NYT: "Are You My Cousin?"

Contemporary thinking about genealogy seems exceptionally lowbrow.

From the New York Times:

Are You My Cousin? 

By A. J. JACOBS   JAN. 31, 2014 

I LOVE my family, but I’m glad I don’t have to buy birthday presents for all my cousins. I’d be bankrupt within a week. 

My family tree sprawls far and wide. It’s not even a tree, really. More like an Amazonian forest. At last count, it was up to nearly 75 million family members. In fact, there’s a good chance you’re on some far-flung branch of my tree, and if you aren’t, you probably will be soon. It’s not really my tree. It’s our tree.  

The previously staid world of genealogy is in the midst of a controversial revolution. A handful of websites have turbocharged family trees with a collaborative, Wikipedia-like approach. You upload your family tree, and then you can merge your tree with another tree that has a cousin in common. After that, you merge and merge again. This creates vast webs with hundreds of thousands — or millions — of cousins by blood and marriage, provided you think the links are accurate.

How good are online genealogy websites?

A few years ago, I helped out some relatives, two brothers, trying to find out about their father who had died when they were young. Their mother had remarried and their new stepfather had put the kibosh on all talk of their father. Now they were middle-aged and wished to get in touch with a whole side of their biological family they didn't know anything about.

I was not impressed with the quality and disinterestedness of the commercial genealogy sites I came across in a quick review. I eventually tracked down the newspaper in Whittier, CA in which an obituary of their father would likely have appeared, but only intermittent parts of the archives are online and not the crucial month. (The Whittier College library no doubt has the full newspaper archives on microfilm, but I've never gotten out there to look at them.)

Hopefully, the quality online genealogy has improved over the last few years.

One site, Geni, has what it calls the World Family Tree, with about 75 million relatives in more than 160 countries and all seven continents, including Antarctica. 

My newfound kin include the actress and lifestyle guru Gwyneth Paltrow, a mere 17 steps away, and the jazz great Quincy Jones, a mere 22. There’s also the former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who is apparently my wife’s great-uncle’s wife’s first cousin once removed’s husband’s uncle’s wife’s son’s wife’s first cousin once removed’s husband’s brother’s wife’s nephew. 

These folks have no clue who I am. They have yet to return my calls. But at least according to this research, we are, in the broadest sense, family. 

In a few years, we may have a single tree containing nearly all seven billion humans on earth. The Family of Man will no longer be an abstract cliché. We’re all related — we just have to figure out how. ...

Concepts like "pedigree collapse" appear to be ungraspable in the current zeitgeist.

    

Russians win Olympic fashion parade by rejecting unisex

The Russians won the Opening Ceremony parade of nations fashion contest by simply rejecting the unisex orthodoxy for national uniforms. Just about every other country dressed both its male and female athletes identically, which can work at the Summer Games because that athletes aren't wearing all that much in the way of clothes. But, at the Winter Games, everybody has to march into the stadium in heavily insulated winter wear, so females curves get buried. 

This may appeal to some athletes on the women's ice hockey team, but not to most women. My experience with skiing in California over the years is that snow bunnies generally wear the most skin tight clothes possible without general frostbite setting in.

(In general, the Winter Olympics are noticeably less lesbian than the Summer Olympics, due to a number of factors: if the premiere sport, figure skating, didn't exist, it would be invented by the Disney Corp. to sell more merchandise to Daddy's Little Princesses; the smaller number of team sports; and the general association of winter sports not with school but with expensive vacations.)

If on top of the insulation, you insist upon dressing the male and female winter athletes in the same exact clothes, it makes for a thoroughly unsexy look. Thus, the American squad all wore patriotic ugly Christmas sweaters that kind of looked like a Fourth of July family reunion where all your aunts and uncles decided it would be the cutest thing to make everybody wear the same bulky red-white-and-blue sweaters to attend a very chilly fireworks show in Juneau, Alaska, or something.

A few Eastern European countries dissented from unisex dogma. The Czechs at least gave the boys and girls different colored hats. The Poles were subtly but elegantly varied with the men in gray and white, the women in white.

The Russians went all the way and dressed the men in some sort of dark pea coat-like militaristic thing to make their men look strong in the upper body, while their women wore long fake fur coats nipped in at the waist and flaring over the hips to make them look sexy. The Russian's execution of this basic concept -- make our men look manly, our women look womanly -- may have been less than ideal, but in the Culture War going on in Sochi, getting the basic concept right is a win for the Russkies.

