Buy Lithuania!

Abby recently picked out the book Corrections by Jonathan Franzen for me.   Here's an incredible riff in that novel:

The hero of the book meets his former girl friend's (separated) husband who is a Lithuanian politician who looks exactly like him.   The politician tells the tale of IMF led privatization of Lithuania, which led to the gutting of the Lithuanian economy and liquidation of its banks, airport, phone company and airline....devastation for Lithuanians.   As a macabre joke the Lithuanian politician sets up a  web site in the name of a fictitious political pro business Lithuanian party and encourages Americans to send money as an investment in owning a piece of Lithuania, Inc., a for profit nation, when the party buys its way to power with American dollars.   To his surprise, people respond to this parody by sending dollars, tens of thousands of dollars.   The hero of our novel accepts a job to be the legitimating American face of this charade, with the goal of raising the take to millions!

Really juicy!

March 31st

The 31st of March:

A cold insistent rain swells the buds.
Swamp maples begin to redden, a scarlet
that taunts the corner of the eye.
Lichens swell and fur the oak boughs.
In Paradies Hollow, a mourning cloud
idles past like an animated kerchief haunting bare branches.   Look: the wood
cock rises in feathered desire.

Green uncoils pressed against earth,
grasses, moss, bulb spears pricking up,
the tiny leaes of pesky chickweed.
the first slug of spring extends itself
like a yawn across the sand.   My next
year splits open to show its first color.

.....Marge Piercy

I just happened to pick up this poem and had quick connection.   My official birthday is March 30.   However my mother always said the birth certificate was in error, so it was kind of a family joke for me as a kid to have two birthdays, double pleasure, etc.

Well from about age 11 - age 14, my father regularly took me and some friends to Bear Mountain, NY for my birthday.   It was an outdoor time, with climbing hills, running in the woods, and generally being boys out and about.   All my friends thought it was pretty cool.   Well back to the poem, one March 30 or so, we had had a blizzard.   We still went to Bear Mountain, but boy it was a different winter kind of birthday.   One thing about that age, you would never feel cold in winter if you were out having fun in the snow.....kind of a miracle of the mind.   I believe that wintry birthday we built a pretty fancy igloo out of blocks.

Another time at Bear Mountain in the winter with my parents we watched (live!) the ski jump.   That was really scary and the fact that human beings would do that was so far beyond my belief that I wondered if they were really humans like us.

I once returned to Bear Mountain in my 20's with a girl friend.   We had a great meal in an big old WPA type log lodge.   For some reason, we were almost the only people.   It was kind of uncomfortable with the wait staff hovering around because there was nothing else for them to do.

Birthdays did seem like the beginning of the year.  I could even say that back then I felt the next year begin to split open and reveal at least its adolescent beginnings.

BTW, this March 30 I can officially collect full Social Security.   As the next year splits open, I can sense its color.   But as yet, the reddish rust brown is more an aura than a picture.  

Supreme Court opens corporate $$ flood gates

I've been trying to think of what can be done to counter the horrible supreme court decision allowing corporations to directly fund political campaigns.
If corporations have free speech rights, maybe they can vote, be drafted, and get maried as well  (UGH!)

So today I got an email from Moving On announcing a campaign on the issue.   One objective would be (as mentioned by Obama last night) more congressional fair election regulation.   I'm just not sure what Congress's opion is given the supreme court ruling.

Moving On also will propose a Constitutional Amendment on campaign funding.   While it may never pass, I think that's a great idea and has a lot of potential for educating folks.   Who knows, maybe it would actually pass.

Jewish Icecream

When I was about 4, we lived in an apartment in a house on Brenner Street in Newark.   The house had four apartments, 2 on each of 2 floors.  Brenner Street was right off of Springfield Avenue, near 10th Street, which was later the heart of the area the Newark riots took place.   My grandfather Savel owned the building and lived in the apartment across the hall from us.

