Contraria

Veterans Day

2011-11-21T20:03:00.000-05:00

When did Veterans Day get to be a big deal? When did it get to be any deal? Because it certainly was this year.

I am a veteran (Lt. (jg) USNR), but as my service was during the Vietnam era both my service and the reactions of others to it were measured, or perhaps a better word is conflicted. In the days when returning veterans were probably spat upon in Oakland the service was something I had done and wanted behind me.

My sense is that the excesses of those days have engendered a reaction some 40 years later. People of all stripes seem to be more appreciative of the service of the young men and women who go off to war, and expressions of thanks are now common.

In our world – each November 11 for many years I have worn my summer work uniform with its gold striped epaulettes to the office where cake is served in the afternoon. A young associate was a captain in the Marine Corps, so I salute the senior officer and he cuts the cake with his sword. It is what we do.

This year I wore my uniform jacket across the street to the pub for lunch, and a waitress said, “Thank you”. Egads. At the synagogue on the next day the veterans were asked to rise for recognition and afterwards I got a few “I didn’t know…”s. My goodness.

All this from other people has made me have a thought I never had before. Maybe it really was a big deal. When other people did whatever they did after college I went away for two years, living on a ship, sent to standby for trouble to the coasts of Haiti and Trinidad. I was not sent to Vietnam and was never in serious danger, but I went, did what they asked me to do for $348 a month and came home. Veterans Day has a meaning.

The World Would Be A Better Place

2011-11-17T19:58:00.001-05:00

The world would be a better place if I had more money.

Or at least such seems to me to be the media message of the moment. I first noticed it some years ago in the letters to the editor where the executive director of some well-intentioned organization would explain how great is the need for his services and why the government should fund it. The conflation of public and private interest. We witness the apotheosis of the drive to privatize the public treasury in the “Occupy” movement. The “99%” have no demands, but many grievances. A spokesperson has told the TV camera that they don’t want to have specific requests because someone might disagree with it and cause a split – they want to be all inclusive. So, there are some who want student loans forgiven, some who want mortgage debt forgiven, some want more health benefits, some who want other people to pay more taxes and not a few who take more traditional views in favor of killing Jews.

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country can do for you.

Since they stand for everything everyone must find something to like. I understand the simple concept that the government has been expending vast sums to make rich people richer. The investment bankers who held the nation hostage in 2008 to be bailed out in the billions used to pay their bonuses have set the standard. Yesterday the heads of FMNA and FHLMC testified before Congress justifying their $5M and $9M bonuses paid for their agencies to lose billions. They should be testifying at their parole boards. The President’s cronies obtained $500 million giveaway loans to Solyndra and congressmen are trading as insiders. Ask not. Tell not.

The “Occupy” folks have taken a big idea and made it small. I’m sure the government would be happy to buy them off, but the government is broke.

Downgraded

2011-08-08T21:16:00.000-05:00

We been downgraded. Totally dissed.

Standard & Poors has downgraded US government debt, and the Dow fell over 1000 points, about 9% in the past three days. Early reports say that most of the stock sellers were in a flight to safety – to recently downgraded US government debt now with rates falling due to increased demand. Which I suppose makes some kind of perverse sense, much like the debate which preceded it.

The S&P action follows our national humiliation as the President and Congress tried to raise the debt ceiling, a crisis manufactured by Republicans to assure that any economic train wreck occurred while President Obama is in office. http://contrariat.blogspot.com/2010/11/train-wreck-ahead.html. The failure of Congress to address the nation’s debt and revenue issues was stunning and craven, and I happened to have observed the worst of it through the eyes of the world while visiting #2 Son in England. They think we are nuts, and they are right.

No one I know thinks much other than that there is a serious problem, and that the necessary steps to deal with it include some debatable mix of spending cuts and revenue increases, something like what President Obama almost worked out with Speaker Boehner. Contraria believes, however that this fight was twice lost by the Democrats. First, in December 2010 with majorities in both houses and the 2001 tax cuts about to expire the Democrat majorities caved to the Republicans in extending the tax cuts. The President after running and railing against the tax cuts sugar-coated his defeat by announcing that the extensions were a good way to stimulate the economy. Bullshit, but it proved that the President could be bullied by the Republicans and that the Democrats were as usual wholly unprincipled.

Worse was the scene after the President and the Speaker reached most of an agreement when Senator Reid announced a Democratic plan with no new revenues. When the President stood alone against both parties in Congress Boehner could not support new revenue when Reid did not, so the negotiations collapsed.

The Congress manufactured a crisis and failed to deal with it.

We deserve to be downgraded, but no good will come from this.

Numero Uno Hijo está casado

2011-06-23T19:01:00.000-05:00

Number One Son is married, or somewhat so. His wedding is in October, in Cancun, Mexico but we have had a civil ceremony at our home. So he is married or married with wedding to follow.

My freshly minted daughter-in-law with her freshly minted MBA is both delightful and accomplished, from Mexico, and we have been adjusting for quite a while. Her parents Rosa and José Luis who were in town for the graduation understand a little English and speak even less, so in anticipation of meeting them Trophy Wife and I have been studying Spanish since the winter at the local high school.

It all went rather well, I thought. José Luis and Rosa made the best of it, strangers in a strange land, and graciously accommodated my effusive, if bumbling efforts to communicate. When I spoke English my daughter-in-law translated into Spanish, and when I spoke Spanish she again translated into Spanish. Mostly I said with more enthusiasm than accuracy “Yo hablo Espaňol muy bien!”. What I noticed was that if I managed to get out something intelligible it seemed to engender a response, in Spanish which I could not in any way understand. “No entiendo nada!”.

It was in any event a beautiful day in our back yard. José Luis marveled at the tall trees which they do not have in the high desert of Monterrey, a brother whose visa did not come through attended by Skype, Grandma was quite pleased, and Number One Son did what he was supposed to do. More passages, more good stuff.

Argentina

2011-06-12T19:57:00.000-05:00

Trophy Wife and I have been to Argentina, and there is much to report.

Argentina is off the beaten path, as the 8 hours past Miami go a long way past anywhere. It turns out that there are a few very specific tourist destinations, and a trip involves choosing among them. In May it was early Fall and we thought it too cold for Patagonia or Bariloche in the Lakes District, so we headed for Buenos Aires, the pampas cowboy area, Mendoza in the wine country and Iguazu Falls in the north.

Buenos Aires is an almost European city, designed to be so at its center, but third-worldish on the fringes. The attractions are limited so that 3 days would be a lot, but the Recoleta area was quite attractive, the downtown area worth seeing, and the parks in Palermo were quality public spaces that we just do not have. History is heavy in Argentina, fascism not very far below the surface, and for an American the lack of African or Asian faces was stunning and unexplained.

In the pampas region outside Buenos Aires the communities have taken small “estancias” – ranches – which are probably not economically viable for ranching and combined the ranching with destination tourism. In our case it was a day trip, but the ranches also have guest rooms, in some ways like dude ranches. In Mendoza the wineries have likewise adapted to tourism as a revenue and marketing resources, and we enjoyed a lunch at the Ruca Malen winery with a tasting of several varieties and a spectacular view of the Andes.

Most places in Argentina are a flight from Buenos Aires, and it is 2 hours north to Iguazu Falls wedged in a little finger between Brazil and Paraguay. Maybe 50-100 miles of jungle canopy surround the Falls which are nothing short of spectacular and have been unexpectedly kept in a clean natural environment amidst hundreds of varieties of butterflies. I was thinking Niagara Falls and got caught greatly surprised.

A nice trip.

There But For Fortune

2011-03-24T20:46:00.003-05:00

Phil Ochs has been on my mind this week.

First I saw that a documentary of his life, “There But For Fortune” has opened at the local theatre. Assuming that there are only 5 of us around who actually know or care about Ochs I went to the 5:00 show, and it was…sold out. How could that be? So the next night I went back for the 7:15. Sold out. What am I missing?

We are bombing Libya with no conceivable national interest at stake, no clear military goal, improvised forces and no exit strategy.

The Marines have landed on the shores of Santo Domingo

Maybe it will work out. In the first week it is a very clean war indeed. Green-tinged night vision screens show remote control destruction. We have no casualties to date.

If they ever give a war without the blood and gore I’ll be the first to go

Our long-planned trip to Japan for this week is canceled. What with the uncounted thousands dead from the tsunami and radiation in the drinking water it just was not to happen. We are considering where else to go where there is no tsunami, no radiation and no war.

Try hard not to worry, if someday you should hear

That the whole world is off limits, visit Disneyland this year

Ochs was good for most of his brief time, and he probably can be forgiven for his old left infatuation with dictators. He got off the Stalin bandwagon, although he never understood the killers in China.

On the Soviet shores with right on their side

I wonder who knows how many have died?

Movie critic Ty Burr says that Ochs was dead before he died. The mental illness, addictions, rage and career failures killed him.

Show me the whiskey stains on the floor

Show me the drunkard as he stumbles through the door

And I’ll show you a young man, with so many reasons why

There but for fortune go you and I, you and I

I’ll get down to the show one of these days.

I won’t be laughing at the lies when I’m gone

And I can’t question how or when or why when I’m gone

Can’t live proud enough to die when I’m gone

So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here

Party Like It's 1989

2011-02-21T21:48:00.000-05:00

This month the news needs hourly updating. It is February, 2011, governments have fallen in Tunisia and Egypt, and today the Libyan Air Force bombed its own people in Tripoli while there have been active and unprecedented protests in Yemen, Bahrain, Algeria and Iran.

Everyone who can remember thinks back to 1989 and wonders if the Middle East will remake itself in the same manner as Eastern Europe did, but my thoughts are more about how blind we really were then, and how short is our foresight.

On May 2, 1989 the Communist government of Hungary opened its borders to trade with Austria. Under treaty obligations with East Germany, however, East Germans who could travel to Hungary were not allowed to go to Austria, and East Germans began seeking asylum in the West German embassy in Budapest. On August 24, 1989, dealing with overcrowding at the embassy but certainly in no way seeking to overturn the world order Hungary allowed 108 asylum seekers to leave the embassy and cross into Austria. By September 10 with “intolerable conditions” at the embassy Hungary temporarily suspended its treaty obligations and allowed 7,500 refugees to leave for West Germany. By September 25 Time Magazine noted that 14,000 German refugees has left Hungary, but still no one perceived any existential threat to the Communist bloc. Within weeks East Germany was hemorrhaging people out the back door, and on November 9, 1989 – a mere two months after the first refugees escaped the Berlin wall was breached and an era had ended.

Talking heads now speak either of the birth of Middle Eastern democracies or of islamofascist thugocracies. The truth is we did not predict what has happened to date and we do not know what will happen in 2 months. In a future retrospective I’m sure whatever happens will all have been obvious, but the future is opaque and for now the news is updated hourly.

Mixed Passages - Now I'm 64

2011-02-13T12:00:00.000-05:00

The Winter has brought travels to the Land of Snow and thoughts of things to come. Now I’m 64. http://contrariat.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html.

In the Land of Snow of course the plow guy comes to do the heavy work, but preparing for the plow guy is like cleaning up before the cleaning lady, and getting out before he comes means removing the plow-in at the end of the mercifully short driveway.

The shoveling brings on a lot of heavy breathing and other effects which, if researched at Web MD would likely be labeled as precursors of something bad, but I don’t believe it, don’t know what shoveling is “supposed” to feel like, don’t know what anyone else feels like and simply cannot/will not accept that one day it will be poor judgment to shovel the driveway. In the Land of Snow it’s what happens, and we can’t stop doing what we do.

The reward of the effort is to get to the ski slopes. I started skiing very late and always badly, but it seems now that my skill decreases annually. What 10 years ago was covering all the blue trails and the easiest black trails is now most of the blue trails and gratitude for the greens. On the other hand, I guess there just aren’t that many guys my age skiing at all, so maybe it’s all good.

Back at the lodge the trifecta is that fiscal logic compels the conclusion that Trophy Wife should shortly claim Social Security benefits. Putting aside the absurdity of the government writing us checks we don’t need with money it doesn’t have, the matrix of calculations indicates that it is to our advantage to start taking the benefit. If I am hesitating it is not out of some higher moral conviction against taking it but out of some distaste for the “senior citizen” label. The AARP card and $2 off at the movies are a lark, but The Check is something else.

The Sins of the Father

2011-01-09T20:55:00.001-05:00

William Daley, the youngest son of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley has been appointed Chief of Staff to President Obama. Daley, an executive with JP Morgan Chase was formerly Secretary of Commerce in the Clinton Administration and Chairman of the Gore presidential campaign in 2000.

Introducing Mr. Daley to the press President Obama said, “…Bill also has a smidgen of awareness of how our system of government and politics works. You might say it is a genetic trait" , and Daley said, “Fifty years ago this month, I visited the White House with my parents and my brothers and sisters to visit a young president …”.

I believe that there should be a statute of limitations for grudges. See “I’m Going to Germany” http://contrariat.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html.

I might have let is pass except that the President chose to refer to a genetic trait of awareness of “how our system of government and politics works”. My mind travelled to August, 1968. I was on a ship, enroute from La Spezia to Norfolk when it happened, but we got the general idea from cables off wire services, and I have seen the film many times. I have seen Senator Ribicoff at the podium at the Democratic Convention in Chicago condemning the police riot outside and Mayor Daley on the floor mouthing words usually transcribed as “"Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker, go home."

Again I quote the President: “Bill also has a smidgen of awareness of how our system of government and politics works. You might say it is a genetic trait”.

I hope not.

Dylan in America

2010-12-31T18:39:00.000-05:00

Sean Wilentz of Princeton has written a cultural history of the work of Bob Dylan. Not another biography, Dylan in America is a scholarly review of the threads of American culture which have been picked up, evolved, appropriated and moved forward by the only artist to have both an Oscar (“Things Have Changed” from “The Wonder Boys”) and a literary Pulitzer awarded in 2008 for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”

Dylan arrived in New York in 1961 looking to meet Woody Guthrie, and that theme is obvious in his work. Less obvious are the multiple roots and varied media and cultures developed in the background, from the 1840’s Great Awakening music (“Amazing Grace”), blackface minstrel shows, gospel sourced blues from Duncan and Brady to Stagger Lee and Blind Willie McTell, white offshoots of Charlie Chaplin (2005’s “Modern Times” album), Allen Ginsberg and the music of the Popular Front, and the rock descendants of Elvis and the Beatles. Dylan in America criss-crosses the heartland for the currents of American history and mythologies which create our culture and together with exquisite musicianship are reflected in Bob Dylan’s work.

