World-Wide-Matel

People like me like facts. I like to quote John Adams who said. "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." Or even more practical from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." But facts are not what they used to be. The latter quote illustrates that. It is likely that Moynihan did not say that, or at least he did not originate it.

I was a nerdy kid. I used to read the "World Almanac" and then I would dazzle/baffle/bore my friends with my ersatz erudition. Knowing lots of facts was seen as a sign of intelligence back in the halcyon days of my youth. In the intervening time, however, I have noticed that facts change. Some change is unsurprising. Populations grow and cities change. The facts of these things are ephemeral by nature. But I have seen lots of hard realities change. I used to know a lot about dinosaurs. Many of those facts are now wrong, as are many things I learned about biology, ecology and even physics. Textbooks full of "facts" written in the 1950s are now obsolete and these were supposed to be the hardest of all hard facts, the product of our proud science. Our current "facts" are unlikely to do age any better.

The fact about facts is that they often come with an expiration date and they do not travel well. Brazilians credit Santos Dumont with inventing the airplane in 1906. An airport in Rio is named after him. Americans know the Wright Brothers did it three years earlier. Both things can be "facts" because the fact about facts is that they are usually not facts, but rather constructs that most people in a particular time and place agree should be true. Worse yet, what makes a "fact guy" like me profoundly dejected is that we are leaving the "age of facts" and entering or reentering an age when what we know is more fluid and open to interpretation.

Facts as we know them today cannot exist is a mostly illiterate society and did not really exist at all until the invention of the printing press. Let me be clear. I am not saying that truth did not exist, but facts, in the sense of a checkable specific requires writing. Without something in writing, you have to depend on human memory, which is notoriously mutable. Even when people are trying to tell the whole truth, they will get "facts" wrong. Worse yet, human memory changes in response to changing conditions and requirement. Memory is not like a book or a movie. It is not stored in your brain as a file. Instead, you have to recreate memory each time you want to use it. Past events, present conditions and future aspiration mix, so your memory of things past isn't only about those things past.

This is why oral history - as history - is not worth the paper it is printed on and also why oral history tends to seem more logical than the real thing and makes a better story. Especially if it has passed through many minds and maybe many generations, the stories have been rationalized and coordinated with prevailing cultural norms. Legends are always more entertaining than the facts.

Thanks to Internet and greater diversity of our populations, we are reentering the age of legend, as opposed to fact. We left the age of legend - at least in the West - when Gutenberg's invention became widespread. But if printing created the concept of fact, how can the much more widespread use of the equivalent of the printed word destroy it?

The Internet "printed word" is not the same thing as a word on paper. The Internet word is mutable and often anonymous. A printed word on paper has a source that you can find. There is a publisher, who you can trust ... or not. Whether or not you trust the source, you can judge it. Furthermore, there are a limited number of publishers. Finally, your book will not change if the author changes his mind. This is not true of other sources.

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have changed aspects of "Star Wars" or the Indiana Jones films to fit in better with their later films or with changing societal mores. I saw "Return of the Jedi," formerly Star Wars #3 now #6 in the eponymous Saga. I remember the original with the ghost of Darth Vader. He was an old, bald guy. Now he is the young long-haired actor who played Darth Vader in the prequels. Lucas claims he had the whole idea thirty or forty years ago and he altered the historical record to support his claim. (The "first" three are really crappy, BTW, and I can well understand why Lucas feels the need to support them any way he can.)

You really cannot tell for sure what they have done if you have no comparison. I rely on my imperfect memory. Others have the concrete "proof" of the picture on the screen. (Ironically, this is exactly what the dystopian totalitarian state did in George Orwell's 1984. Ingsoc (English Socialism in newspeak) theorized that all knowledge belonged in collective mind of the Party and they have had right to change history as they change their collective mind. "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future." Winston's (the main character) job was to systematically alter the past to fit the current needs of the party. But in those days, he had to physically destroy paper.)

Of course, you still can check in some cases. For example, on a recent episode of "Glee" (which Chrissy likes, not me) I noticed that when they sang "I feel Pretty" from West Side Story, they sang that "I feel pretty and witty and BRIGHT." In the original, Maria feels "Pretty and witty and GAY." The word didn't mean homosexual back then. Modern writers feel the need to go with the PC meaning rather than the dictionary.

On the other hand, I have a copy of the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" that my mother gave to my father before I was born. When I look at those yellowed pages, I am morally certain that nobody has altered a word to make it fit in better with current prejudices.

Most of what the Internet has done to spread information is good, although my own results are mixed. I feel a little less smart today because of it. My encyclopedic knowledge used to be admired. Now my son just tells me that I have "wiki-intelligence" which he can duplicate or surpass on his computer. He is right. But I do worry about matters of fact.

Sometimes on the Internet, I find things that are just wrong. It is especially true when somebody asks a question and then chooses the "best answer". Sometimes my old books, written and printed closer to the fact in question, tell me a different thing. The Internet makes difficult or almost impossible the formerly reliable, if painstaking, process and analyzing texts. Not only cannot you find the physical source, you often cannot tell where the source comes from and have no way of even guessing whether it has been altered.

I studied historiography many years ago. Those who know what that is, know that it is not history. It is the study of the creation of history. In one of my seminars, we studied Polybius and not only traced back to his sources but also looked forward to historians who used Polybius as a source, sometimes w/o even knowing it. It was a truly fascinating few months and it made an impression on me that lasted (so far) a lifetime. I learned that the weight of sources is less important than their lineage. Some of the most elegant narratives are just not based on reliable sources and it doesn't matter how popular they are or how logical they sound. They are wrong. If you find the weak link in the source, you don't have to argue anymore about details. All those analysis that depend on the source are wrong too. Of course, nobody will really believe you if the story is good. The legends are more fun.

Somebody might even "fact check" you using one of those weak link sources.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We have been getting lots of visitors in Brazil. They have to come now, since much activity shut down for the holidays a couple of weeks from now and will not really recommence until after Carnival.  

The most interesting for me was a visit by a delegation from the State of Massachusetts led by Governor Deval Patrick.  Most of the delegation consisted of business people representing high-tech and life-science firms, but there were also representatives of Massachusetts’ universities.  We were happy to see them, since they fit in well with our support for the Ciência sem Fronteiras project.  The universities reps said that they were interested in taking Brazilian students and the Brazilians are interested in going to Massachusetts, so it looks like we have the beginnings of a beautiful friendship.  

Massachusetts is a case study in the value of education. The state has gone through good times and hard times, but it always adapts.  The high levels of education make this much easier.  I gave a short presentation to the group and they were pleased when I called their home a “state of brains” but I was not trying to flatter.  Massachusetts has long been one of the case studies I use when talking about renewal, resilience and the crucial role that education plays in easing transitions.   

Nobody can predict the future with any certainty.  The best plans and most elegant adaptions to current conditions will someday become useless and maybe even dysfunctional when technologies, trade patterns or other relationships change.  Education cannot protect you from change, but it can help you identify trends and develop options to deal with them.  

Posted by Broadnax at 07:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am home today for a Brazilian holiday. If it stops raining, I will go run.  In the meantime I am thinking about how ideas get developed.

Simply having good ideas is easy.  Developing them into integrating them into meaningful systems is hard and making them operationally useful is even harder than that.  And then there is the problem of communicating to others.  Idea creators are rarely the ones who can make them work.  Of course, everything takes time and there are lots of distractions along the way.  

We have a marketplace of ideas.  I understand that term is a little cliché, but I think it fits.  But I think we need to think of the marketplace is broader terms and include the element of time.  In the short term, both products and ideas compete in something almost like a zero sum game.  I buy more Coke and less Pepsi. But the longer term is much more dynamic.  New products are introduced; old ones change. Some products disappear, but something very much like them fills their market niche and you could see how the new one is related to the old one.  In the long run, it is very much NOT a zero sum game.  It is a vast interaction with everything and everyone reacting and changing to the others.  Products in markets tend to improve over time, or at least they better serve current needs and the best markets have lots of diverse participants.   

Like products in a dynamic market, ideas do not merely compete. Instead they develop and change in response to conditions and each other. Unlike physical products, ideas can merge in create whole new combinations. Historians of ideas like to trace the ancestry.  They make categories to differentiate the “species”. Sometimes trace the way back to ancient Greece or Ancient China; the more PC include supposed contributions by pre-literate cultures.  The lineages make sense and they are compelling, but they are wrong if taken too literally.  The historian not only tells the story, but also creates it.  In fact, the lives of ideas are much more chaotic than any story can capture, since everybody has a different hybrid of even the simplest concept.  

I understand that there is no such thing as linear causality in any even reasonably complex in system.  Everything is subject to complex feedback loops with the cause affected by the effect.  It rarely makes any practical sense to trace an idea to its origin.  At best it is like tracing a river to its source.  They say, for example, that Lake Itasca in Minnesota is the source of the Mississippi, but only a few drops of water that reach the Gulf of Mexico actually came from Lake Itasca and w/o water from additional sources, the river would never make it even as far as Bemidji.  Ideas are like that.  Even the best idea cannot get past Bemidji unless they are carried along by others.

So John Maynard Keynes was correct in principle when he wrote that “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,”   but he was exhibiting more than a bit of intellectual arrogance when he assumed that the “practical men” are simply vessels for the ideas or that the ideas came down to them in a clear line; he also overestimated the role of individual ideas and thinkers.  

We are used to thinking of ideas as coming from one wise person (or maybe a wise guy). Whole branches of ideology traced back to a single individual sometimes even named after them. We have Platonism, Marxism or Confucianism.  But how much are they really the product of their eponymous creator?   Not really very much.  How can we know? Think about how many varieties there are of any long-established “ism” and how they change over time.  Plato has been dead for more than two millennia. Presumably he is no longer editing his work, so they changes in interpretation cannot be his.  

Good philosophies are group projects, produced by interactions among individuals often over time, sometimes generations.  This allows the accumulated wisdom of people from different places and times to be put into the balance.   They evolve.  And the best do it while accomplishing the ostensibly contradictory task of maintaining and changing traditions.

Nothing new here, I guess. Just some thoughts on a rainy morning.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I go to Arlington on Veterans’ Day when I am in Washington, but in Brazil I have no place like that. I don’t go for the ceremonies anyway, but rather to remind myself of the debt of gratitude we owe to those who defended our freedom, some at the cost of their own lives.  That I can do anywhere.

My father and most of the men of his generation were veterans. My generation contains many fewer.  The all-volunteer military means that service is concentrated, often among families or places with tradition of military service.  Our military resembles U.S. society in general. The poorest groups in society are significantly under-represented in the military, probably because they more often lack the basic qualifications, such as HS diplomas and clean criminal records. The very rich don’t seem to enlist in great numbers, but contrary to popular conceptions, the wealthier 40% of the population is overrepresented.  So the military tends to be middle-America. It is also a little more rural and more southern (the South accounts for 40% of new recruits) than the general population.  Both blacks and non-Hispanic whites are slightly overrepresented; Asians and Hispanics are not represented as many as their numbers would imply.  Some people speculate that it is because these communities contain many immigrants who have not yet fully integrated into U.S. society. Native-Americans (i.e. Indians), although they make up a small percentage of the American population, are well-represented in the U.S. military.  

I didn’t know very much first-hand about military in combat situations until I spend my year with the Marines in Iraq. (I tried to enlist after college, but I was kept out by a diagnosis of an ulcer when I was sixteen. I don’t think it was correct, but it kept me out.)  I spent much of my time talking to senior officers (majors, colonels and generals) and I know that skewed my perceptions. These guys were very intelligent and disciplined. I was proud to be among in their company and to be more or less accepted.  I say “more or less” because Marines have a very strong circle that I don’t believe any non-Marine can enter.    

I also spent a lot of time with ordinary Marines. The thing that was most admirable about them was how they took responsibility. The twenty-year-old in charge of the vehicle commanded it. I put my life in their hands and had confidence in them. When I was their age, I had responsibility for the French fries at McDonald’s and didn’t do such a good job even at that. Young Marines are amazing.   

I heard on the radio that veterans were having trouble finding jobs back home and I have talked to Chrissy about this. The problem evidently is that military job classifications don’t translate well with civilians ones. The guy that saved lives in Iraq lacks the formal certifications to do the same thing in the back home.   

There is a general problem of translating experience. Life was intense in Iraq. We worked as a team and had a feeling of community against shared risk. When you come home, nobody understands what you did and you really cannot explain it to those who have not been there. When I look back, I think it took me a few months, maybe longer, to readjust and I was lucky to have a stable family life and a good job. The scary thing is that at the time I didn’t perceive the problem. When you are in the desert, you idealize coming home. Nothing can live up to that ideal.  Ordinary life is sometimes harder than extraordinary challenges and hardships. 

I was lucky in Iraq. I got there in September 2007, just as the war was winding down. I remember rolling into Haditha soon after I arrived. It was still smoking from the fighting. Within a few months, we could walk in the market-place among friendly people, grateful for the order we had helped establish. It was an unbelievable change. It also meant that fewer people were getting hurt and killed. But still it happened.

When we lost somebody, they would declare “river city Charlie”. Routine communications were cut until the next of kin were contacted. Just writing that phrase chokes me up. I think of the promising young men killed.  I truly dislike the feeling, but I want never to forget.  There was one young man, called Aaron, who I particularly remember. I didn’t know him personally and I didn’t see him killed, but listening to his service and talking to his friends made a deep impression. He was a military policeman working with Iraqi security forces in the town of Hit, about Alex’s age at the time. He liked to lift weights, like Alex too. I think his similarity to Alex is what made it touch me so much. He joined the Army in a time of war, knowing he might be sent in harm’s way, wanting to serve his country and hoping to acquire some skills that would be useful later in life.   

Colonel Malay and I went to Hit to talk with Aaron's his colleagues. I remember the day, the setting sun, the concrete barriers, the smell of burning garbage, and of course the ubiquitous dust. They were young and upset about what had happened.  They said that Aaron had gotten out of his vehicle and bent down to stretch.  Everybody does that when they get out of the confined space in a HUMVEE or MRAP. Somebody shot him from a down an alley and ran off. The guy got away and we never found out who it was. It was the "odd angry shot," a surprise. Hit was relatively safe.  It was a war zone, but there was not much war left in it. I felt safe when I walked around on the streets and I am sure Aaron did too.  

I am conflicted about this memory. In some ways, I have no right to it; I have intruded in the grief of others and the one loss has come to symbolize many things to me over a year of my life. Years later I am working to remember a person I never knew. I wrote a note to his mother, sharing my condolences explaining the situation. She told me that it was important not to forget her son and said she appreciated my remembrance. I appreciate her “permission" and I am happy if my very small contribution eases her grief. I am getting a lot more.  It helps me remember things I should not forget. 

Posted by Broadnax at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A nanometer is a one billionth of a meter. How small is that?  It is so small that a human hair is 100,000 nanometers thick, an average man is 1.7 billion nanometers tall, a strand of DNA is 2-3 nanometers & an atom is 1/10 of a nanometer. You can’t see a nanometer with your naked eye or even with the most powerful optical microscopes.  But we can see them with our electronic microscopes and we can now manipulate matter at the atomic level. This is nanotechnology, one of the most exciting industries of the future.  

I don’t understand the physics, but I am excited by the possibilities. What our expert told me today was that for most of our daily lives, the things we can see with our eyes, Newtonian physics works just fine.  But when things get very small, on the nano level, elements behave in different ways. A nano-particle is not the same as a molecule.  Molecules are stable. Nano-particles are not because they behave according to the rules of quantum physics.

It's like alchemy. Our experts explained that nanotech cannot turn lead into gold, but it can make an element like lead behave like gold in certain circumstance. For example, gold can be used as a catalyst in some situations. At the nano level, a cheaper material such as copper can be made to perform like gold. This is way beyond my level of understanding, but it has to do with surface areas. The surface areas is the only part that really interacts. This is as far as my science goes. 

One of the interesting uses mentioned was to use nanotechnology to minimize the need for or even replace so-called rare-earth elements.  In recent years, the Chinese have cornered the market on many of these.  We don’t require vast quantities of materials, but they are crucial to the production of many high-tech products.  Nanotech will allow us, once again, to do an end run around a would-be monopolist.  

Nanotech is an enabling technology. For example, nanotechnology is already being used in medicine. A nano-particle can deliver medicine directly to cancer cells and kill them w/o affecting neighboring cells. Some nano-particles can be activated by infrared or magnetism. In that case, a nano-particle could be directed to a cancer cell and then activated to get hot and kill the cancers. These advances have developed only in the last five years.  

We are now familiar with the stain repelling, wrinkle free fabrics, even sox that won't stink. These were developed using nanotechnology. We also have self-healing paints. For example, a car paint can cover its own scratches. The closest thing to a mass produced commodity product today are carbon nano tubes. They can be stronger than steel but at almost no weight.  

Nanotech can help with the environment, for example, turning seawater into drinking water with reverse osmosis or using nanotechnology in agriculture and food. 

