My mother was always present at my basketball games, faithfully attending each one. It was certainly not to see me show my basketball abilities. She liked the company of the crowd, liked sports, and was very involved in our lives in a supportive way. Although I considered myself a rather average player, looking back, I might have been better than I believed at the time. The enclosed suburban world I lived in placed an excessive emphasis on sports, making it necessary to possess at least some level of skill to navigate through. Regrettably, I lacked enthusiasm and performed with mediocrity. The high school coach once noted in my annual report card, supplied by the private school, that I needed to enhance my aggression on the court. I also had a tendency to get in ball-grabbing incidents where I ended up bruising my knees on the floor. I had many more bruises than points that year, if I had even a single point in that boys league. My parents kindly explained that my lack of success was due to the intense practice of other children in the area.

One fortunate night, I managed to make a basket. However, it came well after the buzzer had signaled the end of the game, and I was fully aware of it. In fact, the shot wasn't even close to the buzzer, but well after it. The referee acknowledged this by waving his arms to indicate the invalidity of the basket. Amidst the crowd, I distinctly heard my mother's voice, a yelp of protest, exclaiming, "No, no!" She stood at the far end of the court, passionately advocating for me. Even though clearly not a basket, she was advocating full force, arguing with the ref who had to go to the bench to explain. At that point the memory dims out, me probably slinking back to the bench.

Approximately 55 years later, I shared this memory with my 99-year-old mother, highlighting her unwavering support for me. At that point, I did not know if she fully grasped what I was saying, but she did seem to smile, recognizing, registering, and internally reminiscing about her distant, over-the-top display of ferocious protectiveness.

Some studies show increases in IQ over the decades, and that is consistent with my own suspician that high school and grammar school students hold their own quite well with generations past.  Possibly, with a sample of therapy clients, the verbal abilities may be higher than the general population. Or, possibly my own entrenched ideas, with a poor expectations of high school students may have something to do with that impression. And finally, I do really hope that it is not do to my own declining abilities as decade succeeds decade--said in jest.  The stereotype is of oldsters ragging on the  the new generations and their deficiencies of learning, and this just is not permissible anymore. This generation of high school students speak with relative ease about things submerged culturally in the past, and are conversant with things it took me years to learn in the befuddled, distant, and dimwitted era in which I was raised.  Exposed to liberating and stimulating environments, teens now seem to be able to talk with relative ease about identity, anxiety, subtleties of relationships, and parent divorce with the clinically cheerful quality of an 1980s grad student.  This is not the same as increased reasoning or cognitive abilities, but those too seem better than I remembered at the time,  I speak with adolescents in my work and family activities. Across the board they seem just smarter than we were, and frighteningly, encroaching on my long developed perspicacity. There is even a name for this purported even--The Flynn Effect.

There is one area that teens seem weaker than their baby boomer grandparents, and that is in classical knowledge. Understanding of history and literature seem undeveloped although perhaps compensated by improvements in mathematical and STEM areas.  References to events in history or literature before 1950 or 1900 seem weak, and distorted--possibly there is less immersion on old knowledge because new knowledge arises geyser like every time a laptop is opened.

Certain types of intelligence peaks at certain times. Mathematicians tend to be young, politicians flourish at the other end of the age spectrum, and for the pursuits that require idealism--activism for example, youth also is important. Psychological knowledge seems not to require long apprenticeship anymore, no more a result of long experience and wisdom but just immersion in the ocean of information on the web. Clients often know as much as their therapist. The old job of psychologist was to explain diagnosis and provide treatment. Nowadays there is a more collegial aspect to the therapy process because its hard really to tell many clients anything. They have access, with their younger  brains and brand new short term memory,  and modern electronic tools and databases, to the same information the therapist has., and the information is more freshly learned. Probably the area that an older person has an edge are seeing deviations from patterns. Having been exposed to occasional black swans, as the term goes, there is better alertness to the odd event, the unusual diagnosis, the case that does not fit the usual outlines 

People learn from experience. Yes, true enough, but at the same time people learn all the wrong things for experience. Half of what is learned is likely to be wrongheaded or effected by the brain of the person who invented it.  Lets put it this way, you learn something from an experience but whether what you learn is useful, accurate, or really an advance on what you thought before is unclear. At times, better not to learn from experience, to avoid being hardened, changed or affected by a single event that may or may not be characteristic of a situation.  Don't learn anything and at least you keep an open mind, uncluttered with useless pseudo-knowledge.

