Russia and Development

The first thing Charles Buxton says is that post-Soviet Russia’s businessmen worked entirely through bribes. The second thing he says is that certain organizations, like Afghan war veterans, got tax breaks, which they abused. Nothing here surprises me, because every book I ever read about Russia says that everything was based on bribing someone. However, in this book, the author notes many positive things about Russia, which according to him the Soviet system ruined. Whatever negative traits there were, the Soviets increased.

Russia’s economy was poor and backward in the days of the Tsars, but it did work in many ways. In the days after the serfs were freed, some peasants succeeded in prospering from their farms. Those that could grow crops and raise animals did just that, and those that could do business did business. Buxton argues that Stalin destroyed this prosperity, with his crazy schemes in 1930’s. For starters, he forcibly collectivized the farms, resulting in starvation. You don’t need firsthand proof to know that collectivization can’t work, and the only proof you need is in numbers. If you take every independent farmer in the region, and force all their livestock into one pen, then whatever diseases there are will instantly spread to every cow, pig, and chicken. Now take economics into account; if you have twenty pig farmers, and three of them can’t afford to feed the pigs, then they’ll probably be forced to sell to the ones who can. That, in a nutshell, is how business works. Now force them to share resources; you’re going to force the 17 that succeed to subsidize the three that do not. That means the ones who produce will lose money, and the one who can’t (and should be allowed to die out) will be sustained, and become dead weight for everyone else.

In the Asiatic provinces, there are shortage of central heating and electricity, which are killers in the harsh winters. The weather is comparatively warmer in some parts, but the winters are still freezing cold. Since the areas were “civilized” under the Soviets, the people have ended up living in apartment houses, and for some reason modern buildings are colder in the winter than being outdoors (I know because my NYC apartment can freeze in some winters, even with central heat.

I guess the main gist of the book is that the only people who succeed in Russia are the ones who have too little to steal or the ones with enough muscle to keep thieves away. It funny in some ways, because in “poor” countries like Senegal and Nigeria, there’s a lot of respect for businessmen and traders, while in a “civilized” country like Russia, a business is just another place to steal from. Terry Allen, in his book No Cash No Fear, discusses his attempt to open a pizza place in Moscow, and he found that it was just a big labyrinth of bribing everyone. Keep in mind that Hong Kong, a tiny state with few resources, became powerful through business, and has very little corruption. Russia, on the other hand, is notorious for corruption.

Despite Russia’s resources, talent pool, and cheap labor, it seems hopeless. 

Measuring and Improving Social Impacts

Epstein and Yuthas draw few distinctions between a nonprofit organization and a public corporation. They consider the role of the manager the same for both for profit and nonprofit, where on one side you have monetary investors, while on the other you have the donors and the people they’re trying to help. Either way, the CEO is responsible for how the money is used.

In the first chapter, the authors show you how you can give the investors firsthand views of how their donations are being spent. Organizations that work with African relief can invite them on tours to see what they are supporting, or as in the case of some sponsorship charities, you can exchange letters with a child that you sponsor. The implication is that you attract more donations when the sponsors can see firsthand what their money is doing to help, rather than just telling them that it’s being used to provide education. If you tell the donors “we’re using this money to build a school building in the village to educate 50 children, then you can show them photos of the building and the 50 children. Careful planning makes all the difference.

After that, we get a chapter on the goals that you organization is trying to accomplish. Are the goals realistic? Will your efforts make any positive change? I have seen firsthand many examples of nonprofit organizations that make no positive change at all. For instance, a health insurance company donated thousands to a church food pantry in a low-income neighborhood, with the expectation that the congregation would receive meat, vegetables, and fruits. When they went to check on the place, all they saw the members taking home was government surplus food, and not good quality either. No fish, no chicken, no vegetables (unless they came in a can) and what looked like cast-off Army food. When the donors asked where the pastor was, they found that he’d taken his family on a two-week vacation to the Dominican Republic. I leave it to your imagination as to where he got the money.

One problem with nonprofits, to which the authors devote a chapter, is the measurement improvement. Too often, the organizations don’t want to create studies on their achievements, for reasons that include hardship, cost, time, and effort. Measurements can take up time, which is one reason, and sometimes it’s just difficult to measure. If you’re doing an anti-smoking campaign, how can you know if your efforts have caused smoking to cease among teenagers? How can you be certain? As with earlier chapters, the authors imply that if the effort has clear goals in mind, then it’s easier to measure the results.