Wilentz understands the brilliance of Dylan’s work in the 1960’s and 1970’s but explores the artist’s reinvention in the 1990’s and 2000’s as an American agglomerator and musical historian. Picking up threads from a broad cross-section of American musical styles and schools, Dylan borrows from the Bible, Aeneas, Shakespeare, Ginsberg, Kerouac and different interpretations of blues, jazz and rock to evolve American music, all the while imitating and incorporating other threads which he has taken from Al Jolson, Charlie Chaplin, or Frank Sinatra. In context Wilentz notes that until 2009 Dylan was the only significant American artist who had not recorded a Christmas album, and the songs he recorded then notably include 15 which had been recorded by his vocalist idol – Bing Crosby.

For those who thought that Dylan abandoned them in 1966 – he did not. He just moved on and left them behind. Wilentz’ book has left me with a lot of music to hear and several more books to read.

Train Wreck Ahead

2010-11-21T11:43:00.000-05:00

My classmate from the University is a World Famous Economist. When the Republicans are in he has a big job in Washington, and when they are out he retreats to Stanford. A year ahead of us was another WFE who serves when the Democrats are in. Yin and Yang.

Our class held a symposium on a beautiful fall campus weekend, and the WFEs and sundry colleagues presented a two day series on economic policy.

There were broad and frightening areas of agreement among the economists, and the areas of disagreement were surprisingly narrow and esoteric. Speakers of every persuasion agreed that the U.S. fiscal picture can be summarized by a railroad sign reading “train wreck ahead”. All agreed that budget spending is trending too high, that revenue is too low and that it is just a matter of time before either the creditor nations stop lending to fund the deficits or the interest burden will be unbearable. All agreed that no conceivable growth will narrow the gap.

Two differences emerged, which did not seem very big to me. The conservatives felt that the debt crisis may be imminent, and the liberals believe it is some years away. I wondered if the conservatives want the Democrats to have to fix it, and the liberals want to postpone thinking about it until 2013. Likewise both WFEs graded the Federal Reserve Bank’s 2008 crisis as a “C”, one suggesting that they should have been more predictable and the other that they should have been more creative.

Warren Buffett has written an Op-Ed in the Times “Pretty Good for Government Work” speaking of the government’s interventions in the Fall of 2008 in which he says to Uncle Sam that “…there is a fog of panic – and, overall your actions were remarkably effective”. I am more inclined to agree with Buffett than the WFEs. I don’t think the exact actions of the Fed or the Treasury were nearly as important as the facts that they acted swiftly and decisively to avoid a worse crisis. Buffett says to Uncle “...in this extraordinary emergency you came through.”

Now comes the hard part. In the past week the chairmen of the President’s bi-partisan commission on the deficit have issued their recommendations, and Nancy Pelosi has already gone beserk. The recommendations seem largely appropriate to me but may not get enough support in the commission to become a recommendation of the entirety. Train wreck ahead.

Christopher Hitchens

2010-09-23T19:58:00.002-05:00

        Christopher Hitchens is at least very ill and may be worse than that. In the August, 2010 “Vanity Fair” he discussed his cancer with his usual insouciance and fitting irreverence, his best known quality.

        I have been reading Hitchens for about 10 years, almost everything I can find, from “The Atlantic” to Why Orwell Matters, God is Not Great and his memoir Hitch 22.

        What does a Contrarian say to the author of Letters to a Young Contrarian? “Thanks”? What could be more satisfying than Hitchens' reaction to the death of Jerry Falwell – “… it’s a pity there isn’t a Hell for him to go to”.

        Hitchens is one of America’s great public intellectuals, an immigrant who has enriched our public discourse at the price of being condemned by almost everyone. A 60’s student radical whose first pangs of revisionism came from the discovery in Cuba that people are not allowed to leave, Hitchens is charged with apostasy from the left. He is easily if inaccurately dismissed as a “neo-con” for his support of the war in Iraq long after such support became unfashionable.

        In recent years Hitchens has given America’s first very public face to intellectual atheism. God is Not Great makes his arguments with wit and wisdom from an historical and global perspective that the idea of God is necessary neither for the creation of the world nor for the adoption of a moral code. Like homosexuality in previous generations atheism is out of the closet, and last winter I had the opportunity to hear Hitchens in one of his serial discussions with Rabbi David Wolpe of Los Angeles. A lot of fun, indeed.

        Hitchens was on a tour for Hitch 22 when the cancer struck. The book is perhaps an intellectual history of the last 60 years which uncovers who Hitchens thinks he is, but it seemed to be to be somehow lacking in…warmth, the kind that comes from family or good relationships. I sensed a substitution of banter or pure ideas for values, something missing in the third dimension. An interesting guy.

        I wish Christopher Hitchens well. If the cancer kills him, well…it’s a pity there is no Heaven for him to go to.

The Girl with the Bad Books

2010-08-23T20:01:00.011-05:00

I have read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, recommended by everyone, and hated it. I am bored with the predictability of the off the shelf 1970’s proto-feminism.

There are five female characters in the book, 4 of whom have been raped or abused by a parent or spouse, the search for one of them is the main plot, and the fifth has a husband who is understanding in sharing her with her long term lover. A secondary and bizarrely unconnected plot revolves around the financial misdeeds of the evil Wennerstrom.

For those unable to grasp the subtleties each part of the novel contains a helpful hint. For example:

Forty-six percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man.

2001’s Lies and Damned Statistics by Joel Best tries to deal with the simple falsity of these statistics, trying unsuccessfully to track down any statistical source for the often repeated “1/3 of female college students are raped”. It is what passes for known fact, without support, without any known source and repeated and regularly believed. It is simply a lie.

The heroine is way cool. Impatient with police she sets herself up to be raped, tasers the assailant into submission and then tortures and mutilates him. You go, girl. I prefer Clint Eastwood’s, “Make my day” or Humphrey Bogart’s “Don’t do it” to Major Strasser – give him the option not to get shot, and then at least shoot him dead in self defense without the sadism.

The heroine is also omniscient and therefore omnipotent – God can hack any computer in the world. As to Wennerstrom she hacks him into financial ruin and then leaves him alone in hiding. Until, that is, she finds that he made inappropriate advances to his office staff, so she has him offed by a contract killer.

My goodness. The shallowness is only made worse by several obvious translation errors from the Swedish. I need to learn not to read best sellers.

In Their Own Words

2010-08-18T18:56:00.010-05:00

Middle East discussions seem to me to be mostly trying to make something complicated which is actually simple. Difficult, perhaps, but not complicated. The President believes that he can apply good will to arrange a real estate transaction in which all will live happily. I doubt it, and last week rockets flew from Gaza into Ashkelon, from Sinai into or over Eilat and 1 Israeli was killed by shots fired across the border from Lebanon.

I think it is actually much simpler than the President believes. I think the Muslims hate the Jews and do not want them there. On his side the President has goodwill and a healthy “can-do” spirit. On my side I have the words of the Muslims in a series of newspaper clips I have accumulated on my desk over the years.

In their own words:
November 25, 1999 – Yasser Arafat’s deputy Othman Abu Arbiah said, “The …Palestinian state is a stage after which there will be another stage and that is the democratic state in all of Palestine”.

April 14, 2000 – Abdullah Al-Hourani, chairman of the Palestinian National Council Polical Committee said, “As to the struggle, it will continue. It may pause at times, but in the final analysis Palestine is ours from the Sea to the River.”

October 27, 2005 – President Ahmadinejad of Iran says “Israel must be wiped off the map.”

April 14, 2008 – Abaas Zaki, Palestinian Authority ambassador to Lebanon says, “…after we take Jerusalem, Israel’s ideology will collapse altogether then then we will proceed with our own ideology, …and we will throw them out all all of Palestine”.

May 17, 2010 – Palestinian Television urges that the Jews go to “your original homeland” listing Ukraine, Poland and Germany.

July 13, 2010 – The Times report on Gaza quotes Ramzi, a public school teacher “…in a widely expressed sentiment. ‘All the land is ours. We should turn the Jews into refugees and then let the international community take care of them’.”

Those are just samples of what is on my desk. I cannot imagine a reason to believe that they do not mean what they say.

Ballparks

2010-08-17T20:31:00.006-05:00

The Daughter and I are just returned from Kansas City and Minneapolis, completing a 20 year family quest to visit all the major league baseball parks. Somehow it all makes perfect sense to me.

It began innocently enough in 1991 with a family visit to Yankee Stadium where #2 Son was just too little to stay beyond the 5th inning. When we had to go to Buffalo the next year it seemed no big thing to visit Toronto, and off we were.

We have been in various combinations of Trophy Wife and children, but I have now done them all. Previously the daughter and I have been to Baltimore in 2005 and St. Louis in 2006 (see "Bardstown").

Each trip has its memories. The children and I did an empty Comiskey Park in Chicago one Thursday, got standing room only at Wrigley Field the next day and the next day drove to Milwaukee where a good deal of beer was sold.

I remember 2 hot trips with #1 Son to Florida (Tampa and Marlins) and Texas (Houston and Dallas), but Cincinnati and Detroit with the Boys was probably the hottest, and all those trips had long drives in the middle. I remember the coldest game, the whole family on July 5, 1994 in San Francisco, and I remember the train up Pike's Peak with #2 Son in Colorado. The most peculiar nght was Oakland which I visited in 2003 with Trophy Wife who graciously entertained my high school girlfriend.

The nicest stadium was Pittsburgh, and the worst was Montreal. The newer ones are nicer than the older ones, and the stadiums woven into downtowns have a much better feel than the out of town fields.

I have devoted some time over 20 years to creating memories, both for our little group and for each of us individually. I understand that something can be silly, pointless, expensive and well worth it.

A Commencement

2010-06-13T19:44:00.001-05:00

Last week I had the privilege of attending Commencement at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where #1 Son received a Master of Business Administration degree, and I received bragging rights and reflected glory.

Very much indeed like the twinned weddings the graduation was full or ceremony and of course Pomp and Circumstance, both literally and figuratively.

At MIT the Chief Marshall lead the procession carrying the ceremonial mace given to the Institute by the Class of 1907 on the occasion of its 50^th reunion. The mace, designed by a member of the Class is silver gilt with an eight bladed head topped with a beaver – the MIT mascot and engineer par excellence. The shaft contains a series of octagonal decorative “knops” embossed with symbols for physics, mathematics, biology and other expressions of technology in the service of humanity.

The academic robes follow the standards of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume. MIT’s doctoral robes are gray with distinctive cardinal red stripes, but MIT does not award hoods for Master’s degrees, so #1 son is hoodless while The Daughter has a Master’s degree hood from Washington University.

Who knew?

Again, the tradition and the ceremony are how we vest significance in the event. The mace is a message from the Class of 1907 to the Class of 2010 and those who will come after. The tradition of the dress, the procession, the music is all part of a collective experience shared over time of how we label something as Important. It was a great joy to participate.

Ritual Sanctification - Two Weddings And

2010-06-13T19:41:00.000-05:00

         I have been to two weddings in the past weeks. One was secular and the other religious, but it seemed to me that the similarities outweighed the differences.

        In a world where propriety sucks both weddings were formal and traditional. 150 people all dressed up in suits and dresses sat in rows while chamber music played. The officiants waited while the processionals unfolded in customary order. The brides appeared in their white dresses escorted by parents to the alter. After the officiant addressed the couples they exchanged vows, rings and the customary kiss and the processionals reversed as Trophy Wife cried and I grinned like an idiot. In both beautiful rooms I could feel that everyone was just simply happy.

        The major difference of course was God’s absence of from one wedding and presence at the other, but on reflection, while I’m certain that the participants might feel differently it seemed to me that the formality itself, the ritual, the knowing how this is done is the real essence of the ceremony. I thought that this is our community – family and friends, new families joined together and expressing in the customary way our approval, encouragement and in a real sense sanctification of the marriage.

        I felt no loss in the difference between the secular wedding and the religious wedding, and that was the point. The ritual itself is an art form vesting and conferring meaning on the event and sanctifying the marriage, and the vesting and sanctification is by the assembly, the congregation, the community.

        I do not know that the marriage ceremony is of long term use or reduces the incidence of divorce or anything like that, but I believe it is we who seek to create meaning in significant events by sanctification through rituals. I liked them.

A Lyrical Jaunt

2010-05-20T20:29:00.004-05:00

I am back with the Trophy Wife from a jaunt to the lands of country sunshine and the Delta blues with the wedding of a former pretty good little league player in the mix.

The Nashville Skyline is subdued in the good times, but downtown and the new and plastic Opryland recently flooded the music lived between Third and Fifth Streets. The old Grand Ole Opry building Ryman Hall was open for a live radio broadcast/concert which was a whole lot of old white folks listening to what sounded good, but fundamentally nostalgic. An expert told me later that the Whites who we saw are quite well known.

Off the interstate the slow road to Memphis leads through the Bible Belt, with four churches in each small hamlet and “Jesus” signs on many, many lawns. They are different from us.

Graceland is on the long route into town, almost to the Mississippi line. It fulfills every imagining of kitsch including a real life Heartbreak Hotel, but it recalls for us just how much and how good Elvis was, and how revolutionary. A white guy sings black music and the world is not the same. A talented kid, modest,– what was all the ruckus about? At Graceland they gloss over the end, but that seemed correct in the context.

“Walking in Memphis with my feet ten feet off of Beale” the music was no more country sunshine but blues blaring from every door. Entry onto a beer soaked Beale Street on Friday night is by police frisking everyone which seemed somehow appropriate, and a drunk hit on the Trophy Wife, making me proud indeed. Cacophonous, raucous, more fun than whatever else I would be doing.

Which brings me to the elegance of the wedding. I can testify that I have seen a black lady with blond hair singing Hebrew while Chinese people do the hora. I am too old to see these things and had an uncustomary second drink, but I can die happy – I’ve seen it all!!

April 4, 1958

2010-05-09T19:27:00.003-05:00

The other day I drove by the building which long ago was a department store, and I thought of waiting in my mother’s 1952 Buick on April 4, 1958 in a parking space by the side of the store while she went in. It was an important day, and I waited in the Buick contemplating and a little bored.

Some months before I had asked if I could go to The School, a private school. An odd request to leave what Life Magazine regularly called the best publc school system in the country, but my parents said I could go if I could get in. So I took the standardized admission test which in those days was the same test for 6^th graders going into 7^th as for 12^th graders going for 13 years. I understood there would be a grading curve but was mystified by the geometry, trigonometry and something called a “predicate nominative”. I was called for an interview.

It was a warm day for April and sunny. My mother got lost on the way to the School, and when we arrive a little late Miss McKinnon, the School secretary since 1919 brought me in to the Headmaster. He was a tall man with a red face and a brown suit who started by asking me some questions, and as he began to read me a story I noticed a blossoming tree through the bay window behind his desk. In the story someone walked down a corridor with a candlemaker, a baker and other tradespeople lining the right and the left. The tree behind him made it look like his office was in a garden. He stopped and asked me if I knew which trade was in the second door on the left. I was stunned. Not close to paying attention, I was sure I had blown it.

