Archive for September, 2007
Britney Spears, Future Dictator?
This week, the Iranian President, “He Whose Name Cannot be Pronounced” (HWNCBP), came to New York to lecture at Columbia, hang out at the UN, and not be allowed to visit Ground Zero. Not to be outdone, Chavez of Venezula met with Kaiser Soze…I mean Kevin Spacey. Both individuals got their names in the paper again, and the commentators went wild.
Most people, when they read the content of what was said and done by these two pretty much shake their heads and roll their eyes. There are no homosexuals in Iran? Iranian women are the freest in the world? K-Pax goes to Venezula, and that merits a meeting with the head of state? What is the point?
Anyone who thinks we are not in direct conflict with these states is just kidding themselves. We are. And I do not intend to discuss whether we should be in direct conflict with these states or who started it or anything like that. What I want to talk about is what these two are doing in an effort to gain advantage.
Conflict does not always mean military solutions. Cynical men have suggested that diplomacy and maneuver is merely a means to obtain advantage for one’s country for the next war. If that is the case, the concepts of strategy and tactics apply in times of peace as well as war. While strategy does not change all that much, tactics do. Our friends in Iran and Venezula know this, and might be taking a page out of the Britney Spears handbook to get their way and obtain advantage.
How so? Namely, there is no such thing as bad publicity. Better to be in the news as a joke than to not be in the news at all; that familiarity breeds, if not contempt, than notoriety, and in that status there is some benefit to those who hold it.
I do not know and cannot question as to whether the “laughable” views that these gentlemen profess are genuine or not. But regardless of whether their individual views are true or not, they do have a beneficial effect on the world scene. You can’t be scared of what you find laughable. It worked for Stalin when he got to Walter Duranty; thanks to the internet and the increase of bloggers, Ahmadinejad and Chavez can find more then enough apologists to make them seem harmless. With their harmless public status, thanks to our foray into Iraq, it would be almost impossible to do anything overt against them.
They say that generals fight the last war. It seems to me that right now, we are fighting a war from the 18th or 19th century. We won the Cold War, we should learn its lessons. Specifically, how to win a war with a strong military not utilized, but with an economy and with a culture that very much was. How are we not trying to utilize these traits? The JV is playing our game now. Lets show them what the varsity can do.
A Price Greater Than Rubies–A Titan Story
The struggling sheep was outlined against the yellow egg-shape of Full Saturn. Had it not been for that, Brenn would have given up and headed for home. As it was, he could see it atop the bluff over Wolfden Creek. The question now was what to do about it.
He hadn’t gone too far beyond the creek in the past, but he remembered that there was a spot where it narrowed enough to cross on the rocks. He pulled his light jacket close against the rising evening wind and walked north to find it. It was about fifty yards away, just as he remembered it, but the daily freeze-thaw cycle had broken up more and more of the dirt and the stream had begun to carve a trough in the ground.
He crossed there, taking care on the slippery rocks, since they were beginning to show the first signs of frost on their surfaces. The ground rose gradually on the far side, and he occasionally cast a glace toward the edge to make sure that he was far enough from the edge to be safe as he moved upward toward the last of his charges.
“Guffie, what are you doing up here?” he said softly as he approached the ewe. It looked as if the sheep had wandered into a soft spot on the edge of the cliff in search of a particularly attractive clump of bluegrass and its front two legs had fallen into a hole. The sheep shook a few times, bleated plaintively, and tried to pull its legs out of the hole, to no avail whatsoever.
Brenn didn’t like the looks of that at all. She was too close to the edge, by far, to be safe, and they needed the rest of their herd intact, having lost too many to Justin’s wolves already. Carefully, he moved alongside her on the side opposite the cliff edge, watching every step to keep from slipping on the damp grass. He wrapped his arms around her middle, dug his heels in and lifted.
He felt the ground give beneath the two of them before he saw anything else really happening. He released the sheep and desperately tried for a few seconds to grab something, anything, as the entire patch of ground began to slide down the side of the bluff. In just moments, the two of them had passed the edge and were on their way down towards the creek below.
Thirty feet is not a long drop on Titan, but is still far enough to be dangerous. Brenn had two seconds to calculate the result of his fall. He grabbed the sheep, which was wildly beating at the air with its hooves. In the last second, he arched his back trying to use the side of the cliff next to him to slow himself enough to get his legs under him for the landing.
