Woodbury: Irreverent Maine Yankee

WWJD About Global Terrorism?

2012-01-18T22:32:00.001-05:00

THE EVIL THAT IS UPON US

I first published this in 2005, thus the references to the President at that time. I replay it here because I sense that we may become complacent when there is little happening to alarm us right now.

With the “war on terror” AKA the “war in Iraq” I have wrestled with the question: WWJD? Recently I had to admit being challenged by it from a bumper sticker.

Politics aside, (because one’s fury at or approval of G.W. Bush does not inform my thinking), it would seem that what I’m trying to resolve is a question of religion. And yet, neither dogma nor mysticism inform my thinking either.

Even atheists who oppose the war must admit that they are oddly in league with those Christians who similarly insist upon peace at any cost, that killing is wrong no matter what the provocation, and that the enemy, whoever it is, needs to be approached sternly but with both logic and limits. Atheists-for-Peace (in Iraq), if that describes them adequately, stop short of like-minded Christians-for-Peace, who can be relied upon to add prayer to their solution.

I have some politically liberal friends whom I love and respect and struggle to understand. We avoid arguing, probably because to do so would inform neither of us but would drive us apart, which would be stupid because neither we nor they will affect the course of this war.

I have supported it, in general, since the USA began cleaning up first Afghanistan and then Iraq. Yes, I trust President G.W. Bush, a lot more than I trusted his opponents and his predecessor. But I’m willing to ask myself whether this is right. Am I supporting the destruction of the world? Am I, out of ignorance, in collusion with satan, as my Christians-for-Peace friends might hope I come to realize? What does satan want? Does this war serve satan, or would our avoidance of this war serve satan better? What does Jesus want? What would Jesus do? What is the difference between this and all other threats?

I have sensed, since it began, that it is different. I have accepted that, because it is different, in a way that I could not until now describe, then our response to it has been appropriate. Not because I was told so in a speech or by a columnist. For me to form an opinion I need information and evidence. And if these don’t point to a clear path of thinking, then I need inspiration.

I don’t subscribe to the opinions of people who demand that I believe because they told me so or because they have the more worthy emotions or because they are justified by their superior intellect, connections, or purity of motive. I don’t subscribe to an opinion because it is widely held, supported by polls, or for the common good.

So in searching for the answer to this deepening ethical dilemma – How can I support a war that confutes the teaching of Jesus? – I have drawn upon the evidence that I have been accumulating for decades: the instruction of my own church. For inspiration, I have looked to my own faith. For facts, I have read the Bible. And what follows is what I see.

When Jesus came right out and said Do this and Don’t do that, he confused his followers, including us, more than when he taught by example and parable. I don’t struggle with the counsel to walk another mile and turn the other cheek. That’s illogical because it is elegant and noble and just might do more to confound an individual enemy than resisting. When he invited the holier-than-thous to cast the first stone, he really was inviting them to compare themselves with their intended victim.

When he asked whose picture was on the conqueror’s coin, he was pointing out that money is of the earth (has it ever been different?) and is controlled by whomever is in power, while people are not Caesar’s but belong to God. Resisting Caesar would amount to wasting energy fighting Romans. By their faith in his illogical pronouncement, his followers were able to create something that eventually would rule Rome, not submit to it.

But the enemies everyone could identify with in that era were, for all their power and arrogance, civil people. Throughout history, there have been many organized forces which descended upon the innocent and conquered without mercy, but their objective was to control and subjugate a nation, a region, or the known world, not to annihilate, and especially not to annihilate out of apoplectic hatred for their chosen enemy. In present time, apoplectic hatred of all Americans is the motive of those who started this.

Attempts at conquest involve nation rising against nation, either to settle a grievance or to satisfy a charismatic if arrogant, self-appointed, self-worshipping ruler. Even though Hitler and Stalin were perhaps the most sinister and duplicitous of them all, they still made a pretense of civility and honor. They needed to be glorified and, even though they made mockery of it, they pretended at diplomacy. Kim Jung-Il does the same today, and will probably not rest until he has attempted to bring more of the world into his fold of worshippers. Not that anyone actually worships him, but he doesn’t know it, such is his delusion like that of Hitler and Stalin, a few Roman emperors, and others.

Islam suffers from the same sort of self-destructive forces in the person of a few ruling do-no-wrong clerics. But Islam is not a country or an ethnic group. Nor is it a unified religious body such as the Roman Catholic Church. Islam is a body of ideas, some of them religious, some even grounded in faith (as opposed to religion or dogma), but not the property of any orderly clerical hierarchy. The high priests of Islam don’t even appear to be interested in finding their own common ground or representing their teaching to the world. (Something like that could also be said about the intolerant, hate-motivated splinter groups of so-called Christians, up to a point.)

The high priests of Islam’s most self-destructive splinter groups aren’t interested in civility amongst themselves or representing their teaching to the world because it is not their objective to win converts. They are preaching hatred for anything and anyone who is not themselves. They don’t want slaves. There is no place in their world for converted followers or repentant non-Muslims. It is ironic that they now have a few tools that they did not have a century or even a quarter century ago, and all are the products of civilized societies: Broadcast media to spread their message, money from oil or plunder (whatever the difference might be), the armaments that their money can buy, and most diabolical of all, the open borders that free societies have permitted in the name of humanity. Ironically, too, they have the complicity of a fawning American communications media, motivated not by love for radical Islam but by hatred for a common enemy, George Bush.

It is with the tools made possible by our prosperity and generosity that we are being attacked. This time in history, though, the enemy is anywhere and everywhere. There is no leader who, by our taking him out, leaves the movement stalled or stopped. Since it is not a nationalist movement, there is no single country to overpower to stall or stop the movement.

And since the movement is not interested in our subservience, our gold, our conversion, or our appeasement, there may be no stopping it. It was easier to wipe out smallpox than it will be to put down radical militant Islam.

Regardless which way we react, with guns or with olive branches, we face one choice and that is to wait it out. Turning the other cheek will have no influence on their loathing for all things American or Jewish or Christian. So what do we do while their fury runs its course?

Options:

...Duck every time there is a bombing in a civilized part of the world such as Spain or Indonesia or England or the USA, then carry on as if it was another hurricane that can’t be prevented or diverted.

...Send money and suicidal volunteers to the mountains of the Middle East to set up schools for teaching the peaceable tenets of Islam, and hope to have more influence than the radical militants.

...Appeal to the good will and spirit of cooperation of desperately poor and uncooperative nations such as Russia and China and ask them to intervene to persuade the radical militant rabble-rousers to look more kindly on the USA, so we can resume exporting Barbi dolls and Coca-Cola to the Middle East.

No, these aren’t options, and I won’t go on.

War is a great waste of resources and lives, but Jesus did not suggest how to deal with this enemy. Rather, I’m somewhat persuaded that he warned of this enemy and this time. I am not a student of Revelation, nor do I want to be. It accomplishes nothing if I spend the next ten years of my life becoming yet another expert on the end times; (experts on Revelation have come and gone by the thousands). But I could be persuaded that we are there or nearly so.

I’ve tried to discover the rational, productive, and inspired response to the attacks on the free world by this newly-empowered force which, as I admit, we have helped to create. If a military response is appropriate, then it must be everything we can do or nothing at all. Anything in between will be like Vietnam. And damn the United Nations; half the nations involved are state sponsors of terrorism, so it’s no wonder the UN isn’t united on this problem.

If the response is heightened security, then let it rise to a level that will truly thwart homeland terrorism. Anything less will be a waste of resources and an acceptance of random attacks. No security at all is, to me, not an option, especially when the earliest victims of a casual attitude will be slaughtered or poisoned innocents, including more children, and letting our lives ever more be controlled by the fear of another attack now and then. I may be uncomfortable in the summertime wearing long clothes against the insects, but if I want to reduce the bites and stings I live with the extra heat.

Whether we submit to the attacks of those who hate us and regard it as a fact of life in the modern world, or respond with decisive force and intrusive scrutiny, as we have begun to do, I am persuaded that we are in it for a very long, long time. Those whose anger at the USA is so profound that they will commit suicide in order to express it do not represent a passing fad. They represent a still-growing movement. Ignore them and they won’t go away. They will not be satisfied until they have annihilated us.

What does Jesus want me to do? Well, there is frankly little that I can do, personally. I wish there were effective channels for me to do something beyond the borders of my own country, but at least I can look after those in need in my own country. I can and do vote. But I vote with different things in mind than a single issue that has most affected my “consciousness.” I vote based on my understanding of government and how I believe candidates will uphold the Constitution, not based on contrived issues such as abortion-as-birth-control or campaign finance "reform" or fake immigration reform. Candidates dangle their positions on issues before us to attract our votes when they know full well they have little chance of delivering on their promises. We are fools to let their stands on issues influence us. It's their position on government that matters to me – the less of it the better and the less intrusion and money poured into other countries the better.

If I have the opportunity to come face to face with an open-minded Muslim who has yet to form an opinion of Americans, I hope I as an individual will have contributed to a favorable impression. But what are the chances that such an opportunity will fall to me?

America has been attacked by these indistinct forces somewhat due to our own indifference toward the nations that they come from, but moreso due to their envy, the misinformation fed to them by their own leaders, and the machinations of their own minds, steeped in ignorance of us. When mosquitoes swarm, I swat. I don’t kill or chase them all away, but fewer get to poke me. I don't try to talk them out of it. They want my blood. I am definitely less efficient in whatever I’m doing if I’m flailing at them, but the alternative – simply letting them all stick me – is unthinkable. Let that be an analogy.

I wish I could regard the “enemy combatants” as redeemable individual humans. They won’t let me. Jesus submitted to his crucifixion without flailing or fighting back or calling upon his followers to attack his captors and free him. But I argue that he knew that his individual death, so inscrutably accepted by him, would affect the entire world. If I submit to death by a mindless enemy, it will not affect the world as did his, and so I am motivated to resist, on an individual level.

Perhaps we humans have reached the limit of our ability to civilize ourselves, the limit of our ability to cooperate to any greater extent. Perhaps this is as good as it gets. Four fifths of the world still lives in conditions no better than a thousand years ago. It’s America’s delusion that there is a bright future ahead for humanity with disease-free planned communities and sanitary food and free cellular phones for everyone on earth. We tried to show the world that it can be done: Individuals can have liberty and self-determination; and left to choose whether to be selfish or charitable, people will mostly chose to give to those in need. Supply will meet demand when markets are left to take care of distribution and cost. People freed from tyranny will invent and invest. Information will flow.

Well, we have demonstrated all of that. But the rest of the world only stares at us in wonder, then envy, then hatred. They don’t perceive that they, too, can chose what we have. They are persuaded, instead, that they cannot, and they would deny us the same. When they can lash out at us in the name of God, they are justified.

A long war has only just begun. It may cost the USA all that we have left in lives and resources, not to mention money and the destruction that will be wrought wherever we meet the battle. But I can see no alternative. Not to engage them is to invite an equal waste of lives and resources and destruction in a place of their choosing, not ours. It matters not to them who dies, as long as the maximum number of Americans (or Brits or Spaniards, etc.) are destroyed. In a war, however peculiarly it is fought, the individual foot soldiers of the enemy cannot be indicted and “brought to justice.” In a war, they get picked off before they pick you off. They disguise themselves as or hide behind “civilians” and so the innocent in their own countries are victims. So are the innocent in this country.

I find only one clear answer in the Bible. I find no evidence that Jesus dealt with or told anyone else how to deal with humans who turn themselves into mosquitoes or vipers or whatever non-human analogy best describes the plague that is upon us. I am not persuaded that the enemy we now face is even fully human except in DNA. I do not purport to be an expert on evil, so I will refrain from declaring those who would destroy me as evil, in the sense that would make them literally agents of satan. They are evil in the sense that they are fiercely dedicated to opposing the will of God, inasmuch as we, as a society, have constructed our world on the premise that God is love and that the two great commandments should guide our thoughts and our actions.

In the Bible, the answer is in the words of Jesus. Yes, all of his teaching points to faith in God and love of oneself and others, but there is one more dimension to it: You improve humanity by improving the one human unit over which you have control – yourself. He does not preach collective action, the joining of movements or armies or political parties or even churches. He preaches to each individual the responsibility to get oneself right with God. That’s what Jesus would do. Improve your one human unit. Get yourself right with God. And let those who have eyes see your plain example and those who have ears hear your humble words. Jesus does not call upon us to create or join a tumult.

Armies and parties and mass movements do not improve me, as a unit, and they do not help me by showing up on my doorstep, whether with aid or demands. Likewise, I cannot presume to improve any other human being by showing up, as part of a group, on someone else’s doorstep with a demand or with unrequested aid. Those who have joined the armies of this country to defend it are doing me a favor, just as I did by joining up during the Vietnam war, and it is a favor rather than a curse only because the motives of the individual recruits in this country’s armed forces are benevolent and defensive – note I say the motives of the individuals.

I will carry on with my life as best I can. I will think globally and act locally. In thinking globally, I will not regard the hate-motivated, random-destruction-of-anything-that-can-be-a-target as an acceptable norm, therefore I will not oppose reasonable efforts to stop it. I will vote to reduce the reach of government both within this country and abroad. Locally, I will act as I have been inspired to do by my God. Locally, too, I will defend, with adequate force, if an enemy such as this appears personally on my doorstep.

What God has in mind to resolve this conflict and repair this mess I don’t presume to discern, and I will be skeptical of anyone who confidently tells me he has discerned God’s mind on this. I think we will be shown, in the fullness of time. As I await, I will attempt to do what only I can do: Make myself one person who the rest of the world does not have to carry owing to my own irresponsibility and does not have to avoid because I have become a threat.

11 July 2005©David A. Woodbury

Genealogy of Joseph

2012-01-15T23:23:00.001-05:00

This seven-minute clip on the genealogy of Joseph, the husband of Mary of whom was born Jesus, is convincing enough to me. Not that it is relevant to anyone's faith; who was Joseph's grandfather is entirely of no consequence to the divinity of Jesus. It is just a little explanation of what at first glance appears to be a contradiction between the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Unfortunately, the man speaking throughout this clip is not identified, and may or may not be the "NathanH83" who uploaded it to YouTube. So have a look.

Hold This Image in Your Mind

2012-01-08T20:23:00.002-05:00

Let me share something with you, and I wrote this spontaneously on December 18 when our good and humble friend, (and next-door neighbor for eleven years), Debbie Lyons was dying. I sent it to her grandson, Joshua, whom she had raised. (And she died just a few days later): "Hold this image in your mind: A grand reception room in Heaven, bigger than any room ever built on earth; a huge heavenly host has gathered. A door opens, and a very tired little lady steps inside not knowing what to expect. When she comes through the door, the room erupts in applause and cheers. And a great but gentle voice is heard over it all: "Well done, Debbie. Now come rest beside Me and let me hold you."

I have an old friend nearby who is about to slip away. This is how I imagine his arrival in Heaven, too -- and the arrival of all the weary travelers on this earth who have ever had faith and who have done what they could and at last had to let go and let God.

And when I go that way some day, I imagine being nudged through a doorway, in a dimension beyond our own and in a realm I don't comprehend, and I sort of anticipate the room I envisioned for my friends who went before me, and if it is anything like that, then I am confident I will see Debbie's face in the welcoming throng, and Bob's, and maybe quite a few more.

It's difficult to express just how, but I know that's what happened when Debbie arrived. I knew it the moment I perceived it.

Revisiting the Execution of Terri Schiavo

2011-12-31T17:41:00.000-05:00

UPON THE EXECUTION OF TERRI SCHIAVO
Note: I first published this in March, 2005 at www.DamnYankee.com because I was stunned that a Florida judge ordered Terri, a U.S. citizen, to be executed by starvation without being charged with a crime or the benefit of a trial. Tens of thousands of Americans in circumstances similar to hers are vulnerable to the same sentence for the same reasons that led to Terri's execution. I still hope to stir some national resolve on this topic in 2012. Don't know who she was? Go to www.terrisfight.org.

By now Terri Schiavo’s experience should have launched a national debate about how to dispose of nuisance citizens in a manner that is consistent, discreet, legal, sanitary, and (most importantly) humane. While she is merely the latest of thousands of people in the U.S.A. who have been dispatched when their guardians have grown weary or have given up hope, she has generated enough media attention that no thinking person can be unaware of the debacle.

WHY DEBATE IT?
We need to engage in this debate without submitting to the emotion of the zealots forever commanding media attention over abortion (both sides), who, for years, have shouted from the same opposing ramparts and have prevented rational dialog. Many of the same zealots have tried to hijack the Schiavo situation. Anyone with megaphones needs to be ignored by those who want to resolve the matter.

We need to have this debate among ourselves, as Americans, and we need to leave the rest of the world out of it. Many other countries have their own solutions. If we were fully aware how inconvenient citizens are disposed of in other countries from Scandinavia to Southeast Asia, it would be sobering to everyone on both extremes on the Schiavo issue. We might, however, study other countries’ solutions and find some guidance there, guidance both for how to select individuals to be dispatched and what methods are most efficient.

We need to make this a national debate not subject to states’ rights. Rather, we need to define that which makes us citizens of the U.S.A.; clearly we understand that one is a citizen who has been born here or naturalized and who has not renounced citizenship. We even confer citizenship posthumously. What about citizens who are still breathing? We need to decide when a breathing corpse, as Terri Schiavo was clearly perceived by Judge Greer, ceases to hold the rights of citizenship.

The definition of “dead” used to be a lot simpler in centuries past, but now we seem uncertain whether a “viable fetus” is alive, whether a body on “life support” is alive, and whether a person who is “brain dead” is alive. Terri Schiavo was deemed dead enough in one respect that a court ordered her body deprived of food and water so that it would have the good sense to go with the already dead part. We need the national debate to define “dead” once and for all. And concomitantly it can encompass the definition of “not-yet-alive.” We permit fetuses with beating hearts to be declared not alive yet, so maybe that could be instructive at the other end of... of a lifetime. (Heart beating but not yet alive: heart still beating but already dead.) We need one definition nationally, because, once again, there cannot be fifty definitions of a U.S. citizen.

We need to debate this definition outside the courts. Courts settle disputes according to laws already on the books and decide the constitutionality of such laws. There is nothing in a national debate for the courts to get involved in as long as there is not yet a national consensus and a national law on what “dead” means. Judge George Greer, the unwitting villain in the Terri Schiavo case, took it upon himself to declare her legally dead. But he was grasping at a definition that did not yet exist in our laws.

We need to disregard what will surely be a shrill attempt by lawyers to lead the debate. Again, it concerns what is not yet law, and what is already law must be set aside. Legal precedent does not inform us here. “Not-yet-alive” and “dead” are concepts found in our national soul, not in the Internal Revenue Code. Lawyers should be welcome in any national debate not as experts on irrelevant law but as individuals who may or may not have personal experience that informs each one’s position.

We need to reach one accord and then tell Congress what we’ve decided. Congress then needs to render our decision in the form of a simple, unequivocal law. “This (insert results of debate here) is what defines life. Anything not fitting this definition is not life. Dispose of corpses appropriately.” And, incidentally, that which defines not-life for humans ought also to apply to beached porpoises, comatose rhesus monkeys, laboratory rats, and the like.