Miss McKinnon escorted me out and my mother in. After a while she came out, and as we walked to the Buick she told me that I had been accepted, but the Headmaster said, “He will not be at the top of his class”.

My mother stopped at the department store on our way home, and I stayed in the Buick in a parking space which has since been removed but which I remember.

When I'm Sixty-Four

2010-02-16T21:27:00.001-05:00

I have been giving more and increasingly unhealthy thought lately to the whole thing about getting old. I reached a new level last week when I truncated a hike through the rain forest in Puerto Rico about halfway down the 30 minute down, 45 minutes up trail. I stopped and went back up because, well, because I thought the return trip might be too tough. I think it’s the first time I didn’t do something because I was…too old.

On the whole I think that ignoring these things is the best approach. My standard routine is that as long as I ski, play my guitar and coach little league, however badly in each case everything is OK. Within the past few years I even managed to fall off a motorcycle, a plus in this context.

But in the cultural context another reality lies. The Beatles said it as:

When I get older, losing my hair

Many years from now

And what happens then?

You can knit a sweater by the fireside

Sunday mornings, go for a ride

When is this? When is this?

Will you still need me, will you still feed me

When I’m 64?

When I’m 63 it doesn’t seem that 64 is “many years from now”, and I just do not think it is down to “Sunday morning go for a ride”. What were they (we) thinking?

The Beatles at least were cheerful. From where I sit 70 does not look so awfully far away, and how does it look to Simon and Garfunkel who are now 68?

Old friends, old friends

Sat on their park bench like bookends

Ouch.

Can you imagine us years from today,

Sharing a park bench quietly

How terribly strange to be seventy

It doesn’t seem all that strange to me any more. I guess that guys who write songs when they are 25 might look at things differently in 40 years. That happens, I suppose.

I should have walked down the goddamn trail.

The Trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed

2010-01-31T20:52:00.001-05:00

        “First we’re gonna give him a fair trial, then we’re gonna hang him”.

        I love Westerns. I believe an episode of “Maverick” had that trial/hang theme, and in a Western that “First we’re gonna give him a fair trial, then we’re gonna hang him” from the mob would usually precede an ultimate determination that the intended “strange fruit”¹ was innocent, and that the lynching would have been in error.

        Now that the White House has joined the mob, what are we to make of the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed?

        What is the purpose of the proposed trial? Usually we have a criminal trial to determine if a defendant is guilty or innocent. If the accused is innocent then he should be released from custody. Does anyone other than the Muslim and leftist conspiracy factions believe that Mohammed did not plan and carry out the 9/11 attacks? Is the President prepared to admit the possibility of a “not guilty” verdict and watch Khalid Sheik Mohammed walk out of the Federal District Court in New York? I would think not. How about a hung jury? Some combination of his "peers" could easily come up with a hung jury.

        It is hard to see what good will come out of this show. I do not believe that an enemy combatant captured outside the U.S. has any Constitutional rights, and an enemy combatant in the U.S. not in uniform is a spy. Military tribunals were the proper forum for disposition of these combatants. I fear that the Democrats who were so eager to make political capital at Guantanamo by treating the prisoners as citizens have bought a problem that has no limits.

        Certainly the message to the military is clear – do not take prisoners lest Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi use them against you.

1. "Strange Fruit Hanging from the Poplar Tree" - Billie Holliday

Propriety Sucks

2009-12-30T20:50:00.000-05:00

Contrarians are fated to react poorly to changes in the language, for changes in the language almost always appear to be like a muddy meandering stream ever seeking a lower level and rarely as improvements. I am confident that in the future all oral communication will be by grunting or screaming and written communication will have excised vowels, all text talk all the time.

There are some changes to which we accede with varying grumpiness. For example, I have come to accept and if necessary live with new rules as to split infinitives and prepositions, such that a preposition is a proper word to regularly end a sentence with. Aaaaargh.

On the other hand, the creeping acceptance of “sucks” in common parlance is for me more of an acquired taste, and I have not yet acquiesced in its general usage. My father banned “lousy” from the house for general impropriety and the matter declined from that level for some decades, until “sucks” began appearing on bad sitcoms, seeping into the general culture from below.

Currently a TV ad for some nicotine patch now says that withdrawal “sucks”. How much it sucks is shown on a Suckometer with an arrow pointing from green on the left to red on the right. The patch moves the Suckometer down towards green.

I must admit to occasional use of the word in one context. When a male (but not female) friend is whining I am inclined to “it sucks to be you” in lieu of sympathy. Other than that I usually think there is a better way to express a thought.

Can we get used to absolutely anything? Stick around, time will tell. In the meantime my Suckometer is pretty much stuck on red.

All the (Good) News That's Fit to Print

2009-12-27T18:03:00.001-05:00

The Gray Lady is smiling, and the whole world smiles with her.

Like it or not the New York Times is the “newspaper of record” and much of our generation reads every day what the Times wants read. And now the Times wants all the good news to be read. I feel a sense of relief that suddenly not everything in the world is a problem and all to be roundly blamed on President Bush. A year ago crime, traffic jams, global warming, terrorism, unemployment, every possible disease, family disfunction, obesity and skin rash, were all bad and getting worse on a daily basis and all caused by President Bush. There it was – I read it in the Times.

Now, like “Yesterday”, all our troubles seem so far away. The news, of course has not changed at all, but the coverage is 180 degrees reversed. All is spin, spin, spin.

It is December, 2009. This month President Obama has given a muted call to arms at West Point to announce his Afganistan policy. The “surge”, loudly condemned in Iraq in 2007 is acceptable to the Times. The next week the President tells the Nobel Prize committee that “There is evil in the world”, paraphrasing Niebuhr (the President is a contrarian!! See http://contrariat.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html ) and proclaiming American exceptionalism to police the world. President Bush never went nearly so far, but all is well with The Gray Lady.

Within the past week She has declared the Copenhagen environmental summit to be a limited success and the recession to be over. Faithful reader, I am greatly relieved to see that progress is made on all fronts. It is only if I look elsewhere – not even as far as Fox but even going only to CNN to see that these are indeed impossible conclusions. It is all spin, spin and more spin, but if we are to be spun we might as well be happy about it.

Lost in Storage

2009-12-09T20:25:00.002-05:00

I have resisted Kindle, in part because I do not think of books as “digital information”. The having of the book and its location on the bookshelf is part of the experience. The medium is the message.

The thought came to mind when we recently had a conversation with a library science student. Skipping over the part of the conversation where I stepped in it by being naively unaware that so-and-so is transgendered, we talked about electronic media. A hot issue in library science (yes there are!) is the effort to categorize and preserve various forms of electronic media.

Take for example the Kindle. How 2009 is the Kindle? In 20 years will Amazon be supporting Kindles while they are trying to peddle Kindle Super 5’s? Will all those books be lost?

Closer to home, I’m writing in Word and html (hyper-text mark-up language) to be posted on the Internet and located by http (hyper-text transfer protocol). In 20 years there will be an Internet, but Word? Html? Http? In the future someone is going to need ancient technology to find Contraria. There will be no book on the shelf.

Of course it has already happened, but I never thought about it. My attic has dusty boxes of 8” disks in c/pm format WordStar. Is there some magical machine somewhere that can read them? I have a box of 5 ¼” disks in DOS formatted Q&A word processing and 3 ½ inch disks in Word 96 for which I keep one 3 ½” disk drive for emergencies. All lost, lost and lost.

So the Library Scientists have a challenge. We live in the moment, writing in Word then html found by http, oblivious. Since Gutenberg we have had books as we know them. The future? As usual, not so clear.

Giving Thanks

2009-11-29T20:19:00.002-05:00

Being a Contrarian is essentially reactive. I see something that strikes me as generally accepted, yet plainly stupid and chronicle it here. I could mis-read myself as plaintive or whiny, but that is only what I’ve chosen for this forum.

It is the season of Thanksgiving. I more or less lounge around the house in new clothes patriotically purchased at the Mall on Black Friday. I recall the well-known un-intellectual Dennis Prager writing that the difference between red and blue states is that people in red states are grateful while people in blue states are entitled. I am in a blue state but grateful nonetheless in this Thanksgiving season, particularly grateful for the little group we call our family.

We are all healthy. The Trophy Wife, eternally young, the Boys, and the Daughter, all for now without major complaint.

We have what we need. Beyond that we have pretty much whatever we want. The business provides. Sometimes more and sometimes less, but so far always enough.

The Children are off the payroll. #1 Son will have some choice of jobs with his soon-to-be MBA. The Daughter and #2 Son have terrific jobs in their chosen careers. I am not so self-centered as to be concerned about their social lives or any lack of offspring. Not much I can do about that.

We are all engaged in the world. We have our various activities, meeting people, going places, introducing one person to another, trying to make a contribution, reading.

We are happy, as far as I can tell. Perhaps that is the perception of the singularly unperceptive or the simply insensitive, but it works for me.

I am less grateful for other things. Call waiting, for example. For another day.

Health Care

2009-11-16T19:24:00.001-05:00

Well, wade right in.

It is November 2009. The Democrats have enough votes in Congress to pass something they will call “health care reform” and they are now pondering and pandering bills from both houses. The Republicans are howling at the moon, and the real discussion is between Democratic constituencies.

The current bill is 1900 pages long. It appears to be founded on a series of popular concepts which will achieve political success by avoiding choices and thereby maximizing the cost, which only works because Congress proposes not to pay the cost but to borrow it.

The first concept is that health care is synonymous with health insurance. Congress proposes to provide or require first dollar health insurance for all Americans, but that is not “insurance” at all, but a prepaid health plan. Since it is first-dollar coverage with no deductible there is no incentive for any individual other than to maximize the use.

The next concept is that everyone’s coverage and choices will remain the same. The government proposes to cover 30 million presently uninsured without expanding the delivery system or bringing about any systemic reform.

A third concept is that Congress is proposing hundreds of millions of dollars of unspecified savings in future years. End of life care which consumes perhaps 25% of Medicare will not be affected, nor will tort reform be imposed. The “Times” writes that industry and consumer lobbyists outnumber legislators in Washington by something like 5 to 1 and that Congress had actually taken out all cost savings from the bills.
Fourth, it is fundamental to Congress that all the benefits will be paid for by “the other”. Every benefit is without cost to the consumer, and while some income tax imposition on the wealthy will pay for a small percentage of the cost, and the rest will be simply added to the deficit.

We will greatly celebrate “health insurance for all”. It is probably not a bad thing, but I cannot help but wish that it could be coupled with some reform which is an actual improvement or at least that we agreed to pay for it.

Zuleica Got Busted

2009-08-29T10:29:00.003-05:00

Zuleica has cleaned our house every other Thursday for seven years, but after a routine speeding stop without a driver’s license she has quickly gone back to Brazil. That’s about all we know, except that she is hoping to come back “when the papers go through”, and we think she has gone with her one year old but without her husband.

I feel badly for Zuleica and for the baby. She has family in Brazil, but she must have stayed here because she wanted to, and her child is a US citizen whose opportunities will be greater here. What I do not know is whether I think Zuleica’s apparently forced return is “wrong” in any way that makes sense to me. At the personal level I am reminded of Alicia Silverstone’s dissertation in “Clueless” that when uninvited guests come to the dinner party we ought to be able to make room at the table.

And we are hardly innocent. We and our half dozen friends for whom Zuleica worked never asked about her citizenship status. As if it were someone else’s problem, but in fact we were deeply complicit. Also – I am supposed to know these things, but I have somehow avoided knowing how much I can pay Zuleica each year without withholding taxes, as I have avoided knowing how much I actually pay her. I did not want to fill out the paperwork and I did not want to ask Zuleica for her social security number. No heroes here.

The ladies had a nice shower for Zuleica’s baby. I hope “the papers” go through, but in the meantime Zuleica has arranged for Daniella to clean the houses. My head is in the sand, but I remain torn between sympathy for Zuleica and understanding that The Guardians of the Borders do what they do.

The German Foils

2009-08-09T19:23:00.002-05:00

I need something new to read.

I have read four books this summer - Hope and Courage by Sid Schachnow, People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Barrows and Annie Shaffer and City of Thieves by David Benioff. None of the books are about the Germans but in each book in a different way they appear, do what Germans do, and the story goes on.

Hope and Courage is an autobiography of Sid Schachnow, a retired Jewish major general in the U.S. Army who lived from age 7 to age 12 in a German concentration camp in Lithuania where much of his family was killed. His is a personal story of survival and accomplishment as a refugee in the United States. In People of the Book the story of a Haggadah in Sarajevo unravels backwards through time starting with the heroine running from and then captured by the Germans in Yugoslavia. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society tells a postwar story in the context of the lives of the islanders the Channel island occupied by the Germans from the fall of France until 1945. City of Thieves is an updated “quest” novel in which the narrator plays Sancho Paza to a mystical Russian soldier surviving during the siege of Leningrad.

All four books were placed in the context of German occupation, but all four struck me as not necessarily being about the Germans. Rather they are all in one way or another about the victims, less about the acts and facts of atrocity than about the reactions of people to the atrocities and what acts of decency can be found.

I have a sense that the Germans, while real enough are now becoming a backdrop of evil, the foils of perfect malice against which the books speak. The Germans are fact-based Borg or Lex Luthor providing a vernacular of horror variously in Lithuania, Yugoslavia, Guernsey and Russia under which the characters of the books have to live their lives, grow up, raise families and try to stay alive. The telling of biography and fiction against the gold standard of real life horror.

I need something new to read.

The End of Tax and Spend

2009-07-29T20:58:00.001-05:00

We appear to be at the end of a rhetorical era. For 30 years or more, at least since the Reagan years we have had rhetoric against “tax and spend” government. The traditional accusation has been that liberals would impose a vast spending agenda on the backs of the taxpayers. To some extent the rhetoric has framed budget issues and affected the political dynamic, with both parties for a long time keeping spending somewhat aligned with some baseline of revenue. During the economic growth period of the Clinton years government spending could grow while taxes did not rise, and the federal deficit was greatly reduced. During the Bush years tax cuts caused the deficits to grow, but appearances were that the deficits were related to defense.

No more. President Obama has changed the paradigm, broken the Gordian Knot. There is no more “tax and spend” because we have done away with the “tax” part. The President has successfully preached that the economic situation is a crisis of a scope only surpassed by the Great Depression. With that rhetoric as background the President and the Congress have de-coupled government spending from any obligation to pay for it. The news has reported a $15 million contract to renovate a Montana border post which boasts an average of 2 cars per day. The Congress has spent $1 Trillion in benefits and corporate subsidies in 2009 and is working on another $1 Trillion in health care. If there is a limit I don't see it.

