Author: admin

Posted on

Oral history not worth the paper it’s printed on?

I had an Irish-American friend who hated the English, and he had good reason. Family oral history related how a few generations ago one of his ancestors had been shot and killed by an English officer in a land dispute.  As a result, his family lost the land and became destitute. These kinds of stories helped make my friend interested in tracing his family roots, which you can do now easier than ever with computer records. He was surprised to find that his family was Anglo-Irish and that his ancestors were “English” officers, the villains of the family saga. They could find no records of the specific land dispute of family legend, but if it happened his ancestors were on the other side of that gun.

Oral history is always like that, which is why it often has better stories.  Individuals do it with “fish stories” where their role get bigger and better defined with each telling and groups do it. It is not that people are trying to lie, although sometimes they can be, but memory must be recreated each time we tell.  Some of the details are forgotten, so we fill in what seems best.  Groups get messed up even faster than individuals.   Investigators know not to let eye-witnesses discuss what they saw before they get it down on paper individually.  When people get together, they produce a shared narrative. They help each other remember details.  Some of those details are things that never happened, but the confirmation of the group makes everyone more certain of their memory.  In memory, certainty does not correlate strongly with accuracy.

Oral histories sometimes retain enough facts to make them useful and enticing. The Iliad and Odyssey were passed orally for centuries before they were written down. The 19th Century archeologist Heinrich Schliemann used the books to find the location of Troy. But the details of the war and the personalities are legend.   When I was a nerdy classicist, my friends and I played a game of finding things mentioned in Homer that did not exist during the time of the Trojan War, but were evidently added in the telling, or things that Homer did not understand from the time of the Trojan War and so explained poorly.

Accurate sources and assessing all sources is a challenge for anyone who writes history or even is interested in it. We really can study only the written sources. Some cultures do not produce written sources and no written sources comprehensively cover all the things we may want to know.  People write what THEY think is important. We might want to know something completely different.

There is an advantage to being unknown. I recall reading an essay about the great warrior Crazy Horse.  Little is really known about him.  There are no confirmed pictures.  He made his reputation as a warrior by going on raids of other tribes.  In the raid, people are killed in brutal ways, women are abused and generally misery is inflicted.  What would a detailed and accurate history do to Crazy Horse’s reputation?   If we are doing a history of the West, can we compare the oral legend of Crazy Horse with the historical record of his adversary, George Armstrong Custer?  Crazy Horse’s “history” is much more akin to the legends Libby Custer told about her husband after his death.

Oral history is useful more as a way of understanding what a group thinks about itself today than about actual events of the past.  The narrative is a group effort.  It both shapes the thinking of the group and is shaped by it. That is why it is so popular.  If you don’t have to worry about being proved wrong by a written source, you can speculate and make up better stories.  This might make me an apostate as a historian, but I think maybe it is not so bad to “improve” outcomes.  It is depressing to know your family was a bunch of losers for six generations. Do yourself and your posterity a favor and insert a few stories of overcoming adversity and coming out on top.  You don’t even need to make anything up, just re-frame it.  My ancestors were not driven out of Europe by Cossacks because they were drunks, draft dodgers and ne’er-do-wells.  No. They were freedom loving rebels who could not abide spending another day in those oppressive precincts. 

BTW – the story I told up top is not accurate.  I was correct in the general thrust, but my telling had some addiOral history not worth the paper it’s printed on?tional details.  I think they might be true, but I have no real reason to think so.  If I retell it to my friend, he may like my version better and I have no doubt will incorporate parts of it into family lore.  When the story is told in the next generation, some of my story telling DNA will be among the heritage.  Who knows, maybe I got this right by random chance.

That is why when we really want to know we need to find a contemporary written source.  And don’t believe what people tell you about the past, especially if the say it will lots of passion. 

Posted on

Reasonably priced health care

My teeth are rotten. It is my own fault. I didn’t care for them when I was young. As a result, I have a big investment in crowns and fillings. Much of this work was done decades ago and it is getting old. I also chipped two front teeth a while back. I decided to get it all fixed, in Brazil. Getting three crowns and four filling replaced, as well as two cavities fixed and my chipped front teeth capped will cost $2553, all in. Lots of money, but only about a quarter of the U.S. price.  Maybe less.
In addition, this dentist can get all of that done in about two weeks. It is different in the U.S.