Indeed, a constitutional amendment may be the proper result. We cannot leave it to different courts with 50 separate sets of state laws to decide upon different ways to execute nuisance citizens.

This debate needs to be held by ordinary citizens and the rational organizations that represent many groups of citizens. It is not a debate that can be resolved in Congress, because nothing decided in Congress has anything to do with finding a real solution, much less dealing with anything but contrived problems. Congress is ever obsessed with finding a compromise, between opposing sets of values, that both sides can agree wreaks the least political damage to the two parties that control the government. Compromise in Congress is not about agreeing on fixing something; compromise is about appearing to fix something and getting at least part of the credit. When the fix doesn’t work, each side can say it wasn’t their fault because their entire agenda wasn’t incorporated in toto into the “solution.”

We need to have this debate because, through our collective compassion, we have preserved populations of humans in our midst who cannot be relied upon to take responsibility for themselves: pathological criminals, the seriously mentally ill, those with serious physical or mobility limitations, the seriously mentally retarded, the frail and demented elderly, and of course, those in a rapidly-deteriorating state or a persistent vegetative state, which may have arisen out of anything from birth defects to terminal deterioration to self-inflicted loss of function or consciousness. Terri Schiavo reached her persistent vegetative state by initially depriving herself of nutrition necessary to sustain consciousness. Others inflict permanent incapacity upon themselves by such means as over-consumption of substances that they know will destroy them, by submitting themselves to absurd risks, and by overtly attempting, and failing, to kill themselves.

WHO GETS TO TALK?
In order to have a rational national debate, we need to reach a consensus on who represents some of us. I prefer to speak for myself, but others are not confident doing so. So I’m on my soap box and you can get onto yours. Or you can get behind someone who thinks like you do.

There is a vanguard of citizen groups that vigorously oppose the death penalty under all circumstances. Of all citizen movements, this one, to my observation, generates perhaps the most universal respect for its agenda. We should consider including these people as rational participants in the debate. There is another vanguard that advocates permitting the terminally ill the option of assisted suicide. This too is, for the most part, a rational and compassionate group of citizens and we should let them participate. And there are rational voices on the plight of the unborn. Zealots, too, on both sides of that, but the rational voices can be identified.

We should let the politicians participate who have a personal perspective to contribute. Otherwise, they are our servants and should sit it out until they are instructed to act. Even those of us who are “members” of passionate organizations must agree to set aside our most ardent passions and tell our too-vocal organizational leaders to put a cork in it.

A debate needs moderators. A national debate needs someone to do this who can command some media attention, some financial backing, and most importantly, the respect of a significant majority of us. When two former Presidents appeared together to appeal for voluntary contributions from Americans for victims of the 26 December 2004 tsunami, they formed such a team. They are not necessarily the ones to manage a national debate, but they suggest one sort of possibility. Twenty years ago another group of influential people came together for one brief session and recorded “We Are the World.” The effect was fleeting but pervasive. Americans from two to 102 were singing it. People like those who made that song are acting responsibly when they allow themselves to be persuaded to use their enormous influence in an unusual but benevolent way.

I’m merely squeaking like a cricket under the porch. I can’t bring the media to my door to listen to this idea. I can hope only that someone with that kind of power pauses to listen to me chirp for a moment, and understands.

A debate, though, involves a clash of opinions. It differs greatly, too, from the din of opposing zealots. Zealots try to shout each other down and rely not upon thoughtful argument but upon insult and rage. In a debate, the opposing sides at least suspect that the other side has a point that could be respected. They listen to one another. And they submit their best arguments to a panel or a populace. When the populace decides, the debaters accept the result.

WHAT DO I THINK?
And so, as I advocate for a national debate, I am offering opinions along the way in the hope of stimulating support or opposition, but opposition that attempts to persuade me, not destroy me.

For my own part, I certainly have an opinion. I also have a personal perspective. And I have an emotional response to the Terri Schiavo incident as well, so I’ll get that out and be done with it: I struggle with a court’s decision that Terri Schiavo didn’t feel her starvation and thirst. We assume that a hanged criminal doesn’t feel the snap when his neck breaks. But we don’t kill people that way any more. In the judge’s opinion, she wouldn’t feel it because she was already legally dead. Since his was a legal opinion not subject to direct knowledge of what she could feel, it is no more valid than my opinion, legally held, that any judge who could reach that conclusion wouldn’t feel it if a broomstick were rammed up his rectum and then mounted on a marble column on the front of his courthouse. You had a tough case put before you, Judge Greer. But I think a brilliant judge could have alerted the legislature in a different way to tell them that there is a law on the books that stinks and needs to be rectified. It didn’t require a human sacrifice.

There. Now I don’t need to say it again.

I also have a global, (in the sense of wider), more comprehensive, perspective. But first my personal perspective: For fifteen years I too have lived with someone who has survived all that time only because of a feeding tube. (We never thought of it as “life support” though.) He doesn’t walk or speak. He follows a balloon with his eyes when it is passed before him. He is diapered 24 hours a day and must be bathed and wheeled about. We, his family, believe that he takes pleasure in things, and we can tell when he is uncomfortable, but when he hurts he can’t show us where, or when he is frightened, why. Maybe we are deluded to think that he communicates in his own way. Maybe his quality of life is crap too. On paper he would appear to a judge to be a lot like Terri Schiavo. Certainly he is a financial burden on society, on Medicaid and the medical insurance, and on his family. Maybe it’s time to stop feeding him, too. Who wants to sit there and keep vigil while my son starves to death?

On a wider perspective, I learned a little about Dr. Albert Schweitzer when I was a youth. His influence on me is borne in the term he coined: “reverence for life.” To the extent that that concept affects us, we struggle to understand the killing that is necessary so that we might eat and the killing that others force us into so that we might defend ourselves. But necessary killing does not justify unnecessary killing. To this day, I still release spiders outside that I have caught in the house, rather than killing them.

Perhaps those same words, which describe the principle Dr. Schweitzer attempted to elucidate in his Philosophy of Civilization, published in 1923, became the basis for our culture’s turn toward greater compassion for all people. Perhaps, though, that turn had already begun to take place and Dr. Schweitzer merely uttered what was already understood.

WHAT ARE WE DOING TO OURSELVES?
Thus, years before I had heard of Terri Schiavo, I had begun to contemplate the inevitable consequence of America’s scramble to assist all people, in whatever manner of decay and incapacity, to hold onto life at any cost – cost in money and cost in effort. In the first place, assisting children with genetic mental and physical challenges to reach adulthood – children who until a hundred years ago or less would have died sooner (and still do, of course, in most of the rest of the world) – helps assure that their genetic material will be passed on. As more and more medical solutions are made available, more and more children or their guardians assert a right to those solutions. I participate in that process myself on behalf of my son.

With medicines and machines we already preserve the elderly, including the hopelessly demented elderly, beyond their ability to sustain themselves, and at extraordinary cost and extraordinary emotional drain. We wage costly battles against dread diseases on a national and international scale, fighting malaria and polio, smallpox and influenza. These largely indiscriminate, periodic, shotgun-approach campaigns affect whomever they can and leave others at times unprotected. But we also wage costly individualized battles against such dread diseases as cancer, on the premise that every American has the right to muster whatever resources one can on the off-chance of becoming one more survivor.

When people who are predisposed to develop such a disease, and who are young and strong enough to recover, do survive, they often reproduce, increasing the odds that there will be more people genetically predisposed to the same disease in the future. When someone is severely injured in an accident or loses significant function due to a stroke, just two more examples out of many, we don’t just let them go. We encourage them to try electric scooters at public expense (Medicare), prostheses, and rehabilitation of indefinite duration.

We build dialysis centers, and clinics to rehabilitate addicts who would otherwise die in oblivion and who are at increased likelihood to become candidates for long-term care later anyway. We agonize over the homeless and try to steer them toward wellness and recovery at public expense, and largely public waste, considering their recidivism.

Nowadays we give no thought to the marriage of a man and a woman who each endure severe myopia (of the visual kind), people who in past centuries may have been ridiculed and tortured for their clumsiness or devoured for their blindness before the opportunity occurred to marry and reproduce. As innocuous as it seems, this too is an example of our rush to assure the physical weakening of our population. And so it goes with people who have chronic asthma, cystic fibrosis, diabetes, a predisposition to addictive behavior, hemophilia, and the list is endless. It is our national will to assure us each and every one the fighting chance we never before would have had... to weaken the gene pool.

We have declared insane asylums inhumane, even though they once helped keep our streets safer and to some extent inhibited procreation. We have moved their populations into the communities to be integrated as much as possible with regular folks. That’s good! They have rights. They aren’t dead yet either!

Nobody wants to volunteer to forgo available medical treatment that will help them fight their way back from a disease or injury. Nobody wants to abandon their physically or mentally weak children or grandparents to the life they would lead if they had to be dependent completely on their own responsibility and faculties.

We all want assistance in all of these circumstances. Most of those who don’t have insurance have some claim to public funds for acute or critical care. Other than the somewhat-meaningless lifetime maximums in health insurance policies, there are no limits to what someone can seek for treatment. Seek it, schedule it, and ask for donations to help pay the bills afterward. Declare bankruptcy if you must. But our attitude is that we don’t have to sit home and die as our ancestors did when they knew it was serious. And there are certainly no statutory limits to the care one may seek.

We are becoming a nation almost overrun with people who are, if not outright nuisances to the rest of us because of their dependency, at least greatly inconvenient to have around. We must discuss whether this is the way we want to go on. Unless we do something, the percentage of nuisance people in the population will only increase. Are we okay with this?

ISN’T THERE AT LEAST SOMEWHERE WE CAN START?
Terri Schiavo’s example at least begs the debate on whether we can’t get rid of a few – perhaps quite a few – people who have no awareness, no hope of developing any awareness, and presumably have no quality of life. (If we don’t debate it and agree, then we’ve already assented to let the judges decide quality of life for us based on “law. “)

It almost leaves moot the debate on what to do with people who are plainly and permanently unconscious. At this point, consider the distinction between awareness and consciousness. Terri Schiavo was conscious and had a relatively normal wake-sleep cycle. But she was arguably not aware. She apparently processed nothing that her senses took in. At best, she had reflexive responses to certain stimuli. So say certain “experts, “ anyway.

Unlike her, my son, despite the superficial similarities, is aware. He is in an aggressive school program where he has learned to communicate through a picture-exchange system. He follows precise verbal instructions to match, separate, and otherwise manipulate objects. He soothes himself by playing sometimes sweet, sometimes raucous “tunes” on the piano. He points when asked to “pick the one you want.” If he is sitting on the floor before the television and we cajole him to turn it on, he will scoot to it and press buttons until it comes on. He has a couple of hand signs which he invented and uses to communicate.

Someone who is conscious, then, may or may not be aware. But someone who is aware is, almost by definition, also conscious. (I had to say “almost” because I’ve read Dalton Trumbo’s poignant novel, Johnny Got His Gun. Poignant because it's fiction; tragic were it true. But let’s not go there.)

If you haven’t seen them, there are institutions in every state where children, born in a persistent vegetative state are cared for who can’t be cared for in their own homes and for whom there is a paucity of foster homes. I’m familiar with such an institution and, as closely as discretion allowed, have spent considerable time observing the conscious-but-not-aware, immobile children that mostly populate the place.

If it’s cruel to say it and nobody else wants to, then I will be the first: These children are an inconvenience. Many of them I’ve seen have no awareness, no hope of developing any awareness, and presumably no quality of life. Many have been abandoned by their birth parents. Under the criteria used to kill off Terri Schiavo, these children are indistinguishable from her, in other words, legally dead already, under Florida law anyway. They are, nevertheless, U.S. citizens and, without a clear expression of national will codified into law, judges in different states have the option to order them executed under a mish-mash of indistinct state laws. (I use the term “execute” rationally and according to its dictionary definition: to “put to death according to law.” But then, I see my error: How could Terri Schiavo be put to death when, although her heart continued to beat on its own and she breathed without assistance, she was already legally dead. You cannot kill again that which has already died... You see, I can appreciate both sides of the debate!)

WHY IS THIS SO IMPORTANT?
A nation with a growing population of nuisance individuals needs to decide what to do with them. Why? Because it costs a lot to maintain them and they are consuming valuable time and resources that could be applied to the living? Some day that will be the incentive, but not yet. Because they are weakening the gene pool? That’s really only a mild side-effect involving a few individuals at this point.

We need to decide what to do with them because if we don’t reach one accord, we must realize that some day each of us may become not a national inconvenience but a personal inconvenience to the ones we most depend upon to look out for our interest. Any of us may, then, be deemed unable to feel or comprehend and may then be sentenced to death by starvation or some such method. Why would we want to subject our loved ones to the agonizing decision that Michael Schiavo had to come to and the rest of the family to a feud with no winner?

We could choose, after rational, national debate, to continue to be compassionate toward the partly dead among us, so that those who, like Michael Schiavo, have simply gone on as long as they can and need to be relieved will have a recourse other than a court order of execution. Those who give up caring for the partly dead need to be forgiven for giving up but also need to understand that there should be no financial gain or loss in doing so. They need the liberty to turn guardianship and custody over to the state, not so that the state can put their vegetable to death, but so that the state can then contract for further care if not equipped to maintain nuisance people in state-run semi-incarceration or warehouses. A necessary adjunct to this decision will be to make possible a network of foster homes where people who have been turned over to the state can be cared for with the compassion that others can no longer muster.

Or we could create a national rating system and simply execute people who don’t score above, say, a ‘two’, or some logical but fixed threshold. If we do create a national rating system that provides for the execution of people who don’t meet the threshold, Terri Schiavo being a good example, those of us with loved ones in declining health who can’t speak for themselves – my son for instance – must accept the national will and step aside when that threshold is passed on one’s way to total death. We must let the last heartbeat be assigned by the state, but according to a national law or constitutional amendment that leaves little doubt what the criteria are.

HOW CAN I INTERCEDE ON MY OWN BEHALF?
However such a debate might turn out, let us nevertheless accept the wishes of each individual who, while coherent, has expressed a desire to avoid “heroic measures” and “life support” when in a coma, persistent vegetative, or even quadriplegic completely-dependent state. That is, if the national will dictates that we must sustain what life remains by whatever means are possible – pretty much as things are now despite the winds of change heralded by our collective apathy over Terri Schiavo – and if the individual says: “When I’m clearly on my way out, let me go,” then the debate should let the perspective of that individual be respected.

If instead the national will dictates that a scorecard will determine when to execute someone, but that someone, while aware and reasonably believing that such an end is coming, chooses a quicker end, that means ought to be arranged and respected.

For what follows it is necessary to acknowledge that there are several versions of the life of dubious quality.

There is the person who was born essentially legally dead, or what is genteelly referred to as a persistent vegetative state – PVS.
There is the person who has, for whatever reason, slipped into a permanent but persistent state of unconsciousness, PVS, and depends on artificial support only for sustenance. (This was Karen Ann Quinlan.)
There is the person who has, for whatever reason, slipped into a permanent but persistent state of unconsciousness or unawareness and depends on artificial support for respiration or circulation or both, as well as for sustenance.
There is the conscious person who depends on artificial support for respiration, circulation, or sustenance, or any combination of the three, but who can persist indefinitely, even function productively, with that support.
There is the person who is conscious and aware but severely mentally impaired, either from birth or from the occurrence of some event, who is dependent on artificial support for respiration, circulation, or sustenance, or any combination of the three. (This is my son, Sam, who is on “life support,” that is, a feeding tube, for sustenance only.)
There is the person who is apparently conscious but who persistently has no apparent awareness of things and is therefore dependent on artificial support for respiration, circulation, or sustenance, or any combination of the three. (This was Terri Schiavo, who was on “life support,” that is, a feeding tube, for sustenance only.)
There is the conscious person who is enduring a slow, agonizing death and who must gradually be brought under artificial supports as well as treatment for pain.
There is the unconscious person who is enduring a slow, agonizing death and who must gradually be brought under artificial supports as well as treatment for pain.
There is the person who was apparently healthy only a few days beforehand and who is rapidly slipping away due to a virulent infection, other ravaging illness, or mysterious causes.
And on it goes.

Given that I do not expect the U.S.A. to take from the Terri Schiavo incident any cogent lesson (but rather, I expect us to turn it over to Congress for endless, tiresome “debate”) and that, therefore, I will one day want to spare my loved ones the absolute whim of a court, for I seriously anticipate arriving at a state of complete dependence some day, I offer the following alternative. It is my hope that, if the determination of my percentage of deadness is up to a court to decide, then the court will consider this analysis, or better still, will turn the matter over to my family because I have had the good sense to give some guidance here, thus sparing the court the trouble.

I should define clearly that my family, or loved ones, for purposes of this question, are my wife and two biological daughters. That’s not to imply that I don’t also love someone else, but I don’t want my other loved ones, however many they may be, given control over my death or execution. I’m sure the three I’ve named, or those that remain of the three when my time comes, can readily come to one accord and I bless that decision here and now.

THE TEST
If I am incompletely dead and anyone should suspect that the best thing for them, for me, and for my fellow man is that the rest of me should be put down, give me this test. ‘Yes’ answers point toward sustaining life, ‘No’ answers point toward certain death.

Absent heroic measures and intensive testing:

1. Can I breathe on my own?

2. Does my heart beat reliably without external stimulus or support?

3. Can I cooperate with my own feeding or care?

4. Am I (apparently or occasionally – briefly every day for instance) conscious?

5. Perhaps restating #4, do I respond occasionally and deliberately to questions, gestures, or touch, and do two or more people agree that I do?

Given at least some intensive testing:

6. Am I free from virulent infection or other consumptive disease that, in my state, is likely to kill me in a few days anyway? (Note: ‘No’ means Yes I have such a condition.)

7. Do I have any brain activity suggestive of awareness?

8. Is there a rational basis to assume I’ll ever again become conscious or aware?

9. Are my ancillary systems such as kidneys functioning with apparent intent to continue as they would if I were normal for my age?

10. Do two or more dispassionate “experts” agree that I have some residual cognitive consciousness, awareness, or potential for recovering some rational conscious awareness?

Once this test has been given, if there is any disagreement among my loved ones, I then suggest that two or more dispassionate individuals be chosen by consensus of my loved ones and be charged to interpret the results and render their advice. I then enjoin my loved ones to accept that advice. If I have, previous to becoming incapacitated, expressed a desire to be supplied with the means to artificially accelerate the end, that is, the means to finish dying quickly, then I request that two or more dispassionate individuals advise my loved ones on that matter and that they likewise accept the advice, to the extent that they may legally do so.

(I would not ask to have an assisted suicide arranged for myself unless I were consciously aware of present or impending unendurable pain.)

On the above test, if I score two or more on the Yes side in #1 through #5, then I think I would like to be sustained until it is more clear which way I will go. If I get one or two in the Yes column on #1 through #5 but it’s doubtful, then I would like to be sustained for a while if I also get two more in the Yes column on #6 through #10. In no event do I want to be kept alive for more than a year if I am unconscious or apparently unaware throughout that time. I’d probably be fine checking out after six months in that state, but if more passionate individuals prevail, then let them understand it just can’t go past a year.