The key, however, is the still-new concept of budgeting by spending only as opposed to budgeting by balancing spending against revenue. In 2009 we have undertaken an additional trillion or so dollars of unfunded debt, much of it being programmatic spending which will have to be spent again each year, such as federal education aid which is in no way a one-time expense. For the first time we are borrowing long term funding to pay for current operating costs, and the federal government is pledging long term credit to pay state governments’ current expenses. All while the President says that taxes will be reduced for 95% of Americans.

In retrospect the 2008 TARP program to rescue Wall Street was probably a key to a new spending paradigm. If hundreds of billions of dollars can be paid to investment bankers with bonuses in the millions each year, who can require restraint for any other cause, particularly worthy causes? And if the taxpayers are not affected because we just borrow the money then who will object?

Some old-fashioned Cassandra might believe that trillion dollar annual deficits are a Trojan Horse to our economic health. Maybe so, but maybe not. Maybe we can just spend and borrow from China to pay for it for a long time. We haven’t tried it before.

Tempus Fugit - The Boys of Spring

2009-06-24T19:47:00.001-05:00

Time flies. I need to inform the world that this year’s Little League Phillies have won the championship for a third time under our stewardship. It would behoove me to check on my prior entry “Little League” http://contrariat.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html .

My goodness, that was 3 years ago. I would not have thought it, but there it is. I started in January 2006.

The team this year was exquisite. Two veterans who we drafted in 2007 as ten year olds led the team with grace and power. We got through the monologues about Aristotle and Molly Bloom and swept the playoff series against the much feared Giants and the upstart A’s. We had our share of Little League moments, winning a game in which we got 0 hits and another in which we got 1 hit. One day we benefitted by the famous “walk-off wild pitch”. In the finale we had 9 players make defensive plays for outs, and the A’s coach lamented that they hit the ball, and while he kept waiting for some little league disaster we kept making the plays.

No.1 son was brilliant, winning at least 2 games from his perch as third base coach, manufacturing runs with stolen bases, double steals, fake and real bunts and taking extra bases. I think that this year the coaches really played a role in an excellent team.

I have spend several days basking in the glow. The championship trophy is retrieved from the dry cleaner who sponsors the much feared Giants and with its newly engraved base “2009 Phillies” it rests at the pizza shop which sponsors us and provides free pizza after each game.

I revel in our annual team letter – “E Philibus Unum – The Few, The Proud, the Phillies” and the reverberation of our team cheer which leads us onto the field each game, “For Fun, For Glory, For Pizza, GO PHILLIES”.

The trophy is at the pizza shop. All is well.

Birdathon

2009-05-20T19:53:00.001-05:00

I have sent a check to the Audubon Society. A couple who are good friends are very much into bird watching, and this week was the annual fundraiser. This year the event is a “birdathon”.

If I’ve got this right, teams of bird watching enthusiasts are going to various bird sanctuaries around the state and trying to see as many species as they can in a day. As in a walkathon donors are requested to give by production, not in this case in dollars or cents per mile, but in dollars per species. The teams will compete for species seen and thereby for dollars raised.

My friends hope to see 180 species. In one day. Who knew that someone can first see and then recognize 180 species of birds in one day? If I thought about it I know there are a lot of birds out there, but that did surprise me.

I’m a little reluctant to take a chance on how many birds someone may see, so I decided to go for a prix fixe to support the worthy cause. I am, however, pleased to have been around long enough to see bird watching as a competitive event.

MyTunes

2009-02-15T17:39:00.002-05:00

Reading someone’s Ipod playlist is a modern version of reading his diary. What are a person’s habits of mind or cultural background, and where are they catalogued? On his Ipod, of course, or in my case in CD mixes burned from Itunes downloads.

It is a revealing process. There is no generalized and non-specific icon such as just owning the White Album. I have to pick a song, one song, 99 cents at a time, making an affirmative choice of What I Like, not just what is on the CD. It would be an invasion of privacy if someone were to see the 150 songs I have downloaded to date, worse than, say, a dissection of my wardrobe or house furnishings. There is something about our music and its choices which defines us.

What do I see in my list?

Age and gender come screaming off the list. Bob Dylan is the only artist with 6 entries, although I would note that later work (Hurricane) and even new work (Spirit on the Water) define me as a genuine Dylan guy, not someone who got off the bus in 1970.

Bruce Springsteen would be tied for second with 3 entries (including live Thunder Road) were it not for an oddball personal favorite - the Everly Brothers. I do have their 1957 debut album with its elegant liner notes (“Frails sent mail by the bale”), but I am partial to their ballads (Devoted to You, Love Hurts)

My folk music period is long, but perhaps not really as deep as I think. I have Woody Guthrie (Pastures of Plenty) and the Weavers (If I Had a Hammer – pre-Peter Paul and Mary), but not really genuine folk like Delta Blues from the 30’s. The Cambridge coffeehouse world circa 1960 is prominent with Jim Kweskin (Washington at Valley Forge), Eric Andersen (Thirsty Boots), Dave Van Ronk (Nobody Knows You) and Tom Rush (No Regrets) who we actually saw live a couple of weeks ago. He is pushing 70.

Some choices are like The History of Rock and Roll (Rock Around the Clock, Heartbreak Hotel, Rave On, Come Go With Me) and some are perhaps Evolutionary Folk (Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, Touch of Grey) with some End of An Era Rock (Hotel California, Man on the Moon).

Some choices are just for fun – I like pairing Lipstick on Your Collar with It’s My Party, (I thought about their bookends Who’s Sorry Now and Judy’s Turn to Cry) and I did my Sue trilogy together (Robin Luke’s Suzy Darlin, Sue Thompson’s Norman and Suzy Quattro & Stormin Norman Stumbing In), passing on Wake Up Little Susie. I always wonder about songs glorifying war (Kingston Trio The Alamo, or Sink the Bismarck).

What I discover, though is that when not looking for artist or genre I seem to head more than my intellect would like toward the Bubblegum aisle. In the A’s alone I have ABBA’s Dancing Queen, Air Supply’s Lost in Love and America’s Sister Golden Hair. I fear there are that many in each letter of the alphabet. I like melodies, harmonies and simple rhythms. I am anesthetized on the table. The bubblegum is probably the most embarrassing.

Or perhaps the omissions. Women are seriously underrepresented, although Linda Ronstadt has 3 (Long, Long Time, Desperado, and Blue Bayou), Norah Jones (Don’t Know Why) is this century and I include miscellaneous salutes to Bonnie Raitt (Nick of Time) and Carol King (Tapestry). Black music, which perhaps today is almost all music, is present (Johnny B. Goode – or is that a black guy playing white music?) and a few others from Motown, but all old, nothing of current black music. My loss.

Looking at my list I would say that I’m a white guy over 60 for whom music is nostalgia and no longer the lifeblood that it was 40 years ago. The modern music I like is throwback music, not current. The collection is mainstream, falling off the track before Aerosmith in the 1980’s, more or less Bubblegum since then, with some breadth in a sidetrack of Cambridge Folk which had its day. I will need some help from Son #2, an expert in the industry to develop a list that will create a more sophisticated profile.

The Bailout

2009-02-08T18:14:00.002-05:00

Which side are you on boys
Which side are you on?
Marching down to
Washington
Which side are you on?

The old civil rights song says that sometimes we have to choose. Either “fer it or agin it”. The government is coming to our economic rescue, and while the bailout plan is probably mostly stupid and ineffectual even Contrarian is not contrarian enough to be “agin”.

The current plan is in flux, but generally it will cost about $850 billion split between tax reductions and handouts. I am dubious of both.

We have some experience with handouts. Who could ever forget, or perhaps more accurately who remembers the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan of 2008. The government printed $170 billion and mailed it to all taxpayers - $600 per person, $1200 per couple with various income levels. The consensus is that the net effect on the economy was negligible. It appears that sending every American to the Mall for a day will not re-open 560 closed Circuit City stores or 580 Linens ‘N Things stores. That is not surprising.

We also have some experience with bailouts. The TARP program put out some $350 billion over the Fall of 2008. Although it was initially intended to relieve banks of troubled assets there are various complications with that, and the Treasury used the funds instead to provide liquidity to financial institutions who used it to shore up balance sheets rather than make loans and, unbelievably, to pay executive bonuses. I am inclined to believe that the TARP money probably did some good in preventing a collapse of the credit system.

Now we see Senator DeMint (R, S. Carolina) arguing that the bailout should be mostly tax reductions. He is demented. Rep. Barney Frank (D, Mass) correctly points out to him that he has never seen a tax cut pay for a bridge repair. The Democrats ignore the experience of the last rebate to maximize the pandering, and we can only imagine the lobbying fees paid to get an additional allocation of millions for the National Endowment for the Arts and new furniture for the Department of Homeland Security. The concept of economic stimulus was lost months ago as the hogs line up at the trough.

Which side to be on? The tax reductions are insidious and the rebates are ineffectual. The proposed infrastructure expenditures will either take years to go through the system or go to the first unworthy projects available, and the proposed bailout of state governments merely rewards their unwillingness to raise taxes to pay for their programs. I have no sympathy for the states. Raise taxes.

I am for it. I guess it is more important to appear to do something than to get it right, because there may be no getting it right. Somewhere some innovation or psychological upturn may get the economy onto a sounder footing. Although anyone should be unhappy about the proposed deficit spending, the current need for the spending merely accents how wrong it was during the Bush administration. Let’s move on.

The Market

2009-02-08T16:32:00.002-05:00

It has been 6 months in which “the market” has behaved poorly and shown the conventional wisdom at its worst. The conventional wisdom is encapsulated in modern portfolio theory, that a balanced portfolio of domestic and international equities, bonds and cash will perform with some consistency, flattening out the highs and lows of speculation. The usual expression is that in any 10 year period stocks will outperform bonds. Think again.

In the last 10 years U.S. equities have underperformed all models. Fidelity’s flagship Magellan Fund of large and growth companies has a 10 year average return of -4.77%. Their fund which most closely reflects a portfolio theory in a single fund is the Asset Manager which has an average 10 year return of 1.02%, only positive because of its bond component.

I and almost everyone else took a beating in the market in 2008. On the whole the geniuses were the most aggressive and took the biggest beatings. I am among the fortunate for whom the beating means only rethinking and re-orienting. Others are not so lucky, but will still get by. I think of retirees I know who thought they were comfortable with $2 million and now have $1.5 million. Or people who thought they were rich with $5 million and now have $3 million. No one will feel very sorry for them, they will be OK in the scope of things, but their lives are a little different now and not what they planned.

I would feel better if there were any lesson to be learned, and I have two thoughts. First, it seems that the stock market is not an investment at all. It is pure gambling. What normal or even sophisticated person could understand the financial condition of Citibank? Large companies are opaque, an investor cannot understand either the business model or even the financial condition of the market leaders, so there is no rational basis for investing. Citibank stockholders have lost 90% of their investments over a couple of years. Small companies on the other hand are fed and limited by big companies and took the biggest beatings in 2008. Even if an investor can understand the finances and business of a small company its public stock price is at the mercy of larger forces.

My second thought is that our current financial system does not primarily reward stockholders. The staff and players in the market eat enough of the profits to increase the stockholders’ risk significantly. The investment bankers get a percentage of the gross off the top, mutual funds get a percentage for winning or losing, and the hedge fund managers usually get 20% of the gains. The management of most public companies controls the passive Boards of Directors, and an unkind commentator could believe that General Motors and Citibank have simply been looted by management. The amount of profit which has to be earned by a public company to pay the overhead, the financing institutions and management guarantees in many cases that the stockholders are unlikely to see any increase in value of most companies, and any gains which are made are significantly diluted by management stock options.

In 10 years the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gone from 9000 to 8000. I do not know if it will go up or down or nowhere in the next 10 years. What I think is that whatever it does will not be because of anything that is or can be known to me or anyone and it will not be reflective of value to shareholders. It is only gambling on the psychology of other people. Good luck to all of us.

Reinhold Niebuhr and Gaza

2009-01-04T15:56:00.003-05:00

Reinhold Niebuhr is perhaps best known as the author of the 1943 Serenity Prayer:

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Niebuhr (1872-1971) served for most of his career as a professor of theology at the Union Theological Seminary. His intellectual journey led him from pacifism and sympathy towards Communism in the 1930s to a clear moral stand against the Fascists in the 1940s and then opposition to the Vietnam war in the 1960s. However, because he did not shrink from the consequences of his anti-Fascist beliefs his legacy has led to a tug of war between liberals and conservatives, with both claiming him and both Barack Obama and John McCain enlisting his ideas for their purposes.

Niebuhr offends modern liberals with an underlying belief in sin, a denial of moral relativity. In considering a proper choice between the evils of tyranny and the anarchy of war he wrote:

The refusal to recognize that sin introduces an element of conflict into the world invariably means that a morally perverse preference is given to tyranny over anarchy.1

Niebuhr’s view was that sin can impose tyranny and given the choice of accepting it in the pacifist tradition or opposing it with war the preference of acceptance is perverse in acceptance of sin. Sin. A quaint notion in 2009.

On the actions to be taken Niebuhr wrote:

Whatever may be the moral ambiguities of the so-called democratic nations, and however serious may be their failure to conform perfectly to their democratic ideals, it is sheer moral perversity to equate the inconsistencies of a democratic civilization with the brutalities which modern tyrannical states practice.1

The argument is clear in an area where clarity is at a premium. There is no moral equivalence between an imperfect society and a tyrannical society. Perhaps it goes back to a belief in Sin, but if we can believe in Sin, Niebuhr’s view was that where the Sin is identified decent people hold their noses and do what needs be done to oppose it.

Yesterday the Israelis entered Gaza. The Daughter is in Israel until tomorrow on a group trip, and I fear somewhat for her safety but a good deal for the boys and girls her age who have gone into the battle.

The trick in the Serenity Prayer is to identify the Sin. There is little to be done about Muslim hatred for Jews, but there is a lot to be done about rockets fired into Israel, and in this case the Israelis can tell the difference and do something about it. I see no difference between today’s Gaza and Afghanistan after 9/11. I pray for the IDF and the boys' and girls’ safe return.
____________________
1. Quoted in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr Edited by Robert McAffee Brown Yale University Press 1956

Luke and the Mortgage Crisis

2009-01-01T16:17:00.002-05:00

I’m not opposed to flip-flopping. Things change. People change. It’s best not to be too committed to an idea unless it is really really important.

I’ve changed my position on gay rights, or gay people, not that I was particularly committed to anything previously. Sometime in the 1960’s or so I dropped “fag” from the lexicon, and occasionally one would wonder about so-and-so, but I was a staunch advocate of nothing, a moderate advocate of keeping it in the closet, and gay issues had no immediacy while gay people on TV seemed, well, “different” and vaguely threatening, like immigrants or Muslims.

