Review: Blue Lock 1-10

 Boen is a huge soccer fanatic, so I tried to find him a comic book that has soccer that he'll like. Blue Lock came up repeatedly as a good comic, so I picked it up for him.  He didn't want to read it though, so I ended up reading it.

The concept is a Hunger Games style selection game, in which a coach hired by the Japanese soccer federation promises to produce a winning striker. The idea is to start with 300 players and through a process of elimination ultimately produce a winner.

There's some social commentary about how the typical Japanese person is too communitarian and not egoistic enough, and the training/selection program is supposed to encourage egoism. The training is not very realistic, as there's nearly no downtime and any athlete training this hard and playing this many games is likely to become injured. But that's par for the course for these types of stories --- realism is not the point.

The story starts out with some very basic selection and setback stories, with each player focusing on his specialty and trying to evolve it against other players. The primary story is about player position and seeing into the future, and the games are rarely a full 11x11 soccer game. Slowly the comic series introduces character interaction and history, to give a bit more flavor rather than just soccer action.

I'm not sure I can consider this series a really good one. But maybe if Boen watches the anime it'll be something he'll enjoy.

Review: The End of the World is Just the Beginning

 I checked out The End of the World is Just the Beginning because someone referenced it as being a good book on the end of globalization. Halfway through the book I realized that the author assumed the end of globalization as his premise and then went on to roll out the implications of what had happened, and realized that if I treated the book as science fiction it would work a lot better.

Maybe that's a bit harsh, since the book actually has interesting details about where cobalt, lithium and other rare earth elements come from, and those statements might not be completely science fiction. The thesis behind Zeihan's work is that all developed (and many developing) countries that urbanize drastically reduce their population growth. As a result of this, demand will collapse and the US will also withdraw as the major peace-keeping power in the world, and therefore globalization will go in reverse.

None of these conclusions follow from each other, but Zeihan throws a lot of pithy quotes and facts hoping you'll ignore this lack of logic:

The Americans have never had a tradition of governing excellence* because for much of their history they didn’t really need a government. Managing foreign territories twice the size of the United States would have been, like, really hard. And the Americans are, like, really bad at government. (kindle loc 602)

 China in 2022 is the fastest-aging society in human history. In China the population growth story is over and has been over since China’s birth rate slipped below replacement levels in the 1990s. A full replacement birth rate is 2.1 children per woman. As of early-2022, China’s only partly released 2011–2020 census indicates China’s rate is at most 1.3, among the lowest of any people throughout human history...For countries as varied as China, Russia, Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Ukraine, Canada, Malaysia, Taiwan, Romania, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria, the question isn’t when these countries will age into demographic obsolescence. All will see their worker cadres pass into mass retirement in the 2020s. (kindle loc 882-889)

It's as though immigration can't happen! Germany recently reported that 23% of its population has immigrated to the country since 1950 or are the children of immigrants. And that's not even including Guest Worker programs or expats. Similarly, I expect countries like Spain, Portugal, and the USA to get immigration whether or not those countries even desire the entry of such immigrants.

This book was published right after the Russian war in Ukraine started, and there, we see no signs of US disengagement in world affairs. We even see stronger determination in the US to contain China, something I did not expect.

If you accept the book's premise is true, the rest of the book kinda makes sense. Zeihan analyzes all the natural resources within the control of each major power and points out that North and South America together have all the resources they need, while places like China, which are heavily dependent on imports and exports are kinda screwed. He makes statements asserting that China grew only by pouring lots of debt into its economy, but debt denominated in yuan can be eliminated at any time by government fiat (which the Chinese government wouldn't hesitate to do, given for instance, their recent behavior towards their own tech industry). More interesting is the demographic challenge:

China should have become a noncompetitive country in manufacturing in the late 2000s because it had exhausted its coastal labor pool. Instead the coast imported at least 300 million—likely as many as 400 million—workers from the interior.* That bought the Chinese economy another fifteen years, but at the cost of hardwiring, both within the coast and between the coast and the interior, massive inequality in income and levels of industrial development. It also makes the Chinese goal of a domestically oriented, consumption-driven, internationally insulated economy flatly impossible to reach. Little of the income from all those Chinese exports went to the workers (especially the workers from the interior), so little can be spent on consumption. China now has a rapidly aging coastal population that has limited consumption needs and—most important—hasn’t repopulated. That coastal population is stacked against a seething migrant class from the interior that lives in semi-illegal circumstances in hypercramped, near-slumlike conditions, working grueling hours, and that cannot repopulate. It is all located next to an emptied-out interior whose primary source of economic activity is state investments into an industrial plant that is of questionable economic usefulness, populated by a demographic that is too old to repopulate. This is all in a country where decades of the One Child Policy have encouraged selective-sex abortions en masse, so there simply are not enough women under forty to repopulate the country in the first place. (kindle loc 4674)

