Update to Leviathan 2007

I wrote a poem Leviathan 2007. Some of the ideas may have seemed exaggerated to some readers. If you are one of them, you might want to reread it and then look at this. Thanks to my niece Genevieve for bringing this to my attention.

On hysteria

I’ve always had a withering contempt for people who panic in a crisis, spread rumors, and make things worse. It is one reason I don’t watch TV news, since that is their primary technique. I understand that at a personal level some element of panic is involuntary when it hits, but it still strikes me as cowardice not to overcome it. One of the really beautiful things about becoming a pilot is that the training deals exactly with that issue and it carries over into the rest of one’s life.

It is no surprise then that I am laughing at the hysteria over the swine flu, at all levels, from the national governments, to the airport managers, to the school districts, to the general public. I was however able to do something about it this week which is unusual. Ordinarily when the herd stampedes I can try not to join in but I don’t have much of a way to make a statement or take a stand.

On Friday the American Film Institute here in Dallas had a special screening of a Mexican film. My Spanish literature class had decided to go a few weeks ago. Naturally a good number of the people in the theater, which was packed, had recently traveled to Mexico, and some of our own group included friends from outside the class who live in Mexico City and were visiting Dallas this week. We then went out to eat, about fifteen of us, in a crowded restaurant, and had one of those really great evenings where the food and company just click. We greeted each other as always, with kisses and abrazos, and we tasted each others food and cocktails. We could not have given a more hospitable opportunity to the virus had that been our intention. It wasn’t, but we all decided that we are not going to join in the ridiculous worldwide panic. We were well aware of it, we talked and laughed about it, and I’m very proud of everyone for not letting it frighten them.

There may come a time if the virus mutates when precautions will be sensible and not hysterical overreaction. That time is not yet here. If you’re hiding in your bed shaking in fear about the swine flu today, thanks for the laughs.

For some sober science on flu epidemics and what governments are doing see this video and these comments.

Faux Pas

In 1989 I was working with a small computer company with offices in a squat, Steelcase-grey building located in the plebian 12th arrondisement of Paris. There was no sense of the style and flair we associate with France. The employees were mostly young computer nerds which was a culture I knew so I felt at home. I was the only American there and my command of French was weak so I often was unsure of what was going on around me.

One day we were told to report to the small conference room. On arriving I saw the table covered with snacks, plastic utensils, and bottles of wine. A birthday party? A celebration for landing a big account? I didn’t know and I couldn’t make out what people were saying.

It turned out that it was the annual arrival of the Beaujolais Nouveau. The atmosphere was relaxed. The boss made a short speech interrupted with jokes from the staff. Most people, including me, were smoking. As was common, there were few ashtrays even though almost everyone was a smoker, so most people just flicked the ashes on the floor and only looked around for one of the few ashtrays when it was time to dispose of the butt. Many butts were just dropped on the concrete floor and ground out with a shoe and left for the janitors to clean up after hours. I still wasn’t used to that but I was trying to fit in so I overcame my scruples smoked without an ashtray.

After about twenty minutes the gathering broke up and a few people stayed behind to clean up. I was one of them and this raised a few eyebrows as people of my rank weren’t expected to help clean up. I didn’t realize it but I had drawn attention to myself that would inflame what came next.

There was a large trash can on wheels with a plastic bag lining. We were making stacks of the plastic cups and plates and carrying these over to the can and dropping them in. For each stack, food was scraped from plates onto the top plate in a stack and then the now emptied plate was added beneath it to the stack. Similarly wine was poured into one cup and the empties were stacked beneath. When the top plate or cup was full, the stack was carried to the can and thrown out and one returned to the table to clean off some more. On one trip to the can I dropped the butt of the cigarette I had just finished into the top cup on the stack I was carrying so it would be extinguished in the liquid and I could safely drop it in the garbage and not have to drop in on the floor and grind it out there.

Instantly the room went silent, everyone stared daggers at me, and then began whispering to each other. I had no idea why but I know a lynch mob forming when I see one. Quickly a friend of mine said, “We have to forgive him. He’s an American and doesn’t know what he did.” This got a laugh and I went along still not knowing what I had done. That was explained to me later.

