Tag: reflections

Posted on

Theoretical Perfect: Enemy of the Practical Good

Please read this linked article first.  All the pictures are taken today in places where I have been running for more than ten years.  I have been observing what changed and what stayed the same during that time.  The picture texts could be read independent of the general text.

I was still thinking re the ivy problem and the general problem of native and invasive species.   Let me stipulate that there are real problems with invasive species.  In fact, I would rate it as one of the most important problems we face, bar none.   The Washington Post has an article today on potential release of Asian oysters into the Chesapeake, which is one of the high risk plays that scare everyone involved.  On the personal side,  I spend many days fighting the Chinese paradise trees that infest parts of my forest land and they seem to be in league with another invasive – the multiflora rose – which makes approaching them painful.   So I know the problem with invasive theoretical and practical.

Below is an ivy covered culvert.  It has been holding the soil since before 1997, when I first saw it.  The ivy slows the storm water and allows it to soak in.  Ivy is low/no maintenance and nothing else would grow as well in this shady and stressful environment.  This human environment will NEVER be like the natural world.  The rain quickly runs off the impervious surfaces and washes away soil and most vegetation…but not ivy. It would be foolish to forgo this option.

But the whole concept of invasive lies on a continuum.   Horses are not native to North America, at least since their ancestors disappeared here during Pleistocene.   Nature did not place the horse on our continent; the Spaniards and English did the job.   Few people today consider horses an invasive species, but they are.   In fact, wild horses get special legal protection.   Also among the immigrants are honey bees, white clover, cows, sheep, wheat and even earthworms.   It is clear that these species have altered the environment in profound ways;  they made the land more productive and it would be insane to try to eradicate them.   On the other hand, we have chestnut blight, snakeheads, kudzu, wild hogs, Chinese longhorn beetles, emerald ash borers … the list goes on.

Below is an alternative to ivy – concrete.  Storm water rushes down and floods stream beds.  This culvert, BTW, is above the ivy in the picture, so it rushes into the ivy, where it is slowed down and tamed.

Reasonable people disagree about where to draw the line.   Norway maples are the most common street trees in the upper Midwest.   Are they invasive?  Some people think so.  They replaced the American elm, almost eradicated by the invasive Dutch elm disease.  The salmon introduced into the Great Lakes are generally well received.   They replaced the lake trout, wiped out by the invasive lamprey eel.    We cannot dial the history back to the past, and what year would we choose anyway?  Species composition is always changing. 

Below – somebody dumped gravel into this low spot to slow erosion.  They still mow the grass all around.  Maybe ivy would be better than this alternative.

The problem of invasiveness is really a type of cost/benefit calculation.    My own bias is to prefer native species – actually local species – because they have been around together a long time and have a demonstrated adaption to the nearby environment.   But I do not limit my choices to only local species because I recognize that human activities have changed the environment sometimes rendering the previous adaption less adaptive.   The human changed environment is the new environment.  The old one is only historical.

Below – imagine the force the stormwater will achieve as it rushes down this hill in a concrete culvert with no plants to slow it down and no possibility of soaking into the ground.

This last part is important.  Every species is adapted to a niche.   But the niche is not the species and the species is not the occupant of the niche.  A species that occupies a very narrow niche is probably on its way to extinction in our rapidly changing world.   One of the definitions of an invasive species is that it can invade several niches and do it well.   This is also an advantage.  

Below is a local stream where most of the water running through the culverts ends up.  The impervious surfaces and the fast water runoff ensures that it floods and erodes.  The rip-rap holds it somewhat, but it requires consistent attention.

Our environmental tool kit should include a variety of solutions, native and not.  While native is often the best choice, a slavish devotion to the environment we happen to have had in 1607 is senseless.    

Below – the neighborhood is in many ways an oak savannah.  The oaks were planted years ago when the houses were built and/or some were left from the original cover. It would be better if the lawn was replaced with some more resilient, non-mowing, vegetation.

BTW – some of our native species are invasive in other places.   Our native southern pines are planted all over Australia and South America, where they often grow better than they do back here at home.   Some people in Scotland complain that our Sitka spruces and Douglas fir are now the main components of their forests.   The world’s largest redwoods may soon be in New Zealand, where they were introduced 150 years ago.  They grow even better there than they do in California.  I saw some very big redwoods in Portugal and some really majestic sequoias in Geneva. 

