WilliWeb

Whatever happened to the paragraph?

2010-02-07T07:01:00.001-08:00

Remember when a paragraph was a set of sentences expected to express some thought or notion that an author wanted to get across? In those long ago days even a single sentence could ramble on quite fluidly, commas here, semi colons there, and one might even encounter the occasional colon. I always liked the colon, perhaps because so scarce they seemed exotic.

If one goes back further still—yet not all that far—an extravagant paragraph might go on for a page or more, sentence after rambling sentence. This extreme could be annoying because if you were interrupted while digesting this big mouthful it was hard to find your place again when you got back to it.

When I studied grammar in high school, our teacher said definitively that a paragraph should express a complete idea. That mystified me; almost anything, even a word, can put across an idea: sweet, noisy, and I could go on. So that definition always seemed to me pretty shaky, worse than useless actually, a waste of time; I was no better off than before. But as the years have flown past, paragraphs have become shorter and shorter.

Now I think, the ultimate has been reached. I just read an article in the New York Times—which organization is, or was, staffed with echelons of editors. A writer could hardly get an article through this phalanx without having punctuation and organization checked upside down and backwards; and that doesn't even count fact-checking and other such editorial function. So people think of them as exemplars of this sort of esoterica.

Here is the article I read, not very interesting I found, after I got into it; I can give you the whole article in one sentence:

Profligate Greece spent more money than she had and now wants to borrow more, but the Euro people, tightwads, don't want to give her any; so she threatens to borrow from the IMF, but The Euros don't like that idea either because it makes them look cheap and unsteady.

Think of all the trees I might have saved. Why do I read articles like this in the first place? The answer is simple, if not edifying; the headline sucked me in: "Debt Problems Chip Away at Fortress Europe" I like to read articles that confirm my biases about the snooty Europeans. There you have it; not pretty, but human. But that's not my point.

Why the New York Times thought that this might be news—something that is new—I can't even imagine. Nevertheless the story, as I hypnotically read it, was mesmerizing; it was as though I were watching a public execution; the entire article consisted of about 31 paragraphs—and 33 sentences. Paragraphs! Sentences! Nearly every paragraph, if such they can be called, consisted of one sentence. One sentence! Consider this so-called paragraph:

But that may be easier said than done.

Or this one:

The speculator's bet is a simple one.

That's right, these are entire paragraphs, brought to you by the Doyen of literary organization and punctuation. So, that's it for the paragraph. Muerte.

Why I am an American

2009-09-23T10:13:00.001-07:00

If, after reading this title, you suppose that this is a patriotic screed you will be excused. You will be wrong, but you will be excused. If I read a title: "Why I am a Christian", or "Why I am a Lesbian", (neither of which would be true) I too would expect some sort of argumentation to follow. It's natural. But what I will write about here is nothing like that. This post concerns only linguistics. Think about it: Both 'Lesbian' and 'Christian' are qualities, while 'America' and 'Lesbos' are places.

I want to explain why we here in the United States have arrogantly grasped for ourselves the quality of being American, when certainly Argentineans, Canadians and all the many peoples in between on this side of our planet would seem to have an equal claim on the term. When traveling to other countries I used to be reluctant to say yes when asked "Are you American?". Often I would just reply "Yes, I'm from the States." I thought it sounded more humble, and I like that quality. But on reflection it is easy to see that Mexico consists of united states, just as we do, so that's not a very good answer either; what makes us think we are The States? So the thing is, there's just no good way around this problem. I have quite given up, and now just reply "Yes, I'm American." Let there be an end to this humility.

The forming of adjectives from nouns is actually a trickier business than one might at first think. If I am from Australia I have a pretty easy job: tack an 'n' on the end and you're done. Simple as pie. You're Australian; easy. If you're from Romania, ditto. Costa Rica, ditto, you are Costa Rican.

Now give a moment's thought to Canada. For some unknown reason they don't follow the pattern. They're not 'Canadan', like every other country name that ends in a, they are Canadian, they have, it seems to me, and somewhat pretentiously, added an extra fillip to the standard formula, which goes to show you that even the seemingly humble Canadians are not entirely without a sense of extravagance—perhaps the French influence.

If one hails from Britain, one becomes British, in the same way that an imp, having a good day, might become impish, or a ripening apple might become reddish, a state of being that implies, hints at a condition, not definitely stating it. The English are rightly credited with understatement. And further, this reticence is often carried to the further extreme of simple truncation as in, "Yes, I'm a Brit." And what are we to make of Japanese, Chinese, and even Taiwanese and Lebanese? The linguistic mind boggles. But the real trouble is this:

What can we call someone from the United States? United Statesian? Doesn't exactly roll around on the tongue does it? USian? I don't think so. How do you pronounce it? So you see the problem.

We needed a term and we took it. Get over it. And of all the places in the western hemisphere, the continents of the Americas, that might have a claim on the term—whether one likes what we do, or dislikes what we do—it would be hard to argue that we're not The Americans. Which will certainly put a shiver down the spines of Canadians and Europeans (who by rights ought to be Europan), many of whom speak pejoratively of American Exceptionalism. What they may not realize is that by assigning us this judgmental phrase they simply confirm the term we have assumed, American, since everyone knows who they're talking about.