When I was a Cub Scout we were taught to treat the American flag reverently, like a holy relic. Never let it touch the ground, never fly it in the rain, and when it’s frayed and torn burn it honorably, never just throw it in the trash. For us, it was no longer just a rag on a stick as it might appear to someone not brainwashed by the Cub Scouts.

Wine is similarly protected by a set of taboos in French culture. Even awkward computer nerds who are not oenophiles and who lack most social graces know better than to drop a cigarette butt into a plastic cup of leftover wine from half a dozen guests even at the very moment they are throwing it into a garbage can.

My bad.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Elizabeth Gilbert is the best-selling author of Eat, Pray, Love. She gave a talk at TED that I just saw yesterday. She has wonderful stage presence and high intelligence which made for an arresting presentation.

She examined creativity and stress. Why do we have so many artists who succumb as drunks, suicides, mental cases? What is the link between creativity and stress in our culture? She looked at her own life. She’s now written an international best seller and there is a good chance she will never do anything as good again. People ask her if she is afraid of that, she asks herself, and of course she is. Her father was a chemical engineer and never in his life had these sorts of doubts about himself and no one came to him to ask if he did because we all know chemical engineers don’t have that kind of problem. Why is it so hard for artists?

She looked to history and found that in ancient Greece and Rome the culture did not think that the burden of creation was the artist’s alone. They believed that there were messengers from the gods, sort of invisible fairies or angels, who inspired artists. The Greeks called these demons and the Romans, more tellingly, called them geniuses. The genius is not the artist. The artist is inspired by a genius. So the artist is only part of a team and her success or lack of it is a team problem, not a personal one. These geniuses come arbitrarily, unpredictably, and not to everyone. So a person who creates is at their mercy and no amount of self improvement or fanatic labor can change that. Ms. Gilbert finds this a calming and very attractive belief. It banishes the fear. No need to hide in the bottle or in lunacy.

Her research finds that we in the West lost this in the Renaissance when we adopted a secular outlook. What we lost was the sense of the divine in Art. She tells a story of Arab dancers who performed in the moonlight in the deserts of Morocco over a thousand years ago and when one dancer would have that rare breakthrough and attain to transcendent performance the spectators would chant “Allah, Allah, Allah!” recognizing the hand of God in the performance. When the Arabs conquered Spain and Arabic invaded Spanish this became the “Olé, Olé, Olé!” we hear at bullfights and flamenco dances.

Ms. Gilbert closes by inviting the audience to return to this belief system, as she has, despite their secular heritage. She receives a warm, standing ovation. You can see the whole video yourself here.

Am I the only one laughing out loud?

I can’t hear you and I didn’t hear anyone laughing on the soundtrack. After all, they just attended a revival meeting of the sort that Billy Graham used to run which is generally scorned by the scientists who attend TED. These are the same people who give enthusiastic applause to atheists like Richard Dawkins and certainly defend Science against Religion at every opportunity in their daily lives. What happened? She stroked their egos. We’re all creatives here and we suffer terribly for it, she said to them in so many words.

Then she offered them the balm of superstition. I do admire her originality. Most people come to Religion for fear of death. A few come for fear of wickedness unbound by divine law. Ms. Gilbert will have none of this. She turns to God for fear of writer’s block.

Olé, Olé, Olé!

Newspapers, sic transit gloria

That newpapers are in trouble is not news. However understanding how they managed to slide into bankruptcy is a little more complicated. Jeff Jarvis has an excellent summary.

The Newspaper Association of America is meeting in San Diego this week and they’re preaching up at their own choir loft with angry, self-righteous fire and brimstone about their plight. Today, Google CEO Eric Schmidt will address them, but he’ll be polite because that’s the way he is and because there’ll be a few hundred aging but armed publishers with blunderbusses aimed at his heart. They need to hear a new message, a blunt message from the outside. Here’s the speech I think they should hear:

You blew it.

Read the whole article.

