Missives from Samsara

The beauty of collecting quotes and ideas from what I’ve read is being able to see what I have saved that touch on specific subjects. In a time of such blatant lying, I poked around some of the quotes I’ve saved over the years that touch on truth. Below are three.

Last week the faux-king president announced he was going to ask for $1.5 trillion for the military in the next budget cycle. From what I have read, the war in Iran has been costing us roughly $1.5 billion a day. For comparison, Biden’s 2024 budget request for the Pentagon was $850 billion. According to the Education Data Initiative all K-12 public schools spent $981.57 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2024.

Then the other day I came across this report by the American Society of Civil Engineers. They give U.S. infrastructure an overall grade every year. This year’s report is 225 pages long. See the scorecard below to see how we are doing. I’m sure you aren’t surprised.

The report says we need slightly more than $9 trillion to bring our infrastructure “into a state of good repair.” According to the folks at Morning Brew (who are citing the World Bank), it is also true that every dollar of infrastructure spending leads to $1.50 in economic activity.

But what about all that potential military spending? Sure it’s great for Northrup Grumman, whose CEO Kathy Warden has taken home more than $20 million in each of the last four years. But what about we the people? According to Morning Brew (again, citing a 2022 study by the World Bank), a 1% increase in military spending leads to a 9% decrease in economic activity.

Are we great yet?

After yesterday’s ‘day late and a dollar short’ address about the Iran War by the faux-king president, I came across two European takes. The first is from the the authoritative German magazine Der Spiegel. The translation below comes from a @Burgerb on Reddit. The second take is the new cover of the great U.K. news magazine The Economist.

Translation from German:

The Strategic Catastrophe of the Iran War

“He appeared tired. When Donald Trump addressed the nation on Wednesday evening to explain for the first time why he had led his people into a war with Iran, he spoke for nineteen minutes and said nothing new. Instead: boasting, threats, exaggeration. He spoke of bombing the Iranians back to the Stone Age—a remarkable strategy for winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of the local population. He said he would destroy the power plants. He would be finished in two or three weeks. He held all the cards. He had won.

Trump again spoke of Venezuela as a shining example for Iran—referring to the kidnapping of the local ruler, Nicolás Maduro. But in doing so, he only illustrated how badly he had misjudged the Iranian regime from the start. At the same time, he called Iran one of the most powerful countries in the world. Yet, even before the war, Iran was at best a middle power. What we saw was the opposite of control. It was the image of a man who has stumbled into an adventure for which he can find no end.

The Reality: There is no regime change, no surrender, not even negotiations. The regime has not become more pragmatic through the war, but more radical. Instead of a containment of the Iranian nuclear program, an expansion could follow the war. And with far inferior means, Iran has shown that it can take the world economy hostage at the Strait of Hormuz. Trump claims that is not America’s problem. Others should take care of it.

The head of the International Energy Agency calls what could follow the greatest energy security threat in the history of the world—worse than the oil shocks of the seventies, worse than Covid, worse than the Russian attack on Ukraine. In the Philippines, there are already four-day weeks. In India, people are once again cooking over wood fires.

With this aimless war, the American empire is not only burning its political capital. It is literally burning its ammunition. Over 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles have been fired—replenishing the arsenal takes years. While America is tied up in Ukraine and actually wanted to focus on the Pacific, it is wearing down its military in the Middle East of all places, where Trump allegedly never wanted to lead his troops again. The Iran war is a strategic catastrophe for the USA.

Imperial powers rarely destroy themselves through defeats. They destroy themselves through overconfidence—through the belief that military superiority alone means power. Rome is the oldest lesson: its legions remained effective until the end. What decayed first were the institutions. The British Empire shows the same pattern, only faster: in the 19th century, the Royal Navy was superior to any other fleet, and yet London got bogged down in too many wars on too many continents. Every single campaign was winnable. Together, they ate up the capital that held the empire together: the finances, the alliances—and the allies' belief that London knew what it was doing.

The United States did not win its global position through battlefields alone. After 1945, they created a system in which others participated voluntarily: institutions, alliances, dollar hegemony, moral credibility. Political capital, saved over generations. Trump is currently gambling it away systematically.

In Europe, Secretary of State Rubio has threatened to “review” NATO after the war ends—the clearest questioning of the alliance by a sitting U.S. Secretary of State in its history. Allies whose bases America wants to use for a war they do not support are insulted as cowards. In the Middle East, Trump publicly boasted that the Saudi Crown Prince had not expected to have to “kiss his ass.” Allies treated this way will not put up with it forever.

