Against the Wind

Found a blog today, a science blog. I decided to read the “mission statement,” and the author suggests that a mission statement is worth doing for a blog. So how do you dress up a mission statement that says, “I write because I must write.” It’s a sanity saver! And I get to show people some of the photos that I’ve taken.

Today, the photo is still from the Alhambra. After a longish wait on the plaza outside the Alhambra complex itself, we were ushered into…another garden! It’s easy to be seduced by all these gardens and the attention to water resources to think that the Islamic dynasties of Spain were “not so bad.” The reaction to them in the reconquest, and then the conquistadors that made their way to the new world, as well as the Spanish Inquisition, are not exactly selling points for Christianity! But I would argue that the restless economic activity unleashed by the new economic freedoms, though they were were likely only great in contrast to the highly structured submission to authority in Islam. Betsi, however was not a bit taken with the idea that Christianity might be preferred. As a Jew, she simply felt she had no horse in that race. Furthermore the Spanish Jews were expelled from Spain during the inquisition. I still have to submit that the fundamental philosophy of a creation that is knowable to human intellect which is foundation bed rock in Judaism or Christianity, is much to be preferred to lovely gardens and baths, where Allah is supreme, and his rule requires that you submit to his appointed rulers.

This is the courtyard where the petitioner’s waited to get a hearing with the vizier or for something truly important with the Sultan.

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Part of my mission is to pass along some of the bits of the web that I find interesting. Neither humor, nor scantily clad young women, but things that grab my quirky interests.

Megan McCardle spots a statistical logic error that bought a lot of grants from Bill Gates to support small schools. The Atlantic

Bowling with Our Own in one sense states the obvious, but we’re not allowed to mention this lest we be branded bigots, racists or whatever the epithet du jour might be. I’ve certainly observed this everywhere I’ve traveled in the world.

And David Warren writes another great column on growing up in the bubble of limited consequences that we try to provide our children. It’s not going to end well. A sample to whet your appetite:

I feel for middle-class, urban children today, who must come to adulthood almost proverb-free, and often enough with asthma, too, for they were exposed to neither wisdom nor dirt. Efforts made to sterilize both the intellectual and material environment, through political correctitude and hand cleanser, have left them unable to cope with the slightest exposure to the rich manure in which a civilization grows and flourishes. They’re left with nothing to hurl except the occasional spit-ball.

And if that’s not enough of a weekly reader, here is a snippet of history. FinancialSense

Once upon a time there was a nation, free and proud. It was armed and ready for war. Its warriors were battle-ready and disciplined. But the leaders of this nation were socialists, and they were opposed to their own country’s armed forces. In secret collaboration with a foreign power, they ordered their country’s disarmament. They eliminated military units, they slashed military spending, and promoted commanders who were willing to disband their own armed forces.

And what nation is that, in what era?

Dr. Sanity is back writing with force and shining her light on the utopianism that we suffer here.

A lone voice crying out in the wilderness of government regulation, more government regulation and the creeping “social justice” utopian (i.e., socialist) fantasies of the so-called ‘leaders’ in Congress:

It’s 8:15 ayem, and I’ve already had a long day. Tara called last night as I was playing online bridge to ask me to go pick up Q in the morning and take him to school, paying her water bill on the way. I suppose there were three stinky guys in that house last night, as they came home to find the water turned off. Seems Tara in the crush of to do’s overlooked the water bill.

So I woke before 5 dreaming that I’d gotten home from bridge today, had forgotten Quentin and that he was home alone all day in the house with no water and no phone. When I told him of that dream, he thought it was a great symbol of his increasing maturity and independence. I think it’s more like my sense of dancing always on the edge of some monumental screw up. What could be simpler than going to pay the water? I dreamed I just forgot it. Like I forgot that I needed to get the label I made on Monday onto the quilt project. Just ignored that to do. There’s something sick going on there and the dream was a clue. I just tried to google “boundary issues” to see if that fit the bill. I’m still as in my youth trying to self diagnose!