Below is a bad introduced species – bamboo.   Bamboo is extremely aggressive and hard to eliminate.  People plant it because it provides quick cover, but it takes over real quick.

Below is a yard with a ground cover of pakisandra.  I don’t know if they are native, but they are not as hardy as ivy and they can be killed by too much foot traffic or even weed wacking.   The advantage is low maintenance and no mowing.  BTW – most lawnmowers make more pollution than a full sized car. 

Below is a “good” non-native, a Lebanon cedar.  They get big and live a long time.  I really cannot reliably tell cedars apart unless they have some special color, like some sorts of Atlas cedars.  I planted a deodar cedar near gallows.  The only way I could identify it was from the tag at Home Depot.

Below is a bad non-native, multiflora rose.  You cannot see them very well in the picture, but they cover the forest floor.  They have pretty flowers, but I hate them for their thorns; those thorns, however, are why they are so common.  The government recommended them as erosion control and as a “living fence.”  I can attest to their value as fence barriers.

Posted on

What is Art?

Below is the my regular Capitol picture taken at 7:45 on February 13. As I wrote, I am trying to take regular pictures through the seasons. It is getting warmer and lighter in the mornings.

Beauty is all around us and all sorts of common things are interesting if examined. The beauty often lies less in the physical attributes of the things themselves than in the serendipity of finding them or in their  ephemeral nature, like the flower that blooms only for a day or the leaf that hangs an instant in the wind. Of course, people create and appreciate art.   

Patronage.  That was the whole basis of art until a short time ago and it was a good thing.   In the days before government grants, few artists had independent means so they had to find patrons.   Most of the world’s great art was made to order.  The patrons set the bounds and artists were not free to express themselves exactly as they wished.  In fact the tension between artists and patrons was one of the ingredients of masterpieces. The Sistine Chapel is great because of the tension between Michelangelo, who was doing the painting, and Pope Julius II, who was paying the bills.  Everybody needs boundaries.

Below is modern art at the Hirschhorn Gallery.  It is interesting, but not much.  It has no particular context.  I bet the government paid way too much for it.  I am sure the artist had fun making it and even more fun spending the money he got for doing it.

The context determines the value. We all hold onto things that have meaning to us.   I have carried around the world a little statue of Caesar Augustus that my Aunt Florence gave me in 1965.   Objectively, it is worth next to nothing and it is poor art (It doesn’t look like Augustus, more like Napoleon), but it has meaning to me on several levels. It is representational.  

Below is another sculpture on the Mall.  Also of limited interest.  I read the sign in front and didn’t get any more meaning than you do from looking at it. It would be okay if they let kids climb on it, but they don’t.

I take sublime joy in just walking around the Capitol Mall.   The monuments and buildings have meaning to me as an American, a lover of liberty and as an individual.   I have “a history” with these things personally (25 years of knowing them) and for the larger reasons.  The monuments represent something bigger than what you see.  You can find out the names of the artists who worked on them, but it doesn’t really matter.  They don’t represent an individual’s narcissistic artistic ambition or personal vision.  They represent traditions, aspirations, sacrifices and triumphs of the American people. Of course, there is also the modern art pictured on this post.

Below is the Natural History Museum.  I like the traditional buildings better, but that is just my taste.

I don’t like art that doesn’t have greater meaning or is just an expression of what the individual artist wanted to say.   I don’t like the artists to challenge or try to shock me out of what they considers my complacency.   The artist has no more right to challenge me than I have to challenge him.   A lot of challenging art is just crap.   We have fallen into a kind of emperor’s new clothes trap, where all of us are afraid to express our own taste for fear of being seen as unworthy philistines.   But as Emerson wrote, “The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise.”

Above is a community garden near the Capitol.  I think they started these things in the 1960s and there used to be more of them.  If is kind of interesting to see this little hippie farm in the middle of the monuments and monumental buildings.  This is a more meaningful art than those two modern sculptures above.

Posted on

Internet Steals Memory

People in pre-literate societies had phenomenal memories.  Great epics like the Iliad & the Odyssey started off as oral stories.   While details were dropped or enhanced over time, storytellers could repeat from memory tales that cover hundreds of pages of modern print.  

