Category: General Thoughts

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Some Thoughts on Immigration

My grandfather was an immigrant who came to this country w/o particular skills. Back in those days there were lots of jobs that didn’t require skills and his education was about the same as that of the average American at the time. Today we can still use immigrants, but maybe not those uneducated masses like grandpa.

We should allow MORE legal immigrants,but we should choose the types of people we want and need. Literally millions of smart & skilled people would bring their skills here within days if we would let them. There is no shortage of applicants. WE should choose who gets to come to our country. Sorry, grandpa. Today you need at least a HS education or comparable tech background and you need to speak English if you want to make yourself useful.

People say that we need somebody to do the dirty work that we don’t want to do. This is only partly true. We still need some temporary farm workers, given the seasonality of that work. But there is no reason why these guys cannot go home at the end of the season. If we had a system that allowed them to come when needed and then come back again, I think many would indeed choose to do just that. Besides that, cheap labor is a mixed blessing.

Cheap unskilled labor creates its own demand. We employ lots of people doing crap jobs like blowing leaves because they work cheap. If we didn’t have cheap labor, we wouldn’t bother doing many of these jobs or we would use machines to do them. Cheap labor makes it less profitable to invest in new technologies to replace labor. We “need” cheap immigrant labor because we have cheap labor. Many jobs could be restructured or replaced by machines if we had to pay more for workers. It is a fairly simple equation.

I used to load cement bags. They had a dozen of us piling bags on pallets. Now they have one guy with a machine. We used to work twelve hour days; this guy doesn’t even come in to work every day. They don’t even use the bags at all most of the time. Now they just load cement directly. Dozens of dirty jobs have been eliminated by redesign. Some smart guy’s ideas replaced our many dirty and blistered hands. But if labor had been really cheap, nobody would have bothered doing that. Cheap labor retards development in anything but they very short run.

The fact is that you don’t get prosperous by hard work and there is nothing virtuous about working hard at low productivity. That is just for people who don’t know any better or are doing it for the exercise. People in the past worked physically harder than we do now and people in many poor countries still do but none of us wants to trade places with them. The key to prosperity is managing the connections, understanding the exchanges and working smarter. That is why we pay so little for unskilled labor. It is not worth very much. Knowing what to do and how to do it better is almost always worth more than actually performing the task. Brains won the battle with brawn long ago, even if some still ain’t heard the word.

Some jobs cannot be automated, but many of those jobs now done by immigrants used to be done by American teenagers or college students and could be again. I worked at McDonald’s, Burger King and several Italian restaurants whose names I cannot recall when I was in HS and college. My kids had trouble finding work at fast food places because they were competing with immigrants who would work almost full time. I say almost full time because employers are very careful not to let them work 40 hours where they would get benefits. Employers prefer immigrants to American young people because they are more reliable and easier to exploit. These are not indispensable reasons and may not even be good ones.

I don’t want my country to be competitive in low-wage industries, so I prefer not to import low-wage workers. I like the guys who come to America and open businesses, make software or do some things that create wealth. Immigrants account for about a third of the tech workforce in Silicon Valley. These guys make the big bucks and they create jobs in America. Good. Let’s have more of them and fewer of the cheap ones.

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U.S. Liked by Latins

Give President Obama credit for improving the U.S. image in Latin America. Approval of the U.S. went from 68% in 2000 to 74% last year, according to a  Latinobarómetro  poll released yesterday.  The news is even better when you look closer. Younger people have a better opinion of the United States than the old guys. While 74% of the region’s overall population has a positive opinion of the United States, only 55%  of respondents who were more than 60 of the over sixty set agreed.

Compared with other countries, the U.S. does well at 74%. Spain gets only 65%;  the European Union 63%; China 58% and little Cuba 41%. Despite (maybe because of) all his yelping, only 34% of respondents in Latin America think Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela is playing a constructive role (only 25% of Brazilians think so)  & even in Venezuela the U.S. gets a 64% positive rating.    

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Dumb Things that Seem Smart

I studied two things in college that I have not used since and rarely seen others use.  Those were classical Greek and calculus.  I am not saying that either was useless, but both were more ornamental than practical.  The difference is that everybody knows that Greek is a kind of intellectual exercise, maybe even an indulgence, while many people – most who have never studied calculus – think it that a population generally conversant in calculus is a golden key to international competiveness. Come to think about it, Greek has been more useful to me.
 
