We recently visited the High Museum of Art in Atlanta to see the temporary exhibit on modern art, “Picasso to Warhol.” Included with 13 other artists were some sinuous abstracts by Jackson Pollock. It is amazing what age will do for art appreciation. My eyes were just ready, I guess. Anyway, my response was to hurry home and do this with a photo of some trees.
I make no claim. This image was the first thing that popped into my head there at the High. No words necessary.
To successfully visit loved ones at Christmas time, a wise man will do the following:
This one will get me some controversy, I expect.
It is long past time for the U.S. to halt military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The people do not want us there, we gain nothing by it, so stop the bleeding. We have to stop killing people over there. We have to stop asking our fine military volunteers to leave their families and go take mortal risk in that place. Bring them all home.
As it did every Western conqueror-wannabe nation that has ever tried in the past, Afghanistan defeated us by a combination of long supply lines and cultural incompatibility. It is time, as one old Iowa politician would say, “to take the bull by the tail and face the situation.”
Stop the money flow to both countries. Zero. No sense in us borrowing money from China then giving it to people who wish us ill. Trade yes, aid no.
What about the harms of war? Legitimate issue but not an endless liability. Add it up, subtract beneficial investments already made, calculate a net damages amount. Put the money with the U.N. or some other third-party referee to supervise repairs and be done with it. When it’s gone it’s gone. Of course the money might get stolen by corrupt politicians in the two countries. They would have to answer their own people for it.
I know, I know, the two countries have both sponsored terrorism before and might again. Nuclear-armed, even. Risk is not certainty, however, and persistently making enemies creates the same kind of risk if you ask me.
Get out as fast as we can. Let those two countries stew in their own juices for a while until their passions against the West cool. They will find new enemies elsewhere, or within, I have no doubt.
When tempers against America have subsided through lack of contact, and there is a basis to find mutual need, then re-engage diplomatically. Speak softly in words of peace, and mean it. But maintain the ability to decisively respond against aggression, and the resolve to use it.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I hope that you ran out of numbers counting your blessings.
Around the residence here we dined both deliciously and inexpensively. Our plan was to fix foods we had never done before, focusing especially on bread. No turkey. Here was our day in food.
Wednesday night: mix up a batch of whole grain bread dough and put it in the cold, cold garage to rise slowly.
First thing in the morning: start the sweet potatoes baking; mix batter for Boston Brown Bread, pour it into a former soup can and start it steaming. This brown bread followed the Fannie Farmer 1915 recipe that you can read at bartleby.com. Whole wheat flour, corn meal and ground rye with soda, molasses and buttermilk.
Breakfast: small sausages wrapped in thinly stretched bread dough, baked. Orange juice, coffee.
Appetizers: a) bread dough run through the sheeting rollers of a pasta machine, cut in thin strips, rolled lengthwise and baked into crispy, pencil-thin bread sticks. b) sheeted bread dough made into small, ravioli-like pies stuffed with minced sausage, Gorgonzola and celery, raised half an hour and baked. Yum!
While the main meal was a-makin’, we played around with braiding bread dough in the style of Challah. It came out surprisingly well for a first attempt. We took these braided loaves around to the neighbors.
Main meal: focaccia savory with carmelized onion and other good stuff, fresh cranberry relish, candied sweet potatoes with cinnamon marshmallow crust, tomato-and-bread stew as good as any dressing you ever ate, and fresh fruit, served with a bit of wine. Dessert was thin slices of Boston Brown Bread with fruit preserves.
Supper: the chicken noodle soup that came in the can I baked the brown bread in.
There you have it. A ton of inexpensive fun, many new things done with bread dough, new recipes tried, and the food was actually quite good. I have always wondered about running bread dough through a pasta machine. Sometimes you’ve got to stop wondering and find out!
Sometimes I try to imagine what life was like for families during hard times. I heard a definite echo of it in the old cookbooks that gave us our ideas for today’s meal. Be content with plain food simply prepared, they told us. No argument here, but I will tell you a little Gorgonzola helps.
Sheesh! You would think that maxim would be carved in the marble arches over the gates of American colleges. But I guess each generation has to learn its own lessons the hard way.
Thank goodness this time nobody died. But as I watched The Spray Seen Round the World, a.k.a. the pepper-spraying of students doing a sit-down protest at the U. of California at Davis, all I could think was “Kent State.”
Before anyone sniffs and tells me this incident was nothing like that, I bow to the distinction. Nobody died. But really, the difference ends there. The students disobeyed the officers and then the officers discharged weapons at them.
No amount of rationalizing can change the facts. Pepper spray is a weapon. Anyone who does not think so, just try carrying a spritzer of it into Canada. As a weapon, its purpose is to deter attack. The officer is allowed to use if and only if his safety is actively threatened. These officers, however, were not attacked, but disobeyed.