Literacy is a foundation of civilization.  One of the reasons is that it enhances and replaces physical human memory.    It allows for accurate communication over distance and time and prevents the loss of knowledge and collective experience.  It also means that individuals no longer need to remember details when they can consult an easily available written source.  They no longer need to learn them at all when they can easily consult the collective memory. The analogy of memory to muscle is imperfect, but Hippocrates’ old dictum still applies, “That which is used develops; that which is not used wastes away.”   Everything else being equal, a man with a notebook and pencil is still better off than the man who has to rely only on his great memory, but we pay an atrophy price for leaning on the memory crutch.   

Computers and the Internet turbo-charge access to the collective memory. Much of the accumulated knowledge of humanity is available in seconds at the cost of a few key strokes.   That is why I love the Internet.   (I feel a tinge of regret that my treasured for reference sources have become mostly dusty decorations, and  I still appreciate the cultural and tactile pleasure of actually a book, but I fear that the last “people of the book” generation has already been born.)  Internet magnifies my memory, but it also changes it. 

My memory used to be better and I don’t chalk up the entire decline to the effects of age. Internet & computers are partly responsible.  That which is not used wastes away and if you know you don’t have to use it, you often don’t.  I don’t have to exercise memory as I used to because I know l I really need to remember only parts.  If I can remember part of a name and part of a story, that is good enough.  Internet will do the rest.   A good example is the quotation from Hippocrates above. I remembered that the quote existed. I thought it was from Hippocrates. Google found it.  

My memory used to be imperfect but it was organized mostly in complete stories associated with names, places and often dates in ways that made sense.  My computer assisted memory is unorganized and random.   I rely on external organization power of software to put what I know in order. Search engines assemble it for me, and I have mixed feelings about that. Computer power enhances but devalues intellectual muscle in the same way power equipment enhances but devalues physical muscle. It is an equalizer.  

Being a strong man used to be a determining advantage working on a farm or building a house.   I can still remember a time when truck drivers had powerful forearms from wrestling the wheels of the big rigs or when you knew that a man was a farmer by shaking hands with him.  Today just about anybody can aspire to these jobs. Lack of physical strength is no longer a barrier.   

Will the same thing happen with intelligence?  It is happening already. I am a beneficiary. I could handle the higher level math required for my MBA only because calculators and computers largely eliminated the need for actual calculation. My statistics professor was sad that all her years of training doing regression equations by hand had been made redundant by cheap calculators that could be wielded by anybody with a couple minutes instruction.

All things considered, the price is worth paying. You are reading something right now that could not exist ten years ago, and not only because of the obvious internet as a medium. I write something for my blog almost every day. Many of the entries are recounting of my experiences, but some are mini-essays.  I can write, edit and post an entry in less than an hour.  This is only possible because of technology.   My digital camera provides the illustrations.  Everything I do would have taken me a lot more time and probably required added help. Microsoft Word replaces someone who would read and correct my grammar and spelling.   The digital camera replaces the photo developer. Easy upload takes the place of printers.  The Internet delivers it and provides takes the place of researchers who would have to dig through card catalogues and dusty stacks to give me what Google does in seconds.  Ain’t technology wonderful?

Most things are better remembered than they were lived.  My memory probably was never as good as I remember it being anyway.

Posted on

Do Words Count More Than Deeds?

Ford Edsel and New Coke are spectacular examples of how even the most sophisticated marketing and biggest bucks cannot sell a product people don’t want.  But we are talking about tangible products in these cases.   Each time you tasted New Coke, you were given another chance to test for yourself.   Everybody who saw or drove an Edsel could make his/her own judgment.   Imagine if you had ONLY the advertisements about these products and/or you had to depend on what others said about them.  Go one further. Imagine that much of what you had almost no opportunity to make independent verifications and that almost everybody involved in explaining to you had a vested interest in misleading you, or at least spinning the facts.  Now you are in the world of public affairs.

Abraham Lincoln famously said that “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”  This sentence is designed with the encouraging part as the punch line, but it not really very encouraging.    Phase it just a little differently.  Some of the people are always fooled.  Some of the people are sometimes not fooled, but all of the people are fooled some of the time.  Mr. Lincoln wisely didn’t speculate about how many people would sometimes not be fooled or the amount of influence they might exert on the benighted majority.