I would say the one other area that older people have over younger people intellectually is that, being better off financially, decisions can be more detached, or developed in a more quietistic environment. A doctor in their thirties scrambling hyperactively around to pay bills or make his mark financially or professionally, is bound to be rushed, compared to the circumspection of a more placid 50 year old doctor less possessed by anxiety and careerism. So, age has an advantage there. Overall, however, except in areas like politics where connections and seniority play a role, really the race for intellectual acumen goes to the younger. Rimbaud, the French poet and friend of the poet Verlaine, wrote his best prose as a teen. His mind was especially limber at that age--full of the grandiose joy of making poetry.  At about age 18 he ran off to Abyssinia to smuggle guns, or some such pursuit,  and possibly at some instinctual level he realized adulthood would not be the creative playground he enjoyed in his youth.

Sometimes I see people wearing shoes or boots with fur trims. This probably is not a new fashion. But my noticing these boots or shoes is relatively new. Reading Thorsten Veblen alerted me to the social significance of these, to me, somewhat absurd shoes.  Normally, the varieties of shoe style would not be worth noting. However, these boots are obviously a form of "conspicuous consumption". The fur is essentially useless, and a shoe with fur is not likely to protect the foot, or warm the foot better than a shoe without fur, made of faux leather or other less expensive material. It is "potlach" all over.  Potlach is a ceremony of conspicuous consumption and display. The fur is purely ornamental and without use.

Spending on useless displays is a way of conveying one's high role in the social hierarchy, said Veblen. Veblen was a deep, but ironic and inadvertently funny genius.  Since fur is noticeably useless, and the shoes are probably more expensive than non-furry boots, they are worn to connote extra reserves of cash and capital. As odd or critical as that sounds, one can't be too judgemental. Personally, I wear jeans with phony and useless pseudo-watch pockets or, on rare occasions, nowadays, a tie, or a button-down collar, which in Veblen's view, are also useless additions, perhaps reminiscent of an earlier sartorial age, but maintained in contemporary (admittedly Veblen was writting in the 1800s) clothing to denote status. The more useless an item, the more expensive to maintain, the more the item signals status.  Those phone little watch pockets on dungarees or blue jeens hearken back to the day when wealthy men ostentatiosly consulted their pocket watches.

 These extravagantly upper-class shoes may mimic shoes of yore that did require fur. Possibly at one time Native Americans or others in cold climates across the world shod their feet in fur to protect against real winter cold. Nowadays, the shoes have a slightly comic look--with the black tights favored by contemporary fashion, they give a "Puss 'n Boots" appearance, especially if the wearer is tall. 

This tall aristocratic type, not very good at physical labor, was described by Veblen as a valuable addition to humankind, with their keen understanding and culture. They are nurtured along by having a more barbarian parent who provides protection for these foals. They are usually identified on sight or brief discussion and really don't need fur boots to signal status. 

 The display of conspicuous consumption can take mutated or inverse forms. For some, an affection of working-class solidarity is hoped to ring the proper status bells. Social activism can also be a way of signaling hidden wealth and status. As one grunt in Platton says to the idealistic Charlie Sheen character, "you have to be rich to think that way." Just the right political leaning, say, for example, what some call the bourgeois liberality of the Eastern elite, also can  convey status. Particularly risible is status-seeking en masse. In a suburb where most are living above the national income norm, a view of the street may show several people wearing furry boots. At what point are these status-signaling, preposterously upper-class shoes, approaching a vanishing point of worth. If everyone is wearing them.... 

 The matter of furry shoes reminds me of Tolstoy's description of Ivan Illyich, in well known short story. Illyich attempts to decorate his house as befits his recent rise in barrister status. 

