My mistakes. Producing a blog. Demographics. Russian sleepers.

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Nothing from Bob Homans today.

Self editing is a major drawback of self-publishing.  One's own writing is so pleasing to the eye that one overlooks mistakes that a dispassionate editor would find. In yesterday's post I wrote of speeding instead of spading the garden.

It isn't just me. At first I left Bob Homans' writing just as I got it.  I have since decided that as a professional he would probably appreciate having his material edited. So General Milli, as in Milli Vanilli, became General Milley in a recent post.

This is worth a riff on technique. Step-by-step, here is how I produce this blog:

·       I dictate using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. My computer microphone is more accurate, but my handheld voice recorder extremely practical when I'm walking with the children. Although other dictation software is now pretty good, I have not heard of any better and, having used it for 20 years, I am familiar with Dragon.

·       I proofread what I wrote fixing obvious errors, such as improperly formed sentences. I attempt to improve the style, avoiding repeated words, long sentences and excessive informality. I use dictation for lengthy changes and the keyboard for short changes.

·       I use Microsoft Word's review feature to check spelling and grammar. Just about every day I add new words to its dictionary. Microsoft is right only about half the time when it comes to grammar, but I am grateful for that half.

·       I have Dragon NaturallySpeaking's voice synthesizer read me the text one paragraph at a time. My ears are better at picking up errors than my eyes. Quite often a paragraph will simply sound wrong and I will reword it.

I prepare drawings in Corel Draw.  I create graphs in Excel, then pretty them up in Corel Draw.  Photographs I import directly into Corel PhotoPaint from my camera. I crop them and touch up the colors as necessary.

Neither Substack nor word have very good tools for properly sizing bitmaps.  I reformat graphs and photographs to a standard 5 inches across and 180 dots per inch, so their appearance in the Substack blog will be uniform. 

When everything is in place, I copy and paste the text into Substack.  I proofread it one more time as I insert the graphs and photographs. When I'm satisfied, I publish and send it to you.

As often as not I will notice an error even after I have published. They usually do not affect readability, but I fix them anyhow for the benefit of people who navigate directly to Substack.com instead of reading the email distribution.

As long as I have been doing this, and as often as I have offered to show other people how. I have not had any takers. My son Eddie is my guinea pig. I am impressing on him the fact that anybody who wants to make a difference in the world has to be able to express himself in writing. Eddie is already doing a pretty good job with dictation software. We are working on the editing process. Two days ago he wrote 525 words on the history of Ukraine from the time of the Neanderthals to the arrival of the farmers and Indo-European horsemen about the time of the Greeks and Phoenicians.

Four million Ukrainians have been welcomed into the West. Many have long wanted to emigrate in any case. Lots of the best and brightest will not be back.

Gary in London, his wife Marina and my wife Oksana still have contacts in Russia. We understand that just about every talented Russian who could has left the country. That's the technicians, the software people and the like.  Gary's friend in Siberia stayed behind only because her elderly parents could not travel. She tells Gary every educated person in their small town is gone. There have been stories about extremely long queues of cars at the borders heading west into Norway, Poland and Finland.

I remarked to Oksana that Ukraine's total fertility rate was a disaster even before Covid and the war – 1.4 babies per woman versus the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. She begged to differ – the people in her hometown of Svetlovodsk marry young and start producing children. She sees them playing out of doors as the parents sit on the steps and drink.

My rejoinder was that yes, those are the people who are having kids. But the statistics are correct. The best and brightest are not reproducing themselves. I pointed to our own circle of friends, mostly in their 30s, fewer than half married and many of them without children. Though Oksana assures me that they want them, if they haven't started in the early 30s the odds against a big family are huge in the odds against any family at all are appreciable.

With the dislocations of this war I am quite sure that the birth rate will tumble even further for a few years. People will not have the income or the stability to start families. Some lost their homes, others lost the opportunity to acquire one.  It won't be easy.

Among the people who in my opinion are stubbornly wrong about this war, but have had useful things to say on other topics, is my fellow Berkeley graduate, native Russian Anatoly Karlin. In researching how this war is going to affect demographics in Russia and Ukraine, the best single article I found was this which he wrote three years ago.  Karlin noted that Russian fertility had been rising. I am sure that with the exodus of everybody who could get out, and the economic impact of the sanctions, it will fall again.

All of that is not taking into consideration the impact of Covid through the vaccines or the deaths due to war. The evidence is accumulating that the vaccines damage a person's immune system and are leading to excess mortality. Moreover, the evidence that they affect fertility is strong. As I have noted previously, Russia is pushing vaccination harder than Ukraine. Ineptitude may be its salvation. While the government wants to jab everybody, half the population has managed to avoid it.

Apparently some Russian units are still in the Kyiv area. Video footage of Ukrainian units taking them on shows up periodically. Gary says that civilians are doing a fairly good job of locating tanks hidden in forests using drones, forwarding the coordinates to Ukrainian artillery, and getting them taken out.

These remnants might be sleepers, part of a comprehensive Russian scheme to resume the assault on Kyiv. Or they might simply be out of gas, broken down, disillusioned or one thing and another. My bet is that it is more the latter, and we should be pleased that the Ukrainians can locate them and take them out one by one. Good job that they are not able to move east.

I don't think I'm hearing any more missiles, but we do hear artillery every now and again. Taking out sleepers is as good an explanation as any for occasional artillery. Sporadic explosions may be the result of explosive ordnance demolition teams getting rid of Russian mines and unexploded shells.  Oksana learned that the small arms fire in our neighborhood is merely target practice and weapons familiarization.  There is a quarter-mile strip of sand in a nature reserve between the river and the 25 foot levee that protects us from it.  With the levee as a backstop, it is an ideal place for a rifle range.

I bicycled down to the Livoberezhna market yesterday, where about half the vendors were open.  The Metro still isn't open, but the buses will be running as of today on a reduced schedule. The post office is open. 

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man is delighted that our Toastmasters club will be meeting, if only online. The good looking women love meeting neighbors in the street again, and the children are enjoying the step-by-step return of normalcy.

Graham