HOW WOULD I HAVE YOU LET ME GO?
If I have become apparently unaware and there is no prognosis for regaining awareness, as would be the case if I were being consumed by a virulent infection or metastasizing cancer, I also don’t want to be kept “alive” by heroic means. Here’s an example how to interpret the test above. If I’m not conscious, therefore on “life support” for sustenance, AND if either my breathing or heart won’t keep going without tubes and wires, AND if I ain’t coming back from this situation, then give it a few days if you must and then let me go. I don’t consider Terri Schiavo that far gone, by the way.

I participated in the decision to “unplug” my father only four or five days after he had packed to leave the hospital under his own power following surgery for lung cancer. But he had a serious reversal, and the decision was simple when the answer to #1 through #6 and #8 through #10 above was No in every instance. I don’t remember whether #7 was answered. Was that an execution? Nooooo, because he wasn’t “put to death according to law.” It was a medical determination, and the answer to #6 was the clincher. Life support systems would have been insufficient to sustain him for another day anyway. He drew his last breath two or three minutes after being disconnected from the ventilator.

So, on the supposition that the national debate and clear direction to the courts will not be forthcoming in my lifetime, I wonder what I would prefer if I were not clearly dead but were deemed by a court to be dead enough to be finished off in some gruesome way – if I were in Terri’s predicament. And not only I, but if I am called upon to concur that a person under my care and guardianship is likewise due to be dispatched, these are a few of the ways I’d consider among my options, for myself and for someone else:

Starvation and thirst – The Terri Schiavo solution. This is slow and, I must believe, agonizing even to a person who is already partly or legally dead. The brain stem is a powerful advocate for food and water, and it is the brain stem that sustains respiration and circulation. For me, at least, I would ask that my guardians consider my will to eat and drink as strong as my will to breath and pump.
Suffocation – Not with a pillow pressed over the face. That would be too dramatic. Instead, this could merely be a plastic tent placed over the head to slowly reduce the supply of oxygen to my lungs. One assumes that I wouldn’t have the involuntary reflex to strike the tent away with my already-dead arms. As long as it was a “natural” suffocation by merely depriving me of oxygen, in the manner of starvation by merely depriving me of sustenance, it would be a peaceful and efficient way to go, and certainly quicker than starvation.
Drowning – Assuming a compassionate intent to attend to the partly dead person’s comfort – after all, we do surround them with pillows and such – nothing is quite as soothing and comfortable as a warm bath. I could be lowered into a bathtub, the warm water could slowly be raised in the tub until it completely covers me, I would inhale a little of it, and then it would be over.
Freezing – This is a possibility that removes most of the worry about the suffering that some might ascribe to the previous methods. Even conscious people “suffering” from hypothermia aren’t aware that they are suffering. (Judges take note: People don’t feel it, as those who’ve been rescued from the edge of death-by-freezing have testified.) They become disoriented – if I were already partly dead presumably I would already be disoriented in the extreme – and then they slip from consciousness, and then their systems quietly shut down. I think freezing Terri Schiavo would have been more humane than starving her.
Buried “alive” (but in fact partly dead) – If I were partly dead but a consensus couldn’t be reached concerning my wishes, I could be placed into a coffin and lowered into a grave where any of the foregoing consequences could take place and no one ever need know which one succeeded.
Bleeding – If I’m already partly dead and my heart and lungs haven’t the good sense to shut down, this may be my first choice of a way to go. It would be quick, and it would not need to be messy. I’ve already donated roughly 80 units of blood in my “life”time, and this would be a way of donating ten or so more units of good blood under a controlled collection process. Then someone else who is not already partly dead but in need of more blood could be prevented from becoming partly dead. If I’ve reached 90 donated units before I become partly or legally dead, then finishing me off in this manner would help me earn the coveted 100-unit pin!
Cremation – The opposite of freezing. This has its advantages because it not only makes one completely dead but also completely resolves the secondary debate about what to do with the remains. I frankly reject this solution for myself anyway, because I cannot accept that I wouldn’t feel it. Cremation, however, would be my disposal of choice once I am completely, 100% dead dead. I am concerned that there isn’t enough land to keep burying people and pets and plastic. Take the pressure off the land and burn me up.
Natural disposal – A very simple solution used by aboriginal Americans, according to pre-PC literature on the American Indians. My partly dead body could be placed onto a platform high above the ground, out of sight of people who might find it distasteful to accidentally glance upon the scene, and the crows and vultures and other hungry creatures of nature could each carry part of me away. Digested in this manner, it would be nearly as efficient as cremation. And anyone who wants a souvenir of me wouldn’t have to settle for a lock of my hair. There are about 206 bones in the body, enough for all my friends to have one after they’ve been cleaned of the fleshy parts over a couple of weeks of exposure to nature. I don’t think being picked apart in the manner would annoy me. In fact, if I’m sufficiently disoriented, it might tickle.
Lethal injection – This would be fine but probably wouldn’t be approved by any court because it’s too much like punishment.
Assisted suicide – This is an option under certain circumstances. If I am partly dead, (dead enough to be put to death under a court order but too weak to protest that I didn't commit any crime worthy of execution), but still marginally conscious and able to manipulate something, I might want to go this way. The type of contraption that would make this effective would depend on my residual voluntary abilities at that point and is beyond the scope of this discussion.

ABOUT CITIZENSHIP AND ABOUT LIFE
There is but one matter left to consider. Whatever the outcome of a national debate, and before it has been decided, it simply makes sense that each of us should prepare a living will. I have one, and it authorizes the same people who would decide whether to sustain me by artificial means, upon deciding not to, the option to then authorize the removal of parts of my body, through legitimate medical channels, to be used so that someone else can live.

For it is life which I revere. I understand that just living through one day at a time may be difficult for some, can stink really. Suck even. I can’t invoke spiritual, religious, or cosmic arguments here. Even though I am guided by an authority above myself, I assume that authority only over myself. When I assume that authority over you also, you have the same right to rebel that I have if you projected some alien authority over me. More religious people are logical than logical people are religious, and it is the intensely logical people who seem most not to understand what the big deal is about Terri Schiavo. I don’t condemn those who don’t understand. I appeal to their logic.

Terri Schiavo, whatever she was – woman or vegetable – was a citizen of the U.S.A. She was executed at a judge’s order, and not by lethal injection or some other humane means but by starvation and dehydration, which, if inflicted upon a criminal would be condemned as a cruel and unusual punishment. She was sentenced to death without a criminal charge, a trial, or a conviction. What was done to her cannot legally or ethically be done to a disobedient dog. As a disabled person without a voice, she apparently had forfeited her rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. One might have supposed that the ADA, a federal act which presumably, until Terri Schiavo, applied equally to all U.S. citizens, confers the right to remain disabled indefinitely. That it does not is perhaps the most frightening implication of this event to those of us who care for the severely disabled.

It initially astonished me that those charged with carrying out the sentence didn’t protest en masse and invite the judge to come clamp her off himself, if that was his order.

I want to be charitable toward Michael Schiavo. He had tried to do the right thing for his disabled wife all these years and even, I heard, studied nursing and took time off to nurse her himself. Eventually he wanted out, and the history of the case shows that there have been earlier attempts to do away with the nuisance that Terri had become. He knew that there is a conventional way to dump a wife you don’t want to stay with, and that is divorce. (There was some mumbling in the media that Florida made that difficult for him. So what prevented him from dragging her to Georgia?) There is an unconventional way, and that is murder. And for him, because Terri was a unique burden, there came a new, convenient way.

Never mind the accusations that it wasn’t until seven years after she uttered it that he mentioned his wife’s wish not to be kept on life support if anything tragic ever happened. Never mind the insinuation that it was the cash from a malpractice settlement that motivated him to want her dead rather than divorced. Never mind the other woman and the second family he started. It comes to this: For whatever reason, he wanted his wife out of the picture. Instead of divorcing her, getting on with his life, and letting Terri get on with hers – and who would have blamed him? – he found an accomplice in a judge and a law that could be twisted around her feeding tube, choking it off.

Is this how we all want to be treated? And is this the sort of decision we want to inflict upon our families, whether parents, children, or spouses, when we have become burdensome and they have come to the end of their endurance with us?

What defines life and therefore citizenship and therefore protection under the law is not something to leave to the politicians. The politicians get the second and third parts of it, but the first part, the very definition of life, must come from something deeper than politics and also something more rational than religion. It must be found in the soul of our culture and must be plain to all of us, or else none of us is safe. We must debate it and we must decide.

©David A. Woodbury, 31 March 2005

If I Lived in New York City

2011-12-19T20:59:00.002-05:00

I haven't walked the streets of New York City since I paid my daughter a visit there in 2004, but I suspect it wouldn't be much of a different experience now. It wasn't much different for me in 2004 than at my first visit, in 1965. So, I imagine you can still find photocopied announcements posted randomly at eye level around the city inviting anyone and everyone to

Come See
Sephalie Bane-Todo
Only Appearance This Month
at the
Electric Danger
Sandwich Experience
305 East 5th Street
Thursday, June 17, 2004
4pm to closing
Low Cover Charge
and
Free Whores' Ovaries
(Hors D'Oeuvres)

New Yorkers are acutely attuned to the 'artists' among them, in all media, and love to be the first among their friends to speak the name of the soon-to-become famous person who just may become the next David Sedaris. Until that person becomes famous, he or she can be found cruising the little eating and drinking spots, arranging venues for her blood-on-pizza-box paintings, or his strolling-minstrel-history-of-North-Korea-in-12-tone songs. Some, such as David Sedaris, whose work I appreciate, stretch the limits but keep one toe inside the circle of conventional expression, thereby standing a better chance of attracting the sort of backing (publisher, promoter, investor) who will one day help them reach a broad audience outside Manhattan and become rich.

If I lived in New York City, I would most certainly be a single person, since I would be too poor to support a family on $50,000 a year, or even to support a wife, in a place where a low monthly rent is $10 a square foot. (Who owns the buildings in New York City, anyway? Corporations? Who lives in them? Corporation-haters? Why?)

So I'd be a single person, trolling, no doubt, for a connection with someone now and then. So maybe what I'd do is make my own poster:

Come See
Lonicera Tatarica
Only Appearance This Week
at the
Bread Kettle
Garden and Café
215 East 5th Street
Thursday, December 29, 2011
2:30pm to closing
No Cover Charge
and
Great Bread Samples

Beforehand, I'd attend a few of the legitimate scenes and see what kind of people show up at what venues in which neighborhoods. Once I've chosen the best neighborhood and shops for the type of person I'm attracted to, then I'd choose a cozy but clean store-front eatery in that same neighborhood. Naturally, I'd give my fictitious performer a name calculated for intrigue. And I wouldn't need to ask the shopkeeper's permission, since he would not realize that the posters are going up and all I'm really going to do at the appointed date and time is go sit in there, like every other patron, and wait for the announced soon-to-be-famous person to appear.

I would be checking out the faces in the shop, minding my own business, appearing to wait expectantly, and choosing the person whom I would approach at the right moment.

When the audience begins to grow restless at being stood up -- about the time two or three people have asked the shopkeeper where he or she is, this Lonny Cera -- I would approach my chosen stranger and strike up a conversation about the missing not-quite-celebrity; maybe propose that we go together to the one around the corner which is supposed to start in a half hour or so.

That's what I'd do if I were an under-employed, poor, single intellectual living in voluntary confinement in New York City.

Brain Leak

2011-10-14T20:16:00.000-04:00

Instead of pissing contests, which don't smell good, why not have cat-throwing contests? If you paint a target on a barn wall, maybe the cats' claws would stick for a moment, and someone could keep score!

Das Neues Reich

2011-08-05T19:55:00.002-04:00

Saturday I get to leave for a two-week family vacation, driving my Ram 3500 diesel pickup with five of us aboard from Maine to Indiana, round trip, to visit my daughter, Leigh and son-in-law, Conor. It so happens that, several years ago, Leigh, during her first year of teaching elementary school, became active in cowboy action shooting at a local club. She and her husband shoot clays with me once or twice a year when they visit Maine.

For this trip I was cheerfully planning to bring along a .22 magnum revolver to give her, since she does not have a handgun in a caliber conducive to her petite size and of suitable economy for practice.

Since I am a licensed firearms instructor with a concealed weapons permit, as well as a Registered Maine Guide with a degree in wildlife management, I always have a couple of loaded guns in my truck appropriate to traveling the Maine woods. Needless to say, like most homes in low-crime Maine, my house is well-equipped to discourage intruders. So I almost didn’t give a thought to tossing in the little revolver for the trip.

For the heck of it, I decided to check a guidebook on the gun laws of the 50 states. What I discovered in that little volume is like stepping into someone else’s nightmare novel of what the United States would have been like if it hadn’t started with a clear, supreme Constitution.

Obviously, I have no firearms issues in Maine, whose state constitution paraphrases the country’s Second Amendment and says the right to keep and bear arms shall not be questioned.

I looked at the summary of regulations for the other states that I will be driving through. NH, with its motto, Live Free or Die, is predictably observant of the Second Amendment. Indiana, my destination, is also a free state.

The confederation of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, which may as well be dubbed Maconjny: Das Neues Reich, has apparently seceded unnoticed from the USA. Those four states in particular have written regs of their own that mock the U.S. Constitution. Let me paraphrase, but I’ll base it on the First Amendment rather than the Second:

· Anyone transporting printed material, critical of the government of Maconjny, through the Reich of Maconjny, must have evidence of a destination that is outside the Reich, such that the only reason for being in the Reich in possession of such material is to reach the other side essentially without stopping.
· Anyone intending to transport such material must first apply for and obtain a dangerous materials transport permit from the governor-general of each state or through which the material will pass.
· Issue of such permits is at the discretion of each governor-general.
· An application must be accompanied by a non-refundable fee of $10 for each state on the route, and each approved permit will require a fee of not less than $45.
· A permit is valid only for the state of issue. Obtaining a permit from one state on the route does not permit transport through other states on the route, so failure to obtain permits from each of the remaining states on the route renders the intended transport illegal in the remaining states.
· An approved dangerous material transport permit will be good for nine days from the date of issue and will cover one trip through the state of issue.
· Anyone transporting such printed material must keep that material stored in a locked container separate from the passenger compartment or in a manner that clearly prevents anyone in the passenger compartment of the vehicle from seeing or reaching the material. Each state may modify this rule at its discretion without notice. Rules in effect on the permit date may no longer be in effect on the date of transport.
· Approval of methods other than a locked container will be at the discretion of an arresting officer.
· Anyone transporting such printed material through the Reich must have evidence of a destination that is outside the Reich (a printed motel reservation, for example).
· A vehicle transporting such material may make only brief stops for fuel or food.
· Anyone stopping for reasons not related to reaching the other side of the realm, such as to visit relatives, will be deemed to be stopping with the intent of using or distributing such materials within the Reich and will be deemed in direct violation of this rule.
· What constitutes printed material critical of the Reich will be at the discretion of the governor-general of any member state (or a designee), regardless which state the material is transported through.
· The operator of any vehicle which is transporting any printed material, including material which does not in the opinion of the operator constitute dangerous printed material, which vehicle is stopped for any reason, with or without a permit, must submit an example of the material to an agent of the governor-general of that state and the subject material may not be transported further than the point of arrest until deemed free of criticism of the Reich.
· Material found to be critical of the Reich, which is not accompanied by a timely dangerous materials transport permit will be cause for arrest of the operator of the transporting vehicle as well as arrest of any other occupants deemed by the arresting officer to be involved.
· Transport of materials assumed safe by the transporting person but which are later deemed critical of the Reich, or of materials previously deemed dangerous but which are being transported in violation of these rules, will subject the responsible operator and responsible others to mandatory imprisonment of not less than one year without appeal.
· Distributing, discarding, posting, public reading, or any other disclosure of any portion of a printed item which, in the whole, is deemed critical of the Reich will subject the responsible person and/or others to mandatory imprisonment of not less than one year without appeal.

These are, almost word for word, the laws of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, regarding one or our most fundamental rights. If these really were the rules infringing on free speech (and freedom of the printing press), wouldn’t they cause universal, if not violent, protest and disobedience? Wouldn’t the idiots be impeached and disbarred, who wrote the enabling legislation giving the Fourth Branch of government (the regulatory branch) the option to write such rules? Substitute the topic of the second amendment -- simple antiquated armaments of self-protection -- and the subjects of Maconjny find these rules soothing and comforting.

Germany's (Hitler's) Third Reich had achieved restrictions like these in the 1930s before setting out to conquer Europe. At least one credible historian (Clayton Cramer, Firing Back) believes that "if the population of Eastern Europe were as well armed as the average American, the Nazis would have lost much of their military capacity attempting to implement the Holocaust."

I am baffled all the more to realize that these states, while they have seceded from the USA, are still receiving the remaining benefits of the Constitution, particularly social welfare and common defense. With regulations such as these, they are not members of the United States.

If any random phrase can be erased from the the US Constitution in a state legislature, then the entire Constitution is optional at a state’s whim. Therefore why did the nation’s founders bother to write a Constitution? Oh, yeah… it's just a list of suggestions. Most of its provisions have been twisted into opposite meaning by the Supreme Court which is supposed to uphold it. For all but the first 50 years of this nation’s history the Supreme Court has regarded the Constitution as something comparable to the Bible: too vague and contradictory to be read directly and therefore eligible for interpretations in direct reversal of its actual words.

Our culture has embraced all manifestations of lunacy as valid expression since the 1960s. Where we once had criminal codes that protected us from the truly dangerous, the truly dangerous, who should not have guns, face no restrictions on possession. As a result, we get monthly reports of massacres by nut cases who would not have been running around loose 50 years ago. And, as a result of their miscreancy, we get regulations like the above and demands that there be restrictions on all owners of firearms.

My daughter is not a lunatic. She can own a .22-caliber revolver. Unfortunately, there is no legal way for me to give her one, neither for me to transport it to her in Indiana, nor for her to take it back with her the next time she visits Maine. Thanks, Maconjny!

Epson Perfection V330 scanner review - YES!

