Morning Belz

Farewell (for now)

Adam Belz — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 15:16:40 GMT

I’ve been thinking for a while about how to explain that Morning Belz is going away and haven’t really come up with anything good or profound, so I’ll just say this: thanks to everyone who has read this newsletter (or at least hasn’t unsubscribed). I’ve enjoyed working on it, but it’s going away, at least for a while.

My soccer podcast is doing well, and growing, and with the World Cup 12 months away and an exciting, young, totally multicultural U.S. men’s national team looking like it might be gelling nicely amid a tough World Cup qualifying campaign, I’m going to devote myself to that, in addition to the jobs of parenting and helping to manage the household. So I guess I’m a sports podcaster now. If you wanna see something cool, check out the way the crowd in Cincinnati sang the national anthem last Friday before we played Mexico off the pitch and beat them 2-0. I make a little cameo at the end, standing next to Eagle Man.

I may well bring Morning Belz back some day. Take care!

Morning Belz, Oct. 7

Adam Belz — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 13:13:54 GMT

The 18-yr-old striker from El Paso, America’s hope — ESPN*
Re: social media, the acceleration of addiction — Paul Graham**
A very dark dispatch from...the Dispatch — David French
Retired husbands, a problematic bunch — FT*** 🔒
The latest research on vaccines, efficacy, etc. — CDC
A decent list of bullet points on the $3.5T budget — Econlib

*fantastic piece of sports journalism, touches on borderland mentality, dual nationalism and the sacrifices families make for sports
**from 2010 but feels prescient
***I didn’t need a subscription to read it. Check it out, if only for the ruthless ways Japanese women refer to their retired spouses

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“Social media, rather than repairing our damaged souls by connecting us, has merely revealed the scar tissue.” — J. Patrick Coolican, The Reformer

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Morning Belz comes out most weekdays and is written by Adam Belz, a former newspaper reporter who lives just outside Chattanooga, Tenn. Hope you benefit from it. Please shoot me a note if you have suggestions, ideas or corrections, and share it with anyone you think might enjoy it.

Morning Belz, Oct. 1

Adam Belz — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 15:28:33 GMT

Facebook’s under pressure after the Wall Street Journal dug up an internal presentation showing the company knows the damaging effect Instagram can have on teenage girls. Here are slides from that presentation. But we all know it’s not just Instagram and it’s not just teenage girls. Different social media platforms bring different flavors of tedium and toxicity. Facebook is the middle-aged marketplace of unfortunate ideas. Reddit has its younger mobs and groupthink. Snapchat, as far as I can tell, is a magnificent time-suck for teenagers.

For me, the platform is Twitter. I love it and hate it. On one hand, the app is a wonderful way to find news and populate this newsletter. It has also helped me build a national audience for my soccer podcast, something that really wouldn’t have been possible in the 1990s. On the other hand, as probably my primary avenue for engaging with the wider world, it gives me the false impression, every day, that the world is full of angry, sanctimonious, bad-faith ideologues. I can try to make the distinction between real life and Twitter, and that’s my official line, but I’d be lying if I said this past decade on Twitter dot com hasn’t affected my general approach to reality.

Even if the details are sometimes difficult for our largely geriatric legislative body, social media is a massive (and from what I can tell, under-studied) influence on modern life. It’s not, however, a problem of any one specific company or its algorithm. All the platforms have destructive effects. The problem is human connectivity. It’s not going well. We thought it would be good to be in touch with everyone everywhere all at once, and it turns out in many ways to be awful. Why? I’m curious what you think.

The best I can come up with, and admittedly it’s the equivalent of a tipsy theory espoused from a barstool, is two things: 1) humans are actually not good, but bad, and the badness compounds thanks to the connectivity of the Internet, and 2) the human brain can’t process all the information that’s available to us now. There’s too much. So we cope with it by constructing formal and informal filters that speed up polarization, or by gravitating toward over-simple theories of everything (QAnon, the Church of the Democratic National Committee, Jenny McCarthy’s vaccination ideas).

Anyway, this stuff is obviously a big deal. If you’ve seen anything thoughtful written about these issues (not company-specific critiques but rather the ways social media is changing humanity) I’d love some recommendations.