But the early to dos got done. Quentin and I had a nice visit as I drove him through town and to school.

Enough of my silly life.

Government in our lives? Sure bring on some more! Q & O is a libertarian site that I find some nuggets in. Yesterday there was this about the overreach of the “insurance reform” bill.

Of all people, Chuck Norris brings that point home with a vengeance. Unlike our lawmakers, he’s apparently actually read the House bill and found another nugget that is not only costly and none of the government’s business, but has nothing to do with health insurance reform.

It’s outlined in sections 440 and 1904 of the House bill (Page 838), under the heading “home visitation programs for families with young children and families expecting children.” The programs (provided via grants to states) would educate parents on child behavior and parenting skills.

The bill says that the government agents, “well-trained and competent staff,” would “provide parents with knowledge of age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains … modeling, consulting, and coaching on parenting practices,” and “skills to interact with their child to enhance age-appropriate development.”

You can read Norris’ fisking of the provision for yourself. He, of course, wants to know why a government agency is being legislated into existence to provide parents with “knowledge of age-appropriate child development” tools and wants to know whose principles and values would drive such teaching – the government’s or the parents. Uh, well, I don’t think you really have to ask, because there’s no reason to send out agents if they’re just going to teach the parent’s values.

The more imporant points are A) this is none of the government’s business and B) it has nothing to do with reforming health care insurance.

And in the Wall Street Journal, the realization that some of the sweetness of life may soon be in short supply.

Some of America’s biggest food companies say the U.S. could “virtually run out of sugar” if the Obama administration doesn’t ease import restrictions amid soaring prices for the key commodity.

In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack, the big brands — including Kraft Foods Inc., General Mills Inc., Hershey Co. and Mars Inc. — bluntly raised the prospect of a severe shortage of sugar used in chocolate bars, breakfast cereal, cookies, chewing gum and thousands of other products.

Sounded like an investment opportunity to me. So I went back to my youth and the Great Western sugar beet refinery in Sterling. I sure couldn’t find much about it online. I was trying to see who owns it…and if it’s an investment opportunity. Something about commodities being a great hedge against the coming inflation. But I sure didn’t find easily the information that I was looking for. I’m not even sure the refinery is still in business. But I found a collection online of photos from Sterling. Pixels are so cheap, that anywhere people walk, there must be a photo online! What’s ever to become of all this photography? Nothing for me to do but contribute to the clutter.

Last photo from the swim day. Almost exactly a month ago. I may go fiddle with the saturation, because in life, he really looked like the Coppertone ad as his swim trunks migrated south. Yup, a little touch moves it closer to what I was hoping to take a photo of…

The weather has been great today. Out walking for a bit.. at least 2.5 miles, and had great fun teaching. I also have had fun looking at the stock accounts that Mother left.
I’ve done every bit was well with my own accounts without the assistance of a finance professional. But an afternoon messing about with spread sheets is not all unpleasantness. At threeish Tara and boys pass through… Q is using my address to attend the school he’s going to. Rides the bus home. Still left over from Katrina madness, but it seems to be working.

One sunny December afternoon, Tara invited me to meet them in the park. She and Andrea were walking the perimeter and I trained my camera on the boys. So we’re in a siege of grandboy shots. They’re photogenic tykes, so I have lots of photos. For some reason my file uploader isn’t acting right. I’ll try again later.

A comment by tigerhawk on how we all become pigs at the trough when there are a few trillion dollars floating about. I don’t think it helps our moral character any more than too much allowance and not enough responsibility helps a teenager.

The most dispiriting thing about the event was that virtually all of the questions from the audience were directed at the Trenton dude and were variations on “how can I get my hands on some of that there stimulus money?” This being New Jersey it should not have surprised me…

Shrinkwrapped writes longish articles, but I find her psychotherapist’s take on politics and group psychology to be informative.