It seems that the main point of this book is that you can only make serious improvements when you have clear, measurable goals. Take for instance a program where kids paint murals on building walls. The organization needs paint, brushes, paint rollers, drop clothes, and a van to drive the kids around. The measurement will be how soon the mural was painted, how much paint was used, and to reward the donors, you show them the results. If the organization provides a dance studio for low-income kids, then you decide what kind of space you need, the instructors needed, and in the end, you measure how much skill the students have gained, and show that to the donors.

Nonprofits are no different from the average corporation. In the end, the management has to be accountable to whomever provides the funding.

Hollywood’s New Yorker: The Making of Martin Scorcese

Scorcese came along during a dynamic era, the time period we call the Sixties. It was suddenly acceptable to question authority, take drugs, wear outlandish clothing, support radic-lib causes, and show nudity on stage and screen. The Hollywood Production Code, which forbade breasts, penises, kissing in the bedroom, pot-smoking, and cursing, had vanished. It was now acceptable, after all these years, to portray divorce positively, leading to the hideous scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now. As for the studios, they all got killed by television, and the old outdoor sets looked like old backlots resembled lost cities. Into these studio ghost towns strode William Friedkin, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, and Martin Scorcese; they were known as the New Hollywood, and they would save the industry.

Prior to Scorcese, relatively few movies took place in Manhattan, and those that did rarely made use of outdoor locations. There were exceptions, however, like The Lost Weekend, which takes place under the El and in the panshops. Most films of the time, however, were westerns, and they took place far from the city. Some films, like Rebel Without a Cause, were shot in LA, as were most of the comedies of the time. New York City didn’t seem to be a place for drama or comedy before Scorcese and Lumet came along.

Hollywood’s New Yorker dwells extensively on Scorcese pre-Hollywood career as a college professor, and his first movie was actually his thesis. It wasn’t your typical movie, because the director wasn’t under any deadline and didn’t have to take orders from a producer. Few directors of the time, with the exception of Stanley Kubrik, Howard Hawks, and Billy Wilder, had any creative control. Scorcese’s thesis, titled Whose Knocking At My Door, show what happens when the director has a micro budget and an even smaller set of rules to obey. He did, however, get along well with the studio system, directing Boxcar Bertha, (not a NY movie)with violent scenes that would’ve previously been forbidden by the Production Code. Mean Streets, set in Little Italy and shot in LA, got great reviews from Roger Ebert, as it would from most young critics. The younger they were, the more accepting they’d be, and the more in tune they were to younger audiences. Ebert wrote that Mean Streets was like Marty, but with hoods.

This book isn’t always in praise of Scorcese. After Raging Bull, his next efforts weren’t well received. New York, New York, his wacky period piece, is not appreciated even today, and King of Comedy got mixed reviews. Nobody doubted that Jerry Lewis (who spent the 70’s as a film professor) did a great job, playing against type, but it seems more like an “indy” film that was a little beneath the director’s ability. Critics like Robin Wood weren’t sure if it was an end or a new beginning, and Peter Biskind, in his book Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, makes his dislike of the 80’s very clear. He writes how the directors of the New Hollywood did poorly in the 80’s, like Mike Cimino, destroying his career with Heaven’s Gate. Coppola, praised for his Godfather movies, scared the establishment with his over-budget Apocalypse Now. As for Scorcese, his King of Comedy was questioned by the critics. While they praised Jerry Lewis, who abandoned his old antics for serious acting, they weren’t impressed by the director. Would the movie have been better received if it came out in 1970? Would they have been more impressed if it were the debut of a younger director? After Hours wasn’t well received, perhaps due to the Yuppie characters and the punk rock scene. As for The Color of Money, everyone liked it, but it didn’t seem to have Scorcese’s edge. The 80’s would be the decade of Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, and Sidney Pollack.

Scorcese would make a comeback with Goodfellas, and he churned out more hits over the decade, like Casino and Kundun. Today he’s gone out of New York, with LA (The Aviator) and Boston (The Departed.)

Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers On Their Unshakable Love For New York

Roseanne Cash came here in 1991 from Nashville, Tennessee, her work newly rejected. He artistic music didn’t excite the country music business, at least not like her previous songwriting, but she found herself right at home in the city’s folk music scene. Shopsin’s restaurant, immortalized in the documentary I Like Killing Flies, was a bastion of weirdness and rudeness, quite a change from Southern hospitality. The neighborhood had nice playgrounds, and they weren’t especially crowded. Today they’re usually jammed, thanks to the massive increase in the number of kids, leaving behind all their leftovers, and that attracts snack-loving rats. Twenty years on, everything’s more expensive, and the streets are once again filthy.

