Julbord or Christmas Smörgåsbord

I just posted my latest two Reader Weekly articles at my website: Not what I intended and Julbord or Christmas Smörgåsbord. The latter is a quick overview of one American family's adoption of a Swedish tradition.

If you think a smörgåsbord is a pile-it-all-on-your-plate buffet, be sure to read this article.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smörgåsbord. If you read Swedish, see also .http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smörgåsbord.

Why Minnesota has no snow

The wind farms in eastern Colorado and eastern Montana aren't really for generating electricity. They are to blow all the snow back west so that the ski resorts have plenty of snow.

Once you do with less, you can't take more

Irregular Blog
I just went down to the kitchen to fill my water bottle. I took a big swig and spat it out right away. It tasted like swimming pool water! I had forgotten to fill my bottle with filtered water and used water direct from the tap. When one is used to the chlorine taste, it is not so bothersome. Once one gets used to almost no chlorine taste, the chlorine taste can be overwhelming.

Something similar happened to us with salt after living in Europe for six years. Most American cooking, especially restaurant cooking tasted really salty to us. This is still true after over thirty years.

I like to say excess salt belongs on only two "foods" - pretzels and the rims of Margarita glasses.

A church by any other name

Or political correctness raises its head again.

The church I attend is going to have a vote next week on whether "church" should be continue to be part of its name. One member gave an impassioned argument for dropping "church" from the name in favor of "congregation".

Her argument was that there are people who are put off by the word church because of past abuses of Christianity. I wonder if these people would even attend if the name is changed. I also wonder if by trying to be all things to all people an organization becomes nothing to everybody.

She also brought up the old saw about replacing "mankind" in hymnals and elsewhere with "humankind". But the words have essentially the same historic meaning. Various sources attribute "human" as coming from the latin "hominus" - "man". On the other hand, "man" originally meant "person" and came from a word meaning "mind". Does this mean if we don't want to use "mankind" for people in general that they have no minds?

Once the males were called "werman" and the females "weibman". Rather than corrupt other people's writings to make them politically correct, why not revert to calling males "wermen"?

See my article on Bowdler.

Why can't men sing?

Or a better title might by "Why don't men sing?

This seems to be a hard question to answer. There are very few references on the web to either phrase. The only references I could find were to my article of February 2005 and a discussion in England in 2004.

Besides all the other reasons like not a guy thing, changing voices, and lack of encouragement of those who don't do well, I've been pondering another aspect - matching resonance. Men may have a difficult time singing because they have more resonance in their voices than women. When they try to match the resonance of the dominant singers, they tend to try to sing too high and thus are way off pitch.

I tried an experiment with a song I'm trying to learn. I put the melody in my computer using the treble clef. Singing the melody was a big strain. I dropped the melody an octave and did much better. Once I had a feel for the melody, I went back to the higher octave accompaniment. I did much better. Even my severest critic, my experienced soprano wife, said so.

Fruitful or spiteful

Christians, Jews, and Muslims state they are guided by the words of the Old Testament, but many of them often seem to choose the words that tell them to smite their enemies. They seem to prefer "Be spiteful and destroy" rather than "Be fruitful and multiply."

Question for those using violence for political gain

What would be the long-range effect if lots of people started asking those who use violence to achieve political ends, whether they drop 500-lb. bombs on houses, lob mortars indiscriminately, or plant roadside bombs, what they are doing to achieve three important parts of a civil society:

Are you making it safe for children to play outside and to go to school?
Do the children have clean water and effective sewage?
Is electricity available 24 hours a day?

Those who use violence in the name of some idealistic goal should be embarrassed at the harm they are causing to achieve their goals.

True believers

Many true believers are quite willing to accept the artifacts of modern times, but they are unwilling to shed the world view "facts" of long gone times.

But a better analysis than this little sentence is expressed by the man who wrote

...[The true believer is] the mortal enemy of things-as-they-are and he insists on sacrificing himself for a dream that is impossible to attain....He is today everywhere on the march."

The author is Eric Hoffer and the quote is from his 1951 "The True Believer".

What is patriotism?

I have some notes at the bottom of "Who masterminded 'political' correctness?" by Dick Palmer and forgot to include them in "PC or PC?"

What is patriotism? I don't think it is shooting off fireworks on the Fourth of July, the wearing of red, white, and blue, or pledging allegiance to the flag. These are all rituals that anybody can follow no matter how they really feel about our history, our society, or our government. Look at a picture of all the little kids waving little U.S. flags as the President's motorcade whizzes past in some foreign country.

I think patriotism is basically three things:

Respecting the U.S. Constitution
Voting
Speaking our minds

When we don't do these, no matter how much we watch fireworks or pledge allegiance to the flag, we bring our country closer to a dictatorship, either of mob rule or a self-selected elite.

PC or PC?

Dick Palmer, a regular columnist for the Budgeteer News of Duluth, this week wrote, "Who masterminded 'political' correctness?" a diatribe against all the silly groupthink about what is appropriate speech.

I wanted to write a letter to the editor, "Who masterminded 'patriotic' correctness?" but I dithered too long to make the deadline for this week's issue.

Patriotic correctness in one of its guises is unquestioning obeisance to the federal government, especially in military matters. It also considers anyone who questions certain phrases as being against "our freedoms". I thought one of "our freedoms" was freedom of speech. I think the climate of patriotic correctness is more dangerous than political correctness because it stifles critical thought about our government's actions.

The whole flag worship issue is one; somehow the U.S. Flag has become more important than the U.S. Constitution. I don't care if some misguided person somewhere sometime burns a flag; they should be prosecuted for burning books, trash, or any other objects outside of approved containers. But we don't seem to be concerned about anybody burning the Constitution, especially the many symbolic "burnings" of the Constitution by Presidents and Congresses.

