Work, Careers, and my Father

Back in January, a Facebook friend of mine posted a Salon article on why "doing what you love" is a bad career choice.  I finally got around to finding and reading the article, and it's even better than I thought; take a look at it (linked above).  The author's argument is that defining "real" work as "what you love to do" makes the people doing "unlovable" work (cleaning toilets; making beds; assembling circuit cards) invisible, and without worth.  It also encourages people to take unpaid internships, because they "love" the job.  She's very sharp about Steve Jobs, who was a great advocate of "do what you love" - without ever acknowledging all the people at Apple who were just toiling away, doing the dirty work.

I'd like to write a bit about a man who never had the luxury of doing what he loved - my father, Lestle Warren Ivy.  Born in Missouri in 1907; in 1910 his mother left his father and took the five children with her.  Because he had to work to help support the family, it took him until 1928 to get his high school diploma; he was 21, and that was as far as he got.  (He made sure both his daughters went to college.)  Here are the jobs I know he had at some point:  He worked in an ice cream factory.  He tried doing field work in Texas, but he couldn't stand the heat and he couldn't make it work.  He drove trucks for bootleggers.  (I only just learned this!)  He sold shoes.  (He never let either me or my sister buy shoes without him along.  He didn't trust the salesmen to fit us right.)  He may have sold furniture; his older brother worked in a furniture store. 

In the 1940s he moved out to California to work at Mare Island Naval Shipyard, the only job I (as a child) ever knew him to have; he worked there over 30 years, retiring in the early 1970s.  Because he wasn't a veteran, as a civilian employee he was a second class citizen - the better jobs went to veterans.  Every time the Navy got a budget cut, they had a "rif" - a reduction in force - and the non-veteran civilian employees either got laid off or were reassigned to lower paying jobs.  Before I learned what it meant, I knew that a "rif" was a bad thing.  Dad did everything blue-collar at Mare Island; he chipped paint on ships (which cost him his hearing, but the Navy never admitted it); he drove forklifts; he carried and stacked boxes.  After the war, he moved up to stockman; at one point he made quarterman, with a team under him.  I have his awards for years without a team accident.  He moved officers in and out of quarters for awhile; to the end of his life he could get more stuff in a U-Haul trailer than anyone else I knew.

Did he love any of that?  He appreciated the paycheck.  He didn't like the rifs, but he just kept going; it was a good job.  And while he was doing that work, 5 days a week, driving 30 miles back and forth to work from Napa (with 5 riders, to help him pay for the gas), in his spare time he was rebuilding our house from the inside out.  He painted the house himself, every time.  He sheetrocked the walls and ceilings.  He put in oak floors - after the war, the Navy tore down some enlisted housing in Benicia.  Underneath the linoleum, the floors were 1" x 4" solid oak.  Dad got a truckload of that oak for $150 and he relaid the entire floor except for the kitchen, the back hall, and the bathroom.  It took him three days to lay the first plank.  He hired a man to finish the floor in the first room; he followed him around and watched what he did.  Then he rented the equipment and finished the rest of it himself.  I remember being down on my knees on that floor with a handful of steel wool and a can of paste wax.  Last time I was in Napa, I saw that, finally, somebody is remodeling that house; I hope they can salvage those floors.

Everything he did, was done as well as he could possibly do it. He never paid anyone to do anything he could possibly do himself.  He fixed his own cars, he mowed his own lawn; if he had friends who needed it, he fixed cars and mowed lawns for them.  Work was what you did; what you loved was your family and friends.  When he retired, he had his civil service pension, but no Social Security; so in  his 60s, he got a job as a roustabout at a local body shop, washing cars and sweeping the place up, to get in his Social Security quarters.  When he finally quit that, they begged him to stay; they said he worked harder and better than anybody else they had.  It wasn't the work; it was him.  His self-respect was in doing the work, any work, as well as he could.  When he couldn't work any more, like many men of his generation, he lost his self-respect, along with his hearing and his eyesight; and so he eventually died, in 1994, aged 87, a few weeks short of his 50th wedding anniversary.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest. - Ecclesiastes 9:10 (King James Version)

Morality and War

This afternoon I was listening to "Philosophy Talk" on KALW radio, and I heard a man ask, speaking of the war in Syria, "Is it more immoral to kill 1,500 people by gassing them with nerve gas than it is to kill them by mowing them down with machine guns?"  I didn't hear an answer in the time before I had to go do something else.

This evening I was reading this week's Economist, and the Lexington columnist was discussing the current flap in the Pentagon over whether drone pilots, and other "cyberwarriors," who never actually get shot at, should receive medals for valor.

The combination of the two leads me to answer Philosophy Talk's question - yes, I believe it is more immoral to kill someone with nerve gas than with bullets; and I believe that really good drone pilots should be recognized for their contribution but a medal for valor isn't the right award.  To explain why I feel this way, I want to do a quick review of the history of warfare.  I don't write much about this subject, but I've actually read quite a bit about it over the years; the human race being what it is, you really can't study history without studying war.  I've studied European warfare, so that's what I'll use to explain my point, which is that nerve gas is immoral because it can be used from farther away, and there is no way to fight back against it.  If a man is mowing you down with a machine gun, he has to be within machine gun range, and you can at least try to shoot back at him, if you have a gun.

