Just Joshin' #153 (Hide and Seek)
1 Family Photo:
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The other week, Calvin and Lawrence played a big game of hide and seek with the neighbors.
Lawrence sprinted to the backyard and stood perfectly still behind a tree. After the eldest neighbor kid uncovered the hiding spots of all the other kids, Lawrence remained unfound behind his tree. The kids scoured the yard to find him, but to no avail. It was like Lawrence was invisible—probably because he was wearing his blue camouflage jacket.
Concerned he'd remain unfound, Lawrence took matters into his own hands. He Grabbed a low-hanging branch of the tree and shook it, like waving the arm of a 30-foot-tall botanical puppet. "Guys! Hey Guys? GUYS, I'M OVER HERE!"
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Toward the end of Obama's first term, I remember seeing a t-shirt with 'Hide and Seek World Champion 2001-2011' written in bold letters underneath a picture of Osama bin Laden.
Reflecting now, with the advantage of time and maturity it strikes me as both funny and not funny.
What if the international conflicts were really just children's games? It is a funny thought.
What if the 50 or so hostages still held by Hamas were just part of an elaborate game of hide and seek under Gaza?
But if my children were among the hostages, I'd want to level every building in Gaza, rip up the ground until every tunnel became a trench and every hostage was found and rescued...Israel's effort to do something along those lines has created collateral damage.
This week, the Gaza Health Ministry reported 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's response to Hamas' October 7th massacre/kidnappings. The 1,500-page report lists the names of the dead ordered by their age. The first 27 pages, 876 names, show age 0—children killed before their first birthday. Some say the numbers may be overstated. Even so, I can't imagine how I'd feel or what I would want to do if I were the father of one of those children on the list.
Or what if my children were among the 20,000 Ukrainian kids kidnapped by Russians? I couldn't imagine a ceasefire. I'd want to march on Moscow and finish what Napoleon started.
It makes me think of the Book of Job. God lets Job be tested, Job loses his family, Job remains faithful, Job is redeemed with a new family and double the wealth.
That ending was never satisfying to me. What about Job's old family? Doesn't he still mourn them? Where is their justice?
I guess that's sort of the point: "Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?...Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him?"
So the t-shirt's also not funny. International conflict isn't a children's games. There's real life and death and loss and suffering and most conflict doesn't really have a clear, perfect solution—at best perhaps just a reasonable path forward among many questionable, uncertain options.
Spread the word in any Signal group chats you may be a part of.
1 Dad Joke:
Hiding in Plane Sight
*Source: The Argyle Sweater by Scott Hilburn
Highlights:
Seeking
How to choose where to live by Kevin Maguire
Here is New York by E.B. White
Americans Are Thinking About Immigration All Wrong by Derek Thompson
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Many Americans—and, really, many residents of every other nation—think about immigration through this lens of scarcity. If the economy includes a fixed number of jobs, then more foreign-born workers means less work left for Americans. If America contains a fixed number of houses, more immigrants means less space for Americans to live. But the truth is that no nation comprises a fixed amount of work or income. Population growth, economic growth, and income growth can be mutually reinforcing. “At the national level, immigration benefits from a more-is-more principle,” Hanson told me. “More people, and more density of people, leads to good things happening, like more specialization of labor.”
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Last month, the economists Alessandro Caiumi and Giovanni Peri published a new paper concluding that, from 2000 to 2019, immigration had a “positive and significant effect” on wage growth for less educated native workers. The key mechanism, they found, is that, over time, immigrants and natives specialize in different jobs that complement one another. As low-education immigrants cluster in fields such as construction, machine operation, and home-health-aid work, native-born workers upgrade to white-collar jobs with higher pay.
Jeremy Neufeld, a fellow at the Institute for Progress, has written, 30 percent of U.S. patents, almost 40 percent of U.S. Nobel Prizes in science, and more than 50 percent of billion-dollar U.S. start-ups belong to immigrants.
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Failing to solve the immigration-recruitment kludge as we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on technology subsidies is about as strategic as training to run a marathon while subsisting on a diet of donuts. When it comes to high-skill-immigration policy, we are getting in our own way.
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The U.S. faces a stark choice. Politicians can squander the fact that the U.S. is the world’s most popular destination for people on the move. They can frame immigration as a persistent threat to U.S. national security, U.S. workers, and the solidity of U.S. culture. Or they can take the century-long view and recognize that America’s national security, the growth of the U.S. labor force, and the project of American greatness all depend on a plan to demonstrate enough control over the border that we can continue to expand immigration without incurring the wrath of restrictionists.
Superlinear Returns by Paul Graham
Risky Play: Why Children Seek It and Need It by Peter Gray
Potential Benefits of Risky Play
iamJoshKnox Highlights:
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer | Walt Whitman
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