Forty-eight

Eight is double four
Lower US seen from Alaska
Winner of WWII
California Gold Rush
Triple Sweet Sixteen

How old Becky would have been today

From my journal on a restless night

On Sunday, October 5, 2008 at 3:14 AM I am thankful for

• My dog Veronica
• My friend John
• My friends Son & Belle
• My health
• My house
• My Weber natural gas grill
• My car
• My books
• My mind
• Quicken
• Netflix
• Amazon.com
• Apple
• Bubbies pickles
• Yogurt
• Challah
• Baguettes
• Cheese
• Ice water
• Gunpowder tea
• Sweetmarias.com
• Palm Centro
• Sudoku
• Levenger.com
• Pelikan pens
• Eagle Creek bags
• Randy Travis
• John Stewart
• Bill Maher
• George Carlin
• David Letterman
• Dr. Gates
• Katrina my stylist
• Amy Harrod of Four Paws
• Cindy my trainer
• Barack Obama
• Bonne Maman preserves
• Colombo Salami
• Dole Frozen Fruit
• Dickie’s BBQ
• Shakespeare
• Sophocles
• Montaigne
• Vonage.com
• American Express Membership Rewards Pay with Points for Travel
• Nice customer service reps at Sprint today
• Pharmacist, cashiers, baggers at Market Street
• Greenies dental dog bones
• Sylvania daylight 6500 K CFL’s
• Gunpowder tea
• Yixing clay teapot
• iRoast home coffee roaster
• washing machine and dryer
• crushed ice and water dispenser in the refrigerator door
• Solo automatic dog door for Veronica
• SMU Informal courses
• JL Borges
• My friends Jay and Fran
• My lost friends Tony and Agnes
• Panasonic wireless phones
• Jacuzzi tub
• Flannel sheets
• A. Testoni shoes
• University of Chicago GSB glass mug
• Grande Communications high speed cable Internet access
• Efseroff and staff, DDS
• Memories of Becky
• My brother Joel and his 2nd family
• Time in which to overcome difficulties
• Time to enjoy things
• Time to learn
• Airline travel
• On line travel websites
• Tradeking discount broker
• Le Monde Diplomatique
• NY Times
• Slate.com
• The Atlantic Magazine
• James Fallows
• Andrew Sullivan
• KCRW Santa Monica and the team at Left, Right, and Center
• KERA 90.1 Dallas
• NPR
• BBC World Service
• La Rochefoucauld
• Oscar Wilde
• Epson Data Projector w/Remote Conrol
• Mac OS
• Glyph silent HD
• MobileMe
• Yahoo Mail
• Facebook
• Twitter
• WordPress.com
• iChat
• Yahoo Finance

Pause at 3:27 AM

Daydreaming at nine

I like to daydream. On the way home from school I walk under the tree branches. On a sunny day like today the light shimmers between the leaves. They divide the sunshine into individual beams. I squint and the some of the beams resolve themselves into taut wires. I look at the pattern they make on my arm and how it changes as I move. It’s warm and I feel cozy and safe.

Where the leaves block my view of the rooftops, they also block the aim of the girls hunting me with their mind-control ray guns. Suzy, Janet, and Debby are up there today. I can take a few hits, but each one weakens me for the next. After eight hits in one block, I can’t resist anymore and I’m under their control. Each hit reduces my will to keep dodging under the trees. The first hit hurts, but then they start to feel good. I hear them telling me to show myself, that it’s not so bad, that it’s actually fun. I shake it off and move carefully. By five hits, it takes all my willpower to ignore their suggestions and not expose myself on purpose. If I can make it to the corner with seven or fewer hits, crossing the street while out of range of their guns renews my strength and we start over on the next block.

Today they got me on Cimmaron, just before I could make it across to Diablo. Only two blocks from home, but now their suggestions are going straight to my brain and have become my own thoughts. After the first few moments I don’t even see the difference. I just think and do like always, but now my own thinking voice inside my head is a girl’s voice.

Instead of Bobby, I’m Bobbi. When I see the girls now, I’m one of the gang. When I see boys on the street, I’m a girl seeing the boys. When I get home, if I can, I’ll find some of Mom’s panties and a bra and go wear them in the attic bedroom behind the locked door.

