Grumble Grouch

Not Understanding Nationalism

2006-02-14T14:37:00.000-05:00

Nicholas D. Kristof, writing on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on February 14, 2006, said that

The single biggest mistake we have made since World War II has been the failure to appreciate nationalsm, whether in China, Southest Asia or Latin America -- or, now, Iraq. Given the origins of the U.S -- an insurgency fueled by the maladroit policies of King George III, who never undersood American nationalism -- you'd think we would be more sensitive to such sentiments....

There never was any "American nationalism" until George III created it. Judging from the documents, speeches, and slogans I learned in American History way back when I was in school, the colonists wanted only the same privileges that the king's subjects enjoyed back home in England.

The slogan "taxation without representation is tyranny," attributed to Massachusetts politician James Otis, asks for representation, not national identity. The opening of the Declaration of Independence (1776),

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another ...

refers to "one people," not "one nation." And its bottom line was

That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; and that as FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES, they have full Power to levy war ... and do all other Acts and Things which INDEPENDENT STATES may of right do.

Recall that "state" at that time meant a region with its own sovereign goverment, not a portion of a larger region subject to a higher government.

A year later, the Articles of Confederation (1777) read:

Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union between the states of [list]. I. The Stile of this Confederacy shall be "The United States of America". II. Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled. III. The said States hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defense, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare....

The colonies were to be sovereign states, "united" for specific purposes only.

Even the Constitution, which begins

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

and then goes directly into formal detail, does not specifically refer to an "American nation."

It wasn't that King George didn't understand American nationalism. There was no American nationalism until the colonists were forced, by his own blundering intransigence, to conclude that the rights they thought they deserved could be obtained only by forming their own nation. George III didn't misunderstand American nationalism, he created it.

So in Iraq, which contains mutually hostile Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds within its borders, the blundering American occupation might unite these factions to create a new Iraqi nationalism.

Kansas evolution

2005-11-16T13:52:00.000-05:00

The Kansas State Board of Education recently revised the state's standards for teaching science.

One change they made was the definition of science itself. Their old definition was

Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us.

This they changed to

Science is a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.

Some critics object that the only reason for removing the phrase "natural explanations" is to allow the introduction of "supernatural explanations." Nonsense. The new definition improves on the old one by listing the elementary processes of the scientific method. These processes, consistently used, do not admit the supernatural.

In fact, most if not all of the changes in the Kansas science teaching standards have to do with evolution. Two of the stated aims of the changes are to:

Exclude intelligent design from the standards, without prohibiting it.

Make it clear that evolution is a theory and not a fact.

Certainly, evolution is theory and not fact. The experimental or observational evidence is fact. Everything else is either hypothesis (conjecture not yet or not adequately supported by fact) or theory (a body of conjecture well supported by fact). Most of science in general is theory and not fact.

As for the supposed neutrality of neither including nor prohibiting the teaching of "intelligent design," there's no neutrality there. The standards still call for the teaching of evolution beginning in grades 5-7, and further detail is called for in grades 8-12, including detailed coverage of variation, adaptation, and inheritance.

But also included in grades 8-12 are some controversial additions. One change is the addition of the statement that

Biological evolution postulates an unguided natural process that has no discernable [sic] direction or goal.

Critics ask why evolution is singled out when all scientific theories postulate an unguided process. I can answer that: many popular scientific explanations refer to adaptations as being guided by an individual's desire to pass on its genes to future generations. According to the scientific theory, there's no such desire. Individuals either survive and reproduce, or they don't, and if they don't, future generations won't have their genes. Any genes we see in currently existing individuals are there because they were passed on, usually because they were either adaptive or at worst neutral. So the unguided nature of the process has to be emphasized.

What I would question, though, is the word "discernable." The theory postulates no direction or goal whatever, discernible or not.

More troubling are the following statements:

The view that living things in all the major kingdoms are modified descendants of a common ancestor (described in the pattern of a branching tree) has been challenged in recent years by:

i. Discrepancies in the molecular evidence (e.g. differences in relatedness inferred from sequence studies of different proteins) previously thought to support that view.