It's fairly accurate to say that until roughly the 14th century, when Joe wanted to kill Ed, he had to get very close to him, and fight him hand to hand; and he had a measurable chance of losing the fight, and his life.  The invention of the bow made it possible for Joe to kill Ed from rather farther away; so did the sling.  But the bow and the sling are specialist tools; not everyone can just pick them up and kill someone.  They require training; they require a lot of practice.  It takes less practice to use a club, a spear, or a sword.  The Welsh bowmen who defeated the French army at Agincourt were masters of their trade, and they trained from childhood.

In the 14th century, European traders began reaching the Far East, and among other things they brought back gunpowder.  Gunpowder rendered the fortified castle obsolete; artillery could throw rocks through the castle walls.  Individual soldiers still fought hand-to-hand.  It took another couple of centuries to develop individual weapons like muskets and pistols, which could reliably shoot lead balls without blowing the shooter's hand off; and they fired one ball and then had to be reloaded, a task which took an expert almost a minute.  Still, by the 17th century, armies still fought hand-to-hand, but they did so after shooting several volleys of bullets at each other, from a working range of maybe 50-100 yards.

In the early 19th century, someone put two inventions together and produced a major step forward (if you call it that) in the ability to kill people from a distance:  the mass-produced gun with a rifled barrel.  Mass produced meant there were now a lot of guns relatively cheaply available; the rifled barrel meant the range was more like 300 yards.  Part of the carnage in the American Civil War was due to the fact that the tacticians on both sides were placing the ranks maybe 100 yards apart, and the troops were firing rifles at each other which were accurate up to 3 times that. 

In the Civil War, of course, hand-to-hand combat was still very common.  But the next century and a half developed weapons with greater and greater ranges - artillery pieces which could fire for miles; airplanes dropping bombs from above; short range and eventually intercontinental ballistic missiles.  The objective is to kill as many of the enemy as possible, without exposing your own warriors to their weapons.  And the more long-distance methods were developed, the less hand-to-hand combat was needed.  Poison gases were used on World War I battlefields, to such universal horror that nations produced an international agreement not to use that again, although as always, not everyone obeyed the agreement.  If you look at the war in Syria (yes, I mean you, Mr. Assad), you'll see that the government forces attempt to use the longest range killing machines they can.

With remotely controlled drones, the 21st century has produced a weapon with which a soldier can kill people on another continent, at no risk to his own life.  I've thought for some time that this is making war much too easy for the attacker.  War should be hard.   If Joe wants to kill Ed, he should risk his own life to do so.  Otherwise he shouldn't be doing that at all.  If you conclude from this that I think remote-controlled drones are immoral on a level with poison gas, you're right.  I do think that.   We have found that by spending huge amounts of money on these drones, we can kill people in Afghanistan, get in the car, and drive home to have dinner with the family.  The arrogance of remote-controlled drone attacks is appalling.  I can't even imagine what this is doing to the drone pilots.  We should be giving them their own personal psychiatrists, not medals for valor. 

And we shouldn't be conducting war like this at all.  For that matter, why are we still shooting at Afghan tribesmen with remote-controlled drones?   We are the richest, most powerful nation on earth, and we're using our riches to kill people who live in mud huts with no electricity, at no risk to ourselves.  Consider that image, if you can stand to.  And yet we have the gall to complain about Basher Assad's poison gases.

What is the worth of a man?

I wrote the following draft in 2006, and then set it aside, because I couldn't reach a conclusion, except that this is wrong:

This has bothered me for some time now. When I was young, and more, when my dad was young, a man could do a day's physical work, and earn enough money to buy himself food, and a place to sleep. This is what Roger Miller sang about in "King of the Road": "two hours of pushin' broom Buys an eight-by-twelve four-bit room." And if you had a skill, or a college education, you could earn more than that, maybe enough to buy a house and start a family.

Sometime between then and now, it's gotten too expensive to be a working American. Now, a man doing a day's physical work doesn't make enough money to pay the rent, and if he has a family, he and his wife both have to work two jobs just to get from one end of the month to another. And the kids stay home alone after school because there's no money for child care.

What happened? I'm afraid globalization is what happened. Factory jobs went from a place where people want safe working conditions, and a break for lunch, and a pension, and maybe to buy a house - to places where people are happy to work for $5 a day or less, and don't complain about working conditions or lunch breaks. This is why the stuff at Wal-Mart is so cheap, and not just Wal-Mart.

In the case of jobs that can't be exported, like fruit and vegetable picking, we imported the people instead: that's what the illegal immigrants everyone's talking about are doing. And because they're illegal, they're doing it for less than minimum wage - how can they complain? So to keep the produce we eat cheap enough for us to buy it, we pay the pickers so little that Americans can't afford to do the work. The immigrants live four or six to a room, and send money home. And a job that Americans did seventy years ago (what do you think the Okies came to California to do, during the Dust Bowl?) is no longer an option, even if Americans wanted to do it. Some people say Americans "won't take those jobs." Well, they certainly won't at those wages.