We can recognize mass deception epidemics in retrospect.  We know how they turned out so we can see the errors. But what do we learn?  By the time the facts are known, we have moved on to other things and with the wisdom of hindsight people convince themselves that they were not really fooled at all.  As someone who loves ancient history, I can think of widely believed hoaxes that persisted for thousands of years.  But let’s limit ourselves to recent ones that we can all recall w/o too much effort from our own lifetimes.  We had the missile gap, the population bomb, global cooling, nuclear winter, imminent collapse of the global financial system (about once every ten years), WMD, diet coke, breast implants, power lines etc causing cancer, and the biggest of all – communism.   This last one was interesting to me professionally, since my dislike for communism was the big reason I joined the then USIA.  Until 1989 most experts predicted the continued health and expansion of communism.   In fact, I was in Vienna on the very day the Berlin Wall came down listening to experts tell me that the East German government was fundamentally sound and enjoyed the grudging support of its people.  It was naive, they said, to expect any real change.  By 1995, you almost couldn’t find an expert who didn’t claim to have known that the communism was about to collapse. 

Self-deception is the most effective kind.

Communism didn’t work, plain and simple, and it was horribly oppressive to boot, but for a bankrupt ideology, communism enjoyed a remarkably popular life. At least fifty million people died as a result of communism, making it the biggest killer in history.  You can understand how people living under those ghastly systems attenuated their criticism, hoping to avoid joining those millions already moldering mass graves, but communism was also widely accepted among intelligencia in the free nations, where people with the freedom to speak and inquire should have known better.   Even today pictures of Che Guevara adorn dorm rooms and t-shirts on college campuses.  And they are not usually adjacent to picture of Charles Manson or similarly murderous cult leaders.

You can fool some of the people all of the time and sometimes for many years. We Americans are a pragmatic people and we have grown up in a country with long traditions of democracy, free flow of information, free media, free markets, free inquiry and a lot of choices in general.  We have trouble understanding how uncommon our happy situation is, both historically and geographically. This gives us an exaggerated confidence that the truth will come out and that it will be accepted by most reasonable people.   But remember in closed countries they sold products a lot worse than Edsels or New Coke and people were content to get them.  They still do.

As pragmatic people, we also believe that what we do makes a difference and we take responsibility for our actions.  We appropriately hold ourselves to higher standards.   But that should not prevent us from making objective comparisons and should not lead to assumptions of moral equivalency with nasty enemies … or worse. We suffer from the effects analogous to excellent students from very stringent grading system competing with mediocre or poor students from a lax one for admission to an engineering program.  If administrators consider a B in highly competitive course in advanced calculus less than an A in the everybody-passes basic arithmetic curriculum, you better drive carefully over the bridges designed by their graduates. 

Or if you permit, let me provide another analogy.   The couch potato can easily criticize the players in the Super Bowl, but we all know he could not have leap high enough to catch that pass in the end zone nor kept both his feet in bounds when he came down. Deeds count more than words only when people have the independent ability to judge, effects are reasonably close to actions in time and space and when feedback is available and reliable.   Otherwise they are like the tree that falls in the wood with nobody around to hear it.    

So, what do we do?  I certainly don’t advocate lowering our high standards or hiding our mistakes, but we should raise our expectations of others & don’t overlook their shortcomings either.  After the President’s SOTU speech, some leaders in countries where democracy is viewed with limited enthusiasm said that they would wait to judge his deeds.  Judge his deeds – great!  That goes both ways.   Let’s see how the couch potatoes do on game day or the wizards of basic arithmetic perform on the practical exam.  AND we always ask the “compared to what?” question.  You don’t win respect by lying down in the face of criticism and the truth will come out only if it has some sturdy and persistent advocates.   

And as Lincoln understood, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, some of the people will be fooled all of the time.

Posted on

Energy, Water & Food/Government, Science & Markets

The U.S. has become the world’s biggest producer of wind energy and will probably be the biggest producer of solar energy by the end of the year, according to Scientific American.    We have lots of land for windmills in America and lots of sunny places for solar, but what we also have in abundance is imagination and innovation.    We are constantly being told that we are falling behind in this or that.   Just a couple years ago, I read that we would be left behind in the renewable energy business.  I know that we can parse the news in many ways, but being first in solar and wind energy means something no matter how you look at it and it doesn’t look like being left behind.

And remember that this happened before we made all those green investments the government promised to make. 

Energy, water and food. Providing ourselves with these prosaic necessities is the challenge of the next decade. This is a worldwide challenge, so let’s look to good practices worldwide. Brazil has been working on alcohol fuel for four decades. Arid Australia is a leader in allocating scarce water resources. Although not currently the world leader, it might be India that soon leads the world in biotechnology.