Media Minutes

2009-09-07T09:59:00.001-07:00

Brought to me through ESPN:

I recently watched The St. Louis Cardinals play the Pittsburgh Pirates. Baseball had never interested me much until I started hanging out in bars—which contain experts. Now, with their help, I'm beginning to get the hang of it. The game is considerably more subtle than I had imagined. But the thing that most interested me was when the action ceased for the Seventh Inning Stretch. During this traditional break (baseball is nothing if not tradition) a quite large woman who looked like Kate Smith but sang more like tweety-bird belted out the national anthem. I had not been aware that a person of such bulk could reach such high and sharp notes. Imperceptibly, I scrunched down on my stool, just a little embarrassed for her.

Near her on the infield grass was a young man who served no obvious purpose, but he silently, and reverently mouthed the words along with the singer. I believe he held his hand over his heart. The camera panned her and him first, and then other parts of the stadium showing rough-tough baseball players, obviously infused with patriotism, standing pensively. It was a moving moment in the same way that wax museums bring to mind the souls of people who no longer move, those who will indefinitely evoke some grand aspect of their past.

This diorama made me wonder just why is it that professional sports—a quite profitable private (not to mention monopolistic) enterprise—feel themselves obliged to project such still-life patriotism. And the same can be said of other sports not even excluding NASCAR automobile racing. The more I thought about it the more I realized that sports themselves are enactments, miniatures of life, small dramas that illustrate proper morals and, at their best, if only occasionally, good sportsmanship.

Then a dark shadow passed across my mind and I wondered if perhaps this waxen patriotism might not be part of a unwritten deal with our government which grants them this monopoly, a deal to promote right thinking and good citizenship among the masses and, lately, to give just a slight boost to multiculturalism. But then I thought, Willi, you're old and getting cynical.

In the bottom of the ninth, the pirates won 5-4. All cheered.

Be careful what you wish for: Royalty

2009-09-06T10:58:00.001-07:00

To be frank I care little about the release from prison of the convicted Lockerbie bomber sent home from Scotland to Libya to die of pancreatic cancer. But an article concerning it, in the British newspaper, The Telegraph, caught my attention because it crisply expresses a more fundamental concern that, as an old person, (75) I have been noticing more and more often here in the United States.

Janet Daley, in writing of the different ways in which Gordon Brown, the Labor Prime Minister of Britain and David Cameron, the Tory, Shadow Prime Minister, have spoken of the release of this prisoner, has clearly encapsulated a new sort of political relationship between heads of government and the populace who vote them in or out of office. (It is also worth noting that the British seem to have a command of the English language that American journalism can only aspire to.)

She says that Brown "has been hit hard while Mr. Cameron has benefited." And she goes on to explain that the non-obvious reason for that is that Cameron seemed more genuine when speaking of it than Brown:

There is now an accepted (if largely unconscious) compact between political leaders and the electorate: to refuse to speak to the people, to fail to give them the common courtesy of an explanation, an opinion, an expression of feeling, anything at all to indicate what you really think about a matter of national concern, is no longer acceptable. For this is the truth about modern politics: it is seen (constitutional purists will disapprove) as a relationship between the people and their leaders of an almost domestic kind.

There is a strong ring of truth to this notion, and it is I think more noticeable here in the United States than it is in Britain: we (the people) lately seem to wish for a relationship with our heads-of-state that resembles that which the British have traditionally reserved for their Royalty. This would certainly surprise the founders of our country.

If a hurricane occurs we want our President to personally console us as well as to take charge of handling the disaster. The governor of the state in which the disaster occurred, and in whom responsibility is constitutionally vested, is sidelined, excused or, at the very most, seen as an assistant to the Royal Manager.

When a recession occurs, it seems to belong to the President, and the Secretary of the Treasury plays the bit part of assistant to the Royal Manager who takes as his role that of the confidence builder who bucks us up, and encourages us to see the crisis through without being discouraged.

One day I noticed these several articles concerning President Barak Obama in RealClearPolitics; they illustrate this tendency: Is He Weak, Obama Saved the Economy, The President Seems Lost.

We seem to have deified our presidency in some needful way. We have become a nation for whom feelings have become paramount, a people who require a National
Shrink as much or even more than an Executive. Individual rectitude and assignment of responsibility among States and other formerly primary elements of government seems to have melted away.

Be careful what you wish for…

Be careful what you wish for: the Professor Gates affair

2009-07-29T11:34:00.001-07:00

To any grownup person there can't be much doubt about what actually happened: after a long flight back from China, Professor Gates, not a spring chicken anymore, was tired. On top of that he had the flu or a cold, always aggravating. Then, he finally gets home, and can't get in the damn house and has to break into it. In other words, he now feels like shit and is probably looking to get a beer and go to bed. But then, to top it all off, a few minutes later he's followed in by a policeman who wants to know what he's doing there.

Now he's just about at the end of his tether. He's a well-known Harvard professor, and black, which, in the state he's in when confronted by this white policeman, amplifies his angst to the point of explosion. So, for him, it now gets visceral, never mind that he's an intellectual, this is deeper than that. He mouths off; "contempt of cop" as they say. All of this is as clear and understandable as the sun coming up in the morning.

The woman who phoned in to 911 was asked by the dispatcher whether the intruders were African American. She said that she didn't know and that, by the way, she wasn't sure if they were breaking and entering or not, or if anything was even wrong; she was calling as a precaution. The police sergeant, responding to the call apparently asked the dispatcher over the radio whether she had any information on the race of the reported malefactors. She told him one might possibly be Hispanic, but she wasn't sure. At the house, Gates, after mouthing off, was arrested on something like disturbing the peace, handcuffed, taken to jail, photographed and then released.