Of course, nothing is free and with any advance comes risk. Nano-particles are so small that they can penetrate deep into your body.  They can breach the blood brain barrier, for example. This is great for delivery of medicines but not so good for potentially harmful substances.

R = E * H – i.e. risk equals exposure times hazard. This is how we need to assess risk.  A shark is very hazardous, but if you are not in the ocean and not exposed to it, there is no risk. On the other hand, constant exposure to a low level hazard can be much more dangerous. To most people, bees are a much bigger threat than sharks. Of course, exposure to some things is not hazardous at all.  

In traditional risk management, dosage or amount makes a big difference. In these cases, the difference between a deadly poison and a harmless substance or even a beneficial medicine is often the dosage, even something as deadly as arsenic in small enough quantities is harmless. With nanotech, we are just not sure if that useful rule applies. Researchers disagree. Another uncertainty is just in the production of nano-materials.  We still don’t understand all the processes so there is great variation from batch to batch, even when made by the same people ostensibly the same way. This is why regulating nanotech is a challenge.  

Nanotechnology has the potential to be a revolutionary process. It changes the very nature of matter that we work with. But we do have to evaluate risks versus benefits on individual basis and do so across the whole product lifecycle, i.e. from material to manufacturing to consumer use to final disposal.  

More information from CRS:

Nanotechnology and Environmental, Health, and Safety: Issues for Consideration

Nanotechnology: A Policy Primer

Posted by Broadnax at 09:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We should base our regulations and plans on actual risks, not the perceptions of risk. Biotechnology is a lot less radical and a lot less risky in than it is perceived to be. Let’s start with some things that are not problems. You can avoid biotech product if you eat nothing but organic food, but all the rest of us have eaten biotech food, since most of our American corn and soybeans, among other things, are genetically modified. There has never been a case of a documented health problem attributed to biotech food. This is a surprising outcome, given the extreme amount of scrutiny biotech gets. It is likely that biotech is actually SAFER than ordinary products because of all the scrutiny.   

Of course, organic food has recently killed at least 30 people and made another 3000 sick, as we saw with the recent e-coli outbreak in Germany attributed to organically grown bean sprouts. The fact is that no food is perfectly safe all the time. You can be sure that if a biotech product had somehow been in contact with this organic product and got infected by it, the biotech would get the blame. We should not “blame” organic food, but recognize that humanity ate organic food for most of our history and our ancestors were not more robustly healthy than we are.

There have been complaints that biotech firms lock farmers into seeds, since they are not allowed to save seeds for next year. This is a meaningless complaint, since it is nothing new in the seed world. Productivity in American corn fields grew fantastically after the introduction of hybrid seeds in the 1930s. Farmers could save seed, but it wouldn’t work. Hybrid seeds are so productive because they have the hybrid vigor. The hybrids are developed to exhibit the best traits from the parent stock. The next generations lose this and may be even poorer performers than the original stock. They may, in fact, exhibit the worst traits of the parents. It is indeed true that farmers using biotech seeds generally agree not to use the seeds again. But if they want to be most productive, they probably would not want to do it. Like those who use hybrid seeds, they can always choose not to use the biotech seeds. They choose to use the better quality seeds because they believe the harvest will improve enough to justify the costs.

Biotech agriculture is becoming more widespread everywhere except Europe. European firms are active in biotechnology, but activists in the Europe resist wider introduction, which is one reason Europeans pay more for their food. Alternative “natural” food is something that only the rich can afford to choose, since it means lower productivity. This might seem like a bold statement, but it approaches a tautology. If the “alternative” is more productive, it becomes the usual method. The poor have often been forced to be organic, since they couldn’t afford other options, but they make the logical choice when they have a choice.

Biotechnology also increases diversity. With traditional agriculture, farmers have to plant one variety, in order to make harvests practical. Biotechnology creates new varieties. You can still keep the old ones if you want, but you have doubled your choices.

Biotechnology is good for the environment, but creating and using plants and animals suited to their environments. They require fewer chemical treatments and less cultivation. This is one reason it increases farm productivity. They farmer needs to spend much less time in the fields spraying or cultivating.

31% of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases come from agriculture. Biotechnology can reduce that by requiring fewer inputs, everything from herbicides, to fertilizers to the fuel for tractors to deliver these things to the field. No till agriculture, which protects soils, conserves moisture and makes it possible for farmers to cultivate much less often, is very much facilitated by biotechnologies. Overall, the introduction of BT Roundup ready crops is estimated to have been the equivalent of taking 6-8 million cars off the road.

Biotechnology is developed by big firms. This is because only well-financed firms can afford the equipment and trained scientists. But an even bigger consideration is the regulatory environment. Governments require extensive testing and field trials. Only a well-financed firm can afford to comply. However, the biotechnology itself benefits small and big farmers. Biotechnology is scale neutral. The small farmer can get as much benefit as the large one and the relative benefit to small holders is often greater, since they often lack the equipment and expertise to take full advantage of traditional farming technologies.

I personally believe that biotechnology is a necessary tool to protect the environment and keep our world reasonably pleasant. We live in a global world. Even people not very knowledgeable about the environment understand that we face the challenges of climate change. Fewer people are aware of the bigger threat of invasive species or the development of native menaces in the face of changing environments. Everything can catch rides on our modern mobility. This includes plants and animals, but also diseases and bugs. Many of our most treasured plants and trees are threatened, including our oaks, maples, beeches … pretty much everything. Natural systems cannot adapt at the pace of change we humans have created. Biotechnology is the best hope we have to save the ecosystems we love and on which we depend. I am unwilling to accept that my oaks will wilt, my maples will be killed by Chinese beetles; my ashes will all succumb to the emerald borer or my hemlocks will be turned into ghosts by woolly adelgids. We can fight back with chemicals and cultivation, but one of the most potent and ecologically benign tools will be biotechnology

I understand the risks of change. But looking around at what we get w/o biotechnology – the food shortages in developing countries, the widespread death of forest species etc, I don’t think we have a good alternative.

There is no alternative w/o risk. We need to be cautious about what we do, but we also need to adapt to rapidly changing realities. World population growth means we need to increase food production. Climate change will make that productivity growth harder. We need to use all the tools we possess and certainly should not refrain from employing the most exciting innovations recently created by human imaginations. We need to deploy biotechnology. We should be circumspect by not timid. The future belongs to the innovative.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have no feelings of accomplishment. I just feel uneasy. This always happens when I finish a big long-term task. For the last six months, I thought of little else but Portuguese. I never had to wonder what I should do. There was always something in Portuguese to read, watch or memorize. I carried my little book of Portugese phrases to review whenever there was an extra minute. My thoughts were organized around Portuguese. People thought I was nuts, walking around & talking to myself, repeating phrases and strange words. I even did it while riding my bike. I  dreamed about Portuguese. Now the voices have all gone silent. It is lonely. The same thing happened when I finished Polish or Norwegian. This too will pass, after a period of withdrawal.  

Now I have to think of my own projects. Maybe I can finally read that biography of Hadrian that I bought a few months ago.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The ancient Greeks & Romans were fairly unanimous in understanding that body health & mental health were inseparable. The idea slipped during the middle ages, when some believed in the “mortification of the flesh.”  Our ideas in modern America are mixed. Popular culture features the fictional conflicts between nerds/geeks and jocks. According to the formula, the geeks are uncoordinated and physically weak, but hard working and smart. The jocks are the opposite. Like lots of high school concepts, this one is based on a simplified version of brains v brawn and narrow definitions of health and intelligence. 

Ronald Reagan would have been 100 years old on February 6. As the partisan passions fade, everybody is starting to recognize the greatness of the man. President Obama recently read a Reagan biography for inspiration and wrote an article in USA Today praising him.  

Any president who leads a big change will provoke dislike on the part of his opponents and I recall the rabid hatred among some of them in the 1980s. They can be forgiven some of their faults. Reagan was a very insightful & intelligent man and a hard worker. We know that now from reading his journals and from other sources coming out about him. But he evidently liked to hide these things. Maybe he was modest or maybe it was a strategy.  

Ronald Reagan used to say that you can accomplish almost anything as long as you don’t care who gets the credit. The easygoing persona that he projected allowed lots of people to feel they deserved credit. It also allowed people to give him things he wanted w/o appearing to give in. Reagan didn’t score points off the failures of others, but his affable personality also led opponents to underestimate him. They thought many of his accomplishments were just dumb luck. In my experience, someone who is consistently “lucky” has something special going on. Only a man truly confident in himself can behave as Reagan did. That is one reason he was such a unique leader.

I voted for Reagan in 1980 & 1984. It was a little hard for me to do in 1980. I had voted for Carter in my first election in 1976 and I was living in Madison, Wisconsin, in one of the nation’s most liberal enclaves. When I would say anything good about Reagan, or even when I didn’t join in the criticism of him, my colleagues would make fun of me. There is considerable social pressure in a liberal university setting to “rebel” within acceptable margins. I was finishing my MA in history and looking forward to going on to my PhD. As I recall, most of my colleagues considered Jimmy Carter too conservative and Reagan was clean off the map. The popular candidate around my part of town was a guy called Barry Commoner. Commoner was a bit of a nut, but he said the right things about the environment and was sufficiently obscure to get the “intelligent” student vote. 

Anyway, it came as a surprise to me too that Reagan made sense to me. Up until that time, I just assumed that I was a type of liberal, which was the local default option. I think that my vote for Reagan actually had significant effect on my life. Of course, not the vote itself, but the cognitive dissonance it provoked.  I have never been good at keeping secrets and so I talked about it with my friends. They treated me like someone who had been in the sun too long and tried to explain why I was just being foolish.

As I listened to their arguments and defended myself, I came to understand that I really did not hold the same sorts of views as they did. I started to read more widely and came to lots of different conclusions. One of the very practical changes I made was in my course of study. I began to perceive myself as a bit of an outsider in my history-sociology circles. I still loved history, but I became more interested in practical things like business (IMO a kind of applied history) and decided to get an MBA. This was greeted with some distress by my friends. One well-meaning guy carefully explained to me that an MBA was a kind of “trade school” degree and it was not the kind of thing somebody like me should do. For me, at least, the MBA was a lot more of an intellectual challenge than my MA, but maybe that was just me.

You follow well-worn paths for maybe 95% of your life. This is something you have to do, since nobody could abide the chaos of constant uncertain change. There are a small number of inflection points, however. These are usually little things. You may be almost unaware of them at the time, but over time they take you off the old path and put you on a new one. The little half turn doesn’t seem like much, but there can be substantial divergence a few miles down the path as the one change leads to another. 

Somebody once told me that there are only around 5-7 inflection points in any life and if you think about it, you can probably identify them. They are rarely the big, shocking events we think of. The road to Damascus type conversions are the ones we mark, but they may actually be the culmination of a long process of change, not the beginning.  By the time you make the public announcement, or even know it yourself, it may have been stewing for a long time.

Looking back, my decision in 1980 to vote for Ronald Reagan was one of those little decisions that changed the way I thought of myself and ended up changing lots of other things too. So like all Americans, I can thank Ronald Reagan for what he did for the country, but I also have a personal reason to be happy that he came along.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pictures from some ordinary days.  The winter has been colder than usual for Virginia. We have managed to avoid most of the snow, but what we have is hanging around.

Above - gas prices are going up again. Given the events in Egypt, maybe these prices will look low after a little while.  Below - not a good time for the Red Cross disaster truck.

Below is a welder at a construction site near Balston. 

Below is the top of the building.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the punks that attacked Alex is up for trial.  He is summoned to give testimony.  He doesn’t remember anything, but he has to go anyway.  I don’t know how strong a case they have against this particular guy.  I am fairly sure he is guilty, but as I mentioned before he is one of six guys who attacked Alex.  The bad guys are taking legal refuge in the confusion about which of them actually did the kicking and stomping.

The attack on Alex has made me a lot more sensitive to random crimes and hate crimes.  He is very lucky that he was not hurt more seriously or permanently.  I read in the paper about a kid about his age who was in a fight that put him into a permanent coma.  Of course, Alex could have been killed and for nothing.  He was just in the wrong place and had the wrong appearance.  I like to think that the world is rational, but not always.  Life can change in a second and all the hopes and aspirations can be gone.

Alex really had a hard time last year.  He starts a new school, away from home for the first time.  That is stressful enough.  Then he gets set upon by six thugs.  He still finished his exams on time and never complained about his bad luck.  He didn’t even want to tell his professors why he missed a week of class and why he had some trouble concentrating after he came back.  I admire him for it, although I thought that he should have at least played for a little sympathy.  It must have impacted his grades.

My other contact with the legal system next month will be jury duty.  I have been a registered voter for nearly thirty-seven years, but I have never served on a jury.  Of course, I was overseas a lot of that time, but I don’t think I was ever even summoned before.   We are lucky to live in county with lots of voters in relation to criminals.  Some of my colleagues who live in DC, where the ratio tends to run less favorably, serve on juries with monotonous regularity.

Posted by Broadnax at 05:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Those weirdos whose false god wants dead soldiers were out again in front of Arlington Cemetery. Only a handful were there and although they were loud and persistent, they were well obscured by a group of patriotic bikers, who blocked the view by walking in front. One of the bikers told me that the police wouldn’t let them stand, but it was okay if they were “pedestrians.” A cop I talked with told me that he wasn’t serving the weirdos, but rather protecting the good people who might otherwise pummel them. Last year a young Marine got in trouble for rescuing an American flag that a protester was dragging in the dirt.

We just have to take it. These clowns have a right to speech & assembly. They were joyful as they predicted that America was doomed & we were all going to hell. I recognized a women I met last year when I challenged her false god to strike me dead. He couldn't, but she assured me that I would go to hell. Only one comment seemed to fluster her. When she told a guy standing near me that, “god hates fags”, he quickly retorted that her god obviously didn’t hate incest, implying she enjoyed a closer than healthy relationship with her father. Maybe he hit too close to home.

I think it worked out as well as it could have. The bikers effectively prevented the weirdos from getting the attention that they craved. Their impact was limited to the couple dozen people took pride in forming a human barrier; they were immune to the protesters. It also provided an environment where people could get close enough to ridicule the protesters w/o shouting, which energizes protesters.

On a day when thousands of us gather to honor the brave people who sacrificed and sometimes died to defend our country, we tolerate the few disrespectful weirdos whose behavior any honorable person cannot but hate. It shows the kind of people we are.These protesters managed to unite liberal and conservative in dislike of them. We agree that we have to tolerate them, but nobody says that we have to like them. We have to respect their right to protest, but we don’t have to respect the protesters.

You can see on the picture up top taken from across the street that the protesters were effectively and peacefully neutered.  The picture below shows the people who were spontaneously taking turns to block the view. I made a special point in not to show the protesters.  You can see a little part of one of their signs, which were very offensive, believe me.

Posted by Broadnax at 05:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I used to talk about the success of South Carolina in attracting foreign investment in the Greenville-Spartanburg area. It was one of my hardy perennial issues when I was in Krakow, since leaders in southern Poland were trying to attract investment and appreciated the successful experience of others. The people in SC are still at it.The latest example is the expansion of BMW. We sometimes complain when American jobs are outsourced to others. The Carolina uplands show how to get them to come to us. They have workers with strong work ethics; living costs are low and unions are scarce. Read a little more here & here.

We may not be aware of how much shift has indeed occurred and how industry is now more decentralized, often rural. Nucor Steel, headquartered in Charlotte, NC, is a good example of an American firm that flourishes among Americas medium sized cities and small towns. The trademark rural occupation is agriculture, but when we think of the old guy on a tractor doing what his father taught him, we are more than a generation behind the times. Agriculture in America is high tech and becoming more so and agricultural tech is informing other fields, such as pharmaceuticals. I was recently reading articles about how the North Carolina Biotech Center is using tobacco plants to help develop vaccines. Tobacco used to dominate much of North Carolina and Southern Virginia. It used to be associated with rural poverty, but now that is changing too.

When we think of high tech, our thought usually run to computers and electronics. But the high tech of the near future will be biological/agricultural (biotechnology) and structural (nanotechnology) and a lot of it will be produced far away from the cool and very expensive high tech places we know today.

I still am surprised at how much science goes into something as old fashioned as forestry. We have better trees that grow twice as fast as the species used to, while producing better wood, with fewer inputs & less disease. They are even better looking, IMO. Working smarter allows us to create a more sustainable society.

Land Management

The Brazilians are trying to figure out ways to both conserve and develop the Amazon. They get fairly annoyed when we preach at them and have even developed elaborate conspiracy theories about UN takeovers of the Amazon. It doesn’t help that some activists have indeed proposed an internationalization of the Amazon. It is easy for us living comfortably in North America or Europe to demand that they preserve the “lungs of the world.” Brazilians will develop their country, as we did and development need not mean permanent destruction. When I first studied this issue more than twenty-five years ago, I was convinced that forest cutting would in short order result in destruction of soils and essentially the creation of deserts. We now know more about soils and the ecology and, not surprisingly in such a large area, it depends where you are. Some soils are deep and could be developed; others not. One size does not fit all.