There's no "challenge" here. Molecular evidence is known to be imperfect.

ii. A fossil record that shows sudden bursts of increased complexity (the Cambrian Explosion), long periods of stasis and the absence of abundant transitional forms rather than steady gradual increases in complexity, and

Fossil evidence is also imperfect. And the idea of "steady gradual increases in complexity" belongs to the hypothesis of gradualism, as distinct from the newer hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium (which postulates that species tend to remain stable for far longer than it takes for new species to emerge). The facts challenge gradualism, not evolution.

iii. Studies that show animals follow different rather than identical early stages of embryological development.

Only the discredited hypothesis that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" demands that all species have identical early embryonic forms. In the theory of evolution, the form of the embryo is (like any other trait) subject to adaptation.

None of these facts "challenge" the theory of evolution.

Here's another troubling statement:

Whether microevolution (change within a species) can be extrapolated to explain macroevolutionary changes (such as new complex organs or body plans and new biochemical systems which appear irreducibly complex) is controversial. These kinds of macroevolutionary explanations generally are not based on direct observations and often reflect historical narratives based on inferences from indirect or circumstantial evidence.

There's something left out here. If "microevolution" is change within a species, then "macroevolution" should be the formation of new species, and perhaps "megaevolution" would be the emergence of new body plans or complex organs.

As to the emergence of new species, Darwin found his observations of the finches he found on the Galapagos Islands quite compelling. The only reasonable explanation was that a single stock of finches came to the islands and diverged to form several new species.

As to the emergence of new body plans and complex organs, there's no evidence that it could not happen. There's even a hypothetical description in a recent Scientific American of how fish evolved into quadrupeds. Really, the notion of "irreducible complexity" does not exist in the theory of evolution. There's no criterion for when complexity would become "irreducible," because there's no reason to suppose that it ever would be "irreducible." Within the theory there are systematic efforts to reduce the evolution of amazingly complex organs to sequences of less amazing adaptations. Not every such sequence has been described, but progress is being made.

I wish the Kansas State Board of Education had subjected the hypothesis of "intelligent design" to the same criticism that they applied to evolution, since then they would have prohibited it. There is in fact no empirical evidence of a designer, beyond an unwillingness to believe that species could have evolved without one, nor is there any explanation of how the designer could have executed the designs. "Intelligent design" is simply not science. But I'm afraid it would have been politically impossible for them to say so.

Where's Telavir?

2005-09-05T11:20:00.000-04:00

If you look at the bottom of the page you'll see a line that says "Visit my alter ego Angry Old Man." Today, that link leads to an error message: www.angryoldman.us can't be found. And my "photo," which is hosted on the same site, is missing.

The site is hosted by Telavir. The name server is also hosted on telavir.com, so if the site server shuts down, the name server also shuts down, and the site isn't just down, it's nonexistent.

If anybody knows what happened to Telavir, whether it went out of business or was wiped out by hurricane Katrina or whatever, please write a comment on it.

Eight / twenty-nine / oh five

2005-09-05T11:05:00.000-04:00

Remember the Alamo. Remember the Maine. Remember Pearl Harbor. Remember the World Trade Center by the mnemonic code 9/11 (through its similarity to the emergency phone number 911).

But how will we remember New Orleans, practically destroyed when hurricane Katrina struck it and and dumped Lake Pontchartrain into it on August 29, 2005?

Eight / twenty-nine / oh five was not an unforeseen natural disaster. Last year Joel K. Bourne, Jr. predicted the event with terrifying accuracy in the October 2004 National Geographic. He even told the month it would happen. Only the year was left to the reader's imagination. It was not a question of whether it would happen; it was only a queston of when.

For decades, plans to halt the erosion of the delta, or strengthen the levees that kept New Orleans dry, or both, were made and then curtailed or abandoned for lack of money. Now the plans are moot, the cost of the destruction is far greater than the cost would have been to prevent it, and the death toll may well exceed that of 9/11.

How does New Orleans today resemble Iraq?

Planning was inadequate.
Financing was and is inadequate.
There aren't enough National Guard people.
Necessary resources are not being provided.
There's no official civilian body count.
It didn't have to happen.

Unprecedented in England

2005-07-24T19:43:00.000-04:00

Did England just revert to the Dark Ages? An unprecendented event occurred in London on Friday: British police chased down a frightened, unarmed man until he fell to the ground, then shot five bullets into him as he lay there, killing him instantly. His only offense was that he had emerged from a house they were watching, while wearing more clothing than they thought was appropriate for the weather.