Patricia Engel has an interesting story with regard to housing. She preferred to live with violent junkies than live in the NYU dorms. She has a liking for rough trade, so I guess she would’ve preferred the 1970’s New York, but she’s not as tough, hip, or independent as she thinks she is. Engel would run screaming from the South Bronx, where I doubt she’d fit in at all, and I wager she wouldn’t want to live in a housing project. Aside from the danger, there wouldn’t be much for her to do in the South Bronx, at least not as much as there is in downtown Manhattan. Perhaps, like many overconfident young women, she’s just “slumming” for a cheap thrill?

Colin Harrison, map collector, discusses his love for the city, as does Whoopie Goldberg, whose experiences in NYC made her feel right at home in Germany. She grew up in the 26^th street projects, where a number of German Jews were living, and her mother encouraged her to pick up on whatever she could.

This book comes along on the heels of another book called Goodbye To All That, where the writers discuss why they left the city. In that book, they all preferred small towns or farms, so it’s no wonder they left. Others, like the writers mentioned here, prefer living in a metropolitan area. John Lennon, for instance, chose Manhattan over London, and became a well-known fixture on the Upper West Side. He lived there when it wasn’t so popular, mainly because the Jewish-Americans who lived there didn’t give a damn who he was. Unlike younger New Yorkers, he lived in the secured Dakota building, not a townhouse in the West Village. You see, while a lot of New Yorkers come here for the experience, they don’t want the dangers.

Something tells me, a lot of these folks would’ve gotten fed up with the city after a few years, had they come here before Guiliani cleaned it all up.

Future American President by Matthew Jordan Smith

Alabama joined the nation in 1820, says this book, accompanied by short bios of some well-known Americans born in that state; Helen Keller and Mae Jamison. Each state in the USA is represented by two sets of kid, along with short pledges (also by kids, and in their own handwriting) on what they’ll do if they get elected. Unlike an old social studies book, Future American President includes kids of both genders and all races.

Matthew Jordan Smith raised funds for this effort on Kickstarter, so I figure one of these days somebody’s going to finance a presidential campaign using crowdfunding. The photos are simple; average kids standing alone with a sign saying “future president,” surrounded by trees, mountain, and grassland. Some of the states are well known for scientists, musicians, and politicians, others aren’t exactly “famous.” Alaska and Hawaii aren’t the birthplace of a lot of “great” Americans, but then again, what makes Americans great?

When Do the Good Things Start?

I grew up with relatives who were just like Lucy in The Peanuts comic strip. They would insult people, shirk their responsibility, and chew people out, but in the end they always found ways to justify their behavior. Eventually I realized that the only way out was to avoid them. You can never win an argument with a narcissist, because they convince themselves that their lying is true.

Dr. Abraham Twersky (MD/PhD) is an interesting character; a Rabbi and Psychiatrist, specializing in addictions, he’s worked with every class of addiction you can think of, be it drugs, alcohol, sex, food, rage, or just plain procrastination. He mentioned in The Jews of America that he sees the traits of an addict in himself, describing it as “I’m a procrastinator, I crave instant relief.” His book, and a later one called Just Waking Up on Time, use the Peanuts comic to illustrate the root of personality disorder, which he seems to blame for addiction.

One of his examples is the dynamic between Lucy and Schroeder, who she keeps trying to win over, despite him being as hostile to her as he can. She keeps convincing herself that everything she does is someone else’s fault, and has a captive audience. She’ll miss a fly ball because she’s drawing in the dirt, and when Charlie Brown gets mad, she’ll say, calmly, “A good coach doesn’t yell at the players.” She goads people into getting angry so she can criticize them, and it’s a way for her to feel superior.

Unlike another Rabbi/therapist name Shmuley Boteach, Twersky doesn’t get as much attention. He’s not a media hound, but he’s a whole lot smarter. I would love to see him interviewed on TV to discuss addiction and crime in the USA. It would be great to hear his opinions on sexting, addiction to electronics, obesity, etc.

An Indigenous People’s History of the United States

Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a longtime advocate of Native American rights, calls Andrew Jackson “the implementer of the final solution.” It doesn’t take much to convince me of this, especially when today’s high school history textbooks make it clear that Jackson was evil. The question, however, is how much of the damage was his doing.

In the story of how the Louisiana Purchase robbed the tribes of their land, the author lets slip that Jackson wasn’t a mere tin pot tyrant. He was a backwoodsman, orphaned as a teenager, supported himself with odd jobs, and studied the law at his own expense, so we can say that Jackson was “from the streets.” Like Bill Clinton, he was born dirt poor and had a desire for an education, so his “up from poverty” background gave him credit. Unlike Bill Clinton, Jackson didn’t believe in racial equality. He regarded the Native Americans as a pest and a nuisance, and to this man with a huge Southern following, wiping out whole tribes was like stepping on a cockroach. We can easily deduce that the killing was part of Jackson’s design.