A few months ago, I needed blood work to test for cholesterol, sugar etc. That cost me only about thirty dollars. And it didn’t take much time.

This was all done by private firms/doctors. Brazil has a public system, but those who can afford it usually go to the private system and pay the private doctors themselves, which keeps the costs down. And the medical system in Brazil is still not as lawyer infected as ours.

I am not saying that I prefer the Brazilian system. American medical care is still the best in the world, but it is expensive. We sometimes get more than we would want to pay for. And we don’t pay attention because somebody else is paying.

There are a few lessons here. First, medical care can become more of an internationally trade commodity.

A second lesson has to do with delivery. If people pay out of their own pockets, prices remain lower. Brazil is NOT an inexpensive country generally. It costs MORE to maintain an American level of living in Brazil than in the U.S. Restaurants and food cost more. Cars cost more. Electronics costs a lot more. But medical care is cheaper.

Posted on

Healthy McDonald’s diets taken with Coca-Cola

It seems that many people in the U.S. maintain a special kind of hatred for things like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. I have been consuming both for my entire life w/o problems. I might say “everything in moderation” but I drink more than two liters of Coke every day and have done for around fifty years. Some would say that was immoderate. But McD can be consumed in moderation and in health. Take a look at this link. Most of us are familiar with the move “Super Size” where a guy ate nothing but McD all month and got fat and unhealthy. It was mendacious. The man simply consumed lots of fat and calories. Do that with any diet and you get fat.

The link here shows a science teacher in Iowa, who ate nothing but McD and LOST weight, while lowering his cholesterol. He ate Big Macs, but also other things available at McD and did so in moderation with a healthy lifestyle.

I enjoy a Big Mac at least once a week. I also regularly eat pizza, tacos & processed flower. I am happy if my food has GMOs. I drink around 30 liters of Coke Zero each week. I almost never drink water unless mixed with extracts of things like cola nuts, barely, hops, or corn. And I love salt. I do also like vegetables; I eat them with my Rammen. My health is exceptionally good because it is possible to be very healthy w/o going organic.

You just don’t need to worry that much. Pretty much everything you eat, drink, breathe or touch CAN cause cancer if you consume too much. But most of us don’t. So eat that Big Mac and take large fries if you want. But walk more and be sensible. And, yes, Coke Zero and McDonald’s can be part of a sensible diet.

If you eat nothing but rice cakes and organic food, while avoiding Coke, candy, fast foods, booze and donuts, you will not live longer, although the boredom might make it seem that way. 

Posted on

Stickin it to the Man

I have been complaining about how independent-minded people cannot get along in the big bureaucratic organizations as long as I have been working in big-bureaucratic organizations. It is getting to thirty years now and I have been getting along reasonable well in big-bureaucratic organizations. For an even longer time, I have been reading books about independent-minded reformers bucking the system to change the paradigms and make meaningful changes. I always identified with the plucky outsiders. Most of us do. It is the American way. You can easily see it in the plots of so many movies and books. A group of misfits is picked on and oppressed by the powerful and/or popular people. They continue to do things their way and by the end of the movie are vindicated. As I said, most of us identify with the underdogs and misfits.

It can’t be right. There are more than 300 million Americans and ALL of us are rebels? If all of us are a little different and a little rebellious, who are we rebelling against? And if the group of misfits comes out on top, don’t they become the in-group. Maybe it is the nerds and the theater kids oppressing the jocks.

I have been reading another of those business-management-behavior books that gives another set of examples about the rebels working on their own turning the tables on the established and powerful. But, as I wrote, I have been reading these sorts of books for a long time. The names are changed and the exact circumstances are different, but the stories are the same. My study of old books tells me that this story has been going on for as long as people could write. Each of the new renditions makes it seem like it is a new discovery, but maybe this is just the way it is, has been and ever will be.

In my own lifetime, I have seen many of “rebels” turn into the establishment that needs to be overturned by new rebels. These erstwhile rebels in general did not “sell out.” They simply solved the problems presented them. Yesterday’s solutions are often today’s problem, which implies that today’s solutions will be tomorrow’s problems. This seems depressing at first glance and it could be, but I don’t think it is. It is simply a matter of growth and change.