I have been reading a book called The Big Burn. It talks about Gifford Pinchot, Teddy Roosevelt and the establishment of our own forest service. The story is heroic in many ways. It takes place in 1910 the American environment and describes events around the great blowout fire, which destroyed an area the size of Connecticut in the course of two days. (It was bigger than the great Peshtigo fire, but killed fewer people because it burned over even less populated places.) The fire burned way inland in Montana and Idaho, but smoke was reported 500 miles out in the Pacific Ocean and as far east as New York.

What does 1910 America have to do with 2010 Brazil? Our experiences are remarkably parallel. Many people don’t understand how bad things were 100 years ago in the American environment. There were all sorts of land grabs, destructive mining techniques and illegal logging. All the things we hear about happening in the Amazon were happening in America. We probably reached the nadir sometime in the 1930s, but the years from around 1890 to 1940 were really terrible. Our country was burning, washing away or blowing away. Experts predicted we would run out of wood in a generation and it looked like the high plains would soon be just a desert. We learned a lot since then. And of course we are still learning. Our significant success in preventing fires and belief that nature was self regulating led to disastrous fires and then to different management techniques. By costly error, we learned. We can and we are sharing our experience. We can learn a lot from each other about sustainable development.

The picture up top shows the results of better land management in Northern Arizona. The Forest Service regularly burns the ponderosa pine forests. The ponderosa pine ecosystem is fire dependent. When we excluded fire, often limited grazing and made thinning difficult, we created lots of trouble. The forests grew too thick (what they call dog hair forests). This overstocking of trees allows bugs like pine beetles to destroy forests (when the trees are too close, the bugs can easily move from tree to tree) and excluding little fires leds to large, disastrous fires. We learned the lessons.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Big issues are perennial. Just details and names change. I recall debating industrial policy back when I was studying for my MBA more than twenty-five years ago. Conventional wisdom back then held that Japan, with its mastery of industrial planning, would overtake the U.S. as the world’s leading capitalist economy. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, with its capacity to focus and centrally command resources, would catch up in the security arena. Our only hope, some argued, was to adapt their methods to our own ponderous, unorganized and chaotic economy through industrial planning.

Things didn’t turn out the way experts predicted/feared. Within a decade, Japan had plunged into an unpleasant and persistent recession that called into question the prowess of the planners. The Soviet Union went out of business entirely, collapsing under the weight of its own centralizing bureaucracy and structural inefficiencies. Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring) failed to change the facts on the ground or in the factory; his glasnost (publicity) served only to show the people the previously hidden hideousness of the decaying communist system. But these things that are so blindingly obvious with hindsight eluded the analysts at the time. *

The U.S. did not adopt a coherent industrial policy, but over the next quarter century grew much faster and created millions more jobs than those places, such as France or Japan, that had something approximating one.

Last time we talked seriously about an industrial policy was in the early-mid 1980s, when we were just coming out of a hard recession and people were uncertain about the future. It is no coincidence that in the conditions of today we are talking about it again. It is a hardy, perennial weed that thrives when things get bad and pessimism dominates. But I think the debate has improved, since it is informed by a generation of real experience. Beyond that, researchers have finally begun to explain in theory what people understood in practice for long time – how distributed but aggregated (i.e. market mechanisms) work. The “hidden had” is not as indecipherable as it once was.

I am a simple person and I like the “Economist” magazine because it explains things in simple ways. I suggest you look at these links if you want more background. here & here.

We can all recognize that every country in the world has something we could call an industrial policy but that none (even the most monotonously oppressed such as North Korea) has complete control of its economy. We spent a lot of time arguing a kind of yes or no industrial policy when I was back in school in 1983, but we were just stupid kids scoring rhetorical points on each other. Like most things in life, the question of industrial policy is one of gradations and implementation. In that regard, a little industrial policy is good, but at some point it becomes poisonous and some applications are better than others.

The best policies take advantage of preexisting advantages or propensities. Identifying exactly what those are is easier said than done, but let me give an obvious example. The State of South Dakota probably doesn’t want to invest a lot in becoming a low cost exporter of bananas. You CAN grow bananas there, in greenhouses. And there are some wise guys (sorry wise men) who will correctly tell you that there is plenty of naturally occurring hot water underground in parts of the state to heat them. But how stupid would you have to be to follow that advice? Politicians often don’t want to hear this, since much of the business of politics is to reward followings. Ironically, the reward is much sweeter when it is for something silly. If the recipient can do it w/o the help of the politician, he is likely to feel less grateful.

Another characteristic of successful industrial policy is NOT to pick winners and losers. The government does best when it creates general conditions for prosperity and then allows the people to make choices & investments that make the most sense to them. In other words, there is a good place for planning but not for the planner. More correctly, the planning is done by the people in that effective distributed but aggregated fashion I mentioned above. Remember how much trouble centralization caused the Japanese and the Soviets. Don’t do it. Once again, this is not something that comes easily to politicians. Picking winners and losers is a big part of political power. That power is the reason lobbyists line up to kiss the politicians asses and contribute big money to political campaigns. How is it that big firms are willing to cut big checks to “charities” recommended by politicians? They expect it to pay off if/when the guy they are backing wins.  

The pressure to politicize decision making – for good as well as bad motivations – is the second biggest hazard of industrial planning. The first biggest hazard is lack of timely, useful and accurate information in sufficient detail to allow decision making by the experts. That is precisely why we should not give them much decision making power. Like the watch making god of the Deists, they should set up the system, with its incentives and attributes, enforce the rule of law but otherwise let it grow by the decisions of the participants, intervening only to address true emergencies. This is essentially how it worked with the Internet, one of the most successful U.S. forays into “industrial policy.

The idea that you COULD have an industrial policy that was centrally run, comprehensive and innovated – all at the same times - is a supreme example hubris. Even stipulating that they are smart and honest, what are the chances that politicians or bureaucrats have the information or vision needed to choose tomorrow’s technologies and technology leaders? The record is not encouraging.

And the record goes way back. The Roman Emperor Diocletian did what we would call comprehensive industrial planning. It helped lead to bankrupting the empire and hastened the development of what we would later call serfdom. In more modern times, industrial policy has been associated with mercantilism. A lot of that originated in France in the early 1700s, when France was Europe’s predominant economic power. Suffice to say, it didn’t work out and France didn't stay on top.

The free market requires government for some infrastructure projects, rule of law and provide for the common security. There are some things that have to be decide politically. But for everything else, we are better off deciding for ourselves the things that we care about the most and have the most information about and having faith that our fellow Americans will do the same for the things they know about.

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* My professor for business policy, a guy called Bruce Erickson, is one of the only serious people I know who openly and unequivocally predicted the imminent demise of Soviet tyranny. I still remember his simple structural proposition. He understood there were other factors, but this was the new part. Again, today this looks obvious, but in 1983 it was fairly new. He explained that the mainframe computer had been the salvation of communist central planning. They could control access to information and still do the needful computations. But the personal computers, which were just becoming common at the time, would be the death of central control because they decentralized information and decision making.

The communists had two options. They could give up a lot of control and then it wouldn’t really be communism anymore. Or they could resist the new technologies and make their system obsolete a little faster. In fact, the Soviets tried first restrictions and then let loose, so that both things hasted their system collapse. The Chinese saw this and refused to liberalize their political system, repressing dissent in a bloody crackdown of which Tiananmen Square was only the part we saw on TV. But they continued to liberalize their economy, essentially conceding many aspects of economic control (defacto abandoning communism) in return for continued political power. The Chinese experiment continues.

Posted by Broadnax at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Broadnax at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wrote these notes for these posts during my time on promotion boards, but held off posting them until the work was done.  

After many years of trying to figure out the tricks of getting promoted, I finally got it.  It is an epiphany. After now reading  the files of 100s of my very competent colleagues, I found that the secret of success is to be good at what you do. Of course, the write up is important. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, it doesn’t make a sound for any practical purpose. But you have to have something to write about.  A week of energetic writing and spinning won’t make up for a year of lethargy on the job. You just cannot sell Edsels.  On the other hand, people stand in line to get the good products they want.

I like the fact that people write their own first pages on their assessments. It gives a better look at what they can do and what they think is important.  Some people “get it” more than others. In their own write-ups they emphasize the right things first and they make logical and meaningful connections among the things they accomplished.  

There is focus.  In the good EERs, I notice a “purposes principle” at work. They explain the “so what?” and list the results and outcomes of what they have accomplished.  I also get the impression that they frequently ask the purpose question.  When someone gives you a task, it is not impertinent to ask, “what do you plan to use it for?” This will often make the person focus more, give you a better idea of what is necessary and maybe make it more of a partnership.  The person getting the task might know, for example, that there is a better way to achieve the goal.   Of course, you have to ask the question in the right way, but a good leader should be glad to have subordinates who try to improve on what they are given.

Nobody is perfect and I like it when I can find areas of actual conflict or mistakes that provided learning opportunities. This is perhaps the hardest part to get right. Nobody likes to be criticized and it is always a risk to have any criticism prominently mentioned. However, it may be a acceptable risk that sets you apart. Nobody has a good year every year. It is unlikely that someone goes from one success to another w/o any setbacks.  I was reminded of the juvenile lovers who ask their partners whether they love them more today than yesterday. Despite what we hear in song and story, the inevitable true answer eventually must be “no”. It doesn’t mean that careers, or love, do not or cannot grow over a long period, but it will never be a straight and clear path in either case.  

That said, it makes no sense to dwell on failure. One of the things I dislike most is when people seem to revel in the hard times they have suffered. Difficult conditions are a mitigating factor, but the fact is that there are two sorts of criteria. You either did something or you didn’t.  Almost fought the great chicken of Bristol just doesn’t compare to actual achievement.  Ideally, you should mention the problem immediately followed by how you moved on from it.  And remember that most FS careers have had some hardships. I served a year in the Western Desert of Iraq, with dust in the air and bad guys behind the rocks; many of our colleagues have had worse. The bad plumbing or poor phone service at someone’s post just doesn’t sound very impressive.

Overall, some files just seem to sing beautifully, others are a little off key and a few are bad. Sometimes one person manages to be/do all three.  That is why I like to see the person in more than one type of job or place.  Some people can do well one time and in one place. That is admirable but doesn’t mean they should be promoted to more responsibility. It is not the one home run that counts but the day-to-day success that adds up over a long period.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday I watched an episode of “Law & Order –Criminal Intent” that featured a murderer obsessed with proving that people were not moral.  He captured loving couples and forced them into situations where one killed the other to save his/her own life.  Today I read about criticisms of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”  Evidently modern activists feel Atticus was not sufficiently outraged by the racism around him.   As different as these seem to be, they are both based on pernicious and self-indulgent interpretation of human morality, an interpretation that is superficially perceptive and intelligent, but is in fact just sophomoric.

I understand that my own interpretation will sound shallow compared with the deep thinking that some of the chattering classes do about historical transgressions like racism or the Holocaust, but I think it has the advantage of being more useful.   It has to do with capacities, and sometimes going beyond what we can expect of ourselves and other humans.

There are two types of judgments that are worthless: standards that are so high that nobody can pass and standards so low that everybody can.  Both, unfortunately, are attractive because we can alternatively claim to have high standards or to be inclusive. I was on the swim team in HS, but I cannot swim as fast as Olympic champion Michael Phelps. But there are two sorts of swimming contests where I am his equal.   If the test is simply the ability to swim 100 yards w/o any reference to the time involved in getting there, both of us can do it. If the test is to swim across Lake Michigan, neither of us can make it.   It sounds silly when I put it in these terms, but that is what we constantly do in our moral judgments of others, especially when we are thinking historically.

If you prove that Michael Phelps cannot swim across Lake Michigan, have you proven that he is a poor swimmer?  Of course not.   What if you put a person into an impossible moral situation?  You might conclude that this person is morally lacking, and you would be wrong.  You might conclude that all humans were morally lacking and you would be right by the standard you set up, but it is a stupid standard.   If nobody can succeed, the test is useless.  Why do people insist on postulating such things?  I think it is because it makes them feel better about their own personal moral shortcomings.  

Just as a reasonable person – even a great swimmer - would avoid jumping off the car-ferry in the middle of Lake Michigan because he knows that he cannot swim forty miles to the other side, so a moral person avoids situations where he will be pushed beyond his breaking point.   This is the moral thing to do.  You need to anticipate challenges and take steps in advance to address them.  In my experience, people who constantly get in trouble are not always worse at resisting temptation, but they are very clumsy about falling into situations where they cannot.   Taken to a higher level, a good society is one that permits and facilitates moral choices.  One of the biggest crimes committed in un-free societies is that they corrupt good people by making it very difficult for to make moral choices, or even recognize that there is a moral choice to be made.   As they are threatened or enticed into poor moral choices, they slip farther down the slope.

I am not arguing for moral relativism when I say that we have to judge people’s choices in the context of their situations.   There are standards we should uphold, but we have to recognize that when you are sitting in a comfortable chair in the safety of your home it is easier to postulate that you would make the right choice than if the Gestapo was asking you whether or not you saw someone hiding in a shed.   

There is also the element of knowledge and experience.  I know that I have become more interested in acting ethically as I have become older.  I don’t think it is merely age.   As I experienced more and learned more, my feeling of responsibility has grown.   Some of us like to idealize children as innocents who instinctually know right from wrong.   This is not true.  It is just that we cut them a lot of slack and we don’t expect them to make the really hard choices.  IMO, true ethics requires learning and introspection.  In a similar vein, I am not a big believer in the noble savage ideal.  I think Roseau was full of shit and besides his occasionally stirring phrases; he was harmful to the ethical development of humanity.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We all understand the concept of time … until we have to explain it. Time progresses at an even pace (at least in our local reality) but time is not experienced the same by everybody or in every situation.   A poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge sums it up well. I have included it at the end.  Chrissy & I got some more scientific insights at a lecture at Smithsonian by neuroscientist Richard Restak called Time & the Brain.  Some would have been obvious  to Coleridge, but it is interesting to get it from the science perspective.

Restak started by talking about “real” time, the kind we measure. Our machines can measure it in nanoseconds, but we don’t perceive it at that level. Events have to be communicated and interpreted by our brains before we can “see” them.  That takes time and in the interpretation time is experienced.  Uncommon or exciting events seem to last longer.  These are times when events seem to unfold in slow motion.  It is an artifact of memory.   When the memories are packed tightly, we have more to remember and we tend to perceive it as a longer time.

This accounts for a paradox is excitement and boredom.  Restak talked about an experiment where some people watch an exciting movie, while others languish in a waiting room. For the people in the movie, time flies by, while it drags for those in the waiting room. However, when both groups are asked to estimate the time actually spent in each activity, the people who watched the movie estimate 10% too high.    That explains why people whose life is boring say that the days drag, but the years fly by.  I recall when I worked at Medusa Cement loading bags for twelve hours a day.  Each day seemed interminable, but  when I think back about each summer it went by quickly. That is because not much changed.  This is also why you tend to remember things that happen early on a job or task, when you are learning it.

Restak explained that in memory past, present and future are not always distinct and if you cannot picture yourself in the past, you cannot project into the future.  That is a problem for people with Alzheimer’s disease.  They cannot envision the future because they cannot recall themselves in the past. There is no longer a continuous identity.   This is also a problem for people experiencing depression. They just cannot envision a brighter future, which affects their perception of the past and the present.

Different cultures perceive time differently.  An important factor in the material success of the West has been our ability to control, or at least to parcel time.  Before the industrial revolution, there was no much need for clocks to have minute hands. Processes were uncoordinated and time was “wasted”.  Even today, not everybody has the concept of time and some people don’t really think we should. 

Our time has become maybe too regimented.  Because of our devices like mobile phones and computers, we always have the possibility of doing something.   It takes away from leisure, but also from time to contemplate and think.  Thinking takes time and if you move from one event or quick decision to the other, you may never have time to understand the purposes and connections.  That is a modern curse.  I remember when the Marine at TQ explained to me that I had to embrace the suck. What that really means is to take the time you have.

Anyway, Calvin Coolidge said that you should always leave when they still want you to stay.  The Q&A lasted a bit too long, with some people just trying to demonstrate their erudition in front of a groups of strangers.   I have been having a little  problem with sciatica and I just cannot sit still for more than an hour, so we slunk out.  Always get a chair convenient to the exit.   I think we got all we could from the talk anyway.

This is the Coleridge poem:

Time Real & Imaginary

On the wide level of a mountain's head,

(I knew not where, but 'twas some faery place)

Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails out-spread,

Two lovely children run an endless race,

A sister and a brother!

This far outstripp'd the other;

Yet ever runs she with reverted face,

And looks and listens for the boy behind:

For he, alas! is blind!

O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed,

And knows not whether he be first or last.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I studied two things in college that I have not used since and rarely seen others use.  Those were classical Greek and calculus.  I am not saying that either was useless, but both were more ornamental than practical.  The difference is that everybody knows that Greek is a kind of intellectual exercise, maybe even an indulgence, while many people – most who have never studied calculus – think it that a population generally conversant in calculus is a golden key to international competiveness. Come to think about it, Greek has been more useful to me.
 