Then Luke showed up at my office, announcing clearly but without provocation that he is a gay primary parent in his household and that he thought I could make money by hiring him. I considered the options, greed outdueled fear, and Luke was on board. Pretty soon Luke was a regular, the kids and his partner were around the office, we went to their wedding celebration, and Luke was like everyone else. Reducing the gay thing to a personal level one on one with a real live person made it go away.

I’m looking at the mortgage crisis. A lot of people bought things they couldn’t afford on the assumption that rates always go down and values always go up. We call those people “morons”, and the damage will play out for the next five or ten years. I haven’t really bought into any “the evil banker made me do it” philosophy or “the system”. Most of it was just a toxic blend of greed and stupidity. That’s my position and I’m not sticking to it.

So, on the News at 10 I saw a couple in a modest home south of here. The adjustable mortgage went up significantly, the wife got cancer, had to stop working and the husband got laid off. The house is being foreclosed. I do not know them, but somehow whether they were morons and what they should have known do not seem so important. I hope they have health insurance. I wish the bank would figure out that it is cheaper to let them stay than to have the foreclosure and sell at the expected loss. I changed the channel.

Photos

2008-09-06T11:22:00.003-05:00

I have posted my photo. In fact after watching so many photos of Senator McCain as a Naval officer in the 1960’s I think the world needs to see me. Lt (jg) Me, USNR circa 1969 in my stateroom playing undercover hippie.

I debated, thinking something more current would be nice, so I attach another. My needs are simple, mostly revolving around stuffing my face with an éclair in Paris.

Convention Wisdom

2008-09-06T11:12:00.004-05:00

This is a point in time. The Democrats and the Republicans have completed their conventions, the speeches have been made and a 60 day campaign has started.

I intend to vote for Senator Obama, and I say that to establish my bias, so the scribbling will be in context. I think Senator McCain is too old at 72 to be the president, not because 72 is too old per se, but because the 5 years in a Vietnamese prison have taken a toll on him physically and psychologically. President Clinton left office in 2001 at 54, President Bush will leave office at 62, and this is not a time to elect someone at 72, particularly an “old” 72.

The question is whether or how Senator Obama can lose my vote. What could he do to lose my vote? One idea would be to pick a vice president who is a partisan insider to bring out the worst of Washington’s gridlock politics. Done.

A second idea would be to give a pandering, low road, attack dog convention speech. Done. Perhaps I am Contraria because I thought Senator Obama’s speech was the worst I have heard since I was in the hall in Atlanta in 1988 to hear Governor Dukakis say that the election was “not about ideology, it is about competence”. Playing to his weaknesses Obama dropped his promise to bring different people together and spoke to the thousands in the stadium instead of the millions on TV. Are there really people who believe that he will somehow bring the steel mills and coal mines back to the Midwest? Does he really believe that President Bush is the crux of the election? Did he win the primaries because people thought he would bring more tax cuts than Republicans? Senator Obama decided to play former Senator Gramm’s comments about American “whiners”. Does Obama think he’ll come out ahead in a comparison of what a candidate’s supporters say? How much more time does he want to spend discussing Reverend Wright?

In my humble judgment, in a moment with an opportunity for glory, Barack Obama blew it.

What could Senator McCain do to win my vote? Probably nothing, but hypothetically he could pick a vice president from out of nowhere who could somehow combine a Teflon untouchability with a strong rhetorical breath of fresh air. Oh wait, he did that. Governor Palin's speech was a delight, and her attacks on Obama were measured, understated and hit him where he fairly can be hit. Very unlike the Democrats’ “Bush sucks” sort of thing. Attacks on her experience have merely highlighted that she has more experience than Senator Obama, and Senator Biden’s experience is all bad, and somehow through some mechanism we do not understand the Teflon has protected her from personal circumstances that might have been devastating.

Senator McCain’s acceptance speech was maudlin, backward looking and presented no vision. It was pretty much as anticipated, but with expectations low for him, at least he didn’t blow it.

It is early September. The polls, fonts of ignorance, say the race is even, which I do not understand. By anything I think Senator Obama should be looking at a 40 state victory. Senator Obama is a Black Swan, but so apparently is Governor Palin. Senator Obama has my vote and less than 60 days to lose it.

The Black Swan

2008-09-06T11:05:00.002-05:00

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan has filled a summer of discussion at our house. Since everyone knows that “all swans are white” the discovery of black swans in Australia challenged millennia of assumptions about swans merely because no one had seen a black swan. Our assumptions and what we call “the truth” are severely limited, often critically so, by the limitations of our experiences and our knowledge. The author’s friend keeps a 30,000 book library, not to show off what he knows but to be reminded of what he does not know. The future is controlled much more by a combination of luck and what we do not know than by the facts in our limited vision.

Taleb says that Black Swans have three essential characteristics: first they are outliers, outside our prior experience and expectations, second they have a large impact, and third they are, after the fact justified with explanations that make them seem predictable. Taleb believes that wars are frequently Black Swans, events set in motion with predictions of future results based on the past which is actually a poor predictor.

In Taleb’s experience life is non-linear, and experience is a rebuke to both the empirical certainties of Hume and the portfolio managers. The author grew up in Lebanon where cultures mixed more or less easily until fighting broke out in 1975. Everyone assumed the fighting would last a couple of weeks as had prior clashes among the sects. 17 years later with their society essentially destroyed some form of peace came to Lebanon, wholly unanticipated results later explained by “experts”. September 11 was a Black Swan, totally outside of our experience, unpredicted, and having an enormous impact. After the fact talking heads could review writings of Al Qaeda, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and make sense of it all, but as a Black Swan, no one had actually said anything on September 10 that would have left anyone thinking that the country was in imminent danger.

Game theory economists, portfolio managers and TV talking heads are Taleb’s principal targets. Each of them make projections that assume “rational behavior” and that future events will look like recent past events and always be distributed within 2 standard deviations on the bell curve. Both assumptions may be true for a very small sampling, but as the sample sizes get larger the larger number of irrational actors are on the scene, and an events outside the 2 standard deviations are more common with greater impact. Being the beneficiary of or ruined by a Black Swan is mostly a matter of luck.

Barack Obama is a Black Swan. Did anyone believe or predict that a convention speech in 2004 could propel an unknown junior senator to leapfrog the entire Democratic Party establishment? Now, of course everyone knows it was obvious, but it was not obvious at all. It was in fact unpredicted and highly unpredictable, outside the normal margin or error and yet so significant. The talking heads after 2004 were wrong, wrong, wrong in everything they said, and still we watch them as if they know something. What they “know” is that each can reinforce what the others say, and what we know is that the future events will be controlled by events the talking heads cannot even imagine.

I have been reasonably lucky avoiding predictions in these writings. The only attempt I recall, “Iraq” in April 2007 appears in September 2008 to have been almost wholly wrong, precisely because I lacked knowledge of events on the ground, changes of positions, and a million other factors invisible from an armchair. Iraq has been non-linear in many ways, apparently, as of the moment, to our advantage. Waiting for some other Black Swan to appear.

In Heaven Everything is Fine

2008-08-24T19:30:00.002-05:00

I had almost forgotten Peter Ivers. In Los Angeles, and in our industry in particular, people come, some stay, some leave and some fade away. Very few like Peter are killed in a murder unsolved after 25 years. Los Angeles adopts and cultivates people, sometimes a person like Lucy Fisher who worked her way up the corporate chain to be now near the top of Sony Pictures, but in those days she was Peter’s girlfriend, working at something or other while Peter was the center of a rising set of talent and on a track to what passes for greatness here.

I am reminded of Peter by a new book In Heaven Everything is Fine by Josh Frank. Frank is something of a punk rock cultist, and in his writings about punk rock disparate threads led back to Peter Ivers, including the song written by Peter which is the book title, performed variously in the 80's by The Pixies, Devo, and the Radiator Lady in “Eraserhead”. Frank followed the threads, and his book brings back memories of a unique personality and the sometimes tragedies all around us.

Muddy Waters once said that Peter Ivers was the world’s greatest living harmonica player, the bluesman not without irony bestowing that crown on a white Classics major from Harvard. When I told Peter that I had seen Paul Butterfield perform, to let him know that I was a harmonica aficionado, he pulled a harp out of his pocket and played me a riff, and he was way beyond Butterfield. In 1980 his LP “Terminal Love” sounded to me only cacophonous, but when I listened to “Alpha Centauri” again this week it is haunting and nothing but way, way ahead of its time. Peter’s music made it to movies from “Grand Theft Auto” to “Airplane” and he was the face of punk rock on late night cable TV before anyone had heard of either punk rock or cable TV.

Frank’s book has the panache of name-dropping, an Olympic sport in Los Angeles which may sell copies. A who’s who of Hollywood, the merging of film and music in pre-MTV days, Peter’s enormous and multi-faceted talent bumping along for years without commercial success, leading to hard times and then murdered in his downtown loft by an unknown assailant. But for the first few years here Peter was ambivalent about commercial success. With one chance in hand he threw it away, opening for Fleetwood Mac and wearing only a diaper, the audience booed him off the stage. He did not have to do that, and it cost him dearly.

I can only say what I know. Peter Ivers was a joy. With a wry but genuine smile he never had an unkind word for anyone, and he bridged the chasms between the most different kinds of people - artists, nerds, jocks, straights, gays, suits, black, white, whoever. He had the quality often attributed to President Clinton that when Peter spoke to you he made you feel that you were the only person in the world. I knew more of his personal qualities than his art, and thinking of the loss to us all has been a little difficult.

In Heaven Everything is Fine is not memorable as literature. Peter Ivers was memorable, and I thank Josh Frank for assembling the material and helping us to remember. www.peterivers.com

The Mayor's Prayer Breakfast

2008-04-29T19:15:00.002-05:00

The Mayor has a prayer breakfast every May. Held at the local Jesuit college the Prayer Breakfast is what we call “ecumenical”, as about 300 of the nicest people in town gather to solemnly congratulate each other on their good works and exhort each other to do more to combat racism and injustice. By 10:30 or so every interest group imaginable has made sanctimonious common cause with every competing group, and the municipal employees, fundraisers and other payrolled people are certain they have moved the good fight forward. The self-employed and people with real lives are certain they have encountered Hell.

For many years I considered the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast merely insipid, one of the places we have to show up in order to be among the nice people, and the tables cost a good deal less than at other functions. This year, however, I have changed my mind and deem it to be an affirmative evil. No table at the Prayer Breakfast this year.

I have started to wonder why and to whom we are all praying together. No really, let’s think for a moment. The Jesuits believe that She is going to condemn all the non-Catholics to eternal damnation, no small thing. The Jews as the Chosen have a monopoly on Her revelation, the Protestants are on the one hand supporting various boycotts of Israel and on the more conservative hand supporting Israel as a means of accelerating the Apocalypse. Unitarians and Universalists do not believe in Her at all. Since 9/11 it has become popular in our parlor liberal communities to invite Muslims to join in the levity so we don’t have to think about what they are praying about, and I call Him “Her” to point out the archaic visions which we peddle to each other. Somehow each of us prays for the damnation and destruction of the other in our own tents, and the cacophony makes no more sense when we do it together in the name of Brotherhood. I would guess that on the whole praying is better done in private or in our own tribes so we do not have to get too close to what the other tribe is actually saying.

I am also concerned about the Mayor’s invitation list. The Roman Catholics and the mainstream, if declining Protestant denominations are invited as are the Reform Jews. Orthodox Jews, of course cannot eat the food or off the dishes, so they will be absent as will the Conservative Jewish clergy, although various synagogue members will attend. Quakers are popular because they favor peace, but we are uncertain that they actually favor praying. The Wahabi Sunni Muslims will be invited, but we have not seen any Shi’a, perhaps out of concern that a car bombing might impinge on the fellowship. An occasional Greek Orthodox will show up in regalia for exotica. There will, however be no animists or wiccans at the Mayor’s Community Prayer Breakfast. We generally do not see Mormons who are outside the pale of this gathering, and certainly not the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints whose Texas compound has recently been cleared of 416 children who the government believes were mistreated by their sect. They will not be invited to the Mayor’s Community Prayer Breakfast. We are unlikely to see Buddhists, although some Unitarians and Reform Jews may sound like them. I would nominate the Rastafarians, as some early morning dope might enliven the proceedings, and Haile Selassie has not recently been honored in these parts. Our nearby city has a Haitian population which might appreciate voodoo. Do we expect Zoroastrians from Iran or Baha’i from Israel? Joel Osteen, pastor of the Lakewood Church in Houston, America’s largest church and home to America’s leading televangelist is unlikely to attend with his personal witness of Jesus, but we are a very liberal community, so I would not be surprised to see Rev. Jeremiah Wright with some words of hatred which will make the white liberals feel very guilty indeed. I would think the staff would try to find Hindus and Sikhs, but I have never seen them, they might not be able to get along, the Hindus probably would not like various cow products in the dinner, and perhaps they prefer my suggestion to keep their praying to themselves. In our community we make a good deal about the Native Americans, but there will be no pagans or spirit worshippers at the breakfast, and a hundred Native American religions will be ignored.

All in all I expect the Breakfast to be enjoyed by an incredibly and shrinking band of liberal Protestants, Catholics and Jews. Joining the community in prayer it will exclude almost the entire known world of religion, make public that which should be private and do so by blissfully ignoring the basic and fundamental concepts on which these faiths are based. I do believe I’ll skip it.

Hitchhiking

2007-12-29T19:37:00.000-05:00

I miss hitchhiking, or at least I am nostalgic about hitchhiking. Not that it was such an enjoyable experience, frequently cold, wet, dark or interminable, but there is something lost in a world where hitchhiking is more rare than skydiving.

Hitchhiking bespoke an unspoken public trust that it was safe to be out and about. Both the hitchhiker and the driver trusted that a kid on the side of the road in suburbia wasn’t a serial killer, and standing by the side of the road wasn’t an invitation to predators. Today we have a more inward, cocooned mentality, defensive and relating electronically rather than informally with strangers. We have been told and tell our children so often not to talk to strangers that we have come to believe it.

Hitchhiking peaked in the 60’s, and I did very little after 1970, the last time I was carless. But, for 10 or 12 years the thumb provided frequent, if irregular transportation and minor adventures.

I started hitching around town when I was 12. It wasn’t very unusual, and in fact having parents for chauffeurs was perhaps more unusual. My first interstate trip was in the summer I was 17. The rides didn’t always come, and the worse the weather the less likely was success. I got groped once, but just got out of the car.

