By My Troth

On The Latest Outrage

2012-01-19T10:09:00.000-05:00

A video has been making the rounds lately, taken in Afghanistan, showing a group of Marines urinating on some dead Taliban fighters. The outrage was, of course, extreme and has gone all the way up to the Secretaries of State and Defense.

Personally, I'm having a hard time getting worked up over it for a few reasons.

- These are Marines. They don't come to your door to sell you cookies, they are the people we send out to kill our enemies and break their stuff, a job they perform admirably. They are rough, hard men (my own father was a World War II Marine, so I have some personal experience there). They've likely seen some of their friends killed or maimed, they may even have been wounded themselves. They may have just been taking fire from those very Taliban, and when they emerged victorious I believe they're allowed to let off a little steam. They are, after all, still alive despite the efforts of the Tangos. Winston Churchill said that there's nothing move exciting than being shot at and missed, so these Marines live very exciting lives.

- Before you criticize these Marines put yourself in their boots. Look around you right now, what do you see? A computer, a chair, a wastebasket, a phone. These are the things you deal with and encounter every day. Imagine, if you can, being in a position where the sight of a corpse is just as common. Most of us have never seen a dead person outside of a funeral home or hospital. The sight of dead bodies is a common one for combat Marines, seeing one affects them about as much as seeing a trash can affects you. They don't experience the horror that we would. They'd never be able to function if they did.

- Next, back in their boots. You're put into a position where your duty, and your survival, require you to kill another person. That's a terrible and weighty situation, but it must be done. How do you make yourself pull the trigger on someone? You learn to hate them. My father (the aforementioned World War II Marine) carried his hatred of the Japanese to his grave. Letting go of that hatred is something our returning veterans must learn to do in order to function back here in civilized America, but when they're in combat they need that hatred. Still, hatred is caustic, you can't allow it to build up and still retain your sanity, therefore it must be released. Personally, I think pissing on the corpse of someone who was recently trying to kill you is a pretty tame method of releasing some hatred. Others have done far worse, as the records of atrocities committed by soldiers throughout history shows. They didn't dismember them, rape their wives and murder their children.

- It's not as if our own dead were treated with compassion and respect by our enemies. I remember the pictures of decapitated and burned bodies hanging from a bridge. Let us also not forget that this war started with terrorists flying jets into buildings and people having to make the horrible choice of jumping hundreds of feet to their death or burning to death. Pardon me if I find it hard to want our enemies treated with compassion.

- Spare me the statement that this will only make our enemies hate us more. They already hate us enough to commit suicide by flying airplanes into buildings. They already hate us enough to strap on explosives and blow themselves up in hopes of killing us. They already hate us enough to murder us indiscriminately, men, women and children. It's hard to imagine them hating us more than they already do, and honestly I don't care if they do. I don't want our enemies to love us, I want them to fear us.

Having said that, I'm not saying that what they did wasn't wrong. They dishonored themselves, their nation, and the Marine Corps. They need to be punished, but that punishment shouldn't be the equivalent of a felony conviction (which is what a less-than-honorable discharge is). Marine officers and NCOs can be VERY creative at finding ways to punish Marines who misbehave, so I think their immediate superiors should be given free rein to make an example of them. There is absolutely no need for the Secretaries of State or Defense to be involved. Who knows, the miscreants may even become better Marines as a result.

Socialists are Stupid, Crazy, or Evil

2011-08-23T11:34:00.000-04:00

Yes, those are harsh words in the title. I'm not being ironic. I'm not exaggerating to make a point. I mean what I wrote quite sincerely and perfectly literally, and I can back up my assertion with historical facts.

First, I need to offer my view of history. I view history not as a boring collection of names, places and dates, but as a laboratory where ideas are tried and from which the results of those ideas can be analyzed. If a social idea is proposed, it's wise to look back at history and see where similar ideas have been tried in the past (they almost ALWAYS have been tried) and see what the results were. Those results can often be counter-intuitive.

Far from being workers paradises, Socialist nations have to build walls around themselves in order to keep their own people from fleeing to other places. Socialist governments have killed more people, their own citizens, in the 20th century than all the wars we fought during that time. An estimated 12 million people were killed by the Nazis (National Socialist Party), 20 million by Stalin in the Soviet Union, 50 million by Mao and his successors in China, and more untold millions in Cambodia, Korea, Viet Nam, Cuba, etc. With such a horrific track record, how can anyone see Socialism as a viable philosophy? Well, I've identified a few different types of people who embrace this failed idea:

1) Some people are completely unaware of the results of prior attempts to bring about Socialist societies. It looks good on paper, it looks FAIR. They never take a look back in history to other places where it's been attempted to see how they worked out. They never see the abject misery and outright horror brought about by Socialism. It looks good in theory, so it must work in practice, right? Well, as they say, in theory there's no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is. These are the people who insist that Cuba is a wonderful place to live, despite the remains of rafts on the beaches of Florida or the untold numbers of Cubans who didn't survive that trip. For those who would claim that some of these people are merely ignorant and not stupid, I'd offer that the evidence is freely available and totally conclusive. If you're old enough to vote or order a glass of wine in a restaurant and haven't availed yourself of that evidence you're only ignorant because you're too stupid to become educated. I repeat, stupid.

2) Some people actually DO see the history of Socialism's failure, but they conclude that it simply has never been attempted properly. They think the problem is with the implementation, not with the underlying philosophy. They completely mis-understand human nature, that such a society can't work. People will always look out for their own interests, they'll always take the path of least resistance, and they won't labor for that which doesn't provide benefit. These believers will tell you it WOULD work if only the RIGHT people were given the job of making it happen. (Kevin at The Smallest Minority refers to this concept as "Do it Again, Only Harder!") Just because it's failed every other time it's been tried doesn't mean it'll fail this time, right? Albert Einstein's definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Crazy.

3) This next group of Socialism's supporters is vile. They see the human wreckage left behind by prior attempts. They see that the vast majority of people living in a Socialist society exist in a state of misery, and that many people will be labeled as "enemies of the state" and incarcerated or outright murdered. They also note that for the elite, the higher ups, the party aparatchiks.life is pretty good. Instead of being one of the many miserable ones, they expect to be among the few well-off ones. Instead of being murdered, they expect to carry out the ordered the murder at least, or at best to be the one who does the ordering. Down that road lies the worst excesses of depravity. If that's not evil, I don't know what is.

4) Then there are the people who believe humans just haven't evolved far enough to be good Socialists, but that we will. They believe that human nature is progressing to a state where everyone will naturally work to the best of his ability and give the produce of their labor to those with the greatest need. They believe, in that Utopian society, that no one will be lazy, no one will be greedy, no one will do less work than they can or take more than they need. Perhaps there are some people with this viewpoint who are willing to sit back and let nature take its course in human evolution, believing that eventually we'll reach that higher plane of existence, but I've never met such a person (who I would classify as stupid). Most such true believers in Socialism are more than willing to hasten the process of evolution by eliminating people who don't wish to be Socialists. Oh, they would never come out and admit that they'd like to see guillotines set up in the town square. They use such innocuous terms as "re-education" or "the greater good" or "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs". Whatever euphemism they choose, the result is the same, the gulag, the concentration camp, the killing field. The truly disgusting thing is that these people can act with clear consciences, they're trying to bring about Heaven on Earth, and if a few people have to experience a living Hell to do so, well, that's just the price you pay.

I've never met a Socialist (or Communist) who didn't fit one of these categories, and I expect I never will. This is why I have such a passionate hatred for Socialism. It's a philosophy that belongs in the trash bin of history, but because there's a steady supply of people who are either stupid, crazy or evil it keeps being put forth as a viable system of government. It's the job of the intelligent, sane and good to keep defeating it every time it reappears.

Atlas Shrugged - Part I

2011-04-19T09:39:00.000-04:00

My wife and I saw the movie "Atlas Shrugged - Part I", the weekend it opened. I thought I'd offer a review.

I need to make a couple points first. I've read the book twice in the last few years. It's a sometimes difficult book to read, Ms. Rand seriously needed an editor. I'm also not a big fan of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, I believe it's another of those concepts that looks better on paper than it works in reality, just like Socialism, Communism, and Utopianism. Still, I think she has some valid points to make.

Since I'm sure a few of my loyal readers haven't read the book, let me offer a synopsis. Atlas Shrugged (the book) takes place in the indeterminate future, the movie is actually set in 2016. The United States, along with the rest of the world, is in the throes of a recession. There are a few companies that are still profitable, chief among these are Taggart Transcontinental (the largest railroad in the nation. The CEO is James Taggart but the company is really run by the Operating Vice President, his sister Dagney.), Wyatt Oil (an oil company drilling previously untapped reserves in Colorado, operated by Ellis Wyatt) and Rearden Steel (a steel company in Pennsylvania, which is successful mostly because the company owns its own iron and coal mines, so it's not at the mercy of any other company to supply the raw materials it needs. The company is run by Henry "Hank" Rearden, who has also developed a new metal that's cheaper and stronger than steel.). These successful companies attract, in Rand's words, moochers and looters, meaning those people who believe they have a right to the fruits of success because they need them, and those who will just take those fruits, respectively. The government, supported by the less-competent executives of less-successful companies, passes legislation to take from the successful companies because it isn't fair that some companies are successful while others aren't. In the background, numerous successful people are just disappearing, quitting their jobs or abandoning their companies, never to be heard from again. People repeatedly ask "Who is John Galt."

The critics have been nearly universal in their hatred of the movie. Many of their criticisms stem from the attempt to bring a book about the future that was written in 1957 to the screen. Ayn Rand didn't anticipate extensive air travel, computers, cell phones, or a whole host of other technological marvels that are everyday tools of the people sitting in the theaters fifty years later. There was some attempt to explain or incorporate those technologies into the movie, and I thought they were mostly effective. As an example, very near the beginning of the movie we overhear a news report stating that, due to turmoil in the Middle East, gasoline has reached $37.50 per gallon, meaning that it's just too expensive to drive or fly, so trains were the most cost effective method of travelling long distances.

So, on to the review. I liked it. I didn't LOVE it, but I liked it. I thought the acting could have been better, but the characters were fairly convincing, or at least instantly recognizable from the characters in the book. There were some things left out, which given my aforementioned belief that Ms Rand needed the services of a good editor is a good thing. There were places where a LITTLE more detail would have gone well to explain things to a person, like my wife, who's never read the book, but all in all I think the movie did a good job.

Better acting might have elevated a decent movie to a good one. The reason for this is two-fold, one is the budget, and the other is that the vast majority of Hollywood actors wouldn't have touched this movie with a ten foot pole. Still, I would have loved to have seen, say, Gary Sinise as Hank Rearden. I honestly don't know what current actress could have played Dagney Taggart though. Few actresses can combine youth and beauty with the hard-as-nails (nails made of Rearden Metal no less) toughness her character requires. Taylor Schilling did about as good a job as anyone could have and probably better than most Hollywood A-list actresses would have. (Maybe there's a discussion of the current crop of young actresses in a future blog post?)

All in all it's a movie that's worth seeing, and I hope they make enough money on it to go forward with parts two and three. While, as I said above, I have some problems with Objectivism, I think the warnings about the impact of certain policies is one that needs to be voiced.

Communal Guilt

2011-04-14T12:28:00.000-04:00

There's a video making its way around the Internet called "Dear Woman" by a group of human males calling themselves "Conscious Men". I won't link to it, but you'll find it if you want to. I'll admit that I haven't watched the entire video, doing so requires a stronger stomach than I possess, but the upshot of the video is a couple of (alleged) men apologizing to women for all the mean and nasty things done to women by men throughout history.

The whole thing reminds me of a conversation I had with a former girlfriend (herself a Women's Studies major), where she asked me if I ever felt guilty for the fact that men rape women. I told her, most emphatically, that I do not feel guilty, because I personally have never raped a woman. I've never hit a woman. I have, to the best of my ability, attempted to treat women with the respect they deserve. I would, in fact, intervene to defend any woman I saw undergoing such an attack.

The thing that sticks in my craw about this is the concept of communal guilt, the idea that an individual belonging to a group is to blame for all the misdeeds of any other individual member of that same group. Therefore all men should feel guilty for the crime of rape committed by other men. This despite the fact that most men are not rapists. All Christians are responsible for the Crusades, despite the fact that the last Crusade ended hundreds of years before anyone currently alive was born. All whites should feel guilty about slavery, despite the fact that no one currently alive either owned, or was, a slave and that indeed for most of us our ancestors weren't even in the United States when slavery was abolished (personally, three of my four grandparents came to this country fifty years after the Civil War, the fourth grew up in North Dakota and her ancestors fought on the Union side).

I accept no guilt for actions I personally did not perform. I do not apologize for the actions of others. No one has the right to apologize on my behalf. I reserve the right to apologize for my own, and only my own, misdeeds.

My Favorite Movies

2011-03-29T11:01:00.001-04:00

Here are some of my favorites movies, in no particular order (well, except for the first):

Secondhand Lions - Probably my favorite movie of all time, and vastly under-rated. Two old men (played by Michael Caine and Robert Duvall, how can it NOT be great?) have their niece's son (Haley Joel Osment) dropped off on them for a while. At first the men don't like the boy and the feeling is mutual, but they grow on each other. The boy brings a new life, and reason for living, to the old men, the men help the boy grow up to be a fine man. The plot revolves around the men's life story, a story that has obviously grown better with time and telling but still contains essential truths. The best line in the movie (spoken by Hub, Duvall's character): "Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love... true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in. "

Dead Poet's Society - English teacher John Keating (Robin Williams) at an exclusive all-boys school instills a love of poetry and life into his charges, often going against the grain of the establishment. We learn about Mr. Keating's personality when he has one of the students read the introduction to the poetry textbook which claims that you can determine the quality of a poem by plotting (literally, on an X-Y axis) the technical perfection of the poem against the importance of the poem's objective. Mr Keating responds with one word, "Excrement", and has the boys tear the introduction from their textbooks. My favorite quote: "We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."

The Sand Pebbles - A China sailor named Jake Holman (Steve McQueen) befriends a missionary English teacher named Shirley Eckert (a very, very young Candice Bergen) in China during the Boxer Rebellion. Holman is more comfortable around his engines than his fellow sailors who consider him bad luck. As their friendship grows, so do the tensions between the American navy and the Chinese Nationalists. My favorite scene happens when Jake and Shirley meet on a ferry, Shirley starts talking to Jake (probably because they're the only two English speakers on the boat) and Jake tells her "Maybe you don't know, but nice white girls don't talk to China sailors."

The Longest Day - I don't think you could pack more star power into one movie with a shoehorn. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, Sean Connery, the cast reads as a Who's Who of Hollywood in 1962. It's arguably the greatest war movie ever made, about (inarguably) the greatest military achievement ever, the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. At the turning point on Omaha Beach Brigadier General Norman Cota (Robert Mitchum) tells his men "Only two types of people are gonna stay on this beach, those who are already dead and those that are gonna die. Now get off your butts."

Contact - A hard headed astronomer (Jodi Foster), in charge of the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) has contact with an alien life-form. The problem is that she has no proof beyond her own experience of it, a level of proof she's repeatedly rejected in the past when dealing with people of faith. Best quote (spoken by the alien): "You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other. "

Unforgiven - An aging gunslinger (Clint Eastwood) who spends his days mourning his wife and trying to raise his two children gets a chance to make some money by killing a cowboy who cut up a prostitute's face. He and his friend (Morgan Freeman) deal with the morality of their mission and the demons that haunt their own pasts. Best line: " I ain't like that no more. I ain't the same, Ned. Claudia, she straightened me up, cleared me of drinkin' whiskey and all. Just 'cause we're goin' on this killing, that don't mean I'm gonna go back to bein' the way I was. I just need the money, get a new start for them youngsters."

Gran Torino - Another Clint Eastwood movie. A retired auto worker, Korean War vet, and widower has a family of Chinese immigrants move in next door. Despite his prejudices, he finds that they have a lot in common. He takes a young man under his wing, teaches him how to fix things, helps him get a job, and helps steer him away from a local gang. Along the way he's battling his own demons. One of my favorite lines (at least of those that don't contain profanity)" "Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone."

Iron Man - Yeah, I know, it's a comic-book movie. It's also about a unique superhero. He wasn't born a superhero like Superman, he didn't become on by accident like Spiderman, he became one via his own effort and genius. Here's a story of a man with few redeeming qualities who has his eyes forceably opened to what he'd previously ignored and decides to do something about it. Favorite line: "Well, Ms. Brown. It's an imperfect world, but it's the only one we got. I guarantee you the day weapons are no longer needed to keep the peace, I'll start making bricks and beams for baby hospitals."

Zulu - Based on the story of a British regiment at Rourke's Drift in Natal, the story revolves around two Lieutenants, Chard of the Engineers who is only in the area to build a bridge, and Bromhead (played by Michael Caine) who's from a military family (he refers to his grandfather as "The General"). They lead a 140 man force against 4,000 Zulu warriors who are attacking their outpost. Despite the enormous odds, they are determined to follow their orders to stand fast. It's a story of courage, determination, and sheer guts. As an aside, seven Victoria's Crosses (Britain's highest military honor for bravery) were awarded, the most ever awarded in one action to one regiment. Just one of many great lines: "A prayer's as good as bayonet on a day like this."

The Princess Bride - A sick boy gets a visit from his grandfather, who reads him a book that he read to the boy's father when he was sick. The story revolves around the beautiful Princess Buttercup, her farmboy true love Wesley, and the evil Prince Humperdink who's determined to have Buttercup for his bride. There are probably more great one-liners in this movie than any other I've ever seen, but my favorite has got to be "Life IS pain Princess. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something."

Star Wars (Original Trilogy) - A rag-tag group of rebels takes on the evil Empire. It takes place in a galaxy far far away, or does it? Action abounds, Harrison Ford's Han Solo hits just the right mix of scoundrel and boyish charm, and all in the days when special effects were done with models. See the original theatrical releases, not the "updated" ones. If Han shoots first you've got the right one. Don't waste your time with the three pre-quels. Favorite line: "Do. Or do not. There is no try."

300 - 300 Spartans and a few hundred other Greek warriors meet thousands of Persians at Thermopylae. They know they can't win, but they hope to buy enough time to organize a defense. It's classic good vs evil, Western civilization against barbarism. Just one of many great lines: "The world will know that free men stood against a tyrant, that few stood against many, and before this battle was over, even a god-king can bleed."

Open Range - Aging free-grazer Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall) and his hired cowhand Charley Waite (Kevin Costner) meet up with rancher Denton Baxter and his crooked Sheriff. One of their friends is killed, another wounded, and the two free-grazers decide to even the score. This movie contains one of the best Western gunfights ever filmed. One of many great lines, spoken by Charley Waite: "Well you may not know this, but there's things that gnaw at a man worse than dying."

Feel free to comment on these movies, or any others!

Rules and Safety

2010-11-23T12:45:00.000-05:00

There's been a lot in the news lately about the changes to TSA practices, including full-body scanners and invasive pat-downs. All this is, of course, a direct result of the 9/11 attacks on our nation. We have, as Pogo said, redoubled our efforts after having lost sight of our goals.

The problem on 9/11 wasn't that terrorists got box-cutters onto planes. The problem was that we were operating under a given set of assumptions and the terrorists found a way around those assumptions to accomplish their goals. Up until 9/11 everyone had a set of assumptions about hijackings: Comply with them, you'll fly someplace you don't want to go, land safely, then the hijackers will make demands which may or not be met, the hijackers will make threats that may or not be carried out, actions will be taken against the hijackers which may or may not result in the hijackers being killed or captured, and eventually it's likely everyone will live to go home to their families and put it all behind them.

All that changed on 9/11. We now know a successful hijacking is a death sentence. We hardened cockpit doors and, more importantly, we hardened our resolve not to comply with hijackers. I've only flown a hand full of times since 9/11, but every time I've boarded an aircraft since then I've decided that if something bad happens I'm getting involved. I've made the choice between me possibly being killed and everyone on the plane (including my wife) almost certainly being killed. I'm not going to sit there hoping there's an Air Marshall in first-class. I made that decision despite the TSA's insistence on removing from me anything that could outwardly be used as a weapon.

So we now have a new set of assumptions. We scan shoes. We frisk passengers. We produce pornographic images of teenagers. We allow children, CHILDREN, to be groped by strangers in a manner that would get them lynched if they weren't wearing badges (because apparently no pedophile would even THINK of applying for a job with the TSA). We can't bring nail-clippers, pen-knives, or bottles of liquid on board. All this for a false sense of security.

The terrorists are watching all this. They'll find the hole, the crease, the seam they can exploit. They'll make their plans and carry out their attack. If their attack is unsuccessful it won't be the TSA that'll stop it, it'll either be vigilant and courageous passengers on the plane, or it'll be plain old dumb luck.

Public Service

2010-07-29T15:21:00.000-04:00

In comments on my previous post, buddy Larry asks the following:

"Chris Christie is walking the walk. Cutting and reducing the government, fighting the special interests, and helping NJ. How do we identify others who will follow through?"

Now I don't pretend to be a big fan of Governor Christie, but he's about the closest thing to a Libertarian leaning Conservative New Jersey would elect. Still, I think he understands the nature of public service and of holding public office.

To understand what I mean requires a trip back into history. Up until the 20th century people didn't consider politics a career. Most elected officials had successful careers outside of politics, and most served with the intention of returning to those careers after their term was over. They looked at elected office much as modern people look at jury duty, a temporary, unpleasant, but necessary duty incurred by a citizen which allowed our society to function as intended. In addition, political office was a part-time job. You went to Washington DC for a few months a year, did your civic duty, then went home until it was time to go back or until some emergency prompted a special session. You were first a farmer, lawyer, or whatever occupation you followed first and secondarily a Congressman or even President.

Now people study Political Science in school. Congressmen and Senators spend DECADES in office. Some rarely return home to meet with their constituents except when running for re-election. They're more concerned with preserving their own legacies than with representing the people who sent them to Washington in the first place.

So my answer to Larry's question would be, the candidate who will follow through is the one who looks at elected office as a temporary job. He or she probably doesn't particularly WANT the job, but they realize that someone has to do it so it might as well be them. They probably look upon the idea of holding elected office with distaste, again much as we look upon jury duty. On the other hand, a person who wants to hold elected office, who desires deep down to be called "The (insert title) from the great state of (fill in the blank)", who is more concerned with having the title than what they'll do once they get it, should most definitely never be allowed near the levers of power. Unfortunately, there are a whole bunch of people holding office now who fit that description.

Authority

2010-07-27T12:50:00.001-04:00

Throughout history people who rule others have had different claimed sources of their authority. Sometimes it's just whoever happens to be stronger, whoever can defend his rule against others who would rule. Sometimes rulers claim that their authority comes from God, or they may even claim to be gods themselves. Sometimes the authority to rule is determined by heredity. In Platos's proposed Republic the philosopher-king was authorized to rule because of his wisdom. Sometimes the ruler is chosen by the majority of the people. In most cases, the ruler or rulers have near absolute authority over the people, and the people exist to support the ruling class.

In July, 1776 Thomas Jefferson and company thundered forth with a radical concept, that all men are created equal, that all men, without exception, are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which were life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That men form governments for the sole purpose of protecting those rights, that a government that fails to protect those rights is not valid and that the people have the right to abolish such a government and form a new one that will protect those rights. That, in short, the government exists to serve the people and not the other way around.

This radical idea turned the political world on its head. No longer could the ruling class do whatever it pleased, no longer were the people powerless in the face of political might. On the contrary, the ruling class existed and continued to exist at the sufferance of the people. They could be replaced any time the people found them not doing the job they were selected for, namely the protection of the rights of the people.

Under such a political system, the ultimate authority rests with the people. The people choose to delegate some of their authority to a group they choose, thereby freeing themselves from the need to protect their own rights individually. My choice of the word "delegate" was intentional. If I delegate someone to act on my behalf, they do so under my direction and at my pleasure. If I ever decide, for any reason, to replace my delegated spokesman I may do so. He may object, but the final decision is mine and mine alone.

We've forgotten that we are the ones with ultimate authority. We have elected officials who look upon the electorate not as employers, but as sources of income. They see their job not as serving the people they represent, but as telling those people whatever they need to in order to be elected, then once in place they do whatever will increase their power despite the promises made to their constituents. Those same constituents accept their representatives lies with a shrug and with the statement "All politicians lie and break their campaign promises." When the 27th Amendment, ratified in 1992 (not only within the lifetimes of most of my readers, but within their adulthoods), states that Congress could not vote itself a change in pay unless an election of the House of Representatives (which is elected in its entirety every two years) had occured since the last such change and they get around it by voting themselves an automatic cost-of-living-adjustment every year, AND the Supreme Court upholds that travesty, it makes me wonder what it would take to send the populace to Washington armed with torches and pitchforks. Such a situation would have had our Founding Fathers reaching for the tar, feathers and rails, not to mention ropes.

We need to reclaim our birthright as Americans. We need to remind our elected officials that they serve at our pleasure and sufference. That they act in our names and for our best interests or they will not act at all. That we are not ruled, we are represented. That they are public servants, not public masters. That they need to employ themselves at our business or they will find themselves among the unemployed.

That's the difference between a citizen and a subject, between a master and a serf, between a free, sovereign individual and a second-class person.

Work Ethic

2010-06-01T11:33:00.004-04:00

The other day my wife and I ate in a restaurant we frequent, it's near the theater we likewise frequent, so when we go to a movie we often have a meal there before or after. There's one waitress there who's our favorite, her name is Julie. She has that uncanny ability to be out of the way when we don't need her for anything, but as soon as we want something she's right there to find out what it is. She's efficient and helpful but at the same time unobtrusive. A glass is seldom empty for long before she's there to find out if we want another, but she doesn't constantly interrupt our meal to see if everything's alright. Honestly, if I were to open a restaurant of my own I'd do my best to hire her away from her current employer. And yes, I've complimented her to her manager and I always tip her well, good work ought to be rewarded.

This is a young lady working in what many would consider a menial occupation, but who does it well. She has the one thing it's almost impossible to teach, a work ethic. There was a time when work ethic was common. My grandfather, an immigrant from Norway, started working at the local ship yard cleaning the bathrooms. He used to say the work was dirty but the money was clean. By the time he died he was a foreman at that very same ship yard.

Nearly every day I encounter people begging for money. I encountered those same people when unemployment was low, when anyone who wanted a job and was physically and mentally capable of holding one was employed. If pointed out that if they could stand on a street corner, in the rain, asking people for change they could stand behind a counter in a fast-food joint asking people if they wanted fries with their meal, they'd reply that such a job was beneath them. I've also encountered people with menial jobs, like emptying trash cans in my office, who did a lousy job of it, all the while complaining about how badly their job sucked. Honestly, if you can't (or more likely won't) do a good job of emptying trash cans, how is anyone going to entrust you with a better, more responsible (and better paying) job? If you are faithful with a little you will be entrusted with more, but if you are unfaithful with a little even what you have will be taken from you.

I don't know Julie's personal story. Maybe, like so many waiters and waitresses, she's an aspiring actress or musician. Maybe she's working as a waitress while she goes to school. Perhaps she doesn't intend to work as a waitress forever, but it's only a temporary job until she gets something better. Regardless, if she brings the same ability, attention, and (if I can use the phrase once more) work ethic to whatever else she does I suspect she'll be successful.

Gambling, Risks, and Bail Outs

2010-04-30T09:44:00.004-04:00

Whenever I get together with my in-laws the guys wind up playing poker. It's strictly a fun game with no money involved. We divide up the chips, and if someone runs low someone who has more will give him some. At the end of the game the chips all go back into the box, and we really can't tell who did well and who did poorly. I find that in these games I am much more likely to stay in a hand I shouldn't, or I'll ride a hand much longer than I should just in case something good happens. I'm not above chasing an inside straight. Every once in a while I pull a hand out of the trash, but mostly I end up donating my chips to one of my in-laws. It's all in fun, I've got nothing to lose.