It's not just factory jobs anymore. Eighteen years ago I became a computer programmer, because it was a good career path. Now, there are damn few entry level computer jobs; they've gone to India where they can get a kid with a college degree in computer science for $20,000 a year. I've read complaints that American kids aren't studying engineering, especially computer engineering, in college. Why should they? The jobs are in India. And senior people with long careers are told they're "not measuring up", and then replaced by a college grad for a quarter of the salary.

That was in 2006.  It's now 2014.  The intervening 8 years have made it brutally clear that the America I grew up in no longer exists.  We've reverted to the America my grandparents grew up in - historians call it "The Gilded Age."  The age where all employment was "at will," there were no work rules and no safety requirements, and if you got sick you went home to recover or die, without pay, because there was no "sick leave" and only the rich could afford doctors.  Check it out on Wikipedia - the first pre-paid health care arrangements coalesced into Blue Cross in the 1930s, and employer insurance came in during World War II because wartime regulations didn't allow salary raises (see the Wikipedia article cited above).

Income in America today is appallingly unequal.  I'd usually cite the research, but we've all read it.  The rich now own Congress - hell, the rich now are Congress.  And the Supreme Court supports them.  Justice Scalia goes duck hunting with them.  Sure the judiciary is independent.  
How can we be proud of an America where you're either Mark Zuckerberg, with more money than he knows what to do with at age 30, or you're working two jobs at $8 an hour and still can't pay the rent, like far too many people in the San Francisco Bay Area?  When did we decide that $2,500 a month was a reasonable rent for a 1 bedroom apartment?  When did it become "reasonable" to pay a few bankers millions of dollars a year for bankrupting our economy through fraud?  

What do we do about this, and how?  I wish to God I had answers.  I hope to God that the money we've saved up will last us the rest of our lives; it seems like a lot to me, who grew up with my mother making all my clothes, and canning fruit every fall; but we're still comparatively young, and we have no kids to "help us out."  Not that anybody's kids can help them out when the kids are also making $8 an hour, if they have a job at all.  

Whatever the solution is, if there is one, we have to work together to do it.  The rich have gotten where they are by scratching each other's backs, and setting less wealthy people against each other.  In case you wondered, that's where all the rhetoric about "welfare queens" and the "lazy poor" comes from.  Until the rest of us realize that we have more in common with each other than we do with "the 1%", and start collaborating on solutions, things will stay exactly as they are.  There are more of us than there are of them; but they're really good at the old "divide and conquer" routine.

Google Glass Can Now...

I've had my doubts about Google Glass for some time, and not just because I'm not one of the beta testers.  I don't think I can be - I wear actual glasses to see with, and I've never seen any explanation of how a four-eye like me could even put them on.  Over my glasses?  I don't think so.  My metaphysical objection to Google Glass is that it - they? - make it way too easy to get lost in your little digital world, and to forget that your physical body is doing something actually dangerous, like driving a car, or crossing a street.  After all, those are two of the most dangerous things you can do these days, in terms of the death rate.

Google Glass strikes me as a solution in search of a problem to solve.  It can do some very useful things - but that tiny heads-up display could all too easily be a fatal distraction.  Yes, military pilots use heads-up displays in very tough situations, but they also go through hours of intensive training.  Sooner or later Google Glass will kill someone - a man merely texting while driving just killed two people in Santa Rosa (of course, he was also high).  (Sorry, the article is behind a paywall but you can see the headline and summary.)  I'm not the only one who thinks this, either; San Francisco Chronicle columnist C. W. Nevius came to the same conclusion about 10 days ago.

It wouldn't break my heart if Google Glass never came out of beta. But it almost certainly will, and now we learn there will shortly be a video game for Google Glass.  Oh, great, a video game.  Even better, the game is "Global Food Fight."  I am not making this up.  You will now be able to walk down the street, wearing your Google Glass, weaving and bobbing your head and shoulders back and forth to control a Global Food Fight game that only you can see.  Isn't that precious?  Take a minute and imagine what it will look like. And somebody will do that - it's inevitable.

Cell phones are bad enough, useful as they are.  In the bad old days when phones lived in phone booths, if a man walked down the street gesturing and talking loudly to himself, you could assume he was crazy.  Now if a man does that (or a woman), you have to look for the Bluetooth headset before you write them off as short a couple of shingles.

I never walk down the street talking on the phone.  It's a great way to get your phone stolen.

Imagine the joy of watching a Google Glass wearer bobbing and weaving down the street, indulging in a Global Food Fight.  Now imagine them playing the game and talking to someone on the phone about it.  Since Google Glass is a Bluetooth headset, they'll be walking along, talking to themselves, moving their head back and forth and shrugging their shoulders...

After all, as the article says, a virtual food fight game "is a fun way to engage people to play with the potential of this new device."

And of course, in San Francisco, it's possible that no one would notice.

RIP, Pete Seeger

I don't often cry when I listen to the news.  But I cried this morning when I heard that Pete Seeger had died.  He was 94, and people do die when they're that old.  I thought about his lifelong struggle to put people and music over war and conflict - his attempt to prove that the guitar is mightier than the sword - and I cried to think that he is gone.  I learned his songs fifty years ago, in college; I'm still singing them.