Compared to some events that have occurred in New York, the British actually look better than we Americans. This was no case of police officers mistaking a wallet for a weapon and shooting to kill when they should at worst have aimed to disable. London had just been subjected to two series of suicide bombings. The police had reason to believe that the man they were chasing might have been connected to those bombings. The man could have been carrying a bomb under his coat, he was acting as though he might detonate the bomb at any moment, and nothing short of killing him would ensure that he could not do so. The killing of an innocent man was unfortunate, but under the circumstances it was done according to official policy.

But do you see what has happened? The terrorists succeeded in creating a situation in which the British police were compelled to do what they had never done before (at least not in recent history): hunt down and kill an innocent man in cold blood.

Terror in the White House

2005-06-30T10:44:00.000-04:00

What's a terrorist? Not just somebody who throws a bomb. The object of terrorism is to create a climate of fear that will divert people from their ordinary day to day occupations.

So it was that when a small private plane (according to this morning's New York Times) ventured into restricted air space over the nation's capital, President Bush was whisked away to a "safer place."

No longer do we assume that an aircraft overhead is an ordinary, daily occurrence. Now every plane that passes near the Capitol or the White House is a threat to be fled.

The terrorists have succeeded in establishing terror.

Social Security Reform

2005-06-27T16:28:00.000-04:00

Long time no post.... I don't ordinarily like to get political here, but this was just too much: an ad by the Cato Institute headlined "The real issues of Social Security reform" listing them as "Ownership ... Inheritability ... Choice."

That's a diversion. The real real issues for Social Security reform are simply that it remain social and secure.

Ownership, inheritability and choice are all appeals to separate the individual from society. Social Security is social because it works by all of us chipping in together. It remains secure because we pool our resources, manage them as a group, and don't let individual choices jeopardize security or let personal concerns like ownership and inheritability divert resources from its primary goal of providing a safety net for the aged and disabled.

You want to know how I would reform Social Security?

Look at some of the historical facts. The Social Security tax rate was increased in 1983, during the Reagan administration, partly because the Social Security trust fund was nearly depleted, and partly to provide for future benefit payments to the large numbers of retirees expected in the post-WWII baby boom generation. From then on, Social Security revenues have greatly exceeded expenditures, and the surplus has gone into the trust fund.

Now look to the future. The baby boom generation will start to retire in the next few years, and by the time the Social Security trust fund is predicted to run out, (currently predicted to be 2041), most of them will have passed on. At that point, we may have to raise the Social Security tax as the program returns to a pay-as-you-go basis.

Why do I say we "may" have to raise the tax? Because the current shortfall is due in great measure not to any inadequacy of the tax rate but to inadequacy of the tax base. Because income inequality is increasing along with total income, most (if not all) of the income growth is going to people who earn more than the cap for Social Security taxes (currently $90,000). Lower-income workers are not getting much income increase because they're underemployed, and they're underemployed because of competition from lower-wage workers either in, or from, other countries.

That suggests that all we have to do is ramp up the US economy so we use our own workers, young and old, for all they're worth. Get more work from them, pay them more, collect more Social Security tax from them, and the system will stay solvent. But it would also help to get rid of the cap on the taxable income.

Obviously ownership, inheritability, and choice have nothing to do with either the problem or the solution.

P.S. I hesitated to give the link for the Cato Institute's lies about Social Security, but here it is, along with a link to the facts from the Social Security Administration to set things straight.

Stem cells and human lives

2005-05-24T16:26:00.000-04:00

President Bush was quoted today on public radio saying that when we consider embryonic stem cell research, we should remember that we are dealing with "real human lives."

The only real human lives we are dealing with are the lives of people who could be helped by treatments that might be derived from research on stem cells. The embryos themselves are only potential human lives. An embryo is a cluster of living cells that can become a real human life only if a woman nurtures it for nine months, feeding it through her own body, carrying it about on her own legs, and delivering it at the end of that time in agonizing labor.

To equate an embryo with a real human life is to utterly devalue what a woman gives to turn one into the other. I mean, let's compare the contributions of the male and the female to the creation of a living newborn child. The man experiences a few minutes of sheer pleasure and then he can go away. The woman bears the child for nine months, as above, with morning sickness, backache, food cravings, all that good stuff. But as far as Bush is concerned, as soon as the man has done his "job," that's it, it's done, we have a "real human life." But that's Bush.