As to racial profiling, in spite of what has been written about the nice policeman, a well-thought-of trainer against this very thing, there was, and is, profiling of all sorts going on in this encounter: Why did the 911 dispatcher ask about race in the first place? Why did the sergeant, on his way to the scene, inquire of the dispatcher about race? It seems quite obvious that this is a factor built right into the system. And perhaps for good reason. In a pretty ritzy neighborhood, the presence of someone who doesn't ordinarily live in such a place is indicative, useful information.

I'm 75 years old and I find myself being profiled all the time, but in a good way. I'm often given a break, and deference, for the very reason that I am an old person. And, no matter what they say, with the perspective on reality that age gives one, I can assure you that profiling for security reasons in airports goes on routinely, though invisibly, right alongside of the frisking of a little old white lady with her shoes off, just so that no one can say that profiling is going on. It would be silly for profiling not to be done in this instance, and in innumerable others. It's useful.

Ω

My first academic experience was in a Catholic grade school. The teachers were nuns in full habit. While not routine, it was not unusual to be wrapped over the knuckles with a ruler for malfeasance, often for the offense of "contempt of nun". And there were other, more subtle, corrective and coercive measures applied routinely as well. As a young student one is faced every day with uniforms and coercion, clearly separating those who run the show from those who don't.

On an airplane, the captain is the captain, and he wears a uniform that lets everyone know that. The cabin attendants do as well. And nowadays, with higher security, they have a certain amount of coercive power which one ignores at one's peril.

I have never been in the military, and that's probably a good thing. But my understanding is that a clear distinction between officers and men (generically speaking of course), is maintained, and respect—even if feigned—is a strict requirement. The military seems to think this ranking is necessary for discipline. No doubt why they wear uniforms which have the distinguishing characteristics that form a hierarchy.

Now we come to the police. I have been confronted by the police for minor traffic violations. I was, I suppose by my early training, respectful and polite, and of course I'm white too which certainly didn't hurt anything. So I was never arrested and handcuffed. Nevertheless I did feel uncomfortable and somewhat helpless as, in the encounter, the officer seemed to speak a special language taken from a police manual that inhibited ordinary conversation; he asks the questions; you do the answering. Period.

In spite of never having been arrested I did once take it into my head to protest a ticket and so I went to court. There, the judge had on a robe, though he was obviously an ordinary civilian underneath, and he was seated on an elevated platform, while I was at a lower level with the hoi polloi. Once again, here was a uniform, and a certain subtle, coercive demand for respect.

This litany of authority could go on to include pharmacists, firemen, "holy men" of one sort or another, doctors, and many others, and not excluding professors when they are lecturing. The point is that society seems to have found that in certain situations things work more efficiently when a hierarchy is established. This consensus has been weakening, probably since the sixties, and constraints are being routinely applied to limit discipline and to restrict coercive power. The jury is out, weighing the efficacy of these changes. For now, society seems more and more tolerant of aberrational behavior and ever more set on resolving "issues" verbally or psychologically. An extreme example, but not ridiculous, consider the attempt at verbally coercing Iran out of an atomic bomb. Good luck to all.

Be careful what you wish for.

Be careful what you wish for 1: energy independence

2009-06-02T13:10:00.001-07:00

Let us imagine, just for a moment, that unlikely scenario in which the United States and its Allies, in their energy needs, become completely independent of OPEC. All the grasping oil kings: the Chavezs, the Saudis, the clerics of Iran, and the other troublemakers, who previously were floating calmly about in their elegant, regal yachts on a sea of black gold have had to come to shore since that oil is now worth about… Oh, 18 cents a barrel. We still use it for grease and the occasional kerosene lantern on our green camping trips.

We are now completely powered by sunlight beamed down from gigantic collectors orbiting in space, or by nuclear fusion, or by vast forests of slowly spinning windmills, or by some other magical, green technology. Detroit has been reborn; now we all drive around helter-skelter in cheap, little, wheeled, electrical marvels manufactured by American Motors, an amalgamation reborn from the ashes of GM, Ford and Chrysler. Everyone in the country has a few shares; you're given 100 when you're born.

Is this great or what?

The Arabs, and all the other former malefactors, are poor as church mice and no longer jet around to those conferences at which they used to set the price for our oil. They're back to camels. Unfortunately they had become so dependent on our largess that they failed to learn how to do anything useful. But we send them checks now and then. We can afford it and we're all brothers under the skin, after all.

But ask yourself, what is it precisely that poor people, getting welfare, do best? You're right! Procreate. The demographics of youthful male society had been getting unbalanced with ours before, but now they're producing young guys exponentially, just as fast as we're producing power. And there seems nothing much for all these guys to do. But they sit around in their coffee shops and grumble about those rich Americans who have nothing better to do, "than make money and keep us poor."

"Omar, have you seen that latest playboy. Disgusting!" Omar, not sure whether to admit he had seen it, finally shook his head sadly, then agreed, and noted that The Faith is not spreading as it should.

Now ask yourself, What are Omar and crew doing now? Think about it. Here's a clue: They're not playing cards.

The New York Times is my homepage

2009-04-06T09:19:00.001-07:00

The Times is full of useful information. I find it without peer in the newspaper world, and I read a lot of newspapers. I visit the site at least once a day, sometimes more. Besides that, and irrespective of content, its format, its style, is in my opinion the best on the web; the fonts are carefully chosen, both for headlines and for text, in a such a way that I don't continually have to zoom in or zoom out, even with a high resolution screen, and it is pleasantly arranged to boot.