Now, Jews eat a lot of sour cream.   I guess I might not have taken to it naturally as a child, given its tart taste.   So in my family we called it Jewish ice cream.   I'm guessing that was a ploy to get me to eat it (just as I called water "water juice" for Nina to get her to drink more water.)  Anyway at some point around age 4 I was to have my first opportunity to walk around the corner to Springfield Avenue and buy something from a store totally on my own.   So as chance would have it, my parents sent me off with money in hand to buy Jewish Ice Cream.   I trotted around the corner and stood nervously at the deli counter.   It took a long time for the shop owner to notice me, but at last he did and asked me what I wanted.   "Please may I have some Jewish Ice Cream?"   "Vat are you talking about?  Ve don't have nuttin' like dat!!!"  I was mortified, scared, and defeated, by this huge failure.   Ran crying home and my father tried to recover by taking me back to the store and explaining that what I really wanted was sour cream.   Oy Vey, it still hurts.

By the way, the other thing I remember about that deli is they had one of those ads in their window where the eyes of the person seemed to follow you as you walked past....pretty spooky!

Mumbley Peg

I just wrote in my "things I've changed my mind about" concerning pocket knives.

I did own a boy scout knife when I lived in Newark.   And I did play the knife game of mumbley peg.  In this game two participants took turn throwing the knife as close as could be to their feet without experiencing impalement.  There were trick throws as well.  If one person did a trick throw, the other had to do the same.   One was called spank the baby, where the knife we rested on the fingers of the one hand and slapped on its protruding blade edge so it spinned off as it went to the ground.   For a throw to count, it had to stick in the ground so two fingers could fit underneath the blade (if it leaned.)

I didn't play much because it was pretty scary.  (BTW, we did not play barefoot...which I believe some kids did!)  What made it particularly difficult was that we played in that little strip of dirt between the sidewalk and street where grass was meant to grow.   In our neighborhood in Newark, I never saw any grass there.   In fact the dirt was packed down so hard, it was difficult to get your knife to stick.

Did I play baseball in Newark?   No
Did I play football in Newark?   No
Did I play basketball in Newark?  No

What did we do?
We played stickball
We played stoop ball (a lot!)
We flipped cards
We flipped coins
We climbed garages
We threw snowballs, dirt bombs, and rocks (at "gangs" from the next block)
We played strip poker (only a little....in the coal bin of the Redluss's house.)
We mostly hung out!

compare and contrast

Estimated 190,000 dead in Haiti Earthquake
Estimated 180,000 Iraqi Kurds killed under Chemical Ali's chemical bombing in 1988

What did US do to prevent or even respond to the latter?

Cod Liver Oil is Good for You

Stocks have fallen 4% in the three days since Obama announced on Tuesday that he would tighten restrictions on banks.   These proposed restrictions are intended to make the system more robust to resist busts like we saw in late 2008.    You'd think the stock market would  act on an assumption that  protections insuring stability in the system would cause a rise in stock prices.   But no.   Apparently the strongly held view of stock holders and traders is that they would rather retain the capacity to make huge short term gains, risk precipitous losses, or count on the govt to bail them out, than see a  positive in these regulations.   Have they not learned?   If the American people have a memory, they won't bail the banks out if there is a next time.   We need to feed them some regulatory cod liver oil for their and our own good.

Uncle Dave as landlord

My uncle Dave worked most of his life as a apartment house superintendent/engineer/handy man.   He did have two excursions into property ownership.

In the mid 1950's Uncle Dave bought a large old victorian style mansion that had seen better days in Seabright New Jersey.   He ran it as a boarding house.   It was about one block from this very old fashioned beach tourist town.  I spent a week or two during several summers staying with my uncle.  I don't remember too much about how I spent the time.   I do remember taking a lumbering bus to Seabright for the visit.   This was one of those noisy diesel buses that was streamlined to look sort of like an upside down bath tub.   It was along ride for me to be taking at that age alone.  I remember he didn't have many boarders.   The house seemed pretty empty.   Dave was into his gardening and cooking.   I remember he made a mean spaghetti sauce.  I went to the beach every day.   I also remember being shocked that Dave made some admiring comment about how some young women looked.   I guess I was shocked because I didn't think old bachelors felt that way.