I didn’t come up with this myself.  Gregg Easterbrook in his book Sonic Boom questioned the efficacy of higher math for the masses.  He said that pushing higher math for everybody just has the effect of making lots of teenagers feel stupid. Probably a majority of students cannot master calculus and the time &  energy spent trying to hammer the big square peg of complicated math into the smaller round holes of limited cognitive ability could be better spent elsewhere.  As I said, I took calculus, but the only time I ever used it was to get into business school. I really think the primary purpose was to create a filter for the school.  Requiring calculus keeps down the numbers of applicants and is a proxy for significant years of study.    
 
Let me be clear. I am not saying that higher math skills are not important for society; I am just saying that they are not important for most people, not attainable for most people and not sustainable even for those who learn them but don’t use them in daily life. I have not used calculus since I left college and now my skills have atrophied to the extent that the difference between me and someone who has never taken the subject at all approaches zero. The same goes for my Greek, BTW, but in the case of the Greek I still retain important knowledge from the underlying documents.
 
I agree with Easterbrook when he says that it would be much more useful to give the masses of students a better grounding in things like economics and statistics. Those are things that I do use almost every day and it is clear from the decisions people make that many do not understand the basics enough to apply them to their own lives.
 
Another dumb thing that sounds smart is the idea of self sufficiency. I read Thoreau when I was a kid and I even bought books that explained how a person could support himself on as little as a couple acres of land. Of course you would have to live like a medieval peasant, i.e. like shit, but you could do it. (I am reading another good book called the Rational Optimist that cut through some of the pabulum that life was better in the past or is better still in less developed places.)  Self sufficiency sounds attractive but why would you do it when working and interacting with others is so pleasant and profitable? Specialization is the key to prosperity and happiness.  It is the capacity to do some things well and trade them that makes us better off, not some kind of ability to do lots of things clumsily
 
I don’t have to know calculus because I know that some smart guys do and I can rely on them. This is just the basic economics that so many people don’t learn about in school. A good essay explains how we are all interacted. It is called I Pencil. Kids would read it in HS, if they were properly educated in economics.
 
Related to the myth of self sufficiency is the idea that a person should be “well rounded” and be able to do many things.  We hear that at work or in school. People try to make up for their deficiencies, which is great … as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of developing strengths. The fact is that we usually become successful at developing strengths, not  making sure we can do everything. As I mentioned above, I don’t need to learn calculus and time spent developing it, where I have no natural inclinations or talents, would be wasted.
 
With something like “well rounded” there is threshold. If you are below the threshold, you cannot properly function, but at some point you are good enough at the things you are not very good at doing.  It is binary.  After you cross the threshold, getting better is not necessary.  After crossing the threshold, it is better just to avoid the things you don’t do well. Let somebody else do it, somebody who likes it better and is better at doing it.   
 
This shows up in my panels. Some people are good at lots of things. They are well rounded. They tend not to get promoted. It is better to be acceptable at most things and really exceptionally good at a few. Playing to strengths while minimizing or avoiding weaknesses is better than trying to fix every problem.

George C Marshall, the architect of victory in World War II, used to say that it was more important to ask what a man could do and let him do that than to ask what he couldn’t do. People with great talent are often uneven personalities. George Patton was not much of a diplomat, but he was very good at pushing armored units through German lines. Marshall used Patton where he could do some good.  Eisenhower was not the greatest strategist in the war, nor did he have real combat experience, but he could cobble together coalitions.  That is what he did.

Finally re the dumb things that sound good is learning foreign languages. We Americans castigate ourselves and accept the criticism of others because we don’t learn foreign languages. Well … what foreign language should we all learn?  It is an easy choice for non-English speakers. English is the world language.  Learn English. No other language is so widespread or universally useful. We already know English. So do we learn Spanish, which is no use anywhere besides Latin America and parts of the Iberian Peninsula? Chinese has the greatest number of speakers, but it is not the language of business of commerce even in Asia. What about all those poor kids whose parents immersed them in Japanese, back when Japan was supposed to take over the world in the early 1990s?  How useful has that been for them, I wonder?

If you don’t know where you are going, you should just keep and improve English or maybe simplify it into Globish.