I didn’t come up with this myself.  Gregg Easterbrook in his book Sonic Boom questioned the efficacy of higher math for the masses.  He said that pushing higher math for everybody just has the effect of making lots of teenagers feel stupid. Probably a majority of students cannot master calculus and the time &  energy spent trying to hammer the big square peg of complicated math into the smaller round holes of limited cognitive ability could be better spent elsewhere.  As I said, I took calculus, but the only time I ever used it was to get into business school. I really think the primary purpose was to create a filter for the school.  Requiring calculus keeps down the numbers of applicants and is a proxy for significant years of study.    
 
Let me be clear. I am not saying that higher math skills are not important for society; I am just saying that they are not important for most people, not attainable for most people and not sustainable even for those who learn them but don’t use them in daily life. I have not used calculus since I left college and now my skills have atrophied to the extent that the difference between me and someone who has never taken the subject at all approaches zero. The same goes for my Greek, BTW, but in the case of the Greek I still retain important knowledge from the underlying documents.
 
I agree with Easterbrook when he says that it would be much more useful to give the masses of students a better grounding in things like economics and statistics. Those are things that I do use almost every day and it is clear from the decisions people make that many do not understand the basics enough to apply them to their own lives.
 
Another dumb thing that sounds smart is the idea of self sufficiency. I read Thoreau when I was a kid and I even bought books that explained how a person could support himself on as little as a couple acres of land. Of course you would have to live like a medieval peasant, i.e. like shit, but you could do it. (I am reading another good book called the Rational Optimist that cut through some of the pabulum that life was better in the past or is better still in less developed places.)  Self sufficiency sounds attractive but why would you do it when working and interacting with others is so pleasant and profitable? Specialization is the key to prosperity and happiness.  It is the capacity to do some things well and trade them that makes us better off, not some kind of ability to do lots of things clumsily
 
I don’t have to know calculus because I know that some smart guys do and I can rely on them. This is just the basic economics that so many people don’t learn about in school. A good essay explains how we are all interacted. It is called I Pencil. Kids would read it in HS, if they were properly educated in economics.
 
Related to the myth of self sufficiency is the idea that a person should be “well rounded” and be able to do many things.  We hear that at work or in school. People try to make up for their deficiencies, which is great … as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of developing strengths. The fact is that we usually become successful at developing strengths, not  making sure we can do everything. As I mentioned above, I don’t need to learn calculus and time spent developing it, where I have no natural inclinations or talents, would be wasted.
 
With something like “well rounded” there is threshold. If you are below the threshold, you cannot properly function, but at some point you are good enough at the things you are not very good at doing.  It is binary.  After you cross the threshold, getting better is not necessary.  After crossing the threshold, it is better just to avoid the things you don’t do well. Let somebody else do it, somebody who likes it better and is better at doing it.   
 
This shows up in my panels. Some people are good at lots of things. They are well rounded. They tend not to get promoted. It is better to be acceptable at most things and really exceptionally good at a few. Playing to strengths while minimizing or avoiding weaknesses is better than trying to fix every problem.

George C Marshall, the architect of victory in World War II, used to say that it was more important to ask what a man could do and let him do that than to ask what he couldn’t do. People with great talent are often uneven personalities. George Patton was not much of a diplomat, but he was very good at pushing armored units through German lines. Marshall used Patton where he could do some good.  Eisenhower was not the greatest strategist in the war, nor did he have real combat experience, but he could cobble together coalitions.  That is what he did.

Finally re the dumb things that sound good is learning foreign languages. We Americans castigate ourselves and accept the criticism of others because we don’t learn foreign languages. Well … what foreign language should we all learn?  It is an easy choice for non-English speakers. English is the world language.  Learn English. No other language is so widespread or universally useful. We already know English. So do we learn Spanish, which is no use anywhere besides Latin America and parts of the Iberian Peninsula? Chinese has the greatest number of speakers, but it is not the language of business of commerce even in Asia. What about all those poor kids whose parents immersed them in Japanese, back when Japan was supposed to take over the world in the early 1990s?  How useful has that been for them, I wonder?

If you don’t know where you are going, you should just keep and improve English or maybe simplify it into Globish.

I have to caveat – again – if you are going to live in a country, learn the language. I learned several and hold myself to a high standard (i.e. I actaully want to speak it well enough the people know what I want and don't feel the overwhelming urge to compliment me on how well I speak their language.  You know you doing poorly when they compliment you in the first couple minutes, especially if they do it in English). That is why I question the idea of general language learning. I am now working to get my Portuguese back. I once spoke it well and will again, but in between not so much.  One of my tasks is to purge out Polish and Norwegian, which are now flowing back into my brain as “foreign”. When my Portuguese is again very good, I won’t be able to command the Polish, Norwegian or German that I once could. 

Language must be used to be kept and few of us have enough time in the day,opportunities to practice or actual talent to remain "mulitlingual," even if we ever mange to achieve it. Most of us also have more important things to do than practice a language we rarely use. Learning languages in college won’t cut it, unless your standards are very low. Which brings me in complete circle back to the Greek or more broadly the classics. I studied both Greek and Latin in college and, as I admitted, I really cannot remember the languages well enough to read them anymore. But I do remember the content of much of what I read. Classical languages give you access to a full panoply of Western thought and literature. 

IMO, if you want to just learn “a language” in college, with no more specificity than that, you are probably better off studying Latin than any “living” language. You will get access to many more centuries of literature of history and when you forget the language, as you inevitably will, you may remember some of that literature and history. When/if you figure out where you want to go in the non-English speaking world, learn the language then. Latin will probably help with that.

Posted by Broadnax at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We attended the hearing for the six guys accused of beating Alex.  It was painful to hear the story of how these thugs attacked him, unprovoked, and started to kick him in the face.  Evidently there was  a pattern of attacks.  

I don't want innocent people to get in trouble and I know that is why we have all the complicated legal procedures. It is good that the system is stacked in favor of defendants. But their lawyers were clearly fishing. They asked the cop on the stand all sorts of questions clearly designed to tax his recollection, things that really didn’t matter and/or things he could not have known.

Alex took the stand to tell what he knew, which wasn’t much. He only knows that he found himself on the ground being kicked. None of the lawyers for the defendants cross examined him. I was glad for that; he could not have added anything, but I thought the lawyers might try to cloud the issue somehow.  

I made a special point of staring at the defendants as they were identified. They didn’t show emotion. During the recess they all went into the bathroom and I got to wait in line among them.  None of them looked at me. I don’t know what that means, if anything. Maybe they had to go to the bathroom really bad and that was all that was on their minds. I cannot tell who is guilty just by looking. I was hoping they would brag or say something that I could bring to the attention of the authorities, but they were completely silent. They were very savvy defendants, which I think is significant.

The authorities are still waiting for DNA evidence. Human blood was splattered on one of their shirts. You have to wonder how it got there and if it is Alex’s it will prove that the guy in question at least came close enough to get splashed. Until that comes in, they had enough evidence to hold only one of the guys.  As I wrote above, I don’t want innocent guys punished. But they caught these guys at the scene where they were identified at the time by witnesses. Maybe they were not all involved, but the probably all know who was involved. There is no honor in protecting bad guys.

Alex is philosophical about this. He doesn’t want them punished very much, since they are young and perhaps inexperienced. But anybody who would hit a stranger from behind and then commence to kick him in the head and face is dangerous to society. I can understand, if not accept, assault during a robbery, but they didn’t try to rob Alex. It takes a special kind of evil personality to want to hurt a stranger purely out of hatred. I have never even contemplated doing anything like that and I don’t think many people do. It is our civic duty to get these kinds of people out of circulation until his attitude improves or his energy diminishes.

A witness clearly identified the one guy they were able to hold. That is how they got him. She said she had seen him earlier too. Evidently he attacked a customer headed into the gas station with his money in hand. The witness said that the perp hit the customer in the face, took the money and taunted him saying, “What are you gonna do now?” and walked away. That is why she could identify him with such certainty as the one who attacked Alex when he showed up a second time. I stood next to him when waiting in the bathroom line. He just looked at his shoes and seemed very harmless. He was wearing a suit and had cut off the dreadlocks he sported a couple months ago.  He didn’t look much like the picture we had seen before.You cannot judge guilt by looking at people and they tend to behave differently in the courthouse than they do on the street.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Broadnax at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Friday was bike to work day. I noticed an unusual amount of bike traffic that day, but now it is back to normal. The weather has been good for biking, warm but not hot with gentle winds. I have been at FSI this week, which is a little more than half way as far as my usual ride, but since I have to make the return uphill trip, it is a little harder.

I see some of the same people on the bike trails, which is not surprising. Most of the people riding at that time are commuters like me.  We tend to ride faster and more consistently. I am very consistent in my biking times. Only a strong wind makes significant differences. 

People who bike only occasionally or for leisure are less predictable or consistent. Sometimes I see someone way ahead, but when I catch up and pass, they go faster and pass me back. Then they slow down again until I pass again and the game continues. One of the habits some bikers have is a kind of lock colonization.  People leave their locks attached to bike racks, presumably because they are too onerous to carry around every day. I think some people just forget about them after a while and they accumulate.

Most people walking dogs on the trail are okay, but some have bad habits and so do their dogs.  The offensive dog walkers have their animals on long leases. The dogs run back and forth across the path, alternatively getting in the way and setting up a rope barrier across the trail. Dogs have become dumber and less agile. They used to be alert. Old time dogs knew when you got close and would leap out of the way with alacrity. Many of today's dogs are like slow-witted drunks. They stare blankly as you come up on them and often don’t move until the owner pulls them away. I think they are too cosseted by their owners. It has dulled their instincts. Maybe there is more inbreeding too. Those little designer dogs seem to be the stupidest.

I haven’t really figured out the runner etiquette. I run to the extreme side of the trail or on the gravel verge. It is easy to bikes to pass me.  Some runners insist on running down the center line.  I give them as much space as I can when I am riding, but if they are striding the center there is not much space to give them. The center runners tend to be the crankiest. Some of them complain when you pass them about not getting enough space or warning.  Shitheads. I just keep on going. But most of the runners are good.  I think the ratio is like I used to tell the kids. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people are good, but you pass more than 100 people.

There is one old guy I have been seeing for more than ten years, a barrel chested guy with a Marine style haircut. I never talk to him but he seems so familiar that I have at him when I pass.  

A big snapping turtle was stranded in the middle of Shreve Road when I rode home. Cars were swerving to avoid it and I didn’t figure it was long for this world. His shell would have done him no good against the car tires. At the pace he was going, I wondered how he got that far w/o getting squashed. A guy stopped his car and we kicked it along until it ambled to safety on the side of the road. Another passing motorist suggested we grab it by the tail on the assumption that it couldn't snap us in that position, but both of us were afraid of the thing. It opened its mouth threateningly as every time we nudged it and everybody knows that those things can snap off a finger if they get a good shot. There is a wetland on the side of the road where we shooed him. The other side is just a construction site. It seemed like the thing was crossing from the verdant swamp to the rocky construction site. It would have been a mistake, but turtles don't do a lot of hard thinking.

Why did the turtle cross the road? To get to the Shell Station. 

Posted by Broadnax at 08:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Calling somebody a Neanderthal is no longer just a hypothetical insult. Evidently our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals, or maybe put the other way, our ancestors interbred with Homo sapiens sapiens. But now that we know that 1-4% of SOME people’s, but not everybody’s come from the Neanderthal, won’t it become politically incorrect to disparage beetle browed cognitively challenged ice age hunter?

The Neanderthals were sorely oppressed by Homo sapiens sapiens (HSS), who evidently were not very inclusive of the Neanderthal. It was unlikely that good looking HSS men dated the stocky, troll-like Neanderthal girls, although some of them may have taken advantage of them sexually.

And why do the HSS think they are so smart anyway? Neanderthals did okay through the tough times of the ice age and as soon as the weather improves here come the HSS, with their fancy flakes spear points and articulate grunting (i.e. actual complex language). Maybe Neanderthals should have been more careful in protecting their southern border.

Trolls & ogres look suspiciously like Neanderthals. Isn’t it likely that they are based on Neanderthal racial stereotypes? Or maybe the Neanderthals were forced to live under bridges and that is how they got to be "trolls". And what about those people who say "don't feed the trolls?" Aren't they really saying, "starve the Neanderthals?" Aren’t the dim-witted but dangerous bad guys in “The 13th Warrior” Neanderthals? In fact, it is hard to think of any common positive media portrayals of Neanderthals.

I am assuming that I have some of those Neanderthal genes. That probably explains why I have not been as successful as I think I should have been. And I am wondering if I should get some kind of restitution or affirmative action as a result of the ancient oppression. In the entire history of the world, not one openly Neanderthal individual has ever been a president, king or even a successful lawyer. Is that mere coincidence? Generations of science books have shown a “progression” of humans from the “lowest” to the “highest”. Neanderthals never get to be on top, despite the fact that Neanderthals had a larger average cranial capacity than modern humans. And what’s up with the German name “Neanderthal?” Neanderthals lived in the Neander valley long before Germans were invented.

The mainstream society has changed its view of Neanderthals but not enough. We should spare no expense to find out what the Neanderthals called themselves, so that we can show them the respect of calling them by that name. After eons of oppression, do they deserve anything less?

Posted by Broadnax at 08:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We got a call last night that Alex was in the hospital in Harrisonburg and would be soon having a CAT scan to see if he had any damage to his brain. He was transferred to UVA hospital in Charlottesville. We drove through the early morning darkness to get him. It is not good, but it looks like he will make a full & rapid recovery, fortunately, although he will have some scars and will be in pain for a while. We hope follow up exams find nothing new. The story that we learned between that call and now is troubling. I don't know if I have all the details down right, but let me try.

Alex was attacked by six young men in what evidently was an act of random hateful violence. They hit him over the head by a beer bottle, so Alex doesn’t remember much about the attack.  What we learned came from witnesses, the police & the perpetrators themselves.    

Alex remembers someone running past him and then he was on the ground being kicked by six guys. What happened, according to witnesses, is that these guys  wanted to beat somebody up. Their first victim was the guy that ran past Alex, but as they chased him they decided Alex would do just as well.  So one of them hit Alex with a beer bottle from behind and the others joined in the beating. The original victim called the police, who were already in the area and quickly arrived; this and bystanders scared the perpetrators off before they did lasting damage.

The police told Alex that they caught the guys who did it and that they would probably be charged with felony assault. Alex and the running kid were not the only ones they attacked last night.  This was not a simple case of drunk and disorderly.  These guys were looking for someone to hurt. They didn’t know Alex; they didn’t try to rob him, ask him anything at all or even look him in the face before smashing him over the head and commencing the beating.  The motivation was simply atavistic hatred, based on nothing, nothing at all, maybe a lust to do violence.

How do you deal with someone who wants nothing from you except to do you harm? We look for motivations.  We might feel more at ease if they had tried to steal Alex’s wallet or if we could discover how he antagonized them in even a trivial way.  But there is no comfort there. 

Chrissy is staying with Alex in Harrisonburg tonight and maybe tomorrow to make sure he is okay.  Espen had been up there visiting one of his old HS friends who also attends school up there.  He didn’t know about Alex until we told him this morning. I drove back with Espen and we talked along the way.  It seems the block party got out of hand generally. People were throwing beer bottles.   

Espen and his friend headed toward his friend’s dorm room and Alex went toward his, which was only a short distance from where he was attacked. Unfortunately for Alex, his dorm was right in the middle of a place where lots of rowdy people were gathering and Alex had to walk through the crowds.  Fortunately, the police were there too and that is probably what ended up saving him from a more severe beating.

The cops interviewed Alex. They took pictures of his various injuries and examined his bloody clothes, but he couldn’t tell them much that was helpful, but there are lots of witnesses and the perpetrators are evidently talking. I am interested to see how this case plays out and I want to learn more.  I don’t know anything about the perpetrators and I will admit that I am more than a little angry at them for hurting my boy. But I think there also is a rational argument for making sure this does not get passed along. I don’t think the attackers are hardened criminals but the kind of hatred and violence that went into this attack is dangerous. It is not something we can ignore or forgive.  Letting the attackers too easily off the hook would do them no favors if the lesson they learn is that what they did is no big deal.  It is something we have to confront.

Posted by Broadnax at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I drove up to Harrisonburg for Alex’s birthday.  He is doing okay, but is still having some loneliness problems. We didn’t do anything extraordinary, mostly talked. We did go to lunch and supper together and went got a few necessities at Walmart. Lunch was at Kyoto, one of those Japanese steak houses where they do the grill show with the food. 

Mariza’s birthday was a couple days ago. She came down from Baltimore for it.  We had some cake, but we aren’t very big on the party things.

I wrote the birthday stuff last year and nobody feels comfortable about too much recent information being divulged. There is a kind of declassification period that must be respected.   