On the few occasions I've played poker for money I play very differently. I'm much quicker to fold a bad hand, or even a fair hand if people are raising. There have been times I've folded hands I would have won had I stayed in, but for the most part if I stay in the hand I either win or come close to doing so (the most expensive poker hand is always the second-best one). In short, when I play for no stakes I don't do well, but when I have a stake in the game I generally come away at the end of the evening with more money than I started with.

Businesses work the same way, they make decisions based upon risk and reward. A poor decision can end up costing a company lots of money and may even cause the company to go out of business, therefore companies spend a lot of time and effort in analyzing risks and weighing them against potential rewards. Successful companies do this well, less successful ones are the ones for whom stock certificates are now collectables instead of having value as a share in the now non-existant company. This system mostly works.

The balance gets thrown off when a company is deemed "too big to fail". Those companies are just playing for chips, if they win they reap the rewards, if they fail they get bailed out at taxpayer expense, so they'll take much bigger risks than they otherwise might. If there's no consequence for failure there's no sense expending the effort to analyze the risks, just try it and see what happens.

The funny things is, just as in my poker example above, paying more attention to the risk/reward balance leads to more success, not less. If a company is truly too big to be allowed to fail it's also too big to be permitted to risk such failure, and the only way to ensure they don't fail is to maintain failure as a possibility. I know, that seems counter-intuitive, but removing potential failure from the possible outcomes makes ultimate failure that much more likely.

So let's stop bailing out companies. Let's let them go bankrupt, they (or whoever buys up their assets) will come back stronger and better afterward. The alternative is a nation full of unsuccessful companies supported by taxpayer money.

What Government Is

2010-04-14T12:06:00.002-04:00

I'm sometimes asked why I take exception to government controlling, well, just about anything. This question generally comes from people who hold a very different view of what government is than I do, so from their standpoint it's not an unreasonable question. To offer my view of what government is, allow me to quote someone who was much wiser than I could ever hope to be: “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” That was the view of the very first person to hold the title of President of the United States, George Washington.

Don't believe me? Let me offer you a scenario: Suppose I decide (with no input from you) that you owe me a sum of money each year, let's say $12,000 for a nice round number. I send you a letter to the effect that you much remit to me $3,000 each quarter, by a date I determine. If you fail to do so I begin collection proceedings against you, taking your savings, your paycheck, or taking over ownership of your home. If you resist I send a group of heavily armed men to your home in the middle of the night, they break in your door, kill your dog if you have one, tie you up, drag you from your home and lock you in a cage until such time as you agree to pay the amount in question, with penalties for late payment. If you resist this intrusion into your home you will be shot and likely killed. If I did such a thing I would be thrown in jail for (at the very least) breaking into your home, assault, and kidnapping if not murder.

Try not paying your property taxes sometime and see what happens.

Government maintains a monopoly on the proactive use of violence to enforce its will. No matter how reasonable the government's request, no matter how eloquently the request is delivered, that request is backed up by the iron fist of force. As far as I'm concerned the fewer aspects of my life government is permitted to bring that force to bear upon, the most comfortable I am.

Independence Day

2009-07-06T10:37:00.006-04:00

Over the weekend I had better things to do than sit in front of a computer, but I had to say something about Independence Day. Here is the full text (with names of signers) of the Declaration of Independence, with my commentary at the end:

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Georgia: Button Gwinnett Lyman Hall George Walton

North Carolina: William Hooper Joseph Hewes John Penn

South Carolina: Edward Rutledge Thomas Heyward, Jr. Thomas Lynch, Jr. Arthur Middleton

Massachusetts: John Hancock

Maryland: Samuel Chase William Paca Thomas Stone Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia: George Wythe Richard Henry Lee Thomas Jefferson Benjamin Harrison Thomas Nelson, Jr. Francis Lightfoot Lee Carter Braxton

Pennsylvania: Robert Morris Benjamin Rush Benjamin Franklin John Morton George Clymer James Smith George Taylor James Wilson George Ross

Delaware: Caesar Rodney George Read Thomas McKean

New York: William Floyd Philip Livingston Francis Lewis Lewis Morris

New Jersey: Richard Stockton John Witherspoon Francis Hopkinson John Hart Abraham Clark

New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett William Whipple

Massachusetts: Samuel Adams John Adams Robert Treat Paine Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins William Ellery

Connecticut: Roger Sherman Samuel Huntington William Williams Oliver Wolcott

New Hampshire: Matthew Thornton

*********************

Mark D back.

We're familiar with the ideas enshrined in that document, and with that familiarity we forget just how radical those ideas were at the time. Everyplace else, throughout the world and throughout history, the people existed for the support of the ruling classes and not the other way around. Here is a group of men thundering forth with the concept that All men are created equal! That people have the inviolate right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness! That people create governments to protect those rights! That when a government fails to protect those rights it is their right and duty to throw off that government and establish a new one!

At the very end, when the signers pledge their "Lives, fortunes and sacred honor" to the cause of Independence they're not kidding. Had the Revolution failed the best they could hope for is to be hanged. At worst, well, the penalty for Treason at the time was the same as it was in William Wallace's time, watch the end of Braveheart for an idea.

Reflections on my 46th Birthday

2009-06-11T10:08:00.003-04:00

Yesterday was my 46th birthday. Birthdays being a good time for looking back over one's life to date, I find that L.P. Hartly was correct when he said "The past is another country, they do things differently there." (As an aside, this quote is often mis-assigned to Jeff Cooper, who titled one of his books "Another Country".)

When I was a kid I had a whole arsenal of toy guns. I had cowboy-type six-shooters, shotguns, a Tommy gun, an M1 rifle, even an M16. Most of them were made in fairly realistic colors, and most of them looked fairly realistic. I don't recall ANY of them having a little red or orange thingy on the muzzle. A cop passing by my yard while my friends and I were playing cowboy, soldier, cops and robbers, etc wouldn't have been alarmed at a bunch a kids running around with guns and apparently shooting one another, that was just what boys did. Thru this type of play we learned that there are good and bad people (note that few kids WANTED to be the Nazi/Robber/Indian) and that if you were a bad person then the good people would hunt you down, that was just what they DID.

From first grade thru third grade we recited the Pledge of Allegience and sang "America" first thing every morning. From fourth thru sixth grades "America" was replaced by "The Star Spangled Banner", a rite of passage that meant you were now among the "big kids". In elementary school (first thru sixth grades) boys had to wear ties and girls had to wear skirts or dresses to school, you couldn't wear jeans (we called them dungarees). In winter the girls could wear pants under their skirts and had to remove the pants when they got to school. On Monday we had Assembly where boys had to wear white shirts and girls white blouses. The class that had the best record of 100% white shirts, blouses and ties got pizza at the end of the year.

When I was about ten my parents gave me a pocketknife for my birthday. It was a "scout" knife, it had a main blade, a penknife blade, a can opener and a screwdriver/bottle opener. The blades were sharp. When (not if) I cut myself with it my mother put a band-aid on it and told me to be more careful next time. I still have a small scar on my left index finger from that knife or one of the others I've owned over the years.

When I was in fifth grade my parents got me a crew-cut. One kid thought that was funny and would squeeze my head every chance he got. I finally had enough of it, turned around, and punched him in the jaw. Later that day my teacher (Mr Santangelo) said "Mark, I heard you punched (whatever his name was)." At my affirmative (I didn't DARE lie to him) he shook my hand and said "Good job". I didn't get suspended, I didn't get detention, the police weren't called, nor was my mother (although she heard about it and approved as well).

I had a Royce Union bicycle, one speed, with a banana seat and sissy-bar. When I first got it it had training wheels, once I learned to ride it (and that took a while since it really was too big for me when I got it) the training wheels came off. I rode it in the driveway and on the front sidewalk at first, as I got older I ranged farther afield on it. I'd sometimes come home scraped up from a fall, and once I fell on my butt trying to pop a wheelie and my wheelie height was more important to me than getting my feet down in time to catch myself. Of course I never wore a helmet. When I got a bit older my brother gave me his Schwinn Varsity ten speed, a fall from which provided me with my only broken bones (both bones in my right arm, just above the wrist) at age 14.

I'd play outside all day, come in dirty (unless I was playing with my Tonka trucks, in which case I'd come in filthy). I had Army-men, G.I. Joes, Tonka trucks, race cars and the aforementioned toy guns.

Each afternoon I'd watch Mr Rogers' Neighborhood. I didn't care much for Sesame Street or Electric Company (besides, I already KNEW my ABCs and how to count, although the guy in the chef's hat falling down the stairs was funny), but I liked Mr Roger's puppet world.

On rainy days my parents and I would play games, Monopoly, Parcheesi, Life. They also taught me to play cards, mostly Rummy 500 and Pinocle. If Mom and Dad were busy I'd play Solitare, with cards, not on a computer. I was probably a teenager when my older brother gave me a Pong game, the first home video game I ever saw.

The only car I remember my Dad owning was a 1968 AMC Rebel station wagon. I remember him working on it in the driveway one time, he couldn't reach whatever he was after at the back of the inline-six-cylinder engine so he stepped over the fender and stood between the fender and engine to get at it. Of course it had no air-conditioning, power windows or power locks. It had seat belts (the kind that went over your lap), but he decided they were in the way so he stuck them under the seat. After my Dad couldn't drive anymore after being disabled at work he gave the Rebel to my brother, who drove it until it was wrecked while parked in front of his house. I later learned that he'd planned to give it to ME on my 18th birthday.

Yes, some things are better now. I'd never consider putting my car into gear unless I and all passengers had their seat-belts fastened (right Sweetie?). I wear a helmet when I ride a bike. I like having more than seven TV channels to choose from.

Still, some things aren't improvements. How many seven-year-olds know the words to the Pledge of Allegience? How many ten-year-olds learn to be careful with knives the hard way, but cutting themselves? How many learn that it's better to be a good person than a bad one because good people will go after bad ones? How many kids today can make their own fun if the TV dies?

The past really is another country, and they really do do things differently there.

Think Back, and Get Mad

2009-03-20T15:30:00.000-04:00

I want you to go on a journey with me, to when you got your first "real" full-time job. You know the one I mean, the one where you worked "on the books", not mowing lawns for your neighbors during the summer. Maybe you were quoted an hourly pay rate, maybe it was an annual salary. Maybe you got paid once a week, once every two weeks, twice a month, or once a month. However it worked, you probably got out your calculator and figured out what your first paycheck would be before you got it, you multiplied your hourly pay by the number of hours you worked, or you divided your annual salary by the number of pay periods per year. Someone probably told you "Don't forget that taxes will be taken out", but you just sort of chalked that up to "miscellaneous", deciding that, yeah, your paycheck would be lower than the actual number you calculated, but not that much.

Then your first paycheck arrived, you tore the envelope open, and said "Holy crap, where did all my (expletive deleted) money go? What the (expletive deleted) is Fed Withholding and why does it cost so much?" Welcome to the wonderful world of tax withholdhing.

By now you've probably just accepted that a bunch of the money you make is taken away from you before you even see it. Deep inside you may even be a little, well, shall we say grateful, that the various government entities allow you to keep as much as they do. (For the record, this is how the government thinks too, any money that stays in your paycheck is considered by the government to be a "tax expenditure". It's as if they're doing you a favor by letting you keep some of the money you work for.) In the first quarter of the calendar year you probably file your tax returns, if you owe money you probably think of that as the taxes you "pay", or if you overpaid all year you think if that as money you "get". If you get a refund you may even think you don't PAY taxes at all. This is, of course, wrong, a refund merely means that you paid more than you should have and the overage is returned to you, without interest of course.

Right now about one-quarter of my paycheck is withheld for Federal taxes. That's Federal income tax, Social Security tax, and Medicare tax. One quarter. I work ten hours a week, two hours a DAY, to pay these withholdings. My wife has similar withholdings from her paycheck. That doesn't include state taxes.

Lest you think this is a rant against all taxes, it's not. I like the idea of having carrier battle groups, interstate highways, and Marine divisions, all of which are expensive. I object, however, to money that I work for being given to people who took out mortgages that were too expensive for them to handle, all while I pay my mortgage on three-quarters of my salary.

There's only one reason why we Americans put up with this, because we never see the money we "spend" on taxes. We consider our take-home pay to be our salary. If you want to see a change in our tax structure we need to eliminate withholding. If your paycheck was your actual salary, then every month or quarter the government sent you a bill for your taxes, it wouldn't take long (probably before the next election day) before taxes went down. In my own case, the monthly check I'd have to write for my taxes would be the single biggest check I'd send out all month, it would be considerably larger than my mortgage payment. That will get people's attention.

And maybe, just maybe, the people who's attention was gotten would vote.

A Rite of Spring

2009-03-11T12:05:00.000-04:00

Spring is fast approaching, and practitioners of a classic American sport are getting ready for the new season. In some of the warmer parts of the country folks are already engaged in their passtime, while those of us in colder areas are looking ahead to the coming season. Soon you won't be able to go to the local park without seeing Dads teaching their sons the basics of a life-long passion, or on a lazy Sunday afternoon you can turn on the TV and watch the pros go at it.

I am, of course, talking about fishing.

I honestly don't remember the first time I went fishing, but it must have been about 40 years ago (I'm 45 now). I remember my Dad telling me I caught a blowfish and a striped bass using a little bait-casting rig my parents bought me at the local department store (and I still have the rod). When I was in High School my father and I would go surf fishing every other weekend (when the tides were right), and you could always count on my friend George and I being at the local pond going after catfish, carp and sunnies on a summer afternoon.

There are as many reasons for fishing as there are fishermen (or fisherwomen). Some people fish because they enjoy eating a fish that was swimming around an hour or so before it was cooked (and I can tell you from personal experience that no fish tastes better than that). Some enjoy having the latest gadgetry. For me, I enjoy matching wits with an animal that's perfectly suited for his environment. I enjoy reading the water to decide where the fish are likely to be and what they're likely to bite on, then presenting that bait to that place in a manner that won't scare him away. Many times I've come home without catching a fish, but I've never regretted a day spent fishing.

You don't need lots of expensive equipment. My primary freshwater rig is a 30+ year old rod I bought in a department store combined with a reel that my brother gave me that may be older than I am. Last Saturday I seriously considered buying a couple bamboo poles (at $4 each) to let my nephew and nieces use during our annual family vacation. The fish doesn't care what's on your end of the line.

Putting it in Perspective

2009-02-13T13:10:00.004-05:00

Congress is preparing to pass a $787 Billion stimulus package. That's $787,000,000,000. That's a mind-blowingly big number, so I put on my nerd hat, crunched some numbers, and tried to put it into perspective. You don't need to thank me.

- If you spent a dollar a second it would take you 24,956 years to spend that much money.

- At an estimated population of 303,824,640 people in the US, the cost comes to $2,590 for every person in the nation.

- Let's say you convert the cost of the stimulus package to pennies. You then wrap those pennies and lay them end-to-end. Your line of penny wrappers would go around the Earth 2,494 times.

- That string of penny wrappers would reach from the earth to the moon and back 130 times.

- If you laid those penny wrappers in a straight line, it would take LIGHT a bit over five and a half minutes to travel that far.

Our grandchildren will have reason to hate us.

Power-Shifting a Paradigm*

2008-11-19T10:31:00.005-05:00

Had I been asked a few weeks ago how I feel about books, I'd have said I love them. I buy them constantly, and I'm seldom not in the process of reading a book. I have four book-cases jammed to capacity with books, many of the shelves are two-deep in books, and there are enough stacks of books around to upset my wife. It seemed to me that my love of books is well established.

Then we bought a Kindle.

If you're not familiar with the Kindle, it's Amazon's e-book reader. I never thought I'd embrace this technology. Every e-book reader I'd seen (and I admit I hadn't looked at one in a few years) was lacking, the text was poor, the screen was small, and I found the display led to eye fatigue (and this from someone who makes his living sitting in front of a computer screen all day). Plus, I reasoned, the Kindle was expensive. Upon speaking to a number of people (including cyber-buddy MorningGlory) I found that most of my objections, except the price, were unfounded. A lady I saw reading one on the train let me see the display, and I found that the text to be very readable. When Oprah announced a discount my wife and I decided to buy one.

Having now used it for a couple of months I can say I love it. I can change the font size to suit lighting or other conditions (larger fonts are more convenient on a bumpy train ride for instance, or at night when my eyes are tired). The battery needs to be recharged about once a week.

I also learned I didn't so much love books as love reading, and the Kindle is the perfect device for people who love to read. For instance, I bought a two-CD set of classic books from the Western Canon for $30, those two CDs contain almost eight hundred books. Available books range from free for public domain downloads to about ten dollars for current best-sellers. (And yes, I could have downloaded the 800 books on those two CDs for free, but my time is worth something too.)

So the man who resisted getting a cell phone until pay phones became rare, the man who refuses to buy a PDA because a paper calendar and note pad does the same thing cheaper and with no battery worries, the man who predicted twenty years ago that CDs were a passing fad, has embraced a new technology. Which brings me to another point about me. I'm not opposed to new technologies, but they have to actually be better than the low-tech devices they replace. Digital cameras, for instance, are better for most applications than film cameras. Battery-powered watches are better than wind-up (I still prefer a watch with hands as opposed to digital, but that's just my preference). The Kindle is the size and weight of a thin paperback but will hold hundreds of books and display them in in a font size that doesn't make my eyes water.

So, accompanied by much grinding of gears, I embrace a new device.

* For the non-gear-heads out there, "power shifting" is a method of shifting a manual transmission without lifting your foot from the accelerator. It's a good way to get extra acceleration, it's also a good way to break your transmission. If you try it, don't blame me for damage done.

Vote Mark D in 2012

2008-11-10T13:05:00.006-05:00

OK, I've decided to annouce my candidacy for the office of President of the United States for the 2012 election. I offer my platform for your consideration.

I believe that America is the greatest nation in the world not because of our government, but because of our people. I believe that the government exists to serve the people (and not, I may add, in the same manner as a bull serves a cow). I believe that the function of government is to protect the rights of the citizens, those rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I believe that our Constitution creates a government that can do just that, but that the government has trangressed that Constitution and needs to be corrected.

Therefore, if elected, my first order of business will be to reform the executive branch, of which I will be the head. Each department head in the executive branch will provide me with the following: 1) a brief description of the duties and responsibilities of that department, and 2) a copy of the pertinent sections of the Constitution authorizing that department to perform those tasks. Mass resignations will be accepted in place of either of these items, failure to provide both to my satisfaction shall result in mass firings and (if I can manage it) public floggings. Any department heads who reference the "commerce clause" had BETTER be dealing with interstate highways or something similar. Don't test me on that.

Next, we will work on reforming the Legislative branch. I can't do this directly, but I can do so using two tools, the veto and public opinion. My first order of business will be elimination of expenditures added to bills which have nothing to do with the bill, we know this as pork barrel spending or simply as pork. I will veto any bill containing pork, regardless of the merit of the bill. This will be totally non-partisan. For example if the original bill is for tax reform that I would otherwise sign, but there's pork included, I'll veto it whether the pork provides for a wind farm to be built in Wisconsin (which I would disapprove of) or if it provides for a wall across our southern border to keep out illegal aliens (which I would approve of). Give me the expenditures as seperate bills which I can judge on their own merits. Finally, should Congress override my veto of a pork containing bill I'll call a press conference the very next day and explain to the American people that their Congress approved these expenses, apparently believing that their pet projects are more important than letting the taxpayers keep the money they work for. I will then name each and every member of Congress who voted to override the veto. I suspect a great many promising legislative careers will come to an abrupt end at the next election cycle.

I want America to take a page from her own Marine Corps, I want her to be no better friend and no worse enemy. First, America will no longer be part of the United Nations, an organization which serves only to undermine American sovereignty and give comfort to our enemies. If the UN wishes to maintain its offices in New York City they may do so, by paying fair market value for the property in question. Otherwise, they may leave, the choice is theirs. Next, I will re-evaluate our international alliances. These will be modified as appropriate, our allies should enhance American interests, not detract from them. Our remaining allies will find America a worthwhile friend, quick to assist them militarily, economically, or with humanitarian aid. Everyone else can pound sand. Oh, an earthquake just flattened your capital city and you need food, medical supplies and facilities, power and water? Well, we'll be happy to send a carrier group there to provide all those things, the fee will be one billion dollars per day, plus expenses.

Lastly, I want hostile nations or groups to think twice before they mess with us. I mean that. Much of the trouble we have today with terrorism is because we lacked the intestinal fortitude to flatten Tehran when they took Americans hostage under the Carter administration. You take Americans hostage? You have 48 hours to set them free unharmed or there will be a large hole where your capital used to be. This is non-negotiable, there will be no extensions, this will be your only warning.

So vote for me, we'll make America what it's intended to be.

I'm Mark D and I approve this message.

Profits and Taxes

2008-10-16T10:09:00.003-04:00

During last night's Presidential debate Senator Obama made mention of record profits by Exxon Mobil, profits that he wishes to tax. The implication is that those profits go to people who are already obscenely rich, so they can afford to lose a bit. Let's take a closer look at that.

Exxon Mobil (I'll abbreviate it as EM from now on) is a publicly traded company, meaning that anyone who can afford to buy stock in it can do so. Stockholders get dividends on their stock, corporate profits translate into a certain amount of money for each share of stock owned, so those profits are divided up among all the stockholders.

Yes, lots of wealthy people own EM stock. Who else does? Well, for one thing I probably do. I have IRAs, 401Ks and Mutual Funds, and of those funds don't have some shares of a company that posted record profits last year I want to speak to the fund manager and find out why.

Most companies, and I assume EM is no exception, have employee stock purchase programs where employees of the company can purchase stock, often with some matching funds provided by the company. This stock can form the basis of a retirement plan or personal investment package. Yes, the CEO will hold stock, but so will a chemist in the research department, an administrative assistant in Human Resources, or a mid-level manager in Accounts Payable. Let's take that last person as our example, let's say her name is Susan. She's been working for the company now for ten years and has been buying stock every paycheck since then. Her quarterly dividends checks have been growing larger as her stock portfolio has increased. She is, in point of fact, solidly middle class, with a job, a mortgage and a car payment. For the last seven years, since she gave birth to her son, she's been putting those dividend checks into a college savings account. Those are the profits Senator Obama wants to take away.

Unlike the government EM can't just print more money or force people under authority of law to pay higher taxes. EM won't just accept smaller profits and pay lower dividents, they'll also attempt to increase income and decrease expenses. Since EM is already selling all the petroleum products it can produce, increasing income is problematic, so they'll probably end up reducing expenses.

If I can simplify EM's business model, they make money by finding petroleum in the ground, removing it from the ground, refining it into usable products, and selling it to consumers. If profits are reduced perhaps EM will scale back the expense of exploring for new sources of petroleum, which may well cause a shortage years down the road (perhaps around the time Susan's son is preparing to go to college). Perhaps EM will scale back some drilling operations, especially in areas where it's more expensive (and thereby less profitable) to drill, which could cause shortages much sooner and may make Susan long for the gas prices of the summer of 2008. Maybe they'll move their operations overseas, to a nation that doesn't have such an onerous tax structure. Finally, maybe they'll just cut staff, and Susan will become one of many unemployed people who lost their jobs because companies were trying to stay profitable under a heavier tax burden.

So by taxing oil company profits we're reducing middle-class Susan's income by reducing her stock dividends, we're making her find other methods of financing her son's college education, we're potentially forcing her to pay more for gasoline, and we may even be forcing her out of her job. All because a politician sees a sum of money earned by a company for selling a product as a source of government income.

Still want to tax those juicy oil company profits?

Government and Business

2008-10-14T10:38:00.004-04:00

For the last couple of days the morning radio news has abounded with stories of the Federal government "taking over" banks. I seem to be one of the few people who's not enthused over this idea, and I believe I have history to back me up.

When the United States entered World War I on April 6, 1917 the government realized, correctly, that there was one industry that would have a major stategic role to play in success in that conflict. It was an industry comprised of a large number of competing companies, often providing comparable products to the same markets and run by some of the most cut-throat businessmen ever to head a corporation. Some of these companies were crippled by labor disputes, the corporate infrastructure was aging and in many cases in need of replacement, and lack of standardization meant that most equipment was custom made.

That industry was the railroad system, which would be needed to move troops and equipment from all parts of the nation to the Eastern ports for shipment to Europe. Many doubted that the railroads were up to the task, so in 1918 the government nationalized most of the railroads under the United States Railroad Administration. This administration was responsible for allocating and upgrading equipment, dealing with labor, and controlling how railroads operated. While many good things came out of the USRA, such as standardized locomotive and freight-car designs, the costs to the government (and thus to the taxpayers) were staggering. After the conflict the railroads were returned to the prior ownership and operation.

It is, I think, significant that twenty-three years later, when the United States became embroiled in a larger conflict where even more troops and equipment needed to be transported to both coasts for shipment overseas, the government decided to let the railroads operate with minimal interference from the government. It would seem that the elected officials realized that corporations run for profit by men whose job it was to operate railroads could provide rail transport more efficiently than government bureaucrats could.

Answer this: who do you trust more with your money, the manager of your local bank or an appointee from a group of local politicians? Who do you think knows more about investing your money for a favorable rate of return, a person whose job is to manage money or a person whose job is to get re-elected? Who is more likely to make sure you get your money back when you want it, someone who has to compete with others providing similar services or someone who can take your money under power of law whenever he or she sees fit?

What a Difference Competition Makes

2008-07-19T10:56:00.004-04:00

Last week my wife and I had two visits, on two consecutive days, by two technicians for purposes of making upgrades or repairs to items in our home. The difference in results of those two visits were enlightening, to say the least.

On day 1 we had a representative from the cable TV company in two do two things: install a cable box (which we needed because we kept losing channels we like because we didn't have one) and install a cable phone line. We decided to go with cable phone because it's cheaper, since we already have cable TV and cable internet service, so we get a package price.

Now, deciding upon who to call for cable system upgrades is easy, the only company to call is the cable company. They are a monopoly. So we call them, and we are promised that the techician will arrive between 8:00 am and 11:00 am. At 10:30 the cable company calls to give me a phone number and reference number, so I can contact them if the technician doesn't arrive by 11:00. At 11:05 (as I was about the make the call) the cable company calls again, tells me the techician is running late, but he'll be here within 45 minutes. About 35 minutes later he arrives. He sets up our cable box, no problem, then installs the new internet/phone modem and shows us where on the form our new phone number is located.

Say what?

New phone number? No one told us we'd be getting a new phone number. After some discussion (and him calling the cable company) it's decided that he'll do everything but run the phone line, we'll need another service call (which he promised us could be done on a Saturday, for which we will not need to pay a fee, and which will take ten minutes).

Shortly all the hardware is installed and he now has to set up our internet connection for the new modem. He calls the cable company to do so, and his put on hold. I can hear the music playing thru his speakerphone, with periodic pauses to tell him his call is very important and he'll be assisted by the next available person. He was on hold for about 20 minutes, until at long last we're two-thirds set up. When we called the cable company we were informed that (a) this would in fact take ten minutes, (b) no, it could not be done on a Saturday and (c) we WOULD have to pay a fee for a service call. Amazingly, this fee was waived, perhaps threatening to switch to satellite TV had something to do with it. So I have a vacation day today to await the technician who will, of course, be there between eight and eleven again, so he'll probably leave too late for me to have time to go to the range anyway.