Brazil provides an excellent example of the interaction of market forces, political will and good luck. Brazil’s military dictators stared the program back in 1975. There is some doubt whether a non-authoritarian government could have taken the initial steps to make it happen. Even with subsidies, favorable laws and official sponsorship, Brazil’s ethanol program languished and almost died in the very low oil price environment in the 1990s. The history of Brazilian ethanol once again confirms the necessity of a higher price of oil to encourage alternatives. When prices rose, the ethanol program once again made economic senses.

The lesson: Government intervention may be necessary to jump start alternative energy programs. A big change in infrastructure is something individual firms cannot handle alone.   However, it is clear that the government can propose and encourage, but the market ultimately decides. Luck played a big role in Brazil. If the price spikes had come just a few years later, the Brazil energy program may well have been left for dead and very difficult to revive.

Fuel is important, but water is even more crucial to survival.  Ironically, energy solutions such as Brazil’s use of sugar cane to make fuel will worsen water shortages. Unlike fuel, however, we do not produce water; we do not use it up. It is the ultimate renewing resource. What matters is quality and location. This renewing aspect has fooled us into thinking water is (or should be) free.  Most water is not really allocated at all. In non-arid areas, we just assume there is enough water and even in arid ones, we generally give precedence to whoever is nearer or who got there first.  This guarentees that water is wasted. We have to stop treating water like a free good and begin to distribute it according to market principles.

This will seem unjust.   A couple years ago, I watched the Milagro Beanfield War, directed by Robert Redford.  It concerns some poor farmer who steals water bought by a rich developer.  It is natural to sympathize with the little guy, but if more people practiced his primitive methods it would drive everyone into poverty. He just wants to grow some beans – in the middle of the desert.  He doesn’t know and the plot doesn’t openly reveal it, but he just wants to waste water, increase the salinity of his soil and ultimately make it useless.  Only the free market (including rule of law, reasonable regulation & market mechanisms) will allow diverse decision making can achieve a fair result.  You can still cheer for Joe Mondragon, but recognize that he is part of the problem.

The lesson: We have to look at the bigger picture and think of water as a regional, maybe even a world resource. If done properly, it can be done justly and gradually with most people given choices that improve their lives.  If we pretend we can go on the old fashioned Milagro Beanfield way, everybody suffers and some people die, but somebody gets the satisfaction of “sticking it to the man.”

In the end we might have some great options from the science of biotechnology or nanotechnology.  Biotechnology can produce plants that require less water, fertilizer and energy to produce greater outputs.  But the connection is even more direct. Biotechnology is already contributing to the production of biofuels and may soon make the production of ethanol from cellulous faster and easier. Cellulous alcohol is the holy grail of liquid fuels. That would mean we could make fuel out waste products such as wood chips or stalks, or from easily grown and ecologically benign crops such as switchgrass.  Nanotechnology may produce much better ways to capture, store and transmit energy.

Lesson: Paradigms change and we can make them change. If we think only about how things are today, we can never solve our problems. In fact, it is likely that today’s problems CANNOT be solved with today’s methods.  We cannot solve problems with the same techniques that got us into them.  Innovative solutions require a leap of faith, but it is a leap of faith in human intelligence and our ability to learn & adapt.

We are standing at a crossroads where our provision of energy, water and food are radically changed. These three factors will be more completely integrated than ever before. All change is difficult, but if done right this one will make all (or at least most) of us much better off and make our lifestyles more sustainable.

Posted on

Give a Man a Hammer

The world is too complex to be understood directly, so we use simplified mental models to make sense of things.   All of us have habitual models – metaphors – that we fit w/o much thought to the events in our world.    The model/metaphor we use determines what we do.    But none of our models is reality.  They fit more or less well, and to the extent the model is a bad fit, we make bad decisions that follow with perfect logic from our assumptions.

Give a man a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.   The model makes a difference.  The most explicit models we employ are often related to sports.  Think about how different the results can be.    A football model will entail planning by a leader and execution by different people, each with specific specializations (quarterback, linebacker etc) on the field in separate steps with pauses between moves.  Basketball, with its continuous fluid and reactive action, produces a very different model evoke very understanding of the problem.    I often wonder how many of our international misunderstandings result from our football metaphor versus their football/soccer way of simplifying reality.

