As my time at the undisclosed location comes to a close -- I'll go so far as to name it the Tampa region -- I'd like to take a moment to speak to what I'll remember about the place.
Here a couple of Mr. Wolf's bikes.
The "small" one in the foreground -- it's a 1200 cc Harley -- is one I spent about a month riding. It's a good little bike, though you can't go a day without stopping by a gas station. The bigger one with the red rims and the whitewall tires is his bagger.
Here is my current bike, which I have named "Lady Luck." There are good and sufficient reasons for this which I won't go into as at this time.
Lady Luck outside a hole in the wall on the Gulf of Mexico which I highly recommend to those of you who normally carry knives about your daily business. The guitarist on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday is the most talented I've ever seen in person. He not only seems to know every song written between 1940 and the present day, he can improvise with them -- and lead his three-or-four piece band along while he does it. The fourth piece is a harmonica, wielded sometimes by an old hippie who drops in when he feels like it.
Not every bike survived the approach.
A shrine to the owner, Master Sergeant John Susor, whose service was in WWII. The place is full of tributes to him, especially news clippings with headlines like: "Bar owner says he was acting in self-defense when he took up his pickaxe" or "Bar owner arrested for gambling" or "Notorious bar owner running for mayor." He passed on in 2008, and I'm sorry I didn't have the honor of meeting him in person.
One of two cats and two Pit Bulls who live at this bar. The elder Pit Bull is quite old, and mostly sleeps on the couch nearest the band. She is quite content to have a man -- a man fearless of dogs, at least -- sit on the couch and spend an hour petting her.
The rules posted on the bar advise complainers, "The animals live here, and you don't." Fair warning!
Ah, "folk art."
More folk art. The table is as off-level as any I've ever played on, and we could only find one pool stick in the place with cork on its tip. Good game, all the same.
If any of you find yourselves with business at SOCOM or CENTCOM, and share my own impulses, you could do worse for yourselves.
Truck Driver
The personal part of this story is tragic, but the basic facts of truck-driving are universal.
His truck is governed to 68 miles an hour, because the company he leases it from believes it keeps him and the public and the equipment safer."If."
The truck he passed was probably running under 65 mph to conserve fuel. You see, the best these trucks do for fuel economy is about 8 miles per gallon. With fuel at almost $4 per gallon -- well, you do the math. And, yes, that driver pays for his own fuel.
He needs to be 1,014 miles from where he loaded in two days. And he can't fudge his federally mandated driver log, because he no longer does it on paper; he is logged electronically.
He can drive 11 hours in a 14-hour period; then he must take a 10-hour break. And considering that the shipper where he loaded held him up for five hours because it is understaffed, he now needs to run without stopping for lunch and dinner breaks.
If he misses his delivery appointment, he will be rescheduled for the next day, because the receiver has booked its docks solid (and has cut staff to a minimum). That means the driver sits, losing 500-plus miles for the week.
Which means his profit will be cut, and he will take less money home to his family. Most of these guys are gone 10 days, and home for a day and a half, and take home an average of $500 a week if everything goes well.
Mead
Walter Russell Mead has been producing a lot of interesting stuff lately. I think I almost wholly agree with this piece, which may be biasing me in judging its quality; but I think it is rightly put.
Doc Russia used to quote Kipling's "The Gods of the Copybook Headings." Yes, I remember thinking: that's right. The old rules, the simple rules, the ones so many thought they left behind with childood -- thought they had become too sophisticated to believe -- are the real rules of the world.
Hostage-Taking
In the recent blanket coverage of the debt crisis, the ongoing story about Congress's failure to extend funding for the Federal Aviation Administration got a bit lost. The limited coverage concentrated on the ping-pong aspect of legislative gamesmanship. Something rang a bell, though, when I read that the House had passed a bill with a short-term extension of funding, which the Senate refused either to vote on or to propose an alternative to, instead demanding that the House try again with something more palatable to the Senate. Hey, that sounds a lot like what happened with the debt ceiling. In my line of work, we call that negotiating against yourself.
The New Civil Discourse
"If the budget is balanced, the terrorists will have won."I need that on a T-shirt.
8 Things Never
This is one of those pointless humanizing pieces that news agencies run more for entertainment than for serious reasons. Still, since we often talk about the relations between men and women -- or man and wife -- let's look at it.