It was a bad one. He felt blinding, white-hot pain in his right leg that made him sure that it was broken, probably in a couple of places. He heard the sheep’s neck crack when he fell on her because of the rocks beneath the two of them. One good thing, however, in this situation—they were on dry land.
There was a small, small bank on this side of the creek that they had fallen onto. It was just a bit over two feet wide, but dry. His leg was caught between two rocks that looked as if they had toppled from the edge above on an earlier day. Not for the first time in the last hour, Brenn realized that it was getting colder, fast. He shoved the sheep aside, into the creek, and tried to sit up, reaching for the rocks. His leg was firmly wedged between them, and he had already lost feeling in his toes. He noticed the sandy dirt below the rocks and began digging beneath the smaller one.
It was slow going. Each time that he pulled a handful of soil back, the pain would cause him nearly to black out. The bank was in the shade of the bluff, so he could only make out his progress by starlight. Finally, an hour or so after he began working, his leg was free. He began to slide his body along the side of the cliff wall—until he hit the water.
It wasn’t a full bank that he was on, but merely a ledge at the water’s edge. He was trapped on the far side of the creek with no way to get across. He shook off the encroaching cold and tried to lift himself enough to slide his phone out of his pocket to call the house. He inched it out, but by the time it had cleared his pocket, he realized that he had landed on it. It was not only crushed, which the nannies could have repaired, it was broken completely in half. Gail would have no idea where to look for him and there was no way to get in touch with her, now.
He slipped his pocketknife out of his shirt pocket and cut away the cloth around his injured leg. It was noticeably swollen and the skin was showing signs of stretching–internal bleeding, most likely. The icy wind lifted the edges of his pants leg for a moment or two. He was in a really serious position, it was obvious.
Worst of all, his body was beginning to work against him. The Titanian nights were a week long, so that he was created to sleep through them. Anytime that there was a combination of cold and dark, his liver began producing ethylene glycol and a soporific. If nothing intervened, he’d be asleep in a half hour, even with the adrenaline pouring into him from the pain. A sleep, he realized, from which it was unlikely that he was going to wake.
Read this, all of you
It is not often that I read something that leads me to comprehend people in general and societies in particular so much better than it can only be called an epiphany. I’m not going to even hint at what the article below says, since I don’t want any judgments going in–it’s too important.
Jonathan Haidt interview from 2005.
Thanks so much to Vox Day for pointing me to this.
The Good
Army Staff Sgt. Ian Newland spotted the enemy grenade inside the Humvee. Almost simultaneously, he saw Spc. Ross McGinnis, 19 — a gunner standing in the turret of the vehicle — lower himself onto it.
“I saw him jam it with his elbow up underneath him,” says Newland, who was sitting inches away. “He pressed his whole body with his back (armor) plate to smother it up against the radios.”
The heat and flash of an explosion followed, and McGinnis was killed. Hours later, after surgery for shrapnel wounds, Newland realized the gravity of what happened: McGinnis had sacrificed himself to save four other soldiers in the Humvee on Dec. 4. “Why he did it? Because we were his brothers. He loved us,” Newland says.
Since the Iraq war began, at least five Americans — two soldiers, two Marines and a Navy SEAL — are believed to have thrown themselves on a grenade to save comrades. Each time, the servicemember died from massive wounds.
A Departure
I don’t normally like quoting people. I respect the great minds of our past, but I try to refrain from quoting them, so as to not be contained by their vision: I think we can do better than they sought to achieve, that we have evolved from where they were. That our aspirations should always exceed our grasp, and as our grasp has grown, so should our aspirations. But I came across a quote by Ken Burns, of Civil War and Baseball fame, which I felt compelled to share with the group. Its about World War II, but I think it is applicable to all generations, in the fact that sometimes the best of us sometimes compels the worst of us.
“The Second World War brought out the best and the worst in a generation–and blurred the two so that they became at times almost indistinguishable.”
The majority of us (apologies to Tom) are just starting out in our lives. The majority of us feel a compulsion to serve, a compulsion to do good. But in a period of high tension and great passion, it is important to remember anything can be tainted and corrupted, and in our zeal to obtain a better world, we may use means that taint our goal. It is not a novel thought, but it is one that bears constant consideration. Consider this a reminder. If it could happen to the Greatest Generation, it could happen to us.
What are we going to do with Alan?
Monetary economics is not the sexiest thing in the world. That’s fine. I get that. But there is a little bit of intrigue going on in the monetary market that bears some comment.