Explicit models are treacherous enough, but it is the IMPLICIT models – the ones we use w/o thinking – put the biggest hurt on us.  Framing the model is the most important part of decision making, but it is often completely overlooked.    Decision makers often assume models out of habit or inertia and then cannot understand why their perfectly logical choices that flow from their premises do not produce the expected results.     Reality is too complex and confusing.  You have to have a model to simplify it, but make it a good one.

My preferred model is ecological, specifically forestry, and I have worked to refine my understanding of this model and its application.   No model is perfect, but this one is robust because it accounts for interaction of complex factors, properly accounts for the effects of time, anticipates changes in conditions and anticipates random shocks.  The most important insight in this model is that the actions you take will change the expected outcomes and they will never produce proportional results.    Little inputs can create very large results, very large inputs may produce almost nothing and change come in spurts and lumps.   This doesn’t make intuitive sense because we tend to think in terms or physical models where inputs relate directly to outputs.   If I pour eight ounces of water into a cup, I expect to find eight ounces.   In a biological model, eight ounces may result in a gallon of result or nothing at all; or it might produce no visible result for a long time and then make a big jump.  

You also learn that some things take time to work and extra resources cannot rush the process and that there are some things you just cannot have, not matter how much you want them or how good it would be to get them.

Many people think that if we just all agree, we can have all we want.   When it doesn’t work out, they assume there must be some villains standing in the way.  But in the real world, there are many things we cannot have right away – we have to wait – lots of things we cannot have simultaneously and some things we cannot have at an acceptable cost and things we cannot have at all no matter what cost we are willing to pay.   And this happens naturally.  Villains are optional.    And often you don’t get what you think you want, but what you get is better.  Sustained interaction with the natural world teaches these lessons.   That is why forestry is a good model.  But it takes time to learn. 

Posted on

Building the Future

Below is the art in front of the Building Museum.

The world is better now than it was a century ago, but we have lost that sense of muscular optimism.  Pity.  You could read it in their literature and you could see it in their architecture.  I was reminded of that today when I went up to the National Building Museum.  It was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland and it has all that substantial grandeur common to buildings of that period.

Vast and imposing indoor space is the hallmark of American public buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  They are cathedrals of the Republic.

I went to see the exhibit on green cities.  It was not that good for me, although I can see its general value.   The whole museum is set up more as a place to bring school kids to learn about these things.  I like the concept, though.  It is possible to design buildings and whole cities in ways that make them both more pleasant and more environmentally sustainable.   We are often confronted by the false choice of either destroying our world or living a Visigoth level of technology and consumption.  The correct answer is neither.  We can do better.

Implicit in the dilemma is the false premise that people and nature don’t mix and that the best we can do is mitigate or repair the damage we inevitably cause.  In fact, humans are an integral part of nature.  Some of our activities do indeed damage nature: others improve it.  The key goal is to make our existence sustainable for a long, as nothing lasts forever, and the premise of man v nature is not helpful.    

In the great scheme of nature, animal and plant life sets the stage for its own local destruction.  Pine trees grow so thick that they shade out their own offspring.  Grazing animals have to keep moving as they destroy the grass they need to eat.  Elephants rampage through the forests they depend on for food. Despite all the Rousseau “noble savage” fantasies, pre-industrial humans were/are that way too, i.e. very destructive.  Their populations were sustainable only because their numbers were small enough to minimize the damage.  This is the way it works in the animal world; this is how it worked with human populations.  People moved away when things got bad or they died off.  It was a Malthusian spiral never ending – that is the real circle of life – until our technology and knowledge broke us out of it. Of course, this created a different set of problems.

Below is the frieze on the National Buidling Museum.  The building was finished in 1887.  It used inexpensive materials, such as brick instead of cut stone.

We humans, alone among the animals so far, have the capacity to see the larger effects of our activities.  The game is not over. We may yet suffer the population crash that afflicts animal species when they overrun their habitat’s carrying capacity; but not today or tomorrow.   I still have that old fashioned optimism and I have seen the new fangled techniques of environmental restoration or renewal.  Things will be tough, but we will get better.