You might ask, don't I know that The Times is biased? Of course I do. I'm easily right of center politically. But why shouldn't it be so? It's their newspaper. Scanning their front page, the paper conveniently make looking through the headlines for things that interest me easy; it's child's play to detect the drivel before being sucked into the article. Very little practice is required. These headlines resemble crystal-sprinkled traffic cones on a great field of black asphalt. One does not have to be in the upper quintile of IQ to easily make this discrimination. I simply avoid articles in which I already know what they are going to tell me.

But every once in awhile, when I need a chuckle, I bump into one of these cones on purpose, just for the exhilaration of it—how crazy are they now? With luck, this can put a smile on your face that can last for several hours. I hit paydirt in this way yesterday with a story written, fittingly, by Louise Story: A Rich Education for Summers (After Harvard).

Now, right off the bat, just by reading the headline, you know that Larry Summers is going to get the stuffing beat out of him, again. Larry needs to resign himself to the uncomfortable fact that on the two coasts he is, and will remain, a pariah. He probably already has.

Louise writes:

Mr. Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Harvard president who is now the chief economic adviser to president Obama, earned nearly $5.2 million in just the last of his two years at one of the world's largest funds,… [H]e worked there just one day a week.

Bam. Take that Larry. Ready for more?

Mr. Summers joined the hedge fund world after his tempestuous, five-year term as the president of Harvard came to an unhappy end in February 2006, after a statement he made that women might lack an intrinsic aptitude for math and science.

Louise, just shy of slavering now, is giving us the juicy irony that at least women didn't fuckup the entire economy of the world as did Larry and his close associates. Here, she not only sticks it in, but she twists it, quite discombobulating Larry's stuffing.

It seems that after Harvard Larry applied for a job at D. E. Shaw, a hedge fund company. Though he was considered a "marquee hire," at his initial interview for the somewhat geeky firm, "where jeans, sweat shirts and sandals are common," the former Secretary of the Treasury was asked to solve math puzzles. It appears that he quite impressed the geeks interviewing him. Now this is a golden nugget of information that I had not expected to find; interesting in its own right. They weren't sure that he could still do math. Louise continues:

It is a quicksilver business and wildly lucrative. Mr. Shaw is said to be worth $2.7 billion…

If Louise thinks that a net worth of $2.7 billion is wildly lucrative, what must she think about Bill Gates and Warren Buffett? Doesn't she read? $2.7 billion isn't even a round off figure compared to the numbers I see in the paper every day now, usually ending in trillions. She does like her adverbs and adjectives.

[Larry's] arrogant personal style that turned off some Harvard colleagues seemed to evaporate [at] Shaw…

Of course it did, since he was no longer surrounded by the fuzzy wuzzies at Harvard.

Mr. Summers traveled to Dubai for a series of meetings with Shaw's marketing staff and potential investors. Bankers from across the region flew in for the event. Mr. Summers spoke at several lavish dinners…

In December, he attended the firm's annual holiday party, held in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, beneath the giant model of a blue whale.

If one is it all familiar with Dubai, and still under the illusion that a meeting of bankers there could be less than lavish, well… And it seems that Larry attended the firm's annual holiday party that was held at a museum. That's big news.

The other thought that this article left me with is that Louise, in her scorn of Larry Summers, seems completely to have ignored Tim Geithner, the now Secretary of the Treasury who, supposedly, is running the show in Washington. Larry would have been, well,… too visible. I, for one, hope that Larry and Tim are just as smart as can be. Having read dozens of articles on the state of the global economy, I confess I haven't the slightest idea how to fix it. Nor, it seems to me, have the myriad writers who criticize the government's every move, but don't really have a viable solution of their own. Go Larry!

As I neared the end of the article, I was not only feeling sorry for Larry, I was beginning to feel sorry for Louise. Dear, you need to get out more. I know you don't make a great deal of money at the Times, but you can probably afford a truly lavish dinner at La Grenouille for about 100 bucks, 200 if you take a friend, and 300 if you split a bottle of wine. It's not out of the question. And it will do you good.

More SCOTUS: always more interesting than the articles

2008-04-29T09:10:00.001-07:00

Here is a link to the more recommended comments on The New York Times article concerning the decision by the Supreme Court on voter registration.

Just keep in mind that these are readers of The New York Times.

Misoverestimating SCOTUS

2008-04-29T08:42:00.000-07:00

The Supreme Court of the United States is highly overestimated. This was made especially clear to me with last week's 60 minutes broadcast on CBS, an interview with Justice Scalia, by Lesley Stahl and, as well, with an article yesterday on the front page of The New York Times, by Linda Greenhouse, concerning the six-three decision upholding Indiana's voter registration requirement.

There are fundamentally two schools of thought concerning just how SCOTUS is meant to operate: one school, we'll call it the original school (Scalia's in this one), maintains that rulings ought to be based on the original intent of the constitution's writers; the other school, we'll call it the living school (Ginsburg is in this one), says that since the constitution was written over 200 years ago no one should expect interpretations to stay the same over a period of time when the country progressed from planting potatoes with horse-drawn plows to putting a man on the moon; it should instead be considered a living document and be interpreted in the light of today's more modern considerations.

I once worked in a large engineering company and I learned something there that isn't obvious, even to some of those sitting on the court. The company was organized into departments. I was in the civil engineering department. And there was a mechanical engineering department, and a project management department, and others.

Each department had a written set of standards that applied to their particular work, and the company as a whole had a set of standards that applied to more general things such as the company's mission statement, the rights and responsibilities of employees, who had to approve changes in the standards, and how much independence each department had to write their own standards.