They get off to a very bad start here: "One of the best parts about marriage is being so comfortable with your hubby that you can say just about anything to him. But if you don’t watch your mouth, sometimes the ugly truth comes out..."
So, these concepts are supposed to be truths that you shouldn't say to your husband. Ugly truths. About him.
1. "You're just like your father."
I don't know -- this one doesn't seem bad to me. I'd take it as a compliment, in large part because I know I'm not very much like my father (though we look alike); he's a better man than I am in many respects. Though he has his flaws, as all men do, overall I think of him as a shining example of what a good man is like: a volunteer firefighter, a loyal husband and father, a former staff sergeant and drill instructor in the US Army.
2. "When are you going to find a new job?"
Job-related questions are very touchy for any man in modern American society, because they get at the core role that society expects him to fulfill. Unhappily, questions about his job are going to be received by most American men as questions about his whole worth as a human being.
That's improper -- it is also philosophically out of order, as his essential nature is not related to his employment but to his ability to exercise virtue in a vigorous and rational way. Employment can be a way of doing that, or it can simply be a private struggle to provide yourself and your family with the means to exercise virtue in other spheres: as a thinker, or a writer, or a mountain-climber, a horseman, or -- for those with the calling -- a man of God.
Fixing that problem will make it much easier to talk about the employment issues. Once he is in order in his soul, the question of how he makes his living will be of far less importance. As it should be! What a waste of our lives, to focus as much as we do on what Elise likes to call the 'circular' business of just earning enough to get by.
3. "My mother warned me you'd do this!"
I would find this one intriguing. I would like to know what my wife's mother warned her about -- she was a very interesting lady, and I liked her a lot.
4. "Just leave it -- I'll do it myself!"
Since we're talking about the 'ugly truth,' the concept is going to be 'You're incapable of doing a good job here.' This need not be unpleasant to hear: I am always glad to discover that my wife would rather reorganize the pantry without my assistance. However, this certainly could be said in a hateful way, and anything that sounds like "Go away you incompetent idiot" will probably be received as the insult that it was intended to be.
5. "You always..." or "You never..."
Yes, this is wisely avoided in all circumstances, and for all audiences.
6. "Do you really think those pants are flattering?"
The likely answer: "How should I know?" Most men wear pants that conform to the kind of pants they were taught to wear at work or in the military. The question of whether they are "flattering" never enters either consideration: the question is whether they are the proper kind of pants for that environment. If I don't look good in them, it's very likely because I don't look all that good. We can't be blaming the pants for that.
7. "Ugh, are we hanging out with him again?"
I see the point, although in general married couples find it nearly impossible to remain actively engaged with single friends.
8. "Please watch the kids. But don't take them here, or do this, or forget that..."
There is a rule that will serve as a useful guideline for women dealing with men: "You can tell me what to do, or how to do it. Pick one."
There are exceptions, of course, but in general it's best to learn to let go and give your husband some autonomy in how he executes the tasks set for him. Or, if there is something you really need him to do in a particular way (say, you want the house painted, but it's important that it be painted green and not just any color he likes) you should probably find a way to convince him to do the task short of telling him to do it. "If you paint the house, then I'll..." is the kind of strategy that avoids telling him to do it, which means that (if he agrees to do it) you can give him very specific guidance on how you want it done without irritating him.
That, at least, is my advice; you may find that your own experience is otherwise. Feel free to say so in the comments!
Italian Sports
This seems like it would be fun.
What strikes me about a lot of these sports is that they've been reinvigorated recently -- this one in 1995. That's interesting.
We're Here to Help
In "The Compassion Trap," James Delong at The American Enterprise notes the dilemma we create when we obey a compulsion to help without a commitment to bear the cost without grudging. In the Florida version of the lawsuit against Obamacare, for instance, the government justified the individual mandate on the ground that the government had previously decided to make emergency medical treatment mandatory; it followed, therefore, that irresponsible citizens must not be permitted to take a free ride.
The Florida judge countered that perhaps the problem was with the mandate for free emergency care. I think the problem is instead with the double-thinking that permits us to congratulate ourselves for our compassionate extension of free emergency medical care, while at the same time resenting the recipients' failure to make adequate pre-arrangements to pay us back.