Many of the problems of my youth have indeed been solved and the world is generally a much better place than it was back in 1973. Our generation actually did pretty well. I have reasonable confidence that it will be a better place in 2053 than it is today, i.e. the kids will be all right too. But people will still complain, because people complain. We can always imagine better.

I have been complaining about how hard it is for independent-minded folks like me to make it in the organization. People like me like to “stick it to the man.” But in the course of all my complaining, suffering and strife, I realize now that I have become the man, or at least one of them. People see me like I saw my bosses of the past. I now understand that my old bosses too were surprised by their own apotheosis or demonization, depending on who was doing the taking and when. These successful folks were – in their own minds – the plucky outsiders who had to push open doors and make the system change. Some were right.

It is a little deflating but nevertheless comforting to realize that we – we plucky outsiders – we are the system, maybe too much to say bricks in the wall but not too much to say links in a chain. It is a great strength of our American system that we can easily absorb good people and ideas from outside the current establishment. We actually live in a state of constant revolution, but w/o the nasty bits associated with those things that happened in France or Russia.

It doesn’t work in spite of us but because of us. We “rebels” sometimes don’t admit it or even see it. The system works with us and we work with it.  The energy of our discontent is part of its lifeblood. We never get all we think possible because we can envision better than anyone can achieve and it is a moving target. As soon as we get to a place we thought impossible, we start thinking it is normal, deserved and maybe not enough.

Well, looking around on this first day of 2014, I see that things are pretty good. Can I envision better? Of course I can. Is it better than I envisioned by in 1974? Hell yeah. We solved the energy crisis, brought down world communism, reduced absolute poverty by 80%, cut cancer deaths, greatly improved water and air quality, brought back species such as wolves & eagles; the population bomb fizzled; Lake Erie turned out not to be dead and we even got rid of disco & leisure suits. Those were things I worried about back then, I thought there were no good solutions; fortunately, I was wrong.

And still can stick it to the man. Take a look at this clip.

Posted on

Wimpification, bureaucratization and time wasting

You can see it just by walking around. You don’t even have to walk around; you can see it by looking around the house and seeing all the signs warning you about things that aren’t very dangerous or admonishing you not to do things that no reasonable person would contemplate. 

I noticed a few funny signs as I walked around the neighborhood. But they are not really funny when you think about it. Each of these signs was erected to solve a problem that didn’t really exist. They needlessly make people – at least some people – anxious about harmless things like a rise so gentle that it wouldn’t stop a fast rolling tennis ball, as you see in the top picture above.

But consider the cost. I know from experience with our home owners’ association’s experiences (they managed to spend something like $90,000 to cut down medium sized existing trees and replace them with similar smaller ones)  that nothing like this can be done inexpensively. Dozens of people need to be involved in the decision process. They will almost certainly need an expert to figure out the exact placement of the sign and just to be safe will get a legal opinion from a lawyer.  That is before you bring in three or four workers, equipped with expensive specialized digging and construction equipment to erect the sign. After that it will require periodic maintenance. That silly sign about the little grade must have cost thousands of dollars to install and maintain.

I have always been a kind of a minimalist.  I think you should always have “do nothing” as the default option.  Those advocating any kind of action should have the responsibility of proving its worth. Lots of activity does nothing but cost money and many actually do harm.   We are fooled into believing the activity is effective by things just returning to normal.  There was an interesting article in WSJ about knee surgery.  It usually doesn’t work better than nothing and since it costs money and can create complications, it is worse than nothing.  But people who go to doctors expect something and they usually get it. I recall an old episode from the “Beverly Hillbillies” where Granny discovered a cure for the common cold.  You took the medicine, and in a week or ten days you were better.

It is a bias in the human condition to attribute causality to activity. In Granny’s case, it is clear what is at work, but it is not always so clear. Politicians make all sorts of promises and regulations.  Sometimes things do get better, but it may or may not be the result of their actions. 