In August 1966 a friend and I bummed across the country and back returning with lifetimes of stories. One morning we woke up at the Denver YMCA, having discovered “3.2” beer the prior night. Almost the first car to come along was a cop who kicked us off the road. He was nice about it, as were the next cop later that day who did the same thing. The third time the cop was pretty helpful, as we had inopportunely been dropped off in front of the state prison at Canon City, a really bad place to hitch. He checked our id’s over his radio and drove us downtown, suggesting that perhaps we could take a bus. So bus we did, the 4:30 PM from Canon City arriving in Albuquerque at midnight. Now, in those days the Albuquerque bus station was right adjacent to Route 66, so at midnight we stuck out our thumbs, and sometime around 8:00 AM, a very bad night, we got picked up by a guy in a ’48 Chevy who was working his way across the country with a siphon tube. We bought him a loaf of bread and let him drop us off in the Arizona desert before he had to refill his gas tank.

How do I remember a conversation from 40+ years ago? “How long have you boys been in California?” the cop asked. “About an hour, officer”. “About an hour and already you want to go to jail.” No jail time, but we did learn that it was legal in California as long as 1 foot was on the sidewalk. Got to play by the rules. One time a guy picked me up in Sacramento on Tuesday afternoon and dropped me off in Boston on Friday morning.

So I have stories that they don’t have. On the other hand, as I write this one of them has just emailed from Australia, one is going to Mexico on Friday and the other one spent a semester in London, mostly traveling through Europe. So they have stories too. What I wonder is whether there actually is more danger hitching now than 40 years ago, or whether incidents get more publicity and we are simply more risk-averse. Is there more danger in the streets or only in our heads?

I'm Going to Germany

2007-09-25T18:39:00.000-05:00

I’m going to Germany.

For many years I would not have considered going. My position was that if I had to go to Germany I would walk down the street carefully and only if heavily armed, because I think they are trying to kill me.

People would ask, “Why do you think they are trying to kill you?” and I would usually respond, “What makes you think they are not? They never stopped the killing until someone forced them”. See “The Holocaust”, supra. No German cars either. Even when Detroit put a gun to my head with crap vehicles and said “Buy foreign” it was Japanese cars for 25 years. Even when Eddie Carson at the gas station disapproved, “Those yellow bastards killed my brother”.

But in more recent years I’m getting soft. I’ve decided there should be a statute of limitations on grudges, and I have established it at 20 years. 20 years is enough to property nurture, feed, feed on and ultimately get rid of a grudge. Time to move on. I no longer bear grudges against the people who wouldn’t hire me in the 70s, the girls, who, well, anyway,…and I’m OK with Harvard which rejected me 3 times. There are some continuing annoyances which get refreshed from time to time, Jimmy Carter and Al Sharpton come to mind, and I am unsure yet whether only their infractions within the last 20 years are worthy of grudgedom. Even if I were to make a special exception for the Germans certainly 50 years would have been enough.

We are going on a Main-Danube cruise which starts in Nuremberg and ends in Budapest via Vienna and several cities in southern Germany. We have tacked on a couple of days in Prague, undecided as yet whether to go to Terezin. Thereisenstadt. The Daughter thinks I will react poorly, and #2 son was there in the spring and did not enjoy seeing people with his name on the wall. The cruise looked good, my bride and I could agree on it, and I am reluctant to trip on my own feet to keep the grudge alive. The statute of limitations for grudges is a good thing.

What Not to Think About

2007-09-23T18:05:00.000-05:00

We have taken to watching “What Not To Wear” on Friday nights, another reason for Contraria to be anonymous. Each week Stacy and Clinton find some woman of slovenly dress with some more or less offbeat justification for slovenly. A few days in New York later, with a $5000 credit card spent under the tutelage of Stacy and Clinton, with a new hairstyle and make-up the formerly dowdy, hippie, or teenybopper as the case may be emerges as a sophisticate. New wardrobe, new personality, new outlook. Fashion alchemy. Fashion therapy. Fashion as religion, a 60 minute salvation.

My own fashion is not so much “what not to wear” as “what not to think about”. Seven or eight years ago I stopped wearing a suit to the office. Now there’s a family of dress pants from Land’s End and a gaggle of dress shirts with little polo guys. My little polo guy period. A couple of Brooks shirts have sneaked in, perhaps foretelling the end of the little polo guy. The thing is, it’s good enough, and I don’t have to think about it.

I believe there is a huge premium on things we don’t have to think about, in addition to what to wear, or what not to wear. There are two routes to my office, and more or less every day for the last 25 years I have gone one way and come back the other. If ever there was a reason I have forgotten it. I don’t go out on Friday nights, except for baseball games or nuclear war. I go to the gym on Wednesday and Sunday. Many are the things which do not absorb thought.

Now comes the problem of the shaving cream. For an unknown period, and that phrase in my experience usually means 15-20 years, I have used Crabtree & Evelyn Almond shaving cream with a little brush. Brushes come and go, and every couple of years I have to go get another little jar. Who knows how long it lasts, but this year, “It was discontinued last year” came in a particularly unsympathetic tenor. Those words moved the shaving cream from the What Not to Think About column to the Problem column. Who needs shaving cream in the Problem column when it clearly belongs under What Not to Think About? Should I go to EBay and find the discontinued model or just pick out something else? I have picked out something else which is currently a small daily annoyance, but I believe it will recede in time to What Not to Think About, until one day I hear again, “It was discontinued last year”.

Bardstown

2007-08-22T18:24:00.000-05:00

Bardstown, Kentucky is on the warm side at this time of year, about 100 last week, but the self-proclaimed “Bourbon Capital of the World” is ready for visitors.

More or less 20 miles off Route 64, south of Louisville, and for my daughter and me 5 hours East of St. Louis, Bardstown is home to some 23 bourbon distilleries and a neat downtown which reminds us that old little towns in the East pretty much look the same. Two story brick buildings with nice shops and restaurants line the two streets of town which meet in a small square with the Bardstown Welcome Center in the middle. It could have been Middlebury, Vermont but hotter.

We stopped at the Bourbon Heritage Center at the Heaven Hill distillery. An infomercial movie reviews the history of bourbon and of the distillery, and the main gallery has displays of old stills, photos, recipes and bourbon lore. What we have forgotten, but they have not is that Prohibition ruined the economy of the entire county in the name of someone’s zealotry leading to a Constitutional amendment. And for what? 14 years later it was repealed, but the county’s capital investment had been ruined, and the people of Bardstown had to start over, victims of a social experiment.

In the case of Heaven Hill distilleries the starting over was by Louisville merchants, the Shapira family, 5 brothers who purchased the property at the end of Prohibition and re-started the business which the family still owns. Reviewers generally consider the Heaven Hill bourbons to be ordinary, except for the Elijah Craig 18 which is the oldest bourbon available, and some of the single barrel varieties. I don’t like bourbon much, but I got two bottles, one for a friend to celebrate the end of chemo this Fall and one for a talking souvenir.

Not too much time to spend at Bardstown. We had another 5 hours to drive through the Cumberland Gap to Johnson City Tennessee to watch the Single A Cardinals play the Kingsport Tennessee. Mets. #2 son’s former American Legion teammate plays for Kingsport. Almost 600 miles on a Tuesday from St. Louis to Bardstown to Johnson City. Beats working.

An American Prometheus

2007-07-22T20:31:00.000-05:00

I have at long last finished An American Prometheus, the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Prometheus we remember as the Greek hero who angered Zeus by giving fire and presumably light to humans. His punishment was to be chained to a rock where on a daily basis birds of prey came to eat out his stomach. Robert Oppenheimer, colloquially known as “the father of the A-bomb” was similarly punished by a McCarthy-inspired inquisition which resulted in removal of his Atomic Energy Commission security clearance.

A lengthy and carefully crafted biography turns on two points of time in the life of Robert Oppenheimer, the first being the creation of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos New Mexico in 1945 and the second being Oppenheimer's administrative hearing, in effect a trial, contemporaneous with the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. In his years prior to Los Alamos we have a detailed description of privilege and brilliance, years at Harvard, studies with professors whose names are as familiar as Neils Bohr and others and the intellectual life of Berkeley and Europe. Oppenheimer is intense, intellectual, overbearing, superior, oversexed and perhaps somewhat amoral. His personal life could be generously called a failure. Oppenheimer was at least a “fellow traveler” with Communists in the 1930's, and the authors may have given him the benefit of the doubt as to those years. Oppenheimer was, however, at the right place at the right time to lead the United States in a race against Germany in development of atomic weapons.

As the European war wound down in 1945 the race against the Germans becomes a race for its own sake. The project was shifted to a weapon to be used against the Japanese, and although some scientists expressed concerns about the use of the bomb, the debate about its use has been wider and more general since 1945 than at the time. There is no evidence that either Oppenheimer or Truman had any reservations about the Alamogordo test on July 16, 1945 or any serious or lingering concerns prior to August 6, 1945. Afterwards, seeing the certainty of nuclear buildups, Oppenheimer opposed development of the hydrogen “super” bombs, for which opposition he was labeled as a security risk.

Oppenheimer’s fall came in the form of a 1954 hearing on removal of his AEC security clearance. Orchestrated by Lewis Strauss, AEC Chairman the hearing violated every standard of due process or fundamental fairness, and the divided panel ultimately found that Oppenheimer had given inconsistent accounts, years apart, of a 1942 meeting in which he was approached about sharing atomic secrets with the Soviets, a suggestion he immediately rejected. In the end he was found unsuited for a security clearance in a wave of societal paranoia, not because of anything he had done but on account of telling different versions of events to protect a friend. Not the event itself, but the telling of it, in effect the coverup. Shades of Bill Clinton and Scooter Libby. “American Prometheus” is a suitable title.

The World We Want

2007-07-18T18:42:00.000-05:00

Peter Karoff has written a not-very-big book giving voice to multiple viewpoints on private philanthropy, and describing through conversations with various people their views of the goals and means of private charitable giving.

For 20 years Peter has given himself to organizing thoughts around philanthropy, and as the philanthropic world as at once become more diverse and more donor-centered, Peter through The Philanthropic Initiative has been tailoring giving programs to individual donors and expanding the types and degrees of philanthropic giving. A list of the “good guys” might start with Peter.

In contemplating The World We Want Peter has assembled voices who speak from different perspectives on different issues, people who have devoted their resources or their professional lives to envisioning and working toward The World We Want. How those different peoples’ visions compare and contrast is really quite interesting, and at the end of each discussion Peter presents “Reader’s Guide Questions”, challenging the reader to put himself in the book, and not infrequently subtly challenging his interviewee’s views.

Karoff’s conversations are probing, and although they may to some extent beg the question of exactly what world we want, there is enough communality of issues and a common perhaps bourgeoise sense that there are things which can be done to make it better.

Likewise each of the conversations reveals something about the world, more about the speaker and something about the philanthropic system. It seems, for example that dollars are not the scarcest resource. Programs with measurable and sustainable results and an appropriate ideological underpinning seem to be in the shortest supply. It is clear that India and China have made strides in the last decades towards reducing poverty, largely through private economic growth. In Africa, even according to Peggy Dulamy, poverty is increasing notwithstanding the considerable and reasonably well funded efforts of so many groups.

But perhaps the clearest thoughts are the expressions of the speakers – donors, program managers, social workers, and what motivates them. I was occasionally troubled by the combination of entitlement and its opposite but fellow-traveler, guilt, and a political anger and the obligatory race-baiting which seemed to be the lingua franca. The United States, great Satan, takes a general pummelling from all, and perhaps unsurprisingly to the greatest degree from those who have enjoyed its fruits to the greatest extent. What I would have hoped for, the missing ingredient was – humility, except, perhaps in the case of Sister Margaret Leonard, and perhaps gratitude.

Ultimately the visions of the world we want vary. Pierre Omydar, founder of Ebay credits the auction site with “economic self-empowerment”, and his charitable foundation expects to invest in initiatives that promote individual self-empowerment. Why are we not surprised that a person who had made a reported $10 billion from Ebay might find that Ebay is the solution to the problems of the world?

Amy Goldman believes that philanthropy can make poverty disappear, all evidence to the contrary. Good for her. Shirley Strong is not happy with the human species and seeks transformation of inner instincts. That is a harder vision. John Abele believes in doing well by doing good, which is hard to deny, if ultimately convenient to the highly respected Mr. Abele. Melinda Marble of The Philanthropic Initiative matches resources with needs to allow donors to express their own visions. The donors, providers, facilitators, experts and the neediest people of the world intersect, and it is little wonder that the visions vary. It is nice to have a chance to hear them.

Email

2007-06-13T19:57:00.000-05:00

Only Contraria would think that email is a mixed blessing.
It is a blessing indeed. How else to exhort the little league team to show up at practices or tell a group when the meeting is? How else to transmit documents and images to keep the world turning ever faster? How else to communicate with relatives in Africa, or in case we don’t know if someone is in California or England?

But I have thought for a while and in the past few days have had a series of conversations suggesting that email may not be ideal in all situations. Two conversations arose from a single exchange between the office manager and one of the staff. Each came to me to complain about the tenor of the other in the email exchange. The matter was routine, or perhaps a little uncomfortable, and there was a certain lack of subtlety in the first email which elicited a sharp reply in the second. Both would have benefitted from some unknown feature of Outlook which could say “Are you sure you want to phrase that exactly that way?”, before the “send” is finalized. Both would have benefitted by having the conversation face to face.

Today’s conversation was with a young man who wants a vote from the City Council. He says he has done everything right because he has emailed his position to each of the councillors. The older people in the room are skeptical. The lobbyists say that they do provide information to councillors by email, but the “ask” is in person or at least by phone. People from some other generation believe that email has replaced the phone, but I think they are just uncomfortable with face to face encounters.

What we cannot do with email is gauge or evaluate a response, which makes email good for delivering pure information but bad for testing ideas or eliciting subtleties. In a sense I am troubled not by the failure of email to give information but by the inability to use “active listening” to the response. Email creates a form of barrier to communication which takes the listening part out of a conversation.

At the end of the day, I am a salesman. I can take orders by email, but would not get the orders if that were all I did.

Iraq

2007-04-17T18:34:00.000-05:00

In the Fall of 2002 not many people said “no” to the war in Iraq. The vote in the U.S. Senate was either 99-1 or 98-2 authorizing the use of force in Iraq. My view at the time was that the evidence of weapons of mass destruction was convincing, and the evidence of Saddam Hussein harboring or supporting terrorists was probably true. All in all I thought the decision to go to war was a close call, and I expressed that where there is a close call the answer should be “no”. I did not favor starting the war.

By the spring of 2003 I was much more supportive of the war. I try to appreciate our armed forces and wished them speed and success in the advance to Baghdad. In 2003 and 2004 it seemed to me fair to let Iraq try to settle down, to organize a government and get about its business. By some time in 2005 or at least in 2006 it was pretty clear that was not going to happen. The Iraquis have not surrendered and are following their traditional patterns and ways of life.