  He found a delightful house, just the thing both he and his wife had dreamt of. Spacious, lofty reception rooms in the old style, a convenient and dignified study, rooms for his wife and daughter, a study for his son — it might have been specially built for them. Ivan Ilych himself superintended the arrangements, chose the wallpapers, supplemented the furniture (preferably with antiques which he considered particularly comme il faut), and supervised the upholstering. Everything progressed and progressed and approached the ideal he had set himself: even when things were only half completed they exceeded his expectations. He saw what a refined and elegant character, free from vulgarity, it would all have when it was ready. On falling asleep he pictured to himself how the reception room would look. Looking at the yet unfinished drawing room he could see the fireplace, the screen, the what-not, the little chairs dotted here and there, the dishes and plates on the walls, and the bronzes, as they would be when everything was in place…He was particularly successful in finding, and buying cheaply, antiques which gave a particularly aristocratic character to the whole place….All this so absorbed him that his new duties — though he liked his official work –interested him less than he had expected. Sometimes he even had moments of absent-mindedness during the court sessions and would consider whether he should have straight or curved cornices for his curtains. He was so interested in it all that he often did things himself, rearranging the furniture, or rehanging the curtains…the result was charming not only in his eyes but to everyone who saw it. 

 In reality, it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people of moderate means who want to appear rich, and therefore succeed only in resembling others like themselves: there are damasks, dark wood, plants, rugs, and dull and polished bronzes — all the things people of a certain class have in order to resemble other people of that class. His house was so like the others that it would never have been noticed, but to him it all seemed to be quite exceptional.

I imagine that this aspiration to be admired is somewhat built in. There seems to be no domain where people seem content to be ordinary. As was said by the bard, we are the heroes of our own plays. And possibly this is the trait that will drive us and the planet to ruin. 

 Certain parts of the adorned body have social meanings in terms of status and conspicuous consumption. A rink on the pinkie means something different than a ring on the ring finger. The former, especially if large, denotes implied wealth or connectivity with wealth and power. The ring ties up the working use of one finger so implies conspicuous consumption. Whereas a ring on the latter is associated with domesticity and marriage. 

The foot, as a source of human preoccupation, was analyzed by Freud. As odd as it sounds 100 years later, Freud said the foot was associated with the phallus. Freud was brilliant so I am loathed to bring up examples from his writings that solidify dumb stereotypes of Freud, but that is what he said, in an analysis of parapraxis. So, decorating the foot becomes, as said of, say, binding in Chinese women, a form of eroticism, as is fur. So, the excessive attention paid to picking shoes of a particular type becomes not only a sign of wealth but of robust and attractive vitality and availability.

 On a different, but related topic, there is the meaning or signaling of "spectator shoes." These are the usually white shoes with brown portions on the uppers, more common in the forties or fifties than other decades. They are fabulous examples of conspicuous consumption. Indeed the very word "spectator" indicates idleness, which is a keen indicator, in Veblen's view of wealth. The more useless things we have, the better. It is better to have servants who just hang around, in terms of status signaling, than ones who work hard--an entourage so to speak. Having a lawn, a useless patch of ground reminiscent of a pasture of yesteryear is another example of status--a piece of ground that does nothing and is moreover, requiring expense to keep up. A lawn is a way of elevating one's own status. A garden, while many times more practical, doe snot do the same thing, at least traditionally. The same kind of uselessness as an expensive but impressive docked boat. It is better to have a golden, exquisite fork, that requires care, and possibly is to cumbersome to really use effectively, than to have a simple tin fork. 

 But back to the spectator shoes. I am hoping at some point they become a little more in style, slightly less absurd than they are considered nowadays for a typical walk around. The reason is that I already have a pair and the execution of conspicuous consumption will cost not a cent.

The Man Nobody Knew

I enjoyed the movie “The Man Nobody Knew,” about career intelligence officer William Colby. Colby was a CIA director appointed by Richard Nixon in 1971 after he served in Vietnam, with his term extending in the presidency of Gerald Ford. The movie was directed by Colby's son, Carl, and much material was gleaned from family photographs and interviews with his mother. The film describes Colby's career progressing not only within the OSS and CIA, but also the parallel developments within his family, and the role of his mother, with generous interview segments. We see footage of Colby in early in his CIA career in Italy, his later work in Vietnam, and the congressional hearings after Watergate when Colby was called to defend his Phoenix program in Vietnam, which eventually began to be called by detractors, probably unfairly, as the assassination program.  The movie is free on Amazon Prime--amongst to many pricier movies not nearly so important.