2011-03-12T20:53:00.003-05:00

[The following is the review I submitted when I installed and registered my new scanner.]
I have the Epson Perfection V330 connected by USB to a MacBook Pro Intel dual-core home computer running OS 10.6.6. Long delays during installation made me nervous, but my patience was rewarded. I let it do the full install and it went without a hitch. I registered it but left the final install screen open because it had the link to write this review. You can be glad I did.
I ran my cords but didn't plug anything in until the simple Start Here guide told me to. I had to dig a little in the Applications folder on my desktop once it was finished, but I found the Epson Scan icon and dragged it to my dock for every-day use.
I scanned one of my pen-and-ink sketches first, on full auto. It cropped it too closely, but the white paper had no border so I wasn't concerned. A photo next. Nice and clean and bright. Then for the test I had been waiting for for years. I prayed that some day I would be able to scan old negatives. I pulled out a strip at random and didn't bother to figure out what it was.
Be prepared: It took me four tries before I understood how orient the negative and slide holder. You remove the white panel that's built into the lid. You lay the slide holder onto the glass so that the negatives, if that's what you're scanning, are in the middle and will be against a frosty screen built into the lid when you close it. If you're scanning slides, which I will do too, then I assume you rotate the slide holder so that your slides are against the frosty screen instead.
I ran a preview. Omigosh! Four pictures I had taken with an old manual 35mm camera in the summer of 1969: three from the top floor of Siddall Hall at the University of Cincinnati at night and one daytime picture of a praying mantis on the sidewalk! One of the night pictures includes foreground details under streetlights and the full downtown skyline - good enough to use as the desktop image on my 17" monitor - this from a 42-year-old 35mm color negative. (I will post the image at http://woodburyyankee.blogspot.com.)
If you have the negative preview showing in the Epson Scan program, don't tinker with the dpi. Look at the proportional choices instead. When you click on each one (4x6, 5x7...), the thumbnail has an overlay to show you how each one will crop, and a line on the lower right shows you the length and width pixels and resulting file size. This is my best guide for final resolution and file storage implications.
When I had settled on, I think, 5x7, so the result would be about 1500x2100 pixels, I clicked scan, and that's when I was able to see the final results. I am impressed.
I haven't played around with the MediaImpressions, although ArcSoft PhotoStudio was my favorite user-friendly photo software on a Windows PC up until 8 or 10 years ago.
Be aware also that the slide/negative holder can be stored in the lid behind the white panel. There are plastic tabs on both pieces to guide you, and you really don't want to line them up wrong or break one off!
I read the reviews carefully before buying this scanner, wanted it for the slide/negative capacity, and am pleased so far with the automatic scanning features. As I understand it, the difference between the V300 and the V330 is that the latter will set you up in Windows 7 and Snow Leopard, while the V300 is just one step down in operating system readiness. I gleaned that from other reviews - so I can't say trust me on that one. Epson's own web site is not helpful on that.
The Epson Scan interface is a little eccentric, but I am a good learner. It works as advertised and will serve my needs splendidly. This is a great little scanner for the purposes I've described.
[A few days later... The software is odd, but it works. It has "modes" for scanning: Full Auto, Home, Office, and Professional. Full Auto works with the negative/slide holder. But if you need to crop before scanning or make other adjustments first, use Professional. You just have to try the other two modes to see how they're different, but they're essentially just pre-sets.]

The 2010 Maine Conference on Wealth

2010-11-15T21:08:00.002-05:00

The envied wealth of America is an illusion, according to a panel of economics experts meeting this fall in a conference at a scenic resort on a remote lake in northern Maine. Actually, the conference consisted of myself, some assorted shoreline refuse, and the geese winging southward overhead, (OK, don't count them; they didn't even look down), but the setting is authentic. I was really just there to soak up some frosty wind, watch the sun set, and think.

Nor did this conference actually conclude that America's wealth is an illusion. That was the premise on which the conference opened, and it was neither proven nor refuted. Perhaps the illusory property of America's wealth will be the topic of next year's get-together.

As the ranking conference member present at this year's event, I set the agenda. First I imagined a slate of conference participants. The lake shore was littered with rough, rounded granite stones, so I arranged a dozen or so of these into a few orderly rows at the water's edge. Since it was possible to forgo registration and introductions, the first order of business was to assess America's wealth. We weren't looking for a dollar figure here. Since there is no longer any such thing as a unit of value, there is no way (and no point) to assign a value to this nation's wealth. (When the dollar was essentially an ounce of silver, up until 1964, there was a unit of value that the federal government could not control: an ounce of silver.)

We actually found ourselves defining wealth, in a way, as we brainstormed a list of what constitutes America's wealth. As at any conference, latecomers drifted in and tried to appear inconspicuous. We were joined by an occasional piece of driftwood, some flotsam such as a candy wrapper, and a couple of mallards that seemed not to realize that they were at the wrong conference.

Those of us participating, though, concentrated on our work. We imagined a large flip-chart of Post-it sheets and began listing what we could include that represented America's wealth.

We immediately rattled off broad categories, such as land and natural resources. We included all the gold at Fort Knox, if that's where it is still hidden. (Later, during the analysis and refinement sessions, we decided to exclude all the gold at Fort Knox. This will never again find its way into the hands of the citizens, and so it's essentially as unavailable as all the gold that has never been found. Only the federal government will ever have access to it, and it's safe to predict that it will only ever be used in some corrupt way to pay off a foreign dictator or to fund some idiotic project such buying carbon offsets from -- or for -- the Chinese.) We agreed that gold in the hands of individuals is a component of each individual's wealth. And we agreed that silver is abundant enough for industrial and private use that it can be counted in America's wealth. But government gold effectively doesn't exist.

We thought of the things that are bought and sold on the stock market. Shares, we call them, shares of ownership in large ventures, which many individuals regard as wealth. But we had to separate these into different categories too.

We decided that some businesses own real assets -- forested land, for instance. Oil shale. Tooled-up manufacturing facilities, such as tractor factories. A large agri-business. A string of resort hotels, even. These businesses are in one category because they truly own something tangible.

We began to have trouble with some other categories of shares in the stock market, though, even though a lot of Americans (and foreign investors, too, we suspect) have much of their money tied up in such investments: For-profit health care facilities, banks, and retailers came most quickly to mind. Since I was doing most of the thinking at this conference, we stopped with those three, since our light was fading, we were distracted by the brilliant colors reflected in the rippling water, and the chill was increasing, meaning that it was time to move along to the next step.

We analyzed these three examples more deeply. Health-care conglomerates don't really own much, except for expensive buildings and expensive equipment. Their ability to return profits to investors depends on sick people's ability to coerce someone to pay. We couldn't guess how many billions of pretend dollars are invested in banks, but what do they own besides debt? Well, they own shares of all manner of other stock, but we kind of guess that their portfolios are offset by their debt ownership. And retailers: If they even own the inventory in their stores, it isn't much to brag about -- next year's outdated fashions, next year's obsolete consumer electronics, perishable and mostly useless food such as potato chips. But their inventories are also often not their own. Their stock has pretend value only in the promise that they will continue to have customers day after day who will leave behind more dollars than the store needs to operate.

Those of us at this splendidly-illuminated fall conference -- myself and a bunch of rocks -- realized that if we had any money to invest, we'd be reluctant to give it to retailers handling junk merchandise for other people, banks juggling debt, and places that hope government programs will pay them for providing sick care. We think those are very risky places to lay our money down. No one at our conference knew whether accounting firms and law firms are bought and sold on the stock market. If not, why not? (We may be experts, but even economics experts don't know everything.)

We don't know what proportion of the stock market is composed of shaky enterprises and what proportion includes those with true assets. We just think that, if there is another stock market collapse, we'd rather own the ability to make tractors than the option to join a lawsuit against a bankrupt bank.

We also realize that the public value of a company is not just its assets but is comprised also of some anticipation of its ability to find customers and return a profit to its investors. We aren't naïve. And some companies with impressive assets have lousy money-handling habits, or they goof around with unrelated ventures that drag them down, such as GE dabbling in insurance.

In assessing America's wealth, we considered its luxury features, in spite of who owns them. This means its golf courses and resorts, vacation meccas and parks, sporting arenas and museums. We were divided on these things. They do not detract from the nation's wealth, but since there are few investors in these things, neither do they represent functional wealth.

A nation has an easier time remaining wealthy and productive if its citizens share access to the ability to move things around, so we counted its coastal access and navigable waterways and its vast highway system unimpeded by regional boundaries. The nation's railroads were a grand asset fifty to eighty years ago when they were privately-owned and the government wasn't yet taxing them out of existence in order to fund a highway system, so in their decaying state they are a secondary consideration in terms of America's wealth. They could come back, but only if government were to get out of the way, which it won't.

We gave some thought to other institutions that contribute to, if they don't comprise the wealth of, a nation. Colleges, for instance. We have lots of those, and their physical and intellectual resources are splendid (except in the arena of ideas, where they are decidedly fungal and Marxist-leaning). Colleges aren't bought and sold on the stock market. Citizens don't own them. But we weren't trying to quantify America's wealth, in order to compare it with Germany's wealth, for instance. We were trying to assess its assets but also to figure out, concomitantly, what makes this country strong and resilient -- what it has which secures its wealth, in other words. Colleges, in spite of their determination to destroy the founding principles, are a positive force in securing America's wealth.

At the break, someone was heard to remark that, of all the thoughts listed so far, federal, state, and local governments had not appeared on any list of what contributes to the wealth of the country.

When we re-assembled after a light snack, our optimism began to wane. Maybe it was the remark about government. It comes through as the villain in the equation, because it has the option to bleed the wealth from anything, as it did in the last century when it gave promises to pay in exchange for the nation's circulating gold and silver coinage. (And what does it pay in? More promises to pay.)

We began to think of the individual citizens who, together make the nation.

One "average" citizen would have a paid-for house on a half acre of land, a paid-for vehicle that would serve if fuel distribution systems remained intact, also a few judiciously-selected implements to assist in gardening and harvesting wildlife for food as well as the skills to use them. This same person might have a few pieces of silver set aside, some way of illuminating the interior of a darkened home on long winter evenings without electricity, a shelf containing books to while away the quieter hours, and the mental discipline to wait out a period of uncertainty lasting from a year to a generation. All of this might comprise the keys to survival. He might also have an investment portfolio strong in manufacturers and natural resources that retains a remnant of value in catastrophic circumstances.

Another citizen, this one a "gadget guru", might share an apartment with a couple of parasitic "friends" in a megalopolis that extends across six states. He might have a collection of gadgets for status and entertainment and the skills to use them when not using his skills at locating restaurants and social settings. He might also have some fading martial arts skills and a vast knowledge of television history. He might have a half-finished collection of tattoos and a couple of days' worth of cigarettes. He might have an investment portfolio strong in pharmaceuticals and bonds. He might have a few select pieces of avant-garde artwork as an illusion of tangible wealth.

When our little conference compared these two citizens and then tried to add them to the formula that includes national parks and oil wells, we had an apples-and-oranges problem. That's when we realized that the wealth of an individual is distinctly different from the wealth of a nation.

And that's when a breakthrough occurred. A breakthrough is the dream result of any conference. We realized, suddenly, that there is wealth available for common use and actual, personal wealth. That enlightenment engendered the corollary that personal, individual wealth may include more than physical assets such as land, money, and belongings. It may also include knowledge, skills, and relationships.

The sum total of individual wealth is a portion of the nation's wealth, which then is extended to include that which we hold in common, our natural resources, transportation systems, museums, and secure communities.

When we pondered which of the two matters more -- our common wealth or that which each individual has to his name, it seemed to depend on the circumstances of the moment. When a community is secure and systems are functioning, our common wealth holds things together. What does an individual have at his disposal, though, when the chips are down -- if suddenly some global calamity interrupted everything? If we all suddenly had to cash in our chips, survive without public assistance, and live by our skills and the implements in our toolboxes, what would we have?

We considered the multi-millionaire -- a Hollywood celebrity, maybe -- with a high-rise apartment in Mega City and a two-acre hot property on the inter-coastal waterway in Jupiter, Florida. Besides his two ex-wives and their children, his dependents include an accountant, a lawyer, and an agent. We decided that this rich person is in deep trouble if all, or even half, the systems that support that "lifestyle" were to fail for any significant period (from one year to a full generation). These would be systems such as a supply of potable water to either location, airports, servants, courts for divorces, and expensive restaurants.

We contrasted this rich guy with the poor farmer in rural Idaho or Vermont who has twenty cleared acres and a ten-acre woodlot, six or ten head of cattle, and a clean well.

The wealth of the nation is of about equal blessing to the "average" citizen and the poor farmer as it is to the "gadget guru" and the celebrity, but the first two are richer in skills and assets when the artificial systems fail that support the other two.

As with any conference, participants were found drifting out early. Some rocks were being reclaimed by the water as the wind shifted northeasterly and the chop engulfed the ones nearer the shoreline. The ducks had long since become bored. I realized, with little warning, that I had just taken part in a serious and unexpected awakening about wealth. I also realized that no one was left but me to record the proceedings and the discoveries of the event.

Just as the conference faded into silence, the last thin band of orange faded to gray on the western horizon. I left the lake shore behind my truck's headlight beams, as happens following most conferences. But, as with many that I have attended, this one left me so much to ponder that I didn't bother to play the radio on the way home.

Over the Edge

2010-08-25T21:49:00.004-04:00

We often hear about the quiet guy who snaps, goes over the edge, looses it; who explodes in unexpected rage and commits carnage of surprising intensity. No one who knew him saw any signs that he was distraught. No one saw it coming.

Well, I’m close to fury myself. When I snap, though, no one need fear being hurt. Rage expresses itself in bloodless ways as well. In my own situation, it may spew forth in a torrent of words, and then I’ll be fine. Or I may use what power I have in order to merely shut someone off who now has the legal means to rob me.

Let me lay it out for you.

When I was a child in the 1950s, eldest of six siblings, my family had nothing to start with. My parents came from self-sufficient Depression-era households. They were both college educated school teachers, and their gift to their children was a well-nurtured desire to learn. We didn’t know that we were living in poverty – abhorrent conditions by today’s standards – we just knew we didn’t have much. (We often didn’t have a telephone, or a car. Our father carried a bag lunch as he walked to work and we kids carried lunchboxes as we walked to school. We wore darned socks, patched or homemade garments, and re-soled shoes. We saved the bath water for the next kid in line. When I was in fourth grade, we lived in a house with an outdoor hand pump for water. We played outdoors, since only one household in three had a television. Today we have taxpayer-funded programs to prevent that kind of misery.)

To varying degrees we kids took advantage of our opportunity to learn. We were taught that if we earned good grades in public school, colleges would compete to give us scholarships, meaning discounted tuition rates. (That may have been true before the 1960s, but by the time I matriculated at a nearby municipal university in 1969, things had definitely changed.)

Our parents led us to believe that we would never be rich, though. For several of my crucial growing-up years we lived at 1165 West High Street in Lima, Ohio. Our back yard abutted the back yards of houses on West Market Street. The further west on that street, the more enviable the homes. We understood that we would never live like that – spacious brick homes with tree-lined meandering driveways and cultivated flower beds. We believed we would never, even as adults ourselves, know what it was like to go to the bank when we needed money and simply take $1000 out of a savings account. We knew we’d never know what $1000 looked like, but maybe $100 at best. We didn’t expect even to mix with that kind of people, although in school I often found myself among the children of those families. I was self-conscious to find myself accepted and included, but still I held myself apart socially. Rich kids made friends only with other rich kids, right? Kids of teachers became teachers. Kids of poor people grow up to remain poor.

Our house stood nearly on the edge of an all-black neighborhood. I now realize that, even though I had several friends among the kids in that neighborhood, including one who was my best friend for seven years there, the black kids must have looked on us the same way I looked on those on West Market Street. Kids of black people stay black.

Nevertheless, even though we knew our parents weren’t saving to put us through college – heck, our mom was sometimes heard to say she was still paying (hospital delivery charges) for our youngest sister after I had started college – we were taught thrift. I had a daily job (including weekends, as a paperboy) from the time I was 10. I had a savings account from the time I was 12. I bought a car at 15 – a 1939 Chrysler for $395 – and drove it 1000 miles from Ohio to Maine a year later when my family made the big move to my father’s stomping grounds in Farmington.

When I finished a three-year enlistment in the Army and five years of college I landed a low-level management job in manufacturing. I opened a retirement savings plan at work and started an IRA. I worked for that company for 23 years and benefited, slightly, from an employee-stock-ownership plan. I went on to another industry in a related management role, and that lasted nine years. Except for some modest self-indulgence along the way, I’ve been saving for retirement for 50 years. Oh, and I do not have a pension plan (automatic payments for life), only my retirement savings, to count on once I become, in my 60’s perhaps, unemployed. I’m now in what may be my final steady job, as a medical receptionist, entry-level, non-management, and I like it fine. (I already characterize myself as semi-retired: I now work only 40 hours a week in this job, which makes me eligible to buy group medical insurance for $10,000 a year. In my former life as a manager, 40 hours would have been part-time.)

I bought a home when I was young, moved up to a nicer one, and then a nicer one, rivaling the ones I envied on West Market Street. Given the economy of August 2010, I estimate that my home is worth about $180,000 (in rural northern Maine; it would be worth a million or more today in some metro areas), and my retirement funds, all told, are worth about $600,000. A couple of years ago both were worth about 50% more than today, probably about $270,000 and $900,000 respectively. I’m now 59½.

So, why am I close to snapping? I’ve been a fool, that’s why, and it’s too late to back off and rejoin the “poor”. Long ago I fell for the premise that no one else will take care of me (and my wife of several decades whom I pledged to support), so I accepted that I needed to save for my own future. And that may have been a safe assumption if I had earned, and saved, enough to be sitting on a couple of million dollars by now. That’s not a couple million to spend on a spree, but to draw from for support for decades to come in the absence of any other source. That’s to pay the several thousand dollars a year that I’ll need, once I’m no longer employable, to cover the premiums for my “free” Medicare and to buy supplemental medical insurance, to pay my property taxes, to pay for my heating fuel and other utilities, to feed and clothe myself and kin, to remain mobile – and to pay income taxes.

But there is a gap, and I fall within it. A little over half a million dollars is not enough to live on for the next 30 years. It would be if I also had taxpayer assistance. But, because I have “assets” I will evermore be ineligible for such charity. My Social Security, which I’ve paid into for 42 years, will be “offset”. I will be ineligible to have my Medicare premiums paid for me. The other charity that my neighbors enjoy I will continue to pay for: food stamps, unemployment compensation, Medicaid, Social Security disability income, property tax relief, heating fuel assistance, sliding-fee scales, WIC, community action programs, and punitive income tax schemes which assure that more than half the voters don't pay into the program.

I could have believed my parents’ culture lesson – we will never move in those circles and we will never know what it's like to have bank accounts. We will never own assets. I could have rented places to live all my life and could have spent every remaining dollar I made on better vacations, eating out, new cars, more booze, bigger televisions, all-inclusive cell phone plans, tobacco, fancier computers, name-brand clothes and groceries, and a garage full of motorized outdoor toys. Then I might not have ended up with retirement savings or a home of my own; I would have been eligible for hand-outs paid for by fools such as I have become.

Instead, I’m penalized for my thrift and planning. I will continue to be envied by those who remained (as some of my siblings did) in the "poorhouse" as I might have chosen to, while their elected representatives will continue to have hands on my wallet. Their representatives will always promote this class envy – (theirs, not mine – I can’t get my representatives elected because they don’t buy votes by pretending to a false charity which consists of spending other people’s money in order to appear generous themselves).

I do have a choice. It's a bitter choice, and that's what infuriates me. I can spend down my retirement savings as quickly as the Internal Revenue Code allows, being careful not to accumulate assets that can disqualify me from all the assistance schemes. I could – revenuers plug your ears – “spend” my retirement savings as quickly as possible while actually stashing it as cash. I could do the reverse mortgage thing on my house and maybe remove that asset.

Then I could appear, on paper, as poor as those whose elected thieves have their hands in my pockets. What a fool I’ve been!

I’m thinking about it. I'm thinking about it...

Investing Advice

2010-08-09T20:25:00.005-04:00

You can ask: Who am I to give advice? Compared to investment insiders, I know next to nothing about the stock market, and I have under a million dollars invested in my portfolio. I had hoped to be “retired” by age 60, which is now about two months away. But retired isn’t going to happen.

Nevertheless, I have some advice for those picking stocks for secure long-term growth and for quicker gains, say in a year or two. (More on all that in a moment.)