I so want to be pretty! I want to pick out cute outfits, a new hairstyle, and be noticed for them. Mom says that a pretty girl can always wrap a boy around her little finger and make him do whatever she wants. That sure beats being the shrimp getting picked on and made fun of all the time.

I want to wear a pink sweater like Suzy had on today, or better yet borrow hers at our next sleepover, and then in Algebra watch Mark stare at my breasts when he thinks I’m not looking. Deep breaths, in and out, just the way you like it. Knowing you’re staring and wanting to be with me. Thinking of things to say, how to bump into me and make it look accidental, walk me home, get me to let you touch me, thinking about me when you touch yourself later. Everything about me excites you and you can’t concentrate on anything else. My shoes, my nail polish, my smile, my giggle, my hair, my legs, they all give you that boner you love but can’t control. The one you rub against the desk leg “by accident” every chance you get, when you think no one notices. Then I’ll have you, wrapped around my little finger, showing you off to the other girls and making you do tricks.

That’s why I feel so good wearing the bra and panties. I feel the power and I have to have it. Bobby doesn’t have it, but Bobbi does. Of course I play with myself and am very careful not to get any on the clothes. I have to put them back, unnoticed, later.

After I come, I feel sad. While I’m good at daydreaming, I’m not good enough. I see myself in the mirror ¬– the loser Mama’s boy in Mommy’s clothes. I know I’m not pretty, that I’ll never have the power, but I only feel alive in its presence. So my Fate is to surrender to a girl that has it and to be her pet. That way at least I can still feel it and be part of it. Some men may have sexual power over women, but I’m not one of them. For me, all the current runs the other way.

I think about girls all the time now. I look at them just as I imagined being looked at as Bobbi. I can’t help myself. I’m going to belong to a girl one day and it scares me. I’ll know all her moves, I’ll know exactly what is going on, but I won’t be able to resist and her whims will be my duties. Seeing her do it to me, feeling humiliated by my weakness, and letting it happen anyway, somehow makes the pleasure exquisite. I get hard just imagining it. I have to have it.

I take off the bra, keep the panties on, open the window and lean out. There’s no cover now from the trees and I’m under constant fire. I’m leaning out in the open with my chest exposed and taking dozens and dozens of invisible, mind-control ray hits. Girls are beautiful, girls are graceful, girls are powerful, girls really are Greek goddesses.

I hear noises downstairs. Got to change quickly, hide the clothes, and go down for dinner before someone comes up looking for me. I hear my father and mother talking.

“Yes, Dear. Right away.”

A beautiful mind begs to differ

Freeman Dyson is an eccentric scientist. He’s English, tweedy, and iconoclastic. He’s also one of the greatest geniuses born in the 20th Century. For most of his life he’s been on the side of “liberal” causes, working towards nuclear disarmament and opposing projects like “Star Wars” missile defense. His concern for humanity and his ethical conscience have been demonstrated throughout his life. He is not someone that can be accused of being a pawn of business, political, or religious interests for whom he bends the truth as he sees it to satisfy them. That kind of criticism would be ignorant and off the mark.

So when he takes exception to the growing scientific consensus about global warming, I think he can’t be dismissed out of hand. He may be wrong, but my reading of history tells me that for the greatest scientific breakthroughs, almost always it is the unpopular, lone genius who is more often right than the majority of the scientific profession. Even more, it is often someone without specific credentials, who makes these fundamental advances for our civilization. Newton was a college student, Darwin was an amateur biologist, and Einstein was a recent physics graduate working as a patent office clerk.

Newton was wrong about alchemy and astrology and Einstein may have been wrong about quantum physics, though I think the jury is still out on that one. (Darwin does not seem to have been wrong about anything major, yet.) So Dyson may be wrong about global warming, but I wouldn’t be too sure.

The New York Times has just published a long magazine piece about Dyson and his thoughts on global warming. I recommend it.