——
Henry Thomas’s audition for E.T. — YouTube
A Romanov just got married — Moscow Times
More on China and “common prosperity” — Jonathon Spine
PwC goes remote for 40k employees, permanently — Reuters

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“What changed yesterday
Will have to change tomorrow
Just as I change
In this distant land.” — Mercedes Sosa, 1985

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Morning Belz, Sept. 30

Adam Belz — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 13:33:02 GMT

Xi Jinping’s cultural revolution — Scholar’s Stage
Danish artist “takes the money and runs” — CBS
Cyclists at Stanford wear masks more than helmets — Stanford Review
A dive into declining U.S. construction productivity — Noah Smith*
No eviction tsunami just yet — Washington Post 🔒
How the Cold War really was won — Branko Milanovic**
Old but still relevant: a chlorine shortage — NOLA

* “The institutions we use to implement the construction technologies we have — things like purchasing, permitting, and regulation — are getting less efficient faster than new construction technology is being invented. In other words, social sclerosis is outrunning human ingenuity.”
** see quote below 👇

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“The big mistake that the United States made by the 1950s was to regard all movements for the emancipation of the Third World peoples as potential Soviet allies and thus as the enemies of the United States.” — Branko Milanovic

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Morning Belz, Sept. 28

Adam Belz — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 13:35:31 GMT

Pep Guardiola

Bruenig on liberalism, religion and wokeness — Yascha Mounk*
The Marshall Plan model didn’t work in Afghanistan — WSJ 🔒
U.S corn harvest is 18% complete — Successful Farming
How Eldridge Cleaver endorsed Reagan in 1984 — Daily Beast
Woman started Fawn Fire while boiling bear urine* — KPIX**
Shipping container shortage! — Globe and Mail
2020 footage of Ammon Bundy supporting BLM — Twitter

*In this conversation, Bruenig is reluctant to go hard into “wokeness,” and instead focuses on liberalism, and its claims, and the ways it deals with threats to itself, including “religion” and “wokeness.” Very interesting.

**according to police

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“Only outside Western Europe does youth football remain pre-Cruyffian. Around 2013, a kids’ indoor soccer tournament in Rockville Centre, New York, found itself a referee short. One of the organizers asked the parents: Does anyone know the rules well enough to call a game? A Hispanic-looking man in a baseball cap volunteered. But he turned out to interpret his role rather broadly. He kept stopping the game to advise both teams on positioning. The watching parents, who had come to see their kids win, grew antsy. ‘Come on! Let them play!’ they shouted. The guy in the baseball cap, on sabbatical in New York after four draining seasons at Barca, was Pep Guardiola.” — Simon Kuper, “The Barcelona Complex,” 2021

Morning Belz, Sept. 27

Adam Belz — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 14:28:14 GMT

Merkel’s party takes an L in German election — NYT 🔒
Lively, even combative, interview with Amia Srinivasan — Cowen
Obit: John Ruan III, Des Moines business scion — Dave Elbert
Taliban’s opponents regroup in Tajikistan — Foreign Policy
Explainer: What is behind China’s power crunch? — Reuters
3-in-10 Hispanic newlyweds married non-Hispanic in 2019 — Pew*
Panel investigating Covid origin disbanded — WSJ 🔒

*Part of a broader report on Hispanic demographics in the U.S. The nation’s Hispanic population 62 million in 2020.

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“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” — Mark Twain, 1888

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Morning Belz, Sept. 24

Adam Belz — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 14:41:07 GMT

It rained off and on for about a week in north Georgia and then the sun came out Wednesday and we’ve had three days straight of crisp fall. It reminds me a little of spring in Minneapolis — those first warm days when everyone heads to the trails around the lakes and the city comes to life. Except this is in reverse. Summer wasn’t even especially hot here, as I understand it, but the coolness of this week has brought a fresh vitality. A cool breeze at night, fewer bugs in the air, Friday night football, more people outside more often. It’s energizing.

——
Birds have flourished during the lockdown — CBC
Starlink, SpaceX satellite Internet, is really happening — Cringely*
A 3,000 word review of the Peter Theil biography — Amazon
Chuck Grassley, 88, is running for reelection — Yahoo
The conspiracy theory that explains bad architecture — Astral Codex
Radon-filled mine in Montana drawing pilgrims — Kaiser
Some nerds used AI to try to evaluate media bias — MIT

*It’s a fascinating article. Raises the possibility of Internet that’s impossible to censor. And by the way, according to Geospatial World, there were 7,389 satellites in space as of April, the vast majority of them orbiting Earth. Well over 2,000 of those were launched in the past 18 months. According to the article linked above, Starlink itself accounts for 1,378 satellites.