For service call number 2, our clothes dryer wasn't working properly. If you open the phone book under "appliance repair" you'll find a full page of listings for people who will come to your home and repair your dryer. Having purchased this dryer at Sears, we called Sears to repair it. This service call was scheduled for between eight am and twelve noon, and we were told that they'd call at 8:00 with an approximate time we could expect the repair technician. As it turns out, we were the first call of the day, so he just showed up at 8:15. I escorted him to the basement, explained the problem, told him the steps I'd taken such as cleaning the vent. He spent ten or fifteen minutes down there, went to his van for parts, and spent another fifteen minutes installing them (including replacing a part that wasn't the cause of our problem, but was squeaking). He was gone by 9:00, and I was on my way to the range by 10:00. If anything at all goes wrong with the dryer for the next year it will be repair for free, even if it has nothing to do with what was repaired this time.

So here we see a difference, one company that's the only game in town (unless you're willing to mount a big, ugly dish on your roof), one that knows it has to provide good service or we'll take our business elsewhere. One company that's one of many providing competing services, one that has no competition.

Tell me again how wonderful "single payer health care" will be.

Apocryphal Text From Genesis

2008-05-21T13:02:00.004-04:00

Found in a cave near Qumran in Israel, sealed in a metal can with a plastic lid:

God saith unto Adam “Thou shalt harvest the fruit of the coffee plant, and thou shalt dry that fruit, and thou shalt roast that fruit until it is a deep brown color. And thou shalt grind the roasted fruit into a fine power. Thou shalt place the grindings in water over a fire and boil them until the brew is dark and strong. This brew shall be called “coffee”, and behold it is very good. Behold, thou shalt be careful not to drink in the grindings at the bottom of the cup, lest ye choke. Thou mayest add to the coffee the milk of the cow, or the product of the sugar cane, according to thy taste. And behold, using the intellect which I hath given thee, thou shalt devise new and better methods for preparing coffee, causing hot water to drip or perk through the grindings, that thou mayest consume better coffee without the dregs at the bottom of the cup. Beware though, lest ye be led astray from the pure coffee I intend that thou consumest, and addest to thy coffee vile substances such as sugar substitutes or creamers not made of the milk of the cow.” And thus Adam drank coffee, and behold it was good. And Adam devised new methods for brewing coffee, the percolator, the drip maker, and the French press. And God smelled the aroma of brewing coffee in Heaven, a sweet scent beloved by the Lord, and God saw that it was good. In the fullness of time Adam devised a method for forcing steam, rather than hot water, through the grindings, causing a stronger and richer coffee to be made, Adam called this brew Espresso. And God looked upon Adam drinking his coffee, and behold it was very good.

Then the demon Nescafe didst whisper in Adam’s ear, saying “Behold, brewing coffee takes much time! Let us brew coffee in large quantities, and let us then dry the water from the coffee, leaving us with grindings that need only have hot water added. This we shall call “instant coffee”.” So Adam was led astray, and made instant coffee. Adam saw that the instant coffee lacked the flavor and richness of the fresh-brewed coffee, but Adam deemed this a small sacrifice to the convenience offered by Nescafe. And Adam was led astray, and fresh coffee was reserved for special occasions, and not partaken of daily as the Lord had commanded.

In the fullness of time Adam was visited by the demon Starbucks. And the demon saith unto Adam “Behold, a place where thou canst purchase burnt-tasting coffee for an excessive price, and behold, the cup is emblazoned with the name of the place, so that all whom thou meetest shall know that thou hast purchased expensive coffee, and thy esteem shall be great. And behold, for an additional price, thou mayest add small quantities of additional flavors to thy coffee. Thou mayest add flavorings like vanilla or mocha, thou mayest add espresso to thy coffee, thou mayest have thy coffee topped with foam or steamed milk.” And Adam was beguiled by Starbucks, and didst consume of the fruit of the coffee plant in a manner not intended by the Lord. And instead of saying “Large coffee, regular, no sugar”, a term pleasing to the Lord, Adam didst say “Vente Cappuccino, double-shot, mocha, foam, cinnamon”, a phrase vile to the Lord’s ears.

Then the demon Heathnut didst speak in Adam’s ear and sayeth “Behold, caffeine is not good for thee!” Beguiled by the demon Adam didst devise a way to extract the caffeine from the fruit of the coffee plant, along with most of the flavor. And Adam didst combine this knowledge with that of Nescafe and didst make Sanka, an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. And Adam didst order decaffeinated espresso from Starbucks.

Adam’s face was darkened, for behold, he lacked energy, and was unproductive in the morning, and was unproductive after lunch, and wouldst sleep when he ought to labor. Adam also was stricken with poverty because of the excessive prices of coffee provided by Starbucks. And Adam saith unto himself “Where hath my energy gone? Why am I unproductive? Why do I lack my former vigor? Why have I no money with which to take Eve to dinner?” And the Lord sent His Angel to Adam in a dream, and showed him how he used to drink brewed coffee in the morning, and in the afternoon. And the Angel reminded Adam of the flavor and smell of the brewed coffee. And Adam repented and ceased drinking of the beverages that are vile to the Lord. And Adam found his old percolator in the back of the cupboard, and didst wash the dust from it, and Adam didst harvest the fruit of the coffee plant, and roast it, and grind it, and brew it with fresh water and drink it. And Adam was happy, and the Lord smiled upon him.

Then the Lord saith unto Adam “Behold, thou hast learned thy lesson, now bear that lesson in mind while I teach thee to make beer, dark and full of flavor.”

The Gulag Archipelago

2008-03-06T13:29:00.003-05:00

My posts lately have taken a lighter tone, but this one is most certainly not of that mold. This is a topic that should disturb you.

I just finished reading The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lately. The Gulags were a series of prisons in the former Soviet Union which were used for “enemies of the state”. Solzhenitsyn (pronounced, I’m told, Sol-JA-hen-eet-sin) likens these camps to an archipelago, a series of islands in the ocean. People were routinely arrested for the slightest reason, or for no reason at all, only to fill a quota of arrests. They were then tortured into confessing, or murdered, or were sent to work camps where they worked until they died.

This is the most disturbing book I’ve ever read. I don’t say that lightly either. I’ve read Iris Chang’s book about the atrocities committed by Japanese Soldiers in Nanking, China that shocked Nazi government officials who were there (The Rape of Nanking). I’ve read of the Nazis and their concentration camps and their Ultimate Solution. This story of millions of people imprisoned, tortured and murdered by their own government, of people pulled from their homes in the middle of the night never to be seen by their loved ones again, of people living in constant fear that they may be next is the worst story I’ve ever encountered.

While many of the people imprisoned in the gulags were criminals, most were “political” criminals. Their crimes? There were stories of World War II pilots who were shot down and spent the remainder of the war in other nations, where they were exposed to foreign culture. These people were considered dangerous and needed to be re-educated. People (including the author) were arrested for being friends with someone who was arrested (who may, in fact, have also been arrested for that reason). Since the work camps needed people to perform the manual labor there were quotas to be met. No one cared if the person in the camp was actually guilty of anything or merely got in the way of an arresting officer with a quota.

We’ll probably never know just how many people died in the Gulags, estimates run in the tens of millions. Some were murdered outright, some were worked to death.

I’ll offer a glimpse of the Gulags. Prisoners were set to work to build a canal, using picks, shovels and wheelbarrows, no heavy machinery. In winter. People would freeze to death during the work day, sledges had to be sent around at night to pick up the corpses. Two hundred and fifty thousand prisoners died during this construction project. You read that correctly, a quarter of a million people. The result of this project can be seen in the authors own words: “In 1966 I spent eight hours by the canal. During this time there was one self-propelled barge which passed from Povenets to Soroka, and one, identical in type, from Soroka to Povenets. Their numbers were different, and it was only by their numbers that I could tell them apart and be sure it was not the same one as before on its way back. Because they were loaded altogether identically; with the very same pine logs which had been lying exposed for a long time and were useless for anything except firewood. And canceling one load against another we get zero. And a quarter of a million corpses to be remembered.” This was just for one construction project, by one work-camp, for one canal that apparently didn’t see much use.

This book has, if anything, increased my already deep hatred of Communism and my pledge to oppose anyone who would try to make America over in the Communist mold. Solzhenitsyn wrote this book not only to preserve the past, but to serve as a warning for the future. On the last page of the book he writes “All you freedom-loving “left wing” thinkers in the West! You left-laborites! You progressive American, German, and French students! As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it all someday – but only when you yourselves hear ‘hands behind your backs there!’ and step ashore on our Archipelago.”

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Strange People I've Worked With

2008-02-25T14:03:00.003-05:00

Over the last 22 years I’ve worked in a number of offices and in direct contact with literally hundreds of people. The law of averages states that a number of those people will be, well, for charities sake let’s call them eccentric. Here is a sampling of the strange people I’ve worked with; names have been changed though, just in case.

David was about my age, we were both only a couple years out of college when we first worked together. He was an employee of the company, I was a consultant. David was, to put it politely, an apple polisher (we used to say he bought chap-stick by the case). David knew the birthday of every manager above him, from his immediate supervisor to the CEO of the company. You’re thinking he sent them a card, aren’t you? You’re thinking too small. He baked them a cake or cookies, with his own two little hands.

Emma was a truly unique person; I will probably never meet another person who reminds me of her. She’d arrive at work with her black wool winter coat covered (and I do mean covered) with cat fur because her cats liked sleeping on it. My cat would like to sleep on my coat too, but I don’t let her. One day she had a bowl of cereal for breakfast and didn’t finish it, the remaining cereal sat, in the bowl, for weeks and weeks, she called it her science project. Her most noticeable quality though was an apparent lack of control over her bodily functions combined with a diet heavy in peppers and onions (she once told me that she’d eat an onion like other people eat an apple, just bite into it). This combination made her both flatulent and fragrant, and she made no attempt to hold them in. On more than one occasion I or a co-worker were driven from our office by her emanations, and she’d frequently be seen, heard and smelled walking down the hall emitting a noxious cloud as she went.

One instance where you learn a person’s eccentricities is when you share a bathroom with them, so there are a couple of men on my list here. Alan had an odd habit in the men’s room. On this particular floor we had a man in a wheelchair, so the men’s room was handicapped accessible There was a plate next to the door you could push and the door would open automatically. Alan would go into the bathroom and, before doing anything else, would wash his hands thoroughly with soap and water. He would then go about the business he came into the bathroom for, after which he would splash a little more water onto his hands, without soap, dry them on a paper towel, use the towel to push the plate to open the door, run back to the trash can to discard the towel, then run back out thru the door before it closed.

Frank was probably the least mechanically-inclined person I’ve ever known. He set up his inflatable pool on a part of his yard that wasn’t level and couldn’t understand why the water was lower at one end than the other. His high-water (pardon the pun) mark was met when he bought a snow-blower. He first wanted to know why a snow-blower with an electric starter needed a pull-cord, which I explained by saying that if it stalled at the end of your property it was probably easier to re-start a hot engine by pulling the cord than by walking all the way back to the electrical outlet. The best one was when he asked me which way he should point the discharge chute from the snow-blower, I told him you should point it left or right, depending on where you want the snow to go. He asked “Can’t I point it straight back?” to which I replied “Frank, you’ll be standing there”.

Marv liked to argue. He considered himself a provocateur (which is apparently French for chop-buster). Given that he was a self-described bleeding heart Liberal I was a frequent target of his discussions, since I was just about guaranteed to be on the opposite side of any topic he could pick. I also don’t like to argue, so I never understood where Marv was coming from until he told me one day that, when among friends of similar political leanings, he’d say things he didn't agree with just to start a “discussion”. There’s a word for people like that, but I’ll keep this blog PG-rated.

Jack was another guy with odd bathroom habits. He must’ve been a high-order germophobe. If he needed to, shall we say, sit down he’d clean the seat. Now most guys will wipe the seat just to avoid anything really nasty, but he would wash the seat with soap, rinse it with water, then dry it, then put TP on it. He’d let you know if you walked in while he was performing this process and you went into “his” stall while he was getting more paper towels or whatever.

Inez was, briefly, my immediate manager. She was, shall we say, hygienically challenged. We suspected she showered once a month or so, whether she needed it or not. During long meetings she’d slip her shoes off under the conference room table, and you could ALWAYS tell when she’d done so.

Claude was also on of my managers. He was actually a really nice guy, but he was a micro-manager. Co-workers told me about an occasion before I went to work for him where there was some emergency that everyone was involved in correcting. Claude insisted upon a thirty-second status meeting every five minutes until the problem was resolved. I was glad I wasn’t working for him at the time, I’d have kicked him out and told him I’d update him when I had enough time to accomplish something.

Martha was another of my immediate supervisors. She was dopey in a harmless sort of way. Her major idiosyncrasy was a nearly pathological fear of squirrels. This wasn’t mere phobia though, she was actually convinced they could hurt you or, if they were near your car, could damage your tires. I know, you’re thinking that she was concerned about their admittedly sharp teeth or claws, but her concern was for their tails. Yes, she believed that a squirrel’s tail was covered, not in soft fur, but in little spikes that would cut into you if they touched you.

There have been other odd people in my career, and if I think of any I’ll be sure to write a part 2 of this entry.

No, I'm Not In Jail!

2008-01-03T11:22:00.001-05:00

Nor amI tied to a chair listening to Barry Manilow.

I called back on Wednesday as previously directed and I was told that the ticket was "changed", meaning I am not responsible for it. Whether this means that the correct person is responsible for it, or that the whole matter is being tossed out, I don't know neither do I care. There will be no SWAT team breaking down my door at 2 am because of a $48 parking ticket.

I need to thank my wife for the offer of a cake with a file in it, and for MG for her concern that'd I'd been incarcerated.

To Err Is Human.....

2007-12-31T10:06:00.000-05:00

To really screw things up requires a government agency.

On Saturday I received an official-looking letter in the mail. It was one of those envelopes with the carbon paper inside so the letter can be typed right thru the envelope, the things that businesses stopped using thirty or so years ago. At first I thought I'd been called for jury duty. It turned out to be a Failure-To-Appear notice on a parking ticket for a Fairly Small Town (FST for short) in New Jersey I don't think I've ever been to.

At this point I must offer a little aside. I work for a consulting company that processes parking tickets for a Very Big Municipality (VBM). I've worked there for nine years. VBM processes more parking tickets in one day than most NJ towns will see in a year. I can quote to you, from memory, the various ways a ticket can move thru our system, from issuance to payment, or judgment, or collection proceedings, or towing your car and auctioning it off, or hearings, or automatic dismissal, etc etc. I've forgotten more about parking tickets than most people will ever know.

So anyway, FST promises me dire consequences should I fail to pay the amount shown, those consequences including suspension of driving privileges, inability to register my vehicle, additional penalties added to the ticket, arrest, and being tied to a chair and forced to listen to Barry Manilow. They provide me with a web site where I can look at details of the ticket, and a phone number I can call on Mondays thru Fridays between the hours of 9 am and 4 pm. Being the technically savvy person I am, I fired up my home computer and checked out the web site. Hmmm, confusion, the ticket in question was left on the windshield of a Chevy. A quick look in the driveway confirms that the vehicle out there is a Jeep Liberty. It was such when purchased in 2006, it is now, one assumes it's always been a Jeep Liberty. Therefore, whoever wrote the ticket got the license plate wrong and, co-incidentally, wrote down my plate by mistake.

I need to make another little aside here, explaining via my vast store-house of information on how parking tickets are processed. The police officer, traffic-control officer, or whoever, who leaves a ticket on your windshield doesn't know who you are. He or she sees your car parked illegally and writes the ticket, keeping a copy for the official record. If you don't pay the ticket the town will contact the state Department of Motor Vehicles to find out (via your license plate) who owns the offending car, they then mail you a nasty letter telling you to pay your fine or Suffer The Consequences.

So, this is obviously not my car, I am not responsible for this ticket, and I can in good conscience plead not-guilty. First thing this morning (Monday) I call the supplied number, push a couple of buttons, and, surprise surprise, get a real live person on the phone. I tell her my plight and she tells me she needs to contact DMV for information on my car and to call back Wednesday (tomorrow being January 1, thus a holiday).

*blink blink*

I can go two possible ways at this point. I can call upon my extensive knowledge of the processing of parking tickets, point out that DMV has already been contacted (that's how they knew who to send the letter to), that if their system was at all sensible they'd have gotten my vehicle information at the same time as my personal information (more efficient since DMV charges for these contacts, so why contact them twice instead of once?), and that the ticket could and should be dismissed right now.

I'll call back on Wednesday.

Christmas Meme

2007-12-24T09:44:00.000-05:00

MorningGlory at http://morningglory2.wordpress.com/blogroll-bios/ tagged me with the Christmas meme, so here goes:

1. Wrapping or gift bags? Usually wrapping paper, unless what I'm wrapping is really oddly shaped.

2. Real or artificial tree? Growing up we had artificial trees, since I've been married my wife and I get real trees.

3. When do you put up the tree? Growing up the tree went up the day after Thanksgiving. My wife and I go with friends the day (or weekend) after Thanksgiving to cut down our trees and we usually get them up (if not completely decorated) that weekend.

4. When do you take the tree down? Again, family tradition was that the tree stayed up until after my parents anniversary on January 7, my wife and I continue this tradition too. We get it down on whatever weekend we can, generally after 1/7.

5. Do you like eggnog? I LOVE the stuff! Strangly (given my mis-spent youth), I've never had egg nog with alcohol in it.

6. Favorite gift received as a child? Toy trains (the beginning of a hobby that I still love).

7. Do you have a Nativity scene? Yes, I started out by buying the Fontanini Jesus/Mary/Joseph set, my wife added the manger, angels, animals, wise men, etc when we were dating.

8. Worst Christmas gift you ever received? I can't recall ever getting a BAD Christmas gift, there were years I didn't get ANY at all though (after my parents died, when I was single and unattached).

9. Mail or email Christmas cards? Mail (thanks to my wife, if it were up to me they'd probably never get sent)

10. Favorite Christmas movie? I've seen surprisingly few of the classic Christmas movies (It's a Wonderful Life, Christmas Story, Miracle on 34th Street, etc, I don't think I've seen any of those all the way thru). Have to remedy that someday. I always loved the Peanuts Christmas Special, and I also like A Christmas Carol (I especially like George C. Scott as Scrooge).

11. When do you start shopping for Christmas? Usually sometime after Thanksgiving, but seldom on Black Friday. I only buy for my wife so....

12. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas? Chocolate Chip Cookies. On a related note, there's one cookie my Mom made that I really miss, she called them "Ice Box Cookies", they were slightly almond flavored. They were WONDERFUL when they were warm from the oven and excellent when fresh. After a few days they turned hard enough to use for hockey pucks (I'd say skeet targets, but I doubt they'd have broken) but still tasted good dunked in milk (me) or coffee (my parents). I also like Yule Kake (Norwegian for Christmas Cake), I pretty much managed to duplicate my Mom's recipe for this (she made it much less sweet than the traditional recipe). It's basically a sweet soda-bread with raisins.

13. Clear lights or colored on the tree? Either one, but colored lights should be kept inside the tree to make a colored glow and neither type should blink, flash, chase or otherwise give the impression of a carnival barker shouting "Hurry hurry hurry! Step right up and see the Baby Jesus! Thrill to the Virgin Birth!"

14. Favorite Christmas song? There are so many! Just a few of my favorites: "Carol of the Bells" (preferably played on handbells), "Do You Hear What I Hear?", "I Saw Three Ships", "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing". If I can be permitted another aside (and since this is my blog I can!), that last one appealed to me as a child. My father's name was Harold, and I thought that my Dad had the same name as an angel. Anyone who knew my Dad would be rolling on the floor laughing at THAT.

Now I'm supposed to tag someone else. One of these days I have get a meme BEFORE MorningGlory so I can tag her! Maybe I can get my wife to answer in comments.

Thankfulness

2007-11-20T13:38:00.000-05:00

At the end of the last chapter of To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth Jeff Cooper offers the reader a list of the blessings he’s received (good health, loving wife, fine children, etc). He ends with “…such blessings cannot be deserved, but they are deeply and humbly appreciated.”

At this time of year we celebrate a uniquely American holiday, Thanksgiving. We celebrate not the founding of our nation, our founders, or our great men and women. We take this time to give thanks for the blessings we have received. Despite the efforts of some to make this into a time of mourning for what was done to the American Indians (and I suspect their descendents are grateful that they’re no longer living like their ancestors), it is a time for counting blessings.

I’m grateful first of all that I serve a God who loves me, who loves all of His creatures. I’m grateful that God doesn’t require that I defend Him but that He comes to my aid to protect me, even from myself.

I’m grateful that I live in the most free, most prosperous nation in the world. A nation that offers me the chance, and only the chance, to succeed. A nation where my abilities are the only possible deterrent to my own success.

I’m grateful for a wife who, inexplicably, loves me. A woman I’d die for and who I live for. A woman who understands me better than I understand myself and who strives to make me happy (and succeeds resoundingly).

I’m thankful that I had parents who taught me right from wrong, who didn’t explain away my misdeeds but neither did they dwell on them after the lesson was learned.

I’m grateful that I married into a wonderful family that treats me as one of their own. After my wife and I married it was just so natural to call my new mother-in-law “Mom”, a name I didn’t think I’d ever utter again after my mother died in 1990.

I’m grateful for good health, a comfortable home, and a good job. I’m glad that I can take my job seriously enough to be good at it but not be so obsessed with it that I live to work rather than work to live.

No, I do not deserve these blessings, but I appreciate them.

Happy (Belated) Birthday, USMC

2007-11-14T11:52:00.000-05:00

I’ve been remiss in mentioning that November 10, 2007 was the 232nd birthday of the United States Marine Corps. The Marines were formed by act of the second Continental Congress which specified that two battalions of Marines be raised to function as landing forces for the fleet. It’s been my honor and privilege to have known a number of Marines (including my father). They’ve all had a few things in common, they were all plain-spoken (if a bit vulgar at times), fiercely proud, loyal to a fault, and a little bit crazy.

For over two centuries, whenever America has felt the need to kick butt the Marines have been the steel toe on the boot. The late Jeff Cooper (himself a Marine) said that if you wanted to see the world you joined the Navy, if you wanted to fly you joined the Air Force, if you wanted to learn a trade you joined the Army, but if you wanted to fight you joined the Marines. Ronald Reagan said that some people go thru life wondering if they made a difference, the Marines never had that problem. Admiral Nimitz, commander of the invasion of Iwo Jima, said of the Marines in that action that uncommon valor was a common virtue. Rumor has it that Chesty Puller (most decorated Marine in history), on seeing a new model flamethrower wondered where the bayonet was attached. Perhaps the Marine Corps motto says all that needs to be said: “No better friend, no worse enemy”.

While I have the greatest respect and admiration for all of our fighting forces, there will always be a soft spot in my heart for the USMC. Now if you’ll excuse me, because of my lateness in mentioning the Marine’s birthday I have to give Gunny 232 push-ups.

St Crispin's Day

2007-10-25T09:54:00.000-04:00

On this date, St Crispin’s Day, in 1415 the badly outnumbered English and Welsh army, commanded by King Henry V, served up a good old-fashioned butt-kicking to Charles VI’s much larger French army at Agincourt. The French defeat was particularly notable due to the number of noblemen killed (according to Wikipedia three dukes, five counts and ninety barons).

This battle would be notable only to scholars and English school children were it not immortalized by one William Shakespeare. The following is from his play King Henry V and is, in my humble opinion, among the great examples of heroic oration. It takes place the night before the battle.

WESTMORELAND
O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!
KING HENRY V
What's he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin:
If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
To do our country loss;
and if to live,The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires:
But if it be a sin to covet honour,I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more, methinks, would share from me
For the best hope I have.
O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
ill stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

If olde English isn’t your cup of tea, here follows my translation:

WESTMORELAND (Henry’s cousin)
If only ten thousand men in England who have the day off (because St Crispin’s day is a holiday) were here with us!

King Henry V:
Who said that? My cousin Westmoreland? I disagree.
If we are going to die, there’s enough of us to be missed.
If we’re going to live, the fewer of us there are the more honor each of us will receive.
By God! Don’t wish there were one more of us.
I don’t fight for money, and I don’t care if anyone in my army does.
I don’t care if men wear my uniform.
I don’t care about things like that.
But if it’s a sin to want honor and glory I’m the worst sinner alive.
No, my cousin, don’t wish there were one man more from England.
My God! I wouldn’t share the honor I’ll receive with one more man if it were my last hope.
Instead, tell everyone in my army that if he doesn’t have the courage to fight he can leave. We’ll give him money to use to get home. We don’t want to die in the company of a man who’s afraid to die with us.
Whoever survives today and goes home will stand tall when St Crispin’s Day is named. When he grows old he’ll have a party for his friends the day before and remind them that tomorrow is St Crispin’s day. Then he’ll roll up his sleeves and show his scars and say “I got these scars on Crispin’s Day". He’ll forget some things in his old age, but he’ll never forget what he did today. He’ll remember all our names as if it were yesterday, and he’ll drink a toast to us. Good men will teach our story to their sons and St Crispin’s day will never pass from now on without our deeds being remembered.
We are a small group of brothers, for whoever fights with me today will be a brother to me. Even if he’s low-class, he’ll be a gentleman.
And gentlemen who are in bed in England right now will think they’re cursed that they weren’t here. They’ll feel like lesser men in the presence of anyone who fought with us upon St Crispin’s Day.

Today's Oddity

2007-09-26T12:50:00.000-04:00

This morning I made my usual walk from the World Trade Center station to the subway station where I embark on the last leg of my morning commute. As I walked down Fulton Street I noticed something odd. It was definitely morning. I was definitely walking East. I mentally confirmed both of these multiple times, I know my limitations before I've had my first cup of coffee. Why, then, was my shadow in front of me. (Think about it, if you're facing East, and the sun is rising, as it normally does, in the East, the sun should be in front of you and your shadow behind you.) The light also had a strange, almost artificial, quality similar to a halogen lamp rather than true sunlight. I looked back over my shoulder and found that there was a tall glass building behind me, the sun's rays were reflecting off of that building and shining right down Fulton Street.

Odd, but oddly cool.

Rhythms

2007-09-04T13:20:00.000-04:00

No, this is not a discussion of natural methods of birth control, bear with me.

Last week my wife and I were in Bethany Beach, Delaware for family vacation (us, her parents, and her three brothers with their wives and children, sixteen people all together). We go on such a vacation almost every year, and I’ve learned that if I want to do something by myself the best time is in the morning, since very little happens until after lunch. Last week was a treat for me; I had an opportunity to do some surf fishing. For the uninitiated, surf fishing involves fishing from the beach, casting your bait into the water beyond the surf. I hadn’t gone surf fishing in over twenty years (since I was in college), but when I was in Junior High and High School my father and I would go surf fishing every other Saturday (when the tides were favorable) all summer.

I’d forgotten how much I love the seashore, in particular spending time on the seashore actually doing something that involved the ocean (as opposed to sitting in a chair reading a book). The seashore is a place of rhythms. There’s the obvious (to a fisherman) twice-daily ebb and flow of the tides, high to low and back to high with the transitions between. Within that is the rhythm of the waves, watching the rod tip as the waves hit the line and bend the rod down, to the unaccustomed it looks like a fish bit (the difference is subtle and nearly indescribable, but obvious once you’ve gotten into the rhythm). Superimposed over the rhythm of the waves, every few waves two will combine to send the water higher up the beach than the others (a good reason to fish barefoot in warm weather or in boots in cool weather). Then every hour or so a wave will wash up even higher, probably hitting your belongings and, if you’re smart or lucky enough to have put them on the downhill side away from the water, washing them further up the beach. Of course if you were neither smart nor lucky, your stuff might well wash out to sea.