   

Independence for Puerto Rico

From the NYT:

Economy and Crime Spur New Puerto Rican Exodus

 At the beginning of the 20th Century, the world was divided up into great empires, but the dominant political trend of the 20th Century was nationalism. After much turmoil, most of the empires are gone, and we live in a world of a couple of hundred independent countries. 

And, strange as it may seem from watching the 24-hour-news, the world is more peaceful and prosperous than ever. Sure, lots of former colonies remain badly run, but the general trend is toward slow improvement: after all, its their problem and they have incentives to get better at ruling themselves.

But self-rule is ideologically passe. Globalism is the default assumption: diversity, you know? Thus, the ongoing failure of imperialism and open borders in Puerto Rico is seldom portrayed as the ongoing failure of imperialism in Puerto Rico. The notion that maybe, after 116 years it's getting toward time for Puerto Rico to stand on its own two feet simply doesn't come up in 21st Century thinking.

Much of the problem is simply that we've replaced old-fashioned conceptual thinking with who-whom thinking. See, imperialism wasn't nice, and American elites believe in being nice to Puerto Ricans, so therefore it's not really imperialism.

     

Victoria Nuland and Ukraine

What's going on in Ukraine, where the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland was embarrassed by the Russkies releasing a presumably tapped phone call of her attempting to stage-manage Ukrainian affairs (e.g., heavyweight champ Vitali Klitschko should be kept out of any coalition government) and expressing short-temperedness with her putative E.U. allies?

The Game of the Great Powers. It's kind of like the Seahawks are winning 36-8, but even if they put in the reserves, the reserves are still going to try hard to run up the score even further. That's what they do. Ukraine may not strike you or me as hugely crucial to America's national interests, but if you are the State Department official in charge of Ukraine you still want to sack Peyton Manning (or the geopolitical equivalent).

Your Lying Eyes took a look at Ms. Nuland's background:

She got into the State Department during the Bush Administration, so she's probably not some wide-eyed liberal nut. In fact she's married to Robert Kagan - that's a familiar name, isn't it. Robert and brother Fred seem to have strategically implanted themselves in key policy-making positions within the Democratic and Republican party apparatus. Robert is embedded at Brookings, while Fred is ensconsed at AEI. It's a beautiful thing, America 2.0 (or is it 3.0 - can't keep track).

Her father-in-law is Yale historian Donald Kagan, author of a four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War from which neocons appear to have drawn remarkably wrong-headed lessons: e.g., a turning point in the war between Athens and Sparta was when the here-to-fore dominant Athenians decided to invade irrelevant Sicily, which turned out to be a vast waste of money and men. Athens ultimately lost the war. Back in 2002, the neocons, like all three Kagans, somehow deduced from this lesson of history that the New Athenians (us) should invade Iraq.

Fred and Kim Kagan
on the job for you and
me bringing democracy
to Iraq.

Her brother-in-law Fred's wife is Kimberly Kagan, who is also a militarist pundit and adviser.

Her father is surgeon and Yale medical school professor Sherwin Nuland, author of the bestseller How We Die.

A talented, energetic family that is part of the Permanent Government of the United States. It doesn't really matter who wins the Presidential election: some Kagan-Nuland will be doing something somewhere in your name and on your dime. From Wikipedia:

Nuland has had a long career in the Foreign Service and has worked for both Democratic and Republican administrations. During the Bill Clinton administration, Nuland was chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott before moving on to serve as deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs. During the George W. Bush administration, she served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and then as U.S. ambassador to NATO. During the Barack Obama administration, she was special envoy for Conventional Armed Forces in Europe before assuming the position of State Department spokesperson in summer 2011, which she held until February 2013. 

She was nominated to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in May 2013 and sworn in to fill that role in September 2013.[3]

So, if the 2016 election is between, say, Hillary Clinton and Paul Ryan, she won't be sweating about whether or not she'll have a job in 2017.

Considering their catastrophic track record on Iraq and their continued ascent in the stratosphere of power players, is there anything the Kagan-Nulands could screw up that would hurt their careers? (Other than publicly recanting and apologizing, of course.)