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“...serious differences made servitude in Virginia more onerous than servitude in England. The ordinary term of service that a man agreed to work in Virginia was not a year but several years; and the wages to which he was entitled had been paid in advance in the form of transportation across the ocean. Almost all servants were therefore in a condition resembling that of the least privileged type of English servant, the parish apprentice, a child who (to relieve the community of supporting him) was bound to service by court order, until he was twenty-one or twenty-four, with no obligation on his appointed master’s part to teach him a trade or pay him. In Virginia a master had little reason to treat his servant well in order to obtain a renewal of his services at the expiration of his term; and a servant had little reason to work hard in order to assure being rehired, because men would not bind themselves out for a second long term when they could make more by working for themselves. The was accordingly the more reason for a master to assert his authority in order to get what he considered a full quota of work from his servants. Not surprisingly, it was reported in England that Virginians ‘abuse their servants there with intollerable oppression and hard usage.’” — Edmund S. Morgan, on the servitude of English settlers in the early days of the Virginia colony, “American Slavery, American Freedom,” 1975

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Morning Belz, Sept. 22

Adam Belz — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 14:45:50 GMT

Texas prisons versus Christianity — Atlantic
Left wing 🤝Right wing — Guardian
US/UK trade deal not gonna happen right now — Bloomberg 🔒
44% of world’s population has one vax dose — OurWorldInData
Taliban fighters not pleased to not be fighting — WaPo 🔒

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“Britain’s problem with the US trade deal is not that we’re at the back of the queue. It’s that there is no queue. Post Trump, the Democrats are too scared to even discuss new trade deals — with anyone.” — Gideon Rachman

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Morning Belz, Sept. 21

Adam Belz — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 13:56:11 GMT

Xiulin Ruan, a Purdue University professor of mechanical engineering, holds up his lab’s sample of the whitest paint on record. (Purdue University/Jared Pike)

The whitest paint ever is its own form of AC — Purdue
Falling cost of renewables offers climate hope — Bill McKibben
Illinois energy will be 40% renewable by 2030 — Legal Planet
Young people are getting more polarized — Stanford
The “special relationship” between the US & UK — Daily Mail
Strange but true: the Straw Hat Riots of 1922 — Wikipedia
Kids learning the Roman testudo formation — Twitter*

*Look, Twitter is bad. But it’s also good. It’s a paradox.

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“Literature is news that stays news.” — Ezra Pound, 1934

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Morning Belz, Sept. 20

Adam Belz — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 16:30:19 GMT

A fenceless capitol this morning. (Charles Allen)

Pfizer says vaccine is good for kids 5-11 — NYT 🔒
Marjorie blowing up a “Socialism” Prius — Twitter
The long arm of Chinese surveillance — The Star
Dems pushing vax bc they want MAGA folks dead — Breitbart*
Schools try to limit quarantine to keep kids in school — NYT 🔒
New Netflix documentary on civilian space flight — YouTube**

*I’m not endorsing this op-ed. Just think it’s fascinating that Breitbart published an article saying Fauci, et al., are pushing the vaccine to do a reverse-psychology on MAGA folks and cause them not to take the vaccine. Talk about 4D chess.

**One of the producers is good friend, Jonathan D. Woods. Super proud of him. Also the show is a good refresher on the latest in space exploration, which, if you aren’t following closely, has seen major developments in the past couple years.

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“Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” — Virginia Woolf, 1925

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Morning Belz, Sept. 17

Adam Belz — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 13:26:25 GMT

China applies to join TPP, which US spurned — Straits Times*
Google, Apple remove Navalny voting app — Reuters
Real debate over jabbing 12-15 yr olds in UK — BBC
Lots of benefits from fermented foods — News Station
Calm update on US women’s soccer equal pay — Soccer America
Lecture 1 in a new Columbia course on blockchain — Roughgarden
Why are there no Republican cities? — Bryan Caplan
Evergrande, China’s potential Lehman Bros. — Bloomberg

*the dark irony: “The original deal was envisioned by the US as an economic bloc to counterbalance China’s growing power, with then-President Barack Obama saying in 2016 that the US, not China, should write the regional rules of trade.”

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“When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold.” — James Joyce

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Morning Belz, Sept. 16

Adam Belz — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 14:59:28 GMT

Sobering update on Ethiopia — War on the Rocks
The FBI botched the Larry Nassar case — NYT 🔒
Covid hospitalization not as serious anymore — Atlantic 🔒
Bout w/covid may prevent Delta better than jab — Bloomberg 🔒
Americans don’t believe online data is secure — AP
The hittiest hit so far from the new Musgraves album — YouTube
Trump caused MORE white people to ID as evangelical — Pew*
Norm Macdonald and Jerry Seinfeld — Vimeo

*Wild that the word “evangelical” is just gonna eventually mean “Trump supporter.” I say that only half-joking.