Full article

Always an embarrasment

I was living in France in 1991. The US Senate, in televised sessions, was discussing the porn star Long Dong Silver as part of their august deliberations on whether to advise and consent to the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. This puzzled my French friends and they asked me to explain it. I told them that our politicians were clowns and that this is how they entertain the mob and keep their jobs. I would prefer that our politicians were not clowns and that when a frenzy agitated the people those elected to lead us would moderate the popular passions as the Founders intended and protect us from our baser impulses. But I don’t live in that alternate universe.

Instead, as they almost always do in this world, as they did in the Red Scare, the Japanese-American internment camps, the McCarthy witch hunts, the Patriot Act, and the Clarence Thomas hearings, they crowded out of the little Volkswagen in their clown suits and makeup, running circles under the Big Top in front of the mob in the stands, waving a rope screaming “Lynch ‘em!”, this time in the televised AIG hearings on the House side of the circus. Nancy, Barney, and Chris channeling Larry, Moe, and Curly. It truly is The Greatest Show on Earth. Not just the demagoguery and incitements to murder, but solid, unconstitutional legislation.

Thank God Clarence Thomas was confirmed and when this latest nonsense gets to him at the Supreme Court he will form part of the majority that will, wearily, once again save us from our elected stooges.

My Lai, nostra culpa

The massacre at My Lai happened 41 years ago today. The best online source of information about it is here from the BBC. If you don’t know what it was about you really should learn.

Delirio

Book review

Delirio by Laura Restrepo (original Spanish)
Delirium by Laura Restrepo (English translation)

Augustina goes crazy over a weekend while her husband is away with his kids from a previous marriage. Why? The husband tries to find out. The story takes place in Bogota when Pablo Escobar was at his zenith and it looked like Columbia might become a failed, narco-state.

I liked this book a lot. I tend to see the world in psychological terms and I found this book did as well. Restrepo uses an unusual paragraph and punctuation. The narrative style shifts from narrator POV to character POV within a paragraph, sometimes a sentence ended with a comma instead of a period. At first this is disconcerting but I thought it was a good choice to go with the nature of delusional thinking in which all the characters indulge, not just Augustina. (I read the book in Spanish but I presume the translator kept this style in English. It’s very important to the novel.)

The background of Columbia at the nadir of the drug wars (one hopes!) was very interesting and a nice plus. It goes without saying that our War on Drugs is a Deliriium as well and we are far crazier than Augustina et. al., to be pursuing it. We also may not be as lucky next time. Colombian civil society managed to get organized crime under control. Mexico, a far larger country, far more integrated with the US in every way, may not.

Mr. Kelly

Walter J. Kelly
World History teacher
November 1963

An Irishman from
Central Casting, he taught us
all about the Church

“Look at it this way”
he said to the Jewish kids
who bristled as one

“Know your enemy”
The laughter relaxed both Jew
and Gentile

Then that meant everyone
Some days he even made fun of
the Principal

Our hero
he taught us about Mozart
and the butcher’s bill

that is History.
We were shown America
the city on the hill

Republicans bad
Democrats good, above all
our mayor Richard J. Daley

The Founding Fathers
Lincoln, FDR
John F. Kennedy

Ask what you can do for your country
We were ready to serve
He cried at the news from Dallas

Sent us home early
“Did they catch the bastard yet?”
My Mom didn’t know

Four years later
a college freshman
I went to see my sensei

Vietnam War
I wanted to talk
man to man

I said civil war
bad faith since Geneva
not our business

He said Korea
Munich
domino theory

He wanted to stop the germans
I was afraid
of becoming a good german

I still love Mr. Kelly
he gave us all he had
I just outgrew him

For Basho, wherever you are

Old pond no frog sound
Dow Jones dives deep; Obama
Daylight Saving Time

Change the rules, win the game

Book Review

The Impossible Advantage: Winning the Competitive Game by Changing the Rules
by
Wolfram Wördemann, Andreas Buchholz, Ned Wiley

I don’t usually like business books, especially since I’ve retired from corporate life. But this one is pretty good.