Dunbar-Ortiz doesn’t place 100% of the blame on Jackson, as she discusses the dynamic of the tribes. Some of the tribal leaders sold or ceded land when it wasn’t legally theirs to give. As settlers farmed the land, the tribes became dependent on the goods produced by white settlers, and that eroded the tribes’ self-sufficiency. From the beginning of the book, she asserts that the settlers pitted tribes against each other, like the Pequot war of the 1600’s, and it unleashed a base instinct in many Native Americans.

I watched a video (courtesy of YouTube) where activist Russell Means decries the Native American tribal governments, telling Congress that these groups are alien to Native American life, and they in no way resemble traditional tribal authority of old. Means is not quotes much in this book, which I thought was unusual, but then again he was a self-proclaimed leader, and the author is free to decide who to include. There’s another book, titled Looking for Lost Bird, where the Navajo handle crime traditionally; they exile the offending youth and his family. Prior to Anglo-American influence, their method of dealing with recalcitrance was expulsion, and I have to wonder if there wasn’t a huge benefit to this. Would it be easier to force a family to leave town, than to spend all that money jailing a teenager? Would it teach the family something? Perhaps Russell Means was right, in that Anglo-American law clashes with the desire to preserve life.

Dunbar-Ortiz has done good research here, and the writing is unbiased, so the book accomplishes what it set out to do. However, as a book of history, it is not entirely satisfactory. Photographs, illustrations, and maps would have been a big help. If you’re going to write a book of history, especially one that deals with migrations, then maps are essential.

A Period of Juvenile Prosperity: Photographs of David Brodie

I often see homeless young people in downtown Manhattan (especially in the East Village) with their dark clothes, filthy hair, and pissed off looks. They contrast sharply to the carefully dressed and more affluent young people in the neighborhood, and thanks to economics, they don’t get much benefit from being there. They can’t afford to enjoy the bars or restaurants, can’t afford to take the subway to the museums, so I have to wonder why they come here. In a piece I did for City Limits, a homeless girl sums it up like this; you can hitchhike into New York City, but you can’t hitchhike out. She refers to these kids as “crusties,” whose chief interest is usually drugs and beer.

A Period of Juvenile Prosperity is a book of photos taken by Mike Brodie, over a period of three where he rode freight trains. Almost all of the people in the photos are young, very few older ones. Some of them look perfectly happy, relaxing on the timber floors of the train cars, sometimes sitting precariously above the wheels, staring off into the cornfields and swamps. There seems to be an unknown world of young people hopping freight trains around the USA, which is how Brodie describes most of his life. It seems like these kids are becoming a new kind of nomad.

Mike Brodie describes himself as a kid from a broken home, though not necessarily a bad one. His father was in jail a lot, and his mother wasn’t the most responsible of parents, but it wasn’t rife with constant beatings. They moved from Mesa, Arizona, to Florida, where he was introduced to punk music. Born in 1985, he would’ve missed the early punk rock scene, and by the time he started taking photos with a cast off Polaroid, the company was already discontinuing regular film. If he came in during the days of regular film, he might not have been able to afford to take the photos.

One of the running themes of this book appears to be hygiene, or lack of it. There’s a photo in this book, of a teenage girl lying on her back on the floor of a hopper car, legs wide apart, skirt pulled up, proudly displaying her menstrual-stained white panties. If not for the stain, her underwear would be the only part of her that’s not encrusted with dirt. Most of the young people in the photos are filthy, which I’d expect from people who spend all year travelling as hobos. Some of the photos show them washing their clothes, like the one of the clay-crusted turning the bathwater brown! Others show them with bandages on their legs, which makes me wonder how many of them may be on heroin?

I also noticed that almost all of the freight train riders are white. Only one black man can be seen, getting handcuffed by police. I have to wonder if this tells us something about race and families in the USA? Brodie says his life was troubled by a broken home, and he says he lived in Philadelphia for a while, but he doesn’t talk about gangs or violence. He was part of the punk subculture, but would this have been the case if he were black? If he and his mother had moved to Florida, would he have found BMX biking and punk rock, or would he have joined a gang? Brodie Oregon, lived with vegans, moved to Philadelphia, lived with an underground rock band, but didn’t get into drug dealing or pimping. Does this mean that aimless black and white youths have different ways of being hopeless and directionless?