To say that Alan Greenspan was “the man” in the 90s is an understatement. Markets rose and fell on any public statements he made. Greenspan was aware of that, so in addition to his maneuvers of the interest rate, any statement he gave were appropriately technical and convoluted because he knew how much weight his words as Fed Chairman bore. He always hedged his bets, and outside of a few quotable statements (“irrational exuberance”) he really limited himself in what he said.
And then he retired. And then he changed.
Greenspan wrote a book, critical of the Bush administration and has been doing a lot of semi-public speaking engagements to select groups of market players, where the content of the discussions always seem to leak. The ambiguity and careful hedging of the nineties was gone. Greenspan is speaking his mind, free from the Chairmanship of the Fed. Now, normally I could care less if Greenspan wants to talk; there are plenty of people who have low opinions of Bush and the current state of the market, and with good reason. However, his words carry a disproportionate amount of power becase of his former position. For example, in February, Alan Greenspan said he thought a recession was inevitable. The result? A 416 point drop in the Dow.
This is a departure from how past holders of power react. Paul Volcker, the Fed Chair before Greenspan, pretty much disappeared from public life after his tenure. He taught a little, looked into the UN and made them look bad, and is a part of the Trilateral Commission, but in terms of public statements, not so much. Presidents are comparable. They speak out on occasion, but generally do not comment on official policy, unless asked to do so by the current president.
So the real question, for me at least, is what should the role be for former leaders. They keep their influence, their ability to analyze problems, and all of their connections. Greenspan can go one step further and actively sway markets by making the odd comment. The only reason he has these abilities is because of his tenure with the government. However, Greenspan is still a citizen and probably also has a sense of duty that does not turn off because he is retired. If he sees something wrong, he is going to say it. To limit his ability to speak his mind, just because of his former employment, is wrong.
I can state that I do not want any sort of government gag order on our former leaders. This is more of a question of what social pressure should be placed on our leaders after they retire. Should we try to encourage our former leaders be silent, or should they be able to speak, even if it does weaken the governmental office and national position they once championed?
Timeless Talent
Sometimes I think I was born 40 years too late. I spent the last hour watching black and white YouTube clips of great performers performing. I asked myself, who in the charts today has the potential to be timeless? Who could be a Bing Crosby, an Elvis Presley, or a Johnny Cash? It seems to me that our generation lacks giants. There is, no doubt, artistic genius today, and one would expect it to be even richer as it benefits from the inspiration of those who came before. I still can’t think of a popular artist today that can overwhelm an audience with artistic genius. Need an example? Here is Ella Fitzgerald singing “How High the Moon.”
My Alma Mater: The Greatest University in America
Now I won’t disagree that my alma mater has a leftward tilt, but to call it the worst college in America is really something. I don’t hear these guys complaining about economics departments that are slavishly chanting the free markets dogma. So why do they complain about Santa Cruz? Oh yeah, because it’s not hard right. I mean I’ve got no problem with people complaining about a bias (which showing was conspicuously absent in this spot), but don’t act like it’s all one-sided.
Invictus
I recently reread a poem that I used to love, Invictus. It is made all the more inspiring by quickly reading William Ernest Henley’s biography. While it can certainly hold many meanings for readers, to the author invictus was about his resilience following the amputation of his foot when he was 12 years old. In latin, “invictus” means unconquered. In a broader sense, this poem is about will, character, and living manfully.
by William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.