"Defense" became a patriotically correct word with the reorganization of the Department of War and the Department of the Navy into the Department of Defense. This aids in the cover of calling any military action, no matter how questionable, as "Defense". How many places do you think you can get in a serious discussion with a diverse group of people that a President's decision to go to war had nothing to do with the "defense of our freedoms"?

Interestingly, those who argue for patriotic correctness in matters of symbols and wars are most often those who can think government can do nothing right in almost every other matter - whether it's running a weather service, designing highways, managing the economy, or just providing for the "General Welfare". How does government magically and correctly decide that a war is a good thing?

Years ago I borrowed from some library "PCPC: Political Correctness and Patriotic Correctness". It took on both of these stiflers of free thought. I have tried to find it with many different searches including WorldCat without result.

I did find something similar: Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America by Robert Hughes. A copy is at the University of Minnesota, Duluth library.

Two interesting online reviews are by Scott London and John P. Sisk.

I could go on all day on references to these two silly ideas, but I'll leave you the The Coffee Place's Joke Stack.

No wonder nobody reads this blog

My user count is about one a day for this blog, but no wonder. I have been remiss in adding anything interesting to it.

I would like to say I'll do better but then I look at my to-do list. I have to start making fruitcake this week, both for a church bake sale Sunday and for shipping to friends and relatives.

We just bought a new printer/scanner which can scan slides, and we have hundreds, if not thousands, of slides to archive. So far the results are not encouraging, but that is a topic for another blog.

Then I have all the accounting, filing, and other paper work to clear off my desk.

Finally, there is all the email to answer. I'm doing my best to keep the "unread" list to under 20.

This is retirement? Why do we keep thinking of more and more things to do, and only half-finishing most of what we actually start?

Ain't standardization wonderful?

I'm sitting in "Brewed Awakening", a coffee shop in Grand Rapids, Minnesota with a free hotspot. However, I can't seem to upload the latest updates to my website. I'm using Fetch to move the pages to my website and the little doggie keeps running and running but never stops. It should only take a few seconds to upload three small files. I'll see if Blogger accepts this entry.

I'm visiting my daughter's "cabin" in Cohasset, about 15 or so miles west of Grand Rapids. They have no phone other than cell, and so I came here to check up on things.

One of the interesting things I did this morning is show my youngest grandson how to sharpen an ax. He gets the side-to-side motion but not the down motion. Its the down motion that really does the sharpening.

I'm trying to post my latest Reader Weekly column, "Forgetting". The forgetting goes on. I forgot to put my reading glasses in my pack, and now that I'm set up here, I don't want to go back to my truck to get the glasses in the console. Squint! Squint!

Do squirrels really bury nuts?

I was watching a gray squirrel in my yard this afternoon scurrying this way and that. I didn't think he was burying nuts and seeds so much as getting food. In fact, he went to a garden timber, sat on it and ate for quite awhile. I wondered if it was just a myth that squirrels buried nuts.

A quick search for "squirrel" and "bury nuts" turned up over 700 hits. One interesting one is "Squirrel hoarding". Gray squirrels favor deciduous forests and red squirrels favor coniferous forests and stash their nuts differently. This is leading to an imbalance in forest propagation. See the article for how humans can help shift this imbalance.

The robots are coming!

"The robot economy" by Arnold Brown is an excerpt from his book of the same name. It was published in the October 2006 issue of Current History.

"The South Korean government intends to roboticize that country, based on a vision of robot-centered intelligent society."

The U.S. military is working on robotic units for battlefield surgery and would eventually like to have autonomous robot soldiers. Congress, quick cut the funds for this! Do we want the berserkers of science fiction whose mission is to destroy all that they come across? Who is to say who will have control of these robots?

The article quotes Neil MacDonald of Gartner, "Over the next 10 years, the rate of IT job loss that can be attributed to automation will be about double what we think will be outsourcing." Arnold Brown calls this "othersourcing".

As I read the article, I pondered how much we've seen this othersourcing with software programs that have become everyday tools for many people and have become increasingly sophisticated.

The word processor has replaced the secretary in many offices, including highly-skilled secretaries. I remember that I tried to direct my memos to secretaries who would give clean uncorrected copy on the first try without any weird right margins. Now the average office worker can produce a clean, nicely margined memo at any time. And with a few minutes more work, have the grammar and spelling checked and corrected.

Spreadsheet programs have replaced many specialists who worked with special paper, sharp pencils, and calculators. Now anyone who can organize numerical data can produce a spreadsheet using some very complex functions.

Brown sees a trend from humankind to mindkind. Communication technology is causing a shift in how people are utilized. Companies can reach out to a network of creative types, some even volunteers, such as customers, for ideas instead of hiring people.

The shift is from managing people to project management, "putting together all the varied resources and components, wherever available and in whatever form, to accomplish the desired task or vision."

Worst to cursed

Robert Baer was quoted in this morning's Star Tribune as saying, "The drift in the entire Middle East is going from worst to cursed."

He is a former CIA operative and the author of See no Evil and Sleeping with the Devil which were the basis of the movie Syriana, starring George Clooney.

He went on to say, "Lebanon is going down the drain, and everybody is looking to the Iraq Study Group for the answer. The answer, it seems to me, at least in the long run, is for the United States to develop alternative sources of energy."

Pity the poor fly

Imagine you're outside and it's getting dark and cold. You look off in the distance and see a small light. You move toward the light and find it's coming from a cave. As you draw nearer you feel warmth coming from the cave. You enter and discover that you're in a huge cavern with food all over. You gorge yourself and find a resting place. Then the light goes out!