I have been able to follow my own advice with only small amounts of money. Why is that? Well, for much of my career, say, the first 25 years I was working, I did not pay attention to where my 401(k) and IRA money was invested. I left the decisions to my older relatives and their advisors and assumed that I would never understand it. Then, when I did have the confidence to experiment a little, I faced several obstacles: the relatives and advisors were watching; a substantial portion of my portfolio was in my employer’s company stock; I changed jobs and joined a 403(b) plan, which does not allow for individual stock trading; and the overall chaos in the market since the early 1990s has left me reluctant to play with much of my available funds.

But I have formed some solid opinions about what to buy in the stock market and what to avoid.

From 2005 to 2008, for instance, I had been watching a group of stocks on Yahoo! Finance – essentially my own portfolio of traded equities and funds. In September of 2005 that group of stocks was worth $365,000. In January 2008 it had grown to $495,000. (My overall worth also contains annuities and some property that is not reflected in these numbers.)

But in the past two and a half years I have forfeited $150,000 of that half million. My sacrifice of market value helped bail out the banks and helped support the cash-for-klunkers pogrom in which the USA borrowed money from China to help Americans buy Japanese cars which would somehow save Detroit. Anyway, I was clobbered, such that my group of traded stocks is worth about $345,000 today – a 30% loss since 2008 and still 5% down from 2005, assuming a flat value of the so-called dollar.

So, what is my thinking on the market?

1.Consider avoiding the stock market altogether from now on. The federal government is so determined to prevent fraud and corruption in the markets – (Why? Could it be because there is so much corruption in Congress that they assume it’s as bad everywhere else? If it is, do they really believe that more employment for lawyers will really wipe out financial crime?) – that Congress is setting out in 2010 to create a web of utterly insane rules for trading and profiting. The objective of anyone who gets into the market is to make money. To get rich, even. The only people who will get rich any longer will be those paid to make and enforce the rules, because they will be the insiders able to make best use of their high-priest status; ergo more corruption. If you expect always to be a lifelong little guy, like me, then maybe don’t even bother to have a 401(k) or IRA. Instead…

2.Buy property. This means different things for different people, and it depends a lot on where you live. Property means real estate, but it also means goods and businesses. Buy open land, or houses, or commercial buildings. Buy woodlots, development property on lakes and rivers. Buy into a small business. Buy small items that you can store securely yourself and sell and trade inconspicuously, (but learn a lot about them first, whether it is antiques, guns, coins, classic cars, and so on).

3.If you do buy stocks, either as your chief investment or to round out your financial security, then consider the following opinions. Starting with the negatives, these would be my rules if I had a lot of money to throw into it:

a. Stay away from banks and lenders. What do they really have that you can profit from? They lend money. That’s all they can do. Yes, they buy and sell each other, but that’s only to the benefit of the executives at the top of each company involved in the trade, so they and their corporate lawyers can all make a bundle and walk away much richer. What do they have for assets? Rented space and obsolete computers. And one another's debt “portfolio.” And where are you in the line of people to be paid, from the interest they make on their loans? Last.

b. Stay away from retailers. Yes, Walmart has made huge profits for many years. Is there a fund out there that does not include it? But its bubble is going to burst, and because everyone owns some of it, few will be spared the ache. Nowadays, when I go into a big store like that, I am shopping for something to help me finish a project or something to replace a worn-out appliance. Sam Walton has died, and so Walmart has little to distinguish it from Rite Aid and the old K-Mart and all the rest. Our local Walmart is really just Super Rite Aid. When Sam was alive, Walmart at least retained some of his personality, and he was a fellow who also needed to go into a store when he wanted something to finish a project. These stores today are all happy to tell you that they carry the four most-popular items in each category. Well, I usually need the nineteenth most-popular item, or the hundred and thirteenth most popular. But the item I need exists somewhere, and lots of them are needed and bought by people like me – somewhere; my problem is that the stores that happily stock the four most popular items have also run everyone else out of business. Since Walmart and Target and the rest have driven the small retailers out, there is no one, particularly in a rural area, who sells anything past the four most popular items. Large retailers are also brutal on their employees. Perhaps they have to be, in order to remain fiercely competitive. But employers with unhappy staff are constantly facing passive resistance if not outright malicious obedience, and that makes their stock a risk, in my eyes. By the way, I have some experience selling my own product to one of these huge retailers. I paid $7 each to produce the item, which carried a “suggested retail price” of $15, tax and shipping included. The retailer was willing to pay me $6.75 each and then sold them for $12 – 20% off, you see. Treating suppliers that way must certainly eventually have a backlash. (In my own case, I quit making something I couldn’t break even on.)

c. Stay away from manufacturers with heavily-unionized work forces. These are the companies whose lines of products, more and more, are being manufactured overseas. If the bail-out of the car companies isn’t evidence enough that they can’t compete, then what will it take to convince you?

d. Don’t fear investing in foreign companies or funds. Choose carefully, but don’t fear that some foreign economy is going to collapse without affecting our own. Consider, for instance, a fund that holds a lot of Pacific rim stocks. If there is an economic debacle in Asia and the fund is shaken badly, the same debacle will shake almost anything else you are invested in as well. No foreign country can go belly-up without far-ranging and long-lasting ripple effects. I accept that it is a global economy, like it or not.

e. Don’t buy a stock after someone has already published an article saying now is the time to buy. The people who have lots of money to play with have already bought it, and are going to profit well, if the prediction comes true, but you’re not going to. It’s too late to buy when you see those predictions come out. I've had a financial advisor for years who steered me toward buying stock in this or that company within my IRA, but I am convinced by their performance that he bought into them days and days before he called me (but after he had read some alluring article). I'm still climbing back up to the purchase price on several of these, but I bet he isn't.

f. Avoid companies whose executives are treated like royalty. Poor Walt Disney – how he has been exploited! About a decade ago, when the Disney company fired a CEO after less than a year in the job and gave him a ninety-million-dollar severance bonus, I quit buying anything Disney – toys, clothes, videos. Why? Because we’re obviously paying too much for the products in order to make an individual like him as rich as a small country. I had only been to a Disney theme park once in my life by then, and I will never go again. I won’t buy stock in an outfit that bilks not only the consumer but also the investors that way.

g. Avoid companies that can’t seem to decide what business they are in. I think of General Electric in this regard. Several years ago I had life insurance through one company, and then I began getting bills for the same insurance from GE. They eventually called it Genworth, and I think it has been sucked up by some other company since then – sold off by GE so that some executives could retire in obscene leisure. Meanwhile, I have noticed that GE products are often crap. I have a coffeemaker at home with the built-in timer. The clock on that coffeemaker loses two minutes a day. A Black & Decker coffeemaker in another room has kept perfect time for months. GE makes (or should I say, sells its name to) a lot of little products, such as night lights. These are often crap. Yes, they make huge 500 megawatt generators, too. Maybe those aren’t crap, but I’m not reassured when they can’t even make an electric clock. Anyway, over 35 years ago someone gave us newlyweds, my wife and me, a $10,000 stake in GE stock. We have left it alone, and it has grown to an astonishing $12,000+ in 35 years. Aren’t you impressed?

h. Be cautious of companies that are a little too proprietary or quirky about their products. Don’t shun them altogether, but beware of their idiosyncrasies. Kodak is a company that I always wanted to love but never invested in. They made very good roll film and dominated the market for almost the entire 150-year history of film cameras, even though their market share was challenged a bit by Fuji before digital photography won out. I think Kodak responded well and quickly to the digital revolution and decided to be the camera supplier for the mass market. And yet, before the change to digital, Kodak made only a light stab at marketing film cameras: some very early folding cameras when roll film first came out and a couple of weak 35mm models, such as the Pony, which imitated the Zeiss Ikon products of the same era. And I like Kodak in general, because they’ve stuck to one business and have not branched out into insurance. But I’m cautious about Kodak because it is quirky. It wants its cameras to do the thinking for you and resists letting you do it yourself. When I was forced to go digital, I gave up a wonderful Ricoh XR-P film camera on which I had expertly managed the exposure and focus manually to switch to a Kodak P850, on which I supposedly can take manual control, but I have not found out how in the four years I’ve owned it. And Kodak’s digital cameras are tied too tightly to Kodak’s software and Internet sites. Still, it’s probably a good, solid company for a long term, safe investment. Just beware when you hear that Kodak has begun selling food or baby fashions or has a started a branch engaged in financial services.

i. Now for the positives. Look at the products that impress you. A few years ago I bought an Apple computer, after twenty years of loyalty to Microsoft Windows. I couldn’t believe the difference. At the time, Apple still had less than 10% of the PC market, but the iPod was becoming popular, the iPhone was coming, and I saw VALUE. I bought several hundred shares of Apple at $90 around November 2007 and sold it less than a year later for $180. It was the product that sold me on the stock. Look around at what your neighbors and friends consider essential. What do they complain about (even though it may be essential)? Don’t buy that. What do ordinary people that you know find irresistible and also have praise for?

j. Get in, stay a while, get out. My best example of this has been my Apple stock. Sure, it has continued to rise, (after falling from $193 back to $82 since I sold mine), but I doubled my money and left. If you make a serious profit, sell and put your dollars somewhere else.

k. What’s the wave of the future? Don’t trust government to tell you, by the way. Use your own sense. Could you have anticipated the total conversion to digital photography? Sure, once we were able to get 640x480 digital images by the early 1990s. The technology could not help but improve. Here’s one: How about home security? A couple of years ago I seriously wanted to invest some money in Brinks or ADT (Tyco) or some such company. As more people become desperate for cash, thanks to our expert money handlers in the federal government, I reasoned, more homes and small businesses are going to buy products or systems to protect their properties from petty and not-so-petty thieves. I was right. I didn’t invest in Tyco or Brinks, but I can see now that I should have. So what else can you see coming? And incidentally, the less it attracts the interest of federal regulators the better. So, how about alternative energy? Well, the government will probably pander to some companies engaged in research and exploration, but it will also require tight regulations in exchange for government caresses. How about… water? What companies are working diligently to make a modest financial gain by making water accessible first in developed countries, such as the USA, (before exporting the technology to undeveloped regions with unstable governments)?

l. Pay attention to who has the ear of the federal government. Investors will make gains in some technologies that are favored by the prevailing political force, but only so long as that political force retains power. The socialist power that has been in control for the past 14+ years, (which is to say, Congress – the President being of little substantial influence), favors voodoo science such as stopping the cycle between ice ages. If you can find a company that is inventing a solar-powered bicycle, think about getting in. Get out early if the political winds seem to favor rational thinking over feel-good socialism.

m. What industries or technologies are saying to themselves: “Oh, damn!”? What companies are afraid for their future because of technology? Would you have invested in a steam locomotive factory after World War II if that factory weren't spearheading the conversion to diesel locomotives? Would you have invested in Polaroid 20 years ago as its instant photography was being replaced by digital photography (to belabor an industry that at least provides a good example)? So who fears for the future of its own existence, and why? Invest in the companies that are striking fear in the established way of doing things.

n. Trust your instincts! If something stinks about everyone else's favorite stock, let others embrace it. If you have a really good feeling about a company or about an industry, you embrace it. That is, if you choose to violate Rule #1 above.

And I have – violated Rule #1, for the reasons I have already given. I own stock. I own funds and annuities.

And, as I publish this, (Aug. 9, 2010), I am hearing that Congress is about to approve Stim II. This time, people who mortgaged $800,000 McMansions are going to get them for free. I realize that they signed for the three-quarter-million loans at a time when that's what the properties were supposedly worth, and now they're worth only a third of that, while their loans remain at over half a million. But I'm getting nothing from Congress. Instead, I'm still paying on my $150,000 home loan, and getting a tax hike to pay for their palaces that have double bowl sinks in the master bathrooms and all-stainless appliances. I expect to be further diminished as the market reels from this next wave of largesse* from the public treasury. Oh, well; my mistake in choosing to be responsible in the first place when I might just as well have chosen the route of owning nothing and relaxing on the dole.

Even so, for those who still remain invested, I hope you find this advice useful.

-=David A. Woodbury=-

*For those who have not encountered the wisdom of the ages, let me add some context: George Bernard Shaw wrote that a government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul. That’s obvious, of course, and cute. But it’s also sinister. A Scottish professor alive around the time of the American Revolution, Alexander Fraser Tytler, gave voice to the sinister side of Shaw’s equation:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.

Amazing that Tytler could have teased this assessment from the history of the world up to his own time.

Better Than Insurance

2010-07-28T17:53:00.002-04:00

I have a great idea.

Are you tired of trying to figure out your medical insurance, overly-managed care, privacy policies, Medicaid, Medicare, and all that? As an alternative to patronizing commercial insurance (for as long as Congress allows it to function), and especially to frustrate government control of your body mass index and your bedtime, how about this:

A large number of people would voluntarily contribute some money each month to a fund of their choice – the money they might otherwise spend for insurance premiums. The fund would want to be endowed with enough money from its participants that it can maintain a cash flow sufficient to cover its purposes. And its chief purpose would be to cover the cost of its members’ medical expenses as they occur. Maybe the people who contribute to a certain fund would have a common interest – it could be they belong to the same church or maybe they’re all farmers – or maybe their fund invites anyone to join.

Each fund would be managed according to rules that the contributors mutually determine. Maybe one fund encourages healing by unconventional approaches such as meditation and acupuncture and would cover these services at 100% of charges but would offer little or no coverage for prescriptions or surgery. Maybe another fund caters to members who have risky pastimes and who expect to undergo more frequent orthopedic intervention. Skydivers and people who race motorcycles would be attracted to this group, which would have complete coverage for fractures and lacerations but might not cover healing-by-meditation at all.

People who see no health benefit from inhaling smoke could choose a fund that has a low level of coverage for lung cancer and which might also provide no coverage for smoke-as-therapy (cannabis).

So – this being America and citizens having the unfettered right to associate with whomever they choose – the idea, so far, raises no issues. On the face of it, it does not even qualify for any notice by the government. People pool their money in lots of ways and distribute it as they see fit. Lawyers, for instance, send astonishing amounts of money to private organizations such as the American Bar Association, in exchange for a list of promised benefits, and that’s not regulated by the government.

Under this funding idea of mine, for a medical office visit, the patient would either pay the total cost at the time of the visit or else would wait for a bill from the doctor, which the patient would then submit for payment or reimbursement. Or maybe the doctor or clinic or hospital would agree to send the bill directly to the fund. The patient would ultimately be responsible for the expenses incurred if the fund is not organized to cover the incurred expense. The fund would not be dictating the medical care, as happens with insurance and government.

Now, I fiercely defend anyone, individual or corporation, who has found a way to make a ridiculous profit from a business, provided there are customers willing to pay too much for a product or service in order to support that ridiculous profit. In America, it’s a private matter.* While I defend anyone’s right to become absurdly wealthy, I don’t personally volunteer to help make someone absurdly wealthy unless I think they deserve it. Each of us can probably think of a product that is so good we’re willing to pay far more than it costs to make and distribute it. Some people feel that way about Post-Its, for example. It also happens when a new product comes along and everyone has to have it no matter the cost – Cabbage Patch dolls, iPods, Avatar. You get the picture. Sometimes a guy simply deserves to capitalize in a grand way on a terrific idea. I don’t begrudge Bill Gates one cent of his fortune, even though his product, Windows, is full of flaws and has lousy, over-priced service. Had I been around a hundred years ago, I would not have begrudged Henry Ford all the money he could make from me.

I don’t feel that way about health insurance. No individual leader in the insurance industry inspires my gratitude or admiration as does Bill Gates or Henry Ford. They didn’t invent the product, and there is nothing so special about any particular company that makes me want to cheer and recommend it to my neighbors over the “competition.” (In fact, insurance is so regulated that, like banks, they essentially have an enforced monopoly.)

If I could, I would buy my coverage from a not-for-profit cooperative, much as I can choose to do my banking at a credit union. You see, there is nothing about health insurance that is so new or unique or hard-to-manage that anyone can possibly earn millions a year heading it up.**

I fail to comprehend how it improves the service I receive from my insurance company, or how it reduces my cost of insurance, when there are stockholders who must be paid, executives who must be pampered, and buyout deals that must be propped up, all at my cost as the payer of the premiums. That’s why I would like to participate in a not-for-profit fund beyond the interest of the government. (Beyond these wastes, my premiums also support the waste of compliance with government interference, such as privacy notice mailings, and the scandal of cost-shifting.)

Insurance-for-profit is not a pretty industry. It’s all about people being paid to push money around. The people being paid the most to manipulate my money under an insurance policy are accountants and lawyers. When we let Congress get its nose into things, it passes acts to create more government agencies – the unconstitutional fourth branch of government – to create more jobs for accountants and lawyers, who become the high priests of more inscrutable rules.

The only alternative proposed, so far, to commercial insurance is a government program. This needs to be abjured by a citizen outcry simply because it places more of our business into the hands of an incompetent government. It is not corruption in the ranks of benefits administrators that is insidious. It is corruption in the manner in which Congress conducts its business and abdicates its responsibility to a lawyering class of its own creation. There is nothing so complicated about insuring people that more than a handful lawyers nationwide should find themselves employed in its concern.***

Ergo, I seek a way of insuring the unexpected costs of maintaining my own health by circumventing commercial insurance and government narcissism. I realize that I will be taxed unto death and beyond to support those who have come to expect their free stuff from government, but I seek an alternative to the many thousands a year I will otherwise have to cough up soon for Medicare and all its parts and supplements.

Is there anyone out there interested in joining me in creating a fund, managed by ourselves, from which we may each draw for certain pre-arranged and mostly unexpected medical needs?

Wait a moment… I have just been informed that my idea is not new. In fact, that is how commercial insurance came into existence in the first place. And I’ve just been shown that government became interested in it because money was changing hands without passing the sieve of government extortion. And to attempt such a cooperative on such a simplistic level now thwarts the purpose of insurance regulation, which is to create jobs for business school and law school graduates, salaries for CEOs, and revenue for government.

I’ve missed something, I guess. Strike those phrases above about freedom to associate, it’s my money, et cetera. (There once was such an America. I swear it. I grew up in it, but that was many years ago. Sorry to trouble you, everyone…)

*If I could make great-smelling soap, for instance, and market it for $28 a bar under some fancy name and millions of people would buy it and give me $26 profit on each bar, why, that’s between my customers and me (and the IRS – I don’t propose cheating on taxes**).

**It’s not the stockholders’ profits that are hard to swallow – in fact I’m starving for a little stockholder profit myself these days. And the obscene CEO salaries leave me only a mildly bitter taste; I try not to invest in companies that treat their executives like royalty. The hidden game that I most despise is the corporate buyout. Companies of all sorts are being bought and sold all the time, and that is what really hurts us all. As soon as Prince Hotshot becomes CEO of Neighborly Mechanical Chicken Separator, Inc., he expects to make a name for himself through cost-cutting, then expects to sell the company within a year or two so that he and those closest to him – whether on the Board or in the ranks of management – can each make a huge personal gain. I do not suggest that this should be illegal! I suggest only that rational investors would protest this culture of greed by putting their money into companies that have a different culture. It so happens that we little investors, who could have effective influence if we all understood what we are supporting, have made the self-enrichment of the executive class the prevailing culture by failing to examine closely enough – and thereby accepting – what goes on at levels we think are beyond our reach.

