okay life update I got smoked on my bike this past Saturday. read on for more. and actually now it was the Saturday before this last Saturday bc I cannot focus to get these blogs out. I Sorry.

Things I have been Watching:

The Eclipse

The eclipse blew my mind. Is God real? I may start capitalizing God, just in case. What an amazing sight to behold. I would have had the most insane FOMO ever not seeing totality without another chance until 2044 or whatever. There really is nothing like it.

This Video which won't embed for some reason sorry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy6p06hfpfY

Problemista

Really good movie!! Julio Torres is a treasure. This movie for all it's surreality, felt truly Real. The film is loosely based on Julio Torres' life. He moved from El Salvador to NYC to attend the New School and pursue his dream of writing comedy. His character in the film, Alejandro, moves from El Salvador to NYC to pursue his dream of becoming a toy designer at Hasbro. Why are we driven to do the things we do? For ourselves, and for the people we love, filtered through our own understanding of ourselves and the people we love, all shaped by forces larger than us like time-bomb immigration laws and job application forms, all subject to change. We all put together the puzzle of life ourselves, one piece at a time. I laughed, I cried. The people at the movie theater found our jackets in their reserved seat and hemmed and hawed about asking us to move them but sucked it up and sat down one seat down. Go see it, but be careful where you put your jackets if you get there early. Sure, you got there early, but with the seats being numbered these days people get real fussy about wanting to sit in the box they checked on the floor diagram of the theater when they booked these $16 tickets, and they show up late. Also, I loved Larry Owens as the personification of Craigslist. Gems of performances abound in this flick!

Reading:

I read it all so you don't have to, here's the literary world drama you may have seen on Twitter; Lauren Oyler, graduate of Yale (one of those smart kids who gets in by growing up the hard way in the middle of nowhere, but not so tough as to not know about Yale) is an author of critical takedowns of lesser-thinker's books and books of her own. She absolutely smoked Jia Tolentino in one of the most talked about reviews of a book ever - sneering at the University of Virginia educated millennial author's essays about hating patriarchal capitalism but loving money and husband. Oyler, the hard-scrabble West Virginian, picks apart Tolentino's upper-class hetero-normative experiences with the Peace Corps and Ecstasy and Book Writing. The thrust of it is: if you aren't going to take writing seriously, try not to bother us.

Now it is Oyler's turn to meet the maker, the black hood has been taken from her head and placed upon a new executioner's. Ann Manov excoriates Oyler's new collection of essays in a review for Bookforum. The thrust is: ye who sneered at those unserious writers be not so serious a writer yeself. Oyler's research skills are put under the microscope by Manov, who takes us readers down the slip-shop Google trails that appear as shadows in Oyler's writing.

Who is Ann Manov? Great question. Essentially if you were to create an evil demon to haunt Lauren Oyler she would be her. Ann Manov grew up in Florida, attending the University of Florida (surely not her only option), where she was a stand out student (Fulbright Scholar) triple majoring in English, French, and Spanish and winning every award a bright young Floridian can. After a stint teaching in France, she went on to Yale (ring a bell?) for a graduate degree in French Literature, then on to Yale Law School. Now Manov is a big time lawyer person (clerk for federal judge, review articles published), a bonafide Good Person (started a Spanish language debate program at Rikers), and an Accomplished Writer on the Side.

You went to college wanting to be a great writer? "Me too", says Manov, "and I didn't go to Yale for the Yale Stamp of Approval and coast on it, I worked on my Good Person-hood until Yale begged for me to come around. I knocked the doors off at Yale not with a sob story, but with my own successes." Now, while Oyler mopes and writes from Berlin, Manov writes part-time after long days of Winning Life.

I can't help but feel deep suspicion of Manov - as much as Oyler may have stuck her neck out for criticism, it does stick out to me that Manov's criticism refuses to engage with Oyler's oft-stated point of view as a low class person who hit the lottery going to Yale to be a capital-W Writer. Instead it feels like Oyler, having joined the upper rungs of society as a Yale Bulldog and by critiquing books so well that people actually read her reviews - by having ambition - is now a fair target for The Elites (the ambitious and powerfully aligned). If you want to say you are as smart as us actually-smart people (with Real Accomplishments) - who actually-deserve everything you have or desire (happiness, ease, self-comfort, acclaim as a writer) - you better prove it, says Manov (presumably from a high-backed chair in the library at The Yale Club).

Manov, a skilled and trained forensic debater, an attorney of the bar, is the most overqualified person to be imagined to write this takedown of Oyler, and for that reason and others this review feels manufactured and insincere. Oyler is self-made, up out of the dust and is proud to say so. Manov, a product of untold privilege (good luck finding out where she went to high school), is so over-productive as to have the time for this takedown after/between gigs running an anti-woke film festival paid for by Peter Thiel, interning at Goldman Sachs and the NYC Law Department. Writing the harshest reviews of books possible is simply good business for Oyler, but cracking back is just a past-time for Manov. Oyler fashioned herself a high-brow writing career, but Manov also likes to hack away at this game.