The question of whether or not Iran can be treated as an opponent with whom to work out a modus vivendi versus an enemy who must be fought revolves around an assessment of whether or not they are trapped in the paranoid projective dynamic. Roger Cohen makes the case for those who desire nothing more than talk:

… the hawks’ case against Iran depends on a vision of an apocalyptic regime — with no sense of its limitations — so frenziedly anti-Semitic that it would accept inevitable nuclear annihilation if it could destroy Israel first.

The presence of these Jews [the 25,000 remianing Iranian Jews-SW] undermines that vision. It blunts the hawks’ case; hence the rage.

This is just part of her discursive argument, but she rather destroys the Cohen argument I think.

And just for grins, from the New York Post

Dear Mainstream Media:

I’m a conservative who believes that other conservatives are fat, drug-stuffed, money-grubbing warthogs like Rush Limbaugh, or scary inbred backwoods retards like Sarah Palin.

So can I please be your go-to guy whenever you need a conservative viewpoint?

When you assemble an op-ed page or a panel discussion that has three or four liberal commentators - plus a liberal moderator (if this is TV) or a liberal news section (if this is print) - I volunteer to be the one voice you allow to speak for the loyal opposition.

I am available to write cover stories for Newsweek, hold down the other side of the New York Times op-ed seesaw against Paul Krugman and Co., or fill in whenever David Gergen is unavailable to supply analysis of President Obama’s next magnifiquent speech for CNN.

And this link from the BBC, a reminder that we live in a dangerous world, and wishing it away isn’t going to work. Hopey change? This is not what I hoped for.

Russia will spend nearly $140bn (£94.5bn) on buying arms up until 2011.

Higher oil revenues in recent years have allowed the Kremlin to increase the military budget, analysts say. But prices have averaged $40 a barrel in 2009 compared with $100 last year.

Outdated equipment

In his first address to a defence ministry meeting in his capacity as supreme commander, Mr Medvedev said considerable sums are being channelled towards developing and purchasing modern military equipment.

“Despite the financial problems we have to cope with today, the size of these sums has remained virtually the same as planned.”

Analysts say the brief war in Georgia exposed problems with outdated equipment and practices within Russia’s armed forces and led to calls for military modernisation.

President Medvedev’s remarks also appear significant for what they say about the diplomatic game between Moscow and the new administration in the United States, says the BBC’s James Rodgers in Moscow.

So with the world spinning out of control, do you buy a bunker? Or just keep on hoping for the best? I vote for the later.

Changes, changes. I don’t do them particularly well. As I mentioned yesterday, one of the evolving reasons for blogging was to keep in touch with Mother. As that reason is no longer operational, some rethinking is in order. I truly love the comments of Gail and Deb, my Quilting buddies, Linda, my long lost friend from pre high school… and through many changes until we lost touch. Aunt Nita comments often in a letter, Sara sometimes has time to write. Carlo, the ex, comments now and again

A blog can build a sense of community. I’d love to do what I can to extend the little community that has been built here. In all honesty, one of the bones I would pick with my mother is that no one’s life is so interesting as to be worth the effort of five books, or 4.5 as it turned out. Yet what is this blog but a near daily bit of exhibitionism of what I’m doing, reading, thinking? I know that among the names I’ve mentioned, great welcome is not felt for the “conservative” point of view that I’ve tried to point out in links. What audacity of me to hope I can educate liberals of the bankruptcy of many ideas that gird their minds. Yet, I continue to find things that are terribly interesting to me.

For example today I have collected links to an article on a village in the Yukon that is trying to install a small nuclear power plant. Energy issues are going to be big ones as we go through this slow down, recesssion, depression. A psychologist (Dr. Sanity) has links and comments about the development of morality as it respects artificial intellegence. Surely this is an interesting issue on the intersection of the humanities and the sciences.

Last I have a tale of the worst experience at the hands of an airline I’ve ever heard. How can I not share it?

Then there’s the photo of the day. Now from Christmas Eve.