***What I DO propose is 100% turnover each time we send people to Congress until the ones who are sworn in every other January get the message that the IRS needs to be abolished and that the federal government needs to be funded by a simple flat tax that everyone pays at the same rate, such as a consumption (sales) tax. The “rich” might spend more and thus contribute more revenue, but the “poor” would contribute something in rough proportion to their overall wealth. Such a tax scheme would remove redistribution by reverse taxation, and those truly in need would receive assistance through welfare schemes separate from the tax process.

Biker Rules

2010-07-26T21:18:00.003-04:00

As we sometimes do when waiting in line among complete strangers, I complimented a T-shirt worn by someone queued ahead of me. Bright and well-designed, the shirt commemorated a bikers’ rally somewhere. The rather elderly woman wearing it asked me: “Do you ride?” I told her I did not – that I have trouble enough staying upright when I’m merely walking. (Well, when crossing a trout stream on slippery stones, for instance, but that’s not pertinent here.)

A rambling conversation about motorcycles followed, which quickly came around to helmets for bikers. I told this presumably-veteran biker about a woman I knew, passenger with her husband out for a casual ride, who was killed recently for lack of a helmet when their bike rear-ended a stopped car.

This biker lady told me that my dead friend was probably safer without the helmet, because what’s the first thing that happens at an accident? Good Samaritans try to pull the helmet off, and that will either kill you or paralyze you. “Let those who ride decide,” she said, in the manner of quoting a rule or proverb. Then she asked whether I knew the eleventh commandment, (I did not): “Thou shalt not stick thy nose in thy neighbor’s business.”

Hardly had she said this when the lady with the shirt was called to the front, ending her wait in line, and stealing my opportunity to respond effectively. So, for her, and for all the rest of you bikers out there, here’s my take on the bikers’ proverb and the 11th commandment.

If bikers were the only ones affected by their helmet decision, then I would have no interest in the subject. But those who ride without basic protection do affect me no matter how their medical care is covered. Those with commercial insurance are members of my medical insurance pool. Sure, they pay premiums (or an employer does), if they have a commercial insurance plan, but my premiums are affected by the insurer’s “experience rating.” The experience rating includes the costs of treating catastrophic trauma and of heroic interventions to save lives. An employer's cost of such benefits is passed on to me in the price of a product, so it affects me there as well.

Those without commercial insurance are dependent on my “voluntary” payment of income taxes for their government coverage such as Medicaid, or, if totally uninsured, they are dependent on charity care at the facilities that treat their medical issues, which then affects me because the cost of providing charity care is shifted to my commercial insurer and raises the premiums I must pay.

So if I am going to let those who ride decide, then let those who ride live with my rule which is “Let those who pay say ‘Nay.’” And my eleventh commandment is, “Thou shalt not stick thy hand into thy neighbor’s pocket.”

Of course, my rules have already been trampled by the audacious stampede of the acquisitive masses under the joke of "representative" government. The have-nots can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury, which is funded by those who pay the bulk of the taxes but who are overwhelmed at the voting booth. But if those of us who pay were to organize ourselves as well as a few (I stress: a few) bikers and others have done who have their hands in our pockets, perhaps those who pay could say “Nay” and make it stick. Then I’d be happy to let those who ride decide.

Message to 2010 Candidates for Congress

2010-06-22T16:20:00.006-04:00

While I happily anticipate this fall’s 100% turnover in the U.S. House of Representatives and 33% turnover in the Senate, here is my advice for those candidates aspiring to get in there and clean up the mess:

Restore respect for Congress

Don’t promise it. Don’t proclaim that you’ve done it. Just do the right things, and (after a long time) respect will follow. Here are some things that Congress must generate the will to do if respect is ever to be achieved. If you just sit when you’re told to sit, speak only when spoken to, and vote the way you’re told to vote, you will dishonor yourself and merely join the gallery of rogues and fools that you think you’re replacing.

Start with the House and Senate rules

Dump the current House and Senate rules. All of them. Term limits have been needed mainly because the current rules invest far more power in some members than is justified by mere representation of a district. Absolute power in a committee chair diminishes fair representation. And try this: Give every member the option to introduce, and require a roll-call vote on, an issue (bill) of his own choosing (even of his own authorship) at least once during a legislative term.

Give no thought to image, impressions, and re-election

I’ve seen it in business but many times but more intensely in government: Those in power try to manage what everyone thinks of them by manipulating words and timing and audience. Well, those efforts are somewhat like General Eisenhower’s example of the difference between pushing a string and pulling it. What’s attached to the other end of a string is going to follow the pulled string but will be oblivious to the suggestion in a pushed string. Most of us can distinguish between authentic information and a line of bull. Don’t insult us with manure marketed as a dietary supplement. If you’re doing it right, we’ll know it.

Make it nearly impossible to attach an unrelated rider to a bill

Call them riders, earmarks, or pork – attaching them to legislation is probably the sleaziest, most insidious thing that Congress does. If it’s a bill to set up a national photo archive, then don’t attach riders to add a veterans’ hospital in a certain member’s district or change the rules of baseball.(1) If a rider doesn’t pertain to a bill, then bring it to a vote on its own merits. If riders are somehow the only way Congress can function at times, then at worst, let every member have only one chance to propose one in a two-year term.

Take a serious look at the fourth branch of government

Lawyers and accountants elected to Congress over the past 50 or so years have evidently created and nurtured the regulatory branch to further their own professions; there is no other rational explanation for its existence! This entire branch of government deserves to be challenged under the Constitution.(2) Let lawyers and accountants be the LAST people whose interests are considered when writing a bill – and don’t let them be the ones to write a bill either.

Name the beast

The Internal Revenue Code is just the best-known example, but we small people realize that nearly all federal regulation is equally absurd. Not complicated. Not merely arcane. It is insane. But it is the irresponsible tinkering of every act passed by Congress that has made it insane. Name it for what it is – America’s shame – and as a dramatic first step, demolish the Code.(3) Then begin a systematic hunt for comparable cancers throughout the remaining legislative refuse of the past half century. This means exposing other dens of cockroaches, such as the Department of Labor and a hundred more like it.

Take control of the beast

Perhaps only a few of us know the dirty little secret of all legislatures. While lobbyists for corporate interests and the shrill, indignant hucksters for so-called “citizens’ groups” are the annoying vermin making it hard to breathe in Congress, the big leaches are the “permanent” government agencies that present periodic demands for money (budgets) as if they are the first line of entitlement in the country. Every one of these agencies needs to learn that the elected representatives (who make us a republic) are in charge of them, not the other way around. Every bureau, department, and commission needs to experience some healthy fear for its very existence, and some (in my opinion, most) of them need to be abolished.

Don’t be my cradle-to-grave problem solver

Congress needs to stop trying to identify all my problems and especially needs to stop trying to solve problems I didn’t even know I had. I realize that Congress gets led around like a bull with a ring in its nose, but who put the ring there? Oh, wait, there’s no ring at all! It's just posturing! Quit enacting lawyers’ and accountants’ full-employment acts with cutesy titles like “An Act to Improve Music Appreciation in Public Education (IMAPE)” which serve only to funnel my money to undeserving recipients involved in causes that I abhor. Stop saving us from ourselves.

Get real about money

For 5000 years, likely longer, people worldwide have used something of intrinsic value as a medium of exchange. A couple of pen strokes by Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon do not erase this history, and can no more than temporarily disrupt the use of real substances as money. John Maynard Keynes promised us that we could live high on the hog and send the bill to our grandchildren, who would send it on to their grandchildren indefinitely, but the bill has come due in the first generation – we have stuck it to ourselves! It’s “experts” like Paul Krugman who now need to be ignored rather than consulted.

Understand what government is for

The Constitution was not written in secret language available only to a class of high priests.(4) Read it, act within its scope, resist the temptation to mollycoddle the able-bodies, and get out of the way. Understand, too, that every state legislature is likely to write its own parody of every act of Congress, especially those that purport to benefit us small people. Thus we have a federal OSHA and a state version, a federal FMLA and a state version, a federal EPA and a state counterpart, and on and on it goes. Who benefits? Attorneys. Who reels in confusion? Those who would start a small business or teach a kid to fish or contribute to a symphony orchestra.

Get out of the businesses that don’t properly belong under government

This includes getting out of health care, insurance, manufacturing automobiles, broadcasting, and on it goes. Support free enterprise by cheering it on, not by jeering it, punishing it, and preventing it with regulations. And get out of subsidizing every state and local undertaking with “matching funds” with strings attached – do we still use President Nixon’s term, “revenue sharing”? Most urgently, make capitalism legal again. De-regulate business. We’ve sent too much manufacturing to China. We CAN have robust industry in this country that is safe and non-polluting. We need to police our industries, but when they are tied up with proving in advance that they haven’t done anything wrong, as they now must do in order to satisfy bureaucratic zeal, we have essentially made it illegal to manufacture, distribute, or sell anything in this country without first paying a host of lawyers for protection.

Accept the responsibility by taking on the job, but you may not be re-elected

You personally didn’t create this mess. But don’t perpetuate it. Be honest in the campaign: What you have to do will require a reality check by each and every one of us. The vultures of our self-indulgence have come home to roost. You don’t want to preside over a catastrophic economic collapse. The next Congress needs to rein in the entitlements, make it legal to hire people and manufacture goods. Pare entitlement programs to benefit those who are truly in need.(5) The able-bodies need to fend for themselves, and once free enterprise is again unfettered enough to operate freely, the able-bodied will find jobs, because there will be jobs. If the lot of you who are sworn in in January 2011 cannot act in concert, swiftly, honestly, and decisively, you may not be sent back to Congress in two years, but your conscience will be your friend if you tried.

Repeal, repeal, repeal

It’s too late to repeal the bail-outs. I forfeited about half of my retirement fund so that the banks could be bailed out and so that young people with $800,000 mortgages could keep their McMansions. In the wisdom of the current Congress, they were more deserving of my savings than I. Maybe I should be happy that my sacrifice was no greater than that. But as soon as you get in there, get rid of the so-called health care reform, financial reform, jobs bill, cap-and-trade if it has gone through, and as much of that sort of garbage as you can rapidly undo.

I grew up in the Midwest and in New England in the 1950s and 1960s. I believed in America and I understood freedom – freedom to act as I wished as long as I acted responsibly, not freedom from want and wishing. I volunteered for the Army during the Vietnam war. I understood that I could be prosperous if I chose to be, but I didn’t expect to become prosperous with other people’s money; I planned to earn it myself. I planned and ran my life around that code. I have no respect for those who have stolen the dream. The only real power I have against those who have stolen it is my vote. If you are running for Congress in 2010, this message is what I expect my power – my vote – to accomplish.

(1) – And get Congress out of baseball. It makes me apoplectic to see Congressional hearings on baseball, (a completely private enterprise requiring no government intervention), when there are real problems, like border security, to be solved.

(2) – Congress needs to avoid passing “enabling legislation” and all that goes with it: agency rule-making, letting the Secretary of the Department misinterpret, misrepresent, and override the intent of Congress, and permitting strong-armed enforcement that properly belongs - if strong-armed enforcement belongs anywhere - in the legislative branch.

(3) – Those high priests exist and are exceedingly impressed with themselves, not just in regard to the Constitution but associated with every federal department and every act of Congress as well. As an HR director I once asked our corporate attorney a tax question. He replied the next day, breathless with excitement because he had reached someone of stellar influence within the IRS. His joy was sickening to behold.

(4) – The tax code… Please, please ditch it all. Set up a flat tax with NO deductions and no extra forms to fill out, or a consumption tax (which is also a flat tax), or both. A flat income tax would exempt some amount – say $25,000 – per citizen, (so a couple with an income under $50,000 would be exempt from withholding and filing a tax return). A consumption tax would affect those who may fall below the filing line and give some incentive not to spend indiscriminately or irresponsibly.

(5) – In my semi-retirement (which means I’m now working only 40 hours a week for under $25,000 a year) I am a receptionist for a medical practice group. I’ve been in the work force steadily for 45 years. I’m still working so that I can provide health insurance for my family, but when I see a 20-something patient whose diagnosis is “anxiety” and who can’t pay his $3 Medicaid co-pay because he is still paying off his fifth tattoo bill, I deeply resent carrying him. I later learned that he just had his motorcycle tripped out with extra chrome, but he has a state-subsidized cell phone, gets to buy convenience groceries with food stamps so he can use his cash for cigarettes, and… and on it goes.

White Noise

2010-05-28T11:13:00.003-04:00

I’m sitting at my terminal in a two-doctor medical practice. I scan documents into the electronic medical record and I help answer the phones. My work space, roughly in the center of the building – a pleasant, spaciously-arranged area with a cathedral ceiling and skylights – is separated from the reception area by a partial wall. Further back in the north-facing building is a nurses’ station for the medical assistants. Three exam rooms on the east side and three on the west line each of the outside walls. Each doctor has an office in a back corner. Sliding windows on the receptionist’s countertop separate the reception desk from the waiting area, which lets the receptionist answer the phone without making all her conversations too public.

The practice management group that runs this office (and several others in this part of the state) has selected some sort of custom music service to provide “white noise.” This noise is apparently broadcast (nationwide?) via radio waves, for there is a receiver in the receptionist’s space. The noise service company provides a remote control and a list of channels, selectable through the remote.

The 50-plus channels include such scintilating choices as 924 for Hot FM, 958 for Strobe, 963 for Concrete Beats, oh, and 920 for Environmental. There are a few channels featuring, it appears, ethnic music, such as Mojito, Little Italy, and Hawaiian. There is one called Lucille, which means as much to me as if it were, say, Roberta or Hortense. There are plenty of channels presumably offering hits of some fan-base or era: Reflections, Expressions, Mo’ Soul, Cashmere, ‘80s Hits, Screen Door, Shag Beach, and Plaza.

The receiver has no display to indicate what channel has been selected. It does have a green LED to indicate that it is turned on. The receiver feeds a set of speakers mounted in the waiting area, and is also cabled to a separate console that was made some 20 years ago by Bose. This separate console, which has a defunct CD changer, feeds its own set of speakers arranged through the rest of the building, including three that immediately surround me at about eight feet above the floor. Right now a husky woman’s voice is coming through the speakers, berating her man, (I assume), with the repeating phrase: “I don’t care what you say/want/do,” something like that, and telling him in no uncertain terms what it is she is unwilling to do. If I were him, I’d be cowering near the exit. I feel as though I’m eavesdropping on a domestic dispute in the next apartment.

The Bose console can be turned off separately, and in fact, besides the white noise feed, can accept an alternate signal source, such as an iPod. But to run the back area of the building from a separate source would cause a jarring clash of sounds, sort of like standing in a shopping mall with Spencer’s on one side and Abercrombie & Fitch directly opposite.

But ordinarily the broadcast noise feeds both sets of speakers. Why? Well, there are several reasons. First, lawyers somewhere have persuaded medical practices everywhere that white noise helps protect privacy. This is borne out when one steps into almost any waiting area anywhere and sees two or three unrelated people, perhaps strangers to one another, who happened to find themselves unexpectedly thrown together for an hour’s wait, shouting at each other to be heard over the strains of “Don’t Let Me Go.” Second, lawyers everywhere have blessed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, which, as everyone knows is all about AIDS/HIV and secrecy. Medical practice management groups evidently believe that pumping white noise through their buildings contributes to health insurance portability and will prevent lawsuits. If it did indeed absolve the practice of any further liability for an overheard conversation, that would be great. We could all tolerate a stream of crappy music everywhere if it would force tort lawyers to find real work. But the volume of lawsuits reaching our courts are not a function of our mis-adherence to regulations, it is a function of the numbers of lawyers clamoring to fill their case loads. Third, and the main reason why it’s pumped through both sets of speakers: The lone full-time receptionist in this office, Mary, who controls the white noise equipment, has made it plain that she cannot work without some sort of continuous aural stimulation and she cannot hear the “music” unless the speakers in the back of the building are on, since the sliding windows in front of her make it hard to hear it coming from the waiting area.

And it’s Mary who gets to make the channel selection. Not long after I joined this office a year ago, I presumed to experiment with the channels. The other staff members might have warned me not to, but they didn’t. Mary, though, made it plain that I had violated some cardinal rule. Since there is no display on the receiver to remind her what channel she had previously selected, and therefore I couldn’t help her remember, she grumbled for most of a day while she tried to return to it.

Mary doesn’t want to listen to music; she’s not interested in the lyrics, and she is not moved by melody or voice or harmony or arrangement. Perhaps because she is essentially an urban person, she just wants background noise. (To which end, I don’t know why other random sounds wouldn’t be as soothing and “white”: trucks dumping gravel, catenaries sparking over streetcars with squealing wheels, sirens and horns, people shouting.)

The couple of times I messed with the system, when Mary was on her lunch break, I tried one channel that had some light classical pieces and another that had familiar old songs with melodies. Mary found these choices offensive.

Since it must be loud enough in the back of the building for Mary to hear in the front, we generally communicate in raised voices, even the doctors – and that’s when we have only lawyer-recommended white noise to contend with. When the scanner is running, the fax machine is dialing or spitting, the copier is beeping, the shredder is grinding, and a couple of phones are ringing, all of which are within ten feet of each other in the center of the building and all of which can be going at once, the “music” becomes inconsequential, and we often shout. It seems to me that a doctor who must shout at the person six feet away, in order to be understood, is in greater risk of violating privacy than one who can murmer in low tones in a quiet space.

When I read Musicophilia, by Oliver Sacks, I was thunderstruck to learn that there are people who do not like music at all, not even that which I (and Sacks) consider true music: a pleasing, even beautiful, combination of tones and rhythm that begs to be listened to and savored or hummed and danced to. Some classical music, particularly from the Romantic period, appeals both to Dr. Sacks and to me, but there is much in modern music that gives me great pleasure. (Limited comparisons abound associated with the other senses: favorite flavors can be consumed only as long as it is safe or comfortable to continue eating; favorite vistas can be viewed only until the sun sets or the fog moves in; and until the invention of sound recording, favorite sounds could be attended only until the source might choose to fall silent.) While I was prepared, on reading Sacks, to discover that there are many like Mary who are troubled by silence, I was not prepared to learn that there are many who find beautiful music irritating and who are deaf to its lure. (And are deaf to the lure of every other type of music as well.) This discovery is confounded by the corollary that, while a person doesn’t find music appealing, music that more resembles cacaphony fulfills their craving for background noise.

Mary can’t stand beautiful music. Nor can she abide silence. Apparently she needs to be surrounded by noise. I wouldn’t know, but I suspect Mary sleeps with a nightlight on, and, probably, with a radio or television playing. While I can’t comprehend her abhorence of beautifully-organized sound, she can’t comprehend my abhorence of cacaphony or my preference for the utter absence of auditory stimuli. Mary happily submits to a day-long drone that includes a guy whining “Oh, I----‘ll never fall in love [repeat ad nauseum]” – a group thrumbing “You might go to sleep on a good-good night [r.a.n.]” – another group that is “sending out an SOS [repeat x24]” – another guy whining that he doesn’t want to die, and, I assume, a compendium of second-string almost-hits from the last year or so. Not only are these “songs” stultifying and repetitive, they recur several times during a daily program. I still don’t know what channel she has chosen in order to secure this drivel. The broadcast does not include a word of information about the songs or performers like a normal radio station, so I have no way of knowing who is performing, nor would it matter. And most of the time the lyrics, save for a repeated chorus, are obscured by the accompanying guitar abuse or other electronic overnoise.