Linda Katehi, the Chancellor of UCD, put the officers on suspension and called for an investigation to take place during the next 30 days. Thirty days! For pity’s sake, 30 seconds is all it takes to see what happened. 30 hours should be plenty of time to take down statements from everyone who was there, and catalog every one of the many videos being recorded by bystanders.
It is plain that befuddled Chancellor Katehi simply does not know what to do. Well, that’s easy. She should insist to be relieved of duty. That is the only honorable action. It happened on her watch. She must stand down.
If she survives in her position at UCD, Ms Katehi will have shown university administrators everywhere that they can blame staff and get away with it. But that argument would defeat itself; it would vacate her authority because internally contradictory. Blame can attach only where authority exists. To say the staff deserve the blame is to declare that they, not the Chancellor, have the authority.
No, to restore the authority and respect of the chief administrative position at the U. of Cal Davis, Chancellor Katehi must go. Her authority has already been lost; her position must soon follow. At the time of writing, Monday the 21st at about 9:00 p.m. Iowa time, she just hadn’t realized it yet. Soon, surely soon.
And then the right lesson will have been communicated to university administrators everywhere: never shoot weapons at students. The very idea of University opposes the use of violence against sit-down protesters. The whole purpose is to teach a better way to deal with opposition. When shots are fired, or even just squirted, they may hit the hapless protester but they wound the institution.
PS. Back in the 1960s at one of our Iowa universities a bunch of students invaded the president’s house to demand some thing be changed. They vowed to remain until satisfied. What did Dr. and Mrs. President do? Why, he sat in the living room and listened to them. She baked cookies. It lasted about a day.
A year later, the thing did get changed and the campus is a better place for it. They named a building after that president. Here is the moral of the story. Weapons: bad! Cookies: Good. Listening: always the right thing to do. Remember: never shoot weapons at students.
I’ve been taking photos with film recently. Kodak Ektar, to be precise. A local lab processes and scans it for me, then I work with the images digitally.
It takes several days to get the pictures back. But oh my! the results are worthwhile. When all goes right, there is a richness in the photos that satisfies me deeply. This roadside corn, for instance.
Glad I could share that with you.
I’m dismayed by the rise of anti-success sentiment in our country this fall. Some people want to make their slice of economic pie bigger by cutting someone else’s down to size. That view strikes me adversarial, and seems self-defeating because it divides the populace against itself.
I’ve always thought the better way toward bigger slices of economic pie for more people was to work together to make the whole pie bigger. Alas, that view is not popular at the moment.
American punditry now condemns “the top 1%” of people in our country for, I’m not sure what, being too successful I guess. Anyway, the consensus among our media elite seems to be that great wealth bespeaks great wrong and no American should be richer than another by more than some not-well-defined amount.
The Populist prescription, as always, is to tax those rich ones down to size; take their money and hand it around to them what needs it more.
The idea that “hurting them helps us” is bad because it doesn’t work and causes consequences. Suppose those “richest Americans” decided to solve the problem by… changing where they live, invest and earn. Wealthy people can do that fairly easily. Then what?
After driving “the top 1%” from our midst and resting from the weary chore of coveting their money all the time, what else might the Occupy movement do to serve our country? Perhaps it could attend to the moral instruction of children that they must never hope or aspire or strive to such attainment. Teach them instead to give up, mire down with the rest of us, and wallow in the Great Sulk. That would show those rich who’s boss, by gum.
The farther you pursue the logic of Populism, the more barren and counterproductive it reveals itself to be.
***
Actually, the rich would not have to leave. They will just rearrange their wealth to suit the times. It takes about a year after the new tax rates go into effect, and then poof! those rosy projections of increased tax revenue evaporate into the fog of Form 1040. Always happens.
Congress in its wisdom will create tax shelters to go with higher tax rates. Rich people will close down businesses that generate taxable income and shift money into politically-favored financial inventions designed to maximize tax deductions, like they always do when Washington goes a-hunting witches.
New fortunes will be made by the inventors and promoters of tax-motivated hiding places. If you truly want to profit from a political victory by the “Occupy” movement, become a tax lawyer.
I hate to think our country would go down that sorry road again so soon. Down that road lies stranded capital, inflation, higher interest rates, slower economic growth, higher long-term unemployment, and eventually another spell of Jimmy Carter’s morose “malaise.”
The priority in our country should be to get people working again. Right now we are fidgeting over how to give more money to people who are not working, based on the idea of them continuing to not work. Instead we should be shifting efforts to get unemployed people back into jobs they know how to do and pay them that way.
Infrastructure projects would employ many excellent workers whose skills became surplus when housing construction slowed down. Taxes raised to spend that way would truly be invested in our economy and pay social dividends for a long time to come. There is a conversation about taxes that I would like to see our pundits open up and talk about.