BTW – we look back on the past with some nostalgia because we know how the story came out.  It is harder to see forward than look back. We should recall past hard times.   The panic (as they called recessions in those days) of 1907 was horrible. Some people actually didn’t get enough to eat; obesity was not a problem of poverty a century ago.  The stock market lost more than 50% of its value.   In the absence of a central bank (the Federal Reserve was not established until 1913) JP Morgan stepped in to rescue the economy with a private sector bailout.  We recovered.  This panic was during the time of Theodore Roosevelt.  Most of us just remember his muscular optimism and know absolutely nothing about the panic of 1907.   That sense of historical amnesia is why our expectations are so high and why we always think we live in the worst of times.

Morgan later went in front of a congressional committee.  This is part of the exchange.

Untermyer: Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property?
Morgan: No, sir. The first thing is character.
Untermyer: Before money or property?
Morgan: Before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it … a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.There is a good biography re Morgan by Ron Chenow.  I recommend it.   I also read his biographies of Alexander Hamilton and John D. Rockefeller (Titan).  They are all good books.

Posted on

Privacy Ancient & Modern

Below is a statue of Admiral David Farragut.  He captured New Orleans in 1862, which split the Confederacy and virtually stopped the export of southern cotton.  His famous quote, “damn the torpedoes, go ahead full speed ahead” comes from the battle of Mobile Bay in 1864. In those days, they called naval mines torpedoes. The harbor was mined but Farragut ordered it forward anyway.

It is only embarrassing if you don’t talk about it. I had my first colonoscopy today and I am happy to say that I don’t need another one for ten years.  The actual procedure is very easy. They use general anesthesia and it is no more uncomfortable than an afternoon nap.

The preparation is the hard part. You have to drink about three liters of some chalky stuff.  It is really hard to drink that much of anything and this stuff is harder than most. You also cannot eat anything the day before. This was not as hard as I thought.  

Modern medicine is wonderful.  Things that used to be hard are now easy. They are very careful legally, however. I had to sign lots of forms and they told me lots of things about privacy. They worry too much.  I think we should expect reasonable – not absolute – privacy.  

Absolute privacy, the privacy where you were really unknown, is a thing of the past. Hanging onto this old fashioned privacy illusion is silly and counterproductive.    While some people are busily reinforcing the front gate with ridiculously stringent laws and regulations, they are eagerly tearing down the back walls, by putting all sorts of really personal information on Facebook or their cell phones.  Internet has got you anyway. The only way you can hide from Google is to have a really common name. Chrissy (Christine Johnson) is immune to Google search.  Most people are not.     

It doesn’t bother me if somebody can find out my buying or travel habits.  I voluntarily share information with Amazon, Safeway, CVS or Marriott, among others.    I don’t mind if this helps them tailor their offerings to my tastes, although I am mildly annoyed that some computer program can fairly predict my behavior by extrapolating from my previous choices.  As a Federal employee, I give the government the right to monitor my office computer use.  Frankly, I find this a type of protection from scammers etc.  Privacy?  All I want is that people cannot compel me to do things or buy things.   They can offer all they want. 

Below is the National Portrait Gallery, one of the most interesting museums in Washington.

Generally, I figure anybody who wants to find out about me can do so but they will soon get bored and go away.   I do, however, like to be unconnected.   I don’t own cell phone and I don’t use the one the government gives me if not on duty.  When I go down to the woods it is very hard to find me.   We can still get lost.  This is the kind of privacy we can still choose, but it is the kind of privacy most people don’t want.  They want to be connected all the time.   I hate it when those clowns talk on the phone when they are driving.   Few things are so urgent that you really need to take a call when driving … or doing most other things for that matter.  

But you don’t need details about everything.  That is why I included only the unrelated pictures in this privacy article.

Posted on

Slothful & Indifferent

“Being yourself” is overrated and it is terrible advice to give a young person.  Much education and virtually all professional training is specifically designed to teach you to be different – and better.  Most success in life depends on your ability to play the proper roles.   This is as it should be. 

On the left is me when I was 19 and knew everything.  I actually had hair back then.

People left to just be themselves will often behave with slothful indifference, or worse. Doing the right thing is hard work that requires significant discipline and preparation.  Those doing the wrong things often rationalize away their failings, since the wrong thing usually results from the sin of omission rather than commission.  People neglect preparation or lack reasonable foresight and then find themselves in an untenable position.  Portraying themselves as victims, they plaintively ask, “What else could I do?” as circumstances “force” them into some questionable actions.

Random chance – luck – is an important factor in any result, but the chronically unlucky are probably making poor choices, often by what they are choosing NOT to do, as I discuss above.   