The Creation of Man

2005-04-19T11:27:00.000-04:00

I heard on the radio this morning that some people believe Cain was the offspring of a mating between Eve and the Serpent, and was the first (evil) Jew, while the later offspring of Eve and Adam gave rise to the Christians. That got me to wondering what really happened, assuming that the Bible really contains an accurate description of the creation of the world.

Was Adam white? If he was, and Eve was cloned from his rib, then Eve was also white. So where did the black people come from? Where did the Chinese and all the other east Asian people come from? If they're descended from Adam and Eve, then you can't object to interracial marriage, because we're all one family. If they're not descended from Adam and Eve, where did they come from?

There's no mention of them in the creation story. Are they among the animals that were created before Adam? If so, they would be a different species. But the existence of so many fertile crosses between races suggests that we are all really one species.

Biblical tradition says we are all in fact one species. The human species, in fact every species, was reduced to one mating pair that survived on the Ark during the Flood. Each of the sons of Noah gave rise to a different race. How can that be? Can a white couple give birth to a black man?

Talking about gaps in the theory of evolution, this seemed to me to be a serious gap in the theory of creation. But then I found the answer on Christian Answers.net. Adam and Eve, having been created with the best possible combination of genes, were mixed race, so they had the capability to give rise to offspring of any race. How were the races separated so that each race lived in a different part of the world? Natural selection, of course - a borrowing from the theory of evolution.

Against People of Faith

2005-04-15T17:06:00.000-04:00

Senator Bill Frist thinks he's clever. He's joined a group of Christian conservatives for a telecast that says Democrats are "against people of faith" because they're blocking W's nominations for federal judges.

I wonder what he means by "people of faith." There's nothing wrong with people of faith being federal judges. But it would be wrong for a judge to put his faith ahead of the law.

We have a Constitution that says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Bill Frist and his companions want to sidestep that provision. They won't write religion into the law. They just want activist judges who base their decisions on religious faith instead of on the law.

A flyer advertising the telecast shows a young man apparently trying to balance "public service" against "faith in Christ," with the heading "He should not have to choose." No, he doesn't have to choose. As long as he respects the separation of church and state that's built into our national heritage, he can have both.

The United States is not a Christian nation. It's an inclusive nation. We have Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, atheists, and many others, all hoping to live in peace and harmony under the rule of law. We don't want Iraq to become a fundamentalist Islamic state, we don't want Iran to remain a fundamentalist Islamic state, and we don't want the United States to be a fundamentalist Christian state.

Nobody around here is "against people of faith" except Bill Frist and his friends, who are against people of any faith but theirs.

Constitutional issue: religion

2005-03-24T10:30:00.000-05:00

A case recently reported in my morning newspaper has to do with the rights of inmates in state prisons to assemble for the observance of unusual religions, such as Wicca and Satanism. Some prison administrators say they have no such rights.

The first amendment to the Constitution says, in full: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

There are two parts here that have to do with religion. The first part says there can be no religious establishment. That means that if inmates are allowed to hold Jewish or Episcopalian services, for example (which they are), they should be allowed to hold services of any religion, not just "established" religions. That led one prison administrator to ask whether religious inmates were being given rights that inmates without religion did not have.

Yes, they are, and the Constitution supports those special rights. I said the first amendment has two parts that concern religion, and the second part protects the "free exercise" of religion. The Constitution does not protect the free exercise of, say, sports, or science. It does protect, as we see above, the free exercise of religion, as well as speech, the press, assembly, and petition. Any such activities that are so protected by the Consitution have special rights.

I suppose that means that in order to afford all citizens the equal protection of the laws (as prescribed in the fourteenth amendment), we have to define atheism as a religion. There is no such thing as an irreligious person. After all, atheism is a faith. Religious people have faith in the teachings of their religion. An atheist has faith in his own belief that they are all mistaken. So it's not such a stretch, after all.

Constitutional issue: Terri Schiavo

2005-03-24T10:08:00.000-05:00

Terri Schiavo (pronounced shyvo) is a middle-aged woman who has been in a vegetative state for years. Her husband wants her feeding tube removed; her parents want her to be kept alive. The state and now the federal government side with the parents; the courts generally side with the husband. As I write, court decisions have resulted in the removal of the feeding tube, and Mrs. Schiavo will expire in at most a few weeks unless the decisions are reversed.