There is an interesting example from behavioral economics that illustrates. David Kahneman, one of the fathers of behavior economics, had a dilemma while working with pilot trainers.  He understood that positive reinforcement worked better than negative, but the data seemed to be against him.  Trainers were right when they told him that yelling at someone who did worse than usual almost always made them do a better job the next time, while praising a good performance almost always resulted in a poorer result next time out.  The data was right but misinterpreted.   What was really happening was a simple regression to the mean.   Someone who does worse than usual will almost certainly return to normal next time.  The same will be the case for someone who does unusually well.

This is comforting to me, but also disturbing. It is a hard lesson to learn that lots of what you do really makes no difference. Many people make a living out of doing things that have no lasting effect but doing it with style and conviction.

I recently watched an episode of “Big Bang Theory” where Sheldon gets his girlfriend Amy to watch “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”  She is unimpressed and points out that had Indiana Jones done nothing at all, the outcome would have been the same.  The Nazis would have found the Ark, a little sooner. They would have opened it, as they did anyway. The spirits would have come out and killed them all, just as happened. Perhaps the only outcome Indiana Jones influenced was the deposition of the Ark in the giant warehouse where it is again lost at the end of the film.

Let me return to my prosaic sign watching.  I am guessing that the sign making the “dangerous” knoll was put up because some fool tripped over the grade and maybe hurt himself. You can make a reasonable assumption that since that time nobody else has suffered a similar fate. The sign makers might take credit for the increase in human safety and happiness. At least Indiana Jones dressed well while he was cavorting around uselessly spending energy.

Posted on

Thugs and perceptions

We went to see the Hobbit 2 yesterday at AMC.  Seats were reserved. When we got to our seats, some were occupied.  We couldn’t resolve the situation easily, so I went to get the usher.  On the way back in, another customer told the usher that a couple of toughs with leather jackets were trying to take seats.  Those were my boys.  They are big now and I guess seem threatening. They do have leather jackets, but they are very polite and soft spoken and they were standing with Mariza and Chrissy.

You are judged by appearances.  It is not fair but true. I suppose it makes sense to be safe.  If you see a couple of big guys with leather jackets, it is probably better to avoid them until you are reasonably certain that they are safe. As we used to say in the old arms control debates, you have to judge capacity as well as intention. 

The picture up top shows the kids. As I was thinking about the above, I thought how that could look dangerous, maybe the guy with hoody about to attack the two people in front.  Alex has been lifting weights.  He has gained about 20lbs of muscle.  I wonder if those thugs who attacked him back a couple years ago would have done so had he looked more like he does now. 

Posted on

Mariza’s new place

The boys and I helped Mariza move into her new place.  It is a very nice place, completely renovated, and they did a really good job. I like the neighborhood.  It is “recovering” but already pretty nice. Within easy walking distance are restaurants, take out places and a Giant.

I know that my impressions are not statistically valid, but I think you can get a feel for a neighborhood by walking around.   It seemed peaceful. One of Mariza’s neighbors, a guy called Greg, introduced himself as we were bringing in stuff. He said that he had lived in the neighborhood for thirty years. It had gone through good and bad times, but things were getting better.  It is the kind of neighborhood where I would be happy to live so I am glad Mariza is there.

Posted on

Happy days are here again

2013 was not a good career year for me, as I have written elsewhere. I tried not to let it bother me. I was content that I was doing the best I could and was producing great results. I understand that randomness plays a much bigger role in career success than most of us like to admit. Throwing snake eyes is against the odds but it happens. Of course, the mind can understand things that the heart cannot feel. Today my good luck came back big time.  

Today I was offered the senior international adviser job at Smithsonian. This is great. I have been interested in this job since I found out about it. State Department seconds a senior FSO to Smithsonian. The job is a kind of State liaison and involves helping Smithsonian make international connections. I will be able to do a good job, make a contribution and it will really be fun.

I have always been fond of museums and of the kinds of outreach they do in terms of culture and education. Science, history, innovation, arts, I will be doing the kinds of things I love. And it gets even better. My office will be in the Smithsonian Castle on the National Mall. In all the world, there probably is no better location. 

So this is pretty sweet. I have been very lucky with my assignments. I “settled” only once for an assignment that I didn’t want when I did my time in the Ops Center, but I was only there for nine months punctuated by three months temporary assignment in my beloved Poland. My assignment at IIP/P went south. I just couldn’t make that one work, but I really cannot complain about how they treated me. Besides those two, it was a string of great jobs: Porto Alegre, Oslo, Krakow, Warsaw and Brasília. I even found Iraq fulfilling, if not physically pleasant. State Department gave me a great gift when they assigned me to Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy ten years ago. I think Smithsonian is even a bigger deal. Excuse my exuberance. I am very happy just now.  