It is mightier, Pete.  As long as we continue to sing your songs, you will be immortal.

But I'm still crying.  Vaya con Dios, Pete.

Stop the Wars!

Recent discussions of the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty got me thinking again about something that's been on my mind.  A San Francisco Chronicle editorial on the War on Poverty claims that we've "only been able to declare a draw."  That's too positive.  With the slats kicked out of the middle class, and millions of people living paycheck to paycheck and praying for nothing to go wrong, we've lost the war on poverty.  The anti-poverty programs that started with Johnson - Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, whatever food stamps are called this week - they don't eliminate poverty.  They merely help poor people not to die starving in the street. Today they help people not to starve in the street who have full time minimum wage jobs.  If the campaign against poverty is a war, we've lost it.

Data Security Breaches - Again

The hot story today is the data security breach at Target, which is being investigated by the Secret Service.  They think data on as many as 40 million credit and debit card accounts may have been stolen.

Really makes you reconsider carrying cash, doesn't it?

What annoys me the most is that this isn't the first time.  Does anyone but me remember the stolen data from TJX Corp. (parent of T J Maxx and Marshalls) in 2006??

They Passed a Budget

I've heard a certain amount of complaining on the airwaves about the bipartisan budget that the House just passed.  I confess I was startled - I wondered what has gotten into Paul Ryan?  Apparently this summer's government shutdown scared him, or did something to him.  Most people feel the Republicans are to blame for the shutdown, and most people aren't happy about it.  He's disturbed enough that he's willing to negotiate, and even to agree on new "revenue" - although he still won't call it "taxes."  Still, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

People are annoyed because the budget doesn't extend emergency unemployment.  I agree - it would have been better if it had.  There are a lot of things it would be nice to have in the deal that aren't there.  But it gives us something we haven't had for several years:  a formal budget funding the U.S. government through this fiscal year and the next.  Remember when the sequester came into force because they couldn't agree on a budget, even though everyone agreed that the sequester was a stupid way to cut funding?

Politifact has a nice article on budget history, evaluating Ryan's January 2012 claim that Senate Democrats "have gone without any budget at all" for more than 1,000 days."  (As of January 23, 2012, that is.  Politifact called it mostly true.) 

But isn't this what we elected these people to do??  Why are they there at all if not to take care of the country's business, in a rational and organized way, working out compromises for the best deal they can cut?  Nobody likes this budget.  Good.  That means nobody got everything they wanted.  That is how politics has worked in this country for 250-plus years (with the minor exception of the War Between the States, and look how well that worked out).  I'm relieved if surprised to find Paul Ryan actually negotiating a compromise.  On past performance, I would have said he couldn't do it.  If he can learn, maybe the others can too.

We passed a Constitutional amendment in California that says legislators' pay is docked for every day they go past the annual deadline without a budget.  Now, the California constitution is hardly the shining example of the way to run an organization.  But it's just astounding how those budgets come in on time since that passed!  I don't think I'd try to amend the U.S. Constitution to do this; but I'd sure love to see Congress impose the rule on itself.  The fact that they won't is just one more of the things that are wrong with  Congress.

I still think they should have extended emergency unemployment.  But I'll take the deal they cut.

The Wisdom of Art Hoppe

The columnists in the San Francisco Chronicle have come and gone in the (my God!) forty-plus years I've been reading it, some better, some worse.  I enjoyed Stan Delaplane in his day, but when they reprint his columns now I can't read them. I can still read Herb Caen, but I never could read the society column.  I wonder why they never reprint any Charles McCabe, my first example of a literate curmudgeon. 

The one columnist I genuinely miss - the way I genuinely miss Molly Ivins, and for the same reason - was the immortal Art Hoppe.  Mr. Hoppe saw the world through the clearest possible lens, and was an absolute genius at laying it out so nobody could be confused about it.  I still love his suggestion that we would improve tax collection if we simply turned the IRS over to the Mafia to manage, and his complaint after the AbScam scandal in the '70s that at $25,000 apiece, lobbyists were making Congressmen too expensive for ordinary citizens to buy.  How does that sound now??

Recently the Sunday Datebook reproduced one of Mr. Hoppe's columns from the 1960s. As I read this, I thought of all the corporate mergers I've seen go down through the years, and how the businesses get fewer and bigger.  And so I give  you:

Mickey Mouse saves the world, 1965 

Read it and weep.

I Heard the News Today, Oh Boy ...

Over the last 2-3 days I haven't heard anything on the radio (my normal source of news) except the death of Nelson Mandela.  In pace requiescat; et lux perpetua luceat eis.  But I did begin to wonder what was happening in (say) Syria, or Iran, or the North China Sea, which China has suddenly declared that it owns.  In fact, my very first knowledge of Mandela's passing wasn't from the radio; it came from - Facebook.  Yup, I was browsing Facebook early in the afternoon and one of my friends posted a link. That was my first indication.  I guess I do get my news from Facebook, sigh.