The film starts with a still photo of boy William Colby, probably about 1920 or, playing in front of a simple spring bed amongst his well-placed toy soldiers, cannon artillery, gun positions, on a landscape of rugs rolled and folder to uncannily simulate landscape. “My father was very good at war,” narrates his son Carl--and much is implicit in that terse, initial statement about his Dad. The room is modest, almost Spartan, and without adornment and the face of the young Colby's is blurred. 

Other terse comments occur throughout the narration. “The family gave Dad a wide berth.”  Colby’s wife Barbara plays a significant role in describing junctures in Colby’s career, and the son points out the sacrifice she had. At the same time, it is hard not to suspect, given what is unusual abilities evinced by interviews, Barbara Colby was as much a co-strategist as a housewife.

Colby, a spare, stern-looking man, somewhat birdlike in appearance, attended Princeton,  and then Columbia law school, where he met Barbara. He volunteered for the Army paratroopers and dropped behind Nazi lines in occupied Norway as part of a small team of saboteurs tasked with destroying transportation links.  A very fine set of  credentials and bragging rights he had, by any measure. 

An appetite for risk and heroism and patriotism was evident--and possibly a mixture that would bring eventual mayhem. After the war, he continued in the military with the fledgling CIA stationed in Rome to facilitate the rebuilding of Europe. This was the Italy of Fellini,  and the charm of that time and place. Italy was highly accommodating to Socialism and Marxism, and leftist groups received massive amounts of money from the Soviet Union despite their claim to independence. A Catholic,  he mingled with the mammoth Catholic presence in Rome to his advantage.

After Rome, he went to Saigon, in 1959. Vietnam had expelled the French but was still Gaulic in influence and style, with President Diem, almost more French than Vietnamese, installed by the Americans a decade earlier. Clips of  that eras show the unspoiled Saigon. Colby developed the Phoenix program, an attempt to undermine the North Vietnam insurgency via winning hearts and minds as well as turning ex-Viet-Minh into South Vietnamese soldiers. But as the film sequences suggest,  the program morphed into a malignant harassment program. Clips show several brutal interrogations, and the role of advisors was ever more overtly conventional warfare.

Former National Security Director Robert McFarlane and Zbigniew  Brezhinsks provided interviews for the movie, and the lineup of strategists is excellent. The worsening situation in Vietnam seemed beyond Colby’s control. He had an idea that the program was going awry but didn’t have the breadth of understanding or personal techniques to draw the program in, as excesses grew in a country falling apart. The program fed antiwar protests at home, with depictions of the March on Washington, and Colby was depicted by many as a murderer and fascist. Ironically, the revered North Vietnamese General Giap years later said the Phoenix program was the most effective program the Americans had.

Matters deteriorated as the self-assured and pompous, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr arrived as Ambassador, with a patrician view of his role and having little interest in understanding the Vietnamese people. He orchestrated the coup against Diem which fueled years of mayhem, and ultimately a lost war. The movie suggests that Diem was going to make major concessions to Kennedy to keep his presidency. Among those concessions might have been getting rid of his brother Ngu, the Vice President pressing a war of oppression against the Bhuddists. But this did not have time to happen before the coup.  Colby had a cordial relationship with Diem and his brother Ngu, as did his wife, and they were shocked to learn while they were elsewhere of the coup.  The movie provides the soundtrack of the discussion amongst JFK, RFK, McNamara, and Averill Harriman as they discussed the viability of the coup right  before it occurred. The soundtracks are evocative of the voices of our political ghosts. Of all, RFK was most opposed to a coup. Once a fait accompli, the war was downhill militarily and politically.The fall of Saigon was of course hard on Colby.

Colby returned to the US in 1971 as Nixon’s nominee for CIA Director. Hearings were ferocious, and Colby testified over 30 times. He appears brilliant but lawyerly, highly patriotic and dutiful, cagey, and with an amazing ability to endure the stress of week after week of testimony before a hostile congress. But also, he seems somewhat limited in his ability to imagine or acknowledge the excesses of the Phoenix program. The film clips include the stars of yesterday’s liberal establishment—Mondale, Ron Dellums, and Bella Abzug. These are interspersed with clips of Bob Woodward and other journalists of the day. At those hearings, which probably weakened our intelligence efforts, Colby was pressed to deliver information about the CIA “family jewels,” the record of illegal acts that had occurred in previous decades. 