I took the picture yesterday. It is the view I will have just a few steps from my office next year. 

Posted on

Another tequila sunrise

The last time I drank tequila was on January 4, 1974. I worked at Medusa Cement Company over Christmas break that year.  It was tough work.  I did the night shift, midnight to noon, unloading hopper cars full of cement.  It was cold.  I remember being out there looking at the Allen-Bradley clock and temperature.  I can still picture it today, the clock at one in the morning and the temperature -5 or less.  We would run out to the hopper cars and set up the shakers and then run back in to our shacks with heaters. The heaters ran on propane and were shaped like torpedoes.  They produced lots of heat along with of noxious fumes and the occasional belch of flame.  My partner LC Duckworth (he evidently had no first name, just initials) actually set his pants on fire when he fell asleep in front of the heater.  No real harm was done.  It was only on the bottom and the coveralls were fire resistant. He woke up a little startled.  I ran in and I helped put him out.  

I made the big bucks that year; at least it was big bucks to me at that time.  The twelve hour shifts meant four hours a day of time and a half overtime, but it interfered with my social life, which consisted mostly of boozing with my friends.  My nights were always cut short, as I had to be to work at midnight.  In that time and place, they didn’t really mind if showed up a little tipsy.   In the land of soaks, the semi-sober man is king.  I have a theory about how this affected all of U.S. society, which I include below. But I still felt oppressed and longed for the end of my working term so that I could go back to my dissolute ways.  

I finished my working week and my working term on Friday and set up a party at my house, in the basement.  With some of the big bucks I made, I bought all sorts of booze. I used to walk back from work and buy a couple of bottles at Bay View Liquor on my way home, so I had the feeling that I was building up to this for a long time.  I invited all my friends and acquaintances. My plan was to give away free booze.  I would stay perfectly sober and talk to my old HS friends. That was the plan. The flaw in my bold plan was that everybody else was drinking.   It is not much fun to talk to drunks when you are not among them. So I set about to catch up. 

I had a long way to go and wanted to get there quick as I could. There was a bottle of tequila that had remained untouched.  I started to drink that, one shot at a time, but persistently and with vigor. I am not really sure if I finished the bottle, but I knocked down a lot of it. The last thing I recall from that night was noticing that it seemed like I was looking through a broken mirror and the world was spinning. The last person I remember seeing was a girl I knew from HS called Janie Peterson.  There was a two or three of these Peterson sisters.  They all looked alike and they all were blond and pretty. I didn’t impress her. Actually, I am not entirely sure she was there. Lots of things I remember from that time may not have happened and many things that happened I forgot.

The next morning I woke up with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt. As an experienced boozer, I thought that I would take care of it in the usual way. My method was to run. It moved the blood around and provoked a horrendous headache. After about a mile you would usually throw up, but then you felt okay. I still recall with some fondness walking back in the sublimely icy air (it was winter a lot in Wisconsin) feeling restored. Not this time. 

This time I could not even get out of bed.  When I stood up, the world would spin and I fell back.  I was really thirsty, but just about as fast as I could drink water, I would throw it back up.  I spent the whole day trying to get up, drinking some water, throwing it up, sleeping a little and then starting it all over. Sometime around evening, I could move again. I was extraordinarily hungry.  There was not much around the house and in those days we didn’t have that many restaurant choices.  I walked down Kinnickinnic Av and ended up in “the Ritz.”  It was not a great place, but it was open. Hunger is the best cook and I recall with joy the greasy hamburger and fries.

This experience did not entice me to swear off booze or even swear off tequila, but I found that the smell of tequila and even the thought of tequila brought back vivid and unpleasant memories.  I didn’t drink a drop of tequila for the next nearly forty years, no Margaritas, no tequila sunrises, no tequila with salt or lemon, nothing.

