Abstractions of Reality

1.

Bad Elements by Ian Buruma:

“Strange things happen when Chinese dynasties near their end. Dams break, earthquakes hit, clouds appear in the shape of weird beasts, rain falls in odd colors, and insects infest the countryside. These are the ill omens of moral turpitude and political collapse. While greed and cynicism poison the society from within, barbarians stir restlessly at the gates. Corrupt officials, whose authority can no longer rely on the assumption of superior virtue, exercise their power with anxious and arbitrary brutality. When people, even those who live far from the centers of power, begin to sense that the Mandate of Heaven is slipping away from their corrupted rulers, rebellious spirits press their claims as the saviors of China, with promises of moral restoration and national unity. Millenarian cults and secret societies proliferate and sometimes explode in massive violence.”

What does it mean to be Chinese? Few questions in history have been as fateful. Bad Elements is the result of Ian Buruma’s five years of travels throughout the Chinese-speaking world observing the varying groups competing for a right to define its answer. From the diaspora of exiles in the West, to Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, to factions within the People’s Republic itself, Buruma comes to terms with the range of dissident communities competing to shape China’s future in their own image.

A brave and illuminating reckoning with the groups fighting for the Mandate of Heaven, Bad Elements is also a profound meditation on the universal themes of national identity and political struggle.

Frankly, I think the title says a lot. It reads like Buruma simply extracted the things he wanted you to see and wrote about them.

I wouldn’t recommend it. I don’t think it’s a very balanced book, and I am extremely amused by the fact that on the book’s Amazon page, all the recommends are from white university professors who, presumably, share Buruma’s prejudices to have thought this was worth reading.

2.

Flawless by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell:

On February 15, 2003, a group of thieves broke into an allegedly airtight vault in the international diamond capital of Antwerp, Belgium and made off with over $108 million dollars worth of diamonds and other valuables. They did so without tripping an alarm or injuring a single guard in the process.

Although the crime was perfect, the getaway was not. The police zeroed in on a band of professional thieves fronted by Leonardo Notarbartolo, a dapper Italian who had rented an office in the Diamond Center and clandestinely cased its vault for over two years.  The “who” of the crime had been answered, but the “how” remained largely a mystery.

Enter Scott Andrew Selby, a Harvard Law grad and diamond expert, and Greg Campbell, author of Blood Diamonds, who undertook a global goose chase to uncover the true story behind the daring heist. Tracking the threads of the story throughout Europe—from Belgium to Italy, in seedy cafés and sleek diamond offices—the authors sorted through an array of conflicting details, divergent opinions and incongruous theories to put together the puzzle of what actually happened that Valentine’s Day weekend.

This real-life Ocean’s Eleven—a combination of diamond history, journalistic reportage, and riveting true-crime story—provides a thrilling in-depth study detailing the better-than-fiction heist of the century.

Flawless was not a flawless read, I must say.

I hoped it would be an exciting bit of narrative non-fiction, but to be brutally honest, the writing is actually worse than the Bad Elements above.

Nor are there any stunning revelations, even to someone like me. I knew only of the theft itself, because it was in the news at the beginning, but I didn’t know that the thieves had been caught or of the trial afterwards.

If you don’t learn anything new reading non-fiction, if it doesn’t excite you, and most of all, if you don’t enjoy it, the book’s a failure. This one flunks all three criteria, so really, really? Don’t get it.

1.

Are you addicted to anything?

I know I have many addictions.

I can never get off the internet, for instance, and I have decided to enable my addiction by getting an iPhone.

2.

Twitter. Oh my god Twitter.

When I have it, I need it.

When I don’t, I might be a more interesting person to be around.

3.

Paul Graham:

What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.

We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want—when it transforms opium into heroin—it seems bad. But it's the same process at work.

There are more addictions coming, if this guy is anybody to go by, and I, for one, can’t wait.

4.

I am  of the opinion that people with addictions make space in their lives for them. No matter what the cost.

(Admittedly, I do not have a ‘serious’ addiction.)

Says the writer* anyway.

*I do define writing as an addiction.

I’m pretty sure I have discussed this before, and I desperately need to write up a review of PeopleQuake by Fred Pearce, which delves into this in some detail.

Bryan Caplan:

Education, especially female education, seems to reduce fertility.  Economists standard explanation is that women's foregone earnings are the leading cost of children.  If you raise women's education, you raise their potential income; and as you raise their potential income, you raise the cost of fertility.