Later when Dave retired,  he had some money from a property the family had sold that had belonged to his father, Savel.  He moved to Miami Beach and bought a four-plex.   I think my father helped out in some way.   The idea was that he would have a place to live and that the other three apartments would pay the mortgage, plus give him some cash income on top of social security.   Well that was fine as long as he made the three apartments available.   Well Dave rented these apartments furnished.  So if he provided a toaster oven, he would quickly collect ten more to keep for parts.    Same with fans, air conditioners, etc.   So where would he store this stuff.   Well when one apartment was empty, he started using it for storage.   One apartment down.   Well that got full, so the second apartment got filled as well.   Two down.   At this point we learned that the health department was declaring his place unfit to rent.    Well, my dad got on a plane, rented a truck and hauled most of the "spares"   off to the dump.   Dave was definitely not happy, and according to my dad even went to the dump to reclaim some stuff.   I don't think he ever rented more than one apartment again.   I also stayed with Dave on the way to pick cotton in Nicaragua in approx 1983.  At this point his whole apartment was filled with spares in supermarket like rows about four feet high.   You had to thread your way through tiny paths to get to the table or bathroom.   How to redefine the word pack rat.   Can we say that this illustrates the effect of depression on young adults.   Never waste, always save, reuse, rebuild, repair, adapt.   If it doesn't get obsessive, these wouldn't be bad rules for life.   When's the last time any of us removed a failed starter from a car and took it to a local rebuilder, had it rebuilt, and bolted that now shiny black thing with a one year warrantee back onto the car?   Am I nostalgic for that?   You bet.

Groan on the Supreme Court and Corporate/Union Election Money

Today the US Supreme Court overturned prior rulings and laws going back to 1907.   They ruled that Congress could not prohibit corporations or unions from using their own funds to campaign directly for electoral candidates as well as the McCaibn-Feingold law that prohibited issue ads in the closing days of election campaigns.

These quotes tell most of the story (NYTimes)
''The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach,'' Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his majority opinion, joined by his four more conservative colleagues.

Strongly disagreeing, Justice John Paul Stevens said in his dissent, ''The court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation.''

''It's going to be the Wild Wild West,'' said Ben Ginsberg, a Republican attorney who has represented several GOP presidential campaigns. ''If corporations and unions can give unlimited amounts ... it means that the public debate is significantly changed with a lot more voices and it means that the loudest voices are going to be corporations and unions.'"
''It's the Super Bowl of bad decisions,'' said Common Cause president Bob Edgar, a former congressman from Pennsylvania.

“With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics,” Mr. Obama said. “It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”
Courts are often placed in the position of balancing interests.   In this case it free speech (corporations are legal enetities equivalent to persons) vrs the basic democratic voting principal of one person one vote.   In this case it looks like this was not a matter of law for the conservative justices to side with "free speech" but actually a matter of their pro corporation ideology.

This decision will give additional power to corporations to do what they seem to have done to Health Care Reform.....turn it into a profit center.

Bad news, good news

Martha Coakley's defeat may finally force spineless democrats in the Senate to change the cloture rule that allows debate until 60 votes are found to stop it....ergo the requirement of 60 votes to pass a bill in the face of a determined oppostion.

If they wanted to be a bit polite, they could vote (51-49) to change the Senate rules to allow cloture with 55 votes.   If it was up to me, I'd make it 51.

Recall that the composition of the Senate is an anti-democratic structure in the first place with 2 votes per state, regardless of population.    That's a far cry from each person's vote having equal weight.   As Lani Gunier points out in the Tyranny of the Majority, it is the winner take all voting in large districts that is most detrimental to democracy.   If we want to protect minorities (of all types) let's change the voting rules.    (I'll report on this later when I finish her book.)

Victory Party for Iraq

The 2006 military budget contained $20 million request for a victory party in Iraq.   Needless to say, it hasn't been spent.

Whither Israeli democracy?

An interesting article in the Nation re the middle east by Henry Siegman.

This article states that many Israeli political analysts believe that the settlements have become so widespread and so deeply implanted in the West Bank as to rule out the possibility of their remova by thi8s or any future Israeli government unless compelled to do so by international intervention.

Furthermore he states this reality on the ground no longer allows Israel to be considered a democracy and compares the reality to be not much different than South African Apartheid.   This by the way is the view of some Israeli leaders including former Prime Minister Olmert.   If perhaps "apartheid' is too strong or word (or too narrowly defined per the South African experience, it is fair to say that the Israeli system disenfranchises its Gaza and West Bank populations based on ethnic and religious identify.  Democracy in Israel is reserved for its privileged Jewish citizens and denied to the Arab populations.