I have to caveat – again – if you are going to live in a country, learn the language. I learned several and hold myself to a high standard (i.e. I actually want to speak it well enough the people know what I want and don’t feel the overwhelming urge to compliment me on how well I speak their language.  You know you doing poorly when they compliment you in the first couple minutes, especially if they do it in English). That is why I question the idea of general language learning. I am now working to get my Portuguese back. I once spoke it well and will again, but in between not so much.  One of my tasks is to purge out Polish and Norwegian, which are now flowing back into my brain as “foreign”. When my Portuguese is again very good, I won’t be able to command the Polish, Norwegian or German that I once could. 

Language must be used to be kept and few of us have enough time in the day,opportunities to practice or actual talent to remain “mulitlingual,” even if we ever mange to achieve it. Most of us also have more important things to do than practice a language we rarely use. Learning languages in college won’t cut it, unless your standards are very low. Which brings me in complete circle back to the Greek or more broadly the classics. I studied both Greek and Latin in college and, as I admitted, I really cannot remember the languages well enough to read them anymore. But I do remember the content of much of what I read. Classical languages give you access to a full panoply of Western thought and literature. 

IMO, if you want to just learn “a language” in college, with no more specificity than that, you are probably better off studying Latin than any “living” language. You will get access to many more centuries of literature of history and when you forget the language, as you inevitably will, you may remember some of that literature and history. When/if you figure out where you want to go in the non-English speaking world, learn the language then. Latin will probably help with that.

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Due Dilligence v Data Sufficiency

Studies show that you feel more confident about a decision as the amount of information you have grows.  Unfortunately, the same studies show that increasing information does improves decision making at a diminishing rate and at some point, usually around seven discrete pieces of decision criteria information, the efficacy of decision making actually declines.  But confidence continues to rise. It is usually a bad thing when confidence overtakes capability.

I am facing this problem all day, every day, on my promotion panels. I take this responsibility very seriously and I feel empathy with everyone I am judging.  Always I am looking for the additional piece of information that will make my decision more certain and my certainty grows with each additional fact I find.  But then I recall the science on human decision making.  Perhaps my certainty is unjustified and undesirable.  I feel better about what I am doing but I am not doing any better.

Seven is the magic number or maybe the logical limit.  It is no coincidence that many thing in literature and myth come in sevens.  You have the seven deadly sins, seven wonders of the world, seven samurai, seven habits of highly effective people, seven voyages of Sinbad etc.  It is also why telephone numbers originally had a maximum of seven digits, of course broken up into smaller subsets.  Our minds simply aren’t well designed to keep lots of information both available and sorted.  We are not the logical decision makers portrayed in the movies and maybe in our own minds.

So we make lots of our decisions using heuristics – rules of thumb roughly derived from experience and previous successful decisions.  These work fairly well if the current situation is well understood and analogous to past ones and if we are aware that we are indeed using these rules, so that we can make appropriate allowance and adjustments.  I think a lot of this is happening in our judgments.   I also believe that it is working reasonably well because of the diverse and relevant experience represented on our board.  Of course, I have to keep reminding myself about that problem of growing confidence and declining effectiveness.

Sometimes you just know all you can. It may not seem enough, but it is time to decide. All decisions are made under conditions of some uncertainty. Otherwise there is no need to make a judgement.

Our scope for serious errors is not great. Almost all the people we are considering are well qualified.  Beyond that, we reach fair convergence among those near the top and the bottom of the distribution. This tends to happen BEFORE we talk it through, so it is not based on overt groupthink. Since the numbers of promoted and low ranked are relatively small percentages of the total, I think we can be confident that most of those “belong” or “deserve” to be where they ended up.  I worry a little about those right near the cusps.  But I don’t see any way to increase effectiveness, although it is pretty easy to increase confidence.

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Intuition in Decision Making

I said that I wished I had done promotion panels before, but in many ways this could not have come at a better time. Almost every file I read gives me some ideas and examples (sometimes negative sometimes positive) of what I should do to prepare for my post in Brazil and what I should do when I get there.  Reading file after file and being able to compare various activities, personalities and responses over diverse situations has been an excellent “case study” education.

We did case studies in business school and the method is generally used in most professions for good reason. It provides the benefits of experience w/o having to suffer all the hard knocks it would take to get it yourself. Of course, in many ways it is not as good as personal experience, but it does have some advantages (besides knock avoidance).  