I’m Turning Japanese
My life here basically consists of working, sleeping, eating at restaurants, or aimlessly wandering. The last on the list has provided me with some memorable experiences. For instance, last night I was walking around the Harbor, and I came across a gentleman singing quite possibly the world’s most well-known song; but something didn’t seem right…:
Yesterday
Rove was such an easy game to pray
Now I need a prace to hide away
Oh, I berieve
In yesterday
All joking aside, the guy had a decent voice for a street performer, and I thoroughly enjoyed his “interpretation” of the song. I’ve seen quite a few people selling their wares on the banks of the harbor, but he was definitely the most entertaining thus far. This evening I saw a gentleman juggling things that were engulfed in flames, but I only got within about a quarter mile of him. Apparently we’re in the festival season in
Speaking of which, I guess I should give you a lesson in Japanese scripts. Although little is written in English (Rōmaji), all the major streets, subway stops, etc. are written in it, so that is how I’m able to get around without crapping my pants every day. The Japanese also borrowed from the Chinese, which is where they get the more complex Kanji characters. Their other syllabaries are called hiragana, and katakana. It should go without saying, but I only can even begin to comprehend rōmaji, let alone the other scribbles. My favorite city/subway stop that I have learned to pronounce pretty clearly is called: Chūōichibamae…and no, I don’t know what that means (although, ichiban means the first…)
I love it here; there are so many beautiful women here that if I don’t see some drop-dead gorgeous dame at least once every fifteen minutes, I start going into anaphylactic shock…luckily that has only happened twice thus far. The hardest part is trying to distinguish how old they all are; they all appear to be much younger than they actually are. I’ve come to the realization that as long as they aren’t wearing school uniforms, odds are that you’re good to go. I’d still suggest asking for some sort of ID before you try anything potentially incriminating. As I mentioned before, most of them are quite short. They attempt to make up for this by wearing stilettos…everywhere. Whether it is walking a hard day through a mall, or riding a motorbike, they have those things on. I’m not complaining by any stretch of the means; I’m just saying that has to hurt at the end of the day. As with women world-wide, the Japanese dislike their god-given uniqueness, and attempt to achieve the polar opposite. Therefore, if you see light-skinned women in the states tanning everywhere, you see that same demographic in the land of the rising sun walking around with parasols preventing their skin from getting any darker than their natural pigment will allow.
There have been a few I’ve seen so far that I’ve had an impression on. Mostly, I think it is the fact that they just see me and start giggling; however, they react best when I say something to them in Japanese; many of them are genuinely impressed that I can say anything other than thank-you (see Japanese lesson from the last update). In fact, I met the future “Ex Mrs. Jaybandit” last Tuesday evening at a restaurant with some other friends of my mentor, who also happen to be contacts at our supplier. Her name was Aya…::sigh::. I don’t want to get graphic, however, she had a nice body…if you know what I mean. She was our waitress, and as they say, the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. After some beer, and a few bottles of Sake & Shōchū, I was telling her I thought she was Kir-ei (pretty). Luckily, I retained enough of my wits to avoid my new friends from telling her I wanted to get married. However, they did get her to put her name down on the back of one of my business cards. Alas, as luck would have it, she didn’t speak a lick of English…so I decided to move on.
The Japanese conduct a very personal style of business. They will often ask personal questions, which to them is completely polite. Luckily, I have no shame. For example, the head QA guy from our supplier (I’ll give you a hint…their logo is a triplet of red rhombi…) asked me Friday night at dinner, “JayBandit-san, how do you buy your shirts?” Now, at first, I honestly had no idea what he was asking me. Then I realized what he was really saying was, “Fat Bastard, how do you obtain that much fabric to cover yourself on a daily basis?” So I explained how I skin a large game animal simply purchase larger shirts at the clothing store. He was then amazed how in addition to actually finding such gigantic shirts, I could purchase them for the same price as any other size!
As I alluded to last time, sitting down at a table can be a daunting task; however, you just have to follow a few simple rules. The first and only rule is to not sit down until you see where other people are going to sit themselves. This makes it easy, because 9 times out of 10 they just end up telling you where to sit down. Basically, the philosophy behind the ordering of seats is that the most important person will sit at the chair farthest away from the door; this may be the head of the table, or it might be the center of the side…so beware! Then it is like a pyramid with the next tier of importance sitting on both sides, and then cascading around until there is no more room. Then the underlings sit at chairs alongside the walls. Being that I’ve been the guest each time, I’ve sat in the good seats most times.
Eating can also be a chore. It is considered rude to pour yourself a drink, and you are supposed to fill the drinks of others. This does not seem to be practiced all the time, but it does happen, so you should be aware. Slurping, something I’ve been taught since birth is incredibly rude, is considered very polite, and silence is considered rude while eating noodles or drinking soup. You’d be surprised how hard it is to slurp after being raised to do the opposite your entire life. Then there are chopsticks…I don’t see what the big deal is, I’m “fluent” with them at this point, and I was about 90% before I ever set foot off the plane, but that’s me. If you’re not used to them, you’ll be in for some interesting problems. The two rules with chopsticks are not to point with them, or even with your fingers, and put them so they stick out of your food (that is the symbol for death, and therefore isn’t looked upon lightly).
It really isn’t that hard though, so don’t get the impression that this is a lot of work. Overall, the most important thing over here is just to be conscious of what is going on around you, and follow suit. Even if you make a mistake (and believe me, I have…I have a nasty habit of pointing with chopsticks), as long as they are aware that you’re trying to be polite, you’ll get off easy.