So, because we are not willing to let people suffer consequences, we, acting through the government, must control increasingly large dimensions of everyone’s behavior for the sake of our own amour-propre. . . . When anyone tries to call a halt, the trump card is played—the children! We might let you die in the gutter, but how can we possibly let your children do so?
A Pollster Who Gets It Right
A left, or "center-left," pollster actually listens to what people are saying. It's fairly amazing to realize that they still can hear it, the ones who decide to listen.
[I]n smaller, more probing focus groups, voters show they are fairly cynical about Democratic politicians’ stands. They tune out the politicians’ fine speeches and plans and express sentiments like these: “It’s just words.” “There’s just such a control of government by the wealthy that whatever happens, it’s not working for all the people; it’s working for a few of the people.” “We don’t have a representative government anymore.”Not quite powerless. We can break it. That is what lies behind the Tea Party's "intransigence" on the debt ceiling: the firm conviction that it is better to destroy this system than to save it.
This distrust of government and politicians is unfolding as a full-blown crisis of legitimacy sidelines Democrats and liberalism....
GOVERNMENT operates by the wrong values and rules, for the wrong people and purposes, the Americans I’ve surveyed believe. Government rushes to help the irresponsible and does little for the responsible. Wall Street lobbyists govern, not Main Street voters. Vexingly, this promotes both national and middle-class decline yet cannot be moved by conventional democratic politics. Lost jobs, soaring spending and crippling debt make America ever weaker, unable to meet its basic obligations to educate and protect its citizens. Yet politicians take care of themselves and party interests, while government grows remote and unresponsive, leaving people feeling powerless.
Read on:
Our research shows that the growth of self-identified conservatives began in the fall of 2008 with the Wall Street bailout, well before Mr. Obama embarked on his recovery and spending program. The public watched the elite and leaders of both parties rush to the rescue. The government saved irresponsible executives who bankrupted their own companies, hurt many people and threatened the welfare of the country. When Mr. Obama championed the bailout of the auto companies and allowed senior executives at bailed-out companies to take bonuses, voters concluded that he was part of the operating elite consensus. If you owned a small business that was in trouble or a home or pension that lost much of its value, you were on your own. As people across the country told me, the average citizen doesn’t “get money for free.” Their conclusion: Government works for the irresponsible, not the responsible.The list of recommendations for Democrats is refreshing; but it is important that Democrats recognize that the alternative is the end of the system. The public is done with it. Wall Street and Washington are alike, says Ms. Megan McArdle, in being mostly interested in 'what keeps the checks flowing' -- but that option is closed save in the shortest term. The system will reform fundamentally or, if that is too hard, it will burn. The end of the world is not too high a price to break an unjust system, for 'the end of the world,' on these terms, already has happened more than once.
Everything they witness affirms the public’s developing view of how government really works. They see a nexus of money and power, greased by special interest lobbyists and large campaign donations, that makes these outcomes irresistible.
For the White Horse knew EnglandIf it comes to that, I shall abide it. For the moment, the establishment appears to have given itself one last chance. As they love their lives and fortunes -- I will not speak of their sacred honor -- they had better take care in how they spend it.
When there was none to know;
He saw the first oar break or bend,
He saw heaven fall and the world end,
O God, how long ago.
For the end of the world was long ago,
And all we dwell today
As children of some second birth,
Like a strange people left on earth
After a judgment day.
For the end of the world was long ago,
When the ends of the world waxed free,
When Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves,
And the sun drowned in the sea.
The Jacksonian Party has a more hopeful take on the whole business.
Baby Guards
Baby GuardsI'm thinking it would be a bad idea to make a threatening move toward this distant baby relative of mine -- a first cousin twice removed. I haven't seen my cousin (his grandmother) for many decades, but we keep in touch through Christmas cards and photos, recognizing in each other the true dog-madness.
Madness in Command
An article in the Wall Street Journal challenges a fundamental idea that we use in choosing leadership, assigning security clearances, and indeed even in determining responsibility in the legal sense of the term. Maybe what we need in a leader is madness...