I think it goes beyond just education.

If you look at developing countries, their fertility rates are falling as well.

It's a question of opportunity. More women are working outside the home, and more women are leaving their villages and little towns to go to the big city in search of work. Some even leave their countries altogether, to Dubai etc.

Education is one way of opening up more opportunities and it is also an opportunity in itself. But in countries where there is a high demand for unskilled labour, in sewing and manufacturing, there are much lower education requirements.

Moreover, nowadays, we, especially in the developed world, do not see children as providing benefits to us, at least not tangible ones as we don't need them to work. In fact, they are expensive. Educating your children well could put you in the poorhouse.

Now from the perspective of a woman, I think being a mother today is hard.

You want to be more than just a mother. You want to have an identity of your own that is not ‘kid’s mom’. You want a career. You want time to spend on yourself. But being a mother? Is a twenty-four seven job.

I think that the driving force is culture in the developed world and economic necessity in the developing world (and maybe the latter applies to the developed world as well, though perhaps to a smaller extent).

Atul Gawande at The New Yorker:

This is the moment in Sara’s story that poses a fundamental question for everyone living in the era of modern medicine: What do we want Sara and her doctors to do now? Or, to put it another way, if you were the one who had metastatic cancer—or, for that matter, a similarly advanced case of emphysema or congestive heart failure—what would you want your doctors to do?

The issue has become pressing, in recent years, for reasons of expense. The soaring cost of health care is the greatest threat to the country’s long-term solvency, and the terminally ill account for a lot of it. Twenty-five per cent of all Medicare spending is for the five per cent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months which is of little apparent benefit.

Perhaps the hardest thing I have to do during my upcoming revisions is to deal with the question of how my protagonist dies.

Just as the idea of immortality fascinates me, so does the idea of dying repel me.

I am, if not very young, then young enough. I will turn just twenty-two next month. I feel like I have my whole life ahead of me.

But my parents do not. When you are a child, you think your parents are immortal. That they will always be there for you. I’ve had enough health scares in my family recently, both my parents and their siblings, to realise that it is not true.

Someday, we will all face this question, if not for ourselves first, then for someone close to us.

How do you want to die?

Gawande outlines two cases for us.

The first one is where you fight. All the way to the bitter end, no matter what the cost. Even if that cost is precious time during which the patient could spend doing things they actually want to do.

The other one…almost borders on accepting defeat. At least that’s what some people think and cannot help but feel. Hospice and palliative care is, after all, for the dying, even if the patient does not choose to end other medical treatments as well.

From what I can tell, it’s more about accepting that your time is limited, and what are you going to do about that? It’s also how you want to spend your last days. It’s about pain, it’s about physical mobility, it’s about mental alertness…in other  words, it’s about quality of life.

It’s not my place to decide for you how you want to die. But I cannot imagine dying in great pain, and if I am going to die anyway,  I’m not sure I would rather spend a few extra days in paralysis rather than live a few less days with enough physical mobility.

Almost all these patients had known, for some time, that they had a terminal condition. Yet they—along with their families and doctors—were unprepared for the final stage. “We are having more conversation now about what patients want for the end of their life, by far, than they have had in all their lives to this point,” my friend said. “The problem is that’s way too late.” In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.”

Is this how you want to die? Is this the last memory you want to give of yourself to your loved ones?

AFP:

China's elderly population grew at its fastest pace ever last year and the country's rapid ageing poses a "huge challenge", state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday.

For people who think that the demographic window makes all the difference in a country’s development, China’s time is running out really quickly.

China's population-control policies have left it with an unusual problem: it is greying while still a developing nation -- a challenge other economies have only had to face at a more advanced stage.

But China isn’t going to remain the only such country even in the medium-term.

That’s something we should be worried about, in my humbled opinion.

Robert Reich recently blogged:

President Obama has vowed to double U.S. exports within the next five years. That’s because exports are critical for rebooting the American economy. It’s clear American consumers can’t get the economy going on their own. They can’t restart the jobs machine. They’ve run out of money and credit.

He says that the problem is that everybody else relies on the American consumer too, and because of that, the entire world economy is reliant on the American consumer. It’s a vicious cycle right there.

That’s certainly true, but what’s also true is that if something isn’t done about China and the rest of the developing world’s aging population problem, this recession is going to be like a freaking holiday compared to the one that will come.