The constitutional issue is whether Congress had a right to pass a special act authorizing federal courts to take up the issue. Many people are saying Congress should not have done that, because whether the feeding tube should be removed is a state issue, not subject to federal jurisdiction.

I disagree on technical grounds. The fourteenth amendment says, in part: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The fourteenth amendment was adopted after the Civil War to protect the rights of minorities, specifically former slaves. Before the war, the basic presumption behind the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was that a strong central government could become tyrannical, and therefore the states were the guardians of liberty. After the war, that presumption was reversed. When slavery was abolished, it was noted that some of the states, but not the federal government, had been supporters of slavery, and so the federal government became the guardian of liberty.

The fourteenth amendment has been interpreted to mean that any action by a state that might be construed as a deprivation of life, liberty, or property may be reviewed by the federal government or federal courts to determine whether a person's "civil rights" are being violated.

It's just ironic that the federal government is intervening to protect the life of an insentient white middle-class middle-aged woman, not to protect the lives of minorities unfairly sentenced to death in state courts. But that's how the ball bounces these days.

Tell a Marketer

2005-03-22T08:08:00.000-05:00

Yesterday's New York Times carried a letter by Josh Nugent, of Amherst, MA, who wrote that he worked for a year as a telemarketer and doesn't like the dumb tricks people play on telemarketers who call them. "No, you're not entertaining us ... [s]top wasting our time and yours."

Listen up, telemarketers! I'm not trying to entertain you. You started by wasting my time. I'm just amusing myself so the time is not a total waste for me -- and so you can get a taste of what if feels like to have your time wasted.

I never spent a year at it, but I've spent a few evenings making political campaign calls. Most of the people who answered were polite. The few who were glad to hear from me made my day. The few were downright rude gave me a chuckle after they slammed down the phone. Cold calling is not for the thin-skinned.

The Retiree Burden

2005-03-17T15:28:00.000-05:00

Being an old man, I get nervous whenever anybody starts talking about pensions, health care, or anything like that. So when this morning's paper reported that G.M. had lost money, the sentence about health care being a heavy burden on the company caught my eye.

G.M. (General Motors for short) is an old company. Old companies have a lot of retirees. In fact, when an old company gets in trouble and downsizes, it can have more retirees than active employees on its payroll! (I'm afraid the company I get my pension and health care from has already reached that point.) That can make it hard for the company to compete with upstart companies that don't yet have many retirees. And that in turn can make it hard for the company to keep up with its pension and health care obligations.

Pensions are hard for a company to keep up with, because people are living longer than they used to. Look at people who retired 20 years ago, at the age of 65, when they weren't expected to live much past 70 or 75. Now here they are (many of them, anyway), thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, still collecting their pensions (at the company's expense) at the age of 85! Pensions depend on the same life expectancy tables as life insurance. But life insurance companies have it easier. When people live longer, they keep on paying premiums longer before they die and collect on their insurance, so the insurance company gains. Insurance companies also sell annuities, which are like prepaid pensions, and they lose money on those when people live longer, but at least they have a balance; the profits on life insurance make up for the losses on annuities. Companies like G.M. have only the losses. And just when they thought the profits on their stock market investments would help them pay out on their pension obligations, the stock market took a dive. And when they thought their profits on production and sales would help them, the economy stalled.

Health care burdens are even worse. Longevity is increasing gradually, but the cost of medical care is increasing by (as they say) leaps and bounds. Each new miracle of modern medicine costs more than the previous one. He who falls ill and is cured today, lives to fall ill and be cured another day. The costs keep mounting. The back strain that put me in the hospital for over a week, the bleeding ulcer I got from the Vioxx I was taking for arthritis, my coronary bypass, and so on and so forth, all these things add up, and it's mostly paid for by employee benefits.

Why is our government talking about an "ownership society"? Nobody wants to own these problems! The Constitution was written to (among other things) "promote the general welfare." These are problems the government should own. Laying them off on private individuals or private companies does nothing to "secure the blessings of liberty for [them] and [their] posterity."

Shoot first, ask questions later

2005-03-08T14:07:00.000-05:00

What's this I read about an Italian journalist who was taken hostage in Iraq a while ago, and was just released, and as she is going to the airport to go back home her car is shot at by American troops and one of the occupants (an Italian secret service agent protecting the journalist) is killed? Allegedly they were approaching a checkpoint at a high rate of speed. Well, darn it, they're in Iraq, you don't go poking along on a dangerous road, you get where you're going as fast as you can!