Quentin wants me to take him home. NOW. I’ll finish later. But the gist is, what interests you, the readers?

Back again…Got Quentin home. He got Rex, his pet gerbil out of the cage to show me. Then he retired to his tree house to play his Mario Bros. video game on the hand held game player. It’s spring time in Louisiana.

Topic from my life that might be of interest? Losing weight (not! I eat when I’m hurting, and I’ve been suffering a bit through the last months.) teaching, kids and grandkids, bridge, quilting, light day trading, church…it’s hardly an exciting life I lead. But I’m content. What interests you? I am just writing to entertain myself? I’m ok with that too. I do need to develop a more entertaining style.

Here are the links

Powering the Yukon?

Galena, Alaska, could be the type specimen for remoteness. A tiny town of about 700 on a bend of the Yukon River, it has no roads in and depends on the river for food, fuel and supplies. The river is frozen eight to nine months of the year. Galena residents pay three times the national average per kilowatt hour for diesel-generated electricity. Alternative energy would have special appeal for Galena, but with an evening that stretches 20 hours in the winter, solar is out. With the help of Toshiba and its American holding, Westinghouse, Galena is thinking nuclear.

A Swiss Zoo confronts hippo overpopulation.

An article on some interesting AI questions… can AI have moral berings?

The Worst Airline Company in the World

After spending several weeks each in Iraq and Lebanon at the end of 2008, I bought a plane ticket to the U.S. from Beirut on December 22 and figured I had plenty of time to get home for Christmas. I had no idea, though, that I had purchased my ticket from the worst airline company in the world – Italy’s national carrier Alitalia – and that a two-hour layover in Rome would turn into an ordeal that lasted longer than a week.

The gray skies and the closed liquor store in Arkansas, along I-40 seemed to fit the mood of a day leaving Mother in the Cardiac ICU, with Dana about to arrive back in Tulsa. Driving all day Christmas eve day… to a nice dinner in Slidell, rather surreal. Aging and reaching that last battle is not a journey for the faint hearted. But even the faint hearted and terrified go there. I found those times back and forth, a long twelve hours on the road many many times to be gruelling. That bit I’m glad to be past. I came home knowing Mother was not going to last terribly long. Helpless before the coming days. Hoping as a true coward that somehow I’d not be called upon to do the bedside vigil. But I got there and did it. I’m glad now.

Today’s blog is really just two essays. The first is from the New York Times, and titled The end of the financial world as we knew it. A taste….

Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what?

To that end consider the strange story of Harry Markopolos. Mr. Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldn’t be anything other than a fraud. Mr. Madoff’s investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not merely improbable but mathematically impossible. And so, Mr. Markopolos reasoned, Bernard Madoff must be doing something other than what he said he was doing.

The second of two major links is to…. of all places, the Huffington Post. Harold Ambler has it well written…. Mr. Gore, apology accepted

Mr. Gore has stated, regarding climate change, that “the science is in.” Well, he is absolutely right about that, except for one tiny thing. It is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind.

What is wrong with the statement? A brief list:

And another try at a Round Robin quilt top. The pictures aren’t as good as I would like, but I am getting faster at putting everything together, so I may continue to use this technology. Time will tell.

One more link… This is over long, but the trend to making obesity a disease, and overeating a sickness of some sort is well SICK! I’m a fatty boobalatty, and I’m fighting the battle of the bulge, but I am not sick because I’m fat. I’m damn healthy. My metabolism would be the pride of a nation in times of famine. Luckily we’ve not seen famine in my lifetime. Obesity is the product of genetic tendencies and choices about what to eat. Nothing more. It does not ask for a tax on soft drinks or a special class of people who deserve some sort of phony sympathy. Keep your platitudes and let me deal with my own problems, thank you.

As respects the fusalage in Gaza, Linda’s remark is in the vein of “same ol’, same ol’.” True, but guess I’m crazy. I’d like to see the war fought till there was a clear winner and loser and we could go on to other battles.