The gist of the article, however, says this situation is exactly what was planned by those encouraged the settlements...to prevent a two state solution, while proclaiming support for that concept.  Accordion to Siegman, the only hope is a two state solution imposed from abroad.   Currently US shows signs of inclining this way, but perhaps Europe might follow this path.   For example, the EU council of ministers passsed a resoltion that the EU would not recognize unilaterlal Israeli changes in the pre-1967 borders (ie settlements on the West Bank.)

The article does not consider the other (also difficult alternative) of a one state binational democracy.   South Africa has shown that is possible.   Can not the Jews and Arabs?

13 years with unions

I spent 13 years of my career as a labor educator.   So, nu, what's that?

I came to West Virginia University Institute for Labor Studies July 1, 1979.  Fresh out of school with a masters' in Industrial Hygiene, I moved from Detroit to Morgantown.  We had a grant from OSHA to provide safety and health training to unions in WVa.  I was lucky enough that soon my boss at WVU, Dick Humphreys, saw the value of the program and put me in a hard money slot that opened up (and here I am today still a WVU faculty member in extension.!)

Labor schools have a long history.   Progressive social work schools (particularly Bryn Mawr) taught courses to workers back into the 1920's (I think) on how to improve their conditions, including skills in organizing and making their unions effective.   In the 1950's labor unions in about 16 states persuaded legislatures to create schools at land grant universities supporting the training of union leaders (paid and volunteer) in the skills they might need to be effective.  The argument went that universities train doctors, lawyers, businessmen, nurses, etc.   Unions also have a socially beneficial mission and so, they should be trained as well.   There is certainly an argument that a skillful and knowledgeable union is a better partner/antagonist than one that is "off the wall."   When I arrived at WVU, the right wing across the state (particularly the Wheeling newspaper) regularly went apoplectic that the state's flagship would train union members...."anti-American"

So what I actually did was arrange and teach local and statewide classes for union members.   Most participants were volunteer leaders of unions serving on safety committees.   One typical format would be to offer a class one night a week for six weeks in a region.   Workers from different unions in the area would show up.   Parkersburg was a big supporter of these classes.   Sometimes I would do the same six sessions for students from one union that wanted to train a group of people.   I remember traveling that first winter to Lewisburg to train laborers and hotel workers employed at the Greenbrier Hotel.   Some of those winter trips over the mountains were scary.   Those two unions were notable because they worked really well together.   We met in a bar/restaurant owned by the business agent for the laborers.   (His son was in culinary school, and sometimes showed up and made us some fantastic food.)

The content of the training had about equal portions of:
1. Learning technical health and safety stuff (including chemical exposure)
2. Learning legal rights under OSHA
3. Learning tactics and strategy.. how to prepare, how to mobilize support, etc.

I loved this work.  I was clearly from a different world than the students, but I probably was pretty successful based on showing up as who I was and not pretending to be someone else.   (I've seen faculty at WVU who come to West Virginia and try to "go local"...cowboy boots, pickup truck, etc.)   Of course I was very enthusiastic and that helped.

The students were incredible.   First of all they were in the class because they were hungry to learn.   (I believe we had a subset of students who came just because they had not had many other formal learning opportunities.)   Most were incredibly dedicated to their union work and spent untold hours at that work.   I learned quickly to leave lots of time in class for stories.   The stories were often touching, sad, and sometimes made me really mad.   Intelligent men and women in workplaces were often treated as children by bosses who were motivated by obsessive need to be one up from the hourly workers.   The stories I heard always made me a better teacher the next time around.

Over the years I developed a particular interest and a bunch of methods for teaching concepts that had to do with math:  risk, probability, epidemiology studies, dose response, etc.   Like many, the group had a fair amount of math phobia.  Over time I found successful ways to communicate understanding all these concepts.  I had students in summer schools analyzing epidemiology journal articles while understanding the limits of concepts like "not significant at p=.05."  When I talked about occupational disease, I always enjoyed spending a lot of time on the anatomy and physiology aspects.   That was partly because it was fun for me, but I believe it also lead to understanding rather than rote learning.

I did that work for 13 years.   In my mind's eye, I can see the faces of dedicated workers sitting in front of me.   I know (from intuition and from research) that we talked about in those classes was translated into action that likely saved lives and limbs.   Not bad!