During a relatively quiet moment one day, when only the tune-of-the-moment interfered with the peace, I commented to no one in particular in the open area of the building that I wondered why such a song, which sounded like someone straining at stool, ever made it to the public airwaves. Another co-worker replied from around the corner of the wall: That’s So-and-so; meaning, I suppose that So-and-so’s performance of anything more musical than a fart should hold me spellbound. Just because So-and-so did it; like, whatever God creates is perfect because he did it. I’ve mostly kept my mouth shut since then.

Set aside, though, our difference in taste, if you can call it that. (It’s beyond taste. I must someday argue for a definition of the word ‘music’ that excludes such affronts as cell phone ring tones. I’m reminded, for instance, of other settings where I’ve spent a little time under the forced white noise, and I remember hating the repetitious drivel of “Su-su-sudio” and “Cisco Kid was a friend of mine.” It doesn’t matter how famous or creative the performers of these pieces were – I could crank out tuneless, mindless pieces like that all day long but I’d be embarassed to do so.) The greater question is this: Why is it OK for my employer, in the person of Mary the music Nazi, to subject me to an irritating, distracting, assault on my senses? What is it in her that not only assumes but insists that I will enjoy the noise she chooses? (It pleases her, so it must please everyone.) Consider the other senses. If I had the power that Mary has and I decided that she must endure a continuous daily light show of flashing blue LEDs over her head, would that be OK? (I know one person who has seizures when she sees flashing lights.) What if I decided that my co-workers all had to settle for a fifty-degree room because that’s my most comfortable working temperature? What if I brought in a plug-in air freshener in, say, ‘hot roofing tar’? What if I were in charge of the white noise and I chose Shastakovich, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev ad infinitum? (I like those composers, by the way – in moderation, but they grate on most everyone else I know.)

Why, oh why, is it ingrained in our culture that I must not subject another soul in the workplace to the odor of my aftershave but I must submit to an auditory assault by the office music dominatrix? If my co-workers must avoid offending anyone who can claim an allergy to the odor of flowers, then maybe I need to assert my own involuntary appoplectic response to white noise that is irritating by design.

50 Books I Highly Recommend

2010-03-28T19:04:00.009-04:00

These are my favorite books of all time, more than 50, actually, and growing. I wish there were time and space to explain each one. If you want to know why any are on this list, just ask. The numbers 1-8 are a sort of ranking by importance to me. Something in the 8th rank may be just as readable and captivating but for me, the content may not have had as much impact as a book with a higher ranking.

Yes, I've read them all, some more than once. And I can warmly recommend almost anything else written by any of the below authors; I just refrained from listing every work each one has written and which I have read. (There are exceptions. Nothing else by Joseph Heller rises to the inspired genius of Catch-22.) No other book glows with the beauty of the English language like Lolita by the Russian author Nabokov, even though the story shocks many readers. (And Nabokov's Russian roots conceal his early acquaintance with the English language. His command of both certainly contributed uniquely to his linguistic power.)

And, sadly, my favorite juvenile novel of all time, The Lion's Paw, is extraordinarily hard to come by. If you look for it, prepare for an arduous search. (The author fell out of favor with his family, who own the publishing rights.) I have a new copy which I obtained right after its very limited 50th-anniversary re-publication in 1996, but I originally read it in my youth.

If you are looking for a book to read, you can't go wrong if you choose from this list, although if you're not "into" non-fiction, then I will not be responsible if you don't enjoy, for instance, Big Bang. If you do enjoy non-fiction, I will be surprised if your reaction to Big Bang isn't similar to mine - the most engaging, suspenseful, and faith-restoring book I have read in a quarter century.

I am specific about the edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotation, by the way. I fear that, over succeeding editions, important quotations will be deemed expendable to make space for later, and probably deserving, entries. So, if you do obtain a later edition, pair it with the fourteenth (or earlier), and if you have the fourteenth and you obtain a later one, keep them both.

I could add a thousand more books, (if I have read them). It pains me to leave some out, for instance William Bennett's compilations under the titles of The Moral Compass and The Book of Virtues. Perhaps, some day, I will compile a book of lists of books...

I am certain that I have forgotten to include a few titles which, if I were to think of them, I would be chagrined to realize I have omitted. When they come to mind I will edit this list.

NON-FICTION
1. Big Bang by Simon Singh
2. In the Empire of Genghis Khan by Stanley Stewart
3. The Great Evolution Mystery by Gordon Rattray Taylor
3. King Solomon's Ring by Konrad Lorenz
3. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
3. The Way of a Pilgrim by author unknown
4. Ken Purdy's Book of Automobiles by Ken Purdy
5. The Code Book by Simon Singh
6. The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
7. The Best-loved Poems of the American People compiled by Hazel Felleman
7. Cosmos by Carl Sagan
7. Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
7. The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White
7. Familiar Quotations, Fourteenth Edition compiled by John Bartlett
7. Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman
7. The Life That Lives on Man by Michael Andrews
7. Game Management by Aldo Leopold
8. Quotations from Chairman Bill by William F. Buckley, Jr.
8. Small Is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher

BOOKS OF ESSAYS
1. The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
1. Parliament of Whores by P. J. O'Rourke
2. One Man's Meat by E. B. White
3. The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener by Martin Gardner

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
1. Memoirs of a Superfluous Man by Albert Jay Nock

CARTOON
1. Pogo by Walk Kelly
2. Asterix the Gaul by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo

FICTION
1. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
1. Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini
1. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
1. The Enormous Room by e. e. cummings
1. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
1. The Lion's Paw by Robb White
1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
1. Oliver Wiswell by Kenneth Roberts
1. The Oxbow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clarkson
1. Penrod by Booth Tarkington
1. Red Sky at Morning by Richard Bradford
1. The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis
1. The Source by James A. Michener
1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
2. Follow the River by James Alexander Thom
2. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
2. Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini
2. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
2. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
3. Halic: The Story of a Gray Seal by Ewan Clarkson
3. Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
4. All Creatures Great and Small by James A. Herriot
4. Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
4. Come Spring by Ben Ames Williams
4. Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
4. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
5. A Fine and Pleasant Misery by Patrick F. McManus
6. Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

Feel free to recommend more!
-=DAW=-

Addendum, 1 September 2010: How could I forget...?!
1. The Way of a Pilgrim by an unknown author
1. The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare
1. Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie
2. Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Freeman

-=DAW=-

Change You Can Avoid by Legislation

2009-02-16T09:32:00.003-05:00

A quick thought for today. I’ve just read a little motivational booklet called “The Survival Guide to the Stress of Organizational Change” by Price Pritchett and Ron Pound – a splendid piece of work describing 15 stress-inducing mistakes we make in the face of constant change.

The authors point out that change is unavoidable and ever more rapid, and change is stressful, but stress is manageable, and so forth. (Best point: Basic Mistake #8: Fail to Abandon the Expendable.) Continuing with my work of the day, in the next moment I picked up an expired invitation to meet with my Congressman, Mike Michaud, (a former co-worker from my old paper mill days). I did attend the meeting, but that’s another story.

Still contemplating the certainty of constant change as I disposed of the invitation, it occurred to me what happens in Congress, and what happens to us-all as a result.

Congress passes massive “bills” intended to alleviate our stress, yours and mine, by promising this and that and socking it to the rich, and so on. (State legislatures pass their own parodies of federal acts, so it happens on the state level too.)

Most federal and state legislation has predominately negative effects. If any positive effect to such legislation ever occurs, it generally takes years, and by then we’ve forgotten that in 1997 Congress passed the School Music Improvement Act, which cut funding for any school music program that failed to include instruction in gangsta rap-hop, and which included an amendment to prevent multi-vitamins from being made out of genetically-engineered corn. The usual Congressional logic.

So I was left considering how this year’s glorious porkulus/cripple-us bill will take years to deliver any positive effect, and by the time anything trickles down to those of us most oppressed by government, there will have been so much CHANGE in the country that the real benefits of the act will be like delivering crank telephones to rural Appalachia in the 1980s.

Congress doesn’t grasp that change happens at the speed of technology. Ominously, Congress appears to believe that the only important change which occurs is that which Congress has set forth. Insidiously, Congress believes that the change which it “stimulates” actually will take place – indeed, Congress seems to believe that the moment its act is signed into law, the matter has been taken care of. Until another national crisis occurs, requiring the benevolent intervention of government.

Congress is blind to the negative effects of all its acts – especially to the utter failure of most.

Congress doesn’t grasp that change happens due to forces that Congress did not vote on and that it happens faster than any compromise* bill of reckless government spending can affect.

I'm left with the only true impact of Congressional action on my affairs, and that is STRESS. Compromise, as practiced by Congress, makes me pray for gridlock.

*To explain congressional compromise, the following is excerpted from DamnYankee.com.

Here’s how compromise works, and why it must not be encouraged: The Democrats have decided that what every household needs is a pig. Pigs are ecologically sound; they take up little space, they consume solid waste, they can be domesticated and provide companionship, they reproduce willingly, promoting neighborliness between pig owners, and one pig eventually provides a freezer full of food. The Republicans have decided that what everyone needs is a Chevrolet. They are economical to buy and come in a variety of colors to let owners express their individuality, they provide reliable transportation, they’re safe to sit in during a storm, and they can easily be repaired with readily-available parts. Neither party is willing to go completely to the other party’s idea. So they compromise. After years of Congressional debate and insipid analysis by Katie Couric, Congress rolls out its prototype. It has the snout of a pig, an engine in place of a mouth, hooves on the left and wheels on the right, a lightweight metal body (with smiling Congressmen waving gaily from the interior – the prototype has bullet-proof glass), a round, hairy rump, an anus spewing exhaust fumes, and a curly chrome tail. It goes in circles, possibly because the hooves aren’t synchronized with the wheels, but that minor detail will be cleared up in the next Congress. It's called a Pigrolet, and it comes with a 7,800-page instruction manual that can't be followed without the help of lawyers. ©2004 DamnYankee.com

The Lawyers' Chorus

2009-02-10T12:26:00.004-05:00

This morning as I bumbled about the bedroom, I heard a woman’s voice on the television hawking some drug called Celebrex. I gradually became aware that she must have spent three quarters of the ad’s allotted minute just reciting the medical warnings about the drug. At the end, she said: “Ask your doctor if you could benefit from Celebrex.”

I thought: To heck with asking my doctor; it sounds as though I could benefit from a law degree. It seems to me that a drug company should feel free to advertise the wonders of its little pills without the need to warn us of the side effects. I don’t hear automobile ads warning us of the dangers of carbon monoxide, burning vinyl, sunburn (in case you use the car to take you to the beach), or obesity (in case you use the car to go out to eat). I don’t hear carbonated sugar drink ads warning us about diabetes. I don’t hear ads for personal injury lawyers warning us of the psychological peril in talking with them.

Sometime in the mid-1990s there was an ad on the radio that I heard two or three times and then it mysteriously stopped playing. I don’t recall what they were hawking, but the ad time was mostly taken up with the wonders of the product, and then, with maybe ten seconds left, the seller’s voice said: “And now the lawyers’ chorus will sing you the fine print.” The ad ended with an actual chorus of voices rapidly chanting a recitation of useless information.

I suspect that someone in the lawyer class heard the ad and threatened the radio station. (That would be the quickest way to get something off the air. Why bother with the ad agency or the seller – it doesn’t matter whether they want to keep the ad alive. It only matters whether it gets played, and therefore it is only necessary to threaten the player of the ad.)

I know some really fine people who happen also to be lawyers. I truly like these people. I truly like some people who are confirmed socialists, adulterers, and alcoholics. But my affection for someone does not confer approval of his do-gooder social maladjustment, masochism, or other misanthropy. To those whom I know who are lawyers, I would agree that, yes, a few laws are necessary, and so the world has need of a very few lawyers as well. But if you are a lawyer to whom a tome of regulation is a rhapsody, and if, for you, a government that is gushing murky law is a glimpse of heaven, I say you need to examine your worth to the world. See my additional take on this at DamnYankee.com.

President Nice Guy

2009-01-20T12:28:00.001-05:00

Today we inaugurated the new President. We elected the one who promised to do nice things for everybody, rather than the one who promised to assure our freedom.

That’s who we elect now: people who tell us how nice they are and how generous they’ll be with other people’s money after they get elected.

President Bush’s approval rating was around 25% going into the election, and he was excoriated in the media. He wasn’t the Presidential candidate of his party, but because of his supposed influence, we threw his party’s Presidential and VP candidates under the bus in the election. This is how we express our disapproval of Republicans.

Congress’s approval rating was about 11%, and both houses were run by the Democrats. So in the election we showed them how furious we are with them by re-electing almost all the ruling party’s incumbents and by increasing their margin as well. This is how we express our disapproval of Democrats.

Our response to Congress’s approval rating looks like an anomaly at first. If we were so disapproving, why wasn’t there a 100% turnover in Congress? But the explanation is simple. We disapprove of every other district’s representative and every other state’s U.S. senators, but we are enamored with our own rep and our own senators. So, while we wish everyone else would replace their scoundrels in Congress, we don’t return the favor.

Back to the President. The new one is a very nice guy. He wants everyone to be comfortable from cradle to grave. He’s a rich lawyer who has also been a lawmaker. Lawmakers in this country who are nice guys have nearly a century of practice making laws that steal from Peter to pay Paul, so they can always count on the support of Paul.

But Paul isn’t just a poor fellow down on his luck and in need of a hand. Lawmakers who force this redistribution have selected, for our forced charity, such recipients as Planned Parenthood, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the usual parasites like that, but now also big banks who get to keep paying their millionaire executives’ salaries.

I have a different idea who should receive my charity, starting with the poor fellow down on his luck and in need of a hand. I also favor people who are disabled. (Really disabled, not the wannabes with contrived disabilities like tobacco addiction or self-inflicted obesity.)

I want a President who has read the Constitution and who doesn’t find it confusing – who can comprehend that the only responsibilities of the federal government are to provide for the national defense, conduct foreign affairs, regulate inter-state commerce (when necessary), and coin money. (Real money, not promises to pay, but that’s a subject for another day.) I want a President and a Congress who are concerned for my liberty, not my access to credit. I want a government that protects everyone’s freedom *to* do things, not one that presumes to protect everyone’s freedom *from* discomfort.

But I didn’t get that President or that Congress this time around, and neither did you. So I hope you enjoy the comfort you have voted for. I hope the wealth of others lasts long enough that you enjoy your comfort all the way to the grave. I didn’t vote for the overtly nice guy, because his being nice isn’t what mattered to me. It doesn’t fulfill my sense of duty to God and my fellow man, as it apparently does for a majority of my fellow citizens, to give other people’s money to government-approved entities like the UN, Harvard University, and ACORN. It fills my sense of duty to give of my own time and my own resources to someone whose NEED has made an impression on me. The more my meager wealth is whittled down, though, to support organizations I don’t believe deserve my largesse, the less I have to offer those I encounter who are in need.

I would also be deeply ashamed to vote a certain way on the premise that I personally could expect a handout as a result. I vote according to how we are governed by those we elect, not according to who pays me more for my trip to the polls.

See this: Obama Inaugural.

Problem Solved

2008-12-24T10:52:00.003-05:00

Ambie Heltrop of Mattamiscontis, Maine, was going up to bed when his wife told him that he'd left the light on in the garden shed, which she could see from the bedroom window. Ambie opened the back door to go turn off the light but saw that there were people in the shed stealing things.

He phoned the sheriff's office, who asked 'Is someone in your house?' and Ambie said 'No, they're in my shed.' Then the dispatcher said that all patrols were busy, and that he should simply lock his door and a deputy would be along when available. Ambie said, 'OK,' hung up, counted to 30, and phoned the sheriff again.

'Hello, I just called you a few seconds ago because there were people stealing things from my shed. Well, you don't have to worry about them now because I've just shot them.' Then he hung up.

Within five minutes three police cars, an Armed Response Unit, and an ambulance showed up at the Heltrop residence and caught the burglars red-handed.

One of the officers said to Ambie: 'I thought you said that you'd shot them!'

Ambie said, 'I thought you said there was nobody available!'

[Reminds me of what someone once observed: Youth and guile are no match for age and treachery.]

Staying Mentally Fit

2008-12-21T21:53:00.000-05:00

I often while away the dull moments with productive mental exercises. This is to prevent memory loss. For instance, right now I'm working on recalling the names of Snow White's eleven dwarfs.

Credentials

2008-12-20T11:50:00.004-05:00

Beneath her talking head on the History Channel appeared her name and her credential, Sonia Shah, Author. I googled her and now I understand better why she was being consulted for a show called “CRUDE.” (She isn’t crude; it was a show about oil.)

I recalled that I had long ago started a list, now lost, of professions, for lack of a better word, or careers if that’s what they be – credentials that regularly follow people’s names in printed and broadcast news stories. And in documentaries, like the one featuring Author Shah.

As I watched Sonia Shah on TV I revived the list as best I could.

In news, someone is as casually identified as a Socialite or Embezzler as someone else is a Professor or CEO. (Nowadays, documentaries are more likely than the news to provide a steady stream of these varied credentials.) And of the array of choices, how do you explain to your kids that they might want to aspire to the title of Contortionist or Auctioneer but perhaps not to titles like Extortionist or Racketeer.

My favorites among titles I’ve seen after people’s names? Activist and Expert. I am especially fascinated to comprehend how someone can earn the title of Activist. I might like to be an Activist for causes of my own, but I’m too damned involved with my family and with earning a living to spend enough time being an Activist who would attract the attention of the news cameras. I can only conclude that most visible Activists are independently wealthy.

I’ve even seen the term Professional Activist. Is there a degree for that? A salary? Myself, I’m more of an Inertiaist. Where I see Activists plying their profession I’m more inclined to say, No thanks, I liked it better the way it was. Activists seem mostly intent on reducing my freedom, and Inertiaists don’t sell news.

I realize that a degree in anything makes someone an Expert, and a Ph.D. makes someone an actual Authority. So there are a lot of Experts out there, ready to have the word, with a capital E, appear after their names on TV. Sometimes it’s a Renowned Authority. Then I’m impressed!

It so happens that I am an authority on many things myself. The only difference between me and an authority on, say, cosmetics, is that I’m not an expert on anything that sells news or documentaries.

It used to upset me to read a news story and see a sleazy rock star referred to as a Musician, (or more offensively, as an Artist). But that was back when I expected my daily news sources to be more discerning, more responsible, more linguistically accurate. I have long since abandoned such expectations.

As I describe myself at DamnYankee.com, I lay serious claim to the titles of Activist, Advisor, Advisor to the Administration, Economic Advisor, Political Advisor, Constitutional Analyst, Legal Analyst, Foreign Policy Analyst, Media Analyst, Military Analyst, Cryptanalyst, Linguist, Expert, Academic Expert, Unnamed Source, Strategist, and more... not that anyone listens, but I am as qualified as anyone named in the news media to assume any of these monikers. How can that be? I’m active all the time, even sometimes an agitator, I analyze and advise and strategize, I’m an expert and a source, and, yes, I’m a cryptanalyst. The beneficiaries of my activism (or intertia), analysis, and advice are those who read my commentary and advice.

