My brother is the popular (and not so popular) music fiend in the family. With one or two exceptions, most of what I enjoy I first heard about from him. His Christmas present to me arrived only a few days ago, but to all accounts is worth the wait (‘we do books‘). Its completely new to me, and I wouldn’t have tracked it.

And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music. by Joe Boyd. I had never heard of him but his name popped up today in my podcast feed of Conversations with Tyler. Here is a nice quote from the interview with Tyler Cowen which is true for me, anyway.

“One of the most important things that music does is, it gives young generations a chance to give the finger to their parents’ generation and to reject things and to have their own thing.”

Other good news. It took him 17 years to write the book. There is hope for my effort yet!

“By 1972, E.B. White had picked up the idea and added a flailing, incoherent, angry, foaming-at-the-mouth paragraph to the 2nd (1972) edition of his revision of The Elements of Style. He calls the sentence-introducing hopefully silly, unclear, free-floating, offensive, ambiguous, soft, nonsense – in other words, he has no idea what he wants to say about it. He just hates it so much that he wants to spit.

Geoffrey Pullum, in The Truth About English Grammar

How hard is it to run the Pentagon? (from the Economist)

“The department [of Defense] employs around 700,000 civilians, around a third of the federal civilian workforce. It contains multitudes: in 2015 it transpired that the Pentagon had spent $84m—more than the defence budget of some small countries—on erectile-dysfunction drugs.”

DAT Green in the FT (The coming battle between social media and the state)

“This corporate weakness in the face of determined state action should not be surprising. In any ultimate battle, the state will prevail over a corporation for the simple reason that a corporation as a legal person only has legal existence and entitlements to the extent set out by legislation. Those who control the law can, if they want, control and tame any corporate in their jurisdiction.”

“This is why, for example, the most powerful corporation the world had then seen — the East India Company — was summarily dissolved by the British parliament in 1874. It is also why the Bell System of telecommunications companies was broken up by US antitrust law and policy in the 1980s. Companies can be very powerful — but there is always something stronger on which they depend for legal recognition.”

Ten years after the Charlie Hebdo attack, satire is under siege. (The Economist)

“We can’t say anything anymore!” laments a character in a cartoon in the latest issue of Nouvel Obs, a French magazine; “You can’t say that!” replies his companion.”

Moving on

The Economist

“A new law adopted in the province of Quebec on October 31st allows Ms Demontigny to request what Canadians call medical assistance in dying (MAID) long in advance of her deterioration. It represents a significant expansion of Canada’s federal laws on assisted dying, which require patients to provide consent immediately before they receive a set of lethal injections. In Quebec, patients with an illness that will eventually render them incapable of granting that consent can now make arrangements for MAID months or even years in the future, long before their condition deteriorates. Ms Demontigny, a radiant 45-year-old, says she is immensely relieved that her death will come at a point of her choosing, and feels that it will be more dignified for that.”

“Slightly over 1,000 Canadians opted for a doctor-assisted death in 2016, the first year in which it was permitted. By 2023 that number had risen to 15,343, 4.7% of the 326,571 deaths in Canada that year. No country that permits assisted dying has seen faster growth in the practice. (The Netherlands has allowed assisted dying for more than two decades, and it accounts for a higher share of deaths there than in any other country, 5.4% as of 2023.)” [emphasis added]

Gerald Durrell’s 100 year anniversary was a few days ago (DOB 7.01.1925). His book, My Family and Other Animals, was one of the very few books I read as an early teen and loved. Later, I went on to delve into some of his brother Lawrence’s very different oeuvre. As I scroll through their Wikipedia entries it is hard to think about Empire, and think about the effects of Empire on so many people (even my wife). How narrow the times we live in have become. Perhaps. But this made me laugh out loud.

In January 1964, [his mother] Louisa died. Durrell was devastated. He began to drink more: he had been advised to drink Guinness to combat anaemia, and began drinking a crate a day, and gaining weight.

Gerald Durrell

Its Time to Break Up Big Medicine

Max Stoller discussing the pernicious role of monopolies in medicine. I used to say that the world will not end in fire or violence but quietly in an Excel spreadsheet.

These kinds of discussions are always done in bad faith, since people who make a lot of money from killing people with spreadsheets like to pretend to be very offended when anyone points out health care is a matter of life and death.

A single idiot acting alone can cause chaos. But to make a scandal—the kind of horror that sticks in the national memory—you need lots of people to do their job so badly that whole systems collapse; and then you need more people, probably in very senior positions, to engage in sustained dishonesty and smug indifference in order to draw a curtain of secrecy around the whole mess. Consider the case of the Guildford Four.

Nick Davies’s review of Timebomb: Irish Bombs, English Justice and the Guildford Four in Prospect magazine. The truth of the Guildford bombings

I knew the final sentence of this quote, but not the preceding sentences.

John Gruber remembers a famous aphorism of Andy Grove, the man who built Intel into a dominant corporate giant: “Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”

via John Naughton