Sailing as tangible metaphor

Sailing is one of my powerful occupations.  I got into sailing when I was taken out on a sailboat on the last day of summer camp.  I was probably 12 or 13.  It was a perfectly exciting sailing day, leaned (hiked) over and wet and exciting.   I fell in love.   So I saved up money from giving piano lessons to younger kids and bought a styrofoam sailboat.   I didn't know how to sail, so went to the Newark library and read some musty old sailing books.   We strapped the thing on top of a car and my father drove me to Lake Hopatcong.   I said are you coming?   He said, no.   So we dropped the thing in the water and off I went.   It was great.   I learned sailing from a book.   (My grandfather arrived from Lithuania in the early part of the 20th centurty and was said to have "learned about America" by reading an encyclopedia from A to Z.)

I had a lot of fun with that boat, but also some bad moments.   One time it flew off the top of the car on the Garden State parkeway and broke about 10" off the bow.  I just drilled new holes for the bow stay and went on.

Well, I got more ambitious and paid $200 for the forty year old wooden Barnegat Bay Sneakbox.   This design developed from rowing boats used in the shallows of Barnegat Bay for duck hunting.   It was a very shallow draft cat boat.  It was totally opened up and leaky.   Per my day's instructions I filled the seams with a mixture of sawdust and varnish, covered it over with that new material (fibereglass.) made a rudder and tiller (see earlier blog.)  and sailed it from a very blue collar boat club in Perth Amboy.  I remember my mother driving me down to Barnegat Bay to find a very elderly Barnegat Bay Sneakbox builder who allowed us to make a trace of the rudder, so I could make one out of plywood.   Catboats sail what is called a barn door rudder, which also provides a good bit of the lateral resistance for the boat.

As a teenager I had two loyal crew:  my cousin Ted Green, and my friend Bob Brewin.   Raritan Bay was not your idyllic sailing country.....the boat was moored in the shadow (literally) of a coal fired power plant, and the rest of the bay was similarly industrial.  You had to clean off the black stain every time you sailed.  You had to watch out for the big freighters.   I had a very very old Johnson outboard for those times there was no wind.   Sometimes the outboard and wind failed at the same time, and we would get towed back to shore by some friendly motorboaters.   The guys at the boat club were very kind to me.   I was the only sailboat (and probably the only teenager) in the place.

We learned a lot, adventured a lot, and got very sunburned.  The catboat was gaff rigged, which meant it had an upper as well as lower boom on the single sail.   This had the unfortunate trait of occasionally manifesting a goose neck jibe.   In this case, with a following wind, one boom would tear one way across the boat, the other would go the other.   When they reached the end of their slack, the upper boom would yank the lower (very big and heavy piece of oak as long as the boat) straight up to vertical and then it would come slamming down.   I only had this happen twice.   Very frightening and impressive!  Luckily no head or boat parts were broken.   Some of my strongest memories are not on the boat, but driving home in our 1951 green Chrysler, totally sunburned, totally wet and sandy, totally tired, and totally happy.   By the way, I didn't have a dinghy to get out to the boat's mooring, so I used the remains of boat number one like a surf board to paddle out to the mooring.

Next boat never hit the water.   It was a town class sloop.   Turned out it was too dried out for me to fix.   The seams just wouldn't hold anything and swell up.   I tried all kinds of soaking and wetting the get it together, but nothing worked.   It was junked in the end.   (I now know of a repair method that would have worked: called splining.   You cut thin splines of wood and glue them into the open seems.   The boat becomes sort of a monococoque.)  I didn't own another sailboat again for 30 years.

So the point was really to be about the experience.  When I'm sailing, I am totally unable to think of anything else.   It's totally gripping.   The thing I like best about sailing is that it's one area of life we can't control.   If there is no wind you don't go.   If there's a lot of wind, you have to adapt.   If the wind is from the wrong direction you have to zig zag to get where you're going....the antithesis of getting in a car or even a motorboat and driving where you want to go.   There's plenty of metaphor there (which btw is beautifully written in a book called "To Row a Little Boat." )   The added piece is that sailing is sometimes so out of control that it can be dangerous.   I don't know the appeal there, but I find that seductive as well.  One of my few anxieties about aging is the anticipation that there may come some day I won't be able to handle a sailboat.