This reminded me of the death of another world figure, many years ago.  In September 1976, I called my mother, just to check in, and she was taken aback that Mao Tse Tung had died and I didn't know it.  I replied that I didn't need to know that right away, and in fact she'd just told me, so now I did know.  Mao died on Thursday, September 9, the Thursday after Labor Day.  I have no idea why I didn't pick this up; I usually read the newspaper.  But I didn't know.  I stand by my statement to her then that if something really important happens, someone will eventually tell me.

Odd.  Both Mao and Mandela died on a Thursday.  Should we worry about Thursdays?

What a change in information sources in 37 years!  In 1976 I accessed the Internet (yes, I did) on a 3600 baud dialup connection, to a paid (very highly paid) database that told me what the peso or whatever was worth on a given date - and only that. (I used a Texas Instruments SilentWriter 800 terminal that used heat to print out the data.  I could practically see the electrons march across the line.)   Now I'm using a high-speed broadband connection to post random reminiscences; and I find out about new events almost in real time.  I remember having more time back then, though.

Safety

I've written about this before, but it comes back around in my head every time I hear another broadcast about how we have to do some asinine thing so we can be "safe."  We have to take off our shoes and go through a metal detector (and now a body scanner) so we can be "safe" boarding a plane, because various people have done evil things on planes, including one guy with a dud bomb in his shoe.  Thank God they've decided the body scanners will spot bombs in underwear; the day you have to be strip searched to get on a plane is the day I quit flying; and driving to visit my sister takes 10 hours.  It would be amusing to watch the business community cope with it, though.

The latest thing to make us "safe" is new FDA rules which effectively make organic agriculture, habitat conservation methods around farms, and anything resembling normal farming, illegal.  This is because e. coli contamination in some bagged California lettuce spread a moderate epidemic, and the entire food industry went shrieking crazy.  The FDA suddenly became aware that farming is dirty.  Animals on farms shit; wild animals and birds passing through farms shit; and the shit gets on the fruit and vegetables and then we all get sick.  (Some of us were once trained that you washed anything you brought home before eating it; what happened to that?  Not to mention, why do you buy lettuce in a bag and not by the head?)

I will not apologize for the word shit.  It's a fine old Anglo-Saxon word; if it was good enough for Geoffrey Chaucer, it's good enough for me.  Part of our cultural problem is that we regard perfectly natural bodily processes as somehow evil and not to be discussed in polite company.  (Thank you, Queen Victoria - not.)  There are doubtless people who would stop shitting if they could - except that it would kill them.

Anyone who's ever been on a farm knows that animal and bird shit is part of the package.  They also know that if you compost it and put it back on the soil, it will enrich the soil, and you won't have to pay Monsanto a penny for it.  Can this be why the new FDA rules ban using manure as fertilizer?  Well, not ban, exactly:

Using natural fertilizers such as manure and compost would become "very problematic" if the rules take effect...

The FDA proposes a nine months wait between applying manure and harvest - plus a 45-day waiting period after applying the compost.  Current organic standards are 4 months, no additional waiting.  (See the article I linked.)  This basically makes growing crops impossible.  Doesn't anybody at the FDA know anything about farming??  On the published evidence, the answer is no.  The human race has been feeding itself with this kind of farming for 10,000 years and now they say it's too dirty?

My dad grew up on a farm in Missouri.  I remember my grandmother plucking chickens for the pot in our kitchen.  We still tell about the time dad brought home a live turkey for Thanksgiving and then had to chase it around the yard with an axe.  Fresh food will not make you sick if you wash everything and cook everything properly.  This is not rocket science.  But many people don't know how to cook any more, and many can't afford fresh food.  Which is about as unsafe as you can get.

Let's get back to that word "safe."  We have to do these idiot things so we can be "safe."  People, we are not safe, and we never have been safe.  First of all, no matter what you think, we are all going to die. The only thing we don't usually know is when and how. Second, stupidity can be fatal, and ignorance can be fatal.  And even if you're well informed and not stupid, someone else's stupidity or ignorance can kill you at any moment (especially if the idiot is driving a car).  We've gone beyond the point where wild animals will kill us - usually, we kill them.  (This is normal, all you PETA folks - homo sapiens is currently the top predator in every biome it inhabits, and what top predators do is eat smaller creatures.)

So we aren't safe, and we're all going to die, and we don't know when.  Oh, woe, what can we do?  It's very simple.  Quit worrying about being safe.  If death is part of life, so is risk; and sometimes you have to take a risk to achieve a greater goal.  Try to avoid doing anything stupid; try to avoid being around people acting stupidly; do your best; keep moving forward.  I've taken three major, life-threatening risks in the last 15 years: three total knee replacements. The alternative in every case was losing the ability to walk. People die in hospitals all the time; people die under the knife.  If I hadn't taken these risks, I'd be in a wheel chair and not living in my 2 story home.  I might even be dead.  I calculated the risk and I won.  Calculate the risks and move forward, knowing and ignoring the fact that you aren't safe.  You may find you live longer than you ever dreamed.  Or maybe not.  We'd all like certainty; and it's the one thing we're never going to get.

Flaming bagpipes

Over the last couple of months I've seen two short videos posted on Facebook, in which bagpipe players, playing their instruments, caused bursts of flame to come out of the drones.  Drones are the pipes which stick out of the bags and produce a single tone each.  The two videos I saw were:

Unicycling Darth Vader Upgrades to Flaming Bagpipes
The Badpiper Thunderstruck

You can find more videos, if you're interested, by searching for "flaming bagpipes" on YouTube.