It offers a practical method to generate fresh thinking to break free from the conventional wisdom and see a business from an entirely new perspective. I’ve read a lot of books and was exposed to many trendy techniques for doing that which were utter garbage. The most robotic conformity I ever saw was at “think outside the box” meetings at IBM. This book is not one of those.

The paradigm is that of a game, like baseball, which is played on two levels. A game itself is played according to rules on the baseball diamond — nine innings, three outs, etc. That is the first level. The second is that there exist league organizations that rewrite the rules. Clearly rewriting the rules can completely change outcomes of games. Subtract one run for every five errors and a different kind of team might win the pennant. Applying this to business, the existing competitive practices and players are the first level. They are playing a game according to the existing rules. A player, or a new entrant, can change those rules. This is a key insight, that players can change the rules during the game and don’t need anyone’s permission to do it. There is no “league” management.

Red Bull could never succeed as another soda pop against Coke and Pepsi. But as the originator of a new market — “energy drink”– not only does it succeed but Coke and Pepsi, despite their great resources cannot overcome being the “copy” to Red Bull’s “original” and cannot overtake it. So Red Bull changed the game from “soda pop”, where Coke was the Yankees, to “energy drink” where Red Bull is the Yankees and Coke is the Cubs.

This and other examples, drawn from the consulting experience of the authors, are interesting and support the thesis well. I also think that the game playing perspective has application outside of business. The book has sparked off a firecracker string of ideas for me having to do with how I see my life and goals outside of financial issues. Redefining problems leads to different solutions.

Five stars. Buy this one.

Buy The Impossible Advantage

Quote of the day

From Frank Rich’s column in today’s NYT

The level of taste flaunted by America’s upper caste at the bubble’s height had less in common with the Medicis than, say, Uday and Qusay Hussein.

3/6/36

An entry from my journal March 6, 2008.

172nd anniversary of the battle of the Alamo. Not very popular to reflect on that today, even here in Texas. But I do. Fess Parker when I was growing up is part of why. I had a coonskin cap. The romance of a doomed last stand. The fact that they were largely civilians and that they could have run or surrendered at least up until the final attack.

But they chose to stand and fight. Yes, they expected reinforcements but they didn’t fold when the help didn’t come. The historical weight is so immense — the US being a continental power and then a superpower — from the efforts of so few. Yes, the war-winning battle was at San Jacinto and the battles at the Alamo and Goliad were fruitless defeats with no effect on the war. But the men who fought there didn’t know that.

I think the question sometimes raised, “What are we willing to fight and die for?” is misplaced. Clearly when our freedom is under attack, we’re willing to sacrifice. The hope is that the day will come when we won’t have to and we can remember the Alamo as a step along that path. The real victory will be not that we draw strength from their example to fight new battles today but that we will use the chance they gave us to build a world where freedom is universal and wars are unnecessary. We are not remotely in sight of that goal.

So today we look at the ghosts on the opposite shore and nod sadly to each other that there will be yet more mornings like Sunday, March 6, 1836.

At 59, listening to my 16-year old self

Growing up is
choosing what to want
proving Schopenhauer wrong

Trading youth, beauty, agility of mind
for irresistible fingernails
and immovable bowels

Murder your dreams
for the retirement
of your dreams

Specializing
ever smaller parts of life
for the whole

Routine boring
pointless inevitable
slow slide into death

Life only seeks to be,
squirming on that hook
religious fantasies etherize

Hate yourself your life
rage
a rotten deal

Vile motives boil
rationality scabrous
swelling sac of pus sews shut

Giving up all
for mortgaged marriages
betting on stability improbable

Reinventing yourselves
new wrappers
same saccharine souls

Birthdays

Yesterday was the birthday of the English actor David Niven and the Israeli statesman Yitzhak Rabin. I have tried to come up with a clever connection to use as a lead-in to some statement of cosmic meaning. There is none.

Prove me wrong.

In Russian, Winograd means “grapes”

(I found my first blog post which was on a different server using different software that I abandoned. It was first written and posted April 8, 2007, six months before the financial panic. Reproduced below)

I’ve decided to retire and to try to live on my investments. One of the activities I want to pursue now is this blog. Why I do not know. It just seems like a good idea.