I'm as much an expert on things political and philosophical as Chomsky, Chopra, and many other darlings of the broadcast media. (Just as with me, Chomsky and Chopra each have a formal education in something far removed from the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. It's plain to me that I have read it and they have not, so I claim a greater expertise in that hallowed document than they can.)

I scoff at news media reports that quote “experts” without naming them. I’m equally unimpressed by reports that credit “unnamed sources”, “legal analysts”, “political advisors”, and the like. I’m analyzing politics and laws and the media all the time. I write letters to elected officials giving my advice. I’m an expert on quite a few things, especially in dealing with the messes created by “enabling legislation”. And DamnYankee.com stands as my continuing political activism.

Meditating on Situational Awareness

2008-12-18T16:33:00.001-05:00

For me the most useful term to emerge from the study of behavior – and I am loathe to use buzzwords and generalities, but I like this one – is situational awareness.

I know people who are always attuned to their surroundings and for whom it comes naturally, instinctively perhaps, or arising from a need for vigilance in their developmental years. For me it’s learned. But, being learned, it may put me at an advantage; I am conscious of my situational awareness.

What is it, exactly? It’s the taking-in of all available cues and signs in the environment around me, and processing that information to be prepared for action. Some of it is passive awareness, some of it active.

Being a learned behavior, it is often my conscious preoccupation while I’m out in the wild. For instance, the first weekend of December I was busy collecting poles in the woods to use for a tee-pee over a magnolia tree newly planted this fall next to the house. It was a still afternoon, heavily overcast, in the high twenties Fahrenheit. While scouting for strong, straight poles of the right species, which was chiefly an exercise for the practiced eye, my mind was free to regard the rest of the situation around me as I meandered deeper into a familiar woodlot.

Although I may not have a naturally-heightened sense of situational awareness, I do have a great sense of direction. So every now and then I paused to verify what I thought was the direction back home, and I was invariably correct.

A couple inches of snow on the ground assured that I could follow my backtrack, but I realized after a while that I had a high (natural?) vigilance for the coming of fresh snow. The first flake in the air, resembling a tiny tuft of down far to my peripheral left, made me conscious of my awareness.

Still I carried on. I had decided that eight or ten poles would be enough, and so as I cut and de-limbed them, I carried them to a couple of staging areas I had selected.

So, while I subconsciously paid attention to the danger of becoming lost in a snow squall, I half-consciously used my homing “instinct” while I automatically scanned for the poles I needed.

With the three-quarters of my mind that was relaxed and idle, I “read” the forest. I could looked at the evidence of forest succession around me. Mostly I was traipsing through second-growth hardwoods about 20-25 years old. What had once likely been a property line demarked a clear break into mature conifers. And where I was finding the long poles I needed may have been an abandoned snowmobile trail.

The thin snow cover was crisscrossed with squirrel tracks, but for the time that I was out there that day, I didn’t see evidence of any other wildlife. I heard a chickadee “scree” now and then, and at one point a gray-black mouse-sized rodent scampered ahead of me for a yard or so and then ducked into a crevice in the crust that took it under a mound of snow which may have fallen from an overhead branch a day before.

I was impressed by the amount of standing and running water just below the snow in most places. For my whole trek I was on a hillside, keeping to an approximately even elevation, so it made sense that there was abundant spring water. Since there had not yet been a deep freeze, the ground temperature just below the surface might still have been ten degrees or so above freezing.

My creative mind anticipated how I might assemble the tee-pee, so every now and then I made a mental calculation about pole length, whether to retain a fork or cut behind it, whether to use a species or not.

I believe I am skilled at identifying trees, but I found it unexpectedly difficult to be sure of the species when dealing with two-inch diameter saplings devoid of leaves. Suffice to say I stayed with deciduous trees and managed to avoid poplar.

In addition to my innate sense of direction, I have an acute sensitivity for the odor of burning wood. This awareness is probably wonderfully primitive, for all of my human ancestors would have had a serious need to know where to find fire, whether it was a fire to return to or a fire to flee. For me a wood fire is a soothing pleasure, and over a half hour or so I enjoyed the scent of a someone’s distant hearth.

It occurred to me only once to consider the possibility of an encounter with an unpleasant creature. Since the only creatures one needs to fear in the Maine woods are skunks and humans, I could readily dismiss these; skunks would be napping and humans would announce themselves with a noisy approach. Black bears, which an experienced Mainer knows not to fear, are hibernating by now. Coyotes are ubiquitous but inconsequential as a threat. And the eastern panther, which I have more experience with than most people, quod vide, is sufficiently scarce as to compare with a winning lottery jackpot ticket.

I’m sure my complex neurological system was occupied with other things of which I was mostly not aware – a heavy scratch on my ankle proved most annoying once I removed my socks that night, but I managed to ignore it completely while outside. I was thirsty for quite a while, enough so that I once contemplated eating some snow. But I allowed myself to anticipate for a moment the cold ale in my fridge and the thirst, although not gone, was forgotten.

And Oliver Sachs would probably have a great time analyzing my ability to hear a self-composing symphony at times like this, when there are few demands on my active consciousness and my left temporal lobe can play tricks on my auditory senses.

So for me, a Sunday afternoon in the sedate December winterscape of northern Maine was a respite from indoor confinement in the company of teenagers with domestic electronics – (no one wanted to go out with me). It was a time for meditation of the sort that I devise for myself. It was an opportunity to practice bringing together the information gathered by my senses at different levels. And, even though I wasn’t practicing situational awareness at the level of a military strategist or an African bushman, it was a time to be aware of what I am aware of. In spite of the lack of excitement, it was something worth writing about.

Nice People

2008-12-17T18:20:00.002-05:00

I like a lot of people, but I wouldn't want most of them governing me. Just because they are nice and have what they believe is my best interest in mind doesn't mean that they would act in a way most likely to preserve my freedom.

Rising Where You've Fallen

2008-12-13T13:30:00.006-05:00

In my lush field of green that is also my deepening field of white, in my brown tower over that field, and in my travel within my town and far, far beyond it - in my years of learning, fathering, working, exploring, teaching, trying, hoping, waiting, praying, laughing, yearning - I stood for something.

Because I fell for a wonderful woman, I stood for romance.

Because I fell before the throne of grace, I stood for faith.

Because I fell for the laughter of children, I stood for responsibility.

Because I stood for these, I stood for love.

I have fallen for much, and I have stood for much more.

Doom and Gloom

2008-11-14T21:57:00.001-05:00

The world will always have plenty of petty despots, scattered about according to P.J. O'Rourke's definition of "Nationalism - A political ideology which suggests that every little group of human twerps with its own slang, haircut, and pet name for God should have its own country as well." But, while they may be fewer and arise less frequently, the world has not seen its last terrible dictator.

The world has not seen its last famine or its worst tectonic plate shift. As we creep toward the mid-point between mini ice ages, we can acknowledge that the world has not seen its hottest weather (in human history). And there's no reversing "global warming" by switching to compact fluorescent lights. Human who believe we are making the atmosphere warmer are anticipated by Aesop: "The fly sat upon the axel tree of the chariot wheel and said: 'What a dust I do raise!'"

11,000 to 13,000 years ago the northern hemisphere was half covered with ice, and likely will be again in another 13,000 years. But from today until then, it may get much warmer before it turns cold again, and all of this has been happening over and over without the self-flattering influence of Man.

The world has not seen its last dustbowl, mighty flood, or continental fires. It has not seen its last plague or last universal economic collapse. And it has not seen its last atomic bombing in an act of war.

The world may have seen its last free representative republic, and the sinking of that republic will drive rational science underground. For with economic ruin will come a rise in charlatanism and superstition where once reigned reason, free will, and responsible citizenship. Under universal poverty, especially close behind an era of plenty, people will regard science and reason as irrelevant, even maliciously responsible for the plight of the land.

The world has not seen its last era of real money. Since 1932, when the USA ceased circulating gold coin, and more certainly since 1972, when the USA went off the gold standard, the only currency within and between countries has been fiat money - promises to pay, credit, and most recently, digital money represented by the flow of electrons in tiny computer circuits.

People denied control of those electronic circuits will find a way to return to currency of intrinsic value, governments be damned.

The world is not especially optimistic, although optimism is a feature of human nature. But even those who let a little pessimism creep in are not prepared for the turmoil that any of these calamities, or worse, a succession of these calamities, will bring.

Individuals can prepare themselves a little, but those who smugly believe that they are fully prepared are fully to be shocked at the reach of the succession of global crises to come. Those who live in densely-populated urban areas and who blithely expect their urban and national governments to prevent such crises or to coddle everyone if the worst should happen are to be pitied.

I'm Trying

2008-11-05T21:49:00.001-05:00

The election of 2008 is over. I'm still in mourning. The hardest thing for me? Giving up being an independent, responsible citizen and becoming a mollycoddled victim awaiting government rescue. I can’t even figure out what I’m a victim of, except earlier government attempts to rescue me.

Rescue me from what? My own wrong-headed thinking, I guess. Certainly that includes my inability to choose appropriate charities for my philanthropy. Probably also my selfishness in thinking I deserve to prosper from my own efforts and my masochism in thinking I deserve to accept the consequences if I fail in my attempts to prosper. (For if I fail, certainly my efforts were undermined by someone else’s greed, and I need to be taught to petition the government to punish that greed.)

Up to now, I have succeeded in fighting off such attempts.

Most importantly, I need to re-program myself to keep my mouth shut when I can see plainly that the emperor has no clothes. There will be retribution for anyone who says so.

I don’t expect that I will ever become accustomed to being one of the sheeple, but I will soon enroll in groupthink therapy and learn worshipful mantras and take the pictures of Lincoln and Reagan off my walls to make room for a portrait of a benevolent BHO. I hope that I have to put up only a head shot, because I don’t want to expose my kids to the emperor’s full-body image.

God knows, I’m trying to get it right!

Best Left Unsaid?

2007-06-22T20:39:00.000-04:00

Some random stains on the fabric of sanity - some thoughts are better kept to oneself, and so they are not included below:

1. As we made our way across the country, Ginny and I visited the sights, like the world's biggest ball of yarn, the Humane Society Museum, the headquarters of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and an amazing collection of dried varieties of dandelions. Imagine our letdown, then, when we arrived at the wax museum and meandered through the building looking for the wax exhibits. But the quality of the taxidermy on the mounted remains of numerous famous people distracted us from our disappointment in the missing wax.

2. At the yard sale I spied the piece of wall art I’d been looking for! – an abstract, distorted scene of a Paris sidewalk café, fabricated from dingy, copper foil and wire in such a way that it sticks out from the wall in a sort of 3-dimensional representation of a sculpture. Against the oddly-tilted table in the scene leaned a bicycle with oval wire wheels and abstractly misshapen handlebar – my bicycle! I stood rigidly on a table at the yard sale, some distance away from the sculpture-scene and tried to imagine how I would get back into it, hoping no one would buy me separately. How could they not notice that I too was made of copper? – my face like a folded centime coin, one arm and shoulder of exaggerated proportions, one short leg of thin copper wire bent grotesquely into a foot at the end, the other leg sort of a dented metal straw already oxidizing the same as the bluish tint on the lumpy cluster of gens de la rue in the scene.

3. Flush twice; it's a long way to the cafeteria.

4. For me, the hardest thing about becoming a dentist would be getting over my own gag reflex.

5. I found a dragon in a book. I’d a lot rather find a dollar bill in a book, though, because you can’t spend a dragon.

6. I often while away the dull moments with productive mental exercises. This is to prevent memory loss. For instance, right now I'm working on the names of Snow White's eleven dwarfs.

7. I've seen a bug on my windshield with more guts than Clyde showed in that fight.

8. If I told you the real reason Raelene didn't come, you'd be looking for dried blood in my trunk and Raelene's hair on my rake handle. So let's just say Raelene doesn't like to come here any more.

9. If you want to get rid of a skunk without hurting it, you want to use a Have-a-Heart trap. You bait it with some skunk food, sit it by the porch where the skunk lives, then check it every couple of days to see whether there's a skunk in there. You check it from a distance, of course, because - whoooeee if you get too close! I was kind of hoping you'd come over tonight and show me how to go pick up the trap without, you know, whoooeee!

10. If you worked in an operating room and a guy was having a simple operation under anesthesia and someone paid you enough to do this, and you were kind of bored because you mostly had to be on standby during the operation, would you dress him in a Wizard-of-Oz scarecrow outfit complete with real straw and really good makeup? Of course, you’d have to let the rest of the staff in on the gag. Will you figure out how much and get back to me?

11. In the truest sense of the word, “staples” means something you eat, like flour and butter. But if you catch someone really eating staples, maybe the best thing to do is go to Staples and buy some staples and staple his mouth shut!

12. It cost him $2000 for just 48 hours, but Cedric rented a billboard, 40 feet long, on the top of a warehouse near the river, and covered it with a huge sign saying: “Trudy, I love you! Will you marry me?” Knowing she had to leave on a trip the next day, Trudy rented a billboard on the top of a building across the river for another 48 hours and covered it with a huge sign saying: “YES!” That night, fog settled over the river and stayed for three days. Cedric was shy, but he called her anyway. Her mother hadn’t seen either sign, but told Cedric that Trudy had left town and she didn’t know when her daughter would be back. How’s that for the plot of an episode?

13. Kings in the olden days had many pithy sayings which people liked to hear, like "Give him the GOLD!" and "You can marry my daughter." Which is why we should all strive to be like them.

14. The fortune teller told me she saw big trouble for me if I didn't quit smoking. Then she told me that my second wife would soon be trying to contact me. Then she gave me some numbers to play in the lottery. I've never smoked, and I'm still on my first wife, so I decided to ignore that advice. But I have my tickets, and I'm so excited about the lottery drawing tonight. I just have a feeling she'd be right about SOMETHING!

15. The girl in the middle of the back row looked furtively from side to side, as though she thought she was all alone and looking out from a row of bushes instead of other children. She never once looked at the audience. It was as if she thought a large bus would suddenly – and then there it came! The other children stopped singing and scattered, and when it was over, just that one girl lay mangled beneath the huge cardboard cutout of a bus. The audience exploded in laughter at the gag, but for that one girl, it was clearly justified paranoia.

16. The sun was cooling itself in a westerly breeze. The fish were biting, a flock of swallows was snatching mosquitoes before they became any threat to man or beast, and the beer was on ice in the cooler at the front of the little boat. The shoreline was lush with a thousand shades of green. At home, a beautiful woman waited for me to bring home two perfect little trout. And waited and waited. And waited, because I wasn't there! I wondered how long I would be held captive in this alien spacecraft and not be allowed to make just one single phone call!

17. When I hear someone mention cat heaven, as in: “Puffy has gone to Cat Heaven,” I’m really relieved, because the heaven I want to go to is one that won’t have any cats.

18. With my brains and your money, think of all the mischief we could get into at the New York Public Library!

19. Your portion of the national debt is just about $30,000. But did you know that you can buy “Debt Offset Credits”? These are like “Carbon Offset Credits”. For $19.95 plus $9.95 for shipping and $4.95 for handling, I can show you how you can buy these and many other kinds of credits. (For another $4.95 I will actually fondle it instead of just handling it impersonally.) If you call within the next ten minutes, I’ll also name a grain of sand on a beach after you, or something like that.

20. Every time I reach into my pocket for my wallet I find myself shaking hands with my Congressman.

NIMBY

2007-06-14T13:15:00.001-04:00

We think of the NIMBY phenomenon when people who want something done that will alter the landscape don’t want it in their own neighborhoods. It’s pro bono publico – something we all want and need – but let someone else look at that recycling facility or waste treatment plant when they get up in the morning, not me.

It would seem anathema, then, if the very something that everyone wants and needs were also something that would clean up, preserve, and protect a landscape, but if the loudest lovers of the landscape said NIMBY to that.

Recently I had the pleasure, and I mean that sincerely, of taking the train from Boston to Newport News. The ride was comfortable and every Amtrak employee we encountered was friendly and solicitous. The sad part was the landscape from Boston to D.C. – an open dump all the way within a hundred feet of the tracks. It was a steady view of cultch: discarded furniture, tires, rags, and the nondescript paper, glass, and plastic trash that characterizes roadside litter. But this wasn’t mere litter. The imagination struggles to conceive how, through mile after “northeast corridor” metropolitan mile, the embankments look like the old small-town dumps of New England. The very dumps that we eventually closed throughout Maine have been re-created, or continuously created, in the environmentalists’ back yards.

Maybe it’s sculpture, given how ignorant I am about what’s called modern art.

I’ve been pissed for a long time already about the Massholes and New Yorkheads who want to rescue northern Maine from the natives for fear we’ll turn our state over to “development.”

After innocently taking this trip, I’m ready to insist that the Maine legislature send the next governor a bill: No organization may lobby the legislature about the Maine woods that takes support money from residents of other states. From what I’ve seen firsthand, their time, talent, and treasure is absolutely misspent on saving Maine from itself. They need to save their own states from themselves first.

Oh, the railroad right-of-way is off-limits company property? That can’t be stopping anyone from cleaning it up, any more than it has stopped their friends from dumping it; northern Maine is off-limits company property too, and that hasn’t deterred the imperial environmentalists’ foot soldiers from tramping all over the state in order to save it.

- A Damn Yankee from New England
See more tirades at www.damnyankee.com

Makes No Cents to Me

2005-05-02T06:11:00.002-04:00

Look at a Susan Anthony or Sacagawea dollar. In the mid-1800s a penny was the same size and made of about the same amount of copper. A dollar was roughly an ounce of silver and twenty dollars was a little less than an ounce of gold (from the centuries-old standard that gold should be worth about 17 times an equivalent weight of silver).

Our dollar today is worth about what a penny was worth when my great grandparents were kids, both in purchasing power and in intrinsic value. Back in the 1850s Congress ditched the half cent, presumably because they found it to be a useless denomination.

In the mid-1800s, a dollar could buy a night's stay in a luxury hotel or dinner for two in the dining room. Now it costs a hundred dollars for either. Since today's "dollar" has so little practical value, hardly worth an original penny, it seems the smallest useful denomination now ought to be the half dollar, equivalent to the half cent of 1850.

In 1982 the mint changed the composition of the penny from copper to copper-plated zinc, a cheaper metal, so that the melt value of pennies henceforth wouldn't exceed their face value. Congress fears your reaction, though, if it were to abolish the Lincoln cent, not to mention the useless nickels and dimes that have so little comparative value today. If you are a merchant, would it matter to you that you could no longer charge 99 cents but might have to admit that the real price is a (Sacagawea) dollar?

Congress also fears your reaction if it were to abolish the dollar bill, which is a damned nuisance and expensive to produce relative to its face value and life span of 18-22 months. Imagine that both paper cents and copper cents had circulated in the 1850s. (Paper "fractional" currency did circulate during the Civil War in denominations as low as five cents, but was quickly abandoned after the war. Our five-dollar bill is worth about as much as the five-cent paper fractional currency of 1862.)

The half dollar could be redesigned to half the weight of the Sacagawea dollar, the quarter to half of that, if we still need quarters. If we were to add a five dollar coin, then our change would consist of three or four useful denominations, and paper would start at the $10 level.

This is just one sensible idea that you will never see implemented. The dominion to our north may have the courage to do it within our life span, though. What say you, O Canada?