Eventually the cavern is bright again, but the light is different. Instead of coming from the roof of the cavern, the light is coming from the sides. There are big holes in the sides of the cavern, and you see sunlight coming in from these holes. You go over to one of the holes and find your way blocked by a solid, invisible substance. You feel all over the surface of this substance, but can find no way past it to the outside which you can see so plainly.

You make louder and louder noises of frustration. Suddenly, you see a large flat object coming right at you. You quickly dodge it and go to another opening. Again you are blocked by an invisible substance. Where, oh where is the hole you came in? Again, you make noises of...

What's performance?

Many want to pay teachers for performance, but what's performance? Do you measure performance as year-to-year progress in reading or as the instillation of a life-long love of reading? And not all teachers teach reading.

I don't remember much about my first music teacher in high school. I just have some vague visual memory of the classroom. I certainly don't think I was a better musician at the end of the semester than I was at the beginning.

However, I do remember him saying, "Anyone with intelligence can sing." Almost fifty years later I started voice lessons and have improved in fits and starts over a five-year period. If that high school music teacher is still alive, should the school district give him a bonus for performance now?

Playing toady not in the Constitution

The Star Tribune editorial today, "Americans need their Congress back", included this statement:

And rarely has a Congress so willingly abandoned its constitutional role to play toady to a president’s agenda.

I know there are many who believe that when the president says, “Jump,” Congress is supposed to ask, “How high, Mr. President.” I don’t find that in the Constitution.

I think the editors meant,

And rarely has a Congress so willingly abandoned its constitutional role and played toady to a president’s agenda.

Two party system or else

Several letter writers to today's Star Tribune castigated suppporters of Hutchinson and Binkowski for the losses of Hatch and Wetterling to Pawlenty and Bachmann. That is, people who voted for the Independence Party candidates caused the losses of the Democratic candidates to Republican candidates.

Maybe if the Democratic voters had voted for the more moderate Independence candidates, then the Independence candidates would have won.

Maybe if the Democratic candidates had given a message that appealed to more voters they would have won.

Maybe if the people who stayed away had showed up the Democrats might have won. In fact, the Independence Party candidates had fewer votes than there were no shows.

Is one vote worse than no votes?

Four Minnesota candidates for Congress got zero votes. Didn't they at least vote for themselves? (MPR: Campaign 2006: Election Results: U.S. House)

The Minnesota gubenatorial candidate pair Nelson F. Gonzalez and Tom Baumann got one vote (MPR: Campaign 2006: Election Results). Did one change his mind and vote for somebody else.

There were two other pairs that got two votes.

All three pairs were between by the pair Write-In - 945 votes.

Change the guard, let the Guard come home

I heard on Minnesota Public Radio that Donald Rumsfeld might go and then got confirmation via the online New York Times. Now maybe in a month or two the war will be run right and start to wind down. I hope Robert Gates is not a yes man and can open Bush’ eyes that the world is not as Bush dreams or wishes it was.

I’ve been keeping an NPR Election screen up all day on Virginia (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/files/elections/2006/general/by_state/sen_gov/VA.html?SITE=NPR&SECTION=POLITICS&TABULATE=1). I wonder what gives with that last precinct. Strangely, the vote totals keep changing.

Given that Lieberman is one of the independents and that Bernie Sanders caucused with the Democrats when he was in the House, that guarantees a balance at least. If Webb wins in Virginia, then it tips to the Democrats. Even then, so many Republicans are not supportive of Bush that he has lost his rubber stamps. A divided government is very good for governance.

Smoking is not a private act

Many defend smoking as a right that should not be interfered with. To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Your right to smoke ends where my nose begins."

Unfortunately, smoke gets to other people's noses far in distance and time from where the smoker was.

Recently my wife visited an office which had a smoker. He never smokes in that office and was not there when she was. When she went to bed hours later, she wished she had washed her hair. It had absorbed the smoke that exuded from the smoker's clothes when he was in his office.

Today she tired of reading the newspaper. She said, "I don't enjoy reading the paper because it smells of smoke." One or more of those who handled the papers from press to vending box were heavy smokers who left their residue on everything they came near.

Taxes on people but not corporations?

Irregular Blog
As expected, Thomas G. Donlan, editor of Barron's, made a pitch against taxes on corporations ("A Halloween Fright", Barron's, Oct. 6, 2006). "Corporations don't pay taxes, they pass them on to people: Customers pay higher prices; workers get lower wages and shareholders get lower returns on investment."

But when workers are taxed, they want more money from their employers or their customers. That also means customers pay higher prices. So, we shouldn't tax workers? Then who do we tax for all the government services we want? Imports? That was what many of the Founders thought would provide national revenue. But an import tax by one country (A) leads the exporting country (B) to tax imports from country A, resulting in less exports from each country and higher prices for consumers in both countries.

Do we privatize all government services so that nobody pays taxes? How much do you think you'll pay some private fire company to come to your house when your neighbor's house catches fire, especially if he didn't pay any fire company to come to his house because his house "would never catch fire". Do you want to pay a toll to drive on a street to get to the grocery store?

If corporations shouldn't pay taxes, should they be treated as legal persons? The Founders probably didn't forsee this twist. To them a corporation was a chartered organization to provide a good or service that a person or the government could not provide. At that time, most shareholders were actively involved in the company.

But what about the government services a corporation receives? Should a corporation not pay property taxes for police, fire, and an educated work force? How does a community tax shareholders for these services when the shareholders live in other states or countries?

Finally, if there are no corporate taxes will there really be more money for shareholders and workers and lower prices for customers? Or will there be more money for executive perks and salaries?

