Old Hollywood)
Granny Clarke was the mother of my mothers’ dearest friend from the time that JP, my next-youngest brother and I were small children, before my sister Pippy was born, and my parents were living in a tiny rented cottage in the hills part of Beverly Hills a house on a dirt road, with the surrounding area abundant in nothing much else but chaparral, eucalypts and rattlesnakes. Mom and her friend, who was eventually of such closeness that we called her “Auntie Mary” met when Mom began to attend services at a Lutheran congregation in West Hollywood, rather than endure the long drive to Pasadena and the ancestral congregation at Trinity Lutheran in Pasadena.
Auntie Mary Hammond was a little older than Mom, with four sons, each more strapping than the other, in spite of Auntie Mary’s wistful hopes for one of them to have been a girl. The oldest were teenagers, the youngest slightly younger than JP . . . although Paulie was as large and boisterous as his older brothers and appeared to be more my contemporary. They lived all together with Auntie Mary Hammonds’ mother, Granny Clarke, in a townhouse in West Hollywood, an intriguing house built on a steeply sloping street, up a flight of stairs from the concrete sidewalk, with only a tiny garden at one side, and the constant background noise and bustle of the city all around, not the quiet wilderness of the hills, which JP and I were more used to. But there was one thing we had in common with Paulie and his brothers— an immigrant grandparent with a curious accent and a long career in domestic service in Southern California.