Recommendation: Catcher Was a Spy, movie with Paul Rudd

 Looking for a good movie? Watch The Catcher was a Spy with Paul Rudd. Based on the real exploits of Moe Berg [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moe_Berg] a pro baseball player who spoke 10 languages, and Werner Heisenberg [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg] a German Jewish physicist who won the Nobel Prize for hie development of quantum mechanics and, of course, the uncertainty principle. American intelligence was worried Heisenberg was working on an atomic bomb. Berg was sent to Germany to assassinate Heisenberg. It's a fascinating story, well acted by Rudd who had to study 5 languages in order to be able to pull off the conversations he needed to have in those languages in the film. Astonishing performance. Interesting physics, too. Read the Wikipedia articles first to be astonished by these two (three.)

Review: Hatching Twitter_ A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Nick Bilton

     I like this kind of book. It’s an irreverent view of the geeks and misfits who created Twitter, perhaps the most used but least necessary software on the planet.  That is, until Elon got a hold of it. 

    This book was first published in 2013 and so much has changed since then. Twitter (now X, in what has to be the silliest of rebrandings) has become perhaps less relevant than it ever was.  Musk has seen the price fall through the floor and see value evaporate.  

    Fun book if you like business origin stories, but he really needs to do a follow-up, perhaps annually. Just started Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter by Zoë Schiffer, that, so far, provides an in-depth view of Musk’s demolition of Twitter. 

Review: The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War by Frederick Downs

 The very personal story of a young lieutenant’s gradual disenchantment with the war in Vietnam. What especially comes through is the distinctness, often becoming bitterness, the soldiers feel toward the ARVN and the total lack of empathy for the “dinks.” Everything seemed pointless, They would spend days and weeks taking a piece of ground, taking casualties, only to pack up and leave after a period. Just as a company would become familiar with territory and feel like they are making progress, they would be relieved by a brand-new company of recruits who will have to learn their lessons all over, taking casualties in the process. In the meantime, everyone knows the one constant will be the permanence of the Vietnamese people who will be there and return to an area as soon as the Americans leave. 

Some relevant selections: 

However, we traveled in a vacuum of understanding among the villagers and farmers because neither we nor they understood the other’s language. Whenever we found a booby trap in or near a village full of people, we were powerless to question anyone or do anything about it. We couldn’t take the whole village prisoner, so we were forced to vent our anger by destroying the hootch closest to the booby trap. 

The American strategy was to draw them into a fight so we could use our superior firepower to destroy them. To win a battle, we had to kill them. For them to win, all they had to do was survive. 

*The trouble with Nam was that we didn’t control anything that we were not standing on at the time. Anything that moved outside our perimeters at night was fair game because the night belonged to the enemy and both sides knew it. The reality of only owning the ground you stood on meant making sure you continued to stay on that ground. 

Why did we want to kill dinks? After all, we had been mostly law-abiding citizens back in the world and we were taught that to take another man’s life was wrong. Somehow the perspective got twisted in a war. If the government told us it was alright and, in fact, a must to kill the members of another government’s people, then we had the law on our side. It turned out that most of us liked to kill other men. Some of the guys would shoot at a dink much as they would at a target. Some of the men didn’t like to kill a dink up close. The closer the killing, the more personal it became... I didn’t believe in torturing or in allowing a dink to die a lingering death. In the jungle we never took prisoners if we could help it. Every day we spent in the jungle eroded a little more of our humanity away. Prisoners could escape to become our enemy again. 

I stood alone on the side of the road, smoking a cigarette and thinking, perhaps for the first time, that we could lose this war. Standing alone under the cloudy sky, I felt alien in this land. We had just finished an operation back in the jungle and these men now were going out to a different part of the jungle to play the same deadly game of hide and seek with the enemy, probably with the same inconclusive result. 

Perhaps the most authentic Vietnam War memoir I have read.

To Tax or Not to Tax

 I supported Andrew Yang for president in now what seems decades ago, because he was the only candidate who recognized a fundamental economic problem we face: a declining rate of workers coupled with an increasing number of aged. His solution, outlined in the NYT in an Op-Ed is worth rereading: 

 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/14/opinion/andrew-yang-jobs.html

As with any important social issue, there are competing views and ways to interpret data. I have links to several of them below. Note that another component of Yang's plan was a guaranteed annual income, a solution first proposed by the darling of Libertarians, Friederich Hayek, who argued it would give workers more freedom as they would no longer be tied to job and location. 

https://www.niskanencenter.org/hayek-republican-freedom-and-the-universal-basic-income/

Some additional reading:

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/tax-not-the-robots/

https://hai.stanford.edu/news/radical-proposal-universal-basic-income-offset-job-losses-due-automation

https://www.futureofworkhub.info/comment/2019/12/4/robot-tax-the-pros-and-cons-of-taxing-robotic-technology-in-the-workplace

Review: In Pharoah's Army by Tobias Wolff

 In this extraordinary memoir of Wolff’s Vietnam  experience, there is a haunting scene that  reveals the major cultural differences between  the American soldiers and Vietnamese  culture. Wolff was a first lieutenant (he was  a special forces member) assigned as an adviser  to a South Vietnamese unit. He had spent a  year at language school in the United States  and was fluent in Vietnamese. He and some  ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) soldiers  are hanging out when two of the ARVN  find a small puppy wandering around. Wolff  watches, annoyed, as one of the soldiers swings  the puppy by a leg around his head and then  ties it to a tree. Wolff wanders over and asks  what they intend to name the dog. The Vietnamese  laugh bemusedly at this remark, but when Wolff persists, they laugh maliciously and  reply, “dog stew.” The sergeant grabs the dog  and, knowing it will drive Wolff nuts, swings the  puppy slowly over the fire. Wolff tries to get  them to stop, knowing they are playing with his  mind, but the cultural reality and his whiteness  prevent his interference. 

 
Racial issues pervade the story. Wolff was  attacked by a group of Vietnamese outside a  bar. He keeps yelling he must be the “wrong  man,” but they continue until another American  steps out of the bar and the attackers realize  they have the wrong person. Wolff realizes that to them all white people look the same. When  he tries to explain it to his black sergeant, the  sergeant understands him immediately and simply  says, “You nigger.” The analogy to his experience  in the United States is unmistakable.  

Wolff's analysis of the Tet offensive is striking.  "As a military project Tet failed; as a lesson it  succeeded. The VC came into My Tho and all  the other towns knowing what would happen.  They knew that once they were among the people  we would abandon our pretense of distinguishing  between them. We would kill them all to get at one. [Iraq come to mind, anyone?:] In this way they taught the people  that we did not love them and would not protect  them; that for all our talk of partnership and  brotherhood we disliked and mistrusted them,  and that we would kill every last one of them to  save our own skins. . . .They taught that lesson  to the people, and also to us. At least to me."