Again, the author didn't realize that he made contradictory statements. If the reason the population isn't growing is because of cramped, slum-like conditions, then reducing population would enable the remaining population to live a better life and grow! It's as though feedback loops can't happen in human environments and to human behavior. It's not a given that we live in a world where immiseration of humans living in the 3rd world is required to produce modern luxuries. A world where Chinese labor is as expensive as US labor would not be a bad thing for either the Chinese or the Americans!

There are other statements made by Zeihan that I'll let you judge for yourself whether or not to take seriously:

part of why American manufacturers feel cheated by globalization is because that was the plan. The core precept of the Order is that the United States would sacrifice economic dynamism in order to achieve security control. The American market was supposed to be sacrificed. The American worker was supposed to be sacrificed. American companies were supposed to be sacrificed. Thus anything that the United States still manufactures is a product set for which the American market, worker, and corporate structure are hypercompetitive. Furthermore, the deliberate sacrifice means that most American manufactured products are not for export, but instead for consumption within North America...by 2021, most manufacturing processes were already cheaper to operate in North America than in either Asia or Europe. That might shock, but it doesn’t take a deep dive to understand the conclusions. The North American system sports high labor variation, low energy costs, low transport costs to end consumers, nearly unlimited greenfield siting options, stable industrial input supplies, and high and stable capital supplies. Even better, the North American continent faces few security threats between its own shores and those of potential suppliers. On average, North American products face less than one-third the supply chain disruptions the Germans are likely to feel, and one-tenth that of the Asians. (kindle loc 5023-5054)

All in all, this is a great book to read if you want to feel good about living in or putting down roots in the USA. But I hesitate to consider it anything other than science fiction --- as I mentioned above, none of the conclusions he comes to necessarily follow from his premises.

Review: Sandman Act III

 The Sandman Act III covers the Orpheus Sandman Special, Brief Lives, and the Short Stories at World's End. Having recently read Stephen Fry's Mythos to my kids meant that all the greek mythology references are no longer lost to me. As usual, Gaiman's long story arc (Brief Lives) isn't as good as the shorter works in this work, though I find the Inn at World's End to be a notch below any of the previous sequence of short stories. But the production quality is nothing short of amazing, and I loved the lush sound of the series --- this is a series to listen to with both headphones in your ears and as little interruption as possible. 

The unfortunate thing is that I don't know whether Act IV is coming --- there are only two volumes of the entire series left --- The Kindly Ones and The Wake. I hope Amazon renews the series just so I can have the complete series in audio book format.

Re-read: The Killing Joke

 It's been a long time since I read any new Alan Moore, and I'd almost forgotten that he'd written a few Batman stories, the most canonical of which was The Killing Joke. Brian Bolland's art is distinctive for its clean lines and well-demarked detail, so the grim and gritty look is out of the question. Alan Moore uses this to show off how horrifying The Joker truly is, and how unlikely it is that a truly moral Batman could let him live.

The book's also well known for its depiction of the Joker's origin, which ties nicely into the actual story itself. I didn't like the resolution, but to my mind, there's no resolution I would find satisfying that wouldn't result in the Joker's execution, so maybe that's not surprising.

What's interesting about this Batman story is that the Batman is hardly a character here --- he's depicted as always being one step behind the Joker, and does no detecting whatsoever. He's purely there as a contrast to the Joker, and even then he's redundant compared with Commisioner Gordon.

The Killing Joke doesn't stand up to any of Alan Moore's more independent work. Nevertheless, it's a good story and worth the relatively short read.

Reread: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

 After The Graveyard Book, I found The Ocean at the End of the Lane in the Kindle Unlimted library, and started reading it to Boen. Neil Gaiman stated in his blog that he deliberately started the novel slow so that younger readers wouldn't end up reading a book meant for adults, but I'm the kind of person who ignores warning labels on books.

Reading two Gaiman books so close together tells me that Gaiman loves re-using the Hempstock name --- the name clearly means something to him, but the Hempstock in this novel has nothing to do with the Lizzie Hempstock in the Graveyard Book.