Ponzi Scheme that Works

When I was in Brussels in November, I met a Moroccan shopkeeper who assured me that the most important meaning of the "great recession" was that America would no longer lead the world.   As you might expect, he was happy about that downfall...."the bigger they come, the harder they fall."

Jan 1 issue of the The Economist contains an article that takes issue with this prediction.   While acknowledging the US's political, economic, and social challenges, this article points to the desirability of America as a place to live as the secret to its future success.   The article states that people the world over still aspire to live in the US, and that smart, creative, hard working people make the choice to come here and continue to provide dynamism to the nation.   The article cites economic well being (wealth), tolerance, diversity, religiosity (vs secularism), and the ability to find and live with people from their own nations and cultures as strong attractions to talented immigrants.   Also, immigrants in the US  live in a different legal status than those in countries in the Europe.   To stay in the US legally, immigrants have to work.

Of course the article views Republican anti-immigrant posturing and policies as counter productive to US maintaining great power status.  The article quotes predictions that the US alone among great powers will increase its proportion of the world's population, and thus remain the pre-eminent nation for longer than many people expect.Michael Lind of New America Foundation is quoted, "Relying on the import of money, workers, and brains, America is a Ponzi scheme that works."

Inverse Square Law

I've always been fascinated by the inverse square law.   This law of phsysics states the strength of a point source of energy loses its strength significantly as it moves away from the source.   This would apply to sound, radiation, electromagnetics forces, etc.  The first time I experienced this law was when I learned about it as applied to noise reduction in my industrial hygiene classes in 1977.  

So here is how it works:
If you are standing at a point at some distance from a noise source, you can measure a certain strength of noise.  If you now double the distance from the same noise source, the strength of the noise is now 1/4th what it was at the initial point.   If you triple the distance it is now 1/9th, if you quadruple the distance the strength is 1/16th, etc.   So each increase makes a pretty big difference.  It's really just a matter of simple geometry since the energy is radiating out from the source in all possible directions, so each spot (on a hypothetical sphere around the point) only gets a much smaller portion of the energy.

OK so it's always fun to apply these kinds of physical laws to the social sphere.  Let's not takes these too seriously, but maybe some of you out there might comment and suggest some.

Examples:

My wife Roz says her female friends are much easier to get along with than I, her husband.  Ignoring the real issues of gender and a sexual relationship, it's clear that the time and space to these friends is much less than for a marriage, and so a relationship inverse square law would say that the intensity of the relationship  would be far less.   In theory that should work equally well for both the positive and negative emotional manifestations.   But..

As we get further in distance from things and our information becomes "less" we are subject to a substantial decrease in the accuracy of our information.   Thus stereotypes stick to phenomena we haven't experienced first hand ("darkest Africa"; "crazy new yorker") while a human close to hand is observed with a greater degree of accuracy.

Telephone:  Try the game of whispering a phrase from person to person in the game "telephone."  The accuracy decreases by the inverse square of the number of people?????

Oh well.   It's a slow Friday and I'm just noodling.

Business Week, the liberal weekly news magazine

Articles in Jan 11 issue of Business Week:

1. An article on how companies and nations systematically under report their pollutant emissions.
2. An interview with Paul Volcker calling for the breakup of big banks.
3.An article on how radical financial reform envisioned following the 2008 bust has been gutted by financial lobbyists and their pals the New Democrats."
4.  Article on how new Chair Schapiro of the SEC is caving in to business pressure.
5. A muckraking article on how private universities are collecting huge sum of GI bill money without delivering quality education.


So why would a business magazine appear every week publishing works generally to the left of Newsweek?   These guys represent the most modern (and most liberal) wing of capitalism.   They know that unvarnished and unregulated capitalism doesn't work and thus sows the seeds of its own demise.   The existence of this liberal bent of corporate America has been described by such still relevant works as James Weinstein's Corporate Ideal and the Liberal State.