A high-level thank you

When we got home from Brimson with our load of wood there were a few phone messages. One was from Karla Ekdahl, the wife of Independence Party gubenatorial candidate Peter Hutchinson. She thanked me for my "wonderful op-ed piece" about voting who we believe in, not who others say we should. She said she "just cheered."

See "Vote your conscience, not the polls" below for a summary. See the Star Tribune letters for Nov. 2 (http://www.startribune.com/563/story/784760.html) for what was printed. The Star Tribune cut some out from what I actually submitted, but they kept the essence.

I talked to a few people recently about who they wanted to vote for for governor or for Congress. Although they liked the candidate who was not a Republican or a Democrat, they intended to vote for the Democrat so the Republican wouldn't win, even though they didn't like the Democrat very much either. This gave rise to another little voting saying:

Vote not against who you want to see lose.
Vote for who you want to see win.

Simple causes for complex events?

President Bush claimed today that the 4.4% unemployment rate proved that his tax cuts were working.

I immediately snapped my fingers to keep the tigers away; in other words there may be no causal relation between unemployment and tax cuts. It is rather simple-minded to claim one action was responsible for a given effect in a complex economy.

My wife said all the soldiers in Iraq was also a part. There are only 140,000 troops in Iraq but that is only part of the armed forces. I also thought that the war economy was also creating jobs to satisfy the need for ammunition, weapons, food, and other supplies.

Higher oil prices could lead to more exploration; the need for more computer power could lead to more support; students returning to school creates jobs in education and a need for non-students to fill some of the jobs the students held, more baby boomers are retiring and need to be replaced. It really is very hard to say what cause really stands out above all others for reduced employment.

Expensive wood

I heard years ago a long story about a multiple-thousand-dollar cord of wood. A man was going to save money on fuel by burning wood. He bought a chain saw to cut the wood and a pickup to carry it. He damaged the truck, cut himself with the saw, and had several other misfortunes. I looked for a current version but couldn't find it readily.

I almost had extra expensive wood although not on the scale of the above story. My wife and I were gathering small downed trees to break up for kindling and firewood. As I dragged one out of the brush my vision went blurry in one eye. A twig had hit me in the eye and knocked my contact lens out.

I immediately stopped in my tracks and didn't move my feet. My wife first checked my eye to make sure the lens wasn't off center. We both crouched down and tried to see a glint in the leaves and other detritus on the ground. I was just about ready to give up, use a backup lens, and order another when my wife found the lens about two-and-a-half feet in front of me and slightly to one side.

She made sure it was firmly in my grip, and I walked back to the cabin to clean it, take out the other, and put on my glasses. I didn't want to bother with the backup lens, partly because I still had more trees to pull out. But it was hard to walk on uneven ground with bifocals.

Wind and blowhards

We received the Nov/Dec. Utne today. I was wondering if we should continue to subscribe until I started leafing through it.

The first article that caught my eye was on small scale wind projects. Almost any big-box store can provide its power needs with wind power. So can anybody with about an acre of clear land. Some small cities may get 100% of their electricity from wind in twenty years. Some manufacturers are struggling to keep up with demand.

The second article is on I.F. Stone, a maverick, independent journalist, who wrote well and based his opinions on facts he could verify. He quit writing his weekly in 1971 and died in 1989. I remember that he was slowly going blind, but taught himself Classical Greek and wrote a book on Socrates. I know that the Univac library subscribed to I. F. Stone Weekly, but I rarely took time to read it. Many of his words apply today.

"The simple fact that occupying armies, whether allied or enemy, always become unpopular hardly ever figures in official calculation." - Stone on the Vietnam War

The online Utne doesn't contain the text of these articles. If you choose not to buy this issue, you probably can find it in many libraries.

Let's cut election costs

Since some commentators believe we should vote according to polls, why bother to even have elections? Why not just average the results of the three lowest bidders on election day?

It saves all those retired people from overworking because of crowds or being bored because so few show up. It saves the hassle of buying voting machines or the arguments over their accuracy. It saves all the "busy" people from having to take time off from work or detouring to or from work.

We can watch our favorite shows on TV without constant breathless interruptions for the latest results and what they mean. We won't have to stay up to see if our favorite candidates won. Say at 9:00 EST the three polls emailed their results to the FEC. The FEC would enter them into a database and the results would be available online by 10:00 EST. No waiting around to find if your candidate won, just click on the right box.

Gosh, this so simple why hasn't anybody thought of it before?

Finger pointers can laugh

As I wrote the previous (next to you in reading order), I had images of Tim Pawlenty flipping in another window. I had gone to each candidate's site to get the links for the previous message.

Pawlenty is dressed in a suit, a white shirt and tie, a blue open-collared shirt, and a Team Minnesota sweatshirt. The joke is that Peter Hutchinson has Team Minnesota as his name for the team of constitutional officers running with him. However, Pawlenty's sweatshirt is not the "genuine article". For a peak at Team Minnesota's shirts, click here.

Since I'm giving all these free references to the various candidates, I'll add a plug asking you to click on the advertisements of this blog (or my website).

Vote your conscience, not the polls

Lynnell Mickelsen wrote in today's Star Tribune that Peter Hutchinson supporters should vote for Mike Hatch to prevent Tim Pawlenty from serving a second term. She called this abandonment of Hutchinson in favor of Hatch "doing the right thing".

I wrote a letter to the Star Tribune in response to her suggestion that people vote according to the polls rather than what you really believe. The Star Tribune asks for exclusive rights, and so I can't publish the full text here.

However, I did mention that according to the polls Dewey should have beaten Truman in 1948 and that according to the polls Ventura would have come in third in 1998 against Humphrey and Coleman.