The standards did two things: they could be seen as operating instructions, elaborating how things were generally supposed to work and they also assigned responsibility for various operations. With this setup, if some structure designed by the civil engineers fell down, cost the company a lot of money and maybe even killed someone because of a mistake, that responsibility could be clearly assigned and probably the head of the department would be fired.

As a consequence the mechanical engineers were not permitted to mess around with the civil engineers' standards, nor vice versa; reputations were on the line. There is a closer analogy between company standards like these and the United States Constitution than one might think.

There are essentially three departments in our government: the executive, the lawmakers, and the judiciary. Each is supposed to do certain things and, by inference, not do other things. The executive runs things, generally speaking; Congress modifies the standards—that's their job; SCOTUS interprets the standards. It's crystal clear.

Our founders, pretty smart guys, thought things would work better this way. They also didn't want one department messing around in another department's business because then nobody would know who screwed up when things went wrong.

But of these three departments, only two of them have what could be called responsibility. The Executive and the Congress can be voted out; that's political responsibility. SCOTUS can't; these guys are in there for life.

So, contrary to popular opinion, the originals on SCOTUS are not saying that the constitution shouldn't change; they're saying it's
not their job. The constitution has quite clear procedures for getting itself changed to keep it up to date; it's the job of the Congress, with the approval of a certain number of states. SCOTUS is only supposed to judge what the constitution actually says now.

If you think that's too hard, there's also a way to make it easier. But of course that's hard too. That's because it was intended to be hard—though we managed to make it work when we wanted a drink. God, look at the French and the Italians after the Second World War if you want to see what happens when it's easy!

What's been happening over the last 50 years or so is that Congress, that scumbag department (that you elect), is whining that it's too hard, and, as in that old cereal commercial, they're saying, "Let's let Mikey do it." Mikey in this case being the Supreme Court. Ain't s'pose' to work this way.

Guys in bars: the Pennsylvania vote

2008-03-30T15:01:00.001-07:00

There was a perceptive article a week or two ago in the Washington Post by Krissah Williams who visited two different veterans clubs in Harrisburg Pennsylvania in the middle of the state: one primarily a black club, the other white, both of the millworker persuasion. For the upcoming Pennsylvania primary the paper apparently wanted to get a grassroots feel for the working class vote.

Members of both clubs told her that feelings about race were changing or have changed, but the white guys didn't think they would vote for Obama and the black guys didn't think the white guys would either.

Being something of a habitué of clubs and other bars like these myself—including a few black bars—I think I know how the vote will go. And while Williams got quite a bit of the story right I think she misses (and black people generally, too) a crucial point. So, in the new, open spirit of getting it all out on the table, or on the bar, here goes:

On a one to one basis the outlook of white guys to black guys is grudgingly accepting but, depending on the individuals involved, occasionally cordial. Most of these whites have worked with black guys and have gotten to know them in a way they wouldn't have 30 years ago, and at bottom they know they have pretty much the same problems and aspirations that they do, even if this is rarely expressed.

But white guys in these bars abhor black culture. Not black people individually: black culture. This is a crucial, and poorly understood distinction. There are a number of reasons for this: The first is that most of these white guys don't know very much about middle class black culture; they don't socialize family to family, only worker to worker, probably in a bar. And the white guys are fundamental, not in a religious sense, but in a moral sense. Most of them take responsibility to family seriously. They're from the old country. Maybe not literally, but culturally. The black guys are generally far more liberal or relaxed in the matter of family.

I've known several older white guys, like one that was mentioned in the article, whose daughter married (or, more likely, just lived with) a black man, and had a child with him. Grandpa doesn't like that much. But they all love their black grandchildren as much as they would if they were white (I'm adopting the one-drop rule for clarity here) and occasionally they bring them into the bar if they are babysitting and want a drink; they're not ashamed of them: they're family now and that's that, what's done is done. But almost always the father of the child isn't around anymore or, even worse, he's still sometimes half around and mooching off the mother.

Besides all that, their concept of male black culture generally—even if they know some standup black guys personally—is one of drugs, guns, stupid looking pants, no-work, a bad attitude and, to top it off, bad music. These white guys are not all angels either, but that's way over the top for them.

As forthright as his speeches appear to be to liberals, these white guys at the bar will not vote for Obama who, probably afraid to alienate one of his major bases, has understandably been less explicit than Bill Cosby about what blacks could do for themselves. Obama instead seems to be more tuned into black angst, just like Jesse and Al. These guys are not idealistic millennial kids or academics. They have seen it all from the bottom up—"show me the money". They're also very patriotic and that whiff they got of Obama's pastor on TV didn't surprise them… at all. Same old, same old.

The white guys I know, almost to a man, are Democrats, but they don't like Hillary any better than they like Obama. They picture being married to her and… unh-unh; ain't workin'.

My guess is they'll sit out the primary and then vote for McCain in the general. He has a lot of attraction for this crowd. Or they could sit out that election out too, except they'll probably want a Democratic congress in there just in case.

Angels dance on pins

2008-02-26T18:36:00.001-08:00

A recent spate of articles energized me to google this query: "angels 'heads of pins' ", and I was immediately rewarded—in the prime slot position—with this answer which asks and answers whether the straight dope on complete pointlessness is epitomized by the question: "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

There were several articles that drew me to this question and later, after reading the articles, to the conclusion that the world can't be in all that bad a shape if this, today, constitutes our journalism:

Firstly, we have a question asked yesterday—but not really answered—by John Tierney in a blog in the New York Times: Is a pedicab really more virtuous environmentally than a taxi? He wasn't so sure, but his readers largely were: they seem to think that of course a pedicab is better. The reasons expressed, arcane, esoteric and unknowable, those for and those against, make one wonder, What in the world can be going on here?