While Washington fires off its ammunition and damages its alliances, Beijing only has to wait. The Economist put a smiling Xi Jinping on its cover looking at Trump, with a line attributed to Napoleon: Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. Xi has built up strategic oil reserves for several months, secured supply chains, and is betting heavily on renewable energies. China’s three largest battery manufacturers are together worth $70 billion more since the start of the war. Trump’s America, the most fossil-fueled government in the Western world, is accelerating the energy transition—in China’s favor. There is a bitter irony at the core of Trumpism: He is obsessed with the decline of America. And he is accelerating it.

And at home? In his speech, Trump explains that America can afford wars—but not childcare, not Medicaid, not Medicare. The cost-of-living crisis was already the dominant issue in the country before the war. Now come rising energy prices. People who can no longer afford life eventually present the bill. In the midterm elections in November.

Trump asked Americans to put the war into perspective. Vietnam lasted almost twenty years, Iraq almost nine. His war has only been running for a good month. You have to read that twice to understand what it means: Don’t worry, there are much worse wars I could lead you into.”

My reading continues to be enjoyable. I finished four books in March and while I continue to slack on The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (too depressing?), I have been making nice progress on the book I’ve been reading the second longest, In Search of Deeper Learning. Paul Johnson’s book should be done by the end of May if my pace continues. His style is so enjoyable that I now have three of his other books in my TBR pile. The Great Hunt is getting a bit exciting, finally. Reading on Kindle continues to be fun. Richard Rhodes' book on writing has been surprisingly good.

Those that know me know I have a personal interest in the letter J. I recently learned that it was the most recent letter added to the alphabet. It apparently appears after the letter ‘i’ because it started as a flourish to that letter at the end of a Roman numeral, what is known as a swash.

Take “XIIJ”, or 13. In this case the ‘J’ is used in the place of the last ‘I’ to signify that a series of ones has ended. Apparently, ‘i’ and ‘j’ were used interchangeably to write both the consonant and vowel sounds, The first time the two were distinguished as separate letters was in a 1524 text called (in English) ‘Trission’s epistle about the letters recently added in the Italian language’, written by Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478-1550).

Jesus plays a role, too. Distinguishing the soft ‘j’ sound helped Trissino choose how the Greek word Iesus, a translation of the Hebrew Yeshua, should be spelled, and pronounced, the way it is today.

Change takes time though, and as late as the mid-1700s, English lexicographer Samuel Johnson still argued that ‘j’ was merely a variant of ‘i.’

Not surprisingly, the letter ‘j’ is one of the least common letters in English.

I finished 5 books this month and am really enjoying the new ones I am reading.

What’s new these days is that I am also reading a few Kindle ebooks on my iPad. My Kindle purchase rule is to buy nothing that costs more than $3.99. That said, I have still managed to acquire 28 at this point. Happy days!

While reading Jill Lepore’s new book about the Constitution, We the People, I came across the quote below about when New Hampshire officially declared that slavery was abolished in the state. It surprised me that a New England state waited so long to do that. I also remembered their strident state motto, “Live Free or Die.”

I decided to put down the book and poke around to find out what happened, as New Hampshire’s motto seemed a bit hypocritical in light of the relatively late 1857 abolition of slavery. For starters, I learned that the phrase came from a letter written by a New Hampshire veteran of the Revolutionary War. His name was John Stark and the full line from the private letter was “Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.”

The state didn’t actually adopt the motto until 1945, as World War II was ending. The primary meaning behind the phrase as a state motto had to do with political sovereignty and the abhorance of living under governmental tyranny. But what about individual freedom? Why would a state that so boldly proclaims the importance of liberty wait until such a late date to ban slavery?

Apparently, the New Hampshire state constitution, ratified in 1783, stated ‘all men are born equally free and independent,’ which many assumed abolished slavery. However, no law officially banning the practice was every passed. Slavery faded out over time and by 1840, the census indicated that there was only 1 enslaved person in the state.

The reason they eventually made it official in 1857 had to do with the politics of the time. Their 1857 law explicitly stated ‘No person, because of descent, should be disqualified from becoming a citizen of the state.’ It was a direct response to the terrible Dred Scott decision of that same year in which Roger Taney wrote that black Americans were not and could not become American citizens. That makes more sense.

So, my conclusion after digging a bit deeper is that my initial thoughts of hypocrisy by New Hampshire were not totally warranted. Slavery had disappeared in New Hampshire, but the politics of the tumultuous 1850s encouraged New Hampshire to make it official. Sorry I doubted you New Hampshire!