All these events were, as an aside, occurring during my high school years, and that I was most generally oblivious to them, a testament to the gap between what I thought I knew at the time and my actual registration of world events then. The bureaucratic mind—that understands society as opposing institutions or communities—is ever fascinating. To conceive, almost in an engineering way, the forces that move nations, cultures, or political parties against each other seem characteristic of this human type. They build the columns of our civilization but also are the dynamite that blows them up.

In the end, Colby died of drowning while out early morning in a boat. In his seventies, he had divorced his wife once he left public life, suggesting that her role may have indeed been keenly tied to his career. There are suggestions his death may have been suicide, which is not entirely out of keeping with his character. Hopefully, the movie was cathartic to his son, who succeeds in depicting his father as, indeed, a man nobody knew.

Damon LaBarbera, Phd

07/26/2022

Inverse ETFsd

Using TZA, SDS, and other inverse ETFs can help soften a market downturn. These ETFs go against an index, one or multiple times. So, SDS goes against SPY, the SP500, doublBut these ETFs can be treacherous.  In fact there is a warning when you buy them. They are not for the faint-hearted.  And they don't reset exactly at the beginning of the trading day nor do they precisely maintain their value over time, tending to slightly drift downward. TZA goes against the Russell 2000, the small-cap index fund. 

Triple and double inverse ETFs should be traded with care--like handling Drano or vitriol. If small caps go down, say 1%, TZA will go down 3, 4, or 5 percent. On days, I have seen it drop 10%. What comes to mind is one very unpleasant day in 2009 when the market seemed to rise in what I thought was a bear rally, but turned out to be an actual full-fledged rally, the beginning of a thirteen-year rally. Obviously, using stops and limits is necessary. And I gained respect that day for Koehneman's loss aversion theory.  Losses hurt more than gains, and whatever happiness collecting profits on the downshifting market were lost that single day. 

In our current situation, inverses such as TZA or SDS can provide a hedge, and given the likelihood that the market will continue to dip, even if there is a bear rally, one can just buy them, and if they lose for the day, hold on to them.  Presumably when the markets drop further during what seems an inevitable upcoming recession, they can be liquidate. But, given the danger of these instruments to the  novice trader, don't say you heard it hear. And you never really know what the market will do.