Anyway, I thought the whole idea of a checkpoint is that it's the point where you check on people passing through to see if they're entitled to proceed. How can you check them at the checkpoint if you shoot them before they get to the checkpoint?

The excuse is that they're worried about suicide bombers. A suicide bomber will stop at the checkpoint without intending to proceed, and will blow himself up to destroy the checkpoint and kill as many Americans as possible at the checkpoint. So you have to stop everybody and check up on them before they get to the checkpoint. You shoot at them if they're going at a high rate of speed, you shoot at them if they're going very slowly because they're trying not to approach at a high rate of speed, and you shoot at them if they're going at normal speed because you know they're just trying not to appear conspicuous. Why not just stand at a safe distance and shoot everybody, and not have a checkpoint?

If you really don't want people approaching the checkpoint at a high rate of speed, why build a smooth straight road toward the checkpoint? Be sensible. To begin with, post a speed limit. Next you have to enforce the speed limit. Make the road viciously twisty, give it a washboard surface so their tires can't hold traction at high speed, and put heavy rubble on both sides of the road so if a vehicle goes off the road it can't move at all. Anybody who goes too fast will go off the road, with the possible exception of race drivers. Now you can shoot at any vehicle that goes off the road, as well as any vehicle that goes through the esses with a race driver at the wheel.

But if you say you're there to bring democracy to Iraq, and you find yourself shooting at Iraqis before you know who they are or why they're on the road, and even shooting at Italians because they might be Iraqis, then maybe, just maybe, you're in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing in the wrong way for the wrong reasons. Yes, there's a job to be done, and somebody's got to do it. But you don't have the ability, and the people you're trying to help don't have the confidence in you, to do the job. There's such a thing as recusing yourself, and it's high time for the Americans in Iraq to do just that.

What's an old man to do?

2005-03-08T13:25:00.000-05:00

It's been a month since my last post. Sorry about that. It's been a bad month. To begin with, I've got involved in some volunteer work where I've made myself indispensable, so there are times in each month when I'm pretty busy. But besides that, an awful lot has happened.

To begin with, my wireless access point died. That meant that my laptops, on which I do my volunteer work, lost contact with the printers on the wired network. So I contact the manufacturer for a warranty replacement, get on eBay to get a spare -- and see which one arrives first (the warranty replacement), and meanwhile rig the laptops into the wired network so I can keep on working.

Then my wife's computer quits, and won't restart. Won't even power up. After a while it's OK again, but then it quits again. After a couple of repeats of this I figure out that the fan in the power supply has seized; I can start it by pushing it with a pencil, but after a shutdown overnight it won't restart. So it's a trip to the local computer shop to get the power supply replaced so she can get on with her work.

Some time in the same month I broke a front tooth. Not an accident, just that my bite has been going off kilter and applying pressure to the tooth until the front surface came off. That took several trips to the dentist to get a temporary crown and several fittings and finally the permanent crown.

For the last several months we had been negotiating with workmen to get our kitchen cabinets refinished, and that job was scheduled for late February, so we spent the week before "Kramming the Kontents of our Kapacious Kitchen Kabinets into Kartons and Karting" them into the dining room and living room.

Then, the day the work on the kitchen started, my wife's centenarian mother died! So now we are moving stuff out of the assisted living place where she had spent the last few years, and trying to figure out where it will go. This, while moving our own stuff back into the kitchen.

Am I glad that month is over! We have our living room back (though not the dining room, and the garage is still a mess -- but it has been for months) and the kitchen is pretty near back to normal and we can get on with our lives.

Confusion about Medicare

2005-02-09T14:09:00.000-05:00

As an old man, I get Medicare coverage. So does my wife. We are both also covered by our employers' health plans. Because I'm retired, and my wife is still working, her plan is primary, Medicare is secondary, and my employer's plan is tertiary -- for both of us. The tertiary plan seldom pays anything, but that's not the point.

Most years, around the first of the year, her plan starts sending out the same questionnaire with every EOB (explanation of benefits), asking whether that status has changed. She fills out one and sends it back, but they keep on coming for a couple of months. During that time, they reject every claim with the explanation that certain information has not yet been provided by the plan member. Some of the providers get worried, and we try to calm them down until the dust settles.