When not irritably manic in his temperament, Churchill experienced recurrent severe depressive episodes, during many of which he was suicidal. Even into his later years, he would complain about his "black dog" and avoided ledges and railway platforms, for fear of an impulsive jump. "All it takes is an instant," he said.There's a lot of sense to the concept. However, we routinely engage in psychological screening of job candidates, especially for military or leadership positions. The only jobs we don't psychologically screen for are elected officials, many of whom do seem to experience some of the less productive forms of madness -- an intense focus on their own importance, for example. If the theory is right, these tests could be stripping out the very people best suited to military leadership in a genuine crisis. And why should we not believe that? Many generals, like Sherman or Grant, found a success in war that eluded their peacetime efforts: Sherman was a repeated failure, and Grant an alcoholic whose brilliance in maneuvering an army at war was not equaled when he became the leader of the bureaucracy during peacetime.
Abraham Lincoln famously had many depressive episodes, once even needing a suicide watch, and was treated for melancholy by physicians. Mental illness has touched even saintly icons like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom made suicide attempts in adolescence and had at least three severe depressive episodes in adulthood.
Aristotle was the first to point out the link between madness and genius, including not just poets and artists but also political leaders. I would argue that the Inverse Law of Sanity also applies to more ordinary endeavors. In business, for instance, the sanest of CEOs may be just right during prosperous times, allowing the past to predict the future. But during a period of change, a different kind of leader—quirky, odd, even mentally ill—is more likely to see business opportunities that others cannot imagine.
Maybe we should consider this a reason to vote for someone: that he, or she, is sensitive enough to reality to be depressed now and then!
Discourse
"I'd rather be a hobbit than a troll," says one Congressman to another, in reference to the premier issue of political interest today.
Mainstreaming, indeed!
Tropical Storm Promise
Tropical Storm PromiseTwo Weeks
Two weeks from today I should be headed back to the Hall from the "undisclosed location" that has taken up the last few months of my life. I'll be sure to wear a helmet... at least part of the way.
Phoenix Claws
Phoenix ClawsOur neighbors started up a small-scale chicken operation this spring. Earlier this week, it was time to slaughter the excess 3-month-old roosters, who were starting to fight. Max, the man of the household, was kind enough to catch up the roosters one by one, put them in the killing cone, and cut their throats. His wife and I then plucked and cleaned them with the aid and technical advice of his mom, for whom this was a common task earlier in her life. We're lucky to have her experience to draw on. I'm afraid our speed wasn't up to what we'd been reading about: 4-1/2 seconds to pluck one bird! We tentatively learned how to scald and pluck and gut the birds, spending the better part of three hours to get nine of them all done and on ice. But we'll get faster now that we've got the hang of it.
My neighbors didn't want the feet, so I took them home and boiled them down into stock. My husband recommends getting the heads next time, too, but I'm going to have to work up to that gradually. The feet I thought I was equal to. It turns out they make a very fine stock, being so rich in cartilage. This picture isn't of my own stock, but it looks the same: as firm as Jello once it cools. I got a solid gallon of rich stock out of 30 feet (they did six more chickens after I left). I had taken home a rooster the first night, which my husband obligingly roasted, and then I made up a nice batch of chicken and dumplings with the leftover roast chicken and half of the stock the next day. I used my East Texas aunt's housekeeper's simple dumpling recipe, which produces a pasta-noodle style of dumpling rather than the biscuit-drop variety:
1/2 cup Crisco or lard, melted in
1/2 cup hot water
1/2 t salt
2 cups flour
1 egg
Whip up the melted shortening and hot water until creamy, then beat in the egg until fluffy. Stir in the flour to incorporate, then roll it out to 1/8-inch thick on a floured surface. Let it rest a few minutes, then slice it up into bite-sized pieces and drop them into the boiling chicken soup, leaving them to cook until you like the texture of the cooked dumplings (a few minutes, depending on how thin you got them).
I took half of the finished dish back over to Max and Marydell. I revealed the chicken-foot origins of the stock to her, but she didn't choose to tell Max. Today I mentioned it to him and got the expected ewwww response. What the heck: I strained out the toenails, didn't I? And he'd already admitted how delicious it was. Wait till I make up a batch with the heads.
Asian cultures prize the chicken feet in all kinds of dishes. The Chinese, I understand, call them "phoenix claws." In my household, the stock is for us and the dogs get to eat the de-boned discarded solids, as they always do when I make stock.