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“We make a mistake if we believe that only the violent passions like ambition and love can subdue the others. Laziness, for all her languor, is nevertheless often mistress: she permeates every aim and action in life and imperceptibly eats away and destroys passions and virtues alike.” — La Rochefoucauld, 1665

🔒 = requires a subscription. Hard to avoid these days. Is it better to note it, or to just let people figure it out when they click the link?

Morning Belz, Sept. 15

Adam Belz — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 14:21:58 GMT

I’m back. Thanks for all the kind messages you sent after I announced the indefinite shelving of Scuffed News.

Gonna try to write longer-form newsletters on occasion, eventually, but the majority of these emails will be just links for a while.

——
Recent interview with Norm Macdonald — NY Mag 🔒
Norm on Germany — Late Show
Men in general giving up on college — WSJ 🔒
Long, good interview with Marc Andreessen — Hanania
Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for girls — WSJ 🔒
Good thread on this subject — Jonathan Haidt
Former ESPN boss launches new venture — Bloomberg

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“That stupid Jonathan Swift thing that everybody talks about — I read that. It sucked.” — Norm Macdonald, NY Mag

Morning Belz, Sept. 2

Adam Belz — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 16:11:27 GMT

A brief update. Scuffed News has struggled. I don’t think it was a bad idea (one of our videos has 1.8 million views on TikTok), and I think I have done some worthwhile work, but in order to succeed with it I needed to build a large audience quickly and I haven’t accomplished that, and there’s very little sign that this audience is somewhere around the corner. Some combination of my lack of ability, and factors out of my control, are responsible for this failure. By the time the Fourth of July arrived and I had footage for four videos in hand, I found I couldn’t muscle the footage into videos that made sense to me, or accomplished anything useful. Editing those videos takes a huge amount of effort, and, frankly, belief. My belief was flagging in the middle of the summer and hasn’t revived. I still want to publish at least a couple of those videos (the one from Minneapolis about “defunding” the police, especially), but I can’t promise regular output from Scuffed News in the coming months.

A few things are contributing to me being OK with this.

1. My wife Andrea has a good job and we live in a low-cost place and we have three kids to raise. The mundane churn of drop-offs, pickups, doctor’s visits, piano practice, soccer practice, baths, and all of that takes a lot of time and energy, as many of you know, and even though I have to admit to the doctor’s office that I don’t have an employer, and am greeted with an awkward silence, I’m (usually) glad that I get to spend so much time with my kids. They’re 6, 4 and 1. We’re in a season of labor-intensive parenting. It’s good for me to be able to throw myself into that.

2. My soccer podcast is growing fast. It’s a much lower-effort endeavor than Scuffed News, and it’s benefiting from a renaissance in the U.S. men’s national team that’s culminating, this week, in the beginning of an 8-month World Cup qualifying campaign. So we have a window of momentum there and I’m going to defenestrate myself through it. I’ll be busy with this, which I assume almost none of you care about, for the next week, which means Morning Belz will be on hiatus until next Friday at the earliest.

3. While video production isn’t my core competency, writing is, and I think there is potential for Morning Belz to be a better and more consistent product. The best feedback I’ve gotten since I quit my job at the Star Tribune in November has been for the newsletter. I will have more to say about that in the next month.

So to sum up, no final decision on ending Scuffed News right now, but it’s not clicking on all cylinders so let’s just officially say it’s on pause. We’ll see what exactly happens, but all is well with me, and I’m quite busy with work that I enjoy. Have a great weekend.

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“Things in our life simply don’t go according to set decisions. One glides into a new epoch, and the so-called ‘decision’ is as a rule only the final summing-up of items long since entered into the ledger by life itself.” — Franz Rosenzweig, 1928

Morning Belz, Aug. 31

Adam Belz — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 14:26:08 GMT

A bitter struggle over a rural gravel road — Star Tribune
Get to know Prospera, the Honduran startup city — Devon Zuegel
U.S. counternarcotics effort strengthened Taliban — Modern War
Taliban enters airplane hangar in Kabul — Nabih Bulos
Douthat nails it on Afghanistan — NYT
Another good interview with David Shor — New Statesman
“Stop calling me white for having the wrong opinions” — Newsweek
Israel makes 3rd jab available to 12+ — Times of Israel

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“I think people have this idea ‘the other side is stupid, we’ll balance (it) out by being stupid too!’ But sometimes it doesn’t balance, you just end up with more stupidity. US has more anti-vax and more masking of children than other societies, the arms race of stupidity hurts us all.” — Richard Hanania