Now, I like bagpipes, a taste I inherited from my mother; not everyone does.  But to the best of my knowledge, the chanter (the one the piper fingers) and the drones are made of wood, although Wikipedia doesn't confirm this directly.  And I definitely learned from Wikipedia that bagpipe drones are either reed instruments (like a clarinet) or double-reed instruments (like an oboe).  This explains a lot about the way bagpipes sound, actually.

This leaves a huge question in my mind:  how the devil do you blow a huge blast of flame through a wooden reed or double reed instrument without incinerating the whole boiling, and the bagpiper too?  And yet both of these bagpipers continued to play while intermittently shooting bursts of flame out of the drones.

I spent part of last weekend at the East Bay Mini Maker Faire in Oakland, California. Mini Maker Faires usually have flame-throwers somewhere; this one had a guy (from Sheet Metal Alchemist) with a tower of flamethrowers; you could set them off by swinging a mallet at a lever, just like the old "ring the bell" carny act, except this one produces a huge burst of flame in the air above you.  I asked the guy about the bagpipes, but he said no, he didn't know anything about flaming bagpipes.  He sounded interested, though. 

Now, one group which is always at the Mini Maker Faire is The Crucible, an Oakland non-profit specializing in art production involving fire.  I dropped in at their booth and posed my question, and learned some very interesting things from a man there.  I regret that I didn't think to ask his name; he was an older man with a white beard, wearing a hat, sitting next to the booth.

We both agreed that anyone doing this has to put some kind of gas source (The Crucible uses propane) inside the bag.  It would have to have a jet poking up inside the drone, and some kind of spark arrangement on the jet to light it; finally it would have to have either one or two switches the player could use to control the gas flow and the spark (separately or together).  My consultant pointed out that the flow of gas up the tube, before ignition, would cool the area somewhat.  Also, if the flame only lasts for a second or two (and I didn't see any that lasted much longer than that), it probably won't affect the wood of the drone at all; and, of course, the flame will go away the instant the gas flow stops. 

Now, what about the reed or double reed?  Reeds are usually at the end of the instrument where the air is blown in; in a bagpipe drone, that's inside the bag.  If you tapped the gas source into the drone above the reed, it wouldn't be affected by the flame at all.  The gas doesn't have to pass through the reed, although the air from the bag does.

Without talking to someone who's actually created one of these things, this is all pure speculation.  But at least I'm no longer wondering why the whole megillah doesn't burst into flame.

Is This Normal?

The U.S. is back in business for the moment, paying its debts as usual.  At least in the S.F. Bay Area, public attention is now focused on the BART strike, which began conveniently the day after the government shutdown ended.  Wouldn't want to confuse our crises, now, would we?  But the government funding mess isn't over.

The bargain that everyone in Washington was so relieved to achieve only lasts until February.  According to AlJazeera, the government is funded until January 15 (and still at the ridiculous, arbitrary sequester levels), and the debt ceiling has been raised until February 7.  How appropriate.  We get Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's off, then Groundhog Day will come around on February 2, and we'll go through the whole brouhaha again.  Just like the movie.

Convince me it's not true.  Why wouldn't it happen again?  The people who created this snafu are all still in office.  Sen. Ted Cruz still thinks he's God's gift to someone (I'm not sure whom), and certainly still thinks he can parlay this into a run at the presidency in 2016.  I was relieved to see that, pushed to the wall, Speaker Boehner was capable of calling an open vote on a straight bill to put the government back in business.  My confidence that he'll do it again is limited.

The Senate and the House, as they now appear, seem to be ungovernable, and unable to govern.  Their hallowed rules allow a single senator to put any action on hold, indefinitely, and without even revealing a name.  I do know that the structure of the Senate was designed to amplify the power of smaller states against larger states, but this is ridiculous.  The surreptitious last minute rule change in the House, which allowed only the Majority Leader to ask to bring a "clean bill" to a vote - which is normal procedure in the House for any member - was a blatant abandonment, not only of normal House procedure, but of democracy itself.  Without this rule the government would not have shut down.  This was just sleazy.

I heard one promising item among all the mess, and I'm still not sure I believe it.  The chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees (Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Patty Murray) met for breakfast and will convene a committee to develop - wait for this - an Actual Budget.  Congress hasn't passed an Actual Budget since 2009 (or maybe since 1997 depending on the definition).  My confidence that they will actually negotiate and agree on something that would be good for the country is very small.  But they're saying all the right things.  They've given themselves a deadline of December 13.  If they can come up with an actual, bipartisan budget and get it through both houses of Congress, maybe we can relax and just run the country - at least until next October 1...

We can't keep doing this.  We made fools of ourselves in front of the entire world. Is this really what we want to become?