There’s something primal about standing there on the seashore, dealing with the ocean on her own terms. If you try to drag your fish to the beach against the under-tow you may snap your line, you have to hold it in place until the flow reduces. Likewise, you have to reel like crazy when the incoming wave hits your fish or the line may slacken enough for the fish to get off the hook (and my personal rule is that if I didn’t hold the fish in my hands I didn’t catch it). You can’t control the ocean; sharks have fed well on those who tried. You can’t even reach an agreement with her, the best you can do is react to her changing moods.

On our last day (when I didn’t get a chance to fish) we were near the beach and I noticed that the surf was rough and the water quite choppy compared to previous days. I noticed that the weather was very much like it had been earlier in the week. There must’ve been a storm somewhere over the horizon that caused the rough water. Had I gone fishing that day I’d have needed a heavier sinker to keep my bait from being washed in. As always, the ocean set the rules, and I could’ve done nothing but react to them.

Something I Thought I'd Share

2007-08-13T10:07:00.000-04:00

Like most Americans, I'm comfortable with measuring temperatures in Fahrenheit and must less so in Celsius (or Centigrade if you prefer). If someone tells me it's 22 F I can translate that into "cold", 85 F as "warm" and 110 F as "crap it's hot". If I encounter a Celsuis temperature I'm much less certain, what's 28 C? Now my cell phone is equipped with a unit converter, but I'm not going to whip that out every time I need to do a conversion (I'm nerdy, but not THAT nerdy). I know the formula, multiply the Celsius temperature by nine-fifths and add 32, but multiplying by nine-fifths in your head is hard.

Well, here I offer to my readers (both of them) an easy method to convert Celsius to Farenheit in your head. I don't pretend it's original, the math works so I can hardly be the discoverer of it, but I've never seen it anyplace else before. You can use it with precise numbers to get a precise conversion, or you can use close-enough numbers to get an idea of what kind of temperature we're talking about.

Here goes: Take your Celsius temperture, double it, subtract ten percent, and add 32. Each of these steps is easy to do in your head especially if you're doing a close-enough conversion.

Let's do an example, 28 C. Doubling 28 gives us 56. Ten percent of 56 is 5.6, subtract that from 56 and you get 50.4, add 32 and you get 82.4. That's a precise conversion, exactly what you'd get using the usual formula (in fact you ARE using the usual formula, just doing so in a way that's easy to do in your head). Suppose you don't need an exact number, your British friend just told you it's 28 C today. Call it 30 C (close enough), double it to 60, subtract 6 (ten percent of 60) to get 54, add 32 and you get 86 and bear in mind that you're a little high (because you rounded your original number up). So you know it was pretty warm, but not extremely hot.

I told you I'm a nerd.

Junk Science

2007-08-01T11:03:00.000-04:00

Each morning I pick up a free newspaper on the way to work, it gives me something to do on the subway. Yesterday’s newspaper contained an article stating that the number of tropical storms and hurricanes has been increasing, and that this increase is due to “human induced climate warming”, also known as “global warming”. It should come as no surprise that I consider the “science” of global warming to be sloppy at best and intentionally dishonest at worst, but let’s take a closer look.

The study in question gave a chart showing average yearly number of tropical storms and hurricanes for three time periods. First, from 1905 thru 1930 there were an average of 6 tropical cyclones and 4 hurricanes per year. From 1931 thru 1994 there were an average of 10 and 5, and from 1995 thru 2005 there were an average of 15 and 8 respectively. On the face of it one might be tempted to say something really is happening, that the number of storms has been increasing for the last hundred years.

Do you see anything wrong with those numbers? Before 1930 (the earliest timeframe reported) the most common method of identifying a storm was for a ship in the ocean to see it or get caught in it. Ship owners don’t like their vessels to get caught in hurricanes because they don’t make any money from cargo that’s at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Shipping lanes, therefore, tend to avoid those areas where large-scale storms are more likely to form. For the first twenty-five years of the study (and the entire first data-point) the primary method for identifying storms intentionally avoiding being in a position to report the storm. Up until the 1960’s (half-way thru the second time period reported) storm identification still relied on ships and airplanes were also added to the mix. Airplanes also try to avoid large storms for the same reasons ships do, so while more storms could be identified and reported the means of identification still avoided the areas where they were most likely to have something to report. Only in the 1960’s did we begin to put weather satellites into orbit, and newer satellites have gotten more sophisticated and provide greater coverage. From 1995 thru 2005 (comprising only ten percent of the total time period reported on) we can now see a hurricane form anywhere in the world, for the first time we can be sure of a full and accurate count of the number of storms that form.

The scientific principle known as “Occam’s Razor” states that given two possible explanations the simpler one is likely to be the correct one. Apply that principle and ask yourself which is more likely given the information I provide above: are there really more hurricanes and tropical cyclones each year, or have there always been about the same number of storms but we’re now in a position to identify them all?

Mom

2007-07-26T08:34:00.000-04:00

I wanted to post this on Tuesday, but my web access was problematic, and yesterday I was too busy, so here it is, better late than never.

July 24, 2007, would have been my mother’s eighty-eighth birthday had she not died in 1990. Mom lived in a very different world than we do, she was a throwback to an earlier era. She actually wasn’t even modern for her own era. Let me give you some examples.

She never learned to drive.

She was born in Staten Island, NY (part of NYC) and lived there her entire life. She died within a few miles of where she was born. The furthest she ever traveled from Staten Island was into New Jersey near the Pennsylvania border. Think about that for a moment, she never once, in her entire life, had to reset her watch because she’d entered a new time zone.

She dropped out of high school. Actually, her parents TOOK her out because she was the second oldest of ten children (and the oldest girl) so she needed to be home to help care for her younger siblings. This was considered no big deal because the experience she’d get with child rearing and household management was more useful than the stuff she’d learn in school.

Despite her lack of education, she was an incredibly intelligent woman. She could handle household finances better than anyone I ever knew.

She talked about roller skating with her friends over the Bayonne Bridge (connecting Staten Island to Bayonne NJ) the day it opened in 1931. She was 13.

She talked about riding in the “rumble seat” of a car.

The only time I knew her to sleep in a bed outside of her home was when she was hospitalized with the illness that eventually killed her (brain cancer). She did so when she was younger and her parents had a house in Flanders, NJ (imagine people going to Flanders NJ on vacation?). I don’t think she EVER stayed in a hotel.

In 1949, at age 30, her first husband died suddenly, leaving her with two sets of twins and a baby on the way. She went on Welfare. Welfare then wasn’t like it is now, she wasn’t permitted to buy “real” milk for her children, she had to buy powdered milk. No cookies, candy or other treats. The Welfare office would send people to her home to check.

Some time later she took a job as a housekeeper in Edgar Lutheran Home, part of which was an “old people’s” home. Basically it provided a room for an elderly person, with meals in a dining room, but no nursing care. The other part was a nursing home. One of the people in the “old people’s” home was a woman by the name of Gertrude, she was a widow of a Lutheran minister. Her son Harold would travel from Hoboken, NJ to Staten Island to visit his mother. He joked that the first time he saw my mother she was on her knees cleaning under his mother’s bed, that’s when he decided he had to marry her.

They married on January 7, 1960. I came along three and a half years later.

Latest Meme

2007-06-28T09:19:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the lack of posting, things have been a little nuts lately.

I found this on MorningGlory's site, so I decided to play.

WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE? No, but my middle name is my father’s first name. He didn’t want both of us answering when my mother called one of us.

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CRIED? Probably last January when my cat Bompy died.

DO YOU LIKE YOUR HANDWRITING? I don’t dislike it enough to try to change it.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE LUNCH MEAT? Roast beef.

DO YOU HAVE KIDS? No, unless the cats count.

IF YOU WERE ANOTHER PERSON WOULD YOU BE FRIENDS WITH YOU? Honestly, probably yes, since I try to exhibit those qualities I admire in others.

DO YOU USE SARCASM A LOT? Me? Sarcasm? NEVER! What could POSSIBLY make you think that?

DO YOU STILL HAVE YOUR TONSILS? Yes

WOULD YOU BUNGEE JUMP? Not for all the tea in China.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE CEREAL? Right now, Honey Bunches of Oats.

DO YOU UNTIE YOUR SHOES WHEN YOU TAKE THEM OFF? Yes

DO YOU THINK YOU ARE STRONG? Yes

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE ICE CREAM? It’s a toss-up, Ralph’s Butter Almond (Ralph’s is an ice cream place on Staten Island, NYC) or Hagen Daz Chocolate Swiss Almond (much easier to find).

WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE ABOUT PEOPLE? Facial expression.

RED OR PINK? Red

WHAT IS THE LEAST FAVORITE THING ABOUT YOURSELF? My lazy eye, I tend to be self-conscious about it, but getting is corrected would cause vision problems.

WHO DO YOU MISS THE MOST? My parents

WHAT COLOR PANTS AND SHOES ARE YOU WEARING? Blue chinos and black shoes.

WHAT WAS THE LAST THING YOU ATE? Honey Bunches of Oats with soy milk.

WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO RIGHT NOW? The air conditioner.

IF YOU WHERE A CRAYON, WHAT COLOR WOULD YOU BE? Sky-blue-pink.

FAVORITE SMELLS? Bread baking, and my wife’s hair.

WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON YOU TALKED TO ON THE PHONE? My wife.

FAVORITE SPORTS TO WATCH? Football

HAIR COLOR[S]? Brown with some grey

EYE COLOR? Green

DO YOU WEAR CONTACTS? Nope, never will either, I hate the thought of touching my eyes.

FAVORITE FOOD? My wife’s meatloaf.

SCARY MOVIES OR HAPPY ENDINGS? Happy endings because I don’t care for what passes for scary movies these days.

LAST MOVIE YOU WATCHED? In the Theater, Ocean's Thirteen. On DVD, Letters From Iwo Jima. On TV, probably Men in Black last weekend.

WHAT COLOR SHIRT ARE YOU WEARING? Blue.

SUMMER OR WINTER? Summer, I hate snow.

HUGS OR KISSES? Hugs for everyone but my wife, hugs and kisses for her.

FAVORITE DESSERT? Anything chocolate

MOST LIKELY TO RESPOND? No one

LEAST LIKELY TO RESPOND? Everyone

WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING NOW? The Bourne Identity. I read it years ago (I think I was in High School), so I decided it was time for a re-read.

WHAT IS ON YOUR MOUSE PAD? Nothing, it’s a plain grey pad with a wrist pad.

WHAT DID YOU WATCH ON T.V. LAST NIGHT? I saw part of the Mets game, I really don’t recall what else.

FAVORITE SOUND[S]? Cats purring.

ROLLING STONES OR BEATLES? Stones, mostly because I dislike them less than the Beatles.

WHAT IS THE FARTHEST YOU HAVE BEEN FROM HOME? Either Aruba or Phoenix, AZ.

DO YOU HAVE A SPECIAL TALENT? I have very good instincts for when something isn’t right, like when someone is trying to BS me.

WHERE WERE YOU BORN? Staten Island, NY

WHOSE ANSWERS ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO GETTING BACK? I’m not going to ask anyone, so….

Feelings of Safety

2007-04-25T12:47:00.000-04:00

It’s now over a week since a madman killed 31 people and himself at Virginia Tech. Much has been written about the failures that allowed this to happen, especially the fact that the gun which might have ended the rampage was prohibited on the campus by policy. The stated reason for this policy was so that the students could feel safe.

If there’s one thing every adult in the post-9/11 world ought to have figured out, it’s that there is no such thing as safety. When I leave my house to go to work, there’s no guarantee that I’ll survive the day. I could die of an undiagnosed medical problem, I could be murdered, I could be hit by a car, I could have a ten-pound chunk of cement fall from the ceiling and hit me in the head (this last one actually happened at an old job, thankfully it happened over the weekend when no one was around, someone came in on Monday and found a chunk of cement on his desk and a hole in the suspended ceiling). Since there’s no such thing as safety, any “feeling” of safety you may have is an illusion.

Since the feeling of safety is an illusion, what does that say about anyone who says he’s trying to make you feel safe? They’re doing at least one, and most likely two, things to you that you shouldn’t let anyone do.

First, they’re lying to you. They’re pretending that they can make you safe, when all they’re doing is feeding an illusion (an attractive illusion to be sure, but still an illusion). No one has the power to make you safe. The Supreme Court has ruled that even the police don’t have the responsibility to keep you safe, not even someone who’s under police protection at the time of their murder.

Second, they’re probably asking you to turn over some control over yourself in the interests of safety. It’s usually phrased as “I can keep you safe if …” followed by a requirement that you refrain from doing something. So we have gun-free zones in the interests of safety, where people give up their right to self-defense under the assumption that a would-be murderer will be deterred by the fact that guns are prohibited. We’re told we’ll be healthy if only we’re forced to eat properly. We’re told we’ll survive a car crash if only the government forces us to wear seatbelts and pay for safety equipment like airbags in our cars.

To make this deal, to give up a measure of control over yourself for the illusion of safety, is to make a deal with the Devil. You’re giving up something and getting absolutely nothing in return. In the case of gun-free zones, I believe you’re actually making yourself less safe because the criminal knows that he’s the only one there with the ability to apply deadly force. There’s a reason why these things happen in schools and not at, say, gun shows, police functions and Texas rodeos.

When we were children we needed to feel safe and secure, and most of us were safe with our families. Now that we’re adults we need to put aside childish things, childish fantasies, and see the world as it is. It’s a dangerous place, and wishing it was otherwise won’t make it so.

So what do we do? Suppose you knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that there would be a fire in your kitchen today, and that nothing you could do would prevent it. What would you do? Would you declare your kitchen to be a flame-free zone? Probably not. You’d check your fire extinguisher or buy one if you don’t have one. You’d make sure there were fresh batteries in your smoke alarm. You’d stay home, and at the first sound of the smoke alarm you’d spring into action to put out the fire while it’s still small. There’s no guarantee that your house still wouldn’t burn down, but you’d do everything in your power to keep that from happening. You wouldn’t just make sure 911 was on speed dial and hit the button when you noticed flames, knowing that a great deal of damage would be done before the fire department could arrive.

We need to do the same thing regarding self defense. We need to put aside the notion that we are ever totally safe. We need to believe, deep inside, that it COULD happen to us. We need to equip ourselves to deal with such a situation. We need to develop a mindset for self defense (as Jeff Cooper said, you’re no more armed because you own a gun than you are a musician because you own a guitar). We need to develop the mindset that WE, and no one else, are our own first line of defense.

Lastly, we need to eliminate those silly laws that provide nothing but a feeling of safety while enabling people with no respect for the law to commit atrocities like we saw last week. We need to stop pretending that someone who will commit the worst crime it’s possible to commit will be stopped by a law against a lesser crime. We need to act like adults and demand that we be treated as such.

Literacy Meme

2007-04-06T09:42:00.000-04:00

From MorningGlory comes a meme about the books I've read. Feel free to add your own in comments or on your own blog. Rules: Bold any books you've read, if you've read other books by the same author, but don't delete anything.

The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)

Emma (Jane Austen)
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Sense and Sensibility

To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (J. R. R. Tolkien)
LOTR: The Two Towers (J. R. R. Tolkien)
LOTR: The Return of the King (J. R. R. Tolkien)
The Hobbit (J. R. R. Tolkien)
The Silmarillion
The Book Of Lost Tales Vols. 1 & 2
Unfinished Tales

Anne of Green Gables (L. M. Montgomery)

Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
Dragonfly in Amber
Voyager
Drums of Autumn
The Fiery Cross
A Breath of Snow and Ashes
Lord John and the Private Matter

A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (J. K. Rowling)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (J. K. Rowling)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J. K. Rowling)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (J. K. Rowling)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J. K. Rowling)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - currently reading

A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
The World According To Garp (John Irving)
The Hotel New Hampshire

Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)

Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)

The Stand (Stephen King)
’Salem’s Lot
Night Shift
The Dead Zone
Firestarter
Cujo
Different Seasons
Christine
Skeleton Crew
The Green Mile
Hearts in Atlantis
Dreamcatcher
From a Buick 8
Misery
Desperation
Insomnia
Pet Sematary
The Tommyknockers
Gerald’s Game
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
The Langoliers
Needful Things
Thinner

Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)

The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger)

Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
Little Men

The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)

The Life of Pi (Yann Martel)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life, the Universe and Everything
So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish
Mostly Harmless
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
Prince Caspian
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Silver Chair
The Horse and His Boy
The Magician’s Nephew
The Last Battle
Out of the Silent Planet
Perelandra
That Hideous Strength
The Screwtape Letters
Mere Christianity
God In The Dock
Surprised by Joy

East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
Of Mice And Men (John Steinbeck)
The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
The Red Pony
Tortilla Flat
The Pearl
Cannery Row

Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)

Dune (Frank Herbert)
Dune Messiah
Children of Dune
God Emperor of Dune
Heretics of Dune
Chapterhouse: Dune
The Dragon in the Sea
The Santaroga Barrier
The Dosadi Experiment
The Jesus Incident
The White Plague
The Lazarus Effect

The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)

Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
We the Living
Anthem

1984 (George Orwell)
Animal Farm

The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
Lady of Avalon
Priestess of Avalon
The Forest House

The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
Eye of the Needle
The Key to Rebecca
On Wings of Eagles
Lie Down with Lions
Night Over Water

The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)

I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)

The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)

The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)

The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
The Valley of Horses
The Mammoth Hunters
The Plains of Passage
The Shelters of Stone

The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)

Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)

The Bible (Most of it at least)

Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)

The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
The Three Musketeers
Twenty Years AfterThe Vicomte of Bragelonne aka The Man In The Iron Mask

Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)

The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
Oliver Twist
Nicholas Nickleby
A Christmas Carol
David Copperfield

Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
Empire
Red Prophet
Alvin Journeyman

The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)

The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)

Tim
The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)

The Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)

Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
The Vampire Lestat
The Queen of the Damned
The Tale of the Body Thief
Memnoch the Devil
The Vampire Armand
The Witching HourLasher
The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned
Servant of the Bones

Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)

Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Márquez)
One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brashares)

Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)

Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)

The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

Bridget Jones’s Diary (Helen Fielding)

Shogun (James Clavell)
King Rat
Tai-Pan
Noble House
Whirlwind
Gai-Jin

The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)

In The Skin Of A Lion (Michael Ondaatje)

The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)

The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)

The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)

Charlotte’s Web (E. B. White)
Stuart Little
The Elements of Style

Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)

Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)

Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)

Watership Down (Richard Adams)

Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)

Blindness (Jose Saramago)

Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)

Lord of the Flies (William Golding)

The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)

The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)

The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
The Matarese Countdown
The Road to Omaha
The Bourne Ultimatum
The Bourne Supremacy
The Aquitaine Progression
The Parsifal Mosaic
The Matarese Circle
The Holcroft Covenant
The Chancellor Manuscript
The Gemini Contenders
The Road to Gandolfo
The Rhinemann Exchange
The Matlock Paper
The Osterman Weekend
The Scarlatti Inheritance

The Outsiders (S. E. Hinton)
That Was Then, This Is Now
Rumble Fish
Tex

White Oleander (Janet Fitch)

A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)

The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)

Ulysses (James Joyce)

Books

2007-03-14T15:20:00.000-04:00

If you walk into the “spare” bedroom upstairs you’ll notice a number of book-cases that are tightly packed with books. If you look carefully you’ll notice that there is one author I have a lot of books by, in fact I have a copy of almost everything he’s written and have read them all, most of them several times. You might find it unusual that that author is Stephen King. You may even notice that I look quite a lot like Mr. King (actually, he’s a few years older than I am so I tend to look like he did a few years ago).

There’s a place deep in every human mind that dates back to our earliest ancestors who, while huddled together at night would see eyes gleaming just outside the range of the fire and wonder if those eyes belonged to wolves, or to something worse. It’s the instinct that makes the idea of a ghost in the next room more frightening than the idea of a hungry tiger in that room. Modern people build a high, solid fence around that portion of their psyche. They lock the gate with a strong padlock and throw away the key. Good horror stories break off the lock, throw wide the gate and prod that part of our minds, the part we try to pretend doesn’t exist, with a sharp stick.

One thing I like about Stephen King is the sheer variety of ways he finds to horrify us. We may know that vampires (‘Salem’s Lot), zombies (Pet Sematery) and malevolent clowns who hide in the sewers (It) don’t really exist. While we read these books we can chant to ourselves, over and over, like a mantra timed to the pounding of our hearts “It’s only a book, it’s only a book, it’s only a book” while we pretend that we’re shivering because we’re cold. We’re perhaps less certain about the reality behind a space-ship full of dead aliens who can inhabit human hosts (The Tommyknockers) or a final battle between good and evil after most of the human race is killed by a super-flu (The Stand). Then we find ourselves face to face with the reality that men really DO go insane and embark on a murderous rampage (The Shining), that St Bernards really DO go rabid and attack people in small cars (Cujo), that little girls really DO get lost in the Maine woods (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon), and that a woman really COULD get trapped naked and handcuffed to a bed in a cabin in the middle of nowhere after her kinky husband dies of a heart attack (Gerald’s Game). Reading such stories sends an icy finger down our spine as we consider that such a thing actually could happen.

A reader with a vivid imagination can read a good horror story and suspend disbelief long enough to wonder if such things really exist and explore how he or she would handle a similar situation. We can peek behind the door marked “Keep Out”, “No Trespassing”, and “Here There Be Dragons”, secure in the knowledge that after the book is done the door will once again be closed, locked, dead bolted and nailed shut with a chair under the door knob for good measure.

Until the next book.

RIP - Bompy

2007-01-17T09:33:00.000-05:00

My cat Bompy died this morning. There was no indication that there was anything wrong with him, he was standing in the living room, fell over and was gone within minutes.

I found Bompy about twelve years ago. I was doing yard work in front of my house and sat on the steps to take a break. He was across the street, saw me, ran across the street, up the stairs and into my lap. I posted signs around the neighborhood, no one claimed him so he was mine. "Bompy" was an expression my father used for a hobo, it seemed to fit him. Since he was full grown when I found him I don't really know how old he was when I found him, the vet said about two or three if I remember correctly, so he was probably around 14 or so.

Bompy was all black, and a big, solid, muscular cat. He loved people, loved laps, and loved to be petted and scratched. He'd sit on my lap and I'd scratch his head, and he'd purr so hard he'd drool. He'd actually purr as he inhaled as well as when he exhaled, apparently he couldn't get enough purring done just on the exhale. He wasn't the smartest cat I've ever known, but he was certainly one of the most affectionate.

Bompy made my life richer by his presence in my life. I'm glad he died at home, surrounded by his people. I'm glad he died quickly and didn't suffer.

I suspect the other two cats (Algy and Snoball, both females) will be getting extra attention from my wife and I for a while.

"No heaven will ever heaven be, unless my cats are there to welcome me" - Anonymous.

Back From Arizona

2007-01-15T10:15:00.000-05:00

My wife and I took a trip to Arizona recently, we left on December 26 and returned on January 2. I didn't mention our trip beforehand because I'm not in the habit of advertizing, in a public forum, that our home will be empty for a week with someone coming in every other day to feed the cats and take in the mail. I'm seldom concerned about being paranoid, but I'm often concerned about not being paranoid enough.

Anyway, back to Arizona. We arrived in Phoenix, where we have friends, in the wee hours of December 27. We slept for a few hours, exchanged Christmas presents with our friends, and headed up to Sedona for a couple days. Sedona is about the prettiest place I've seen, with beautiful red rock formations. When you look out the window and can't see anything man-made in the distance you just decompress. We actually had snow while we were there, we took a pink-jeep tour (where you're in the back of an open jeep). We froze our collective butts off there, but it was a great time. There was a Christmas-light show where people decorated their homes and visitors voted on which was best.

Sedona apparently does have their fair share of nutters though, a bartender told us that on December 31, 1999 (the turn of the millenium for those who can't count) the road into Sedona was backed up by people who stopped their cars in sight of Bell Rock (the first major rock formation you see on your way into Sedona) and were banging on drums expecting Bell Rock to open up and a space ship to come out and take them away. Not that it would've been an entirely bad thing had that happened.

After our time in Sedona we returned to Phoenix. While the female halves of the two couples went shopping and to the movies for two days, the guys (Rick and I) went shooting at Ben Avery Shooting range. We had a great time, shooting everything from a .22 pocket gun to a Mauser rifle. The thrill for me was an SKS with a detachable 20 round magazine, which is illegal in NJ where I live. Shooting is fun, shooting with a good friend is funner. I have to admit that the SKS didn't impress me as much as I thought it would, I found it heavy, bulky, and I had to make a conscious effort to find the rear sight (as opposed to the Mauser where the rear sight was easy to find).

It was great to see a lot of couples and families at the range. One man was sighting in his daughter's 30 '06 which she'd so far used on an elk, a deer, and a javelina (pronouced hav-e-lina). His daughter is twelve years old. The people at the range run a very tight ship, very safety conscious which is as it should be. Every fifteen minutes they shut down the range so you can go out and change targets and such, during that time you can't handle any firearm that's not already in a hard case, meaning if your rifle is in a soft case (as ours were) you have to wait for the range to re-open to carry your gear to your car to leave. The range safety officer gets positively testy if he sees you touching a firearm during a ceasefire, again this is as it should be.

Things are different in Phoenix than they are in suburban New Jersey where I live. I always thought a cactus was pretty much like a thorn-bush, unless you blundered into it you had no trouble, and if you did blunder into it all you had to do was get out and your problems would be solved with band-aids. Not true. My wife brushed against a cactus in Sedona and found that cacti LEAVE their spines IN YOU. These particular spines were hair-thin, we used tape and tweezers to remove them and she kept finding more for a couple days. Second, there is one variety of cactus (I think it was the "Teddybear Hoya") that, due to differing static charges, will jump on to you and latch on. Great, predatory plants. Once you get off the beaten path there are things around that can put a serious hurt on you, like rattlesnakes, scorpions and spiders. Thankfully, none of these things WANT to hurt you, you have to go out of your way to annoy them enough to hurt you.

I also learned that the Saguaro cactus is pronounced Swar-oh.

Other than that we saw some sights and spent time with our friends. New Year's Eve was quiet, we watched the Times Square ball drop at 10:00 and they rebroadcast it at midnite.

All in all a good time was had by all.

Maybe I can talk my wife into adding some of her perceptions to the comments.

The Day After

2006-11-08T11:30:00.000-05:00

I got up early this morning (around 1 am) to watch the news and see how badly things were going. The news just wasn't good. The Democrats already had control of the House and are looking like they may control the Senate as well. I despaired. Then I read Bill Whittle's comments (and I recommend you do so right now, the link is over there on the right, I'll wait).

He's absolutely right. It's a defeat, it's even something of a disaster, but the Republicans had it coming and maybe, just maybe, they'll wake up and smell the coffee over the next two years. Like John Belushi said "Did we give up when the Germans attacked Pearl Harbor?" We've seen tough times before. We're Americans, we'll overcome, that's what we do. We have not yet begun to fight.

So cowboy up. Be of good cheer. Don't despair and remind me of these words when I despair (yes, I mean you, my dear wife and faithful reader). Go home tonight and enjoy the company of your spouse and family. Have a good dinner, not the dinner of a condemned man but the dinner of one who knows he has a marathon to run tomorrow and over the next two years.

I'm working on an entry containing advice for the Republican party, assuming that they want to re-take the House and Senate and keep the Presidency in two years. Watch for it.

Mischief Night

2006-10-30T09:45:00.000-05:00

When I first moved from Staten Island, NYC to New Jersey some eight years ago I had a lot to get used to. First was that, when you get lost while driving, you ought to make a U-turn. Growing up on an island, if you got lost you did two things: 1) make sure you don't cross a bridge and 2) keep going until you see a street you know, then work your way to where you want to go from there. Eventually, if nothing else, you'd hit one of the streets on the coast (which we all knew by heart), then you'd be able to find your way. That doesn't work in NJ. The second thing that I've had to get used to is that you have to go to a liquior store to buy beer, or some bars can also sell beer to go. In NYC grocery stores and delis sell beer, and bars are forbidden from selling alcohol to be taken off premises.