Sweet Stavin' Chain

This was the second band I played with.   The first was the Monks.   SSC was lead by Danny Starobin and phenomenal blues guitarist whose theme song was "Teddy Bear's Picnic."  Danny had the shortest stockiest fingers I've ever seen on a guitar player.   Boy, did he have power to "bend."  Danny and the group introduced me to Chicago Blues....after I'd been playing soul and r&b.  My memory is that we sounded pretty good.  We ended up opening for and hosting many visiting rock/blues groups including Mike Bloomfield, Canned Heat, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy.   The high point of meeting these great musicians was jamming with Otis Spann in our rehearsal apartment on West Park St in Germantown.   We took Muddy Waters and his band to eat at Mama Foo Foo's where we ate Whammer Jammers (Mammer Jammers?)

I left the band because I didn't care for the social dynamics.   Rock and roll groups have a great challenge. . . to balance musical taste, leadership, money....all while spending a lot of time together, and musicians' native tendency toward big egos.   Attach all that to the instant gratification of turning up the amp and for me it was not very satisfying.   When I left the band, it was my intention to only be in a band with friends.   That's not so easy to make happen.

Afghanistan Alternatives

One thing that has bothered me about US pulling out of Afghanistan quickly, is what would be the mess (for Afghanistan and at least Pakistan, to say nothing of women in Afghanistan) if US were to quickly leave.

I just read the first article that makes sense to me of an alternative future for Afghanistan.   Written by Selig Harrison as an opinion piece in the Nation.   He proposes that there is interest in neighboring countries, Russia, Iran, India, China,  Tajikistan in finding a political outcome in Afghanistan that would leave the nation neutral (as it had been for many years,) with the Taliban a player, but not the dominant one.   Such an outcome could be pressed by a United Nations diplomatic initiative or even a regional one lead by these neighbors.   Each has its own interest in this outcome, whether political re: their own Muslim fundamentalists,  or part of the Sunni Shiite Muslim division.  .Iran and India are already giving major economic aid to Afghanistan and China has expressed intentions to do the same.

  Key would be an aspect which has been little discussed.   The US would have to give up several large regional military bases in Afghanistan.   The absence of US presence as a foil against which the Taliban can push could make this possible.   Of course the US military is opposed to that.    Pakistan could also pose problems to such a solution.  

Well, at least there seems to be something like a less worst solution possible.

Avatar

Let me say I really enjoyed the film.   It was beautiful, I liked the love story, and better anti corporate pro environment than the opposite.

But I walked away with a slight nagging dissatisfaction.  So I'm trying to figure out why and here is what I came up with:

1.  In evoking those old movies of white man joins native american tribe, falls in love with daughter of chief, tries to save from other white men, the piece (that was always in those old movies) of the jealous warrior who is jealous of the newcomer was just too ....... UNORIGINAL.   It bothered me that the imitation was so mechanical.   Maybe they should have presented the movie as a remake, then our expectations would have beenlowered.

2. The lack of any gray  area between the greedy corporate types and environmentalists lead me to feel it was just too shallow.   What's to be learned when good and evil are so simple?

Now here I sound like those folks I usually don't like who won't appreciate a movie with good intentions because it doesn't meet their unrealistically high standards.   They're never happy.   It's just I wanted to like this movie even more.

So, I'll repeat.   I liked the movie.   I like the movie.   Go see it!

Underwater

1/3 of America's home mortgages are still underwater.   That means the households owe more on the houses than the houses are worth.  People paid more for the houses than a realistic hoursing market says they are worth.  This is due to the housing bubble speculative frenzy people refer to as the bubble. People paid more than the "real"value because they were told that values would keep going up.

The current mortgage programs are helping mortgage holders struggling to make payments bylowering interest, but not addressing the "underwater" factor.   Being underwater is a better predictor of foreclosure than being out of work.   People are walking away from houses where making payments does nothing to create equity for them and their families.

As long as the values of the houses remain high, the banks don't have to book (account for) losses created b ythe housing bubble, so they're happy with the current situation.   There seem to be three policy choices:

1. Force the banks to lower the values to realistic values.   (just not politically likely at this pont.)
2. Foreclose on the underwater mortgages (which would put people out on the street and possibly initiate recession again.
3.  Provide govt subsidies to banks to compensate for lowering the book values of the houses.   More bailout larceny for the banks!


I haven't read a politically feasible plan to address this problem.   I sure like number 1.