When you vote next Tuesday, do the “right thing” as you see it, not as someone else sees it.

Should Congress provide local jobs?

Rod Grams and Jim Oberstar, candidates for the Minnesota 8th District Congressional seat, have been pointing fingers at each other about job creation or loss. Grams thinks that Oberstar is responsible for the loss of mining and forestry jobs. Oberstar is proud that his efforts created 100 jobs here and 400 there. They both cite projects they support that will create jobs.

First, is it the business of Congress to create local jobs? Isn't that something best left to the states and other local governments? Even then, by creating specific projects, other than for projects with a public use, like transit, isn't government favoring a specific interest over other interests.

Second, how much can one Representative influence a whole industry, either favorably or unfavorably. Can a Representative put ore back in the ground after a mine is worked out? Can a Representative restore resources which have been taken off the market? Can a Representative create a market for a product that has been replaced by other products? Can a Representative mitigate the effects of automation on reducing the number of employees needed?

Some of the Mesabi Range deposits have been worked out. An act of Congress won't put the ore back. Some deposits are of lower quality than deposits elsewhere. Can Congress mandate that those deposits will be worked even if the company will lose money.

Forestry jobs are down for two reasons. One is that forest land has been taken out of production because the paper companies can make more money selling their land than harvesting the trees. The land is being sold for development, often for private recreational use. Many of the new landowners have no interest in seeing their land clearcut. Two, huge amounts of paper are being recycled, reducing the need to cut more trees. There is such a glut that landfill operators use newsprint to cover the day's take of trash.

Many things that used to be built with steel are now made with aluminum or plastic. Shall Congress mandate that more steel be used in automobiles, thereby increasing fuel consumption?

Productivity increases are generally regarded as a good thing, but productivity means fewer jobs. Huge electric shovels can quickly fill a huge truck with a third of the production of a single deep mine? Shall Congress mandate that more ore be mined with pick and shovel, and possibly with more death and injury?

What Congress and other governments can do is create a climate for entrepeneurship? That includes changing expectations from finding jobs to looking for opportunities, making it relatively simple to create most businesses without a horde of lawyers, and by not favoring some businesses which will take resources or opportunities from other businesses.

Some complex things are simple, sort of

For the seven years we've owned our house, we've had a bedroom blind that didn't close completely. No, nobody could see in, but it still bothered us. I tried fixing it, but I couldn't figure out how to get the cords undone and reset. And we really didn't want to pay someone else to do it.

Several weeks ago I saw a display of blinds in a hardware store. The store would cut the blinds to the needed length. I went home and measured the current blind and the window frame it was covering. Then did nothing more, partly because I didn't want to carry a six-foot package on the bus.

Last week we had a series of errands that we would be doing with the car. Before leaving, we took all the width measurements for the window, including that for each of the two windows in the set.

As I looked for help in the hardware store, my wife discovered much shorter blinds that would fit the individual windows without cutting.

Yesterday was the day to install the new blinds. I gathered all the tools I thought I would need and opened a package. The directions were straightforward and I could see how everything would work. The blinds would fit in the window without problem, neither too big nor too small. Note that we intended to mount in the window frame rather than on the outside. That is, we would mount them inside the box that the window fits in.

I picked up a mounting screw and looked for a drill bit in the bunch of old bits I had in the house. None were small enough! I looked again and I looked in the tool box in the truck. The best I could find was a small box nail.

I mounted the nail in the drill, but as I suspected, the drill was almost too big to drill the topmost hole. I would have to go in at a slant. Now I knew why whoever installed other insert blinds had used only one screw.

I did succeed in getting the brackets mounted, but I had to use the smallest screwdriver to do it. The handles of the others were to big to get a decent grip in the small space.

I slid the blinds in the brackets, put the covers on the brackets, and mounted the valences without much fuss. We did crease a couple of valences, but we probably won't notice most of the time.

Wow, what a difference! The two smaller blinds make the room seem much bigger and open than the one huge blind did. And with less light coming in, we may get a few more minutes sleep in the morning.

Terrorists there are stopped by an army?

"We're fighting the terrorists there so we don't have to fight them here." This sounds eerily like the "domino theory"; we had to contain the Communists in Viet Nam or else we would be fighting them on our shores.

But terrorists will not be contained by an army - people in London and Madrid found that out the hard way. If there is a current terrorist plot against the U.S., it won't necessarily be planned in Iraq or Afghanistan. Why run the risk of disruption? Let's see, it could be planned in Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Germany. Germany? Yes, Germany, remember some of the 9/11 attackers were in a cell in Hamburg.

If God said...

Michele Bachmann, candidate for the Minnesota 6th Congressional District seat, said that God told her to run for Congress. If God told her to run, why didn't God tell her opponents, Patty Wetterling and John Binkowski not to run?

Harry Welty leads in 8th District Poll

Harry Welty, the independent candidate for the 8th Congressional District, leads in a radio station's online poll. KDAL-FM has a poll on its homepage. The choices are Jim Oberstar (DFL), Rod Grams (GOP), and Harry Welty. The results as of a few minutes ago out of 243 votes were

Oberstar 11.11%
Grams 7.00%
Welty 81.89%

Considering that most polls actually talk to between 750 and 1000 people, this is a rather outstanding result, even for self-selected voters.

I would say that there are a lot of dissatisfied voters who don't like the two candidates that get all newspaper coverage.

Making news or reporting news

If you search for Welty on the Star Tribune's web site, you will find two recent stories: one on shingles ("a welty rash") and one on Eudora Welty, the late writer. This from a newspaper that boasts in one of its blogs that its political home page "includes the latest profiles of candidates, their stand on the issues, fresh news, a good list of political blogs of all perspectives and other links."