I cannot predict whether peace will come to Iraq. I can, however, predict how it will come if it does come. Peace will come to Iraq in a paroxysm of violence, bloodshed and death. In other words the war in Iraq will end when someone wins and someone loses.

This is the vision shared by Senator McCain, al-Quaeda in Iraq, President Amadinejad and Muqtada al-Sadr, although their visions differ in exactly who should win the war. Senator McCain believes that the only way for the United States to win the war is with substantial numbers of additional soldiers. President Bush, on the other hand believes that with a short term increase in troops some combination of facts as yet unfound will lead to a civil solution to the war.

Senator McCain may well be correct, that a large enough force can pacify Iraq, that the various insurgent groups can be made to lose the war, but his position begs the questions of whether the war is worth winning, whether the price is worth it and whether America can stand the concomitent loss of American and Iraqui lives to bring some enforced peace. I do not think so.

President Bush appearsunwilling to accept new facts as they have evovled. Prewar Defense Department estimates were that the U.S. would suffer between 200 and 5000 deaths in a war against Iraq. As of April, 2007 we are 4 years into the war, U.S. combat deaths exceed 3,000, and soldiers are being killed at 100 per month. By the time President Bush leaves office U.S. combat deaths will exceed 4,000. The President has allowed events to dictate our policies, and the combination of linear thinking and inadequate force leaves our soldiers as targets without a goal.

In retrospect, at some point in 2004 or 2005 we should have declared victory and gone home. In 2007 we should define our troops' combat role as force protection, let the Iraquis straighten it out for themselves, which will doubtless involve a bloodbath of some magnitude and then leave them alone.

The Euston Manifesto - Ain't Life a Bitch

2006-10-09T18:34:00.000-05:00

I published a three part piece, "The Liberal Manifesto" on September 13, 2006. I had been working on it for a while, one part principles, one part distinguishing from the Right and one part distinguishing from the Left. Balanced, I thought. And although I am certain that portions of the Manifesto will not age well I tried to leave a little wiggle room to change my mind later. A month later it looks...pretty much the same.

Now I find The Euston Manifesto, published in America on September 12, 2006 at www.eustonmanifesto.org. The day before? The day before. And, unless I dreadfully misread it, expressing better than my tentative effort, more than my jumbled thoughts in a cogent, succinct and compelling narrative. Good for Professor Herf et als. I should become a signatory, but will count to 10 first. Probably more later, perhaps a piece on being a day late and a dollar short. Ain’t life a bitch?

The Liberal Manifesto Part 3

2006-09-13T20:03:00.000-05:00

The Liberal Manifesto Part 3. We are not Democrats

We are not Democrats because:

1. We reject the identity politics of the Democratic party which divides us by race, gender, sexual orientation or other identity issues. We are better people as Americans than as hyphenated Americans, and we reject the quotas and pandering which have become the daily fare of the Democrats.

2. We reject the moral relativism of Democrats who proclaim that all values are of equal value and who therefore stand for nothing.

3. We take pride in our successes and do not gloat at our failures. While Democrats seek to fix the blame, Liberals seek to fix the problem.

4. We oppose judicial rejection of legislative prerogative. We understand the difference between constitutional rights and judicial preferences, and fear the day when radically conservative justices may take the same liberties as radical Democratic judges have in the most recent past.

5. We reject "political correctness", speech codes, thought control and censorship.

6. We believe that rights cannot be separated from responsibilities. The proliferation of rights separated from responsibilities of citizenship is not to the benefit of our country.

The Liberal Manifesto - Part 2

2006-09-13T19:58:00.000-05:00

The Liberal Manifesto Part 2 : We are not Republicans

We are not Republicans because:

1. We believe that the government has an important and positive role to play in improving the lives of its citizens. The government needs to have pro-active concern for the poor, the disabled, the elderly and allocate the resources to address those concerns.

2. We believe that the market economy will not adequately deal with long term concerns such as health care, the environment or energy supplies.

3. We support a right of women to choose to terminate many unwanted pregnancies. We do not support efforts to artificially define a moment of the start of life or to interfere with medical research. In 2006 the President is wrong to oppose stem cell research. We believe that whatever wrong he may believe is occasioned by such research, the wrong of opposing the research is greater.

4. We believe that, except in extraordinary circumstances the federal budget should be balanced. Wars should be paid for from current taxes to the extent possible. We do not agree with current Republican aversion to paying for the Iraq war or the consequences of blind reduction in taxes.

5. We believe in a strong national defense for protecting our nation and our allies. We oppose the hubris of making the world conform to our standards.

6. We do not imagine the world to be in social stasis, but we welcome evolution of society and the creation of new values. We are willing to change our minds.

The Liberal Manifesto- Part 1

2006-09-13T19:41:00.000-05:00

There is a specter haunting America. The specter of diffidence.

I observe the political spectrum and have a choice between two parties, one of which has bad principles and one of which has no principles at all. I observe that across time several political parties in America have outlived their usefulness and withered away. The Federalists, the first Democrats, the Whigs. In Israel the two parties which founded the country, Labor and Likud have played to their narrower and narrower party bases leaving the majority with no home, and a most unlikely protagonist, Ariel Sharon, broke the molds, and prior to his stroke formed a new party of the Center. At this writing it appears that the party will survive Sharon’s departure from the scene.

Do we not have the same splintering in America? Certainly writers have noted that the party rules of both parties have tilted the nomination processes to the radical right for the Republicans and the radical left for the Democrats. There are no more "Rockefeller Republicans", and Joe Lieberman is out as a Democrat in favor of Ned Lamont who stands on primary night with Al Sharpton. Is there nothing between Dennis Hastert and Al Sharpton? How about a party for the 80% of Americans who are neither Hastert nor Sharpton?

What would such a party look like in America? First, we will be called the Liberals. Some people think that’s a bad thing, but it is a badge which summons our best spirit. We will probably sound a little like "neo-liberals", but that is mud-slinging. We are not Democrats and we are not Republicans. Some may be "Reagan Democrats" and some may have held their noses and voted for Kerry.

We have certain principles which we deem to be important.

1. We are Americans. We are proud of our past and optimistic about our future.

2. We have faith in our political system of democratically elected representatives. We have tolerance for decisions freely made, and will work to change decisions with which we disagree.

3. We believe in a social compact in which Americans have shared rights, but also shared responsibilities.

4. We believe that political freedom is intrinsically tied to economic freedom and cultural freedom.

5. We believe peace is our first and best foreign policy. We are a nation which can lead the world best by example. We will maintain the world’s most powerful military as an instrument of peace. We have defeated fascism and communism, and the energy and freedom of our people will defeat any future threat.

6. We believe in a positive domestic policy of compassion, planning, management and tax equity, balancing the budget and providing sufficient revenue to provide for national needs.

Self-Evident Truths and the Theory of Thugocracy

2006-07-23T19:39:00.000-05:00

It is summertime, and we annually proclaim that we hold certain "truths" to be "self-evident". In America we say it is a "truth" that all people are equal before the law, that they are born with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We say that we have formed our government for the purpose of protecting those rights, and if the government should no longer sufficiently serve that end then we have either the right or the duty to alter or abolish it.

I have given some thought to whether the "truths" are "truths", whether they are facts at all, determined that they are certainly not "self-evident" and looked around at what might be closer to the "truth".

What Jefferson called the "truths" are not facts, but operating principles, organizational theories proposed for a new society. While rooted in Enlightenment political philosophy and concepts of "Natural Law" the concept that all people are equal in the law was certainly not "self-evident" either to European monarchists who ruled by divine right, to Asian monarchists who believed they constituted divine right, or in fact to any other developed or developing culture.

As operating principles or organizational theories Jefferson’s ideas have worked pretty well for America for 200 years. I would argue that in America the operating principles are a reasonable if imperfect description of how our country actually works. But if the operating principles are empirical principles and not "self-evident" facts then what other operating principles might we see in the real world, and how would they work?

The Theory of Thugocracy is that an alternative to democracy is a government ruled by thugs. Thugocracies share among some common characteristics.

1. A group of armed men take control of a geographic area. The complexity of the target area, its internal defenses, its area and its population may dictate how many thugs are required to take it over or what level of sophistication is required. For example in some African countries control of the presidential palace, the radio station and the airport may be sufficient for a very small number of thugs to claim control of some countries.

2. Thugs motivated purely by greed, who are in effect land based pirates may be more likely to control simpler countries, Central American plantations or African former colonies. Thugs motivated by ideology or religion may be able to recruit more widely and control larger geographic areas such as Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia.

3 Thugs generally attain legitimacy in the world community by adopting the rhetoric, forms and symbols of democracy, if not the substance. The head thug is no longer the "king" but is the "president". His cronies and sycophants are elected as a "parliament" which adopts a constitution, amendable in the discretion of the head thug. The symbols vest the thugs with sufficient credentials to support admission to the United Nations which entitles the thugs to receive various forms of international payments.

4. One defining characteristic of a Thugocracy is that the nation is the same as the head thug. Like Louis XIV’s "L’état, c’est moi", in a thugocracy there are no institutions separate from the head thug, and a particular example is that there is no distinction between the national treasury and the head thug’s bank account. The world seemed mostly amused to learn that perhaps 40% of the international aid given to the Palestinians since Oslo had found its way into Yassir Arafat’s personal bank account, and Mrs. Arafat had no intention of giving it up. Likewise, when Saddam Hussein’s sons backed a truck up to the Iraqi Treasury they were just doing what thugs do to the treasury.

5. It may in fact be a self-evident truth that the consolidation of economic power and political power is a characteristic of a Thugocracy. From corporate banana republics in Central America to aid-based economies in Africa and the Palestinian territories to the government-oil based islamofascist regimes, and backwards in time to the fascists, the Thugocracies need to control the economy as a part of controlling the nation.

6. Thugocracies rule by violence and fear of violence. Communist thugs adopt a populist rhetoric, claiming to rule in the name of the people and for their benefit. It is not necessarily elections they fear, although they fear those that could have multiple candidates, and thugs can call elections "bourgeois". What they fear is countervailing power, and the Communist countries share with the Islamist countries and the greed Thugocracies the control of all institutions.

7. If democracies are instituted by people to secure rights, Thugocracies are instituted by thugs to secure power. While the rhetoric varies from Castro to Arafat to Somalia to the Congo the goal of control is constant. Whether cloaked in false elections, based on the commandments of a false God or in some false ideology, the thugs stay in power for its own sake, and the single common thread separating Thugocracies from democracies is the lack of countervailing powers.

Now, if we look around the globe, do we see self-evident truths that governments are instituted by people to secure the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or do we see people controlled by thugs with various justifications for Thugocracy? I fear that we see mostly the latter, usually cloaked in the language of democracy, frequently paraphrasing Jefferson. I think we would be best off recognizing a good thing when we have it.

The Holocaust

2006-07-23T19:14:00.000-05:00

The Holocaust retains our attention more than 60 years after it ended. What many regarded as the most civilized nation on earth applied the most modern technology of the day to the destruction of human beings. Genocide on a theoretical and practical scale never before attempted and without the benefit of any lowered moral standard available to Arabs, Rwandans, Sudanese or other third world killers.

I know the facts, figures, dates place and names. I have read Dawidowicz and Goldhagen. Digesting it all, I have little to contribute but two things to remember.

Hitler was elected. No beer hall putsch, no coup, no revolution. Elected in a parliamentary system, a minority to be sure, but elected nonetheless, appointed as Chancellor, reflecting the prevailing wisdom and judgments of the German people. His platform was not a secret, Mein Kampf was in general circulation.
The Germans did not stop killing Jews until the Red Army physically and militarily prevented the killing. By January 1945 Himmler had directed that the death camps be shut down and the records destroyed, and yet Auschwitz and other camps, death marches and atrocities on a massive scale continued until the Russians overtook the retreating Germans. I have had occasion to criticize some historical writing which refers to the killers as the "Nazis". A minuscule percentage were members of the National Socialist party. The correct word is
"Germans".

What lessons do I take from the Holocaust? First, if a political leader espouses genocide I believe that he intends to do what he says. Political power does not moderate the views of the killers, it validates them. Second, societies of hate are perfectly capable of democratically electing the most horrible killers to office and following them through the consequences. How foolish would we be to say it could not happen again?

I have watched and listened to the Iranians and the Palestinians. The rhetoric of genocide is not hidden or subtle. It is clear and immediate, only lacking in the immediate means to the end. The Iranians and the Palestinians simply do not have the weaponry sufficient to wipe Israel off the map. At least not today. Those Palestinian sympathizers who deny the genocidal rhetoric are guilty of selective hearing, or projecting what they wish they would hear. In 2006 the only hope for peace in the Mideast is the hope that the Iranians and the Palestinians do not mean what they say, but there is no reason to believe that they do not mean what they say. On the contrary there is daily evidence that they mean exactly what they say, and have the intention if not the present means to carry it out. They have elected their leaders in free and open elections to carry out the wishes of the people, and the leaders are doing exactly that.

The lessons of the Holocaust are on the news every day.

Little League

2006-07-23T19:01:00.000-05:00

I have been inattentive to writing and proffer the usual. Busy. Work. Children. Out of ideas.

All untrue, except "out of ideas" could be related to "never had any ideas".
The real problem is Little League. #1 son and I have just completed our 10th year of coaching the Phillies together, my 19th year of coaching overall including 7 years coaching #1 son before he took to the more cerebral portions of the game, coaching #2 son.

I am a lifer. I have no idea why I coach Little League with both my sons out of that age, or perhaps I have a few reasons, all of which are vaguely embarrassing, so I go to some effort to find them unpersuasive. One is that I enjoy the joint enterprise with #1 son where he is probably smarter than I am, but I can do the grunt work, fill out the papers, send emails to the team and carry the equipment. We can work as equals with no family, danger or money at stake.

We do it this year because we did it last year. Little League is the fabric of the house, the rhythm of the seasons. Debates about the time taken by Little League are part of the deal, and in December we review the coaches’ reports from the minor leagues to discuss the player draft coming up in March. Ah, the draft is exquisite agony.

I love the banter with the boys. After 10 years I have the annual discussions pretty well down, usually starting in mid-season with a discussion, more accurately a monologue, as to whether there have been any new thoughts since Aristotle. In a particularly promising year 2 players have heard of Aristotle, and some years one player is willing to venture that "television" is new since Aristotle. My usual riposte is that television is merely the application of technology with which Aristotle was quite familiar. I have not strictly taken Jacques Barzun’s position that there is nothing new since Aristotle, but I think the concept is worthy of note to 11 and 12 year olds. #1 son is impatient to get on with the practice and thinks it somehow unfair to fire missiles over the heads of the boys. I point out that the impatience of the sons to the wisdom of the fathers is considerably older than Aristotle.