What really infuriated me is the way Congress callously threw tens of thousands of federal workers out of a job, for an unspecified period that lasted (in fact) for three weeks, while being paid themselves the entire time.  The days of the solid middle class are gone.  Very few working families can go for 3 weeks on their financial reserves these days (if they have any), especially when the safety net programs (welfare, food stamps) were also shut down.  Sure, they'll get back pay; but how does that help if they've already been evicted?  Not to mention all the unfortunate small businesses, in small towns around the national parks, whose entire livelihood depends on tourist traffic which was shut down on a moment's notice.  Congress has totally lost contact with the people they are collectively supposed to serve, and it is a national disgrace.

Boehner's Impossible Dream

Everyone involved in the Federal government shutdown, starting with John Boehner, knows that he could end the stalemate in a microsecond.  All he has to do is ignore the Tea Party and call a vote on the "clean" continuing resolution already passed by the Senate.  It's pretty evident that, between the Republicans who are very nervous about the Tea Party stance and the Democrats, the CR would pass.

Boom. The government's back in business.  But it doesn't happen.

I've read in multiple places that Boehner is afraid that, if he ignores the radicals and passes the CR, he'll lose the House Speakership.  Could be.  But he doesn't seem to realize that he's already lost it - he can't control his caucus.  A small but very loud section of his caucus is controlling him.  In fact, as far as I can tell, the person really driving this melodrama is Senator Ted Cruz, who isn't even a member of the House of Representatives!  Meanwhile Boehner cowers behind the podium, making bold but meaningless statements about not wanting to see the government shut down.

The title Speaker of the House used to carry real weight.  It meant a man who could get things done.  The current Speaker of the House cherishes the title so much that he has abdicated all the power to a small group of radicals from gerrymandered districts, just so he can continue to be addressed as "Mr. Speaker."

If he were to act to pass the CR and put the federal government back to work, he might leave the Speakership with some of his honor (that old concept) restored.  As it is, if you listen carefully, you may hear the sound of real Congressional leaders of the past - Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson (a Senate Majority Leader before he was VP), Tip O'Neill and their kin - giving Boehner the razzberry from the heavenly ramparts.

Understanding Egypt

Anyone who is keeping an eye on the situation in Egypt needs to read an article that appeared a couple of days ago in the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle.  Fortunately, it isn't behind their new paywall.  The author is Frank Viviano, a career Egypt correspondent.  The article is:

How social media led U.S. astray in Egypt

Speaking from his 30 years of experience as a regular Egypt correspondent, Mr. Viviano makes points about Egypt, and about the coverage of the "revolution," that I haven't read anywhere else, including in the Economist; and they're important points.  The situation in Egypt isn't what we think it is; it may be much worse than we think it is.  Read the article.

For that matter, there isn't much the U.S. can do about Egypt, any more than we can "do anything" about Syria.  What would we do, send in the 101st Airborne?  I fully support President Obama's hesitation to take "firm action" there - what firm action? 

P.S. A Letter to the Editor in today's Chronicle, also supporting Obama's Egypt stance, read, "Since when is the United States policeman to the world?"  I read that and thought, since about 1947, as a matter of fact.  (Do these people actually not understand 20th century history??)

Anyone else remember "namephreaks"??

Reading the news this morning I saw an astonishing namephreak in this story about San Diego mayor Bob Filner.  This has nothing to do with him personally, but I was hornswoggled when I read the name of his lawyers.

Mr. Filner is represented by - wait for it - Payne and Fears, LLC.

Is that a wonderful name for a law firm, or what?  Would you use that name for your law firm?

Too Soon to Celebrate

In the wake of the SCOTUS decisions yesterday on same-sex marriage, everybody is jumping for joy.  Stop, people, and look at what they actually said.  In the DOMA case, the court threw the entire business of regulating same-sex marriage back to the states.  The majority opinion said:

The federal government, throughout our history, has deferred to state-law policy decisions with respect to domestic relations.

Now count:  how many states do we have?  Fifty.  How many states consider a same-sex marriage legal?  Twelve (thirteen once the appellate court stay is lifted in California).  How many states actively ban same-sex marriage in some way?  I counted thirty-three on the Wikipedia list, but your count may vary by 1 or 2; and a lot of these (I didn't count) don't even allow domestic partnerships.  Plus 5 states with no opinion.  Just take a look at the map in the Wikipedia article:

Same-sex marriage status in the United States by state

Come on, people.  This is good news for the federal benefits etc. of the residents of the few states that allow same-sex marriage.  If you live, however, anywhere in the South, or on the Great Plains, or anywhere except California, Washington, and the New England states, your gay marriage is toast unless you can convince your local legislators to rule otherwise.  Best of British luck on that.

Because the flip side of a decision that the states can decide about same-sex marriage is that any Congressional action to approve it nationally (assuming you could get such a thing through the current House, which is crazy thinking) would also be unconstitutional, because it's a states' rights issue.

Keep raising money for the campaign, folks.  You still have a long row to hoe.

The IRS and the Tea Party

KQED broadcast a segment today about the Congressional hearings currently in progress on the IRS's "persecution" of various "Tea Party" and "patriotic" organizations which tried to get tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4).  I've already expressed my opinion on 501(c)(4) groups (see Fix the Damn Tax Code, posted on May 21).  I don't believe that tax code section should even exist, because it gives tax exempt status, under cover of "social welfare," to organizations that wouldn't know an actual social welfare project if they fell over it in the street.