Suffice to say that I am proud of the adults they have become and I enjoy their company, but I miss the children they were. These are the times that I feel that most acutely.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was part of a new car design survey today. I think that they chose me as part of the control group that knew nothing about cars. I filled out a survey about the kinds of criteria I would use in buying a new car. 

Then I went in and saw about a dozen new car designs.   Evidently they were Volkswagens, Hondas, Toyotas and Chryslers.   We were asked to evaluate each car in terms of looks, interiors etc.   Most of the cars were too small inside, IMO.  I like the feeling of my Honda Civic.  Although the car is small, it has a lot of room in the driver’s seat.  A lot of the bigger cars don’t really have that feel.

I don’t really care much about cars.  I want one that is reasonably safe and comfortable and one that gets good mileage.   Other than that, I cannot tell much about them.   As part of the survey I had to guess what kind of car we were looking at.  I don’t think I did very well. 

I watched an old movie “Convoy” with Kris Kristofferson. It was made in 1978 when the price of gas had gone up and the 55 MPH speed limits were imposed.  There were a few movies like this that portrayed the anger associated with the perceived loss of the freedom of the open road.  “Smokey and the Bandit” was another one like this, a lot of law breaking and destruction of property. 

I wanted to be a long-distance truck driver once. I was an indifferent student when I started college and didn’t see much future in that.  When I worked a Medusa Cement, the truck drivers seemed to have it best.  They got out on the road, while we just loaded the bags of cement on their trucks. I would not have been a good truck driver. It is a subset of the general driving thing and my lack of love of cars (mentioned above) is probably an indicator that it is not one of my strengths.  

The 1970s were the tail end of the trucker golden age anyway.  Traffic was getting worse.  Speed limits were coming down and generally the open road was disappearing.  Everything is a lot more organized now and much less of an adventure.

The 1970s was also the time when containerized cargo changed shipping in general.  It put a lot of truckers and longshoremen out of jobs.   That really revolutionized commerce. 

Posted by Broadnax at 02:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are 120+ little boys for every 100 little girls in China & Northern India. This is because baby girl fetuses are aborted and newborn baby girls are killed in the quest for sons. When the boys get old enough to care, they will find a female shortage. The world has never experienced anything like this before. What will be the social ramifications?

Posted by Broadnax at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

NPR featured an article about lifecycle funds.  These are mutual fund that are supposed to automatically adjust to your age and time before retirement by balancing your stocks, bonds and other assets.   Conventional wisdom tells us that your portfolio should be “aggressive” when you are younger, so that you can take advantage of the long term growth potential of stocks.   But as you get closer to retirement, you want to get more conservative, since you won’t have a chance to make up a downturn of the kind we recently experienced.    

Stocks will yield better returns in the long run, but in the long run we are all dead, as the famous economist John Maynard Keynes once quipped. Markets are always rational in the long run, but they can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

The lifecycle fund is simple. You just decide which year you expect to retire and then let the fund do the rest.   The theory is good, but the practice has a couple of flaws. For one thing, a lifecycle fund usually has higher management fees because it is actively managed. People don’t work for nothing and if you give the management to somebody else, you pay for it.  If the market is doing really well, you might not care. The big stock gains may not be the rule of the future, so fees will be a bigger part of your thinking. But the biggest flaw of the lifecycle fund is the psychological trap. 

People buy into these funds and then outsource their brains and judgment to somebody else.  When I talk to colleagues who have put their portfolio into lifestyle funds, they seem to have more certainty than I think is warranted. There is the idea that when they retire, they will have the projected amount of money waiting for them.

Prospectuses always warn that future returns might not resemble the past.   We cannot know the future and we can only predict it imperfectly by trying to project patterns from the past into the future. Lifecycle funds do this too.  Most of us like certainty, especially when thinking about retirement.   The problem is that we cannot have it.  At best we can get ranges of results with different probabilities connected to them.

The good thing about the lifecycle funds is that they might keep you in the market during hard times and keep you from doing silly things during boom times. Many investors do exactly the opposite of what they should. They buy risky investments and stocks when these things are going up and the prices are high. When prices decline, they sell.  That means that they buy high and sell low. If you have confidence that the fund is taking care of the risk for you, you may be less tempted to do this.

I do my own lifecycle investments, sort of.  I don’t think you can really time the market.  I meet lots of people who claim that they can, but they don’t seem to have the piles of money earned by smart investing that you would expect if they really could.  

I just rely mostly on index funds.  I used to think I could pick stocks well, but I was mistaken.

It is not a smart idea to have all your money in financial investments (i.e. stocks, bonds). Real estate is a good thing too, and with the recent decline in prices it might even be a good time to buy.  Of course, I have my own unusual investment in forestry.   You could call forestry a subset of real estate, but since it has the agricultural production aspect, it is significantly different.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I finished the first module of the distance learning course on intellectual property rights today and I thought I might put make a short write up of some of the take-aways. 

If we want to understand radicals and counter their influence, we have to get beyond pedantic debates about words. That is one of the ideas I took away from a discussion with Ghaffar Hussein, a representative of the Quilliam Foundation, a UK think tank that studies radicalization and how to prevent it.

Not getting bogged down in terms is the first step in making progress. It is good to have common understandings of terms, but some terms are too loaded for a common agreement. Radical is one such word. And it is worse than mere misunderstanding. Some people use linguistics as an offensive weapon to prevent real discussion. Mr. Hussein says that when he gets into these kinds of word-bogs, he just describes the behaviors and tells the person to call it whatever he wants.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had a terrible toothache yesterday. I tried to get in to see the dentist, but the blizzard closed her down too.  So I used a lot of “Orajet” and took some pain-killer pills left over from when Alex had his wisdom teeth pulled. This sort of worked, but only if I hung my head over the back of my chair and left my mouth open. I have no idea why that worked, but it relieved the acute pain.

Today the pain is gone – mostly. I couldn’t explain why it started and I cannot explain why it went away. Misery is a mystery to me. I still plan to go to the dentist on Monday to preempt any recurrence. My teeth are rotten. I treated them poorly when I was young and now they are getting their revenge. It is not hereditary. The kids have excellent teeth and have never had even one cavity among them. Modern toothpaste and fluoride in the water has banished cavities. 

Life does get better, but you just don’t think about it. There was a TV commercial when I a kid.  It featured a kid who came back from the dentist bragging, “Look mom, no cavities.”  That kind of claim sold toothpaste in those days because not having cavities was so rare. Today it is different.  You don’t think about cavities when you don’t have any. It becomes normal.  

You don’t think of too much else when you have a bad toothache, but you forget about it as soon as it goes away. It is a blessing to forget pain but also an invitation to complacency. I was tempted to just let it go after the pain dissipated and that seems to be the pattern for life in general.We ignore what is not bothering us.

The picture above is the truck among the snow banks, snowing how high the snow has gotten. 

Posted by Broadnax at 01:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I got my “welcome to post” notification from Brasilia.   It is still more than a year in the future and it seems sort of ironic as I watch the snow falling outside my window but the future has a way of becoming the present faster than you think.  

So much advance notice is unusual.  I had my boots on the ground in Iraq about a month after I first even thought about volunteering for the job, but usually we get around a year.   Two years is unusual unless you are assigned to hard language training. 

Portuguese is an odd language when it comes to our training.  It is a “world language” and it is a fairly easy language to learn, but it is not as common as other “easy” world languages like Spanish or French.  Since it is not a  not a “hard language” like Russian, Arabic or Chinese, the FS sometimes doesn’t build in enough time to learn or relearn it as it does for officers assigned to posts with hard languages.   This system can work for French or Spanish, since there are lots of people in posts with those languages, Portuguese maybe not so much.   I don’t know if I explained that well, but it makes sense to me.   Suffice to say that for this PAO assignment they really wanted someone with good Portuguese, so this time they built in enough time to make sure of it and I am the beneficiary.

This is very exciting.  I learned Portuguese at FSI a quarter century ago and I got to be fluent when I was in Brazil for a couple years.   In those days you had to use the language all the time, since English was not that common in Porto Alegre.  But fluent is not necessarily the same as good.  You can speak very fast and fluently but not get the grammar or the words exactly right and I never felt really confident.   Diplomats should be really good at the languages of the countries where they are assigned and this additional training - with some consistent work - will put on the polish.   I hope so.

I don’t expect to speak like a native, but I want to get very good.  We have numbers from 1 to 5.  I want to get to 4 before I leave for Brazil, but the numbers don’t mean much.  I think of it in terms of foreign actors.  I want to get to the equivalent of Ricardo Montalban, but I am afraid I had only reached the sophistication of Sergeant Shultz on the old Hogan’s Heroes in my previous time.  I am not starting from zero this time.  I have been reading the WSJ in Portuguese.  I don’t get all the details, but I can understand most of the articles.  I also bought a dozen of Brazilian movies.  W/o the subtitles I would be out of luck, but even in the short time I have been doing it; the language is starting to come back.

Technological advances make it a lot easier to learn languages; at least it has become a lot easier to get the materials.  I can read Brazilian newspapers online and listen to radio and TV.  And of course Brazilian-Portuguese movies are easy to find.  There is almost no comparison to how it was twenty-five years ago.   I remember being happy to get those old newspapers and having to copy audio tapes.

Look below at what I just did   I used Word to translate the paragraph above into Portuguese and then back translated into English.  It did a decent job.  I would have to make a few minor corrections.   The strangest thing is that it translated the word Portuguese into English.   It also left out some of the subtlety, such as “I want.”  The Portuguese translation is better than the back translation to English, it has the “I want” (quero) for example.  This is understandable, since it is like making a copy of a copy.  But the translation certainly still makes sense and is a thousand times better than I could do on my own - the wonders of modern technology.  

Desta vez, quero aprender a escrever português.   Temos de aprender a falar e ler-se nos nossos cursos de língua, mas nós não aprender a escrever, pelo menos não como escrever bem.    Aguardo com expectativa a obtenção de muita ajuda a este respeito de Bill Gates.   Microsoft Word é muito bom na fixação de palavras que estão escritas quase corretamente.   Ele faz isso em inglês, parto do princípio de que é possível fazê-lo também em português.

Back translation

This time, I learn to write English.   We must learn to speak and read in our language courses, but we do not learn how to write, at least not how to write well.    I look forward to getting a lot of help from Bill Gates.   Microsoft Word is very good at fixing of words that are written almost correctly.   It does this in English, I assume that it is possible also in English.

It is really interesting the way that the machine can translate in seconds.  But somehow I am staring to understand how John Henry felt when he saw that steam drill rolling up.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

They say that misery loves company, but that is just an uncharitable way to put it. Comparisons are useful because they provide insight into problems and possible solutions. For example, you should be a lot more willing to change your habits if you see that you are doing poorly while everybody else prospers but if you are part of the larger trend learning from the experience of others might be less immediately useful. The Economist shows graphically how rich countries have fared in the recent recession.

Americans suffered in the “great recession” and it is cold comfort that Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, the UK and the whole Euro-zone suffered more. But it should make us stop to consider the root causes of a downturn that affected a passel of countries with such a wide variety of institutions and economic programs.

The precursor the problems of the 1930s was the rapid rise of the U.S. as a creditor nation along with the circular flow of funds from Germany in the form of reparations to the allies, to the U.S. in the form of loan repayments back to Germany as loans, all the while the U.S. market was not absorbing significant imports. The great economist, John Maynard Keynes foresaw some of these problems in his “” (1919). In the 1970s, we had the problem of recycling petro-dollars after the quadrupling of oil prices in the early 1970s and further hikes around 1980. That liquidity went into loans to developing countries which soon became a problem. Recently, we had the rise of China, which has followed a neo-mercantilism strategy of selling outside while maintaining trade barriers and an artificially low currency. The dollars that pooled up in the Middle Kingdom were/are recycled into debt in the U.S. and elsewhere, helping keep interest rates low, but also helping to create a debt overhang.

 The Panic of 1907, which I include only for the sake of completeness, because it spurred the creation of the Federal Reserve and because I just finished reading the book in the link, was also precipitated by rapid growth and investment in the U.S. It is unusual in that it was largely “solved” by the intervention of one individual, J Pierpont Morgan. This would be the last time that one individual was ever able to take on that role.

The Great Depression ended only with the onset of World War II, which is a fairly high price to pay to end an economic downturn. Amity Shlaes has written a good book called “The Forgotten Man” that details some of the policy fits and starts that did not alleviate the depression and may have deepened it. The end of the recession of 1982 is still way to close to be dispassionately assessed. We forget how bad that one was. Unemployment reached 10.8% but it soon eased and we had a quarter century of decent economic growth punctuated by two short recessions.

We don’t know what will bring us back to prosperity this time, but I have confidence that we will recover. We always do.If you look back at history in the last century, it seems we have a painful downturn every twenty-five years or so. The times of trouble last for around ten years (except in the 1907 case). Let’s hope this one will be shorter. But since nobody has been able to “predict” even the past accurately, I don’t have a lot of confidence in anybody’s ability to predict the economic future.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wrote about Espen’s birthday last year.  He is unenthusiastic about me putting too much about him or recent pictures of him on the blog.  He came home for the weekend and we had a cake, but Mariza and Alex were unable to come, so it wasn’t a party.   Espen wanted to go over to Fuddruckers for his birthday dinner and we had a good talk, but I don’t want to post all that on the blog.  Suffice to say that I miss him, but I am glad he is close and proud of him. Happy birthday, Espen.  We love you.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Past year’s market collapses seemed to confirm all the clichés about capitalism. Subsequent panic-based responses by government with its big bumps in spending and creating of new entitlements confirmed many of the clichés about government.   In April 2009, only 53% of American adults thought capitalism was better than socialism and a full 20% actually preferred socialism (the rest don’t know), according to Rasmussen.  We have since recovered some of our optimism.
 
I got some insights about this at the AEI program “Recovering the Case for Capitalism” featuring Yuval Levin.   I like to attend lectures at AEI when I can.   You have to get there on time, since there is usually a good sized crowd and they start punctually.    Most of the lectures are free. The Bradley Lectures cost $5, which doesn’t even cover the price of snacks and utilities.    The Bradley Lectures were sponsored by the family who owned Allen-Bradley in Milwaukee, BTW.
 
Levin started with Adam Smith.  We often get the caricature of what Smith wrote or mendacious misinterpretations like the Gordon Gecko “greed is good” statement.   Smith actually just made a moderate observation that people were not really good or bad but they were motivated by self-interest.  Most people also have a desire for approval, which can be moved to empathy and “good.”   Smith never advocated getting rid of government.   A good government doesn’t generally push particular outcomes, but it creates institutions that direct people’s self-interest and vanity to proper objects.
 
The market will discipline participants by encouraging people to do things other people find useful or desirable, since everybody has to approach the market terms of what he can provide, not what he will be able to get or even demand.    But the rules of the market are not self creating.  Some people will try to employ coercion.  Rules are necessary to maintain security and open completion, so that negotiations are free and pricing is not coercive. This does not ensure that outcomes are equal and not every transaction serves the interests of everybody, but overall the market produces the best achievable outcome.
 
Nobody seriously questions capitalism’s ability to produce material goods.   A century ago, some people thought a socially planned economy could produce more, but experience had dispelled that idea.   Nevertheless, few people love capitalism.    
 
The market tends to be unkind to established interests and established businesses have an interest to collude with government to limit competition.   Our modern welfare system is largely a creation of this kind of corporate-government collusion.

Capitalism also doesn’t properly stoke the egos of all participants. You are judged by what you do and what you contribute – lately.   The market disperses decision making and it is evolutionary, so in constant state of change, so it doesn’t appeal to academic intellectuals who like intelligently designed theoretical master systems. Most systems work better in theory than the free market, since there really is not a comprehensive theory of capitalism.
 
Capitalism is process, but it is incomplete. This is not a bad thing, considering the world’s experience with the more comprehensive systems. Capitalism is not a totalitarian. It leaves the details of your life and beliefs up to you. In this respect, it is more a tool than a comprehensive system and it requires the input of values from outside. Traditions, family, religion and other anthropological aspects form the “soul” of our system. Capitalism makes freedom possible, but it is not in itself freedom.   Humans need more. The free market makes it possible for them to seek it but it doesn’t force choices.  
 
I guess it is true that man does not live by bread alone.

The picture above is a painting at AEI featuring Gerald Ford, Helmut  Schmidt,  Valéry Giscard d'Estaing & James Callaghan.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Cities can be very crowded and the countryside usually is a bit lonely and lacking cultural services. The ostensible arbiters of taste hate the suburbs.  They critically acclaim crappy movies like “American Beauty” or “Revolutionary Row” that fit into cognoscenti stereotypes of life in the suburbs.   Maybe these wise guys won’t understand, but suburbanites are the happier with their lives than those people who live in small towns or big cities, according to Pew Research.

You can see some of the variety of options in the pictures.  It goes from the very crowded city of Sao Paulo, Brazil to a leafy and low density City of Milwaukee Street.  Frankfurt, Germany has become a very green city, even though it is in the center of a dense urban zone.  Cities can also be the crowded density of India or the grimy but vital Chicago street. And there are still places in the U.S. were almost nobody lives.  You can see on the picture from my sister's back yard in the Milwaukee suburb of Oak Creek.