How to address the top 1% of American earners and investors? Don’t dissolve their wealth in taxes because then it can have no ongoing good effect. Find a more constructive way to engage them in solutions to benefit our country. And if somebody makes a big buck while making things better for all of us, we should be happy for them.
My first encounter with the Cloud!
An e-mail from Microsoft made me aware of SkyDrive. Not long afterward I had a few photos stored out there. I can access them from just about any web-connected device. Unless I am mistaken, that is an example of the famous Cloud.
It offers folders, like a hard drive. I can selectively give other people access to certain folders, for sharing.
It is free of charge (at the moment, anyhow.) Apparently a SkyDrive comes included with an e-mail account through Microsoft, such as Hotmail. This is very cool.
I like it! Something new, at my old age. I see possibilities. As we used to say, far out.
Thanks Microsoft. Really, thanks.
Russell Billiu Long, Senator from Louisiana, famously summarized so-called tax reform as, “Don’t tax me. Don’t tax thee. Tax the fellow behind the tree.”
They are singing that old refrain on the banks of the Potomac River this autumn. Unfortunately there is no fellow behind that tree. He is thee and me.
The President calculates $800 billion of tax revenue to come in 2013 after tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 expire. Among those cuts were measures to postpone the impact of the Alternative Minimum Tax on middle class families. Guess where a lot of that $800 billion is coming from. Hint: money does not grow on trees.
I am a big fan of Open Source Software, or OSS. Let me rephrase that. Great idea, but the implementation varies. Bad implementation can defeat good software in the marketplace. That includes bad technical support.
Open source software is “almost free” but not quite. The “free” part usually means two kinds of freedom. First, it is free to acquire and use. Also users are free to modify the original source code and redistribute the work to others. I added the “almost” part because all the good stuff comes these days with strings attached in the form of an intellectual property license.
The Firefox browser I am using to write this post, the Linux operating system hosting this web site, the WordPress content management system that makes this blog go, the Apache web server that is delivering this page to you, the OpenOffice productivity suite of programs: all of these are examples of high-quality, open source software. A technically proficient person can assemble a powerful set of software tools and be very productive in our modern world without paying anything for software
The great power and attraction of open source software is that it results from the efforts of volunteers donating their skills and work to the cause. They do this for almost universally altruistic reasons. The goal is simple: to free technology from the grasp of corporations, which are perceived by some to have selfish, antisocial motives.
So why do people continue to pay willingly for commercial software?
The great irony of OSS results from the sometimes unfortunate attitudes of those same volunteers. It usually shows up on web sites that purport to “support” the software. These sites include encyclopedia-like “wikis”, such as one I went to today for help with an unfamiliar software language that specializes in graphics.
The very first line in the very first “tutorial” provided to beginners starts this way, “[The above graphic is an interactive 3D bar graph. If you can't see it, it's probably because your browser sucks...]”
Well, excuse me for living! I could not see it. The browser I was using at the moment is one that comes pre-installed on many new computers these days. I use it all the time to interact with complex, interactive web sites. Could there possibly be another explanation for why his precious page would not draw its pretty picture on my computer? Apparently not in the mind of this open-source software sovereign. He presumes to pronounce that my “browser sucks” and so by implication do I for being so stupid as to use it, and therefore he rejects my need for help as unworthy.
Okay, I will go away and not bother him or his Brotherhood of Worthy Open Sorcerers again. Sure it is an emotional response on my part. It hurt my feelings. No doubt there are very nice people who would be glad to help me. But I believe I have seen the inner mind of the volunteers who produce this particular software.
Theirs looks to be a private club, an arrogant gang that holds itself apart from the rest of the world. They probably think that bit about “your browser sucks” is funny and appropriate. What is their motivation then? Is it to help others get acquainted with their work, or create an occasion to show how much smarter they are than the rest of us?
Such conduct reveals a bully mentality, like sophomores hazing freshmen. I don’t like it and, no matter how good the software might actually be, as a businessman would never place any project at risk for depending on the likes of these to help me with it.
There you have the irony and most likely downfall of open source software. Only the commercial vendors have incentives aligned with a pleasant user experience. The open source crowd too often treats users as unworthy wasters of developers’ precious time.
It is hard to write good software. What developers discover is that it is also hard to write good documentation. Too often they push it aside. Their interest lies in the source code, not the end user. The OSS guy says, “Let them study the source code first because, after all, it is the best documentation.” Yeah, for other programmers perhaps. Commercial vendors long ago discovered that users do not want to do that. They want help, and they want it in a way that makes them feel good about the decision to buy.
Volunteer communities that develop open source software should adopt self-governing systems that promote user-friendly support, and actively monitor the web for alienating rants like the one I ran into today.