Harry Welty is on the ballot for Minnesota's Eighth Congressional District, has appeared on Twin Cities Public Television's Almanac debate for this seat, and is mentioned several times on Minnesota's Public Radio site. But nada for the Star Tribune and nada for the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

The Duluth News Tribune did invite Harry to submit an essay and published it on October 20. But they would not include him in a debate on local public television. He was not a major-party candidate.

I think newspapers and other media are doing two things that are not in the public's interest. One, by excluding candidates from coverage, they are making news rather than reporting news. Two, their requirements for major-party affiliation are a self-fulfilling prophecy. "How do you get coverage of a political campaign?" "Be with a major party." "How do you get major-party status?" "Get news coverage."

History repeats and nobody learns

Last night I read "Islam in Afghanistan" by William T. Vollman in Inside Islam. He wrote how Muslims from many countries went to Afghanistan to oust the infidel invaders, the Soviets. Interestingly, for its grander games, the U.S. funded and supplied these fighters, calling them "Freedom Fighters" even though they used terrorist tactics.

Now in addition to insurgents in Iraq who do not want foreign invaders, Muslims from other countries are pouring in to defend a Muslim country from infidels.

Not only do many of the U.S. policy makers not understand the culture of Islam, but they do not see the repeated lessons of history. Have they forgotten about the Crusades, which supposedly were to push the Muslims out of the Christian holy places?

Simple living is not always simple

One of the ideas of simple living is to heat with wood rather than oil, gas, or electricity. The latter "commercial fuels" are actually simpler for daily life.

You set a dial to the desired heat level and the furnace takes care of the rest. Gas and electricity are delivered to your home on an as needed basis. The oil company watches the weather and notes your past usage. When they think you have used up over half your tank, they deliver more and leave you a bill. Except for the cost, could anything be simpler?

As the price of fuel goes up, wood becomes more and more tempting. To use wood you have to have a proper stove or fireplace. An antique wood stove won't do in a modern house. They are inefficient and can be dangerous. The best thing is to have a sealed unit in which all gases go up the chimney and not into a room. These can be pricey. Expect to pay $6,000 for purchase and installation, including any necessary chimney work.

You could purchase wood and might save compared to the other energy sources. If you purchase wood, you need to find a reliable dealer who delivers the promised wood in the promised quantity at the promised price. And you thought buying an auto was tricky.

If you own a rural property with lots of trees, you might save over commercially bought wood. On the other hand you will be doing much more work at a decrease in your personal safety. Just one small act of carelessness can bring a tree crashing down on you or a chainsaw sawing you. You also have to plan well. For next year's wood you have to cut this winter to let it dry properly. Waiting until summer or fall will give you lots of green wood.

You can do like we have to do this year, rely on already dead trees. The problem is that the dead trees may already started to rot, making starting fires even more difficult.

Remember about the automatic nature of oil or gas. A wood fire is not automatic. First you have to lay the wood just so to ignite it. Then you have to adjust the damper or air intake as the stove heats up; this is to maximize the heat that goes into the room instead of up the chimney. Then you have to periodically adjust the wood to keep it close enough to burn well or add more wood. Oops. I have to check our fireplace now.

Well, I didn't add any wood but I pulled out the air intake. The fan hadn't come on because most of the heat was going up the chimney.

Unless you build very big fires and use lots of wood, don't expect a toasty house. With two small logs, the temperature five feet from our fireplace is 64 degrees (18 centigrade). We have a three-bedroom, two-story plus basement house. We wear lots of layers.

Expect to add 1/2 to one hour of chores to your daily routine. Besides bringing in the wood and tending to the fire, you will need to empty ashes, clean the debris on the floor, and clean the glass door.

I don't know if we are saving a lot of money or not, but I think of it as doing our part to "starve a terrorist". Our oil furnace rarely comes on during the day. I don't know how well we'll do when it is below freezing all day.

References:

"How to buy firewood", Minnesota Dept. of Commerce, accessed Oct. 25, 2006

"Firewood sales heating up", Minnesota Public Radio, Oct. 4, 2005, accessed Oct. 25, 2006

Where have all the Iron Range jobs gone?

In the Grams-Oberstar debates, one of the arguments is the loss of jobs on the Iron Range. Most of the blame seems that a U.S. Representative should be held responsible for this loss. However, there are technical and economic reasons for a smaller work force.

The biggest technical reason is productivity. One has only to go to the Tower-Soudan mine and compare it to modern open pit mining. The Tower-Soudan mine employed 475 men working three shifts with picks, shovels, and explosives. They loaded the ore into small cars to be hauled to elevators. It closed in 1967 because other techniques were less costly. See Pioneer Mine. Open pit mining involves huge electric shovels loading trucks holding 240 tons of ore. That is less than the fifth of a day's production from the Tower-Soudan mine. See the size of equipment used in "The Taconite Breakthrough".

One economic reason for the reduced Iron Range smaller work force is competition from other sources. Mini-mills produce steel at less cost from scrap metal than the taconite process.

I wonder if a single person in Congress can control forces like these.

No new taxes means no old fixes

"No new taxes" has become a mantra for many Republican politicians and they have carried out their pledge. However, the result has been that as costs go up many public services and facilities are not being maintained at an appropriate level.

The latest dodge around this is the proposed Minnesota Constitutional amendment to provide a formula to allocate money for roads and transit. The state legislature has been using automobile taxes for other things for years, and rather than raise taxes in other areas, they are using this gimmick to "raise" more money for roads and transit. That is, using the Constitution to do what they should have done politically.