The wedding photo of the day… here I have one that is almost as good as the photographer’s photos. Tara and Marianne attend to the last details of getting the dress in order.

Proverbs 8:8 - 9 (More words from Wisdom, crying at the gates)

All the words of my mouth are with righteousness;
Nothing crooked or perverse is in them.
They are all plain to him who understands,
And right to those who find knowledge.

Reading weekend type reading I ran into an old (2006) Jonah Goldberg article which says a lot about the other side of the political gulf. I’m sure I couldn’t say it better, but the nuts and bolts of his argument are almost like my plaint as I passed through the rebirth of jumping the abyss. My cry was, “how do you know what you know?” His is “are you certain about that?” Worth a read if you’re in a philosophical mood.

If you’re more interested in action, there’s some twitter chatter about the bomb throwing going on in Gaza. Johan Goldberg on certainty/uncertainty.

My Dear Sons,

We embark in the morrow to sail to the New World. I’m secreted in the bowels of the Mayflower with barrels of supplies for our journey, as the English would prefer to take me into custody again, and hang me. We are warned not to travel this late in the season, but we are at the end of our monies, and if we do not depart soon, I shall be discovered.

It’s a long and dangerous journey ahead, but with God’s blessing we shall prevail. We will first set about trading and making profit for the merchants who loaned money for our travels. Seven years of work we owe them, then our labors can be called our own. I heartily pray that before these seven years pass, you boys will have earned a passage and can come join us in the New World. Your mother and I shall miss you and your wives and children, and will work ceaselessly to see the day we are reunited.

The Speedwell is not seaworthy for the journey and is abandoned. We are 130 some odd passengers on the Mayflower, and I’ve paid the ship’s carpenter to construct a small area for your mother and brothers, Love and Wrestling so we may make the journey in some comfort. We have ammunition for hunting, a boat in sections we can use for fishing and sundry supplies of food and seed. We have tools to havest trees for our homes and buildings, and so with the grace of God we shall find new lives in this new land.

Love, and in fervent hopes of early reunion, Your Father, William Brewster

So, in the autumn of 1620 the Separitists set off. Their history is our history.

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I found an interesting reference in the Atlantic to experiments in trading. So far this economic collapsing bubble has cost Linda’s son his construction job, and Cuz Sara her position with Morgan Stanley. Tomorrow, I suspect the news will be full of GM and terms of government backing. Meanwhile…. from Virgina Postrel in the Atlantic

For more than two decades, economists have been running versions of the same experiment. They take a bunch of volunteers, usually undergraduates but sometimes businesspeople or graduate students; divide them into experimental groups of roughly a dozen; give each person money and shares to trade with; and pay dividends of 24 cents at the end of each of 15 rounds, each lasting a few minutes. (Sometimes the 24 cents is a flat amount; more often there’s an equal chance of getting 0, 8, 28, or 60 cents, which averages out to 24 cents.) All participants are given the same information, but they can’t talk to one another and they interact only through their trading screens. Then the researchers watch what happens, repeating the same experiment with different small groups to get a larger picture.

The great thing about a laboratory experiment is that you can control the environment. Wall Street securities carry uncertainties—more, lately, than many people expected—but this experimental security is a sure thing. “The fundamental value is unambiguously defined,” says the economist Charles Noussair, a professor at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands, who has run many of these experiments. “It’s the expected value of the future dividend stream at any given time”: 15 times 24 cents, or $3.60 at the end of the first round; 14 times 24 cents, or $3.36 at the end of the second; $3.12 at the end of the third; and so on down to zero. Participants don’t even have to do the math. They can see the total expected dividends on their computer screens.

Here, finally, is a security with security—no doubt about its true value, no hidden risks, no crazy ups and downs, no bubbles and panics. The trading price should stick close to the expected value.