Secondly, we have a similar article today in the Washington Post's online Slate magazine which asks the question: Should I cancel my newspaper subscription? The author asks whether it is more environmentally friendly to cut down trees and print a newspaper or to read it online using a computer. The assumptions enumerated probe the limit of approximation sufficiently to make a scientist blanch.

Thirdly, the same magazine on the same day we have Michael Kinsley, an ordinarily perspicacious writer, probing an article that ran recently in the New York Times concerning an affair, or a possible affair, or a suspicion of a possible affair by John McCain, with certainly the longest sentence he has ever written:

More troubling, however, is the issue of whether McCain's letter may have led some people to worry that other people might conclude that McCain's letter created the appearance of a conflict of interest, as well as the issue of whether the New York Times, in digging up this eight-year-old letter, was creating the possibility that some people might think there was a possibility of an appearance that the Times was suggesting the possibility of an appearance of a potential conflict of interest in McCain's behavior, along with the most distressing possibility of all: that in this very article I may be creating the possibility that some people might worry that other people might think that I have created the appearance of suggesting that the New York Times has created the possibility that some people might worry that other people might think that McCain has created the appearance that some people might worry that other people might think that there could be an appearance that McCain was having an affair with a lobbyist.

And finally, for sheer inanity, I lead you to this article in The Wall Street Journal darkly parsing the advent once again of Ralph Nader on the presidential front.

Well folks, the sun is shining, the world is in its orbit, the terrorists seem to be more or less subdued, and I would like to see a big smile

U.S. Supreme Court invalidates my father's patent

2007-05-01T10:00:00.001-07:00

Yesterday our family received a blow. My father's patent for a welding cart, granted in the early nineteen forties has been invalidated in a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court. Fortunately I was able to shrug the blow off easily since to the best of my knowledge we had never made a nickel from the whole enterprise in the first place. Yet the story is nevertheless interesting:

As a matter of fact the direct cause of yesterday's ruling was a patent for an automobile accelerator pedal combined with a sensor that sends signals to an electronically controlled engine as to the speed desired. The company that held this patent sued another company for patent infringement; this second company had developed a similar device. The court, in effect overturning decades of patents already granted, said no to the first company which held the patent: to be patentable an invention must solve a problem, be novel, and not simply be a combination of two or more pre-existing patents. In short, it must be: "non-obvious".

Brazing is a common form of welding in which metal is heated by a gaseous fuel, acetylene, with its heat then intensified using another gas, oxygen, finally, when things are hot enough, bronze is added and melted to effect a "weld" between the pieces to be joined. Both of these gases are supplied in heavy, cylindrical, metal "bottles" which are under very high pressure. Surely everyone will have seen these heavy bottles being delivered by truck to shops around the country. The acetylene bottle is rather short and squat, while the oxygen bottle, for no obvious reason, is rather skinny and tall. The problem my father solved to earn his patent was this:

One day at work, an oxygen bottle tipped over and the valve at its top ruptured, thus accelerating the heavy, steel bottle, under the force of the high pressure gas, right through a masonry wall and up Washington street scaring the bejeesus out of horses and pedestrians and causing all manner of pandemonium and damage.

His solution was simply to stabilize the two bottles in a cart with hard rubber wheels and handles which permitted them to easily be rolled around to where the work was to be done. He added little places on the cart where the welding "torch" could be stored, the hoses be neatly rolled up, and other various accessories could be properly put away. It was quite clever—I was made to clean many of them before they were sold to other welders. But it was, in a real sense, an "obvious" design; nearly any good welder could have figured out something like this. Yet he was granted a patent on the idea, as have been numerous others for other clever, but obvious, ideas since then.

Now the lawyers, those pen and paper craftsman, can obviously proceed.

Tragedy and grief

2007-04-18T09:03:00.001-07:00

The great train wreck…

… one of the worst ever in this country -- happened on April 26, 1946, in Naperville, [Illinois] where the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy's Exposition Flyer, racing at 85 mph, rammed into the back of the railroad's Advance Flyer, which was stopped in the Naperville station. The wreck killed 45 people and injured more than 100.

SCN Media August 2005

I remember this tragedy very well because my father was a welder and my mother was a nurse. He had to help to cut apart the steel cars to free the injured and in the recovery of bodies, and she assisted in the medical help that could then be provided—we would call it triaging today. But this was 1946, and while it made the front page of the Chicago Tribune the next day, and it certainly had a mention in papers in other cities, that was pretty much it from a news perspective.

Ω

I recount this story to compare it to the tragedy this week that occurred at Virginia Tech, where a shooter killed 31 students and a teacher, and then himself. I can mention that one of my granddaughters attends this school.

In this instance, as you are all no doubt aware, thousands of people, nearly the entire resources of the country's news media were, and remain, almost entirely mobilized for this tragedy. Officials and dignitaries up to and including the president of the United States feel compelled to articulate the nation's pain and sympathy. Classes are canceled for the week while grief counselors from around the country focus on Blacksburg Virginia to begin the work of working through this catastrophe. The aim of this massive effort: to ease mental anguish and trauma for the tens of thousands involved personally in this event, however peripherally, and for those millions who simply share the sense of grief and sadness that has been so amplified through the vast resources of modern day news.