I work in the city, live in the suburbs and spend a lot of time on my farms in rural areas.   Each has its attraction and I would not want to have to choose among them and I don’t have to, so in many ways it is a false choice.  Let me address it anyway.

The key advantage of the city is that you can walk to the places you need to go, although this advantage is lost on many urban dwellers, since they don’t walk much anyway.  Suburbs are a little too much car culture for me.  Of course, I am a bit spoiled in Washington, which is one of the world’s most pleasant and walkable cities. Washington really isn’t a city.  At least around the Capitol, it is more like a nice park with magnificent monuments and museums.  Who wouldn’t like that?   In many cities these days you cannot really walk around much. 

Diversity used to be an advantage of cities, but not anymore.  Today that is an advantage of the near-in in suburbs.  Fairfax County, where I live, is more diverse than Washington DC.   My homeowners’ association has people from all over the world interacting and getting along, which is true diversity.  People in cities tend to have more defined and sometimes antagonistic group identities.   Group identify is not diversity; it is just a kind of standoff.  The suburbs are now doing a better job of breaking down archaic group-think.  I suppose that sort of homogenization is one of the things that offends some people, but I prefer to interact with people, not “representatives.”   Rural areas tend to be less diverse, in my experience, because fewer people are moving in.

The advantage of the rural areas is space and I love to hike in the big natural areas and I really love MY forests, but absent those things, rural life holds few attractions for me.  The countryside is a place to get away to … and then get away from.  It is not a place I would like to live permanently.  We lived in Londonderry in New Hampshire, which was an interesting exurb.  It has the demographic characteristics of a suburb, but the density of a rural area along with a little bit of a small town. We lived in a kind of cluster development, which I found very pleasant.  I like to see my neighbors, but be able to leave them behind when I want to be alone.  This may be the blueprint for the community of the future.  You can have fairly dense development amid green fields connected to urban amenities.  

The old suburbs, where everybody has a rambler or ranch style house set on a half acre lot are soooo 1950s. The gritty urban environment is too unpleasant and the countryside is too vast.  Put them together, and you have something nice.  I guess that is why I am happy where I am now in Fairfax. Of course, I will be keeping my eyes open for something better.   That is the American way.

Speaking of that, Pew has an article about the middle class (available here) and I read the Economist special report on the growing global middle class (here).   The middle class is also much maligned by the cool ones.  They used to call us bourgeois.   But when you think about it, most of the good values come from the middle class. The poor are too screwed and screwed up to think about the better things in life and the rich are too spoiled and effete to care. 

A good series of articles about suburbs is at this link.  

This middle class guy in the suburbs is feeling okay. A lot depends on not on the location or the life station but on the person.   No matter what how much you make or where you go, you have to live with yourself.  If you don’t like the company, you are out of luck.

Posted by Broadnax at 04:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don’t acquire as much collectible stuff as some people. I was thinking about how I have almost nothing left from my posts in Brazil, Norway or Poland. Then I started to think that I don’t have much from anyplace else in general. 

It is not that I just don’t keep things. I keep things that I regularly use.  Chrissy gives me a hard time that I rarely buy new clothes.  I really see the need to replace something until it wears out. Pictures of me from years ago show this. Once when traveling to Germany, the border guard questioned my passport photo.  Since I got that passport, I had grown older, grown a beard and cut my hair much shorter. He looked up again.  “Okay, same eyes and same necktie,” he laughed.  

I don’t think I have anything left over from Brazil. That was a long time and several moves ago.  We have a few things from Norway.  We have a cheese cutter, a print of the building where the Norwegian Constitution was signed and a wooden bowl made by my colleague Leif Somerseth, who made them from burls on some birch trees at his mountain cabin. (The wooden bowl is pictured above. I tossed in my two pieces of the Berlin Wall and that is where they have resided ever since.)  We were in Poland twice can more recently, so we have a little more from there.  I have a framed antique map of Poland, a reproduction sword, some prints and some wood carvings. 

But the most useful thing we have is a set of Boleslawiec ceramics. We should have bought more of it. They were practically giving this stuff away when we first got to Poland.  You could get a whole set for around $10.  Now a single plate costs that much or more.  Unfortunately, it is a wasting resource, i.e. pieces are breaking and one day they will all be gone.  I don’t think we should just save or preserve them.  It was made to be used and use it we do. In many ways, the experience with the thing is more important than the thing itself.

I never understood those guys who collect things unopened in their original packaging.   IMO, the value comes from its use and using it adds the personal value. The things I still have from Poland or Norway are not things I just bought. They are things people gave to me or things that came from some experience. Their value doesn’t come from the thing itself, but from associations and experience surrounding it. Things you keep should have a back story, one of your own, not just a vicarious one or some ersatz tale created by a salesman or marketing department.

You probably don’t need too much stuff in general and keeping in mind the real back story helps slow the mindless accumulation.  

Posted by Broadnax at 04:22 PM | Permalink

Espen at George Mason

Espen went off to school this year. It is sad for Chrissy and me not to have him around all the time, although we are happy that he is not far away at George Mason University.    He comes home a lot, but we sometimes don’t see much of him anyway, since we are generally awake during the day while he is sort of nocturnal.  

Experiments in sleeping 

He is trying a sleep experiment over the Christmas break.  His idea is to go to bed a couple hours later and sleep later every day until he moved completely around the clock and can wake up fully rested early in the morning in time to go back to school. It should work. It is much easier to go to bed later than to wake up earlier and I read that this moving around the clock is one way they use to cure insomnia. He has fallen off the discipline recently, however, since he has been going out with his friends.

Studying computers & interning at Lockheed

Espen is studying computer engineering.  He has to take a lot of hard classes, but there is strong job growth for those who make it through.  He had a paid internship at Lockheed-Martin working on their computer systems last summer and will probably get the job back next year.    That will probably be as important to his future prospects as what he learns in school.  They also got him a security clearance, which is very valuable for jobs around here with government and government contractors. 

Alex starts at JMU via NOVA

Alex will be going to James Madison University in January and starting as a junior. His is a real turn-around story. He was an unenthusiastic student and wasn’t ready for college when he graduated HS. It was hard for Chrissy and me not to push him in, but I remembered my own early college experience.  I wasn’t emotionally ready to go and I didn’t study and managed to achieve a 1.67 GPA in my freshman year. Alex found a decent job at Home Depot, which both helped him with his basic discipline and made him see the value of formal education. He started to go to Northern Virginia Community College and eased into higher education part time, soon studying hard and getting good grades.  

Valuable experience at Home Depot

It might have been better for him to wait until fall semester to start at JMU. He has been doing very well at Home Depot, working hard and getting some of the respect and opportunity that comes from doing a good job. I think it would be good for learn some more useful skills. He has been scheduling contractors and working with appliances and fixtures.  This experience is worth a lot in the real world, but I understand that he is impatient to get on with the next steps in his life. I will miss him.  We have been attending Smithsonian lectures together. Unfortunately, I think that has made him even more eager to get to JMU. He is usually by far the youngest person in the audience and he feels life is passing too fast.

Following in my historical footsteps

Alex likes history and that is what he probably will study at JMU. Studying history is not directly applicable to any particular career but it is a great general background for life. My history MA has been as useful as my MBA, although it doesn't tend to impress hiring managers as much. I think there is a big difference between rigorously studying history and just coasting along.  Alex really tries to understand.

Mariza working at Travelers'

Mariza is still working at Travelers’ Insurance in Baltimore.  She is an insurance adjuster for environmental claim, which means asbestos, mold, oil spills & sewage - all the fun stuff. Most the clients are firms and it is usually third party liability. A lot of these things are subject to interpretation.   Of course most of the claims are legitimate, but she also has to deal with hypochondriacs who probably really believe that they were made sick by various things and predatory lawyers who prey on insurance companies, firms and putative victims alike.

New apartment not far away

She moved to a new apartment last summer, not far from her old one. It is a cheaper and she doesn’t have to share with roommates. Mariza was the de-facto property manager in his former apartment.  It was hard for her to get him sometimes lackadaisical and deadbeat roommates to cough up the cash for rent. The landlord did the old “joint and several” lease, whereby every individual was responsible for the whole rent every month. Mariza’s roommates had a higher tolerance for risking eviction and/or bad credit and that is how she got stuck trying to herd the cats and get them to pay up.

Baltimore has some nice neighborhoods

Baltimore is a very nice city, if a bit uneven in its attractiveness.   There are some very distinctive sections that are almost like towns within the city. Mariza used to live on Bolton Hill, which was an area of nice old building, some being renovated. She lives in Mount Vernon now, dominated by an interesting monument to George Washington. It also has some of the spillover of students from Johns Hopkins University. Nearby, however, are some very gritty and dangerous looking places.  Espen and I drove through one area after dropping Mariza off. We noticed some really little kids just hanging around and it reminded Espen of a Dave Chappelle skit you can watch it at this link if you are not offended by colorful language.

Chrissy doing HR at Department of Labor

Chrissy is doing well at the Department of Labor. She got an award this year and will probably get her promotion next year.   The Civil Service is not like the Foreign Service. Our ranks follow us personally not matter what job we do. The FS system has its disadvantages, but the rank-in-person allows us to take a wide variety of jobs. The all important arbiter in the GS system is the position description. Chrissy spends a lot of her time analyzing and assessing job descriptions. It is, unfortunately, almost impossible to reward well-performing individuals. Managers have to rewrite their job descriptions or move them to new positions. They are not supposed to do that just to reward employees and that is the problem Chrissy often faces. She has to keep them to the rules. 

Mine safety is serious business

Her section deals with mines and mine safety and Chrissy gets to travel around to do job fairs and recruitment.    Given the nature of mining, these fairs tend not to be in the large and sophisticated metro areas.  They have a lot to do in West Virginia and rural Pennsylvania, for example.  The mine inspector program has a diversity problem that upsets some of the leadership.   Given the location of most mines and nature of the industry, people with significant mining experience tend to be white and male.   Also given the life-and-death nature of mine safety, you cannot fake or fudge this experience as you can in many other jobs.    

On top of all that, inspecting mines is a physically difficult and demanding task.  All this means that “achieving diversity” is a daunting task, which is why they do job fairs in places like El Paso and Puerto Rico.

Federal hiring process is confusing 

It is hard to get jobs in the Federal government, hard because of the arcane and Byzantine system they use for most recruitment. They system is designed to be perfectly fair and perfectly transparent, but because it tries to do these thing perfectly in theory it usually means that it is unfair and opaque in practice. It is a frustrating challenge for Chrissy a lot of the time.  But that is a story that she can tell, not me.

Public diplomacy moves to social media

My job had its ups and downs this year, but nothing spectacular. I wrote about some of the public diplomacy we helped do for President Obama’s appearances in Cairo and Ghana. IIP has really become a new media center and my colleagues are developing programs very nicely. I am getting a little concerned, in fact, that the new media is getting a little ahead of our capacity to use it effectively in public diplomacy. In the last couple of weeks, I have had the chance to work with FSI to develop training in social media for decision-makers. We are hoping to make this a policy level course, not just a how-to but a why-do. It is too easy to get beguiled by what we think we can do w/o asking what we are trying to accomplish and what tools are most appropriate. I have appropriated the poetic phrase that we must not let our new media reach exceed our public diplomacy grasp.

Our reach exceeds our grasp

I worry that the ubiquity and easiness of new media will convince us Washington that we can reach overseas and influence far-away audiences with a one-size-fits-all strategy.  We really need the on-the-ground presence and expertise. There is no such thing as a world brand or a strategy that works all over the place.  The strength of our FS is that we can be decentralized and near the “customers,” responding to local cultures and nuances. But this kind of work looks plodding compared to the excitement of the new media. It is tempting to go direct.  We tried to bypass our posts in the 1990s.  In many ways, the dot.com debacle was like the new media craze. We unilaterally dismantled a lot of our networks in the late 1990s and paid the price later. I hope we don’t do that again and I will do my best to prevent it.

Back overseas for me ... in 2011

I suppose I do have a dog in that fight. I agreed to go back overseas, back to Brazil.  I will be public affairs officer there with lots of up-close, hands-on opportunities.  I won’t be going until summer of 2011, so there is a lot of time to prepare.  I haven’t keep up much with Brazil, so I have some catching up to do but I am looking forward to it.  My favorite issues relate to economics, environment & Energy and those are the crucial ones in Brazil. I will also be glad to have some line duties again. The Wall Street Journal has a Portuguese version. I have been reading it for the past couple days and can still do it reasonably well. I don’t think it will be too hard to take it up again.

All things considered, not bad

It has been a good year for us, all things considered. Both boys took the next big steps in their lives, but I didn’t see any major turning points and we end this year as we might have expected at the start. Of course, you often don’t see the big changes as they happen.  They are clearly evident only later and when you look back you cannot believe you didn’t know at the time.  Maybe there is something like that. We go into the new year grateful for the blessing of the present and optimistic about the future.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

People are more likely to pay attention to threats of loss than they are to possible gains. That is why the news is full of stories of loss and destruction, now and even worse predicted in the future. Of course, it is also just the nature of news. Good things often evolve over a long time. Bad things are usually more dramatic. But even during our “hard times” life is good compared to other times and places.

Nostalgia is a great thing. Our minds get clouded by time and eventually even bad things start to look okay. Survivor bias is also at work. The things from the “good old days” that manage to survive today were often of better value in the first place.

We remember that everything was cheap in the old days, but we forget that we made a lot less money. One of the ways to equalize this is to look at how long it takes to earn the money to buy things you want. I read an article that made that comparison.

Most things get cheaper with better quality

For example, in 1958 a color TV cost 136.34 hours of work at the average wage. Today a similar TV costs only 19.08 hours. Of course, today’s television is a lot better in terms of picture and reliability. Back in 1958 nobody could have afforded to buy the kind of quality you can get now by working a little more than 19 hours.

A person living in middle class prosperity back in 1958 would be considered poor today in terms of the quality and quantity of what he could buy.

Malaria cases way down

Another piece of good news I found on the inside pages of the WSJ was that fears of global warming and disease spreading notwithstanding, malaria is declining, according to the World Health Organization.  It even looks like H1H1 is not as bad as we thought.

Predictions of dooms past seem funny today, but they scared people back in the day

I am old enough to have survived predicted ends of the world several times. We survived the nuclear Armageddon in the 1960s. In the 1970s we overcame global cooling. The population bomb didn’t destroy us in the 1980s and we didn’t notice the near complete depletion of resources that the experts told us was coming. While we didn’t quite enjoy the end of history and the collapse of communism as much as we thought in the 1990s, the predicted vast refugee crisis didn’t materialize, Y2K didn’t destroy our information society and Internet in general didn’t shut down for lack of connectivity. Oh yeah, acid rain didn't kill all our forests and lakes. Terrorism is indeed a problem in this decade, but we seem to have adapted reasonably well and compared to the apocalyptic predictions, we feel lucky to remain alive, healthy and so well-off.

When our kids look back fifty years from now, how funny will some of the things we worry about today seem to them? I know - ours is the worst hard time. Yeah, yeah, that's what we said back then too. They may talk about the good old days and how things were so much better for us. But like us, they will know that they have it better than their parents.

BTW - one of my favorite poems is the Second Coming by William Butler Yeats - written in 1919, when things really were a lot worse. 

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Posted by Broadnax at 09:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Chrissy got the idea to make a kind of glittering Christmas tree with mirrors and glitter to reflect the light.  She made the glittery snowflakes herself.

The tree is a Frasier fir.  Alex picked it out at Home Depot.  I brought a tree up from the farm when we first got it, but loblolly pines don't make good Christmas trees.  They drop the needles very fast and they are not very bushy.  They grow fast, which makes them good timber trees, but that means that they have long growth branches.  Christmas trees are usually trimmed to make them fuller.  It tried that, but it didn't work with my trees.  It is easier just to go to Home Depot.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Up until this year the landscapers around our housing complex have been busy with their noisy leaf blowers and stinky mowers, this year not so much.  In fact, they more or less left the strip in back of our house alone and let the leaves pile up.  This is very good and you can see the evidence of that in the pictures.  

We got a lot of rain this season and the ground is saturated. This has always meant erosion the water runs rapidly off the roofs of the houses and down the narrow channel in back. The shadows of the houses and trees make it hard to grow grass and grass has trouble standing up to the fast water flow. (In the pictures you see the lilyturf and ivy I planted a couple years ago to at least hold the ground in back of our house. That does well in this environment, but in back of the other houses there is mostly just dirt.)  W/o the leaves on the ground, the water running off is full of silt, but the leaves both protect the ground and absorb some of the water.

Storm water is a big and growing problem in Fairfax County because of all the hard surfaces. It erodes the stream beds and messes up the Chesapeake Bay.  Sometimes our excessive commitment to tidiness exacerbates the problem.  Most homeowners are unenthusiastic about water standing near their houses and they quickly sweep up leaves.  This "virtue" is hard on the water systems.