Many who defend "no new taxes" say that government should live within its means, often comparing a government budget to a household budget on a fixed income. Many, including some of the "within its means" people, say government should be run like a business. If this is so, then, like businesses, government should raise prices to meet increased costs, including for the cost of new features that the public wants.

I hope we can have some politicians who are courageous enough to say, "The question is not whether taxes are too high or too low, but are taxes at the appropriate level for the services that people want."

Major party shift coming?

Will a major party shift occur by the next Presidential election? There are signs that it is beginning in Kansas and elsewhere.

This morning's Duluth New Tribune carried a Washington Post story, "Moderates in Kansas decide that they're not in the GOP anymore" (Washington Post, Oct. 19, 2006). I'd call it RINO becomes RINNA (Republican in name only becomes Republican in name not anymore).

Right now the Green Party is a distant third party in many areas. It has won many local and some state offices, but has no representation in Washington. Much of its agenda matches that of the "progressive" wing of the Democratic Party. If moderate Republicans start moving to the Democratic Party, will they, allied with moderate Democrats, take over the Democratic Party. If so, will more left-leaning Democrats start moving to the Green Party? And if this shift occurs on a large scale, will it leave the Republican Party as a minor third party? Will we be saying GOP R.I.P. (Rest in Peace)?

The invisible hand controls the market?

I just updated my Northland Reader article from 2000 on executive pay, "Talk about Boards with Conflicts of Interest!" I found that many of the links were no longer valid, and so I did another search. One search was

fiorina pay 1999 "69.4 million"

Carly Fiorina was the newly hired CEO of Hewlett-Packard and was one of the highest paid CEOs at the time.

Google only gave me six hits and only one seemed relevant:

The Winner-Steal-All Society and the persistence of the CEO-market myth

It has a great quote:

"[When] it comes to CEO pay, the grasping hand usually trumps the invisible one."

Help make voting private

Secret vote? Not really, anymore

Your actual vote is still secret, at least at most polling places, but politicians are working harder to predict how you will vote. According to the above story in today's Star Tribune of the Twin Cities, politicians are using detailed public and private data to predict how you will vote. If they think you are likely to vote their way, they will phone you, visit you, send brochures to you, and more to make sure you vote on election day.

If you consider this an intrusion on your privacy, you can help make it less profitable for those who practice micro-management of voting. Do whichever of these which suits your personality.

1) If you don't hear a voice when you answer the phone, hang up immediately. You are being called by a machine dialer. You may free a caller up to make the next call, but you are reducing the pool of people they have to talk to.

2) If you didn't hang up fast enough and the caller identifies himself or herself as a solicitor for this or that organization, say something like, "I do not respond to unsolicited calls" and hang up.

3) If you feel opposed to the calling organization, you can possibly get off their list by either asking that you be removed or by saying, "What makes you think I'm interested in your cause?"

4) If you're feeling ornery, you can draw out the conversation as long as possible. This reduces the time the caller will have to talk to other people, reducing the efficiency of this method of getting votes and increase its costs.

You can apply some of these same tactics to pollsters. By not responding you help reduce the accuracy of polls and thus help make a more competitive race. A more competitive race also gives third-party and independent voters a better chance of participating.

Property rights vs. property rights

Rod Grams, a candidate for the Minnesota 8th Congressional District seat, has written about and brought up in debates a property rights case that he considers an overreach of Federal authority. He used up almost all of his 600-word essay in today's Duluth News Tribune on this case. As I suspected, the Rapano wetlands case is more complicated than Grams makes it out to be.

The National Association of Counties reports that the Supreme Court decision was 5-4 and five opinions were written.

Amicus curiae briefs in Rapanos’ favor:

Mackinac Center for Public Policy
Attainable Housing Alliance files amicus brief

More details of the case in

Environmental Times, The voice of the environmental industry
Notes and Trends, "Bench and Bar of Minnesota", October 2003
Washington Report, City of Lincoln, Nebraska

This first of these three shows that the Rapanos are not as Grams depicts them. They are developers with many property holdings, and they intended to build a shopping center on a large property that had 48 to 58 acres of wetlands. The second deals more with the legal issues, and if I understand the article correctly, the Federal government's case was upheld by lower courts after the Supreme Court's remand of the case. Note that the Supreme Court did not rule completely in the Rapanos' favor, just that the case was argued in the wrong way. The third is a report on how Congress was dealing with this issue this year. It doesn't paint Jim Oberstar, the incumbent Representative, as such a callous Federal power-grabber as Grams does.

However, I found very little with a search on “rapano” and “wetlands” that was strongly in opposition to the Rapanos’ case. The closest was a blog of an Arkansas canoe club. Even this discussion was not all one-sided.

I’d say that this is mostly a state case. The question is did the Rapanos have all the proper state and local permits. They did not, and they even ignored the advice of their own consultant. There is also what would the impact of their development be on their neigbors. For example, was the wetlands a natural storage area that replenished ground water? If the water is no longer retained, the neighbors wells could have much less water.

There are two issues about property rights here, one clear and one not. The first is just how much authority does the federal government have? If Grams wants to limit authority here, is he willing to limit the authority in the Patriot Act? The second is what are the limits on “property rights”. People can’t start fires in their woods to clear them for farming. Or put another way, your property rights end where my water supply begins.

Disclaimer: I am an advisor and aide to Harry Welty, also a candidate for Minnesota's 8th Congressional District seat.

The future of energy

Harry Welty, congressional candidate, asked me to proofread his answers to a public radio questionnaire for candidates. One of the questions was about a huge goal-gasification plant proposed for northern Minnesota. See MPR: Coal gasification plant: worth the tradeoff?