The question that an old man like me asks himself is this: Is all this angst a good thing? I suppose a case can be made that sympathy for one's fellow man, more absent then present in history, can never be all bad. But I wonder: Does there come a point when this orgy of tragedy and grief, of sharing and sadness, becomes counterproductive?

It seems to me that this grief and sympathy is of a piece with the western world's increasing intolerance of risk, and our short attention span for the effort of protecting ourselves from people in the world who do not yet share, and perhaps cannot yet afford, our pampered psyches, people proven much more dangerous than the shooter at Virginia Tech.

Libertarians, bloggers and free markets

2007-04-17T11:50:00.001-07:00

Today, Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit of blogger fame, whom I have always thought to be a libertarian, said this in a post on his site:

I DON'T LIKE THIS: "Internet radio broadcasters were dealt a setback Monday when a panel of copyright judges threw out requests to reconsider a ruling that hiked the royalties they must pay to record companies and artists. A broad group of public and private broadcasters, including radio stations, small startup companies, National Public Radio and major online sites like Yahoo Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, had objected to the new royalties set March 2, saying they would force a drastic cutback in services that are now enjoyed by some 50 million people. "

While it is literally true that "a panel of copyright judges threw out requests to reconsider a ruling that hiked the rookies they must pay to record companies and artists…," this is highly misleading. Here is what was actually done, as quoted from the article he links to:

Small broadcasters [which is to say Internet broadcasters] have received relief from Congress in the past, benefiting from a law passed five years ago that gave them a break on royalty rates. The legislation allowed them to pay about 12 percent of their revenues instead of having to calculate per-song, per-hour rates like larger companies had to.

In other words, the court, an arm of the government, has seen fit to lift artificial restrictions on the free market and permit buyers and sellers to negotiate the terms of their contracts on their own, an odd position for libertarian not to like. Maybe Glenn is not the libertarian I thought he was.

The article itself was not very informative about precisely what has transpired: Did the judges find that the law was unconstitutional? Did the law expire and the Internet broadcasters wished to extend its term? We'll never know with reporting like this. Like the mainstream media, bloggers too have their own axes to grind: in this case my impression is that their wish is that the Internet wants to be free.

Scrotum is as scrotum does

2007-02-19T13:31:00.001-08:00

The New York Times reviews a new children's book, The Higher Power Of Lucky. On the first page of the book, "the book's heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum."

This seems to have created an "issue" for librarians: stock the book or don't stock the book. Most of the librarians seemed to be against it. But a gusher of literally hundreds of irate comments flowed like sperm into the New York Times concerning this tender issue. They were overwhelmingly against "censorship" and felt that there should be no question but that teachers should take the bull by the scrotum and charge ahead, happy in the fact that the book took the direct approach to an ordinarily touchy subject.

Now, being quite an old geezer and, I might add, one with a scrotum myself, I'm not particularly disturbed by the word. But I do have a certain amount of sympathy for those in the line of fire, the librarians and teachers who will have to have to explain the term to a bunch of ten year old boys and girls en masse. My children went through a stage, though, as I recall, it was earlier than ten, when to everything I said they rather monotonously, over and over, replied, "Why?"

Putting myself hypothetically in front of the class as the reader I can easily imagine the answer to the first question, "What is a scrotum?"

"Why, my dears, a scrotum is simply a sack made of skin that holds the testes of most male mammals." (So far so good.)

"What are testes?"

"Well, testes are just glands that makes sperm." (Maybe they won't notice.)

"What are sperm?" (Bad guess.)

"Sperm are just little things that when the male puts them in a female they can make a baby." (Here we go.)

"How does he get them in there?" …

Next thing you know you've got yourself a sex-ed class. Now there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, except for the fact that you signed on as an English teacher. And what if mom and dad would rather explain it all themselves when the time is ripe?

But no, the readers of the New York Times see this as an opportunity to correct centuries, nay millennia, of subterfuge and, like the brothers in the commercial who want Mikey to try the new cereal, they have only a sperm sized compassion for those who must deliver this correction.

Be careful of this man

2007-02-19T11:35:00.001-08:00

In the Wall Street Journal today (online) Steven Rattner laments the failure of newspapers to make money. People— especially young people—simply don't like to read them much anymore, preferring alternative sources of information:

Perhaps most worrisome is the loss of young readers, who have drifted away steadily since the early 1970s, long before there was an Internet, when more than 70% of 18- to 34-year-old Americans read a daily newspaper. Last year that figure stood at 35%.

His solution? "We could create a pool of money (possibly from a license fee similar to how the BBC is funded)."

And how is the BBC funded? They simply tax every household with a television set $260.00 a year and give it to the BBC so that they can make whatever programs they wish, regardless of demand.

Europeans and Americans at work

2007-02-13T07:32:00.001-08:00

The last few years I have been fortunate enough to spend winters on an island in the Caribbean instead of my much colder home city of Pittsburgh. The place I stay is frequented largely by western Europeans. They get long vacations but most don't make a great deal of money and this place, relatively inexpensive, is ideal for them. And since many of them speak English I've had many interesting conversations with them. I have been particularly struck by their feelings about their work: most don't enjoy it and feel that their relatively long vacations are a just reward for slaving away the rest of the year.

Now many people in the United States don't enjoy their work either but, on the other hand, many more in the States seem to like their work more than do the Europeans I've spoken with. There's nothing scientific about this impression that I came to have so I was more than a little interested in a rather more thorough study of the matter by Edmund J. Phelps, the Nobel prize winner in economics in 2006. He wrote about this issue in an article in the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal yesterday, Entrepreneurial Culture: Why European economies lag behind the U.S. The article seems to be written in a style best suited to academics, so here I will try to summarize the main points that he makes, particularly those which focus on the opinions I took away from the Europeans I spoke with, though I don't believe I'm putting any words in his mouth.