When you read through lots of cases, you can discern patterns. You develop a kind of intuition. Intuition has a mysterious connotation, but it doesn’t have to. Intuition develops as you get familiar with many situations and many patterns.  You cannot always explain why you know something and intuition has an aspect of a feeling, which is why it is seen as mysterious. I don’t think you should rely on intuition alone, if you can gather facts and make distinctions. You should use all available tools to make important decision, but developing a feeling for patterns should be one of the tools. This is wisdom.

Along with intuition comes the capacity to reason by analogy. This is another “mysterious” process that people often cannot quantify. They just see the connections or the similarities.  Many great ideas and successful ventures start off when somebody reasons by analogy. As with intuition, this methods should also be tested and supported by facts and analysis. I call this “due diligence.” I am actually using the term technically incorrectly, but it conveys to me the need to check out assumptions even when you don’t think there is much need to do so. I think it is good to make very clear the nature of the analogy and how the new situation is similar AND different.   

If you have a successful pattern, it is tempting to use it everywhere you can. This is a solution in search of a problem. Give a man a hammer and everything starts to look like a nail. People are often enthusiastic about  intuition because it can mean not having to do the hard work of thinking. Careful analysis can compensate for this enthusiasm.

With these caveats, intuition and reasoning by analogy are very powerful tools that deserve more respect than they sometimes get.    

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Learning from Experience of Others

I wish I had served on the promotion panels before. It is grueling work & eye bugging, but all that reading is paying off in terms of vicarious experience. Each individual report is an encapsulated history/biography for a year and a whole file paints a picture of the progress of a career. My colleagues have done lots of interesting things, achieved some great things and made their shares of mistakes and in these experiences are valuable lessons.

After reading and thinking about what the texts tell, you see patterns in individual careers, in the ways of the FS and – excuse the hyperbole – even in the development of the world in the last decades.  For all the important things that happened, some of us were there, close up and personal.  These sorts of files will someday make excellent primary historical sources. I am sure they do already.  

So serving on the boards has been personally enlightening. I can see how the kinds of work I do fit in – or sometimes not – with the bigger events.  I think it is nearly impossible to see this perspective when you are thinking about your own career or when you are down in the day-to-day fight.  We all like to think we are unique and that the problems we face and solve are special. In detail, they are that; in general they are not.   

The names and the places change, but the situations recur … monotonously. I think we can learn from history and that with the wisdom of experience we may be able to avoid some problems, but not all.  They mutate enough that we just cannot always recognize them or anticipate all the permutations. Experience might allow us to minimize pain or pass through hard times easier and faster, but we will still have hard times.

Progress in careers is never linear. I don’t think it can be.  Not every year can have bigger achievements than the one before.  I can read that there were times when the people involved must have thought their careers were finished.  Often this comes just before a big opportunity or a jump to a bigger achievement. I don’t think this is a mere random occurrence.  Opportunities may come and go, but being able to see them and take advantage of them is a skill and a choice.  Maybe the setback or the career doldrums give the affected person the chance and incentive for introspection and reinvention or maybe just a time to rest before continuing up the mountain.  

It is success that can be more dangerous. It breeds arrogance & complacency and makes you less likely to consider changes, improvements and alternatives. A very successful person may be blind to opportunities. Failure is a better teacher, as long as you can see a way out of it. Of course, if you fail consistently, perhaps you taking the wrong lessons, or none at all.

I can see patterns of success and failure in the files and when I look back I can see them in my own career. They are repetitive and faults are astonishing persistent; it is hard for people to get away from them.  You can travel 1000 miles and leave everything else behind – except you always have to take yourself along on the journey. I recall one of those “de-motivating” saying, “the only consistent factor in your failed relationships is you.” The same goes for success. Of course, we tend to blame failure on outside factors or bad luck, but assume success is earned and maybe overdue.  All those things are true, and vise-versa.

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Life Nasty, Brutish & Short

“I need it like a hole in the head”.  I always thought it was probably a direct translation from a foreign language because of the peculiar grammar.  But I don’t really know where it came from and I figured it was just a saying. 

Alex and I went through a forensic archeology exhibit at Smithsonian. Take a look at the skull alongside and try to guess what killed this guy. I don’t suppose you would need a degree in forensic anthropology. Most of the other exhibits were less obvious. They can read various types of sickness on the bones. Evidently significant numbers of people died of toothaches in the old days, or more precisely from infections related to abscesses. What a way to go? There was a lot of misery back then from things that we just no longer think about. I stroll through this exhibit will cure even the worst case of nostalgia for the good old days.