I've decided that Gaiman works best in the shorter genre, and in this case, the novel is short enough that much like Stardust, the book can shine in every phase. The terror of a 7 year old of his own father who's turned evil by a monster he brought back from the faerie land is palpable, and I will admit that the book has a tendency to keep Boen awake instead of lulling him to sleep as the story is paced just right, with enough scary and exciting things happenings while the more mundane, prosaic events in between those moments of terror grounds the story.

The book never actually reveals who the Hempstocks actually are, or the nature of the magic that is practiced in the world, but doesn't flinch away from the sacrifices that are made. The narrative touch is also great --- the narrator rather than a person telling about events as they happen, is an older adult remembering events as they happened to the 7 year old self, comes through with authenticity and demonstrates the craft that Gaiman has mastered over the years.

There are lots of little gems that make the book quotable as well:

“Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters. And as for grown-ups . . .” She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, “I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.” (pg. 155)

I'm glad that Boen made me read this book to him.

 

 

Review: Astro City - Ordinary Heroes

 I ran out of ways to buy cheap used copies of Astro City - Ordinary Heroes, so I was stuck paying full tilt in digital form, which is outrageous but the books have been so good that I can't really complain. The series opens up with a view of Jack-in-the-box, a gadget-based hero that was established early on in the series. We see the 3rd generation of the family, a kid who secretly wants to be a doctor, who was discouraged from joining his parent in the super-hero business. They investigate the death of their grandfather, and the story pivots quickly to the other side of the story, the nemesis who might have murdered the original Jack-in-the-box. This one is well told and well thought up. I was impressed.

The second arc concerns the lawyer also introduced early in the series --- 20 years later she has a successful practice but still can't satisfy the ghost of her mother, and faces pressure from her boyfriend to move out of shadow hill. Again, I enjoyed the story and the resolution which involved suddenly being drafted to being a lawyer to one of the mystic heroes in the universe.

The last two stories are also great --- one concerns a super-villain who's been stuck on a deserted island for years, and discovers that a come back wasn't exactly what he wanted, and another is a super-hero feline who aids the universe's version of cloak and dagger. The story is whimsical and great. All in all, this volume was definitely a lot of fun. I'm kinda miffed that the series is out of print, but my suspicion is that they're re-releasing the series slowly. Recommended!

Re-read: The Graveyard Book

 Boen asked for something scary for bedtime reading (yeah, I know, the kids wants to be scared), so I picked The Graveyard Book despite it not being scary because it at least had a scary name.

The Graveyard Book is Gaiman's riff on The Jungle Book, and it starts with Nobody Owens, a lone survivor of a grisly serial killer who murdered the rest of the family. He gets adopted by the local graveyard, and is brought up by a combination of ghosts and other night monsters. He's given freedom of the graveyard and brought up by a family of ghosts and eventually enters the world and confronts his family's killer.

The book is episodic in nature, so you can stop at every chapter and pick it up with no memory of the previous chapter (other than the over acing plot), which makes it work for bed time reading. The writing is transparent, and the situations somewhat interesting. Boen was definitely not scared by any of the events in the book, though he didn't pay enough attention to figure out who Nobody's guardian actually was.

The book is fun, but definitely not up to par with Gaiman's The Sandman. I have to say, though that's a high bar to meet, since other than Stardust, I'm not sure there's anything Gaiman's produced in prose form that holds a candle to his work in graphic novels.

Nevertheless, even mediocre Gaiman is not a boring read. Recommended.

Review: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

 When I went to college, the creative writing courses were so impacted that I had no chance of getting in after competing with the students who spent a lot more time writing than I did. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain promised to be my chance to read what happens in those classes. I will confess that I've bounced of George Saunders' books and short stories --- the genre he works in is no fun for me, but this book captivated me in a way I didn't expect.

The format of the book is that a short story by one of the Russian writers is presented. The first one is presented a page at a time, followed by analysis and detailed examination of how the writer accomplished his goals. There's a huge emphasis on how the story/author makes you feel.

Of all the questions an aspiring writer might ask herself, here’s the most urgent: What makes a reader keep reading? Or, actually: What makes my reader keep reading? (What is it that propels a reader through a swath of my prose?) (kindle loc 2756)

The book has lots of insights related to the writer's work, which are as insightful as the stories presented:

Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out comes…poetry, i.e., truth forced out through a restricted opening. That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. (kindle loc 4847)

I will confess that I'd never consider reading Russian literature for fun. This book didn't change my mind, but gave me a glance at the kind of personality and thoughts behind someone who enjoys Russian literature (Saunders' enthusiasm for Chekhov and Tolstoy comes clearly through the page), and gave me a lot to think. about. The exercises in the appendix also look to be worth doing.