So the cycle of the book world continues. Writer writes, critic critiques. Critic writes, and is critiqued to their own standards. Books are scheduled for release, previewed and reviewed and hyped. Manov will probably write her own book to sell for money one day too. I can't wait to read the reviews!

Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate

I watched 15 hours of COVID origins arguments so you don’t have to - but you should!

Astral Codex TenScott Alexander

A great read and rundown on an interesting situation I had not heard about at all, wherein a billionaire guy starts a business to "get to the bottom of things" in "a bayesian way" (using layered weighted probability to make smart guesses i.e; you normally have 1 in 3.46 billion chance to win the lottery jackpot, but kevin is really smart and has 60% chance of picking first five numbers correctly, so his real chance of winning is like 1 in 2, so he should buy 2 tickets and win).

The guy who is featured in the story debating this billionaire guy about the origins of Covid (origins being either lab leak or raccoon dog) shares the name Peter Miller with a good friend of mine, another humble smart guy. The P Milli in the article did a lot of research to make very strong arguments that it was almost certainly a raccoon dog and not a lab leak that Covid came from, and won a $100k bet against the billionaire guy for proving his reasoning for a lab leak hypothesis was junk.

This article brought to my attention Superforecasters and the Good Judgement Project at UPenn. Essentially, using math methods to make better educated guesses about the future. It started as an outgrowth of an IARPA project (the intelligence community's DARPA (the military's special secret research arm)) researching ways to make intelligence officers better at predicting world events (their jobs). Now, you can sign up on a website and start making predictions: people pose questions with answers to be predicted (what will the price of index A be on date Y) and a community of motivated people apply their brains and make guesses. The folks with the best record are "Superforecasters" - the kinds of people you maybe can listen to when they tell you they have a secret way to make money betting on sports.

The trick with this is not so much coming up with ways to determine the correct answer, but balancing the uncertainties that make determining an answer less possible. By getting a good grasp on what is uncertain, why it is uncertain, and what would make for more or less certainty, we can layer our approximations on top of one another and try to approach predictability. Wild stuff!

Suicide Mission

What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

The American ProspectMaureen Tkacik

"Discussing Swampy’s death and the whistleblower lawsuit he left behind, the longtime former Boeing executive told me, “I don’t think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys.” Did that mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? “It’s a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere,” he replied."

Barack Obama joked in 2013 he should receive a gold watch from Boeing, the way he was selling their jets around the globe. Defense contractors like Boeing are experts in playing both sides in Washington to their favor - everybody owes them something. I remember attending a Senate Armed Services committee hearing as an intern wherein Senator Elizabeth Warren asked an Air Force officer to explain for the record why the electronic components Raytheon makes in her district are so critical to our nation's defense. Nearly every legislator at a national level owes defense contractors for jobs in their district, because a big portion of our government has been coopted into a never-standing-down war machine.

‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza

The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties, +972 and Local Call reveal.

+972 MagazineAmjad Iraqi

"the author — a man who we confirmed to be the current commander of the elite Israeli intelligence unit 8200 — makes the case for designing a special machine that could rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential “targets” for military strikes in the heat of a war. Such technology, he writes, would resolve what he described as a “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.” Such a machine, it turns out, actually exists."

Disturbing reporting here about an AI powered system to identify targets to be assessed against acceptable numbers of civilian casualties. I think one of the most disturbing thing about the events in Gaza is how violence of this scale has seemed to have been brewing so openly. It seems obvious to me that as long as we let intractable political conflict fester, the more that violence becomes a seemingly inevitable result of the issue. Until the scab is healed, it will be picked at. China says Taiwan is theirs, Putin says Ukraine is his, the US disagrees - trouble brews. The purpose of the weapons and armies we have is only to make it possible to negotiate peace, so we should all feel threatened when pursuit of peace is abandoned and swords sharpened.

Hearing:

Thinking:

I got the shit slammed out of me by an Audi riding my bike. I was crossing a busy street that has stop signs, and the guy must have picked up/put down his phone and rather than looking about/pulling up to the stop line, he just gunned it through the intersection after the car before him went and T-boned me as I pedaled across.

Overall, it was a really scary experience. It was the first time for a lot of things for me. It was the first time in my life I have ever had an ambulance called for me, that I've ever denied an ambulance ride, the first time I got in a bike accident that maybe wasn't 100% my fault, the first time I've ever smashed a car windshield, first time I cut my head open. First time getting helped in an ambulance, first time going to the ER as an adult, first trauma intake - which meant first neck brace, first CT scan (with first iodine flush), first IV fluid bag.

If you get hit by a car and someone calls 911, everyone expects the situation is going to be as bad as someone getting hit by a car can be. Which is pretty bad. What a surprise for everyone then, that I was about as good as you can be after getting hit by a car. As I found out later I have no broken bones and no glaring internal injuries, so when the EMTs checked me out I had a couple minor curs and no pain, just giant pupils from the surge of adrenaline.