Life in the old days was nasty, brutal & short for most people. Even the rich people lived rotten lives if you look at the things they had to put up with and suffer from. The old palace looks good, until you recall the state of plumbing, air conditioning and medicine that the fat cat had to live with. None of us would willingly trade places with Louis XIV if we had to really live his life.

Speaking of living nasty, brutal & short lives, take a look at the map below and try to find North Korea. It is truly a benighted place – literally. When you go to museums and think about how rotten life used to be in the dark old days, it is useful to recall that in some places it never got any better and I have no doubt that living in a fever ridden colony a couple of centuries was better than living in a place like North Korea today. It must be like living in a giant, endless concentration camp, where technology is used to create misery and control rather than improve lives.

BTW – the map is just supposed to show the world’s bright lights, but when you look at it you cannot help noting that North Korea doesn’t have many. 

Finally, we have something that makes life better, IMO, something even the richest king couldn’t have before the 1880s – Coca-Cola. Below are Kola nuts, used to make Cola flavored soft drinks. I recalled an old commercial for 7up talking about the un-cola nuts and with the wonders of YouTube we can see it again.

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Human Origins

Alex and I visited the “human origins” exhibit at Smithsonian.  I have trouble keeping up with the changes.  As I recently wrote, I had to change my opinion of the Neanderthal man now that I found out he is a closer cousin and probable ancestor.   You would think that all these prehistoric things would be more or less consistent, but they are not.  Scientific perceptions change.

Anyway, the exhibit is very good.   Most of the artifacts are copies, but I wouldn’t be able to tell the real ones anyway.  The picture on the side is the “ice man” discovered frozen in the Alps. He may have been the victim of a murder more than 5000 years ago. Anyway, the exhibit is mostly set up to educate kids, but old people like me can enjoy it too.

The thing that made the biggest impression on me were the wax museum recreations of pre-humans.  If the Neanderthal man walked down the street today, you might notice that he was unusually husky and unattractive, but if we was properly groomed you might not give him too much of a second look. Of course one reason not to stare would be to avoid eye contact with a dangerous looking weirdo.  But my point is that I think you would consider him human.  We do share genes with this guy, as we have recently discovered.  Not so the others like the Homo-erectus.  It was interesting looking into their eyes, or at least the eyes that current science has provided them.

Another surprising part of the exhibit was a skull from Lapa Vermelha, Minas Gerais in Brazil.  (I will put that on my list of places to visit.)  This fossil has been carbon dated to 11,500 years ago. The interesting thing is that the ancestors of today’s Native Americans were not supposed to be there yet.  There is a lot of political argument over very old human fossils in the Americas.

Native American tribes often have creation myths that say they have always been in or near their current locations. Science and anthropology indicate that their ancestors wandered over from Asia via a land mass at what are now the Bearing Straits. The discovery of ancient skulls that do not resemble the current Native American populations upsets some people. They can go to considerable lengths to prevent the evidence from being uncovered that contracts the myths or threatens their positions as “the first Americans”, as with the Kennewick man, who looked more like Jean Luke Picard than Sitting Bull and was evidently most closely related to the Ainu people from Japan.

History is never really simple and when it gets tied in with current political sensitivities it is really hard to get things right.   It is really hard to believe that things that happened more than 10,000 years ago still make a big difference to today’s politics, but they do.

It is a little silly.  When you go far enough back, none of the current ethnic distinctions make any sense and all human history is the common heritage of mankind.  The more we learn from archeology and genetics, the clearer that becomes.

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Promotions

I have not been writing much on the blog because I am serving on promotion panels, which are sapping all my psychic energy.  I am on the “threshold panel” which recommends FS-01 officers from senior Foreign Service.  There is a lot of reading to do and lots of things to consider.  It really is making me sad.  So many great people and not enough places for all of them.   It is like a deadly serious game of musical chairs.  Some people’s careers will end because of our decisions.   I make the choices as best I can and it is my responsibility to do it, but I find it harder than I thought it would be.

I have learned an amazing amount in just a few days.  There are things I thought that were wrong about how the system works, but mostly it is just a different perspective.  After the panels are over, we can talk and write about the process in general terms, but not yet.  For now suffice to say that the process really is as fair as we can make it.   I was very impressed by that and will do my best.

Seeing all these good people makes me wonder how I ever made the leap.  It is truly a humbling experience, but it also makes me proud to be a member of such a group.