I told this story to Espen, who told me that I should give tequila another chance on the fortieth anniversary of the great unpleasantness. I didn’t quite wait for forty years, jumping the gun by a couple weeks.  I tried tequila again.  It was surprisingly hard to drink a shot. It was like jumping into a pool of cold water, ready – go…go.  Are you going or not?  But I did it. It didn’t taste that bad, but neither was it good. It was a long run for a short slide, something maybe worth doing but not worth thinking about doing for four decades.  I will never become a fan of tequila, but I suppose I should be grateful to the cactus whiskey for crystallizing a memory. 

Re my theory of boozing and work.  I was a member of the Longshoremen’s Union Local 815 back in the early 1970s.  We were in that union because we were near the river and some of our cement came in boats.  Most of my brothers worked on the Milwaukee docks and most were hard workers. Many were also boozers, but it didn’t matter.  You could come to work a little tipsy and some of the jobs didn’t require that you work every day.  You could show up and work hard for a few days and then take off. The hard manual work could be done by people recovering from a bender.  I observed that guys sweating out a drunk are often very hard workers.   Besides,  there were “opportunities” to find things that “fell off the back” of trucks.  This world was destroyed in the 1970s when containerized cargo came in.  They needed fewer men to work on the docks and those men could no longer be boozers.  They had to run big machines and come in every day. IMO, some of the homeless problem can be blamed on these developments. There was a general disappearance of short-term, itinerant jobs.   Some guys can work hard, they just cannot work consistently. They had a place before; they do no longer.  I am not saying this was a great world.  It was not.  But it did have an easier time for some marginal people.

Posted on

How the world has changed

The argument today is whether or not the U.S. should export oil. I continue to marvel at energy developments of the last ten years. The U.S. will soon be the world’s largest energy producer, an energy superpower. All the experience of the past forty years has been overtaken by events. It is the energy equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall and will have consequences as far reaching.

I should not be so surprised. I have been an optimist all my life, trusting that human imagination, intelligence and innovation can overcome all obstacles. But I came to maturity during the dark and cold days of the late 1970s, when President Carter told us that we would have to recognize limits, when books and movies emphasized the end of our resources. It is hard for me to believe that it is all so different.

When I was young, people around me made stuff out of raw materials. It seems perfectly intuitive that you could – would – run out of raw materials if you kept on making stuff. I remember hearing stories about the great range Mesabi Range in Minnesota just running out of iron ore. I pictured it just as empty.  It was the end of the line.  Those big iron ore boats coming through the lakes would come no more. I remember being a little surprised by the great song by Gordon Lightfoot about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975. I thought those boats had mostly stopped already.

It seemed to make sense to see the world as a bunch of boxed filled with resources. Our ancestors had emptied lots of these boxes and we were emptying them even faster. Soon there would be no more full boxes and we would be out stuff and out of luck. This formulation is easy for child to understand, maybe because it is childish.

In real life, we have constantly developing technologies and techniques. We do indeed “run out” of some stuff, but by the time we do we have transitioned into something else, usually something that works better for our needs.

I recall my first class is business policy. We were assigned a well-known business and told to ask what business they were in. I was assigned McDonald’s and it seemed an easy answer. McDonald’s was in the hamburger business. This was the wrong answer. I expanded to fast-food. Still not right. I finally ended up with a vague “customer satisfaction” explanation. This was almost right, but still not broad enough. McDonald’s is in the customer satisfaction business, using mostly a fast and integrated process to do that. It is also in the logistics business, the technology business and the real estate business, among others. If people stopped eating hamburgers, McDonald’s would face challenges, but it would not necessarily go out of business, especially if the changes took place over some years. In fact, we have seen McDonald’s diversify its offerings since that time many years ago when I first gave my incorrect answer.

McDonald’s is just one firm. How much more adaptive is the great diversity of our society? I could have been asked a similar question about energy. Back in the 1970s, I might have talked about the need to secure foreign energy sources and to cut way back on energy consumption, maybe put on a sweater, turn down the lights and sit in the cold as President Carter implied. But things don’t really work like that.

So today we talk about how much energy we should export. The big energy producers in the world worry about the U.S. as a competitor. They can no longer ration our energy or use it against us. If they embargo oil to us, we don’t really care. In fact, the big geopolitical talk of today is whether or not we will ALLOW Iran to sell more oil. How the world has changed.