DL

Being There A few observations about the Russian Invasion of the Ukraine 03-06-2022 It is remarkable how the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia is observable at very close quarters. We are living amidst the invasion, safely of course across the ocean, probably with food or coffee nearby, but emotionally, psychologically, visually and aurally much within it. We are within it via social media and the video streams and photographs leaving the country almost as soon as they are taken. One can contrast this situation with our experience and understanding of past wars of historical moment—we can read of the Crimean or Boer war, or WWII, but we don't experience them with the same up to date, modernistic intimacy we know of this ongoing conflict, a sort of historical sensory-surround. Social media, an ally of the Ukraine, is that same social media which has fragmented the West, its politics as well as individual citizens, and probably emboldened, in the first place, Putin to be so adventuresome, anticipating that the internal struggles of the US due to the mayhem associated with social media, would weaken it. That same social media now is the hand grenade dropped into Putin’s plans. Vietnam was the first living room war, so to speak, with the daily tabulation of US, South Vietnamese and “Communist” dead, but that was a far more filtered experience, through a conduit of the media. And one could never really believe the media at that point, with its exaggerated body counts and politicized misrepresentations of US military actions. Now seeing is believing. A default belief is that Russia’s entrance into the Ukraine represents massive risk to the rest of Europe. Most likely, to be contrarian here, that is not necessarily so, particularly if fierce resistence remains consistent. The Ukraine will indeed suffer. However, there is still a reminiscence of the “MAD” doctrine, that is, mutually assured destruction, that will create pause. Internationally, that doctrine still holds sway. But the underlying acceptance of MAD is not foolproof. The same doctrine, one of restraint to avoid holocaust, could paradoxically increase risk and recklessness by providing artificial sense of restraint, or a safety net that is more apparent than real. The Russian plant--it probably would be some sort of turnip or mottled ground cover that thrives under any circumstance, is an invasive species. That is a repetitive theme. Syria, Afghanistan, the countries of the eventual iron curtain, attest to that, From whence does this Eurasian sense of "manifest destiny" arise—Putin or his cronies may look back to writers of the old Russian nation, who regarded Russia as the country who would give order to a lawless world. A strong country led by a strong man. There is hostility directed outward to the rest of the world. Tolstoy, of all writers, stands peculiarly the only writer I can think of who destested Shakespeare. Meanwhile, the invasion evokes past nightmares---the murderous excesses of Stalin, the genocidal starvation of the Ukrainians in the twenties, the titanically deadly battles between the Soviets and Germans in WWII, the grim realities of the cold war. And so, I read that things have very much changed in a few weeks, so startling has this invasion been. Germany has decided to arm, something the US has been encouraging for decades. Russian suddenly seems weaker, and Putin vulnerable in a way that he hasn’t before. Whether an actor emerges to create the coup is another matter. I am surprised there is less allusion to the iniquities of the Spanish Civil War when discussing the invasion. However, I understand that as a fan of George Orwell that epoch may be more on my mind than say, 99.9 per cent of the population who do not read 1930s British writers so much. Spain had elected a government, left-wing, in the thirties. A coup or rebellion by the right was supported by Hitler and Mussolini. Against these fascists, volunteers formed the Lincoln brigade—a compilation of sympathizers from many lands. A greater esprit de corps is hard to imagine. Eventually the Fascists won (some say because of Russian internal divisions) and there followed decades of governance by Franco. Of somber consolation is that great art that arose from the Spanish Civil War-the work of George Orwell, Pablo Picasso’s "Guernica" (a place bombed by Fascists) and the photography of Robert Capra, without whom we might not have the movie Saving Private Ryan. The Ukraine is full of writerly and literate people and possibly we may see, in the midst of this tragedy, some transcendental work. A Lincoln Brigade type arrangement seems to be taking hold of some military types who want to fight for the Ukraine. Why not send actual military aid and advisers, is my thought. Roosevelt was very passive, and could have solved enormous problems if he had acted back then. Staying power is essential. Wars can become spectator sports for those not involved in the actual suffering, enjoying a vicarious war movie from far off. There is the pageantry of the military, the drama of combat, of bravery, and a righteous sense of supporting a “cause celebre”, all the dynamics of watching a sporting event with a favorite team. But maintaining the support is hard, especially when conflict drags on and on and is replaced by other national or internations events A prurient fascination with public interest stories should not supplant policy leveled support to helping the Ukraine. We have been listelss with Soviet invasions in the past. In the fifties, we recall ticonic photos of Polish and Hungarian citizens, depending on the year, hurling Molotov cocktails at invading tanks. The US was passive, and our subsequent sense of regret and guilt, is largely forgotten. I have heard little mention of these very signal examples of historical Soviet aggression in the recent commentary. The Ukrainian crisis also is peculiar in the particular juxtaposition of events happening of the global economy. The US stock market was flirting with correction, and now certainly has entered that zone, with the invasion as significant, in the minds of traders, with the plans of the federal reserve to raise interest rates. Traders are looking back and forth at the two. The market briefly fluttered upward when one pundit surmised that the events in the Ukraine might dampen the Federal Reserve’s appetite for rate hike. The reality, though, is that the invasion of the Ukraine likely will foment further inflationary pressures, and the instability that the market so abhors, as well as the certainty of ongoing inflation will yet be another destabilizing force in market recovery. However, once the market stabilizes, the Ukraine should not be relegated to a less important eventl As a psychologist, these events spark my interest in what might be, if there is any such thing, or can be any such thing, a Russian “temperament”. Do those things exist? Well, there is a certain commonality in the country’s politics—always there seems to be a kind of imperturbable aggression. How is this the country that produced such works as Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, or even the emigree works of Vladimir Nabokov. Add to them works of Chekov, Tolstoy, Pushkin, and even the pop writer Pasternack. What can be gleaned from these authors.? The commonality is that it is a harsh world. I recall the first paragraph of Death of Ivan Ilyich—learning of the death of this barrister his friends, after claiming sympathy and sorry, begin to ruminate on how that death will benefit them, in their machinations to move up in the world. This is calculated materialism at its worst. Our leaders at the moment unfortunately seem more like Neville Chamberlains than Winston Churchills. Still my overall sense is that what we have is history trying to repeat itself but being unable to because of changes in the modern world.