DrakeNews #122 for September 2021
Dear People,
I had an MRI which seems to say I don’t have Parkinson’s. My brain however has shrunk, and there’s evidence of ministrokes of which I knew nothing. My sister tells me that our mom had TIAs in later life. These are often a warning of future massive strokes, but in fact mom died of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. I will be careful of tick bites.
The situation disturbs me, but what it boils down to is that I’m mortal and 75.
At present I’m off the levadopa and taking a diet supplement that Greg Benford touts: Geneaire Rebuilder. I don’t know what or how it does, but I think I’m less scattered in the time I’ve been taking it.
I am also training with my son at the gym. I’m sure it’s good for my health but I’m not certain about specific benefits. I’m genuinely trying to keep my mind working. But I’m not getting any work done. I can’t find enthusiasm for getting down to work.
Part of the problem is that I never have privacy. I don’t mean that I’m frequently disturbed: I rarely am. But I always may be and can’t relax.
Will I be able to do more in the future? I hope so. I can’t expect my brain to regrow any time soon but Geneaire may be the magic pill I called it when I first heard about it.
There’s quite a lot of fuss about the number of afghans who will be harmed by the US leaving the country. Women are the most obvious losers. They will be treated as afghan women have historically been treated by Afghan men. This does not meet western standards of proper behavior.
What should we (western countries) do about this? Invading and replacing officials with Afghan cultural values with those imbued with western values? That hasn’t worked out very well in the long run, has it? Twenty years wasn’t enough time to replace a culture developed over millennia.
Personally, I find abhorrent the practice of burning a widow alive on her husband’s funeral pyre. If a western country invades and stamps out the practice of suttee, however, this paternalism can only be justified by the belief that we know better than the locals do about how men should behave toward women and after all, to quote Hilaire Belloc ‘we the Maxim gun have got–and they have not.’
I was a lot more willing to accept changing other people’s culture by force before I went to Nam than since I’ve come back. Because it does require force and even if I personally think the result is good the means are likely to be pretty unpleasant.
British suppresssion of suttee saved the lives of a lot of Indian women–far more than were killed during the Amritsar massacre by Nepalese troops under British command because an Indian man had insulted a white woman. On the other hand, the suppression of suttee and other Indian customs for good western reasons leads to a culture in which it’s considered reasonable to issue untrained mercenaries from the hills with ammunition and and tell them to fire on a peaceful gathering of lowlanders. Even the British government later decided that wasn’t all right. But if you’re going to ignore local cultural norms which differ from western norms it’s hard to where to draw the line. I heard Katherine Cramer say seriously that the US should object to the chinese government banning pro-democracy protests in china.
Dunno. I don’t want the Chinese government deciding what I should be allowed to think or say, and I don’t think we should decide what’s right for the Chinese to do either Mabe I’m not liberal enough.
Best wishes, people, remember that everybody else is having a tough time too.
–Dave Drake
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