See the utility box in the picture below. Before I put in that ground cover, there was a big rut almost a foot deep running along both sides of that thing. The plants have raised the ground level, by trapping silt. They will completely cover the ground by the end of next year.  If the whole back was covered in plants most storm water would soak in and very little would run off at all.

The lesson I take is that you are often better off letting things alone.   There have been lots of proposals to try to make the grass grow (impossible in the shade), put in drains (expensive, bad for the environment because it accelerates runoff), put in rocks (ditto) or mulch the whole thing (not bad, but mulch tends to wash away a lot easier than leaves), but the best thing to do may be almost nothing.

The best thing to do would be to put in some kind of ground cover, actually make the whole thing into a long rain garden.  (I wrote about this kind of thing before) In time, it would establish a strong root system that would both trap sediment and help water soak in. It would be a little work at first but then very low maintenance.  It took me a day to put in that in the pictures ground cover and I got it all free just by taking what Chrissy thinned out from the front of the house, but I can't and wouldn't be allowed to put it in back of the other sixteen houses along this way. So the next best thing to do is nothing, or maybe just resist any attempts to "fix" the problem at home owner association meetings, unless we are talking about rain gardens.  Maybe I should develop a proposal for a rain garden. I volunteered to help start a landscape committee a couple months ago, but still have no interest or authorization from the board. I suppose I should bring it up again.

So absent that, sometimes doing nothing, or at least not much is the best thing.  All I know is that I have been watching this water flow for a ten years, trying with limited success to stop the dirt from running off.  Now the lackadaisical response to the fallen leaves have done the job for me.  

Posted by Broadnax at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We will be spending less on TARP than we thought.   It is estimated that TARP will end up costing the taxpayers $200 billion less than was first thought, as financial institutions have recovered faster than anticipated and are paying the money back faster.    TARP turned out to be a sound investment.  Let’s keep it that way by not throwing away the dividends we didn’t really get.

Unfortunately many in our great nation have fallen for a fallacy about money and they are being encouraged in their error by dishonest politicians trying to expand the dependency of people on government largess.  

Trick accounting bankrupts people; don't let government do it

The fallacy involved is thinking that money you saved by not spending it is necessarily money you have in hand.   It is a common fallacy and is a contributing factor to making individuals and families poor.  It is the man who buys a car he cannot afford because he got a good deal.   Instead of understanding that he to borrow $30,000, instead he counts that he has “saved” $10,000 because it “would have cost” more.   His initial error is compounded when - flush with his $10,000 “windfall savings” - he continues to spend money he doesn’t have. 

 This kind of systematic error is part of prospect theory and behavioral economics. Cass Sunstein , President Obama’s regulation advisor, has written an excellent book on these nudges.  There is a lot of thinking going on about this.  One would hope that we will not be so easily fooled this time.

C&J learned this lesson when as a young couple they planned a vacation they couldn’t afford.  We were smart enough to understand it was too much money, but then fell into the phantom money saved trap by going on a cheaper vacation that we still couldn’t afford, secure in the false knowledge that we were being virtuous by saving money.  

A penny saved is not a penny earned if you just blow it

It is even worse with borrowed money and since we are running the biggest deficits in human history, ALL the money we are talking about is borrowed money.    Saving $200 billion just means we have to borrow $200 billion less.  It doesn’t mean we have found $200 billion to spend.

We even have heard some really stupid calls to give the money “back” to the people.   What does this even mean?    The government would borrow the money.   Isn’t this how we got into the financial mess in the first place?  Too many people were borrowing money and giving to themselves w/o remembering or w/o caring that borrowed money is not free money.

Let’s not let get fooled again

Maybe $200 billion doesn’t sound like much when you already have a $1.4 TRILLION deficit, but it is real money and it is not FOUND money.  Politicians may indeed decide to BORROW and spend more, but let’s not be deceived about what they are doing or let them bribe us with our own money.  

A politician who uses phrases like "TARP funds have been freed up" or "we can spend the $200 billion we 'saved'” is lying to us and using an easily identified judgment flaw to try to trick us.  Surely we are smarter than that.   Didn’t the last couple years teach us anything about living on the credit card?

Posted by Broadnax at 05:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I started listening to audio-books back in 1985. My audio-book consumption started about the time the format became widely useful. I moved from cassettes through CDs and to I-pods and listened to thousands of books I would not have read. Audio-books make long drives productive and often even enjoyable.  

There are advantages and disadvantages to any medium. A big disadvantage to the audio format is that it is hard to go back and forth, so if you miss something it tends to stay missed.  You cannot really study, as you can with a book. Audio also reinforces or enables one of my intellectual weaknesses.  I have a decent memory for data but not for sources.  I tend to mix knowledge promiscuously.   It is especially bad on I-pods.  I sometimes just launch a book w/o even listening to the title or author.  I could never write a research book because I could never footnote.   

On the other hand, I tend to listen to more parts of a book.   With a standard book I often skim through or skip parts I don’t like.  I don’t bother doing that with an audio-book.   Sometimes I buy the audio version of a book I have read or buy the book that goes with an audio version.  That gives the best of both worlds, but it is only worth doing for something really worth knowing.

One of the books that influenced me the most was “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.”I know some people are sensitive about admitting the read self-help books.Not me.I needed the help and that was a good book for it.All of it is common sense but not commonly known or followed.I read the book when it first came out in 1989 and then I got the audio version.I don’t think it would have made such an impression on my w/o the audio version.

For a couple of years I was a regular customer of Blackstone Audio Books.  They were unabridged rental books.  I drove around Southern Poland listening to the books.  I did a series of lectures in Bielsko, which was around a two hour drive from Krakow.  I made the drive once a week. I remember listening to an audio-book call "Novus Ordo Seclorum" about the Constitutional debates.  James Madison & Alexander Hamilton were prominently featured. It was funny that when I went to visit James Madison's house I kept on having memories of Poland.  I also thought of driving in Poland while listening to another audio-book "Hamilton" by Ron Chernov.  These things happened ten years after.  My memory was cross referencing.

Lately I have been buying courses from “the Teaching Company.”  They are college lectures, each about 45 minutes long.   This is ideal for the Metro trip.  But you don’t even have to buy lectures sometimes.  Lots of universities are putting courses on line for free.  I just downloaded Donald Kagan’s history of ancient Greece.   It is mostly review, so I can just let it play as I walk along noisy streets.  The only problem with the free college lectures is that they tend to be actual live lectures.  They are not delivered with the same alacrity of a narrator concentrating on making a recording.

The narrator style and voice make a big difference. There are some narrators I recognize. For example, I listened to a couple of books by Simon Winchester.  He writes a kind of science-based history. I liked “Krakatoa” so I got another of his books about the San Francisco earthquake of 1905.  I was pleased to have the same narrator.  They guy had a nice British accent and good voice quality.  I had a less happy experience with Thomas Cahill.  Actually it was good three out of four times.  He had some excellent books, such as “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” “Desire of the Everlasting Hills” (re early Christianity) Sailing the Wine Dark Seas” (re ancient Greeks) and “Gift of the Jews.”  The last of the group had a female narrator.   Her pitch was wrong.   It was very hard to hear and understand her with traffic or metro noise in the background.  Narrators need lower and stronger voices.   The problem was that “Gift of the Jews” was a good book, better than “Sailing the Wine Dark Seas,” but the narrator got in the way.

An unwelcome development from my point of view is the increase in video. You cannot use video while driving and it generally requires full attention, which I often do not want to give. Many of the courses from the Teaching Company are available only in video format. 

Audio-books have given me the equivalent of separate college educations.  I am sure I spent more total time listening to audio-books than I spent in college and I bet I have spent more money on them over the years.  It was worth it.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

People say that like it is a bad thing.   In fact, the ability to put a price on most things is the basis of most of our prosperity.   It also reduces or even eliminates many conflicts and just makes everything work smoother. A lot of blood has been shed over “priceless” things, but any problem you can buy your way out of is not longer a problem; it is just an expense.

People have a strange way of disparaging thing they want the most and talk obliquely about them.   For example, when somebody says, “you cannot put a price on that” he usually means that the price offered is too low.  When he says, “Nobody should have to pay for that” he usually means that he wants somebody else to pay for it for him.  

Something for Nothing

Everybody likes to get something for nothing (or at least for not too much.)  We wince when we think about the venality of some of our interactions, but it is just part of human nature.   Actually, it is part of nature in general.   Animals implicitly calculate the amount of effort expended for a particular payoff.   Lions go after the zebras or wildebeests that are easiest to catch and they chase their prey only so far.  After that, it is not worth the effort.   And the king of beasts is happiest when he can find a fresh carcass that he doesn’t have to chase at all, i.e. get something for nothing. That’s nature.

What is it Worth? 

The most important part of a price is the information it contains.  The price tells you whether it is worth the effort.   It also tells you how much effort others would put in making or getting this thing.  It allows you to compare and make choices about disparate things and forms a judgment on the relative effectiveness of various producers.  All this is Econ 101, but it bears repeating since we often forgot why prices are good.

BTW - I have been watching a good show called "Pawn Stars." I recommend watching that when thinking about the "true price" of anything.

Price’s role in conflict resolution is something we talk about less often but it is one of its most important functions.   Price can accomplish so much because it contains all that stuff mentioned in the paragraph above.   W/o price, these are things you would have to fight about.   To illustrate the role of price in conflict resolution, imagine a situation where two or more people want exactly the same thing and have determined it is priceless.   Those are the conditions where people come to blow and nations go to war.

Think of the rare heirloom from grandpa that all the grandchildren want and think is theirs by prior right.   They can all come up with endless credible arguments as to why it should be theirs.   Put a reasonable price on the thing and the conflict usually drains away, as most of the heirs decide they really didn’t want it that much and/or something else is more valuable to them.

Something Beyond Price, or Just a Price Range

Of course, there are some things we really would not put a price on, but fewer than we like to admit.   I am telling the truth when I tell people that I don’t want to sell my forest land, but my statement is valid only within an implicit price range.   I am not exactly sure what that range is.  I know  a price I would accept  is currently significantly more than I am likely to be offered, which I why I can make my “not selling” statements with such moral certainty.   But I think if someone offered me $1 million an acre, I would  take it.

There is joke (I think it is from Groucho Marx) that illustrates the price dilemma:  This guy asks a woman if she would sleep with him for $1 million.  After a little thought, she says she would.   He says, “How about $10?”  To which she indignantly replies, “Sir, what do you think I am?”   The guy says, “We have established what you are; now we are haggling over the price.” 

You Can't Sell That

It is precisely our human “price flexibility” that makes it necessary to have some laws about things that cannot be sold.  No matter what the price, you cannot self yourself into slavery, for example.  Society does this not only because slavery is odious or even to protect the person selling, but rather defends the whole concept of freedom and takes it out of the negotiation/price world.   I think most people support this kind of limit on choice, but we need to be careful not to go far in proclaiming too many things off limits.  Things w/o a price often tend to get abused. 

I recently read a series of articles about the art world.   Art is one of those places where you have a lot of price confusion.  Much of the price is based on fashion and capricious opinion. Artists put a lot of their personality into their works and usually pompously over-value it.   And many people get positively indignant about prices that are too high, too low or anything else.   But price may be more important in the art world than in many other places.    Simply stated: price preserves both art and artists.

Price Preserves Art

One article talked about Chinese art.  Now that some Chinese have piles of money and Western currencies to burn, Chinese art has risen in value.  Some complain that it was undervalued in the past and that Western collectors were able to buy it up at a fraction of what it was worth.   This is a fairly meaningless statement, BTW, because it is worth what somebody will pay for it.   Today it is worth more.  That’s it.  But there is another permutation. 

During the bad old days of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, traditional Chinese art was often worse than worthless within China.   The Communists made a special effort to denigrate and destroy what they considered symbols of decadence and oppression.    Much of the Chinese art now being “repatriated” would have been lost of destroyed had it not been “plundered” by Western collectors at a time when the people on the ground didn’t value it.

Think of the terrible case of the Tailban destroying those giant Buddahs, because they were an offense to their fundamental interpretation of Islam.  If the British had "plundered" them, they would still exist.

Unappreciated Ancient Civilizations 

The same goes for a lot of the art of ancient Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia.   I know this provokes strong emotions, accusations of insensitivity and even expressions of outrage, but if you look at the historical record, it was British, French and German archeologists who essentially brought the ancient world back to the places where it had been and had been forgotten.   The current inhabitants didn’t know much and cared less about the world of antiquity and usually saw archeological sites merely as places to dig up valuables or convenient places to steal bricks or rocks for new construction.   

There is a legitimate dispute whether those ancient artifacts now housed in museums in Berlin, Paris, London or New York were plundered or saved.    I think it is clear that had those things not been preserved in those museums, most would have ended up lost, part of somebody’s retaining wall or – at best – in some rich guy’s private collection.

Anyway, it is a good thing that these things had a price and that somebody was willing to pay it. The Rosetta stone could have easily become pavement on the road to Cairo, which illustrates another benefit of price.  It tends to put things into the hands of those who want or can use them the most.  The Rosetta stone was laying around for more than two thousand years and nobody bothered to try a translation until it got into the hands of someone who cared.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Delusional

I got an interesting comment on a post I wrote a year ago.  Goes to show how things live on once posted to the Internet.   The commenter said that I was delusional, full of myself and a con artist.   I admit that I was a little taken aback.  I can understand the delusional and full or myself accusations, but con artist just doesn’t make any sense.  The guy didn’t like what I wrote about nature and how I mange my forest lands.  You can read the original post and his comment at this link.  I admit that I chose a provocative title and I guess it provoked ... eventually.   I invited this guy to write 500 words rebutting me and I promised to post it. I doubt anything will come of it.

People sometimes send comments directly to me, which I don’t publish.  I publish almost anything else anybody sends in, but I don’t get too many complaints or comments in general.  

My Audience & Editorial Policy

The “delusional” comment made me think about my “editorial policy”.  I don’t really have one.  I write the blog mostly for my friends and relatives.  I know I have acquired some “online” friends and I am grateful for their continued support.  The statistics tell me that we get around 600 visitors on a good day, but most are just from search engines hitting on some of the pictures.  I figure only that only a couple of dozen people regularly read what I write.  During my time in Iraq I know that some families of the PRT & USMC colleagues read the blog for general information about the situation their loved ones faced in Anbar.  I am glad that I could provide that service.  I suppose most of them have wandered off now that I am out of Iraq.   Given the personalized, idiosyncratic nature of my interests and all things considered, I don’t have a “general” audience.

But let’s get to the question of editorial policy.  There is a valid question about how comprehensive, balanced or fair any writer should be.  Some people worry about this, but it is not something I struggle with.  I am honest and try to be as accurate as I can.   But I feel absolutely no obligation to be fair, balanced or comprehensive.   Mine is only a miniscule contribution to a very large whole, one piece of a very large puzzle.  Presumably those looking for a variety of views will gather mine along with a lot of others and make up their own minds.   

I think that is a good policy for a blogger who writes for nothing and doesn’t promote his blog.

I believe in pluralism.  We need to have a lot of ideas put forward and tested against each other.  Our goals should NOT be to achieve consensus or hold each other accountable, beyond the basic imperatives to be honest, remain reasonable and stay reasonably civil. We should also not try to clip our ideas to fit the sensibilities of others.  That is the good thing about pluralism.  You don’t have to be inclusive. Those who are offended can go someplace else where they feel appreciated, not merely tolerated.  That is all I can offer.  

Do Not Block the Way to Inquiry

We need to express our idea AND be willing to accept criticism.   Everybody is entitled to his/her opinion but nobody is bound to respect them.   Too much respect won’t help us find useful truth. Conflicts, corrections, experimentation and restatements are how we come closer to truth. We never get to possess THE truth, BTW, but we will get closer to useful knowledge.  (THE truth has no meaning outside religion.) Building knowledge is an iterative process.  We try something, learn something, adjust and try again.  This goes for individuals, organizations and societies.   “Do not block the way to inquiry,” is what the philosopher Charles Saunders Pierce said and he was right.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Thanksgiving Turkey

The kids are back for Thanksgiving and it is nice to have them home.  We had the usual turkey dinner, probably for the last time.  I don’t mean this is our last time together (hope not) but we decided that nobody really likes turkey that much.  Next year we will have something else.  My favorite parts of the meal are the potatoes and stuffing with some corn on top. 

We see wild turkeys down at the farm.  I read that they are elusive.  They don’t see very elusive, just dumb.  Sometimes they just wander onto the road.   The return of the wild turkey is one of those unlikely ecological success stories.   They were rare just a generation ago.  Some experts said they could never come back in large numbers because they required larger ranges than they could have in a settled modern countryside.  Turns out that nature is much more adaptive than that and that turkeys can live and prosper in close contact with settled civilization.  

Taking a Different Way

My walk down 23^rd St. from Foggy Bottom Metro to the State Department is less pleasant than the trip I used to make along the Smithsonian.  The sidewalks are a little narrow and you have to jostle with lots of other pedestrians.  There also seems a surplus of smokers getting in their last drag on the way to work.  It stinks up the sidewalk, even in the open air.