Below is a picture of my father (the guy w/o the hat) back in the summer of 1941, when he was 19 and knew everything. Even from our distant time, we can feel the joy of care free youth.  The Great Depression was ending.  Young men could find jobs. Later that year the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.  By the next summer, my father was in Europe at the request of his Uncle Sam.

I am a natural procrastinator.  I have known that since I was a kid.   I compensate for this because I am a quick study with a significant talent to “think on my feet” or “wing it.”  I don’t say this to boast, but rather to point out the mixed blessing.  These skills allow me to get away with insufficient preparation and even when I pull off a success, it may not be the best I could do.  Because I recognize the problem, I can fight against the tendency, but I will forever struggle against the tendency to “be myself.” 

We are our own first creation.  We demonstrate who we are by what we aspire to be, by the choices we make and by the roles we choose.  My “self” is defined by my family, my forests, my diplomacy career and various long term habits such as reading and running.   I doubt anybody would have predicted this for me when I was born.  The things are do now are not the default option; I am not being my “natural” self,  but I am certainly being “me” – the me I have chosen, the one I want to be, not the one I was stuck with.  Sure glad I didn’t try too hard to be myself when I was younger.

My advice to the kids is don’t just be yourself; be better.  It will be more satisfying.

Posted on

A Little Snow in Washington

Below is from the Smithsonian Metro stop looking east toward the Capitol, which is hidden by the fog and snow.

t doesn’t take much snow to paralyze our nation’s capital.  Even this little bit you see on the Capitol Mall was enough to shutter the local schools. It has been a cold winter (by Washington standards) but this is the first snow that has stuck to the ground.  The biggest snow storms come usually in February & March.  The sun is warm and the snow doesn’t last long, but they tie up traffic in this city of southern efficiency and northern charm.

When I was a kid they almost never closed the schools.   We had to walk miles through mountains of snow – up hill both ways.   When you reach your anecdotage, the hardships of the past are magnified in relation to the wimpiness of the present.    It has always been thus.  My father told me tales too.   Of course, things actually were hard for him in the Great Depression followed by WWII.  Those who compare our easy times to those years have a not studied the history and/or did not have a parent to tell them about it.

Below is the view from the Smithsonian Metro looking west toward the Washington Monument.

But we had hard times in the 1960s & 70s too.  This was mostly related to having to listen to the hard times stories of our elders, but decade from 1973-82 really was bad.  What we fear MIGHT happen now DID happen then, with double digit unemployment and double digit inflation. 1979/80 was the worst time of my life so far.  Not only did we suffer the economic malaise, but the environment was much dirtier than it is today.  The Ayatollah had grabbed the hostages; the Soviet Union was expanding all over the world; Central America looked like it would go communist; the debt crisis was crushing the developing world; interest rates were high and gas prices were higher. There was no way out.

My father told me that the 1930s were much worse, but I didn’t live through those worse hard times, so I feared the contemporary fall was forever. Ten years later, the Berlin Wall fell; the economy was expanding; gas was cheap and interest rates were coming down.  The boom that started in 1982 would continue with two minor shocks (1991 & 2001) until 2007.  Nobody would have believed that back in 1979.   There was a whole industry of doom and gloom books, predicting the imminent replacement of the U.S. by Japan, the collapse of the free market & the triumph of the Soviet Union.  Hard to remember now and you cannot find many people who will admit to believing those things, but they did and the experts were wrong.

America is never really down.  We are just resting before going on to our next success. 

But returning to the snow, it was indeed colder during the 1970s.   Earth has cycles.  The 1930s were warm years.  It returned to “normal” in the 1940s, so that the Battle of the Bugle occurred during the coldest winter in 15 years.   The 1950s were a bit warmer again, and then we had a cold decade from the middle 1960s until the middle 1970s.  That is the weather I remember as a kid. 

They didn’t close school unless there were a few feet of newly fallen snow.  Conditions have changed, however.   Most of us went to neighborhood schools and we walked to get there.   You might slip and fall walking to school, but a fatal accident is unlikely.  Today most kids are bussed to school.  It is dangerous to ride in a bus on icy roads.  That is the weak link and that is why they have to close schools more often today for smaller accumulation of snow and ice, that and the liability exposure.  Our culture has changed and so has our adaptation to the weather.  I was not at tough as my old man and my kids cannot be as tough as I was.   We won’t let them.