I still haven't gotten used to Mischief Night though. When I was a lad two different things happened on Halloween night. Younger kids went trick-or-treating, going around to people's houses in costumes and begging for candy. Older kid armed themselves with shaving cream and eggs and had contests to see who could get messier. You might also TP the trees in front of your friends houses and all city buses had a generous coating of eggs.

New Jerseans split this event into two nights, "Mischief Night" is the night BEFORE Halloween (which would be tonight), and is reserved for TP, shave cream and eggs. Tomorrow night the kids will come a-begging.

I still trip over this. Every year I start my planning for mess clean-up assuming it will happen on Halloween, then realize that I'm a day late in my planning. Every year I start hoping and praying for rain on Halloween (when all it will do is make it miserable for the trick-or-treaters) when I ought to aim my wishes a day earlier.

Maybe someday I'll get it straightened out in my head.

Go. Watch. Listen.

2006-10-25T09:27:00.000-04:00

I've never done this before, so I hope it works.

Hat Tip to the Anti Idiotarian Rottweiler

Follow this link, watch and listen. Tear alert.

http://www.beccycole.com/albums/videos/poster_girl.shtml

The best lyric, in my humble opinion "I'm just the girl who sings the crazy song, not qualified to sit and judge". Why can't we have more singers like her and fewer Dixie Chicks?

A little translation may be in order: "digger" is Australian for "soldier".

Buy her albums. Pass the word. Put her poster on your wall.

The Question

2006-09-26T13:22:00.000-04:00

This morning my alarm clock went off at the usual half-past-early, I stumbled to the shower, them stumbled back to the bed to make sure my wife was awake. She asked me “Do you remember what today is?”

Now, this is NEVER a good question. It’s especially not a good question when I’m only half-awake, have yet to have my first (let alone second) cup of strong black coffee, and as-yet have no idea what the DATE is and only a sneaking suspicion of what day of the week it is. Still, I knew I had only seconds to come up with an answer of some sort, so I replied “Oh, happy anniversary!” Now I know full-well it wasn’t our wedding anniversary, but I knew it had to be the anniversary of SOMETHING or she wouldn’t have asked. All the while I’m thinking furiously, then it hits me, her father’s birthday was the other day. It was the anniversary of the day I proposed to her!

Yes, eight years ago my wife did me the honor of agreeing to marry me. This is a story worth telling. I’d picked out the ring without her knowing about it (although I was sure she suspected). I was going to take her to a nice place for dinner on Saturday evening and ask her there. She suspected something was up when I started talking about Saturday plans on Tuesday (I have trouble keeping secrets), but all was going according to plan. Until she told me that her mother called, and we were invited to a birthday dinner for her father on Saturday. Of course I agreed to go (with my stomach clenched the whole time) and she began to wonder if she was mistaken about getting engaged on Saturday. I began to go over my options. I was going to pick up the ring Saturday morning. I could wait until the following weekend, but I’d NEVER hold out that long. I could propose to her at her father’s party, but I’m not that brave. I decided to keep it simple, pick up the ring, pick up a dozen roses from the florist near her apartment (where I got her roses regularly anyway, so she wouldn’t suspect), then give her the ring and pop the question. Then we could announce our intentions at the party (assuming of course that she said "Yes").

So early Saturday morning I went to Luddies Jewelry on Staten Island, plunked down the rest of my money and saw the completed ring for the first time. Luddie (a retired cop I’d known for some time who became a jeweler) gave me a little box with a light in it for the ring (we still call that the little refridgerator), then asked me how I intended to give it to her. I replied that I was going to get a dozen roses and ask her, to which he replied that he had just the thing I needed. He handed me a plastic rose that opened up to hold a ring, perfect! So I put the ring in the rose, then stopped at the florist on the way to her apartment, putting the plastic rose into bouquet. She didn’t think anything of it when I gave her the flowers, like I said I did that fairly often. As she was trimming the stems she came to the fake rose and picked it up, remarking that it looked different, at which point I opened the top, got down on one knee and asked her to marry me.

By the way, she said yes.

Book Meme

2006-09-15T11:05:00.000-04:00

MorningGlory tagged me with the book Meme. Books are an important part of my life, I have a three-plus hour daily commute by mass transit, and I spend most of that time reading. When my wife and I moved from our first apartment into our first house I gave away a couple hundred paperback books and STILL have four bookcases full of books. So here goes:

One book that changed your life: Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Early in my Christian walk my priest/spiritual director at the time recommended it to me, I found it to be a clear, logical and concise introduction to Christianity.

One book that you’ve read more than once: I've read literally hundreds of books more than once, some seven or eight times. Every couple of years I pull out Tolkien's Hobbit/Lord of the Rings, likewise Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia.

One book that you would want on a deserted island: Assuming I can pick a series of books rather than one, either the Dune series by Frank Herbert or the Gunslinger series by Stephen King. For the record, I don't consider my Bible to be a book, it's a commodity like water.

One book that made you laugh: Dave Barry's "Guide to Guys". It's a great look at what makes guys tick. For instance, if an alien landed on earth and gave a woman a simple device that would ensure world peace, end hunger and give an infinite amount a free energy she'd bring it immediately to the leader of whatever country she lives in. A guy will take it apart to try to figure out how it works.

One book that made you cry: There's a line in a short story called "Hunters of the Sky Cave" in Poul Andersen's "Agents of the Terran Empire" that always chokes me up. Dominic Flandry (the agent in the book title) is discussing the impending collapse of the Terran Empire he serves and the age of barbarism (the Long Night) that will ensue. He says (and I'm quoting from memory, but this is the gist of it) that anyone with any sense knows that the Long Night is coming, but they also know that it won't come within their lifetimes. So they turn up their collar, and curse at the cold, and amuse themselves playing with a few brightly-colored, dead leaves. Hits kinda close to home.

One book you wish had been written: The Man's Guide to Understanding Women.

One book you wish had never been written: The Communist Manifesto. While drawing on concepts from Das Kapital, the Manifesto popularized the ideas and brought forth a philosophy that has killed more people in the last century than any other including Nazism. I had to read it in college (I had a philosophy teacher who was a die-hard Communist). I thought it was drivel then and my opinion of it hasn't improved since.

One book you are currently reading: "Enemy at the Gates" about the battle for Stalingrad during World War II. I first developed an interest in the Eastern Front of World War II many years ago when my Dad and I would watch a TV series called "The Unknown War", about the Russian side of the war. I got more interested when I got a Mosin Nagant rifle for Christmas, and a couple weeks ago I saw a copy of Enemy at the Gates in the used-book section of Barnes and Noble. (For the record, if anyone knows where I can get a copy of The Unknown War PLEASE let me know!). My wife just rolled her eyes when I pointed out that the rifle on the cover (itself a copy of the movie poster) had the bolt on the wrong side.

One book you have been meaning to read: I have a collected works of Shakespeare that I've barely cracked.

Where Were You Five Years Ago Today?

2006-09-11T09:20:00.000-04:00

September 11, 2001 was a beautiful fall day. The sky was blue, the day was mild. I'd gotten up a little late that morning. My wife suggested that I should take the later train (about 40 minutes later), but I really wanted to stop in Borders Bookstore in the World Trade Center that morning. I did that once every couple of weeks, just to browse thru the books. So I pushed myself out the door, drove to the train station, and caught my usual train which took me to Hoboken, NJ. From there I took the Path train to the World Trade Center, but completely forgot that I wanted to stop at Borders, and entered the Courtlandt St subway station. After I paid my subway fare I remembered that I'd intended to stop at Borders, but decided that I'd either stop tonight on the way home or tomorrow morning. The time was about 8:10. I got my usual R train and headed into Brooklyn, just as I had every work day for the last several years. I arrived, as usual, at my desk at about 8:30.

About 9:00 a co-worker came in and told us that a plane had apparently hit the World Trade Center, that he saw the smoke on his way in. We turned on a radio and heard that a small plane had hit the North Tower. It seemed like an accident. As the news rolled in, we learned that it was a passenger jet, not a small plane, that hit the tower. Then the South Tower was hit. Then there were reports of a plane hitting the Pentagon. I called my wife to tell her I was OK, she said they were watching the news on a TV. I thought it was a little odd that she didn't seem concerned about me since my commute took me thru the World Trade Center, but I decided not to press the issue.

A few of us decided to walk down to the East River to see what was happening, when we got there my first impression was that there was a lot of paper in the air, apparently sucked from the towers. There was a huge hole in the North Tower, full of flames. The South Tower was partially hidden from view by the North, but it was obvious that it was burning too. We were too far away to see the people falling, we didn't hear about that until later.

At this point I was thinking that the fire department would evacuate the buildings, put out the fires, and then something would need to be done to repair the towers. It never occured to me that the towers might be too badly damaged to repair. Then the South Tower (or what I could see of it behind the North Tower) sort of tipped at the top, then collapsed in a rain of dust and debris.

I didn't have another coherent thought for the rest of the day.

I couldn't stay there anymore, we left, headed back to our office building, where we found that the building (a New York City municipal building) was evacuated and locked down, we weren't allowed back in. We met up with our manager, and we all went to her apartment a few blocks away. On the way I stopped in a store for a bottle of soda and learned that the North Tower had collapsed, but I was numb at that point. I remember repeatedly thinking "This day needs to be over."

Since New York City was pretty much locked down I couldn't get home, so I and some others spent the night at our managers apartment. The next morning we decided not to open, and by then the transportation system was functioning, so I headed for home via the Path train in Mid-town Manhattan. Everyone I saw on the way home had a thousand-yard stare, like they were in shock. From the train I could see the smoke rising from where the towers had been, that column of smoke would be part of the landscape for a long time.

I arrived home in the early afternoon. My wife arrived home from work at her usual hour. As we talked about the events of the previous day I mentioned that I'd been in the basement of the World Trade center a half-hour before the first plane hit. She sat bolt upright and said "You were WHAT?" She'd completely forgotten that my daily commute too me thru the World Trade Center, which was just as well or she'd have been beside herself with worry.

Do not forget what happened that day. Do not forget what you were doing, where you were. Do not forget that three thousand people who did nothing more sinister than show up for work or ride a plane died that day. Do not forget that those people were murdered, they did not die in a natural disaster. Do not forget who murdered them.

Meat Loaf

2006-08-15T10:11:00.000-04:00

My wife made meat loaf last night for dinner. For those who don't know, that is one of my absolute favorite meals. My mother made meat loaf, and although hers was uninspired (just beef) it was good. In my single days I'd eat meat loaf at Boston Market when I felt like treating myself to a "good" meal (meaning one that wasn't frozen, pizza or Burger King). Meat loaf is my comfort food. My wife tells me that her meat loaf never tastes the same way twice, all I know is that it's uniformly good, it's never been dry and it's always very tasty. You will NEVER hear me say "Oh no, meat loaf again!" (ten points if you can identify what movie that's from!).

I need a napkin, I'm slobbering just thinking about it!

I had an English teacher in High School who used to tell stories about his mother's cooking, one of her "specialties" was meat loaf. Her version of meat loaf was simplicity itself, throw a couple pounds of chopped meat in a pan and bake. She noticed that it tended to fall apart though, so she sought some method of holding it together. Research showed that the French cooked with peanut oil, so she decided to make French meat loaf. Not having any peanut oil though, she substituted peanut butter. She forgot to put on oven mitts when she took it out of the oven and dropped the glass pan, the pan broke and the meat loaf didn't. My teacher told us to try to imagine burnt meat loaf that stuck to the roof of your mouth.

I'd share my wife's recipe here, but I really don't know it. I know there's a mixture of beef, pork and veal, there's carmelized onions in it, and there's a glaze on top made of, I think, catsup. Maybe she'll share the recipe if enough readers ask nicely in the comments.

Dad's Stories - Part 4

2006-07-21T09:42:00.000-04:00

It's been a while since I've put down some of Dad's stories, so here's the next batch. As always I'll promise that they are all true, or at least that they ought to be.

Dad worked in a shipyard among his many jobs. Since, as I've mentioned before, he had no fear of height at all, his job was to do the fitting on masts and such. This presented a problem at lunchtime, because he was expected to stay on top of the mast until the lunch whistle blew, upon which he'd have to climb down. The climb cut into his lunch break, which was only a half-hour as it was. To get around this he'd have his friend the crane operator swing the hook of the crane over to him, he'd sit on the ball over the hook and ride down on that. This was of course against the safety regulations, and it so happened that the government safety inspector was there one day when Dad took his ride. The inspector suspended him from working at the shipyard for a period of time, but since he was one of the few workers who'd go up the mast he was back at work the next day.

You may think being up at the top of a mast of a ship would keep you awake, but one day Dad fell asleep up there, leaning against the mast inside the crows nest (I suspect he had a long night the night before). A woman in a house across the road from the shipyard saw him hunched over and ran to the shipyard to tell them that their man had apparently died up on the mast. I'd imagine Dad's co-workers weren't to happy when they climbed up there to see what was wrong and found him alseep.

Last shipyard story for now. One day Dad was painting the lifeboat davits (these are the crane-like things that are used to lower the lifeboats). He was priming them with stuff called red lead, it's basically a water-proofing paint. He'd go from davit to davit with a five gallon bucket of the stuff, painting as he went. Well one time when he picked up the bucket the handle broke off, the bucket of paint fell over the side, hit a wooden scaffold (thankfully one that wasn't occupied at the time) which acted like a springboard and sprayed red lead all over the (freshly painted) side of the ship. Dad's foreman blamed him until Dad showed him that he still had the handle of the bucket.

When I was a tyke my Dad worked in a couple of different hospitals (which shall remain nameless in case either of my readers someday find themselves in one of them). He did general repair, from unclogging drains to changing locks. His time at the hospitals gave him a disrespect for doctors, while he admitted that some of them were very intelligent, many of them had no common sense. One of the doctors got a new blood-pressure machine, the type mounted on the wall that uses a column of mercury. It was mounted, but the mercury hadn't been added yet. The doctor decided to fill the column himself, but unfortunately neglected to remove the plug at the top first. Undaunted by the sight of mercury running down the side of the column, he kept pouring until the bottle was empty, then, upon seeing that the column was still empty he called for help. Dad realized what the problem was, and further realized that the mercury needed to be cleaned up. Today a hazmat team would probably respond, but back then Dad went around the floor with a spoon and a tongue depresser picking up globs of mercury and putting it back in the bottle, after which he removed the plug and filled the column without spillage.

Another time Dad got a call of a burst pipe in an area of the hospital, so he went to investigate. Upon entering the office where the leak was, he saw the doctor whose office it was sitting at his desk while having water leak from the ceiling onto his head. The doctor looked up and informed my Dad that there was water leaking from the ceiling (no flies on him!). Dad replied (in his most diplomatic tone) that he could see that, and pointed out that he (the doctor) was getting wet. The doc asked Dad if he thought he ought to move.

We Need to Change

2006-06-28T09:45:00.000-04:00

I'm not angry, comparing anger to what I feel is like comparing a guttering match to the sun. I'm not enraged, that's entirely too polite a term. I am well and truly pissed off.

We capture terrorists, without uniforms, we fly them to a Caribean island where they get three hot meals a day that meet the requirements of their religion, prayer mats, Korans and when we try to extract information from them by depriving them of sleep we're called torturers. When three of them decide to hang themselves we're held responsible for their deaths.

Then two of our soldiers, in uniform, completely identifiable as American soldiers and perfectly distinguishable from any civilian in the area, are captured. They have their genitals cut off and stuffed in their mouths. They have their eyes gouged out. They have their heads cut off. Their mutilated corpses are intentionally left in a place where they'll be found by other Americans and their bodies are booby trapped as is the area around them in hopes of killing yet more Americans. There's no outrage flowing from this. Two men died a horrible death at the hands of monsters and there's no outrage, while terrorists are photographed with underwear over their heads and we're called brutal.

Yet we have people insisting that we must play by civilized rules in dealing with the terrorists. We have people claiming that the terrorists must be treated according to the Geneva Convention, ignoring the fact that the Geneva Convention allows combatants without command structure, who don't carry arms openly and who wear no identification to show that they are in fact legal combatants to be shot on sight. They ignore the fact that the Geneva Convention is intended to be adhered to by BOTH sides of a conflict, otherwise the agreement is void.

We need to change how we fight the War on Terror. First, we need to get rid of the imbedded reporters. Why? They lead to too many Monday Morning Quarterbacks. When one of our warriors has to make a decision in a matter of seconds, when making the wrong decision could kill him and his comrades, but then that decision is endlessly analysed in slow motion by people in safe, comfortable offices to see if he may have been able to decide otherwise, well as they say that dog just won't hunt. I'm not a veteran, I've never been in combat. I, unlike so many of my self-proclaimed intellectual betters in the news media, won't second-guess anyone for what they do in the heat of combat. The grunt on the ground doesn't have the advantage of all the information that will later be gathered after the smoke clears, he doesn't have access to video tapes and satelite images to tell him exactly what's happening around him and, even if he had access to all this information, he wouldn't have time to sit down and analyze it to make a completely informed decision before he and his buddies are killed. He has to make a decision now, not tomorrow, not in ten minutes, but right this very second. In combat the best thing you can do is the right thing, the second-best thing you can do is the wrong thing, and the absolute worst thing you can do it nothing.

Second, we have to put the blame for civilian deaths exactly where it belongs. Few German civilians were killed by American troops on the ground during World War II. Why? Because when the German army occupied a town to set up a defensive position the civilians moved out, and because the German military wore uniforms so that the Allies could tell at a glance if a person running across the street was a soldier (and thereby a target) or a civilian (and therefore not a target). The Germans didn't fire from civilian occupied buildings while dressed as civilians themselves so that when the Allied troops entered the building they couldn't tell who fired on them. If the terrorists don't want their civilians killed they have to stop making themselves look like civilians while attacking American troops. They have to clear the civilians out of an area before setting up shop. We, for our part, need to support those warriors who make these difficult decisions, stop insisting that they do the impossible and spare civilians while killing the indistinguishable terrorists, and stop blaming our troops when it turns out that someone they killed wasn't a terrorist.

Lastly, we have to stop insisting that our troops fight a civilized war when their enemies are anything but civilized. This war isn't a football game where both sides fight according to previously agreed upon rules and where some impartial third party determines when a foul has occurred and what the penalty shall be. From the very start the terrorists have failed to fight according to any recognized standard, targetting civilians, murdering prisoners, and disguising combatants as non-combatants. Spare me the argument that acting in a similar manner will "bring us down to their level". We are at war, war is organized barbarism, and the nation that's more efficiently barbaric will not only win, it will bring a speedier end to the war. Kim Du Toit gave the best analogy I've seen yet, we can't insist that our boxer go into the ring and fight under the Queensbury rules and watch helplessly as his opponent enters the ring armed with a flamethrower.

Yes, I know, it took me over a week to write this. Part of me was processing the events and trying to make something coherent out of a white-hot cloud of pure emotion. Another part was hoping that the media would respond with some outrage, but instead (and predictably) they responded with stories about Abu Gharib and Gitmo. They responded by saying that our men and women in uniform are no better than the animals who castrated, mutilated, and decapidated two of our citizen soldiers. They drew a moral equivalence between those who broke the rules, in a rather mild way really, and were punished for their transgressions, and those who committed attrocities and who are hailed as heroes. The only outrage I've found has been by my fellow amatuer journalists in the blogosphere and by the common folks I've spoken to. So much for the relevancy of the mainstream media.

Reflections on my 43rd Lap Around the Sun

2006-06-15T10:16:00.000-04:00

Today, June 15th 2006, marks the 43rd anniversary of the day Dr Shernlank (I am not making that name up) caught me as my mother pushed me screaming into this world. A lot has happened to the world in 43 years.

If you're about my age, you probably know how to do long division, but you'd rather use a calculator. You may know how to use a sliderule, but you still prefer a calculator.

You remember stacking records on a spindle on a turntable, where they'd drop down to play. You had to turn them over to play the other side. 45's had a big hole in the middle you had to fill with this little plastic thingy.

My mother made iced tea with tea bags in a big pot, she'd pour it into empty instant coffee jars and put it in the fridge.

Speaking of instant coffee, this stuff is the reason I hated coffee until I discovered that some people actually brewed coffee.

Boys played with toy guns. This wasn't cause for concern by parents, teachers or school administrators. Girls played with dolls. Boys and girls seldom played together unless the girl was a tomboy, then she was just another boy. Boys thought girls were yucky, girls thought boys were yucky, the boys would outgrow this but the girls wouldn't.

You were expected to get dirty when you played, especially if the play involved Tonka trucks in the yard.

The cure for hyperactivity was to go outside and play.

Pong was the extent of home video games. You could go to the Arcade at the Mall to play video games for a quarter a play.

TV had seven working channels, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13. Channel 7 had the 4:30 movie every day.

There were no video rental stores because there were no video tapes or DVD's, if you wanted to see a movie you went to the movies or you waited for it to come on TV.

Wrestling was on channel 42 or 47 UHF, the announcers only spoke Spanish.

The grammer school principal had a paddle. If you misbehaved you went up on the stage during Assembly, assumed the position, and got your butt whacked in front of everyone. The pain was bad, the humiliation was worse, and the thought of what your parents would do to you when you got home was worst of all.

Teachers didn't care about your self esteem, if you didn't learn the material you got a failing grade. If you got too many failing grades you got left back.

There were no mini-vans, there were a few SUVs that were basically short pick-up trucks with seats in back. Families had station wagons. There were no car seats, and nobody wore seatbelts.

The first computer hard-drive I ever saw advertized was in a Radio Shack catalog, it held 8.4 MB (not GB) and cost $4,995. It was about the size of the CPU case on my current computer. Dell currently lists a 1,000 GB (or one terabyte if you prefer) drive for $1,000.

Most cars didn't have air conditioning, power windows or power locks. You couldn't unlock the car from a distance, you had to use the key, but few people bothered to lock the car anyway. Lots of people just left the keys in the ignition. Nobody had car alarms.

Most bikes had one speed, some had three, some had five, and the most any bike had was ten. Nobody wore a helmet to ride a bike. These same people often didn't hold the handlebars while they rode. Bikes came in boys and girls types.

The Star Trek communicator was a futuristic piece of equipment, not something everyone had on their belt or in their pocket or purse.

We landed on the moon. We were going to Mars. In 2001 we'd be going to Jupiter (Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick said so!).

The Russians wanted to nuke us, but didn't dare because they knew we'd nuke them back. Mutually Assured Destruction kept everyone safe.

In High School we discected once-living frogs, grasshoppers and earthworms. Some classes did clams too, those students vowed never to eat another clam. There were periodic small explosions in the Chemistry lab, and there were often noxious smells coming from there.

On Sunday mornings we read the funnies. Mom made dinner early on Sunday, then there was usually a movie on TV in the afternoon.

There were no CDs, DVDs, VCRs or home computers. People bought TVs and stereos, not home entertainment systems. We read books made of paper.

Yes, a lot has changed. The world is better in some ways, worse in others, different in many. We've come further than we'd ever dreamed and failed to accomplish many of the things we expected.

A Good Terrorist

2006-06-13T13:03:00.000-04:00

The other morning the radio awoke me at the usual un-Godly hour with the news that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed by an American air-strike. This was certainly good news to start the day, any time a terrorist gets sent to someplace considerably hotter than Iraq is cause for celebration. The news hit after the press-time of the free (and worth every penny!) morning paper I get in the morning, so I had to wait until the next morning to read about it.

News is a funny thing. Actual news, meaning the who, what, when and how of an event, has a shelf-life of about twenty-four hours. This means that if news breaks in the morning by the time a morning newspaper runs it it's already getting stale. Newspapers don't stop running news stories just because the news is stale though, oh no. Doing so would lead people to believe that the newspaper exists to inform its readers rather than to expose them to advertizing (I go into much greater detail on this in one of my very early entries entitled The Media).

So what's a newspaper editor to do? Everybody knows that al-Zarqawi found himself fatally near 1,000 pounds of smart-bombs when they detonated, that's not news anymore. What we now get is commentary, and todays throwaway is running with the story that al-Z's death doesn't mean anything, that the insurgency will continue, and that the father of Nick Berg (who was decapitated by al-Zarqawi) is sad that another person had to die and blames George Bush for his son's death.

Of course when all else fails, you can always do man-in-the-street interviews to see if people think the insurgency will end now. One of the randomly-selected experts on insurgency said that if he were a terrorist the death of his leader would inspire him to fight harder. I have some news for him, it doesn't matter how hard a terrorist fights, to be successful he has to fight smart. Any idiot with a room-temperature IQ can wrap himself in exposives and blow himself up, but getting the explosives, recruiting, planning, and deciding where to send him as part of a co-ordinated attack requires a smart and talented leader. By all accounts al-Zarqawi was such a leader.

We'll see. Maybe someone will step in and fill al-Zarqawi's shoes. Maybe the insurgency will crumble without his leadership. I don't know and any prediction I may make would be strictly a guess, just like the predictions I read in the newspaper.

Predictions are funny things, if you happen to be right everyone thinks you're a genius. If you're wrong everybody will forget that you made the prediction. I predicted twenty years ago that music CDs wouldn't take hold, that they'd be replaced any day now by Digital Audio Tape and that anyone who had a CD player would end up with the equivalent of an eight-track player. Had I been right people who heard me say it would be marvelling today at my insight. As it is I'll bet no one remembers.

So will the insurgency continue? I don't know, it might, it might not. I do know that if al-Zaqwari were still alive it most assuredly WOULD continue. I know we have enough bombs to take out his successor if there is one.

Let me head off the comments about Osama Bin Laden right now. Yes, I'll read his obituary with great satisfaction too, but in terms of the War on Terror he's a non-issue. He's in hiding someplace (assuming he's not already dead), he's not running anything. He hasn't even released a video tape in years, just a couple audio tapes. We'll catch up to him someday, but al-Zaqwari was actually leading terrorists in attacks against Americans, getting him was a priority.

Not a Word

2006-06-06T08:47:00.000-04:00

This morning the radio had repeated "news" stories about the fact that today is 6/6/06 and wondering if today would mark the arrival of the Anti-Christ and the beginning of the end of the world. The fact that a movie opens today on this topic is completely coincidental I'm sure. The throwaway newspaper had similar articles, and neither had anything about the more significant meaning of this date. In fact no one but a couple bloggers even noted the date.

Do you know what I'm talking about?

Folks, today is June 6. Does that date ring a bell? If not, let's try a little harder. June 6, 1944. Omaha. Utah. Sword. Night of Nights. Normandy.

If you don't get it turn on your TV and DVD right now and watch Band of Brothers in its entirety, from start to finish, including the bonus material, without a bathroom break. No fair fast-forwarding either. When that's done watch Saving Private Ryan.

Sixty-two years ago marked the beginning of the end, not of the world, but of World War II. Once the Allies had a foothold in France the war was lost by Germany, it was only a matter of time.

I've said it before on these pages, the Greatest Generation is dying off rapidly, the men who served in World War II are now in their eighties. If you know any talk to them, get their stories now before it's too late. And thank them.