Anyway, if I write less for the next couple of months that is why.  I write about what I am thinking about and right now I cannot properly do that.

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America’s Biggest Ethnic Group

America’s largest ethnic group is German.  Nearly a quarter of the American population or 58 million Americans claim German ancestry.  It used to be a big deal; as far as I know the Germans never formed a group specifically called “the race” (as in La Raza) but some clearly had separatist notions. It is a tribute to the American assimilation machine that now it matters hardly at all. You can see some famous German-Americans on the stairs to the left.  Who knew Elvis was German?

I had been meaning to go over to the German-American cultural center since I read about it in the paper.  Yesterday I went.  It is the kind of place that is worth seeing, but not worth going to see and you could easily miss it. Look at the picture below. The signs are small. Mostly, it is a permanent poster show detailing the long and varied contributions of Germans to American culture.   Since German contributions are now as American and Americanized as hamburgers, hot dogs and potato salad, it is easy to overlook them and think that now is the first time we have really had such large influx of immigrants and foreign cultures.

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it and those who remember will have to go along with them too, but it is interesting to consider the conditions that existed within living memory. So let me say a little about Germans & America.  I grew up with it in Milwaukee, so talking about German-American culture is like talking about childhood. (The picture below is the Germania building in Milwaukee. They used to joke that the towers were like the spiked Kaiser helmets.)  But I had a child’s understanding of it based on caricatures and molded by subsequent history.  It is hard to put ourselves in the mindset of a century ago but I will try. 

1910 was before the wars and before the atrocities.  Germany in those days was arguably the most advanced country in terms of science and technology.  An American who really wanted to learn science had to learn German.  It was like English is today to sciences.  This persisted.  When I was growing up, the stereotype of a scientist was a guy with a beard and a German accent.   During our space race with the Soviets, it is largely true that our German rocket scientists competed with their German rocket scientists.   We probably could not have achieved what we did in space flight w/o Germans and the Russians certainty did not have the home grown talent to compete with us.

Germans also pioneered what became the research university.   Our American universities resemble them because we specifically imported German methods, ideas and often Germans themselves to remake our system during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.  If we see Germany through the prism of the Third Reich and the World Wars, we see it in entirely a different way than our grandparents would have in 1910.  Germany under Wilhelm II was not a full democracy, but it was more democratic than most of the current UN members today and it was certainly less corrupt that most of the world’s countries now. They held regular, generally free elections. There was a strong respect for the rule of law and reasonable protection of individual rights. If you can look beyond the pomp and circumstance of the aristocracy, you see that in terms of democracy, rights, rule of law & transparency, Germany of 1890-1910 would compare favorably to most of the world’s countries a hundred years later (1990-2010) and has big modern countries such as Russia & China clearly beat. 

Although emigration to the U.S. declined after German unification and subsequent massive economic growth, there still were more opportunities in the U.S. and we continued to draw German immigrants. But it was a different sort of immigration in many ways.  As I mentioned above, Germany was one of the world’s most advanced countries, with technical and scientific skills at a par or above our own. This situation just doesn’t exist anymore. Today technically savvy immigrants are still important to us, but they usually develop their skills and/or use technologies already available in America.  A century ago, we were much more the recipients of skills and technology transfer. We all know that immigrant muscle helped build America, but we may overlook that immigrant brains also had a big role in designing it, none more so than the Germans.

We made an effort to wash the German out of our national memory. During World War I, sauerkraut became liberty cabbage; dachshunds became dash hounds; frankfurters became hot dogs and hamburger was renamed Salisbury steak; many streets changed their names and so did many families. Germans assimilated much faster than they might have otherwise. Wars do things like that and we have a way of trying to fit the events of the past into our current narrative. The problem is that the German heritage just doesn’t fit well into what we think of them and ourselves today. And now we don’t think much of it at all. That is why the German American heritage museum is kind of depressing. It is now located in the middle of Washington’s Chinatown. Immigrant communities come and go. 

All this is past. History happened as it did and we cannot change it. People in the past did what they did, but we have to remember that history didn’t have to happen that way. Just as our futures are not determined, neither were theirs.  W/o that unfortunate and almost random event in Sarajevo (that pathetic little loser, Gavrilo Princip, actually got lost and the Archduke’s car passed him by chance.  Terrorists only have to get lucky once) and the incompetent reactions in 1914 how different the world could have been.