Morning Belz, Aug. 27

Adam Belz — Fri, 27 Aug 2021 14:52:43 GMT

Beekeeping on TikTok: very relaxing — Conor Friedersdorf
Scary headline, but Delta’s not more dangerous to kids — TIME*
In Britain, young children don’t wear masks in school — NYT 🔒
Crowds throng Kabul airport even after attacks — Bloomberg
Life under the Taliban in Afghanistan’s 3rd largest city — FT 🔒
El Paso native Ricardo Pepi chooses USA over Mexico — FC Dallas

*“There is no evidence that the Delta variant is causing more severe disease than previous strains, says Dr. Sean O’Leary, vice chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) committee on infectious diseases. Less than 2% of children who have caught COVID-19 during this wave landed in the hospital—roughly the same percentage as during earlier phases of the pandemic…”

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“We will continue to coordinate with the Taliban on preventing terrorist attacks.” — Gen. Frank McKenzie, CENTCOM Commander, PBS

Morning Belz, Aug. 25

Adam Belz — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 15:23:35 GMT

“Triumphant” Pakistan on the hook in Kabul — Indian Express*
Lies we keep telling ourselves about Afghanistan — National Review
Mexico rescuing desperate Afghan journalists in flight — NYT** 🔒
The youth national team soccer player who fell from the plane — WSJ 🔒
Herschel Walker is running for Senate in Georgia — AP

*worth it for the view from Delhi, and the phrase “masterly inactivity”

**there’s irony in the fact that Mexico must come to the rescue for Afghans who’ve worked for U.S. companies and are fleeing a formerly U.S.-occupied country, because the U.S. immigration system is so bad.

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“There's no reason to think the Chinese will attempt anything like what the Soviets or Americans did (in Afghanistan), overthrowing the central government, and setting up a new one more friendly to them that attempts to control the whole country. China might grab some lithium, though.” — Nicholas Grossman, prof at the University of Illinois

Morning Belz, Aug. 24

Adam Belz — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 14:58:30 GMT

Judge: key immigration law is racist/unconstitutional — Reuters
U.S. has evacuated 37,000 from Afghanistan — AP
12-year-old genius in engineering at Georgia Tech — CBS
Reminiscence: a St. Louis English professor — Post-Dispatch
Vivid, disturbing Jordan Peterson...satire? Fan fiction? — Aamon
Unsatisfying but mostly level look at the Delta variant — Bloomberg*
Wesley Yang on the Megyn Kelly show — Apple Podcasts

*basically says we don’t know much, yet.

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“When myth meets myth, the collision is very real.” — Stanislaw Lec, 1962

Morning Belz, Aug. 23

Adam Belz — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 13:31:30 GMT

An absorbing look at Parmigianino’s Madonna — NYT
Teaching Afghan women about Duchamp’s urinal — BBC*
Poll: 72% of Americans support mask mandates — USA Today
Biden mostly preserves Trump’s immigration policy — Noah Smith
Farm-tech pioneer Indigo’s stumbles and adjustments — WSJ**
Flooding west of Nashville kills at least 21 — Tennesseean
Reminder to be skeptical even of oft-cited scholarship — JSMP

*Note the way one of the women shakes her head in disbelief. The clip is from Adam Curtis’s “Bitter Lake,” a 2015 BBC documentary that I haven’t watched but looks good and is available on Amazon Prime.

**The convenience and reliability of the local grain elevator remains, for now, undefeated.

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“It's this sense that we're eating decomposition. You could call it death. To me it's a taste of that, but a promise of something delicious. So I think it's almost a subconscious way of being prepared for death, and facing our own mortality. And for me that analogy, of, really a death, a decomposition, creating this wonderful flavor, it’s a promise of something better. I experience that over and over again when I look at cheese, when I smell cheese, and then when I look at the microbial ecology of cheese. That’s the wonder for me, that it’s a promise of life beyond death.” — Sister Noella Marcellino

Morning Belz, Aug. 19

Adam Belz — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 13:37:07 GMT

Smartphones, teens and loneliness — Quillette
Chinese woman torpedoes “cultural appropriation” concept — Twitter*
Lessons from eavesdropping on the Taliban — Atlantic
Alabama has no ICU beds available — WSFA-12
The state senator in Obama’s old seat — Current Affairs
Young U.S. goalkeeper chooses to play for Mexico — Players Tribune

*cheerfully!

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“The timeframe of a rapid collapse — that was widely estimated and ranged from weeks to months, and even years, following our departure. There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.” — Gen. Mark Milley