Answering Machine Message

2006-05-30T13:50:00.000-04:00

Hello, you've reached the home of Mark and Mark's Wife. We can't come to the phone right now. We are the only two humans who live here. If you don't want to speak to either of us hang up now, you won't get in touch with anyone else here. We speak English here. Neither of us is fluent in any other language, so if you don't speak English hang up, we won't understand you and you won't understand us. We're perfectly happy with our insurance, phone service, Internet access, exterminator, financial advisor and mortgage. Even if we weren't we wouldn't do business with you on the basis of a cold call, so don't waste your time or ours by leaving a message. Our siding, gutters and roof are in good condition, our chimney is clean, our furnace is in good repair, and our basement is waterproofed already. We're not interested in selling our home, buying a new home, buying a vacation home or buying a timeshare. We already give generously to a variety of charities, we don't decide which on the basis of messages left on our answering machine. We really don't believe you're calling to give us a free trip, a free camera, a free computer, or a free anything else. We're not fish, we know bait when we see it. We don't believe we've already won a million dollars. If you are a machine with a recorded message try to ignore the irony of two machines talking to each other and leave your message, we'll have our toaster get back to you. Please note that by leaving a message we offer no warranty, express or implied, that we will get the message or that we will return your call. If you still want to leave a message please do so after the beep. Or don't, it's entirely up to you. Beeeeeep

In Honor of Mother's Day

2006-05-15T12:20:00.000-04:00

I didn't have a chance to post this over the weekend, but better late than never.

When God Created Mothers
by Erma Bombeck

When the good Lord was creating mothers, he was into his sixth day of overtime, when an angel appeared and said, "You're doing a lot of fiddling around on this one."

And the Lord said, "Have you read the spec on this one? She has to be completely washable, but not plastic; have 180 moveable parts, all replaceable; run on black coffee and leftovers; have a lap that disappears when she stands up, a kiss that can cure anything from a broken leg to a disappointed love affair, and six pair of hands.

"The angel shook her head slowly and said,"Six pairs of hands...no way."

"It's not the hands that are causing me problems," said the Lord."It's the three pairs of eyes that mothers have to have."

"That's on the standard model?" asked the angel.

The Lord nodded. "One pair that sees through closed doors when she asks, "What are you kids doing in there?" when she already knows. Another here, in the back of her head that sees what she shouldn't, but what she has to know, and of course the ones here in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and say, "I understand and I love you," without so much as uttering a word."

"Lord,"said the angel, touching his sleeve gently, "Rest for now. Tomorrow..."

"I can't," said the Lord. "I'm so close to creating something close to myself. Already I have one who heals herself when she is sick, can feed a family of six on one pound of hamburger and can get a nine year old to stand under a shower."

The angel circled the model of the mother very slowly. "She's too soft," she sighed.

"But tough!" said the Lord excitedly. "You cannot imagine what the mother can do or endure."

"Can she think?"

"Not only think, but she can reason and compromise," said the Creator. Finally the angel bent over and ran her finger across the cheek. "There's a leak," she pronounced. "I told you, you were trying to put too much into this model."

"It's not a leak," said the Lord. "It's a tear."

"What's it for?"

"It's for joy, sadness, disappointment, pain, loneliness and pride."

"You're a genius," said the angel.

The Lord looked somber, "I didn't put it there."

Mark D writing again:
My own mother died in 1990, May 24 to be exact. She was tough as an old boot and mules used to say among themselves "That woman is STUBBORN". She could produce more good food with less money than anyone I'd ever met. For instance after my Dad was disabled at work in the mid '70's their entire income was from Worker's Comp until the Disability Social Security kicked in (which given the inefficiencies of the Federal Government took a long time). The Worker's Comp check was $183.80 every two weeks, rent was $214 a month and she fed two adults and an 11 year old boy (the definition of skin stretched around an appetite), never borrowed money, never paid rent or utilities late, and we never went hungry. She'd walk to the electric company to pay the bill to save the money on the stamp and money order (never had a checking account). I remember those days, lots of pasta, lots of chicken. She was a high-school drop out, her mother took her out of school to help care for her eight siblings, but I've often referred to her as an uneducated genius, no one maintains a household like that without a good supply of brains. She loved animals, the last four pets she had were strays she picked up or animals that were too old to get by with other, younger animals that people had.

I'd be remiss now if I didn't mention my mother-in-law, who welcomed me into her family with open arms as she did the wives of my wife's three brothers. "Like a mother to me" is about the biggest compliment I can give any woman, and she is. It took me a couple months to start calling her "Mom" after my wife and I got married, but one day it just popped out and seemed right and that's what I've called her ever since.

TV Complaints

2006-05-03T08:56:00.000-04:00

One thing that drives me nuts when I watch a TV show or movie is when the show presents information about things I know about, and the information is so completely wrong it's insane. Since I know a lot about computers, and history, and science this happens pretty often, which explains why I don't watch much TV.

The topic where it makes me the most crazy is guns though. Every time I see a bullet spark when it hits something I cringe, and I've seen movie bullets spark when they hit TREES.

I'm going to give some spoilers for last night's episode of House, so if you didn't see it yet and plan to stop reading.

What little I saw of this show last night, before I retired grumbling to the bedroom, revolved around a police officer who'd been shot, the bullet hit his vest, fragmented, and fragments shot upward and hit his eye socket lodging in his brain. We'll leave alone the fact that soft body armor is intended to capture a bullet, not fragment it, it COULD have hit something hard in his pocket before reaching the vest.

This being the show that it is, the cop had other serious medical issues besides hunks of metal in his skull. The preferred diagnostic was an MRI, but the doctors were afraid to perform an MRI because he was shot with a .38 Special hollowpoint, and those bullets are ferro-magnetic.

Huh?

I've fired and seen thousands of rounds of .38 Special cartidges, both hollowpoint and non-hollowpoint. Most have been basic lead alloys, some have been lead alloys with copper jackets. "ferro" means iron (I guess ferro sounds better than iron). Still, I guess it's possible that someone manufactured rounds with iron-based bullets (they used to make them in .22 specifically for use in shooting galleries with steel targets just so they would spark, they also wore out rifle barrels in a hurry). I have to ask myself why any sane engineer would design iron hollowpoint bullets for a .38 though. Hollowpoints are intended to expand to create a bigger wound and also to keep the slug from going completely thru the intended target and hitting someone else. The .38 Special is a low-velocity round, so if a bullet is going to expand it has to be made of soft stuff. Now what's softer, lead or iron?????

But wait, there's more! Our hero decides to test if the bullet in question posed a problem in an MRI, so he gets a similar cartridge, loads it in a revolver, and brings it to the morgue where he shoots a corpse with it, they then MRI the corpse to see what the bullet did.

Now, I'm no doctor, nor do I play one on TV, but I know enough about both bullets and MRI machines to figure out if a particular bullet would cause a problem in an MRI without having to use someone's dead relative for a test. I'd start by bringing my bullet, not to the morgue, but to the kitchen. I'd then pull a magnet off of the refridgerator and see if it would stick to the bullet. If so I know I'd have a problem. If not I'd probably, just for the sake of safety, pull the bullet from the cartridge and just MRI the bullet, if it flew in the machine I know we'd have a problem, if not I'd know we wouldn't.

Of course this wouldn't make for very good theater, which is the bottom line here. It's much more dramatic to make up a problem where one wouldn't exist in reality. It's much more dramatic to have a shocking method of determining if there's a problem than a simple method.

What happened? I didn't watch that far, maybe my wife will answer in the comments (hint hint).

The Gospel of Judas

2006-04-20T10:15:00.000-04:00

There's been a good amount of buzz regarding the recent translation into English of the only known copy of the Gospel of Judas. This event was heralded as providing new insight into Christianity, particularly early Christianity. Since I'm a Christian, I tend to be cautious about new insights into Christianity, believing as I do that the insights that have been around for the last 2,000 years are quite adequate. Still, if someone insists upon talking at me about these new insights, it's only common courtesy that I inform myself about what they're talking about, so I found a copy of the translation online, downloaded it, and read it.

I now offer my view of it: It's typical of Gnosticism, which makes it fundamentally contrary to Christian belief. I'm in good company here, since in about 180 AD Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, discussed this very document, referring to it as a fictional account. The premise of the Gnostic gospels I have some familiarity with is that Jesus took the person for whom the gospel is named aside and imparted to him or her information that wasn't offered to the other Apostles. The Gnostic gospel then supposedly reveals this secret information which is supposed to be only for the inner circle.

Horsefeathers.

First of all, Christianity is an open book, open to all. The Church was at its very lowest during those times in history when it attempted to limit popular access to the basic tenets of Christianity, for instance in insisting that Scripture only be available in Latin when only priests could read Latin. Christianity is no mystery religion. Anything you could want to know about the official beliefs of the Church is available to you, go to your nearest bookstore and buy a Bible. Even the traditional interpretations of Scripture are freely available, for the Roman Catholic Church in the Catechism, for the Anglican Church in the Book of Common Prayer, and in similar texts for other denominations.

Secondly, and perhaps more tellingly, there's the issue of the overall availabilty of this "new" gospel. Some scholars are insisting that Gnosticism was as widely practiced in the early Church as Orthodox Christianity. If that were true there should be many more copies of the Gospel of Judas in existence. If it were that widely circulated and followed it wouldn't be all but lost. Perhaps you believe that the Church prevented the desemination of this document? If Gnosticism was an important branch of Christianity it would have flourished anyway, Christianity itself was illegal for the first four centuries of its existence but the documents which make up the New Testament survived. Even the Roman Catholic Church at the height of its power, during the Inquisition, couldn't stamp out the Protestant Reformation but ultimately had to recognize Protestantism as another form of Christianity. Even today Christianity survives, even thrives, in places like China and the Middle East where Christian practice is a punishable offense, sometimes even a capital offense.

Thirdly, the basic doctrine behind Gnosticism is fundamentally opposed to Christian doctrine. Gnosticism teaches that humans are spiritual beings trapped in physical bodies, that the physical world is evil at worst and irrelevant at best. Therefore Jesus could not have been fully human and fully Divine and the Ressurection (THE central event in Christianity) could never have occurred.

Gnosticism wasn't just another branch of Christianity that was stamped out by the early Church, it's a belief that was found to be opposed to the most basic doctrines of Christianity and was therefore rejected. Christ doesn't offer anything to some followers and not to others. He doesn't take some followers aside to whisper mysteries in their ears that the rest of the world isn't privvy to. What He offers He offers to everyone.

The four Canonical Gospels (those found in the Bible) are in agreement regarding the central concepts of Christian doctrine. Yes, there are differences in detail and emphasis, as you would expect on reading four accounts of the same events written by four different people and also written with four different communities of Christians as the intended audience (for instance, Matthew appears to have been written with Christians who were formerly Jews in mind, while Luke appears to have been written for Pagan converts). The important doctrines, that Jesus lived at a certain time in history, that He taught and performed miracles, that He was crucified, that He died, and that He rose from the dead are all found in all four Gospels.

Just because a document is refered to as a "gospel" and it deals with events in the life of Jesus doesn't mean it gives insight into Christianity. Someone could write a fictional account (the very term used by Irenaeus whom I mention above) of the life of Abraham Lincoln, that doesn't offer insight into America during the Civil War.

If you want to know about the life of Jesus read the four canonical Gospels. Treat the doctrines found in the other gospels as beliefs that were tried by the early church and were found wanting.

Success and Failure

2006-03-29T09:45:00.000-05:00

If you've read my previous posts you know that I consider America to be the best place in the world to live in. One thing that separates us from other nations is the ability it gives people to succeed. Let me offer an example. You've probably seen the TV show American Idol, or at least heard of it. People compete on this show for an opportunity to become a pop-music star, with a record contract and all the trimmings. Everyone who auditions does so with dreams of success. Some people back those dreams with considerable talent, others with much less. Still, anyone who shows up can audition. I could audition, and I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket. If I were to show up to audition I wouldn't be turned away because my parents weren't singers, or because I didn't study singing at the right school. I'd be sent away because I don't sing well. I'd fail, but the only thing standing between me and success would be my own ability.

Some societies force people to be mediocre, to stay as close as possible to the average. People in such societies are forced into a washed-out pastel existence on a faded great background. There are few failures and just as few successes.

We, on the other hand, reward success and we give people the chance to succeed. That chance to succeed is also the chance to fail, because you can't succeed if you don't risk failure. We give people buckets of vibrant, brightly colored paint and a pure white canvas to paint on. Sometimes the results are beautiful, sometimes terrible, but seldom dull and lifeless.

If you want to understand our typically American attitude toward success you could do worse than to read some things that Thomas A. Edison said on the topic. Edison was, of course, one of the most successful inventors in America (which tends to make him one of the most successful inventors in the entire world). He describes success as one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. He said at one point that he hadn't failed, he merely found ten thousand ways to do something that didn't work. He said he knew five thousand ways NOT to build a light bulb. Perhaps most poigantly, he said that most people fail because they didn't realize how close they were to success when they stopped trying.

Once you've eliminated actual barriers to success (for instance Michael Jordan could NEVER be a great jockey no matter how hard he tried) the rest comes down to ability and hard work. If you want to succeed at something, if you have the basic ability to do it, and if you have the will to work hard enough to make it happen you can do so. If that's not a recommendation for the way we do things I don't know what is.

The Dubai Ports Deal

2006-03-10T09:08:00.000-05:00

I don't normally comment too much on current events, especially current political events, but I'll make an exception here.

If you haven't been paying attention, there was a proposal to turn over control of a number of major American shipping ports to a company run by the government of the United Arab Emerites (UAE). This caused concern for a great many people (yours truly included) due to the possibility of a large-scale weapon entering the port in a shipping container. Opposition to this was pretty much bi-partisan, except that the president supported the deal. Now, I thought I had our president pretty-well figured out, whatever else he is or isn't he's tough on terrorism. His support for this deal amazed me, I just couldn't understand it.

I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories. If your only proof for something is that it might have happened and no one can prove it didn't, well frankly that's just not good enough for me. I also think that GWB, whatever his flaws, has a deep love for America and doesn't want to see it harmed. (If you don't believe this, you may as well click to another site now.) So I'm left with the conclusion that the Dubai deal wasn't a bad thing for the nation, but I just couldn't see how that could be. When I read that President Bush had "bowed to the pressure of Republican lawmakers to call off the deal" it hit me. The answer is politics.

No one in the White House is going any further. President Bush can't run again. VP Cheney will probably retire at the end of his term (if not bef0re). They have nothing to lose by taking an unpopular stance, approval ratings for the President and Vice President are completely meaningless. However, the mid-term elections are coming up, a number of Congressmen and Senators are coming up for re-election. If the President takes an unpopular stand that allows those lawmakers coming up for re-election to take a popular stand, and not long before the 2006 elections. I don't think this deal was ever meant to go thru, but the opposition had to come from people who could benefit from it.

So President Bush takes one for the team, it doesn't do him any harm, and it gives his fellow Republican lawmakers the opportunity to look good, to apparently go against the President, and to come out as being tough on terrorism. Democrats, on the other hand, had to take a calculated stand since this is the same party that opposes racial profiling, and opposition to the ports deal looks an awful lot like racial profiling.

If I'm right about this (and I'll probably never find out for sure) this was a politically brilliant move, let people who have nothing to lose be unpopular, let your own folks take a popular stand, and let the other side have to decide which group of constituents to alienate. Like I said, brilliant.

God and Free Will

2006-03-04T09:08:00.000-05:00

This entry grew as a side-issue to part 2 of my Science and Faith entry which I'm still laboring at. If nothing else my labors there have provided ideas for more entries.

If you believe in God you've probably encountered the argument, advanced by someone trying to convince you of the non-existence of God, that belief in God is incompatible with belief in free will. The argument usually goes something like "Does God know everything" to you which you reply "Yes". "So God knows what you're going to do tomorrow?" "Yes" "Therefore you don't have free will, since what you're going to do has already been determined! You either have free will and God doesn't exist, or God exists and controls everything you do!"

In Einstein's view of the universe time is a dimension, just like the three dimensions of space. You understand this in a practical sense too, when you're approaching a road intersection you don't worry about whether a car went thru the intersection ten minutes ago, or whether one will go thru ten minutes from now, you concern yourself with whether another car will be in the intersection at the same time your car is because that's what causes a traffic accident.

Let's assume that you have free will. You carry a chair into a house and, using your free will, you place it someplace in the three-dimensional space within that house. I walk in afterward and observe where you've placed the chair. Does my observation of where you placed the chair mean that you didn't exercise free will in placing it there? People are capable of moving around in three-dimensional space fairly freely, but we can only move thru the fourth dimension of time in one direction, from past to future, and we MUST move thru it, we can't make it stand still.

God, on the other hand, is an Eternal Being. That doesn't just mean He lives for a very long time, or even an infinite time. It means He exists OUTSIDE of time. He can move freely thru the dimension of time as easily as we move thru the three dimensions of space. He can look forward in time as far as He wishes to see what happens. As a matter of fact if He wants to know what I'll do tomorrow He MUST look forward in time to see what I'll do, since because I have free will the only way He can find out is thru observation.

If I may be permitted a digression, this ability of God to move thru time as He wishes has ramifications in our prayer life. Suppose someone I care for is scheduled to have surgery at 2:00 in the afternoon. I decide that at lunch time that day I'll find a quite place to pray for a successful operation, so at noon I leave my office where I'm likely to be distracted and go to my chosen place to pray. When I return I have a voice mail telling the that early that morning the surgery was rescheduled to 9:00 am and was over even before I began to pray. Was my prayer wasted? It was not, because God could move ahead to noontime to hear my prayer, then move back to 9:00 to apply my prayers to the surgery.

Free will is an essential aspect of our relationship with God. The only way we can love someone is to be free not to, that goes for each other, and it goes for us loving God too. There have been plenty of movies made about what happens when someone gives someone else a love potion, it's generally unsatisfying for the person who gave the potion precisely because the other person wasn't free not to fall in love. If you look around you'll see a great many people who have no love for God. That's the price God is willing to pay in order that some people will love Him freely.

Who Says You Can't Train Cats?

2006-02-22T09:05:00.000-05:00

Since I'm struggling with part 2 of my Science and Faith entry, I thought I'd post a little comic relief.

My wife and I are jointly owned by three cats, all of which I brought to the marriage. We generally keep the family-room furniture covered with old sheets to keep the fur off, and uncover it when we have company. The cats have learned too, when the furniture is covered they can go up on it, when it's not they can't, so when the covers are off they tend to stay off.

Last Saturday my wife had a luncheon for a few women she works with. I was going to try out the rifle I got for Christmas, but it was too cold so I did what any red-blooded American male would do when confronted with a house full of women, I stayed at my workbench in the basement working on my model trains. So anyway, off came the sheets from the funiture, so the cats stayed off. Then my wife put a tablecloth on the dining-room table, a nice dark brownish-red one, at which point Snoball (guess what color she is!) realized that the table was covered so it must be OK for her to go up there. My wife described her as lounging in the middle of the table. Since none of the cats generally go up on the table, we decided she must have thought it was OK because there was a cover on it.

It's hard to be too upset when they're following the rules as they understand them.

Science and Faith - Part 1

2006-02-17T09:35:00.000-05:00

For those of you who don’t know me well (which is about two-thirds of my regular readers, the other third being my wife) I’m a Christian. I’m also quite well versed in the “hard” sciences (physics, astronomy, geology, some biology, and a little chemistry). Some people find it hard to rationalize faith with science. I believe this inability is a direct result of a misunderstanding of science.

Science deals exclusively with what can be consistently measured in the universe. If it can’t be seen and measured it doesn’t belong in the realm of science. If someone else, following the same procedure as I do, can’t get the same results as I did it’s not science.

Modern people don’t understand how radical the scientific method was when it was first proposed. I’ve read that at one time mathematicians were debating at length over whether the weight of an object had any effect on how fast it would fall under gravity. Some argued that the acceleration of gravity was independent of mass, some argued that a heavier object would fall faster. Then a man by the name of Galileo did something that was so completely unheard of that the mathematicians must have gaped in wonder, he actually took two iron balls, one considerably heavier than the other, to the top of the Tower of Pisa, and dropped them to see what would happen. I’ve personally seen similar tests done in Physics classrooms, and the results were always the same as what Galileo got, the two objects hit the ground at the same time. (Interestingly, one of the astronauts who landed on the moon brought a hammer and a feather with him and dropped them. In the absense of air the hammer and feather hit the ground at the same time too.)

Let’s set up a simple experiment to use as an example. Let’s say I am going to take a marble and drop it from the roof of my house and measure how long it takes to hit the ground. So I need a marble, and a stop watch and my house. I can use a tape measure to determine how high the marble will be when I drop it, and I can calculate how long it should take to hit the ground. I can then use a stop-watch to measure how long it actually does take. I ignore anything that doesn’t affect the outcome of the experiment, I don’t care what color the marble is or what day of the week it is. So I climb up on the roof, drop my marble, and a seagull swoops down, grabs the marble in mid-air, and carries it away. He drops the marble ten minutes later, at which point it hits the ground. Do I claim that it took the marble ten minutes to hit the ground? I do not, because the seagull wasn’t part of the experiment.

Pay attention now, this is important. If I perform this experiment a hundred times, or a thousand, or a million, and hundreds of other people perform exactly the same experiment thousands or millions more times, and in no case does a seagull swoop down and grab the marble, does that disprove the existence of seagulls? It does not, for exactly the same reason, seagulls aren’t part of what we’re measuring.

Science, by definition, is repeatable, it deals with the general case. Science can say that, given a set of conditions (for instance height from which the marble is dropped) we expect a certain set of results (time to hit the ground). If something else comes into the system (like a seagull) the results are unusable.

So, the science of medicine can tell us that if a person has a particular disease he or she will probably die within a certain amount of time. Medicine can tell us that there is no known cure for such a disease. Then God can swoop in and perform a miracle and heal the person. This doesn’t discount the value of medical science, nor do people who are not healed miraculously disprove the existence of God. God exists outside of our universe, He is unpredictable (God works in mysterious ways) so His actions cannot be accounted for in science.

This is part one of this topic, where I’m trying to lay some groundwork. In part two I intend to deal with some issues where faith and science collide and hopefully make some sense of the issues. If you have any such issues you'd like to see discussed let me know in the comments.

Random Snowy Thoughts

2006-02-13T09:49:00.000-05:00

The area I live in (Bergen County, NJ) got nailed by a good old fashioned Nor'Easter over the weekend that dumped a couple feet of snow on us. Nearby NYC recorded the largest single-storm snowfall ever recorded, almost 29 inches (although I was sure there was one ten or so years ago that topped 30 inches). I spent a good part of my day yesterday moving snow around, shovelling out the cars, clearing the sidewalks (and since I live on a corner I have twice as much sidewalk as my neighbors), and raking snow off part of the roof that's got a mild pitch so it tends to form ice dams. Advil is my friend today.

Since this is a rant outlet for me: The town Department of Public Works (DPW) is responsible for plowing, salting, sanding, etc. Since I live on a small side-street I don't expect to get plowed early. We finally got a plow Sunday afternoon, and only then did I go out and finish clearing the driveway. An hour or so later DPW sent another plow that actually left the road looking worse than it did before, and of course plugged up my driveway again. I did get a little lucky though, on the side of my house the plows often run right along the curb and throw the snow up onto my sidewalk.

The snow in NYC where I work is the usual post-snowstorm color, a brownish grey sludge. Anyone who describes someone as "pure as the driven snow" has never seen snow that's been driven over.

I've noticed that the ability of an individual to drive in snow decreased with the size of their SUV. Hint: Four-wheel-drive won't help your two-ton monster stop, so please don't drive 75 mph when the road is snow covered. Someone I care about may be in the car you ram into.

Whenever we have a snowfall like this I wonder if it would be a good idea to buy a snow-blower. The only problem is that I'm terminally cheap, and snow blowers in the price range I'd be willing to pay only handle up to eight or ten inches of snow. Honestly, I can generally handle that much snow with my shovel. I can't see spending $1,000 or so on something I'll probably only really need every two or three years.

I'm fairly handy, mechanically. I used to work with a guy who was, to say the least, not mechanically inclined. He decided to buy a snow-blower, so he sought my advice. The blower he bought had an electric starter, you'd plug it in, start it, then unplug it and go blow snow. He didn't understand why it also had a pull rope, until I explained that if it stalled at the far end of your property it was probably easier to pull the rope to restart a hot engine than to walk it all the way back to the electrical outlet. He also asked me about the chute on top that directs the snow, asking which way he should point it. I told him that depended on where he wanted the snow to go, left or right. He asked if he could point it straight back, to which I replied "(Name withheld to protect the dopey) you'll be standing there!"

Well, it's supposed to turn warm later in the week. I'm glad we got the basement waterproofed last year, since normally this much snow melting would give us a nice pond in the basement. I'm working on a couple entries that are just about ready.

I've Been Tagged

2006-02-13T09:25:00.000-05:00

MorningGlory tagged me with this, and since she's one of my faithful readers I'll do my best:

4 Jobs I Have Held In My Life: College Assistant; Night Adjunct Computer Lab Technician; Computer Programmer; Consultant

4 Places I Have Lived: Mariner's Harbor, Staten Island, NY; West Brighton, Staten Island, NY; Clifton, NJ, River Edge, NJ. Given that I've had a total of five addresses in my entire life, this wasn't easy.

4 TV Shows I Love To Watch: Mail Call; Mythbusters; any NY Jets game; I used to love Junkyard Wars but it doesn't seem to be on anymore

4 Websites I Visit Daily: http://www.boortz.com ; http://www.theothersideofkim.com ; http:// www.railroad-line.com ; http://www.thehighroad.com

4 Favorite Foods: My wife's meatloaf ; steak ; grilled porkchops ; anything chocolate

4 Places I Would Rather Be Right Now: Home; Aruba; Dominica; Norweigian Dawn

4 People I am tagging: Honestly, any blogger I read regularly either already got tagged or wouldn't respond, so I'll just have to pass on this. One of the downsides of being among the last people to get tagged.

Men Without Chests

2006-01-30T14:15:00.000-05:00

“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful.” C.S. Lewis

The above quote is from one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis. Even though he wrote those words over 50 years ago in England they still ring true for 21st Century America, perhaps now more than ever.

Let me offer an example, one taken from popular culture, on the TV show "Survivor". I seldom watch this show, but once in a while I’ll catch part of it. One thing that strikes me about it is that a person can make a promise to someone, shake hands on it, swear to God, or swear on their mother’s grave, or swear on anything you care to name, then go back on their word. Their excuse is always “I’m playing the game”, and the other surviving participants nod approvingly. How in the name of God did we ever reach a point where someone would give their word, on national TV, then immediately and intentionally break that word, also on national TV, and not become a social outcast? There was a time when someone who did such a thing would have been voted off the island at the very next tribal council and would have been a pariah when they returned home. As the young ape in the original Planet of the Apes movie asked, “What ever happened to honor?”

We’ve raised a generation of men who’ve been told that it’s entirely up to the woman whether she wants to bear a child, but if she does he’s totally financially responsible for that child for the next eighteen years. We wonder why there are so many men who consider their parental responsibilities to begin and end with mailing a child-support check. We’ve raised a generation of people who denigrate strength and heroism as “macho BS” then wonder why, when an emergency happens, there’s no one to hide behind. We’ve raised a generation of people who consider honor to be quaint, old fashioned, and out of vogue and wonder why we now have a generation of people who will lie, cheat and steal in order to get what they want. We’ve raised a generation of people who are told that their own self-esteem is the most important thing in the world and wonder why people are so selfish. We make light of marital vows and wonder why so many marriages end in divorce.

Perhaps I’m the dinosaur I’ve been accused of being. I believe that there’s a way to act toward others and most definitely a way not to act. To my immense shame I don’t always live up to that standard, but when I don’t the problem is with me, not with the standard. “If at first you don’t succeed, lower your standards” is the slogan of a person who will never accomplish anything, and it’s the slogan of a nation that’s in a downward spiral.