This year there were no questionnaires. Instead, her plan is rejecting every claim with the explanation that they have to know why Medicare rejected the claim. That's funny, Medicare couldn't have rejected the claim because they don't get it until after her plan processes it. Oh, I see. Suddenly, on January 1, they forget they're primary and think Medicare is primary.

So as soon as each EOB comes, we get on the phone, push the right buttons to escape from the automated system, wait for a human "representative," and explain that they're really primary. The representative says they will reprocess the claim. The providers still get worried. The other day I fielded a call from one and explained that we take care of the problem and they will get their money.

This is just one example of the hassles we get into because of the multiplicity of health coverage plans. And these are good plans -- I'm grateful that we can afford to pay for the "traditional plan" and don't have to fall back on the mercies of an HMO. Still, many providers are confused. Every once in a while I have to phone a provider to explain which plan is primary, or who gets the claim next.

For a supposedly advanced country, we sure have a stupid health care system.

Departure from Iraq

2005-01-30T10:10:00.000-05:00

Today the Iraqis are voting in a US controlled election. In an interview three days ago with New York Times correspondents, President Bush is reported to have said "that he would withdraw American forces from Iraq if the new government that is elected on Sunday asked him to do so, but that he expected Iraq's first democratically elected leaders would want the troops to remain as helpers, not as occupiers."

The elected leaders won't ask for a US withdrawal any time soon. They are identified as collaborators with a foreign infidel army of occupation. Their only authority is today's election, and the authority for today's election is our military force. They know that if that force leaves they will all be dead within a week.

Yesterday, Reuters reported that "President Bush said on Saturday that the U.S. mission must keep going to help the new government get its footing." I hope Bush knows what that really means. I know the Iraqis do.

Property tax reform

2005-01-26T22:10:00.000-05:00

Whoa ho! AARP New Jersey writes in Grassroots Update (which I got in today's mail) that "New Jersey's property taxes are out of control." You have to know that a few years ago New Jersey drastically cut its income tax rates, especially in the upper brackets. That put a heavier burden on the local property tax. Now, as they wrote, many "older New Jerseyans" with low incomes and high-valued homes are being squeezed beyond their ability to pay.

AARP New Jersey wants to fix that by putting a limit on the property tax bill depending on ability to pay. making the property tax look more like an income tax. Next, somebody will want to make the income tax look more like a property tax. Or replace the income tax with a sales tax, but make the sales tax look more like an income tax, which is an idea I've seen floated.

The obvious fix is to reduce the property tax burden by raising the income tax rates that were lowered a few years ago. Is our political system so screwed up that it's politically impossible to do the obvious?

Marriage amendment

2005-01-26T09:43:00.000-05:00

Somebody asked me a question yesterday about the proposed "Marriage Protection Amendment" (or whatever they're calling it now), which is supposed to define marriage as being only between a man and a woman. The question was, how would it apply to intersexed people, that is, someone who is not clearly either a man or a woman? According to KindredSpiritLakeside about one person in 2000 is ambiguously sexed. This is not about sexual preference, but sexual appearance.

I'm the wrong person to ask that question. I'm not a lawyer. Logically, I supppose that amendment would allow anybody who is legally a man and anybody else who is legally a woman to marry each other, but I'm no expert.

More to the point, the marriage amendment is a bad idea. Amendments to the US Constitution should deal strictly with the structure, function, and powers of the federal government. The one amendment that dealt with behavior, the 18th (which prohibited "intoxicating liquors") had such awful unintended consequences that another amendment, the 21st, was needed to repeal it. We need a slogan: "No More Prohibitions!"

Marriage as we know it is an entanglement of church and state. It's a holdover from the Middle Ages, when Church and State were two aspects of the same "establishment." The Church promoted the divine right of kings, and the State defended the Church. The clergy performed marriages, and the law recognized them. In the US today, the local government issues a "marriage license," but the marriage does not actually happen until a member of a state-authorized clergy "performs" it, or unless a "civil" marriage (evidently, from its name, a special and perhaps lower class of marriage) is performed by an authorized government official.

Legally, marriage used to be a license to have children, or even a license to have sex. But over the past century, the law has changed. It no longer regulates what goes on between two consenting adults in their bedroom, and has become more open-minded about how many people of what kind it takes to raise children.