There have been articles about the “crust punks” in the New York Times, and the attitude towards them and their lifestyle hasn’t been especially favorable. The people who work low-wage jobs resent them being here, and most stores won’t hire anyone without a permanent address. There is, however, what I believe is the reason a lot of them come to New York City, and I came to that conclusion from the book’s photos. Most of the shots in this book are in rural areas with nobody around, not in cities or towns. I’d wager that in the average small town, their presence would not be tolerated, thanks to anti-loitering and vagrancy ordinances. Burlington, Vermont, has a small population of young homeless people, which is why the public libraries are getting crowded. Tempe, Arizona, has always had its share, as does Washington State, Oregon, and California.

A period of Juvenile Prosperity isn’t the first book of such photos. Back in 1980, Mary Ellen Mark did a photo essay called Streetwise, about homeless youth in Seattle. Those of you that read the book, and saw Martin Bell’s documentary of the same name, know that Seattle was a city that tolerated these kids. They didn’t have to hop freight trains and leave the city. But at the same time, a lot of the kids profiled in the documentary would end up on drugs, alcohol, have lots of children by absent men, and lead unsuccessful lives.

Brodie says that he went back to school and became a diesel mechanic, but eventually quit that. I would like to have seen more photos from his days in Oregon with the vegans, or his life in Philadelphia. I imagine that city has plenty of abandoned houses to crash in, though I wonder why the same thing doesn’t happen in the Bronx. Are these white kids afraid to go there? Maybe that tells you a lot about it too.

A Finger In Lincoln's Brain: What Modern Science Reveals About Lincoln, His Assassination, and It's Aftermath

E. Lawrence Abel sets out to investigate whether Lincoln’s doctors could have saved his life. I’ll warn the reader that he doesn’t find any concrete guilt or innocence, and even if he did, I wouldn’t be able to blame it on the doctors. With all the great advances in medicine today, it’s still unlikely that anyone could survive a gunshot to the head at close range. What the author does provide, however, is a book on the quality of physicians in Abraham Lincoln’s time. I found it all quite surprising.

In chapter 8, the author describes how surviving a headshot depends on where the bullet strikes the head. If it hits the front, it will destroy speech, but if it hits the back, it will cause blindness or death. In a later chapter, Abel discusses the way Lincoln’s physicians handled the physical care; they stuck their fingers in the bullet hole! If you’re wondering what these qualified men were thinking, the author shows that they weren’t qualified at all. He quotes President Grant’s physician, Dr. John Binton, on how bad the army’s medical professionals were during the war. Keep in mind that Dr. Binton graduated from the best medical school in the nation at the time, but as Binton recounts, most of them had never been to medical school at all. One of the surgeons had never performed an amputation, and upon doing so, now had a reputation as a great surgeon.

Medical professionals didn’t have to be licensed in 1865, and most of them never went to school to learn the craft. The best you could hope for was that your physician had done an apprenticeship somewhere, so in reality they weren’t much different from the barber surgeons of old. Medical associations had published standards, but only the best-educated doctors followed them, and those doctors only served the officers and the wealthy. The rest of the army doctors could only do crude stitching and amputate limbs. Medicines were little more than 150 proof alcohol laced with opium and cocaine, and there was no such thing as antiseptics. As for anesthetics, those too would come later.

The question arises as to whether Lincoln could be saved if he were shot today, and the modern physicians quotes in this book say yes. It would’ve required a brain scan, intravenous salinity to shrink the brain slightly, draining away blood in the brain, and other than that, Lincoln would’ve been permanently disabled. As for the physicians who attended Lincoln, they took notes and did tests, including how he responded to light, in which one pupil was unresponsive. That would tell a modern health professional that one side of the brain was intact. But when the doctors stuck their fingers into the bullet hole, did that introduce an infection that killed the President?

It didn’t take this book to surprise me at all. I’d heard the story of how President Garfield’s doctors stuck all kinds of probes and unwashed fingers down the bullet hole, when they could’ve just left the bullet in there and sewn him up. President Roosevelt had a bullet in his shoulder (assassination attempt) as did President Jackson (battle of New Orleans) and both had those bullets in there for the rest of their lives. Both survived for years afterward. Jackson may have gotten lead poisoning from the bullet, but that’s another story. The use of morphine in the Civil War meant that the questionable doctors of the time could operate longer, and take bullets out rather than amputate the limbs. Ironically, these soldiers now had “veterans disease” which today we call “drug addiction.”

This book serves as a history of medicine in the USA. It shows what happens when doctors are not regulated by standards.