I try not to write these entries that identify a problem without offering a solution. In this case I'll start my solution with a reference to two more popular culture icons, two people who rank high on my list of annoying people but who, in this case, are dead right in what they say. These two people are Oprah and Dr Phil, they say these two things repeatedly, I don't know who said either first and I also don't really care. They say that (1) you teach people how to treat you and (2) when someone shows you what kind of person they are, believe them. If someone makes a promise to you and breaks it and their excuse amounts to "I wanted to" don't give them the chance to do it again. If a company does business with you dishonestly and says "That's just the way the business is" don't do any further business with them and insist that everyone you know avoid them. When your elected officials promise you something and do the exact opposite once their elected don't vote for them next time. People lie to us and cheat us because we've taught them that they can with impunity. It's about time to stop that. As always the solution begins with the individual. If I can quote one more cultural icon, John Wayne in "The Shootist" said "I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, and I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other people and I expect the same from them." One could do worse than to live one's life by this standard.

Truce

2006-01-20T08:54:00.000-05:00

Yesterday's media event was a new tape made by Osama Bin Laden and aired by Al-Jazeera (All Terrorism, All The Time). The voice on the tape apparently is that of Bin Laden, and in it he referred to the July 7 bombings in London. This surprised me since I thought he'd been turned into a pinkish mist a year or more ago and the only reason it hadn't been reported was that the Daisy Cutter bomb didn't leave enough to identify.

The big news here is twofold, one, he's promising more attacks and two, he's offering a truce. The first should come as no surprise, we know Al Qaeda wants to attack us, inflict more damage on us and kill more of our people. Honestly, there's nothing to see there.

The offer of a truce is interesting though. Since 9/11 he's been threatening to destroy the US, he's been saying that American troops would be running in disarray, driven by terrorists with the full support of God. He promised blood running in the streets and his followers climbing over the piled bodies of our soldiers to get at the survivors. Now he's offering a "truce", and I have have to wonder why.

Your average American is a fundamentally decent person. He or she doesn't want to spill other people's blood but they also know that sometimes people force you to choose between either hurting them or being hurt yourself. We also tend to be naive, we tend to think other people are also basically decent people, so our first impression may be to look at Bin Laden's offer of a truce as a means of preventing bloodshed on both sides. We may think he's decided he made his point, now let's all take our weapons, go home, and live in peace.

Such a policy would, I believe, be a disaster. Bin Laden is the same man who ordered the 9/11 attacks. In case you forgot, a group of young men armed with box cutters took over four jets and crashed them in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania killing a total of three thousand people who did nothing more than go to work that day or try to fly from one place to another. If these attacks don't show a complete and utter disregard for human life, ours or theirs, I don't know what does. If the terrorists really were winning (as he claims), he wouldn't be offering a truce, he'd be planning our total destruction.

I can think of only one reason for his offer, and that's that he knows that if we keep going as we are his terrorist organization will lose, utterly and completely. In the last four years we've killed or captured thousands of Al Qaeda terrorists, including many high up in their command structure. If we accept their truce we give them the time and opportunity to rebuild.

Another thing about Americans, we tend to take a short view. We decide to do something and we try to get it done next week. The longest-term goal I can recall was JFKs promise to land on the moon within a decade, for us ten years is long-range planning. The terrorists don't think that way, they have no problem waiting ten or twenty years for us to get complacent and for them to rebuild before they attack again. They WILL attack again, truce or no truce. Only one thing will prevent that, and that's eliminating terrorists. We've been doing a darn good job of that for the last four years.

So over the next days and weeks, when you hear people talking about a truce with the terrorists, you'll hear about how it'll prevent bloodshed. Ask how we'll verify that Al Qaeda is keeping that truce. After all, in a truce between two sides of a war each side makes sure the other knows they're keeping the truce and aren't just using it as a cover for preparing for a new attack. Do they plan to just take Osama's word for it? Do they trust him that much?

Yes, we're decent, and we can be naive. We don't have to be foolish, and I believe any talk of truce, any talk of any end to the War on Terror that doesn't end in total defeat of the terrorists is a mistake. Just as in World War II when the US would accept nothing but unconditional surrender from Japan, we can't afford to let this end until our mission is accomplished. That will happen when we say it will and not before.

Philosophy

2006-01-06T10:30:00.000-05:00

When I was in college I took three Philosophy courses, all taught by the same instructor. She was a dedicated Atheist, Communist, and Existentialist. I thought her insights into the Human Condition were just amazing. I thought the books she had us read were incredibly thought provoking (although I never completely accepted the Communist Manifesto as being the best way to handle economics). Now, twenty years later, I can see all this for what it was, namely baloney.

This is what happens in a college environment. You have a group of young people, with essentially no real-world experience. You add a group of older people with titles, letters after their names, and most importantly tenure. This second group generally has little more real-world experience than the first, but they've had the time to read a lot more. Group two then proceeds to fill group one's heads with all sorts of wonderful-sounding stuff, and group one lacks the discernment derived from experience to recognize the fallacy of what they're learning. The students lack the experience to question the underlying premises they're being fed, once those premises are accepted they'll fall for the rest of the philosophy. Anyone who's studied logic can tell you that if you start off with an incorrect premise you can prove anything at all.

This system is self-perpetuating. I was a Computer Science major, my goal was a job out in the real world. Had I been a Philosophy major (and I seriously considered a double major) my goal would probably have been a college teaching position. I would have simply moved up the Ivory Tower, from student to teacher, and helped to fill the next generation of young, inexperienced brains with nonsense. A percentage of them would also have become Philosophy teachers, and so on and so on and so on.

Don't get me wrong, we need Philosophy teachers. We don't want to raise generations of worker drones who know how to do their jobs and nothing else. I do, however, think Philosophy departments in general would be better off if the teachers had to apply their philosophies in the real-world day after day.

I had basically three classifications of teachers in my major and closely related subjects like Engineering. First, and decidedly in the minority, were those who had been teachers since they got out of school themselves. Second were people who studied their fields in school, then worked in the field for some time before semi-retiring to a full-time teaching position. Third were people who were currently employed full-time in their fields and were teaching part-time. Those last two categories were about equal in number. What this meant was that the majority of my teachers in my major had real-world experience. They knew what it meant to work late to find and correct a program problem. They knew what it was to have the phone ring at 2:00 AM because your program just bombed. They knew that all the wonderful theories in the world meant nothing until the program was thoroughly tested and debugged. They knew that if it hadn't been tested by definition it didn't work.

Communism, for instance, is a wonderful philosophy on paper. Everyone treated equally, everyone working for the common good. As Bill Whittle said though, it requires you to believe that the entire commune will turn out at midnight to search for the cow that no one owns when she gets lost in a snow storm. If you've never had to search for a cow in a snowstorm you might well believe such a thing, once you have you'll know better.

My Philosophy teacher often criticized my essays and papers for being too logical. I took as critical a look at the philosophy in question as my limited experience allowed. Looking back, it wasn't sufficiently critical, but you can't expect old heads on young shoulders. The majority of my course work was in a field where a misplaced comma could mean a long night of debugging, where hooking the circuit up to the 12 volt instead of the 5 volt power source could ruin your day, and where Murphy's law was always strictly enforced. Where the question was not whether something would break, but when and where it would break and how much damage it would do when it fell.

So I look around the laboratory that is our world. Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing and expecting different results, well I see a great many people holding on to failed beliefs and expecting them to work this time. Communism, Moral Relativism, Collectivism, Multiculturalism. They've all been tried and have failed, in some cases multiple times. If you make a wrong turn it's not "progress" to keep going in the wrong direction, you only make progress by going back to the last place where you were right.

Anything else is insanity.

Christmas Memories

2005-12-23T09:52:00.000-05:00

Growing up, the Christmas tree was always put up on the day after Thanksgiving and always stayed up until my parents anniversary on January 7. We had a moderatly non-realistic artificial tree. Among my early Christmas memories was that it was my job to sort out the branches by the color of paint on the end of the wire so they'd be put in the correct row of holes on the pole that formed the trunk. The branches would be inserted, the green "tribbles" would be wrapped around the trunk to hide the fact that it was a green-painted pole, and then my dad would start swearing at, er, working on making the mini-lights work. Once the lights were on (of course they were the type that if one bulb blew the whole string went out) we'd put on tinsel (later garland when my mom got tired of finding tinsel in the cat's litterbox), then the ornaments (mostly glass). I also recall a stand my dad made out of 2x4's because he got tired of the old stand tipping over.

Christmas morning was as magic as for most kids. Often there would be a set of toy trains under the tree (the beginnings of a hobby for me). Thinking back I'm amazed at what my mother accomplished on a limited income (Dad was disabled at work when I was ten). She'd start shopping for Christmas around May or so, getting an item or two each time.

Christmas Eve was a family thing at my house. I'm the youngest of my family, my brothers and sister are quite a bit older than I am (I have a nephew who's six months younger than I am). Early on (before I was aware of such things) my parents old me they'd have the family get-together on Christmas Day, but found out that (a) my nieces and nephews didn't like being away from their new toys on Christmas Day and (b) they'd express that by breaking MY new toys. So the party was moved to Christmas Eve. My father and brothers would spend the evening getting tipsy on cheap beer and solving all the world's problems in the living room. My mother and sisters-in-law would share the latest gossip in the kitchen. The kids would be playing with whatever presents we got on that day and anticipating what Santa would bring. And of course there was always a big supply of my mother's cookies and cakes.

One year as my mother was preparing for the festivities she was putting stuff out on the dining room table. She had to be careful what she put out, she didn't want to leave anything unattended where the cat (Jeremiah) could get it, but she thought she was safe leaving the olives out. It turned out that Jerry liked olives, he ate the entire jar.

OK, stop reading my blog and get to work on memories for yourself and your kids. Merry Christmas!

Flight

2005-12-19T09:28:00.000-05:00

I should have posted this over the weekend but was busy with other, Christmas related things (including two parties!).

December 17th, 2005 marked the 102nd anniversary of the first manned, powered, sustained flight by a heavier-than-air craft by the Wright brothers. Consider: a mere 66 years later we left the first human foot prints on the moon, and we now have a number of space craft that have not only left the Earth, but have left the entire solar system never to return.

I grew up with the space program, some of the earliest toys I recall were astronauts, rockets, lunar rovers, I even had a card-game called "Space Race". I see a direct correlation between the Wright brothers and the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. At first planes were used mainly by two groups, the rich and famous and the government. Right now only the governments and a few wealthy individuals have gone into space, but perhaps in a few years (maybe even within my lifetime) we'll see space flight the same way we currently see airplane flight. Recently a private company launched a reuseable craft into suborbital flight. They proved it was reuseable by launching it twice within a preset timeframe. If that's not an exciting concept for a space-age kid I don't know what is.

I remember once being asked what one thing I'd do, what one dream I'd fulfill, if I could do it right now and money were no object. I said I'd ride the space shuttle. To truly understand what this means to me, I hate, and I mean PASSIONATELY hate to fly. I hate amusement park rides, my wife could tell you how Runaway Train at Great Adventure was a white-knuckle experience for me. Just watching a shuttle launch, as the bird rolls over on its back, is enough to make parts of my anatomy pucker. Still, I'd go if I could. If they ever decide that they need an overweight, middle-aged guy as part of the crew I'll be first on line. I'd go as cargo if I had to.

Why? Let me relate a story. Once, while I was commuting by bus, the bus I was in went over an overpass, and on the roadway beneath was a rental truck that was a little to high to make it under the overpass. The top of the truck was peeled back like a sardine can. As I went by at 60 or so mph I could see all the stuff in the truck. Now, I've loaded rental trucks, boxes, furniture, mattresses, etc. This gave me a new perspective on the inside of a truck, a view you don't normally get. I imagine the astronauts in the International Space Station or on the shuttle get that perspective. You don't see a storm from the ground, looking up and only seeing the leading edge of it, you see the whole storm from the top. Imagine seeing the shadow cast by the Rocky Mountains as the sun rises. Imagine looking the other way and seeing stars, more stars than you ever imagined. So I'd clamp my hands firmly on my stomach and keep swallowing whatever I ate for the last two days. I'd hand out earplugs to my fellow crew members so they wouldn't hear me screaming. I'd probably have sore hands for days from clutching whatever there is to clutch. But I'd go, and when I got back I'd be glad I went, I'd count it as the experience of a lifetime.

102 years ago people said that if man were meant to fly he'd have wings. I'd reply that man has wings, wings he made himself. It's what we've always done, we didn't have claws and fangs to hunt with or to protect us from predators so we made them. We didn't have wings, we didn't have the ability to breathe in a vacuum or under water. I believe that someday we'll walk on other planets in this solar system (in fact in the 60's and 70's you couldn't have convinced me that we wouldn't have colonized Mars by now!). That's also what we do, we knew there was nothing on top of Mt Everest, we knew there was nothing really special about the North or South Poles, but that didn't stop people from going there. There may be no good reason to go back to the moon, or to Mars or to one of the moons of Jupiter, but we'll go. We're driven by the same impluse that made a distant ancestor cross to the other side of the river just to see what's there.

Next clear night go outside and look at the moon, reflect that there are footprints, flags, and some decomposing junk up there and that we put it there. Consider that the same spirit that drove those space pioneers drove the Wrights to fly at Kitty Hawk. Try to imagine our world without the technologies that started with that first flight. Now try to imagine our world in a hundred years without the benefits of the technology borne of the space program. Like they say, shoot for the moon, even if you miss you land among the stars.

Merry Commercialmas

2005-12-12T12:02:00.000-05:00

You've seen the commercials, the announcer tells you that the advertizer has the perfect gift for that special someone in your life. The perfect gift turns out to be a brand-new luxury car, and the implication is that you really don't treat that other person as particularly special unless you buy them this car, and of course if you do you're a wonderful significant other for buying what your loved one REALLY wants.

Now, I know that there are people in this country who can afford to drop 30 or 40 thousand dollars on a car as a Christmas present. I doubt that there are enough such people to keep a car company in business, year after year. The rest of us would have to take money from savings, trade in an existing car, and/or finance such a purchase. I know that if I made such a financial decision without consulting my wife beforehand I'd end up sleeping in the shed outside.

I wonder sometimes if we've forgotten what this gift giving thing is all about. Did Melchior go into debt for a year to supply the gold in an effort to win the approval of the newborn King? Did Balthasar see an advertizement telling him that frankincense was the perfect give for that special Savior? Did Caspar buy Myrrh in an effort to make as good an impression as the other two Magi? Did they keep asking "Are we there yet?" as they followed the star to Bethlehem? I doubt it, I think the three Magi (or wise men, or kings if you prefer) brought their gifts as an offering of love, freely and cheerfully offered to the One whose devoted servants they were. The gifts were just a symbol of the love and devotion they felt. As in the wonderful story of the Little Drummer Boy if they had no gift that was worth money they could have offered the one gift that matters, the gift of themselves.

I have, in my jewelry box at home, a ring made of stainless steel. It belonged to my mother. She had it as long as I can remember. My father made it for her when he was unemployed and couldn't afford a present for her, he got a stainless steel nut, drilled it out to fit her finger, ground and filed it down, filed a design into it, and gave it to her as a present. Total monetary value, pennies. Total sentimental value, priceless. Remember this next time you go out shopping for people you don't like, spending money you don't have on gifts they won't like.

Christmas Shopping

2005-12-10T13:47:00.000-05:00

Well, my wife and I went Christmas shopping this morning, we were at the mall by 7:30 and left at about 11:00. I actually got most of my shopping done in this one trip. Of course I only buy for one person, my wife, she buys for everyone else. Hmmm, I see a future blog entry on division of labor in a marriage.

Being a man shopping in the women's section of Macy's can be a rough experience. First off, the store isn't arranged properly. You want to see a properly arranged store, go to a hardware store. All the toilet parts are here, all the paint is there, light switches over there and mail boxes in another aisle. Imagine if hardware stores were laid out like Macy's and you went there looking for a shovel. OK, here's a shovel, next to a rake and a hammer. Then in the next aisle is another shovel, next to a circular saw and a power drill. Two aisles over is a third shovel, next to that one is a set of files and a motion-sensing light fixture. Why aren't the shovels together? Because the whole store is arranged by manufacturer! Each shovel is next to other items made by the same company, so if you want to find a particular type of shovel (say a garden spade or a snow shovel) you either have to know who makes that type of shovel or you wander around the whole store looking for it. Is it any wonder men don't like shopping, except in sensible places like hardware stores, gun shops, and sporting-goods stores?

Don't even get me started on "miss's" vs "women's" (I just learned this one today, I hope I got the right one! Well, that's why I get gift receipts, right?) And we won't even begin to discuss the helpful sales person (who looks to be about the same age as my CAR) who can't figure out the change if she punches the wrong amount received into the computerized cash register and has to cancel the order and ring the whole thing up again. This thankfully didn't happen today, but it's happened in the past.

No, I'm not saying what I bought for my wife for Christmas, she reads my blog. Stay tuned!

Day of Infamy

2005-12-07T09:38:00.000-05:00

Today is December 7th, 2005, the 64th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Have you thanked a veteran lately?

Remember, the Greatest Generation is dying off rapidly, get their stories NOW while you still can. People who were 18 in 1941 are 82 now.

One thing that has always struck me is that the men who served in World War II were just ordinary men. My Dad's last job before he was disabled was as a crane operator. I knew a man who was a Pearl Harbor survivor, he sold costume jewelry at the local indoor flea market. I met a vet last Memorial Day in Cape May, NJ, he was selling a book of poems he's written over the years. Men who did the job they had to do, then went home, picked up their lives, got jobs, and started families.

This Is My Rifle.....

2005-12-04T09:48:00.000-05:00

there are many like it but this one is mine! Hoo boy, is THAT an understatement, it's a Mosin Nagant 91/30, built in 1938 in the Izhevsk arsenal in Russia. It's all matching, with matching bayonet and a cleaning kit and sling.

My wife took me out yesterday to pick out my Christmas present, I knew I wanted a military surplus rifle and I was pretty sure I wanted either a Mosin Nagant or a Mauser. The Mausers in my price range here pretty beat up and the Mosins all looked like they hadn't been fired in 60 years, in fact they probably haven't been.

I have to give her a good cleaning, get some ammo (Sarco was out) and get her to the range.

Since I tend to name things like cars and guns, I'm also thinking of a name for her. Something common, tough and reliable, something that will bring up images of a peasant woman in a babushka in the fields. Of course the name will be female!

Dad's Stories - Part 3

2005-12-02T11:52:00.000-05:00

Insert my usual disclaimer here.

Dad was a Marine during and after World War II. He was stationed on the island of Peleliu in the South Pacific. From there he went to Japan, and from there to China. Here are a couple stories from his time there.

The Marines on Peleliu were given, among other things, a fishing spear head to be used to occupy themselves. The head had three prongs (picture King Neptune's spear). They had to supply the handle themselves. Someone noticed that the threads in the spear head matched the threads on the radio antennas on the jeep-mounted radios, which caused some consternation when the radio needed to be used. Being a civic minded guy (ha!) as well as being handy, Dad set up shop making handles for the spears out of scraps of pipe or whatever he could scrounge. He'd also add barps to the prongs by flattening the metal out a bit then filing it to a point and barb. His fee was either a six-pack or a bottle of scotch. The brass was happy because the radio attennas stayed where they belonged, the other Marines were happy because they had fishing spears and the barbs kept the fish from being lost, and Dad was happy because he had a supply of beer or scotch. Capitalism at work!

My Dad also had no fear of heights at all, I can recall that about him. Well it seemed the airfield on Peleliu had some sort of mast, for radio or radar or whatever I don't recall. The mast had a ladder going up the side of it, and it had a light bulb on top. Since Murphy was definitely in the military, the bulb burned out. As I recall it wasn't the Marine's reponsibility to replace the bulb (I don't recall who "owned" the mast though), but no one who's responsibility it was would climb the ladder to replace it because it was too high. His Colonel (for whom Dad was orderly), always looking for a way to stick it to another branch of service, said he knew someone who'd climb up there for a price. The Colonel told my Dad that he'd get a bottle of scotch for doing this. Negotiations ensued, and the final price was a case of scotch.

The Japanese interpreter for my Dad's unit was a guy from someplace in the deep South, Dad swore that he spoke Japanese with a Southern accent. One day a Marine had been out scrounging on the island and found a cave full of bottles with Japanese labels. He brought the bottle to the interpreter, hoping it was saki or something similar. Upon reading the label the interpreter asked the scrounger where he found it, and HOW he found it. He replied that he was searching a cave using his cigarette lighter for light and found several cases of these bottles. It turned out that the bottles contained something very similar to napalm.

Later on after the war my Dad was stationed in China. He was with the communications unit, he was a lineman. He and his buddies got the job of removing some old phone lines, and he drew a line that was attached to a pole in the middle of a rice paddy. As he climbed the pole (using gaffs and a belt) he noticed that the pole was wobbly. When he got to the top and started detaching wires he realized that the lines were the only thing holding the pole up. Realizing that he was headed for a splash-down, he removed the belt so that when the pole fell he could get away from it, and as he detached the last wire the pole fell and he landed in the rice paddy. If you've never seen a rice paddy or pictures of one, it looks like a swamp with one notable difference, it's fertilized. It's fertilized with human waste. His buddies made him ride back to base on the bumper of the jeep.

While in China the Marines were paid in American money, and the exchange rate was incredible. I recall him telling me it was something like 20,000 Chinese dollars to one American dollar. A lot of the Marines got tatoos, but my Dad never liked needles so instead he had an eagle embroidered on the back of one of his jackets by one of the old men in the area. Upon asking the price he was told ten dollars, he asked if that was ten dollars American or Chinese, and the price was ten dollars Chinese. He gave the man a couple American dollars which made him extremely happy.

Rifles and Riflemen

2005-11-30T12:35:00.000-05:00

I've done target shooting with handguns for quite a few years, and for the last year or so I've given serious thought to getting a rifle. This brought up the topic of just why I want to learn to shoot a rifle, so I thought I'd share my ruminations with the rest of the world (or at least that small portion that actually reads my blog!).

The unenlightened have an idea of your average shooter as a knuckle-dragging red-neck who thrives on destruction and lives for the day the UN invades the US so he can plug some blue helmets. I've known quite a few avid shooters and have yet to meet one that fits that description. Quite the opposite, the majority of shooters I've known have been intelligent, polite, and all-around decent people. The overall percentage of nutcases is, in my experience, considerably smaller than that of the general population.

If there's one trait common to the truly good shooters I've known it's been confidence. Not bravado, just quiet confidence that the world won't throw anything at them that they can't handle. They get this confidence thru self mastery. The Marine Corp's Rifleman's Creed states "I must master it (my rifle) as I must master my life". To a great extent the two go together, mastery of a rifle and mastery of yourself go hand-in-hand.

Shooting is conceptually very simple, line up the sights, hold still, squeeze the trigger. It sounds easy until you try it, then you realize that your body is a bag of fluid held up by a framework that has every connection lubricated. You realize that the slightest movement will affect your aim. Making the weapon fire at the appropriate time requires you to hold as still as possible AND squeeze the trigger only when the sights are on target.

Self control isn't popular these days. People assume that a competent shot is a risk to "go postal" and commit mayhem over the slightest annoyance. We have people talking of shoot-outs over traffic accidents. The truth is the exact opposite, the competent shooter knows he has live-or-death power over anything in range and has enough self control to know that he won't unleash that power except in the gravest extreme. The expert shooter when faced with petty annoyances is in the same situation as if he didn't have a weapon, he won't resort to violence because he knows it's inappropriate and immoral. He's in the same situation as the devoted husband when he comes in contact with another woman, he knows he won't do what he shouldn't, he doesn't WANT to.

The rifleman knows that just because he's capable of doing something, that doesn't mean he will do it. It doesn't even mean he WANTS to do it. Thinking that a rifleman, or any other gun owner, looks forward to the day he has to shoot someone is the same as thinking that a person who knows CPR looks forward to the day someone has a heart attack in his presence. If it happens he's prepared, if not so much the better.

Beyond the skills and self mastery required to move from the status of "owner of a rifle" to "rifleman", there's something about rifles that's interesting and intriguing. Some people would claim that's because I grew up in a gun-free home, but I've noticed the same interest among people who grew up around rifles, have shot rifles since childhood, and currently own dozens of rifles. There's something about a rifle that not even a handgun has. The only other inanimate object I can think of that excites such emotion in an owner is a car. Pick up a well-made rifle, hold it, feel its weight and balance. Look at the way metal and wood are fit together. Notice the way metal moves against metal, observe the way springs, cams, and levers all work together. Consider the intense heat and pressure the chamber and barrel are designed to contain, not once or twice, but thousands of times over the useful life of the weapon. Consider the barrel, accurately machined to within thousandths of an inch. All designed to send a tiny projectile a great distance into a target of the shooters choosing. All so well made that if the shot misses its intended target the most likely cause is shooter error.

When you think about it rifles are truly incredible machines. A rifle built over a hundred years ago is every bit as effective for the job it was designed for as one built this year. Compare a Mauser built in the last quarter of the 19th century with a brand-new, still in the box Remington offering. Assuming the Mauser has been properly maintained and not abused it will do anything you could ask the Remington to do, and if you notice any difference in performance it'll likely be the Mauser on top.

So Christmas is fast approaching and my wife has agreed that a rifle will be The Gift for me this year. That won't make me a rifleman, it'll merely mark the first step, I'll be a rifle owner. That whole mastery of my life thing is intimidating, but it's essential. I'll let you know how it goes.

Dad's Stories - Part 2

2005-11-29T09:21:00.000-05:00

Since both of my faithful readers enjoyed Dad's Stories - Part 1 I thought I'd follow with part 2. As with last time I make no claims for the actual truth of this story, and only say that it's either true or it ought to be.

When my Dad was a young man (probably a teenager) he lived in Hoboken, NJ and worked in a ship yard there. His foreman was a man by the name of Dave McGillary (I have no idea if I'm spelling his name correctly, I'm spelling as best I can from my memory of how Dad pronounced it). Dave wore a jacket and tie complete with starched collars to work every day. Every morning he'd come in, look up, examine the weather, and proclaim "'T ain't bad out today." It didn't matter what the weather actually was, raining, snowing, cold, hot, foggy, sunny, the weather was classified as "'t aint bad".

One day my Dad and his friends/co-workers were proving the axiom that one boy is half a man while two boys are no man at all, they were amusing themselves by dumping buckets of water from the Hudson river on each other from higher levels of wherever they were working. (I suspect the soakings Dad got from this had a lot to do with his robust immune system later in life.) My Dad knew they were waiting to get him once he went thru a doorway so he went around the other way to get into the shop area he needed to work in without his friends seeing him. His friends dumped the water on the first person to walk thru the door, who happened to be Dave McGillary. Picture a man in jacket and tie getting soaked with filthy Hudson river water, he starched collars curling up as the water soaked in. Dad made himself look "as busy as a cat covering poop on a tin roof" (Dad didn't use the word "poop", but you get the idea.) Dave pointed to him and said "Harold, if you weren't standing right in front of me when I got soaked I'd blame you!" and went off to find the miscreants.

Dad's Stories - Part 1

2005-11-28T12:24:00.000-05:00

My father (who died in 1988) was an avid story teller. He would entertain me endlessly with his stories. Dad, as with most story tellers, never let little things like facts interfere with a good story. I thought I'd reproduce some of his stories here. I make no claims as to their truthfulness, nor that I even remember them correctly, only that they're as close as I can recall to the stories he told me.

At some point before I came along my Dad worked with two guys named Carl and Monk. Carl is a pretty shadowy figure, but Monk was bigger than life and a great number of Dad's stories revolved around him. For this first installment I thought I'd offer a Monk story.