He writes that, "Far fewer firms break into the top ranks in [western, continental Europe than in 'Anglo Saxon' countries such as the US and Britain], and fewer employees are reported to have jobs with extensive freedom in decision-making--which is essential at companies engaged in novel, and thus creative, activity." And he goes on to write why this may be so:

Participation rises [when jobs are relatively fulfilling and engaging] and productivity climbs to a higher path. Thus I see the sort of economic model operating in the Continental countries … which typically exhibit a Balkanized/segmented financial sector favoring insiders, myriad impediments and penalties placed before outsider entrepreneurs, a consumer sector not venturesome about new products or short of the needed education, union voting (not just advice) in management decisions, and state interventionism to be a major cause--perhaps the largest cause--of their lackluster performance characteristics. … There is the solidarist aim of protecting the "social partners"--communities and regions, business owners, organized labor and the professions--from disruptive market forces. There is also the consensualist aim of blocking business initiatives that lack the consent of the "stakeholders"--those, such as employees, customers and rival companies, thought to have a stake besides the owners.

In other words the culture itself in continental Western Europe acts in such a way that workers are viewed, and view themselves, as cogs in a grand machine rather than permitting them to be micro-entrepreneurs themselves. In my view this is certainly is the effect of European Marxism and, in general, socialism which was designed in an age when workers were seen in exactly that light and the hierarchical organization in which they were embedded did not want workers to think for themselves but simply to concentrate on the drudge work at hand and fill their quota.

The continental western European culture should be contrasted with the way work is viewed in the United States where there is a much higher level of self employment, an acceptance of risk, and appetite for the great rewards that such activity occasionally yields. But even in very large companies, since they tend not to be unionized—in the US, private unionization is less than 8%, with the highest rate in regulated industries such as transportation and utilities—there is the desire of management to push decision-making down to the lowest possible level and to encourage intracompany entrepreneurialism by workers. Phelps quotes this telling statement: "42% in France and 54% in Italy, versus an average of 73% in Canada and the U.S. … want jobs offering opportunities for achievement."

Fun with predictions

2007-02-12T20:35:00.001-08:00

It's always fun to mess around with predicting an election nearly two years in the future. Here are my guesses, starting with:

The Democrats

Hillary Clinton. She's giving John Kerry a run for his money in the flip flop category. She's just not very likable, and she's a woman (yes it still matters), and even Hollywood's Democrats are beginning to figure all this out. And then there's Bill! What to do with him? She does have a lot of money and the ability to raise a nearly unlimited amount, so that might tip the scales in the primary but I can't see that she can overcome her high negatives in the final election.

Barack Obama. How far can a nice looking, ( I don't mean to say "clean"!) smooth talking, black guy with next to no experience, and who can't even get the support of blacks, get, really?

John Edwards. How far can a nice looking, smooth talking, white guy with next to no experience, get, really? On the other hand if Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton could pull it off, why couldn't he?

Joe Biden. If he can get his foot of his mouth and use it to run with it's not impossible, just unlikely.

John Kerry. Forget about it.

Chuck Schumer. Next time.

Al Gore. He's got one chance: if everyone else gets their socks tied up in a knot, he's their man, but with the primaries structured as they are, and as early as they are, that's a real long shot. But it would sure be a fun race. I long for the old days when candidates were actually selected at the conventions. It lent a lot of passion to what has now become a stage managed event.

The Republicans

John McCain. Nice to see a guy with morals. But the McCain Feingold act is a travesty, and he has other populist tendencies that scare the hell out of me. On the one hand it certainly shows strength of character when someone has survived years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, but strength of character can also be taken too far. Besides all that he's almost as old as me! That's scary too.

Mitt Romney. Haven't a clue. He's a big question mark. And that's not an advantage even this early in the game.

Rudy Giuliani. He's on wife number three, but he seems like the most sensible of the lot. If only he can get nominated, and I think he can get nominated because, after all, who else is there? Like Hillary, he can raise a lot of money. The southerners probably won't take a very well to a New Yorker, but I think they'll have to get over it.

Ω

The real facts of the matter probably depend more upon what happens between now and then, which in politics is a very long time indeed. Here are several scenarios:

The war in Iraq steadies out. Bush sinks a three pointer in the final minutes of the game. Good for Rudy because all the democrats are advertising their antiwar stances in one way or another.

The war in Iraq doesn't steady out. Iraq breaks up in a civil war. We leave or get out of the way. Bad for the US. Good for the Democrats, especially for Joe Biden who came out for separatism long before anyone else.

The terrorists succeed in doing something significant. Bad for the Democrats. Good for Rudy. He's made his bones on that front.

The economy tanks. Actually, tanking is probably the wrong term, but the strength of the economy has been up for quite awhile and is certain to go down at some point in time. The questions are how much and at what point in time? If it happens during the election period, it will obviously be good for the Democrats. Even John Kerry probably couldn't lose this one. If it happens after the election the new Democrats will have a tough row to hoe in 2012.

North Korea simmers on, unresolved. Probably. No matter.

We bomb Iran. A full-blown attack is highly unlikely and politically nearly impossible to sustain. Nevertheless, Bush isn't running for reelection and hot pursuit of the Iranian bomb suppliers into Iran is likely. The case for this adventure is being prepared even now. The question is whether it would be done overtly or covertly. If covertly, I doubt the Iranians would say a word.