Recommended.

Review: Honor Guard and Reflections

 I got impatient with reading the books one at a time, so I bought Honor Guard and Reflections simultaneously and they arrived on the same day.

Honor Guard includes 3 stories about the Honor Guard. The first is about a superhero's retirement. While a decent story I didn't consider it great. The second story was about American Chibi, and I thought that the hero had a great origin story, but again, didn't bring the uniqueness that I'd come to expect from the series. The final story was a story told from a monster's point of view, and I thought that was great!

Reflections starts off with a story from the point of view of one of the Alien races that have tangled with the Furst Family (a knock-off of the fantastic four) in the past. It's a unique point of view that was great. The second major story is about Steeljack, one of the villains from an earlier story in the series. It depicts how hard it is to go straight in the universe of Astro City, and I thought it was great!

Even mediocre Astro City is worth reading, and these were great. I'm kinda sad that I can't find good used copies any more from the series, so I'l lhave to read the next few books in digital format.

Review: Osprey Savu 5

 My long beloved Matador Beast 28 is slowly dying, with a rip slowly working its way around the waist belt. My big problem with the Matador Beast was always that the side pockets were nearly worthless, at most storing a Zojirushi thermal flask that's not very big. The camel's back broke when the thermal flask started falling out of the backpack while riding.

 I decided to try the Savu 5 lumbar pack when Osprey started selling them at $35. It has 2 water bottle holders, and one big central pouch. Actually riding with it, it works for commutes or even road rides of 16 miles or longer. But if you actually load up with two water bottles and tackle steep climbs with it you quickly feel lower back pain, so it's actually not so good for actual mountain biking --- I'd stick with water bottle cages.

What it proved to be surprisingly great at though is the commute --- I can squeeze in a backpacking towel, a change of clothes, badge, keys, and a cap for commuting. The side pockets can hold my headphones and the phone proper can go into a handlebar bag to keep myself from texting and riding. It's also great for day hikes, since the water bottle holders firmly accept almost any type of water bottles and hold it firmly. It won't carry quite enough for a day long hike with the family (you'll inevitably need to carry other people's lunches and jackets if you're a dad), but for short 2-4 mile hikes you'll easily have enough water for the family and a few snacks.

It's also generally good for taking kids to birthday parties and stuff like that --- the main pouch has enough room for a kindle paperwhite, so you can entertain yourself.

I thought about returning it, but Boen decided that he likes it more than his camelbak, so I'll be keeping it.

Review: No Excuses - Existentialism and the Meaning of Life

 I picked up No Excuses during an audible sale. Usually I enjoy the Great Courses series, but this one was a dud. The lecturer basically went over what the various existentialist authors wrote (including some biography), but didn't actually cover why they were all grouped into a movement. Even during the last lecture he didn't explain why you would group together religious people and atheists/humanists in a single movement. I came away from the series no more enlightened about the movement than I did before listening to it.

Review: The Righteous Mind

 The Righteous Mind is divided into 3 parts. The first two are at the very least enlightening and gives you plenty to think about, and the last part unfortunately falls into the "bothsidesim" that has aged particularly badly since 2012, which was when the book is written.

The first part is pretty straightforward: humans aren't rational. Our rationality and reasoning abilities are frequently used for post-hoc analysis and self-justification as to why we did the things we were going to do anyway, whether it was reprehensible or moral behavior. This isn't particularly controversial, as anyone who has tried to get a kid to do the right thing will tell you --- the smarter the kid, the more reasons he will come up with as to why what he did was the right thing, irregardless of the actual rightness of the behavior. What's interesting is that what it takes to change people's minds isn't reason, but affection, admiration, and mutual respect:

When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight. The elephant leans away from the opponent, and the rider works frantically to rebut the opponent’s charges. But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments. The elephant may not often change its direction in response to objections from its own rider, but it is easily steered by the mere presence of friendly elephants (that’s the social persuasion link in the social intuitionist model) or by good arguments given to it by the riders of those friendly elephants (that’s the reasoned persuasion link). (pg. 79)

The second part of the book is an exploration of humanity's good behavior. The author uses a phrase - we're 90% Chimp and 10% Bees. The idea here is that chimps don't normally cooperate with each other, and 90% of the time we behave like selfish primates. But then there are some triggers that get us to all bind together into a team or group or religion, and then humans are capable of cooperating to a high degree, like bees. There's a part of the book where Haidt explains the aggressive egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer societies:

It’s not that human nature suddenly changed and became egalitarian; men still tried to dominate others when they could get away with it. Rather, people armed with weapons and gossip created what Boehm calls “reverse dominance hierarchies” in which the rank and file band together to dominate and restrain would-be alpha males. (It’s uncannily similar to Marx’s dream of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”)34 The result is a fragile state of political egalitarianism achieved by cooperation among creatures who are innately predisposed to hierarchical arrangements. It’s a great example of how “innate” refers to the first draft of the mind. The final edition can look quite different, so it’s a mistake to look at today’s hunter-gatherers and say, “See, that’s what human nature really looks like!” (pg. 199)

 His theory therefore is that the egalitarian instinct evolved relatively recently. I'm not so sure I buy that. In any case, Haidt points out how you can deliberately trigger the "hive switch" on humans:

Increase similarity, not diversity. To make a human hive, you want to make everyone feel like a family. So don’t call attention to racial and ethnic differences; make them less relevant by ramping up similarity and celebrating the group’s shared values and common identity.49 A great deal of research in social psychology shows that people are warmer and more trusting toward people who look like them, dress like them, talk like them, or even just share their first name or birthday.50 There’s nothing special about race. You can make people care less about race by drowning race differences in a sea of similarities, shared goals, and mutual interdependencies. (pg. 277)

This explains, by the way, why corporate programs to increase diversity ironically also increases latent racism --- the training to make people aware of diversity ironically erodes the hive switch and therefore makes the company less cohesive. The reduction of cohesiveness not only makes the company less effective, it also creates a backlash because the people comprising of the company no longer view themselves as part of a whole. People who might otherwise have bought into the human hive now rail against wokeness instead.

Haidt points out then, that the role of religion isn't an accident. It binds communities together in ways that secular shared values do not:

It was things like giving up alcohol and tobacco, fasting for days at a time, conforming to a communal dress code or hairstyle, or cutting ties with outsiders. For religious communes, the effect was perfectly linear: the more sacrifice a commune demanded, the longer it lasted. But Sosis was surprised to discover that demands for sacrifice did not help secular communes. Most of them failed within eight years, and there was no correlation between sacrifice and longevity.31 Why doesn’t sacrifice strengthen secular communes? Sosis argues that rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized. He quotes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport: “To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.”32 But when secular organizations demand sacrifice, every member has a right to ask for a cost-benefit analysis, and many refuse to do things that don’t make logical sense. In other words, the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, particularly when those beliefs rest upon the Sanctity foundation.33 (pg. 298)

This is an insightful and probably accurate view of society. You'll read this book nodding along to this part. The final part of the book (and really, the author couldn't help but insert it all over the book) is the note that liberals rely only on the caring portion of human morality, and ignore the other pillars (he calls them tastes) of society. This leads to the conclusion that liberals can't see what conservatives view as important, such as "traditional values" and the view of sacredness.

The problem with this criticism of liberalism is that it completely goes against the past few centuries of human history since the enlightenment in Europe! There was a time when human slavery was viewed as normal. In all traditional societies, women were frequently treated as property. Haidt mentions a time when he visited India and came back with a strong sense of what made Indian tradition strong and how he came away with respect for the traditional cultures and values of that society. He doesn't mention attending a funeral where widows were expected to burn themselves in the cremation pyre of their dead husbands. He doesn't mention the traditions of feet binding in Chinese society. Haidt protests against this by quoting Isaiah Berlin:

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrestled throughout his career with the problem of the world’s moral diversity and what to make of it. He firmly rejected moral relativism: I am not a relativist; I do not say “I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps”—each of us with his own values, which cannot be overcome or integrated. This I believe to be false (pg. 367)

But in vain. We all know that fascism is wrong, but it's also very clear that in recent years, that's what the "moral right" has adopted. It seems that after reading this book, I've come to agree with the New Atheists --- that religion is a blight on humanity and if we are to survive we must kill it dead. It's very clear even from the evidence in the real world that the enlightenment-dominant societies are the ones thriving, and the fundamentalist Christian societies (whether it's the Muslim countries in the middle east or the red states in the USA) are the ones doing the most poorly in terms of lifespan, happiness, or even pure economic productivity. It might be that the liberal politicians need to find ways to attract those voters, but if they don't, it's clear to me that if Haidt's theory of group selection was true, the liberal tribes are going to outperform the conservatives by a lot!