NYT Argument against interest
Give it up, would-be conservative academics, argues the New York Times:
Dr. Yancey, who describes himself as a political independent with traditional Christian beliefs and progressive social values, advises nonliberal graduate students to be discreet during job interviews. “The information in this research,” he wrote, “indicates that revealing one’s political and religious conservatism will, on average, negatively influence about half of the search committee one is attempting to impress.”...There is at least some chance that academia might choose you precisely because you don't share their views -- the virtue of diversity is, after all, supposed to be at the core of contemporary academic society. In theory, at least.
If you were a conservative undergraduate, would you risk spending at least four years in graduate school in the hope of getting a job offer from a committee dominated by people who don’t share your views?
You might well select another career for yourself — but you wouldn’t exactly call it self-selection.
NEH on REL
The NEH continues its assault on Robert E. Lee. The piece is worth reading, I suppose, in that it shows how little they are able to muster themselves to the work. The most they can really do is convict a faction of historians; the truth is, they have almost nothing to say against General Lee himself.
To answer the question they ask -- how could a man like this have become a national hero? -- res ipsa loquitur. The trauma of the war turned many hands, and even good hands, to evil work; but the General seems to have kept his faith, and done so well that even his enemies could only praise him. It is right and proper to honor those who manage such hours so well.
Mercenaries
Greyhawk has a piece on Hillary Clinton's Mercenary Army. As to which, I always think of the poem by A. E. Housman.
Epitaph on Army of Mercenaries (1914)That Iraq has been abandoned by God, I would not defend; but perhaps he has made provisions we might not have expected.
THESE, in the day when heaven was falling
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages, and are dead.
Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.
Charity and Goodwill
Susannah Breslin writes a rather biting piece on women at blogging conferences. The most important part of the piece is on a tangent to its main point, so we'll treat that first.
For example, this month Love Drop is helping the Withrow family. Felicity Withrow is four. She was recently diagnosed with brain cancer. She has a brain tumor that is attached to her brain stem. On top of this, Felicity’s mother is pregnant. Love Drop is trying to raise $5,000 to help the Withrow family with Felicity’s radiation treatments. So far, they’ve raised $2,500, but they need to raise $2,500 more. It’s too bad Mountain Dew would rather give who knows how much to have some “young, cute chick” natter on about Mountain Dew than give $2,500 to the Withrow family to help their daughter not be sick.Is that too bad? Mountain Dew probably helps many children not be sick, by providing jobs and health insurance to their parents; it may be that there is a greater good being worked than is obvious.
Nevertheless, watch the video.
It is a hard year for charity. We recently finished our Project VALOUR-IT fundraiser, and did not reach the goal in spite of strong last minute strides; and we are very tightly tied to those being helped. This charity has raised only half of what it meant to raise for the little girl, with barely a handful of days left in the month devoted to her.
The reasons for this are obvious: the weakness of the economy, the difficulty of predicting how much you will be able to spare from your own duties and needs. That is to say, it is the weakness of Mountain Dew -- of them and others like them -- that makes it so hard to raise these funds. If people could easily get such jobs, or felt secure in the ones they had, charity would not be so hard to find.
Ms. Breslin makes a larger point about the relative shallowness of female bloggers, but I think she may be pointing her weapon in the wrong direction. The problem isn't female bloggers, but panels about female bloggers. The few women who compete on even terms are as good as anyone; there just aren't as many. If you insist on having a panel about "women bloggers," then, you're going to get a lot of folks on that panel who aren't as interesting as the ones who run at the top.
This is akin to Raymond Chandler's point made in his famous essay "The Simple Art of Murder."
The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published. The average—or only slightly above average—detective story does. Not only is it published but it is sold in small quantities to rental libraries, and it is read.We see much the same economy at work in the academy, where men outnumber women among the serious arts and sciences. It is not that the women who do well in those arts and sciences are less serious than the men; there just aren't as many of them. This seems to have to do with the fact that the IQ curve for women is less flat, meaning that there are fewer female idiots and fewer female geniuses. The average woman isn't less intelligent, less interesting or more self-absorbed than the average man; but the average man doesn't get featured on a panel. Because we are interested in showing that we are interested in women, the average (or slightly above average) woman does.
Take heart, then, Ms. Breslin.