The state should get out of the marriage business altogether. "Marriage" should be a concern of the "church," and the "state" should concern itself with "civil union." Marriages can be performed by whatever clergy (or substitute for clergy) the people involved want, but the law should have no concern with those ceremonies. For purposes of insurance, inheritance, and other legal matters, the state should recognize civil unions between any two (or maybe even more) people who want to live together and form a permanent family.

Art, good and bad

2005-01-22T09:06:00.000-05:00

Went to a concert last night, Oslo String Quartet. They started off with Grieg's F major quartet, written in 1891. Or rather, half written; he wrote only the first two movements, out of an intended four. According to the program notes, he had writer's block. The music was OK, but it didn't engage me. I can understand why he didn't finish it: he didn't have anything to communicate.

Next on the program was the obligatory work of contemporary music: the U.S. premiere of Arne Nordheim's "Five Stages," written in 2001. All dissonance. It's as though composers in the twentieth century decided that there was enough pretty music, and henceforth music had to be ugly. Needless to say, I didn't like it.

After intermission they played the Sibelius quartet called "Voces intimae," written in 1909, 18 years after the Grieg quartet. I was immediately engaged. There was a musical theme, musically developed. The composer had something to communicate, and did so.

Let's get serious. Art is communication. There are (at least) two phases (which may in fact overlap): inspiration and execution. In the inspiration phase, the artist gets an idea. It doesn't have to be an idea that can be put into words (if it could be written in words, the artist wouldn't have to paint it, or compose it, or whatever). It can be simple, but it mustn't be trivial. And then in the execution phase, the artist communicates it. Art is not the solitary expression of an artist's feelings, like laughing, screaming, or vomiting. It's the movement of feelings from the mind (heart, soul, whatever) of the artist to the artist's intended audience. The key requirement in this phase is craftsmanship. The artist must know the tools and techniques and painstakingly apply them to create the intended effect. Slapdash won't do.

I think Picasso is overrated. It's as though painters, like composers, decided in the twentieth century that there were enough pretty pictures and henceforth all pictures had to be ugly. But his "Guernica" is successful, because the ugly picture communicates an ugly idea. The disconnected image fragments accurately represent the chaos of a village being bombed.

Not only art, but science, mathematics, and other activities also require inspiration to produce an idea and craftmanship to convey it. Darwin's "origin of species," and Einstein's paper on special relativity, both convey essentially simple ideas with meticulous craftsmanship. In politics, the Republicans understand the importance of inspiration and craftsmanship; the Democrats either don't understand it, or don't have what it takes to put it together.

Undersea foolishness

2005-01-18T16:40:00.000-05:00

A US Navy submarine was reported to have run at full speed ten days ago into an undersea mountain that was not on the charts. Blame immediately was cast on the people who did not update the chart after a satellite image taken five years ago indicated that a mountain was there. But was the chart really wrong? The part of the chart shown in The New York Times didn't show that there was a mountain there, but on the other hand it didn't show that there wasn't a mountain there either. In the region where the collision occurred, the chart showed no soundings, no contour lines, nothing but a reported spot of discolored water. That area was clearly uncharted.

If the chart had shown a mountain, that area should obviously have been avoided. If the chart had shown that there was not a mountain there, the sub crew would have been justified in proceeding full speed ahead without sonar, as they did. But because the chart showed no information there at all, they should have proceeded with caution, which they didn't.

Too many people have a tendency to believe that every question has an answer. Ignorance is intolerable to them. If they don't see a mountain, they will either conclude that there is no mountain, or (if they want a mountain) they will insist it's there even if it's not. They can't accept the fact that nobody knows whether or not there's a mountain there. (I'm using "mountain" as an illustration; think of other examples.}

I like the song that goes "I'll never know what makes the rain to fall; I'll never know what makes the grass so tall," because in spite of that admission of ignorance, the singer says "I'll get along as long as a song is strong in my soul."

There's a difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge (vs. ignorance) consists in how much you know. Wisdom (vs. foolishness) consists in how much you realize you don't know.

Bloginning

2005-01-18T16:00:00.000-05:00

Today is the first day of the rest of my blog. Already I'm grouching, because blogging is supposed to be easy, but it turns out there are a lot of things to do in the setup that, as a newbie, I haven't figured out yet. More later.