A blog post from the Washington Post suggests that the primary groups 501(c)(4) is intended for are volunteer fire departments and civic leagues; I concede that those groups do indeed contribute to social welfare.  I don't see the San Fernando Valley Patriots (see below) under that rubric; but the definition of what is allowed is frankly fuzzy (another reason to get rid of this).  To see just how fuzzy, read the official IRS definition:

Types of Organizations Exempt under Section 501(c)(4)

Pay particular attention to the link  Organizations that engage in substantial lobbying activities, to see how fuzzy.

But section 501(c)(4) does exist, and these groups tried to get the status, and the IRS had the nerve - the gall - to ask them questions about how they operate!  I can still hear the sweet, can-you-believe-this tones of Ms. Karen Kenny, of the San Fernando Valley Patriots, complaining that they had asked her organization (I summarize, but read the KQED text) if it had ever broken the law during protests, and whether they ever planned actions that would break the law.  "We're the San Fernando Valley Patriots," she said offendedly, "not Occupy Oakland."

I have news for you, lady.  Part of the IRS' job is to find out if applicants for a 501(c)(4) exemption are doing more political organizing than the law allows (however much that is).  This may come as a surprise, but the San Fernando Valley Patriots are not above the law.  Neither are organizations that have the words "Tea Party" in their name.  If you want this tax exemption you still have to comply with the existing laws and rules, and the IRS is entirely within its mission to ask you this stuff.

I still think that 501(c)(4) "social welfare" organizations are political organizers in sheep's clothing, and they should be treated like political organizations and forced to disclose their donors.  But as the law stands, they're entitled to tax exemption if political activity is not their primary focus.  And that means that when the IRS asks them what they do and how they do it, it is merely doing the job we pay it to do.

Real Men Don't Type

I was just listening to a segment of NPR's Science Friday on teaching seniors how to deal with computers, and a man named Andy called in with a story about his 80 year old father, who is an accountant, and who has for thirty years refused to learn to use computers.  He still does accounts on paper.  Andy complained that his father is underemployed for that reason, and he couldn't understand why all their efforts to convince him to change had failed.

In the late 1970s I worked for one of the (then) Big Eight accounting firms.  I was their office librarian and records manager.  And I remember a phenomenon that may explain Andy's father's reluctance, which he may not have thought of.  This was when personal computers were just coming in; I remember "borrowing" the Apple IIe that the consulting arm had bought, so I could put my department budget onto Visicalc instead of 17 column ledger.

The consultants, as you may gather, were perfectly happy to play with this new toy, but I remember that the older accounting partners were very very reluctant.  And it was obvious then why:  in that era, businessmen did not type.  They didn't use keyboards at all; the closest they came to a keyboard was a 10-key adding machine (and you haven't seen fast until you've seen one of these guys adding a column!).  They dictated or wrote notes to their secretaries, and the secretaries typed, and brought the documents in for review and correction, and retyped if needed.

So these men wouldn't use computers because they couldn't type, and it would have been a major loss of face to try to type and fail.  Andy's father is about the age of the partners I'm talking about, they were in their early 50's and up. He may not want to use a computer for the simple reason that he never learned to type and at 80 years of age, he may not even have the manual dexterity to learn any more.  Andy, he's 80; just leave him alone.

Fix the Damn Tax Code

I can't stand this any more.  I have to speak out.

Senators Levin and McCain are yelling at Apple because they don't think it pays enough taxes, and it has "offshore entities" that have "no legal residence for tax purposes."

Everything Apple did was LEGAL under the U.S. Tax Code.

The Senate Finance Committee is freaking out at the IRS because of the way it audited some Tea Party "social welfare" organizations, trying to find out if they were doing enough political lobbying to invalidate their tax-exempt status.

Nothing I've seen suggests anything more than an overzealous first-line IRS employee trying to establish the rules for a legal entity that shouldn't exist anyhow.

All you congresspersons and senators trying to make publicity points out there:  YOU wrote the tax code.  Most of you have been in office for at least 20 years.  You built this mess.  Now you're complaining that you don't like it.

Well, go and fix it.  You, Congressmen and Senators, are the only people who can fix the tax code, but instead of doing some actual work (negotiating what a tax code ought to look like, for instance), you'd rather sit around and yell publicly about the awfulness of corporate tax evasion.

The tax code is what it is because Your Corporate Masters told you they wanted all those loopholes - and you obediently set the loopholes up.  Why else would the tax code allow corporations to stash money overseas and not pay tax on it?

The whole 501(c)(4) tax entity exists because some large donors wanted a way to collect tax-exempt money, without revealing their donors, and still be able to do some political organizing as long as they could say it "wasn't the primary activity."  And the Tea Party groups wanted to set them up because political organizing is their primary activity; it's what the Tea Party does.  Tell me one real piece of "social welfare" work any 501(c)(4) organization has done.  When I see one of them running a soup kitchen I'll believe the "social welfare" bunk.  For that group.

So, outraged Senators and Representatives, until you fix what's wrong with the tax code, I don't want to hear one more word out of you about the awfulness of corporate tax evasion or the terrible abuse the IRS heaped on the poor Tea Party.