Dave fixes everything

Uncle Dave taught me to:
1. Make new tools by saving and combining good handles and good implements
2. Pick up telephone wire ties and use them for everything (kind of like duck tape.)
3. Change the air filter in a car that had oil bath air filter.
4. Fix a toaster oven

Dave was also responsible for helping me along at two early stages of my sailing career.

My second boat (I was about 15) was a junked Barnegat Sneakbox.  My dad helped me spend a summer filling the seams with a mixture of varnish and sawdust, fiberglassing, etc.  Well here I was with no tiller for the boat.  Uncle Dave salvaged a telephone pole cross tie (I don't actually know what salvage meant in this case) and knew enought that under all the grime it was a gorgeous piece of walnut.   He fashioned me a gorgeous tiller from this wood.

Several years later I was keeping this boat at the Perth Amboy Boat Club.  Unfortunately  a truck somehow ran over and broke the large oak boom for the boat, Dave said no trouble.  He cut the ends out of a tin can, sliced it end to end, folded back a flange on each part, drilled the flange, and then used this flange to strengthen and join the regluing we did with the boom.  It worked great.   I did have to watch out for the flange and screws, though.  

Dave was a gentle soul.   My mother would have loved him for himself.   But the fact that when he came to visit, he and my father would get to work fixing anything broken or needing improving in the house didn't hurt his popularity with her.

PS:  That's how I got to be a Jewish fixit man too.   Same with my cousin Ted, who spent even more time with Dave.  Cousin Mark also got a good deal of the "handy's" as well.

Uncle Dave, Abe, and Lindberg

Sounds like my father was sort of raised by his older brother Dave.   They were both adventurers.   Here's a story about the "crazy Beckers" I'm not sure I even believe.

The Beckers were living near Sheepshead Bay.   Uncle Dave had a big sailing canoe.   Apparently the Becker practice (Dave and Abe) was to sail out into the Bay and meet incoming passenger ships.   Then they would call for help and be picked up out of the water and given a free meal.  The story goes that they once pulled this scam on the ship that was bringing Lindberg back from his nonstop trip across the ocean.   This makes a pretty good story, but don't you think there's a bit of an antisocial thread to this?   One thing I never figured out is how they got themselves and the canoe back from Manhattan where the ships docked to Brooklyn.

So if this is just an apocryphal tale, what would it be telling?  Two jews with nothing, adventuring spirit ask the world for help, help received, happy ending???

Or what if the story is accurate on the facts, but they actually got in trouble out on the bay and needed the help?  I'm comfortable I'll not know the "true" answer because, this way I'll keep chewing on the story.

Speaking of Nature Friends....

Apparently, my father's oldest brother (Dave) was the inspiration for Nature Friends.  Many shtetl jews had romantic dreams of living and working on farms. 

So what is the approach of the "people of the book?"   Well my grandfather Savel sent his oldest son, Dave off to ag school to learn horticulture.   He went to Pott State Colllege over the state line in Pennsylvania.  When Dave graduated, grandpa bought a piece of farmland in central New Jersey.   The farm never happened.   New Jersey was building a highway, took the land, my grandfather made a good piece of money, and somehow the dream never happened again.

Meanwhile Dave was a willing horticulturalist.   He loved two things in life: growing things, and cooking.  Dave never got married.   He also never exactly had a career.  He was basically a handyman and spent his life fixing things.  The longest running job he had was as a "super" for an apartment building, keeping things running.   When he retired to Miami Beach, he became the president of the Miami horticulture society....pretty good for a little old urban guy from Brooklyn and New Jersey.   When I visited him his backyard was filled with tin cans growing........EVEYTHING!   Forget green thumb.  Plants loved him just the way he loved plants.

I've got many Dave stories I'll save for another blog.   But I' just sitting here with this thought of how Uncle Dave would call his many nieces and nephews "chickie."   As you might think, having uncle Dave around and call you "chickie" was like having another grandparent.....and that's good!   Dave's last gift to his nieces and nephews was a relatively small inheritance he left to them for their college education.   Since he died when they were pretty young, my cousin Ted invested the money and did pretty well with.   By the time the nieces and nephews went to college, they each got a pretty substantial chunk.

Winner of top tall tale of 2009:

"I just realized how bad the economy really is.   I recently bought a new toaster oven and as a complimentary gift, I was given a bank."

AP Dominion Post