But it is easy to avoid this.  All I have to do is walk one block down.  It is quiet and uncrowded.  It adds less than five minutes to the trip.  Sometimes solutions are easy.  

But it still isn’t as nice as Smithsonian walk.  One of the little things nice about walking along the Mall is the tactile and auditory pleasure of walking on a firm gravel path.

Nutty as a Fruitcake

I don’t know why so many people make fun of Christmas fruitcakes.  I like them and I am happy to see them on the store shelves this time of year.  They are packed with nuts and packed with calories, so I have to be careful not to eat too much, however.

Maple Leaf

The Japanese maple in the front yard turns differently each fall.    The leaves tend to hang on well into the cold weather, but the colors are different.  I suppose it depends on the weather and when the first hard frost comes.  A couple years ago we got an early frost that killed the leaves before they were ready to let go.  The colors weren’t very nice, but some of the leaves persisted until they were pushed off by the new growth in the spring. This year was cool and rainy, but we haven’t had a hard frost yet.   I think that is why the tree is such a bright red this year.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My mother was born on this day in 1923.  I never got to know my mother after I was an adult.  She died when I was seventeen.  So my memories are seen through the eyes of a child or at best a teenager.  The one thing that I remember very clearly was that I was always sure that she loved me. Everything else is less important after that and I know that she shaped a lot of my character.

As I wrote above, I didn’t get to know my mother as much as I would have liked to and I am astonished at how much I don’t remember or maybe never knew. Kids are rarely interested in their parents’ life stories until they get older, maybe because they just cannot believe their parents were ever young enough to have anything to say. Besides, kids in my generation spent most of their time outside and away from the house.  Parents and children have much more intense relationships these days, if for no other reason than that they are together when parents drive the kids everywhere and arrange various teams, trainings and activities.  We didn't have a car and we didn't belong to any organized activities. I spent most of my days hanging around outside with my friends who lived nearby and I didn’t ask much.

I know she was born Virginia Johanna Haase (Mariza has her middle name). Her father was Emil and her mother was Anna (Grosskreutz).  She grew up on the South Side of Milwaukee and married my father after the war. Of her childhood, I know little. Her father was an engineer who remained employed throughout the Great Depression, which was evidently a rare achievement. She was an unenthusiastic student in HS and dropped out in the tenth grade, but she always encouraged education for my sister and me.  She worked at Allen Bradley during WWII but not long enough to get Social Security benefits.  After she married my father, she no longer did any paying work, besides occasionally free-lance catering with her sisters.  My mother made really good German potato salad, which was always in demand at family gatherings.

Ma was phenomenally good natured and I remember her always being cheerful.  My father told me that he was lucky to get my mother to marry him, since she was extremely popular because of her open personality.  She later became a woman of substance, as you can see in the bottom picture.  My father was fond of big women, so I guess they had a good thing going.  

My father enjoyed beer, but Ma drank only a little.  She had one bottle of Gordon's Gin in the downstairs refrigerator. She had a drink at Christmas and that bottle was down there as long as I remember, only gradually emptying.  It was still half full when she died.

Sad to say that my most vivid memories are from the end of my mother's life.  I was riding my bike up to the Kettle Moraine State forest when my mother went into the hospital for the last time.  It was a big trip that I had planned for some time.  My parents kept my mother’s urgent condition from me so as not to ruin it.  When I called from the pay phone at the lake, my father told me that ma was sleeping.  I thought that was odd, but didn’t think that much about it. When I got home she had gone to the hospital.  I never saw her again.

We talked on the phone, but my mother didn’t want us to visit her in the hospital during the last days. I feel a little guilty about that, but it was a good decision. She wanted us to remember her from better times and I do indeed remember her healthy and happy instead of what I imagine it must have been after the chemotherapy and ravages of cancer.

My father got a call from the hospital about dawn on the day before she died. I heard him talking on the phone and infered what was happening, but didn’t come out of my room when he went to the hospital.  We didn’t handle the whole thing very well, but in retrospect I am not sure how it would have worked out any better if we did things differently. I lived in dread the whole day, but she didn’t die that day. I know it is illogical but I convinced myself that she would be out of the woods if she only survived the day.  

But miracle recoveries happen only on television & in the movies.  

They cut down the last of the big elm trees soon after Ma died. I thought it was symbolic and I paid special attention. She loved those trees and felt bad as they succumbed, one-by-one, to the Dutch elm disease.  The tree by the alley was the last survivor near the house, and Ma was happy to have at least one left.  It was in its yellow fall colors as I watched it fall to the ground.  It was a pleasant fall day with wispy clouds.

I don’t want to end on this sorrowful note because that is not the end of the story. Among many other things, my mother left me a special legacy. Ma followed my various interests and encouraged them. All I needed to do was mention an interest in something, and soon a book appeared about it.

I have to thank my mother for all the books on dinosaurs, ecology and history. Even more important, she gave me the gift of reading itself. A well organized or impressive child I was not, but my mother had confidence in me anyway in a way that only a loving mother can. My first grade teacher put me into the slow reading group and I lived up to the low expectations. My mother complained to the school, essentially arguing that I was not as dumb as I seemed and my problem was not that the reading challenge was too great, but that it was not great enough to hold my interest. She convinced my teacher to put me into a higher reading group. Although I couldn’t meet the lower standards, I could exceed the higher ones with Ma’s help. This kind of paradox is not uncommon.  I wonder how many kids w/o mothers as good as mine were/are trapped by the gentle cruelty of low expectations. Ma saved me from all that. She just expected me to succeed. I did, by my standards at least.

Thanks Ma. I wish you could have met the grandchildren.  They would have loved you.  

Please check out what I wrote for my father's birthday at this link. 

Posted by Broadnax at 01:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Most of the fathers in my neighborhood were veterans of World War II or Korea. I remember them mostly as middle aged guys with short haircuts, strong forearms and thick necks. They were like everybody else in our working-class neighborhood because they were the neighborhood. 

Non-veterans were rare.  We kids just assumed we would go into the military when we reached manhood.  But I grew up just at a turning point.  They stopped drafting young men the year before I turned 18.  The new volunteer military meant that fewer and fewer Americans had any experience with the military.  Many young people today don’t have any close friends or relatives with military experience.  They take their impressions from Hollywood, which exhibits a systemic negative bias toward the military these days. 

That is too bad.  Today’s military is extraordinarily impressive, but many of those who haven’t seen it up close lately are stuck in the old stereotypes. You hear the prejudice when people say that the military is full of poor people w/o other choices. In fact, the opposite is true.  75% of today’s young people are not qualified for military service because they are too fat, too weak, druggies, crooks or dropouts and studies show that the average soldiers or Marines are better in terms of education, health and general attitude than the average civilian Americans of their age.

Until not long ago when I thought of veterans, I still saw those old WWII guys I knew as a kid. There service was twenty years in the past by the time I knew them.  It was distant, almost legendary. Their sacrifices and those of their comrades were equally remote. The Vietnam vets were only a little older than I was, but that war got compartmentalized, with student protesters and hippies taking the starring roles leaving the military as supporting characters, portrayed as victims, villains or psychos.   (BTW – I think that is one reason why movies like “The Men Who Stare at Goats” or “Brothers” infuriate me so much.  I fear that Hollywood is doing to the heroes of Iraq and Afghanistan what they did to those of Vietnam.)  In both cases, they were isolated from my reality.

But on this Veterans’ Day I realize that my views of veterans have undergone a significant change.  It is not only because of my Iraq experience.  Some of it is generational.   I am now older than most veterans and many of the older veterans are nearly my contemporaries.   I am now seeing veterans not as fathers, but as sons.   That has made it more poignant and I have seen it closer.

The death that affected me most was that of PFC Aaron Ward. He was only nineteen and had been in Iraq less than two months when he was shot and killed on May 6, 2008 as he stretched his legs outside his vehicle in Hit (that is the city name).  I knew the place but I didn’t know him or anything about him until I attended the memorial service. His friends described him as a friendly guy who liked to lift weights and joke with friends. Like everyone in Iraq, he was a volunteer who had chosen to serve his country knowing that he would be deployed to a war zone.  He seems a great guy and at the same time an average guy who did the things nineteen year old guys do.  I thought of Espen and Alex and I thought of Ward’s parents. And so this Veteran’s Day and every Veterans Day until the day I die I will pause to remember Aaron Ward.

Brave men and women put their own lives on hold and their own lives at risk to protect ours.  We mourn the fallen, but we should think of our military as heroes, not victims. Most come back healthy and alive.  They bring with them the skills, discipline, maturity and experience from their service to our country defending our freedom. They serve in the military for some years. Then they serve as good citizens for the rest of their lives.  Like those veterans I remember from my Milwaukee childhood, first they defend the country and then they come back to build it and keep it healthy. They deserves the honor and respect we give them on Veterans’ Day and every day.

BTW - Please see my note from last Veterans' Day at this link. 

Posted by Broadnax at 07:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I used to daydream about how much better life would be if could go back in time with the knowledge I have now and make changes.  Used to.  My daydreaming was cut short by the anxiety about what I would lose. I couldn’t go back any farther than January 1991, for example.  Otherwise Espen wouldn’t be born.  Nothing could make up for that loss.  But even stipulating that would not be a factor, it still is problematic. 

The dangers & unintended consequences of using foreknowledge to change the future have been a part of literature since there has been literature.   It captures the human imagination, usually with the ironic twist that the very attempt to change the future is the catalyst that brings about the predicted outcome.

The farther back you go, the more small changes would have big and unexpected consequences.  There is no such thing as destiny.  Things did not have to develop the way they did in the past and the farther back you go the more leverage you would have, but you could never guarantee a better outcome.

It is probably a good thing that we fallible and conflicted humans cannot travel in time. But we can benefit from imagining the possibilities. Analyzing alternative possibilities in the past can allow us to make better decisions about the future. Thinking about what might have been is not a fruitless pastime for dreamers as long as you keep it in its place.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It might be a positive sign that there are more hate groups.  This is counter intuitive, but according what I learned at at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of active, affiliated “haters” has actually decreased while the number of groups has gone up.  That indicates a fragmentation of the hate culture.  Maybe some people are ostensibly members of several groups and not committed to any. In the 1920s, the KKK had an estimated 4 million members and was organized enough to influence politics at the state level.  Today there are fewer than 10,000 members, mostly unorganized losers. 

I didn’t know that the Klan of the 1920s recruited most of its members by its anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant stance.  In other words, they hated people like my Polish-Catholic grandparents. That probably explains why the Klan was not strong in Wisconsin.

The speaker said that 6-10,000 hate crimes are reported each year.  Most of these crimes are now aimed at Latinos and immigrants.  Ironically, some of the perpetrators are urban blacks who fear that new immigrants are taking their jobs.  This is in many ways a repeat of the anti-immigrant ideas of generations ago and is evidently the hardy perennial of problems.

We have to be very careful in the “hate crime” designation.  It is a very broad category that can range from name-calling and vandalism to actual murder.  Even in cases of actual violence, the hate motivation is slippery.  Murder is always a crime of hate, whether or not those involved are ethnically similar.  And as in any broad distribution, the very serious instances get the most attention but are very rare.    In a classic case of vividness bias; we more easily recall extreme events and our imaginations turn to frightful images when we may have merely a more comprehensive definition or reporting.

It was much more dangerous in the past to stand up for civil rights in America than it is today and the Institute documented the history of the struggle, especially during the 1950s and 1960s.  There was a memorial listing the names of the forty people killed during those decades.   Alabama was in many ways the center of the struggle and the struggle was much more black and white and not only in terms of race.  When Martin Luther King led boycotts and marches, he was asking only for dignity that most of us agree that all humans deserve.  He was success precisely for this reason.   He appealed to the humanity, virtue and fundamental goodness of his opponents.  Some willing to use firehouses, dogs and worse against protesters, but most suffered pangs of morality.  Almost everybody could agree about what was right and wrong.

Non-violent methods work less well against jihadists or dictators willing or even eager to kill hundreds or thousands of innocent people to make their points and maintain themselves in power.  In Rwanda, Bosnia, Congo or the unfortunately many other places, murder was/is done on a vast scale and individual voices are silenced before they can be heard, sometimes even when they are heard - and murders are seen in the media - as in the recent case of the Iranian elections the regime rolls on. That is the fundamental dilemma of pacifism.  It requires a fundamentally decent society in order to work. 

It has become a lot more complicated since then, which is why I think we often hearken back to those days when right and wrong were clearly defined.  Forty five years after the Civil Right legislation, it is much harder to know which side is right on debates on affirmative action, racial preferences or even – especially – immigration.  The people as the Southern Poverty institutes talked more about immigration than anything else.  Maybe it was just because of the nature of our questions, but I suspect that the direction has indeed turned.

IMO, immigration is much more nuanced and problematic as a civil rights issue.  Good people can disagree about fundamental values.  Of course, individual immigrants are entitled to civil rights and human dignity.  But the act of immigration is not a right and an immigrant who enters the country illegally has committed a crime, no matter what we consider the motivations. A country is also entitled to design its immigration laws as it sees fit. 

I am generally in favor of immigration, since it strengthens the diversity of our country, but there are plenty of problems I do not want to import.  I don’t want immigration that encourages things like the Russian mafia, human trafficking or drugs.  Most people would agree with me on the broad direction, but some of the details of procedures and laws would work against this.  And clever reading of rules can provide “rights” to some pretty bad people in situations that good people might not have envisioned.  I would hate to see the definition of hate expanded to encompass vigorous debate about immigration.

The discussion of immigration inevitably turned to race.  Most new immigrants are non-white, but race is not a necessary dominant factor.  The focus on race indicates a lack of historical understanding or perspective. There are plenty of reasons to advocate strict immigration rules that have nothing to do with race. I remember when our rejection rate in Poland was over half and as I mentioned above the KKK disliked Polish-Catholics.  It just now happens that no European countries now have the growing populations that export people, so that is no longer an issue. The problem with immigration is that immigrants bring different values and often create economic dislocation. Most people want SOME change; not many people want comprehensive change.  There is nothing wrong with wanting to keep change manageable or even not wanting much of it at all.  America is a great country.  It makes sense to be careful when changing a good thing, since usually more things can go wrong than go right.

Frankly I don’t want my country to become more like most countries I have visited in many ways. That is not saying we should just freeze in place.  A culture that doesn't change, dies.  I like the America of 2009 better than the America of 1969 in most ways. I just want us to get the best, not the worst of what the world offers.  We don't want to just open the doors and let whoever or whatever come.  It is our right to choose. That is why I want rights to remain attached to individuals, not activities, not groups.  If you protect the people, other legitimate things follow.  It doesn’t work the other way around.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In Chicago I stopped off to visit Bob McCarthy, the friend from Iraq, who is working with Marine reserve units in Wisconsin, Indiana and Illinois.  Bob made my stay in Iraq a lot more comfortable and rewarding.  We had lunch at a local Lebanese restaurant in the interesting transitional neighborhood near the Marine station.  There are Hispanic immigrants mixed with more recent arrivals from the Middle East, leavened with Hassidic Jews and some recent arrivals from Eastern Europe.  I think the waitress was Russian.  Only in America.

You can see in the picture below the twin moons in Chicago.  Bald is beautiful. Bob actually could grow hair if he wanted.  Interesting shirt.  Where do you even buy something like that?

Chicago is a lot like Milwaukee, only bigger, dirtier and more crowded.   It took a long time to get out of town because of the traffic jam and a lot of construction.  I don’t think this is anything unusual for Chicago.  You have to pay toll on Chicago area highways.  It cost me more than $5 to get through.  You would think that toll roads would be better maintained than the free variety, but you would be wrong.  I guess Chicago politics needs its patronage sources.   If you look at the picture I have included, you notice the sign “Half Day Road.”  It is very descriptive, since that is about as long as it takes to get out of Chicago.   I got clean across Ohio in the time it took to creep through a few dozen miles to get out of Chicago.

I finally got to Milwaukee in early evening.  I look forward to seeing family and doing the Milwaukee things.   That means walking around the old neighborhood, running on the trails in Grant and Warnimont and eating.  I have to go to Rocky Rococo, George Webb and Cousins Subs and I need my 1960s Schlitz beer and Rippin’ Good mint cookies.

A general shortage of mint chocolate has developed.  I have been having trouble finding ordinary mint chocolate and it has always been impossible to get the Rippin’ Good mint cookies outside Wisconsin.  The mint girl scout cookies are not really an adequate substitute.  

I don’t really like the Schlitz beer that much. I drink it out of homage to the old man.  This is supposed to be the original 1960s recipe.  The old man told me that Schlitz was good until the early 1970s, when they sped up the brewing process – replaced the braumeisters with chemists, according to the Old Man - and made it inconsistent. The old man changed to Pabst and soon Schlitz went out of business, acquired by Stroh’s.   The building where for almost a century they brewed the “beer that made Milwaukee famous” is now upscale condos.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)