First, a bit about Monk. Monk was a nickname (duh!), I know my Dad told me his real name at some point but I've long since forgotten it. His friends called him Monk because he looked like a gorilla, medium height but broad and strong, with more hair on his back than most men have on their heads. Dad claimed Monk was the strongest man he ever met, that Monk could chin himself from ceiling joists, holding on from underneath by his fingertips.

Dad, Monk and Carl were merchant seamen. When their ship was in port they'd room together, if the ship was in for overhaul or repairs they'd get jobs. At one such time they had a furnished apartment and had jobs on a late shift. Their landlord was cheap, he'd turn off the heat at night, so when the three guys came home is was cold enough to see their breath in their apartment. Well one evening Monk said he wasn't going to work, he wasn't feeling well. When Dad and Carl got home Monk informed them that he'd found them a new, better place to stay. Monk had even packed their belongings for them and had them waiting for them, Dad and Carl didn't even have to go into their old apartment, they just grabbed their stuff and went off to their new place. All went well until they received a letter to appear in court, it seemed their former landlord was suing them for damages to the apartment. It seemed that Monk had painted the apartment before they moved out. It further seemed that he'd painted it black. Further evidence showed that the black paint he used was paint he'd gotten from the shipyard and was meant for painting the stacks on the ships. This paint was apparently about the consistency of tar, and it was on the walls, the wood work, even the kitchen cabinets. The only way to get this stuff off the walls would be to burn the place down.

Upon appearing in court, Monk produced a contract that he'd made with the landlord. He told the landlord he wanted to paint the apartment at his own expense to cheer the place up. The landlord, cheap as he was, jumped at the chance to get his place painted for free. He signed a contract giving Monk permission to paint the apartment "any color he liked". Monk told the judge "Your honor, I like black." Case dismissed.

Is this story true? In the spirit of Winston Churchill, of course it's true, or it ought to be, and more and better besides.

Winning the War on Terror

2005-11-21T12:35:00.000-05:00

For the last few months the NYC police have been conducting random searches of people’s bags as they enter the subway system. The stated purpose of these searches is to stop suicide bombers before they get into the subway. I’m opposed to these searches on a number of levels, they violate our civil rights, they cause delays, and I don’t for a moment think they’ll be effective at preventing a suicide bombing. I’m taking up this subject from a different angle though, I’m also opposed to them because I don’t believe they’re an effective part of winning the War on Terror.

Over the past couple of decades we’ve been repeatedly attacked by Islamic terrorists. The first World Trade Center bombing, the USS Cole, 9/11 and other attacks were attacks against American interests. I don’t believe that these attacks were in response to anything America has done, they’re attacks against who we ARE. The terrorist leaders don’t just want us to stop supporting Israel or apologize for the Crusades (where, you may note, Americans were incredibly under-represented!). They want us either dead or subject to them. Let me repeat that, they want us either DEAD or SUBJECT to THEM.

There may be people who will say that if those are our options we should just give in to them, it’s better to be alive in bondage than dead in freedom. Even ignoring the fact that that would require a conversion to Islam (since I’m a Christian such a conversion is absolutely out of the question for me), let me say right now that if you believe that I have nothing more to say to you so get off my property, now.

There is a third choice though, other than death or subjection. That choice is Victory. It’s the only choice really, the other two options above are simply unthinkable. Since we’re at war, how do we fight and how do we win?

Fortunately for us (especially for me since I’m writing this entry) history provides us with a picture of a very similar enemy, an enemy that wanted to conquer the world. An enemy that raised up a generation of people who wanted only to be a part of that conquest even if they had to die to do it. An enemy who believed that they were being led into a war by their god and that death in such an endeavor was truly glorious. An enemy who raised up people who were willing to fly planes full of explosives into American ships and other targets. That enemy was Japan during World War II. The comparison between the Japanese Kamikaze pilot and the Moslem suicide bomber is truly chilling.

When I mention the Kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers I need to make it clear that these are only the very last parts of a long string, they’re the point of the spear. American gunners on American ships found that knocking out a Kamikaze was extremely difficult, they actually had to disable the plane enough that it could no longer fly. The pilot wasn’t going to break off his attack so he could bail out if his plane was damaged. He wasn’t going to break off if the antiaircraft fire was too heavy for him to get thru without being injured or his plane damaged too badly to return to base. He wasn’t supposed to return to base, to do so would have been failure. We’ll have similar problems with suicide bombers in the subway. If there’s a checkpoint they’ll simply leave and get into the subway some other way. If they can’t they’ll just push the button while surrounded by the police and the other passengers who are waiting to get thru the turnstiles.

We didn’t stop the Kamikaze pilots by shooting down their airplanes after they were loaded, fueled and airborne. We stopped them by destroying the support system that provided them with a plane, fuel and explosives. We’re not going to stop suicide bombers from killing people once they have their supply of explosives and their orders. We’re going to stop them by destroying their chain of command, by wiping out the high-level terrorists who are making the plans and giving the orders. We’re going to stop them by finding their sources of funding and eliminating them. The police who are looking thru passenger’s bags in the subway could be making raids on terror cells. The money spent on those police could be spent on intelligence to identify those cells.

Finally, we’re going to beat the terrorists the same way we beat Japan. We’re going to prove to them, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this is a war they can not and will not win. We probably won’t do it by dropping atomic bombs on cities because terrorism isn’t geographic. We will do it by systematically destroying the high level commanders of the terrorists AND by showing the very people the suicide bombers are recruited from that the ideology offered by their leaders is deeply flawed and that there IS another way to live. Our job is not just one of destruction, it’s one of rebuilding. We helped make Japan into a nation that values hard work, a nation that is arguably the most Capitalist nation in the world right now. Japan learned that they don’t need to conquer the world, if they make enough money they can buy whatever they want FROM the rest of the world. We can do the same thing in the Middle East. We’re doing it right now, in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

Just like in Japan, it won’t happen overnight. World War II ended almost twenty years before I was born and Japan became a true economic and industrial power within my memory. When I was a kid I had a choice between two radios, a quality American made one or Japanese made junk at half the price. If I bought the Japanese one it would probably break within a month. Compare that to today’s situation.

Imagine in 25 years an Al Qaida representative going to a young man in Mosul and saying “I want you to put on this backpack, go into that building, and blow yourself up.” The young Iraqi will reply “Sorry, I’m on my way to pick up my new Mercedes!”. To the promise “But you’ll get 72 virgins!” he replies “Have you SEEN what a Mercedes will attract?”

If we give the people of the Middle East real hope they won't fall for the lies of their leaders. We know that even the leaders know their promises are lies because if they actually believed them they'd be out there blowing themselves up instead of sending the poor, downtrodden and utterly hopeless to do their dirty work. The young person who now has to choose between a dismal and miserable life here and a promised life of luxury is likely to fall for the lie. The same person, offered luxury HERE won't be so quick to give it up for a lie. On that day Al Qaida will be out of business.

The Media

2005-11-10T12:55:00.000-05:00

OK, it's time for a quiz. One question, if you're wrong you get poked with this cattle prod. Question: What is the purpose of the media? Answer: To keep the citizens of this nation informed about current events. ZAP ouch! Answer: To provide entertainment. ZAP ouch! Answer: To numb the minds of the population so the Martians will have an easier time taking over. Hmmmmm, this has possibilities but ZAP ouch!

Any media outlet, newspaper, TV, radio, etc is a business. In any business, if you want to find out what they're doing you follow the money. If you think the 35 cents you pay for your morning newspaper is all the money the publisher makes on it you're sadly mistaken. If you watch network TV (gag!) you can watch shows starring actors and actresses who are paid millions of dollars for FREE. Where's the money? Where does the money paid to professional athletes come from? How about the money paid to newspaper writers? Magazine photographers?

Everything you're interested in in any form of media, songs on the radio, pictures of pretty girls in a magazine, news in the newspaper, the comic strips, restaurant reviews, absolutely everything is the bait to get you to the hook buried in there. That hook is the advertising. That's where the media makes its money, companies pay to run ads, the more people who are exposed to the ad the more the media outlet can charge for it.

Kinda makes you wonder about our unbiased media huh? Some years back there was a scandal in NYC involving Woody Allen, his girlfriend, and his girlfriend's adopted daughter. This story ran with front page headlines in the newspapers every day, pushing much more important news deep inside the newspaper. People criticized the newspaper for doing so, but they missed the newspaper's reason for existing. If more people will buy the newspaper with a headline about Woody, Mia, and Soon Yi than will buy it if the front page talks about a crime that was committed then the newspaper HAS to run the more productive headline. If people saw that headline, said "BFD" and walked away the next day the Allen family would could get a couple column inches on the society page.

Remember that whenever you see a news story on TV. They're not trying to help you make an informed decision on who to vote for. They're not trying to present both sides of an issue so you can make an intelligent choice. They're trying to keep your butt in your chair in front of your TV until the commercial comes on. That's the ultimate goal of all the writers, editors, producers, reporters, cameramen, right down to the girl who just brought the news anchor a glass of water.

Bias is obvious with non-news shows. Every show has a target audience, whether it's a professional sporting event, a sit-com, a crime drama or a reality show. The commercials will be for products that would be of interest to that target audience. They don't show commercials for toys during Desperate Housewives and they don't show commericals for Preparation H during the Saturday morning cartoons.

You want unbiased news? You're not going to find it. Balanced reporting that covers both sides of an issue is going to cause people who already have strong beliefs on the issue to change the channel. That's OK if those people aren't part of the advertisers demographic, they're not going to buy that product anyway. It's a disaster if the group that tunes out is the group the next set of commercials is aimed at though. So they keep a bias in the news to hook the people who are most likely to respond to the commercial.

But Mark, I really want to understand the entire issue so I can make a truly informed decision. Ah, I see you seek the path of enlightenment. In every news story you're exposed to look for the bias. It's there, trust me, just because it fits in with your political leanings doesn't mean it's not biased. Get under the bias to the actual facts. Then find another source for the same issue, find the bias again and get to the facts. Maybe the facts don't match. Keep digging, you'll finally unearth all the facts surrounding an issue, then make your decision based upon those facts.

Most of us don't do this. Most of us find a news source we believe is unbiased (meaning one we agree with) and swallow what they tell us whole. That's easy. It's also lazy. Being an informed citizen of a free nation takes work.

Everything in the media makes sense if you remember its true function, to expose you to paid advertising. Remember that, write it on the back of your hand if you have to. I'll even put new batteries in my cattle prod in case you forget.

Voting

2005-11-03T09:09:00.000-05:00

Next Tuesday is Election Day. That day I, and my fellow New Jerseyans will be selecting our new Governor, among other elected officials. Voting is ALWAYS a selection of a lesser of two evils. The best possible candidate for any position never actually runs for the job, so we're left with people who actually WANT the job. Generally their reasons have nothing to do with an honest desire to make NJ a better place to live. They're after the goose that lays the golden eggs of political power. I said in an earlier posting that when you elect someone to office you give them immense power, that power is like a drug for some people, the more they have the more they want.

But back to NJ. Next Tuesday I'll choose between two major-party candidates and a number of third-party candidates. I don't trust any of the candidates, but I don't trust any elected official, especially not the ones I vote for. I always cast my vote with the understanding that the candidate made promises to me in return for my vote and that if said promises are not met then next time my vote may well go elsewhere.

So who will I vote for? I'm not going to tell you that, but I'll offer some of my thought processes. Of the two major-party candidates I completely dispise one of them and merely intensely dislike the other. There actually was a candidate in the primary who I liked and would have voted for, but he didn't win the primary. How about a third party? I voted for Ross Perot because I thought that as a businessman he'd bring a level of financial responsibility to our nation. I was misguided. I was misguided first in believing that such issues were the most important and second in believing he actually had a chance of winning. Live and learn, die and forget it all. There is no third party candidate in NJ who stands the slightest chance of winning, period.

But Mark, if you dislike both candidates so badly why not vote third party as a protest? I've considered it, but won't do so. First, the two candidates are quite close in the polls, if one were so far ahead that protest votes wouldn't likely affect the outcome I might cast one, but as it is it's just too close. And while I don't think either candidate would be a GOOD governor for NJ I do believe one would be far worse than the other. Given the tightness of the race, my protest vote is a vote taken away from the lesser of two evils which may well ensure that the worse of those evils gets elected. I learned my lesson from Perot.

I can cast one vote. If the candidate who I believe would be a disaster for my state is elected he'll do so with no help from me, I won't cast my vote for him, I won't withhold my vote from his only viable opponent. Perhaps I can help elect a governor who'll be merely bad instead of dispicable. Then maybe next time around we can replace him with someone who merely leaves a lot to be desired, followed by someone who's not too bad, followed by someone who's pretty good. I may never live to see the day, but we've got to start someplace.

So get out from in front of your computer next Tuesday and vote. No excuses. I don't care if the line is long, you've waited on long lines to see a movie. I don't care if it's raining, you went to work in the rain, you can vote in the rain. If you don't vote, don't complain about the Governor selected by those of us who did.

American Politics

2005-10-24T12:14:00.000-04:00

Since Election Day is fast approaching I want to say a few things about American politics. I said in my entry on "America" that the American government is in the hands of the American people and that's what makes the American form of government so wonderful. There's a downside to that, which is that if the majority of American's just don't care enough about the government to get involved in it then they'll be controlled by a few people, often people with aspirations to power.

Make no mistake about it, by electing someone to any office, from local police chief to President of the US, you're giving that person power. In many cases you're giving them immense power. You're giving them the power that only government has, which is the power to legally use violence or the threat of violence to do what it wants. Think about that for a moment. If I owe you money and you come to my house threatening me with violence if I don't pay you I can call the government (in the form of the local police) and have you arrested. I can even use violence against you in self defense and it would be legal (assuming the legal requirements for self-defense were met). If I owe money to the government, in the form of taxes for instance, representatives of that government can, and will, come to my house and threaten me with violence if I don't pay up. If I respond to these threats with violence I would either be offered more violence (up to and including deadly force) and if I survive I will be charged with resisting the government officials. Think long and hard about that.

To get involved in the process you need to understand the process. I went to the New York City public schools. In those schools we learned a LITTLE about how our government was structured in a class called "Social Studies". This basically combined the classes formerly known as "History" and "Civics". Of course when the SATs rolled around Social Studies was pre-empted by Math and English because Social Studies didn't help you get into college. More's the pity. I have to say that most of what I actually learned about our political system I learned by self-study. The information is there.

What information do you use to decide who to vote for? During the 2000 Presidential election a co-worker told me I should vote for Al Gore because he was better looking than George W. Bush. If she'd told me I should vote for Gore because he was pro-choice I could have respected that despite the fact that I disagree with it, but to decide who should head up the most powerful nation in the world based on LOOKS?

Still other people ignore the process and let others decide who's going to govern them? Why would so many people give up their freedoms as long as they're fed and the TV works? Because nothing's changed since the Roman Empire, give the people bread and circuses and they'll let you do whatever you want. For some people, as long as they're fed and entertained they couldn't care less about corruption in their government, they couldn't care less about whether or not their rights are being violated largely because they don't even understand those rights.

If I have an ultimate purpose for this Blog it's to wake people up. I want everyone, EVERYONE, to understand that you, YOU RIGHT THERE SITTING IN FRONT OF YOUR COMPUTER, has rights. That the Government doesn't bestow these rights like some favor on those who serve it well but that they are part of who and what you are. That the Government doesn't have the authority to infringe upon those rights. That the only way you can be deprived of those rights is that if you have committed a crime and such deprivation is part of your punishment. That if you, YOU! don't exercise those rights you might as well not have them. If you don't vote you have no cause for complaint about the government you get. If you don't write to your elected officials to influence them you have no cause for complaint when they pass laws that are abhorent to you. If you keep sending the same politicians back to Washington DC despite the fact that you hate them then YOU are the PROBLEM.

How do we make the system work? First off, if you're one of those people who doesn't get involved, start getting involved. Vote. Write letters, not just letters to the editor of your local newspaper but letters to your elected officials. You don't know the issues? Educate yourself! There are plenty of places around the web to find out what's going on at the state and national level. You already vote and write? Good for you, now start holding the elected officials responsible, let them know that they were elected based on their promises and if those promises are not kept they'll be voted out and replaced. Nothing frightens a politician more than the possibility of losing an election.

I said it before, the American people decide what happens in our government. If everyone participates we get a government that represents us. If we don't we get a government that represents only those few who turn out. Either way we get the government we deserve.

Robin - RIP

2005-10-18T08:34:00.000-04:00

A good man died on the morning of October 17. I never met him in person, I only know him thru this wonderful place called the Internet. One of my hobbies is model railroading, and Robin was a regular contributor to one of the forums I frequent. Robin made beautiful models. His models were even more amazing because his material of choice was what he called cereal-board, which was cardboard cut from empty cereal boxes. Yes, this man, armed with stuff we all throw in the trash along with snap-off knives, glue, and acrylic paint from the craft store, built models that were unmatched.

This isn't about his models though, this is about him. Robin didn't just post pictures of his completed models for everyone to marvel at, he posted step-by-step construction photos so we could all see his progression from an empty cereal box to a beautiful model. He took our good-natured teasing about the cereal company logos apparent in his models before he painted them. Whenever anyone commented on the quality of his work he encouraged them saying that if he could do it anyone could. He encouraged many of us, including me, to give it a try. This was his magic, not only in building models but in sharing his expertise with the rest of us and encouraging us.

I like to think that Robin is in a place where he has a large pile of cereal board, where he never runs out of glue or paint, and where the knife never slips and nicks his finger. I hope to meet him there someday, and I know he'll be as willing to teach me there as he was here.

My life, and that of many others, was vastly improved by this man I would never have even heard of were it not for a shared love of modelling and a place where people from all over the world could meet. The world will be a little worse now, there is one less artist, craftsman, teacher, and most importantly good man in it. Robin had a gift for teaching and inspiring. His criticism was always constructive, he freely offered advice to anyone who asked and just as willingly accepted advice from others.

I'll miss you Robin, thanks for everything.

Celebrity

2005-10-09T16:42:00.000-04:00

One day last week a New York City newspaper had on its front-page a headline and picture proclaiming that Tom Cruise and his other-half (whose name I’m insufficiently interested in to do a Google search to look it up) were expecting a baby. Now, if I were friends with the happy couple I’d undoubtedly be happy for them. Even though I never met either of them I still feel a general happiness for them as they prepare for their new arrival. But is it news?

I took a photojournalism class in college for an art requirement, and we were given the definition of “news”: whatever the editor thinks will sell newspapers. The picture of a smiling Tom Cruise certainly fit that description, but WHY does this sell newspapers? Why are Americans so engrossed with celebrities that they see a headline proclaiming that Tom Cruise is going to be a father and just HAVE to buy that newspaper?

This may seem a minor issue, but I can’t believe that there weren’t more important things to read about that day. There were laws passed, how do they affect me? Crimes were committed, how can I protect myself from them? Businesses succeeded and failed, how will that affect the economy? Our military is involved in Iraq, Afganistan, and elsewhere around the world, what happened? Iran and North Korea are threatening to build nuclear weapons, what’s happening there?

Worse than the fact of celebrities displacing news from the front page that actually has some effect on our lives is the fact that people actually listen to celebrities and take their opinions seriously, not because those opinions are coherent, informed and well thought-out but because they’re offered by celebrities. When Tom Cruise (and I’m really not trying to pick on him) offers medical advice on treating postpartum depression why should he be taken seriously? He shouldn’t, but some people probably did. When Sean Penn offers advice on foreign policy or when Sheryl Crow talks politics, why are they taken seriously?

Perhaps worse in the cult of celebrity are those people who are propelled into the public eye through events beyond their control and people assume that they are experts. The current media darling in this respect is Cindy Sheehan. Gold Star mothers get a lot of slack from me in what they say, especially in the days and weeks after they get their dreadful news. I can’t imagine the pain they feel. People who are in shock and mourning say harsh things. They may even continue to feel bitter toward the nation their child served and died for. But, the fact that you lost a loved one in the war doesn’t mean that you know whether or not that war is worth fighting or even if this country is worth fighting for. I’m not even going to get into what she’s doing to her son’s memory, that is between her and her conscience. I want to know what makes her an expert on foreign policy and military strategy?

Actors know about acting, if you want to hear an actor talking about what he or she knows watch Inside the Actor’s Studio. Gold Star mothers understand grief, if you’ve lost a child and want help coping with your loss I can’t think of a better person to speak to. If you need legal advice you don’t ask an actor who played a lawyer on TV, why do you listen to political advice from an actor who played a politician? A singer gets one vote just like I do, why should I vote the way that singer tells me because he’s famous?

It’s easy to blame the media, but the media only reflects what people want. If people buy newspapers with celebrity baby announcements on the front page then that’s what they’ll run. If people see such front pages, say “big deal” and keep walking they’ll start running real news. If people hear about celebrities discussing world politics on TV and change the channel then we’ll get some experts giving analysis on TV.

So I ask you, what’s more important to your life, what Congress did last week or what Brad Pitt did? Does what’s happening to Jennifer Aniston interest you more than who’s being considered for Supreme Court justice? Can you name more finalists on American Idol than you can your own Congressmen and Senators? Are you more familiar with People magazine than your own Constitution? Being an informed American takes effort, but if you can handle Fantasy Football you can handle following a Congressional election. If you can handle the alliances on Survivor, you can handle the Senatorial hearings on the Supreme Court nominees. The only person that can make that effort is YOU. If you’re more willing to write fan mail to a movie star than a letter about upcoming legislation to your Representatives, then they’ll do whatever they want and you have no one to blame but yourself. If you’d rather vote for American Idol than Senator, you have no cause for complaint when your Senator doesn’t represent you.

America

2005-10-02T17:40:00.000-04:00

I’ve thought long and hard about what my first “real” Blog entry would be. I wrote essays, articles if you will, on Capitalism and security, but I wanted something that would both provide an insight into both the world we live in and my view of it. Something that, when you read future posts, you’ll be able to say “That’s exactly what he was talking about in his first post”.

So I decided to write about the USA. From now on I’ll refer to it as America. Yes, I know there are two American continents and that the US is part of only one of them, but when I think of the country I live in I think of it as America, as in America the Beautiful, God Bless America, or just plain America. Spare me the comments that Brazil is in America too, I’m not talking about Brazil.

There is absolutely no place else in the entire world I’d rather live than in America. Other places may be nice to visit but I’ll always come back home. I think there are a few things that make America great. Before you get on my case, I know she’s not perfect. There’s room for improvement, but they’re improvements in scale, not in fundamentals. To become more perfect we need to further implement the things that make America great, not throw those things out and start over with something else.

Our system of government is the greatest in the world, and the reason why can be summed up in one simple phrase, government by the consent of the governed. Ultimate power in this country rests squarely in the people’s hands. No matter how bad you think your elected officials, from the local town council to the president, you have to remember that the people who voted put him/her there and those same people can remove him/her from office next election.

Our Constitution is a monument of simplicity and elegance. You can sit down and read the entire thing in a few hours, yet it provides the framework for a system of government that’s lasted over two centuries and governs the people from every other nation who came here looking for a better life. Imbedded in the Constitution is something unique, the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights. This specifically states that the people of this nation have rights that the government can’t take away except by due process of the law. The government can’t lock you up because you criticized said government. The government can’t tell you how, when, where, who or even if to worship. The government can’t search my home without my permission unless they have strong evidence, not suspicion, that I’ve done something illegal. These rights aren’t granted by the Constitution, they’re ours and the Constitution explicitly recognizes them with a sign that says “paws off”.

Our economy, even when it’s at its weakest, is still the strongest in the world. The “poor” people in this country have access to clean water, shelter and food. Nobody starves to death in the US because they can’t afford food. Our economy drives invention, art, technology, and literature. A kid who grew up poor by our standards (but who never went to bed hungry) can grow up to a good job, home ownership, and can sit at a computer on a Saturday morning typing an essay to offer to the world via the Internet. I personally know I’ll never be “rich” because I frankly don’t want to work hard enough to become rich. I’m comfortable and I’m perfectly happy to stay that way. I do know, and know of, people who are wealthy. Most of them got that way by working hard. The man who owns the hair salon my wife goes to has a much nicer home than I have. He’s also worked 70 and 80 hours a week for years to get where he is. I don’t begrudge him a dime of his money. If you want to make it here you can. My mother’s father came here from Norway, he took a job at the local shipyard cleaning the bathrooms, by the time he died he was foreman. That doesn’t happen anyplace else in the world.

One thing that sets Americans apart can best be summed up in the word “Spirit”. Look at our heroes. George Washington, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Robert E. Lee, William T. Sherman, Wyatt Earp, Helen Keller, Susan B. Anthony, Chesty Puller, Audie Murphy, Neil Armstrong. Todd Beemer. They’re big people and their stories make them bigger than life. For every big hero there are millions of small ones no one ever hears of, the nameless men who built the transcontinental railroad and weren’t going to let a bunch a mountains stop them. JFK (who was killed when I was five months old) summed it up when he said we choose to go to the moon not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard. American Spirit, there are bad guys to fight, bridges to build, and new territory to set foot on for no other reason than that no one’s been there yet.

It’s the American people who make this country great. The government is great because it’s in the hands of the people. The economy is great because the people make things, buy things, sell things, work and make money. I didn’t have to be a crane operator because my father was, he didn’t have to be a minister either. I could have had any job I wanted if I had the qualifications for it, the intelligence for it, and the willingness to work hard enough to make it all happen.

People say a lot of bad things about Americans, some are true and some are so obviously, provably false that they’re slanderous. We’re simplistic, we’re lacking in subtlety. I prefer to think of that as directness, we evaluate the situation and take whatever actions are required. We’re stupid. Absolutely not true. If we didn’t invent it we improved it. We’re trying to take over the world. That’s never been true, Americans have no stomach for Imperialism since we carved out our own nation. We don’t tax anyone who doesn’t have a say in our government. We repeatedly used our citizen-soldiers to save other nations and when the threat was over they went back home and started baby booms. People say bad things about our popular culture, our TV shows, movies, and fast food. What they don’t understand is that these things are popular because people like them and buy them. McDonalds is successful because people buy their product.

No, we’re not perfect. We still have work to do. Racism has taken a huge hit in my lifetime, it’s not gone but it’s on its way. There are still some people lacking the basic necessities of life. If they can’t work they need to be provided for, and if they can but lack the education or training that’s where the effort should be spent. In my opinion the biggest threat we have is from people who truly want to bring America, and all that makes it great, down. There are terrorists outside who want to destroy us because we dare to be free and happy. There are people within who would love to dismantle our government and set up a new one with them on top. America has seen such threats before, we’ve beaten them before and we’ll beat them again. It may be hard. I personally never saw a darker day than 9/11/2001, but thru it all I knew with absolute certainty that future history books will state that America stood and the terrorists fell.

I’ve thrown a lot out there today. I’ll be expanding on some of the details in the weeks and months ahead.

Hello Blogosphere!

2005-09-28T15:08:00.000-04:00

Yes, there's yet another blog, just what the world needs.

This will be a forum for me to rant, vent, and otherwise discuss topics of interest to me. Over time you'll get my views on religion (Christian), politics (Conservative), economics (Capitalist), music (Anything but rap) and anything else that piques my interest or torques my briefs that day.

I'd like your comments, I only ask that you be polite. If I say something that's not true, call me on it, tell me why it's not true, and tell me what is true. Beware though, something isn't false because you don't like it, and falsehood doesn't change to truth because it's repeated enough times in a loud or shrill enough voice.

I got the name for this Blog from a line from Shakespeare's King Henry IV: "By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death. I’ll ne’er bear a base mind: an’t be my destiny, so; an’t be not, so. No man’s too good to serve’s prince; and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next."

So pull up a chair, grab a cold one, and enjoy the ride.