At least that’s what economists would have thought before Vernon Smith, who won a 2002 Nobel Prize for developing experimental economics, first ran the test in the mid-1980s. But that’s not what happens. Again and again, in experiment after experiment, the trading price runs up way above fundamental value. Then, as the 15th round nears, it crashes.

And last, the photo. Tania needed a couple goes at getting her hair and makeup done so she’d be ready for the wedding. This was a run the week before. Rather unlike the story of Ina May, who reportedly decided a couple hours before her wedding it was time to wash her hair. Mother was aghast at such nonchalance, but Ina May is still hard to knock off balance. Anyway, the second go at Bridal Do.

Home again from the visit to Oklahoma. I really enjoyed visiting with my brothers. Robert posed several interesting questions while we were visiting. Robert talks in paragraphs, not the phrases and small bits of thought that I think in. One issue he was concerned about was something like this. First he posited a divide in how we explain/understand the world we live in. “Is the scientist’s explanation is the way to understand the world, or does religion offer us a better structure for understanding?” “If I take religious views to have a higher validity than science, is the Bible the divine, inspired word of God?” Light stuff eh? We’re related. What can I say?

I don’t accept the schism in the original question, and take that as a dodge to say, I don’t think I need to accept the Bible in such terms. Anyway, we had a thoughtful, thought provoking discussion around these issues. For me that was one of the high points of the trip. Clearly, I’m a nutcase. But you knew that.

Linda commented at length yesterday about the clouds gathering in India/Pakistan in view of the Islamist shoot ‘em up. Thank God for the Onion. They have that problem sorted out into terms we can all understand.

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Photography, and “It’s all about focus”

I continue to mess with the settings on my camera, and often get it wrong. But these are the best ‘gator in the wild’ photos I’ve ever almost taken.

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Pete sent me a link to a startling story… who needs fiction? His comment was that this should put some theory out of business. From the Daily Mail in the UK

The Papua New Guinea jungle has given up one of its darkest secrets - the systematic slaughter of every male baby born in two villages to prevent future tribal clashes.

By virtually wiping out the ‘male stock’, tribal women hope they can avoid deadly bow-and-arrow wars between the villages in the future.

‘Babies grow into men and men turn into warriors,’ said Rona Luke, a village wife who is attending a special ‘peace and reconciliation’ meeting in the mountain village of Goroka.

Read the whole thing if you have the stomach for it. I always have to look at the comments after such a story.

More review of news found online….from the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Pages, how to redeem American Education. The prescription?

1) Set high academic standards for all of our kids, supported by a rigorous curriculum.

2) Greatly improve the quality of teaching in our classrooms, supported by substantially higher compensation for our best teachers.

3) Measure student and teacher performance on a systematic basis, supported by tests and assessments.

4) Increase “time on task” for all students; this means more time in school each day, and a longer school year.

I was in a reverie as I drove to school today about how frustrating it is that such a simple thing as showing up to class is almost optional. When I was caught in traffic and could not make a class last month, I asked how to put that in the time sheets. I was told it basically made no difference. I got paid whether I made class or not. So it’s not hard to figure out that putting in the effort to teach a class well doesn’t matter much in the reward structure either. What a goofy system we have in place now. And we wonder why it doesn’t really work too well?

Drove to Houston today…quilt stuff begins in earnest tomorrow.  But spoke to Dana on the “HANDY.”  He and Robert were man handling mother’s move from two large rooms into one small one.  She’s not terribly happy with the entire deal.  Point of the mention is that Dana has posted some photos from the nuptuals.  He was playing music during the entire tying of the knot, so no photos from that phase, but several in directories at his website.  The photos look a bit distorted as they’re crammed into a dimention not suited, but click on any that appeal and see the phone camera photos he took to share with Mother.

One reason for going to Houston was to share the quilt tops that Gail and Deb and I have been working on all year.  I hope to finish mine during the week.  It’s almost there, but not quite.  Love deadlines.  They make such a great whooshing sound as they run past me!