On June 16th the Phillies celebrate Bloomsday. I have a commemorative T-shirt I wear that day, dazzle them with the concept of the 50 page concluding sentence and conclude myself that Molly Bloom was a Phillie, that she wanted to be up with the bases loaded, just to have a chance to hit a home run. Yes, Yes. Who wants to be up with the bases loaded? Think about Molly Bloom. And yes I said yes I will Yes. #1 son is practically apoplectic.

This rain-soaked, rain-delayed, rain-dominated year the Phillies won the championship. For the first time since 1999 when #2 son and his friend Phil led the team as 12 year olds the Phillies had the players to win, and the coaches weren’t able to mess it up. What a year! Glory Hallelujah! Yes, Yes!

Occam's Razor

2006-05-13T14:54:00.000-05:00

Wikipedia restates Occam’s Razor as requiring that the explanation of any phenomenon should require the fewest assumptions possible. Through many formulations the central tenet holds that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon is most likely to be the most accurate. From the ecclesiastical roots of Sir William of Occam’s writings and various proofs and disproofs of the existence of God the theory has spread to biology, physics, mathematics and other scientific inquiry including Leonardo’s formulation "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication". Or, in pop culture it is stated, "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras".

A readable blog using the concerpt is http://www.occams-razor.info/

Sophistry on the other hand is the use of confusing, illogical and/or insincere argument to make a point. Sophistry is perhaps the contrapositive of Occam’s Razor. Perhaps this table is not really flat because it is composed of wood molecules which are carbon, oxygen and hydrogen atoms all in frenetic motion, so how can a table be flat?

I find sophistry in public discourse where Occam’s Razor is preferable. Sophistry encompasses moral relativism, the concept that whether an action is right or wrong depends on who does it., as well as its fellow-traveler, the search for "root causes". Muslim apologists look for the "root causes" of September 11 where a simpler explanation is that they hate us and want to kill us.

The simplest explanation is not always the only or the correct explanation. All other things being equal, however, it is the most likely.

I said it first

2006-02-21T22:00:00.000-05:00

The "Boston Phoenix" has announced that it will not publish the infamous Mohammed cartoons. Some time ago the "Phoenix" achieved some notoriety for publishing pictures of Daniel Pearl’s severed head, but in a burst of honesty the editors have said that they will not publish the cartoons, not from any cultural sensitivity but rather because they are afraid of Muslim retaliation. It would be unfair, they say to subject their staff to the potential for violence from Muslims. And so we are censored.

"Outrageous", thought I, but then the words seemed familiar, and re-looking at a piece herein called "pseudonyms" it struck me. I said it first.

I am Charlotte Simmons

2006-02-21T21:26:00.000-05:00

Reading Tom Wolfe is a pleasure. Cascades of words, images, dialogue, description, action and interior monologue laced with research and perception are wrapped in a thick, rich package of humor and sentiment. This book would be a great read even if it were not about anything, but it is. Wolfe is a literary photojournalist who uses the medium of fiction as a means of social commentary, and in I am Charlotte Simmons his focus is on academia. While the portrayal of prestigious if fictional Dupont University as hamstrung by political correctness and fueled by sex and alcohol where the basketball coach is king has been criticized by academics as unfair it has been lauded at least by my daughter as a reasonably accurate portrayal of college life in 2004. She knows better than I do.

I am a little skeptical about Charlotte. Portrayed as coming to sophisticated Dupont from the hills of North Carolina Charlotte seemed to me to be less a person from a different place than a time traveler, a person from 1958 moved forward in time and baffled by the sexual and cultural revolutions. But, while the focus on the book is certainly on Dupont and Charlotte’s reactions to it, I could not help but notice that Charlotte starts out as less a person than a set of credentials, and her self-affirming "I am Charlotte Simmons" masks a certain lack of character. At Dupont Charlotte finds herself inadequate and seeks identity from men, both a frat boy and a jock, and her "I am Charlotte Simmons" loses its meaning. Charlotte is also strangely unable to tell the truth to anyone on almost any subject. I started turning over pages at every place where Charlotte told a lie and found a lot of turned pages. Introduced in Chapter 2 she speaks 5 times, 4 of which are lies or dissembling. I had some trouble with the heroine.

A great book. Brilliant writing is a reward in itself.

Wasting Away in Palupaville

2006-02-19T20:38:00.000-05:00

February 15, 2006. Aruba. In my experience "palupas" are unique to Aruba. A palupa is a thatched straw mini-hut, open on the sides, really a structural umbrella, with a wooden tree-pole perhaps 12 feet high and with a radius of 10 feet at its base which is about 7’ above ground, tapering to a one foot width around the tree-pole at the top. Palupas are placed about 30’ apart on the beach, are owned by the hotels and reserved through the hotel beach staff, although the beach itself if public. During school vacations weeks competition for palupas can become quite intense, with a family scout reserving the prime location palupas at 6:00 or 7:00 a.m. During non-vacation weeks the competition is less intense.

But in Aruba the sun is intense every week, and the palupa shade cuts a cylindrical path across a swath of beach Most days consist of moving the chaises to stay within the shade of the palupa, a chaise and shade minuet heading generally from west to east as sun moves across the sky. Wasting away in Palupaville may be just drinking or it maybe it is a state of mind, switched "off". How else to explain a frantic rush to a palupa at 8:30 a.m followed by a frantic rush to...nothing? OK, to reading. I Am Charlotte Simmons. There are only two topics of discussion - where to have lunch and where to have dinner. I wish I were the kind of person who could not do this, someone who would seek out the best shops, get to know the culture or even play tennis. My brother recently played tennis 14 times on a 15 day vacation. I have spent two days thinking about maybe water skiing. This afternoon I would have exercised but had a drink instead. That must mean it’s almost time for dinner.

On Bullshit

2006-02-06T20:36:00.000-05:00

Princeton professor Harry G. Frankfurt has published a pamphlet entitled On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005), 65 small pages of large type which ought not require additional condensation.

Frankfurt starts, "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit....But we tend to take the situation for granted...In consequence we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is...".

Other words have similar or parallel import, such as "humbug" or "claptrap", but the author finds that bullshit has particular traits and differences from showmanship or misrepresentations or similar concepts. Somehow we know that bullshit is a particular type of misrepresentation.

Frankfurt makes the most specific comparison and contrast between bullshit and lying. In lying the untruth is the goal. The liar wants the listener to think true something which is not true for the purpose of gaining whatever the liar seeks. Bullshit, on the other hand is essentially the indifference to truth. Bullshit does not have to be false, but the bullshit artist speaks without the underlying concern as to whether it is true or false, because that is not his goal. His goal is something else, to project an image, to get the girl, or to get elected, so the truth or falsehood of what is said is immaterial, only the achieving of some other goal. The liar lies to convince the listener of an inaccurate fact. The bluster is indifferent to the truth because he is unconcerned with the facts. Both an honest person and a liar have concern with the truth. A bulshitter is indifferent to the truth.

The best place to test Frankfurt’s theory, of course is C-SPAN. No shortage of bullshit there.

Terrorism

2006-02-02T20:34:00.000-05:00

Definitions of terrorism are enormously popular. Google says that terrorism is defined by the US Department of Defense as:

"the unlawful use of -- or threatened use of -- force or

violence against individuals or property to coerce or

intimidate governments or societies, often to achieve

political, religious, or ideological objectives."

The "unlawful" term means that acts of war may not be "terrorism", and the various definitional fights at the United Nations, on the Web and in various agencies are each an effort to paint specific groups either as "terrorists" or "not terrorists".

My definition of terrorism would focus on the target not the actor. Terrorism could be defined as an act of mass violence or intimidation by states or non-state actors against civilians for the purpose of depriving the victims of the will to fight back as opposed to depriving the victim of the means to fight back. Attacks by states or non-state actors against military, governmental or significant economic targets are acts of war not terrorism.

The reason for a definition is to see who is included and who is excluded in the definitions. The primary inclusion in the world overall are the Palestinians who have largely invented modern terrorism. Palestinian targets are almost exclusively civilians with a particular targeting of children and other non-military and non-economic "soft" targets. Palestinians have invented a modern cult of child sacrifice, using their own children as human bombs to kill Jewish children, and they have infused their culture with the death-worship and glorification of murder. By monetary rewards to killers, cultural glorification of anti-Semitism, and the promotion of the cult of death, Palestinians are archetypical terrorists under my definition.

The reason to include governments is that some acts of war serve the same purpose. The German Blitz of 1940 against London is an example in which the targets were not chosen for military value and were intended, unsuccessfully, to defeat the British will to fight. A somewhat more successful model was the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, neither of which had significant military value, both of which targeted predominantly or exclusively civilian targets and which had the intent and effect of breaking the Japanese will to fight as opposed to their means to fight. Those nuclear attacks and the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden were terrorist attacks in my judgment.

I am interested that under my definition Al Quaeda is not a terrorist organization. Al Quaeda attached Marines in Lebanon, U.S. embassies in Africa and the USS Cole, all, it seems to me to bear more the hallmarks of war than terrorism. And, the September 11 attacks were directed to the Pentagon, a purely military target, the World Trade Center, an economic target and most likely the White House for Flight 93. I do not believe the September 11 attacks were intended to intimidate America. I believe they should more correctly be seen as acts of war striking at specific military, economic and political targets well within the usual definitions of war.

While it may suit the politicians to paint Bin Laden as a "terrorist", he is not so in my mind. Rather, unlike the Palestinians who would not attack anyone who could fight back, Bin Laden is an Islamic fascist warrior bringing the battle to his enemy’s strengths.

It is not clear to me that this, or any other definition is particularly useful, but it does point out to me the difference between acts of war and acts of terror.

Judge Alito

2006-01-18T21:03:00.000-05:00

At this writing the confirmation hearings of Judge Samuel Alito before the Senate Judiciary Committee have concluded, and the Committee vote is scheduled for next week. Most people believe that all the Republicans will vote in favor and most or all the Democrats will vote against confirmation, but the Democrats do not seem to have enough enthusiasm or votes to sustain a filibuster to prevent confirmation.
The Republicans have managed to contain their glee. Judge Alito appears to be a conservative thinker, bright, articulate, and in every way qualified to be a judge.

The Democrats know they are opposed, but are having difficulty articulating their reasons. Senator Kennedy says unequivocally "...the record’s clear that the average person has a hard time getting a fair shake in Judge Alito’s courtroom". Kennedy’s statement is certainly untrue, a good example of the Big Lie for political effect, and some commentators have commented that his questioning of Judge Alito’s 1980’s membership in a conservative college alumni group was reminiscent of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attack on Fred Fischer in the Army McCarthy hearings which ultimately brought his disgrace. For the television it appears that Kennedy’s style, reducing Mrs. Alito to tears has done the nominee a favor. Kennedy’s position is the pure politics. He really did not care about Alito’s "qualifications", he will vote against whomever President Bush nominates.

Senator Feinstein has taken a different position. She says that she does not see a likelihood of a filibuster, which is a concession that the nomination will pass. She says, "This might be a man I disagree with, but it doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be on the court". That is a traditional conservative stance, that the standard is whether the judge is qualified and not a litmus test of a political stance. However, Senator Feinstein then goes on to say that she will vote against Alito, based on his conservative record. Senator Feinstein apparently has two thresholds. In the first instance, like Kennedy, she votes against conservative judges based on their beliefs, but will not support a filibuster to make her opposition effective. At some other and unknown level she would support a filibuster.

I am concerned that Judge Alito is merely competent. He has spent his entire professional career working for the government as have too many of the Justices, and there is little in his record of creativity or originality. Competence may be the threshold to avoid a filibuster, but we will need to see whether we could have done better.

I am also concerned that any Justice on the bench cannot forget the malignant attacks of the interest groups during the confirmation process. The abortion lobby has been relentless, probably defamatory, and certainly misleading in these proceedings. Senator Kennedy has been a mean caricature. What effect does that have on a Justice after confirmation? Is there any doubt that the Clarence Thomas confirmation process taught Justice Thomas to say nothing, ever? And will not Thomas and Alito, having suffered and their familes suffered at the hands of Democratic posturing and abortion lobby defamation have an affected view of their issues?

Pseudonyms

2006-01-16T19:00:00.000-05:00

Pseudonyms have a long and glorious tradition. With some notable exceptions it seems that a practice good enough for both Jefferson and Hamilton and many in-between should be good enough for most of us.
The blogs are full of pseudonyms and debate on their propriety. One Asian-American website has some pseudonyms and some critique of them, apparently concerned about racial pollution of the web site.

I like mine for several reasons: Fun – it’s word play I’ve been saving for a few decades; Fear – the Islamofascists have silenced people around the globe, and it may happen here, sooner or later; Folly – it hides stupidity.

On the other hand, maybe if we needed our names and phone numbers we’d be more careful what we say.

Why Bother?

2006-01-16T18:55:00.000-05:00

There really is nothing new under the sun. One thing certainly not new is the time spent wondering "Why bother?", some of those days when we read the newspaper, feel the weight of the world on our shoulders and wonder what to do, what we should do, or what we can do. Our experience is that we are more inclined to shrug it off, to put up with troubles which are minor or maybe far away. Sometimes it feels admirable or just easier to suffer in silence until an event affects us personally or a long series of events moves us. Then, while there is a time to keep silent, there is also a time to speak, when it is our right or our duty to cast our bread upon the waters and see what comes back.

I used to think that the General Theory of Relativity meant that everyone’s relatives were crazy. Now I have found a common thread in Ecclesiastes, Hamlet, Jefferson, and Ayn Rand, combined in 5 sentences,

The Cyber House Rules

2006-01-01T19:20:00.000-05:00

Ben would be proud of me. I thought of a double entendre which Matt Groening thought of before - Futurama

These are for me – I need to look at them before fouling the nest.

1. Brevity is the soul of wit.

2. Skepticism is warranted, no, demanded of a contrarian. Cynicism, however is inappropriate. Finding the line is the trick.

3. Stick to the knitting.

4. When "frequently in error but never in doubt", make changes

5. Don’t be self-conscious.

6. Make new rules as necessary.

I would like to give some thought to the nature of rules. Sometimes they are useful lenses to focus and sometimes they are harmful self-constraints. I’m not certain how to tell the difference.

I had a motorcycle and wrote down some riding rules (no riding at night, wear protective gear etc.). One of the rules was to get rid of it after one fall. I fell, separated a shoulder, followed the rule and sold the bike. I miss the bike, but I think that having the rule and following it was useful not constraining. It prevented me from making excuses that it was safe.

2006-01-01T18:15:00.000-05:00

New Year's Resolution

If I'd gotten up early enough or stayed up late enough I could have been the first American to make a blog on January 1, 2006. As it is, I will be somewhere in the middle of the day. Which is probably not a bad place to be. I wouldn't want to be a person who pushes the blog button at either 12:01 or 11:59. Maybe that says it all. Which is probably not a bad place to be.