Lucky for me I played one year of high school football in the Chicago Catholic League under auspices of Coach Rich Zinanni, and I have been to Six Flags Great America multiple times, so getting the shit knocked out of me and the ensuing rush of chemicals to the bloodstream are not new and I did not need much time to adjust. Once you get blindsided by a 250 pound Sophomore on punt return or feel your heart lift up in your chest at the top of the Raging Bull, you are in some small way always on edge for it to happen again at any moment.

Thank god it was an Audi sedan, with one of those low, sloping hoods. A bigger car could easily have killed me. This was one of those special edition go fast mobiles with the tinted windows and the extra letters and number by the model name on the back to indicate this is a serious go kart. I crumpled the fuck out of the windshield but it was otherwise unharmed.

The driver is a neighbor of mine, as confirmed by my hasty “lets take a picture of each-others’ drivers licenses” process I default into in a car accident situation, not knowing what exactly should be done. He was just some doofus, and we came to agreement pretty quickly, neither of us got hurt that bad (me or his precious baby car) so lets just let this go I guess. Maybe his car insurance tries to come after me for windshield money, in which case I guess I lawyer up. I don‘t plan on pursuing him for bike / ER co-pay money. It may not be the most compelling case for a jury, given I walked home right after.

The EMTs had to warn me that if I chose to get out of the ambulance I was under risk of severe injury or death. Given I had just been hit by a car without being in an ambulance first at all, it seemed unlikely I would be at more risk now. The hospital people had to talk to me on the phone too and also warned me I could die if I left the sacred hurt person chain of custody of ambulance to hospital. I guess for your future reference it can be harder to sue if you break this chain. But I was fearful of the bill I would incur for the ride, plus my darling girlfriend was waiting for me outside and I wanted to be with her so bad.

Side note, if you get hit by a car, your partner becomes very very protective of you as you cross through intersections together thereafter. Prepare to hold hands and just let them lead you. She helped me get home and grab my insurance card before we walked back, past where I had minutes before gotten slammed, to the ER. I was bouncing off the walls with energy.

The ER staff were very nice to me once my identity as “the trauma” from the ambulance phone call earlier was revealed. Being a trauma patient at an ER with a trauma unit (where they take you if you are fucked up in an immediate bodily sense from car crash or gunshot etc) is an elevated luxury experience. The sign on the intake desk said 2-3 hour wait, but that’s not for “the trauma”. If you are hit by a car they take you right back into a scary looking high ceilinged room with the most intense table/bed for you to get on. And the nurse tells you “take your clothes off right now or they will cut them off when they get here” and you get the immediate sense that you have transitioned from normal old yourself to Patient, normal old self not necessary.

I was told by the main doctor who looked me over and ordered my scans that I was the most boring trauma patient in months, and it’s unusual and a very good sign when trauma patients walk in by themselves. That does not alter the protocol you are put through: stripped, scanned, stabilized.

Because my neck could have been broken they put me in a neck brace - flopping about unbraced when you have a break is “the number one way people get paralyzed“ according to one of my nurses. This sucked and I felt like darth vader. I got an ultrasound “Bladder…good” then I got x-ray’d - and for the first time there was no lead shielding involved anywhere at all they just blasted my parts and bits with those rays. Not cool to my little gentlemen.

They stuck me with a big 16 gauge needle and put those EKG electrodes on my hairy ass chest and wheeled me off to a CT Scan machine. This is not an MRI so it is okay to have a permanent bottom retainer. I checked. The inside of the machine is a surprisingly long tube, enough to make me claustrophobic. They put calming designs with animals hidden in them on the surface of the machine to give you something to look at. The nurses told me when they flushed iodine in my IV for contrast on the scan that my whole body would feel warm. I just felt a tingling warmness where the IV was in my arm. They told me don’t try to help when they moved me between the bed and the CT machine human body tray, just let them do the work. I still tried to politely wriggle the first time and was reminded not to move. It hit me again that my total consciousness for this process was unusual.

After I got done with all the tests and was waiting for results I was wheeled into a post-trauma suite and they let my girlfriend come back and see me. I felt so much love for her, like overwhelming burst into tears feelings of love and gratitude for her being there for me in that moment. The rush from the accident had worn off and I just wanted to get back to our normal day together we had planned, and never scare her like this again. This would have sucked so much worse if I had to go through it all alone. I hope my single friends know they can call me if they need help and I will get to them right away. It’s scary to feel all alone, I feel so lucky to have someone who dropped everything to come be with me and be my familiar face in a very unfamiliar situation.

After all the drama it was confirmed: I did play football. And I was not seriously injured. After a few days a big bruise on my knee brewed up, and I have a super gross 3/4ths detached scab on my scalp I cannot help but touch. But I lived through this to tell the tale, without any issues, and boy do I feel lucky. Not lucky enough to win the Powerball, but I am getting closer. Most of all I feel lucky to have health insurance and a job and boy do I need to buckle down and not get fired so I can do more cool fun stuff like this. For the blog! Thanks for reading!