not sensible exactly

I got to ask a co-worker at lunch today if round planes made any sense in the pre-Stealth era.

I'm not in a habit of doing this, but the co-worker is actually a pilot and is good enough at physics to point out (sometimes gently) when I'm way off on my physical intuition.

Dave Emory has been on a "Nazi flying saucer" kick lately; he claims that among the awful things that are about to happen is an "invasion" by very human "space men" in very earthly flying saucers followed by a mass hysteria accompanied by mass exterminations etc. that are common in Dave Emory scare stories.

He figures that the Nazis perfected flying saucer technology toward the end of World War II, after which the technology went mostly underground, and in the meantime it's only gotten more sophisticated, etc. His theory is that the Nazis figured out how to power a spinning disc using a jet engine in the center. The problem here, as far as I can tell, is the same one that flying wings (precursors to stealth aircraft) suffered: before fly-by-wire they were unstable.

I have no idea whether an industrial grade flying saucer would be possible now (in the stealth era), but that's not the point. Not Dave's point, anyway; in Dave's world everything evil leads back to the Nazis, and while modern flying saucers might well be full of splendid blond beasts, or whatever, if they couldn't be built until the 1970s it's hard to blame the Nazis exactly.

On the other hand, underground Nazi connections to illegal drugs made this week's 10 Things; Dame Helen Mirren apparently stopped using cocaine when she discovered its connections to, among other people, Klaus Barbie.

And while I probably shouldn't bring this up again, this behavior of associating one's own behavior with its distant effects is at the heart of what Misha Glenny goes on about in McMafia. Good on ya Dame Emma, whoever you are.

There's a new Dave Emory/WFMU episode up; I'm hoping to get to it this weekend. I'm still digging out from under the pile of 1973 Jean Shepherd that accumulated while I was away. Soon oh soon.

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McMafia: whence the yakuza?

I needed three weeks or so to finish Misha Glenny's book McMafia, partly because I got really busy and partly because it didn't make the trip to Seoul. I'm an Accidental Tourist kind of traveler; I prefer to take just a carry-on (a cheap shapeless twenty-four-inch duffle bag from Target) and a laptop bag, so very little goes with me, and I tend to abandon anything I finish reading while on the road. I paid for McMafia in GBP, so it was really expensive, and I wasn't about to dump it.

Anyway, McMafia is just packed; it goes places I've never been, and it's not just a chronicle of mindless violence: Glenny occasionally tries to identify proximate causes for particular crime waves; because he's mostly a tourist himself, these analyses typically come from other published sources.

His explanation of the origins of the yakuza is fascinating: in the postwar period the Japanese government restricted the number of lawyers; I don't recall how they did this, but the result was that the concentration of lawyers in the general population was roughly one-third that of the United States or the European Union. Nearly all of them went to work in Tokyo for large corporations (according to this New York Times article, half the lawyers are in Tokyo, leaving one per thirty thousand in the rest of Japan), leaving a shortage of qualified workers to handle legal tasks across Japan. Some of these tasks fell to notary publics and accountants, but others, such as debt collection, fell to other people.

And that's where the yakuza came in; they served as collection agencies in a culture where saving face (one's own and one's debtors') necessarily required an intermediary.

In a part of the book where Glenny deals with Russia and Eastern Europe he suggests that organized crime often fills a gap in an economy during large-scale changes; in Russia's case, between the planned economy of the Soviet Union and the market economy of the future. I'd be willing to bet that the average perpetrator doesn't see himself that way.

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books y books

I could go for one of these Labor Day Weekends about once a month. I got to spend time with my wife in a peaceful, relatively stress-free environment, we painted and cleaned my bachelor house, and I got some time to read. I haven't had much time to read since I got back from London, but here are the little bits about what made the cut:

Culture Smart: Korea. I used to read the Culture Shock books, but those were kind of a mess; I got the impression that the series editor was a little permissive, and let authors write whatever they thought was important without regard for the expectations of the reader. I mean, honestly, who needs to know about the advances made by left-leaning film-makers in Mexico? Not first-time visitors to Mexico, that's for sure. The Culture Smart books, on the other hand, are typically written for English speakers (Americans, Brits, Canadians) visiting a country and probably doing business for the first time. If I had to summarize the helpful things I read in this book, I'd have to say the following:

• Koreans were occupied by Japanese forces from 1910 to 1946, then split into two countries by/following the Korean War (1950-53).
• The Korean language is spoken by people in South Korea, North Korea, and a substantial Korean population in Yanbian in China. The three groups are drifting apart linguistically.
• Don't be seen in public with a "Korean-looking woman" if you're a non-Korean-looking foreigner.
• If you see two Koreans of either gender fighting, don't intervene.

The one unhelpful thing about the book was that it tried to treat Korea as a single country with a border in the middle, rather than two separate countries, by treating a topic as if it were the same in both countries and then differentiating with closing country-specific paragraphs. I would probably have chosen to focus the book on South Korea, then adding an appendix about North Korea. We all hope that some day the two Koreas will be free, peaceful, and reunited, just like East and West Germany, but if and when that happens we'll probably need a new culture guide.

Red Storm Rising. I'm trying to read Tom Clancy's novels in publication order. This is the first one he wrote after he became a household name (in certain households, anyway), and it more or less follows the format of a strategy game. The story is weak, the characters are weak (e.g. no Jack Ryan), and there's lots of action. Unfortunately the action loses its force after a while, and there's no falling action to speak of. The book starts with an energy crisis in the Soviet Union, and ends with the resolution of the subsequent war, but doesn't deal with the resolution of the energy crisis. This book didn't age well, but not many Cold War narratives did.

McMafia, by Misha Glenny. Glenny reports on organized crime in a large number of countries, visiting each and offering stories of individuals either perpetrating or victimized by organized crime in each country. He talks about the impact of globalization, and about the way the ability to move goods (drugs and other contraband), money, and workers (prostitutes, mostly) across national boundaries has overwhelmed law enforcement efforts in various countries. And about the way jurisdictional boundaries (both within and between countries) benefit organized crime. To his credit Glenny doesn't just blame "globalization" as if it were a force like gravity, but tries to dissect the impact of the various forces that are often collectively referred to as globalization. It's an amazing book, and one of the most frightening things I've read in a long time. It's only occasionally tainted by a poorly-argued tendency to blame Blair/Bush for organized crime in far-flung corners of the world. Glenny has written books on the demise of Yugoslavia and on the history of the Balkans; I'd be inclined to pick up whichever book I found first.

I'm trying to get through Kevin Phillips's book American Theocracy and William Young's best-selling novel The Shack; one's turgid and arch, the other wooden and skimmable. I may or may not write up either one here.