This plant will produce 1000 megawatts of electricity. The area in which it is being built doesn't need that much power. Are there sufficient transmission lines to distribute that power to other parts of the state? If not, what kind of battles are going to be fought on the location of new lines.

Coal gasification requires steam. Where is the water going to come from and where is it going to go? The plant is proposed in the Hoyt Lakes area. Are these lakes big enough to provide steam for a large plant, drinking water for the area's residents, and recreational water? See Fossil Energy: DOE's Coal Gasification R&D Program. This site also says that gasification "eliminat[es] nearly all air pollutants and potentially greenhouse gas emissions"; but carbon, the chief fuel makes carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

Has anybody concerned the national security issues for large power plants? It is much easier for a determined few to take out a large plant than dozens or even hundreds of smaller plants. Remember the havoc wreaked by those who were toppling transmission towers a couple of decades ago.

Will solar and micro-turbines provide for power generation closer to the source? What is the future cost and efficiency of solar panels and batteries. Would a few solar panels and a couple of batteries provide evening lights and cooking power for a house? Even if the house got most of its electricity from the grid, would the future cost be low enough that neighborhoods would not go dark when a transformer blows or a storm brings down lines?

I can't do all the research I would like at the moment, but consider these statements:

“By 2030 the cost [of solar generation] will be comparable to electricity produced by a nuclear power plant.”
“Fossil fuel resources will be totally out by then.”

- Solar costs halved by 2010? Sharp thinks so, MSNBC, Aug. 31, 2006

I think this may be the basis of my next article for the Reader Weekly.

Foxes guarding the chicken coop (CEOs setting own salaries)

William McGuire, CEO of UnitedHealth, is the latest to get caught with his hand in the cookie jar. No wonder health costs are so high.

I wrote about the conflict of interest six years ago; I said that all the interlocking directorships of CEOs serving on each other boards does not give them an unbiased view toward executive compensation. You scratch my back; I'll scratch yours.

Education or training

My friend Don pointed out that much of what passes for education is really training. Are doctors and dentist educated or trained in their respective schools? Are engineers, musicians, and artists educated or trained? Many other skills that require higher education for employment are more learning best practice than learning how to create something new.

Education - a boon or a boondoggle?

The Atlantic, Nov. 2006, has an opinion piece, "A Matter of Degrees" which argues that a college education is not all that beneficial. One thing that is skewing the statistics on wages is that some college graduates' salaries are increasing dramatically, giving the idea that all college graduates' salaries are much better than non-graduates' salaries. A graduate with a degree in materials science may be earning quite a lot, but a Ph.D in medieval history may be earning less than an auto mechanic with a two-year degree.

Another problem is that employers are requiring more formal education for jobs that had traditionally been learned on the job. For example, hotels used to promote staff through the ranks with in-house training; now some chains require a four-year degree in hotel management.

Over-specialization of job requirements also limits the supply of available workers, thus driving up the cost. See my article "Tech staff shortage", a different perspective on the so-called tech staff shortage that was claimed during the .com boom.

While reading about the need for long-range goals of students to meet these new requirements, I thought about how we try to stimulate a result with tests rather than work from the beginning with encouraging interest in general. For example, rather than test for reading ability with teachers teaching to the test, why don't we spend more effort encouraging students to read in the first place?

I sent the following letter to the Duluth News Tribune on July 24, 2005. I do not remember if it was published.

Which is more responsible for improvement in reading scores – President George W. Bush and his No Child Left Behind Act or J. K. Rowling and her “Harry Potter” series? Often it is the indirect influence that works better than the direct action. I would say engaging literature children want to read improves reading ability far more than testing of reading ability. If such is true, then well-stocked school and public libraries would improve reading far more than merit pay, mandated tests, and a whole array of top-down mandates.

Will the last Iraqi turn out the lights?

I wrote the title before I remembered the popular Iraqi TV show, broadcast from outside Iraq of course. It is "Hurry Up, He's Dead", a break-up of the Arabic word for "The Government".

I also came across "The Last Iraqi Insurgency", New York Times, April 18, 2004, a recap of the British occcupation of Iraq starting in 1920. The last British soldier left in 1955.

I thought about this entry while reading "Carriers of Conflict" in the November issue of The Atlantic (sorry, only a preview is available to non-subscribers). However, the accompanying map is available.

Over 700,000 Iraqis have left Iraq for Jordan, 450,000 for Syria, and 54,000 for Iran. That's out of a CIA 2006 estimate of over 27 million population. What would we think if over 12 million U.S. citizens fled to Canada or Mexico?

But these refugees are not the stereotypical mother and child. They include many who are willing and able to fight. They will not only make forays back into Iraq, but they take over camps and other refugee settlements, pushing aside traditional tribal leaders. They also destablize the host countries. The author compares the Iraqi exodus to the Palestinian diaspora. Consider what happened in Lebanon and Jordan.

I think we might call the Iraq War "Bushdora's Box". "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." - George Santayana.

Equal opportunity vandalism

A few have written to the Duluth News Tribune that their lawn signs for Republican or conservative candidates have been stolen or damaged. These letter writers charge that it is Democrats or liberals who steal or damage signs.

A smaller number have written to state that their lawn signs for Democratic or liberal candidates have also been damaged or stolen. These writers point out that the vandals are probably apolitical.

This past week I had my Welty sign stolen. Harry Welty is a moderate, ex-Republican who is running for Congress. There were also a beer can and fast food containers on the boulevard or sidewalk.

I think the sign stealers are the jerks that park and picnic outside their own neighborhoods. They don't care about littering and they think their vandalism is "only having fun".

The world needs amorality

Why does the world need amorality? Isn't there moral behavior and immoral behavior? Yes there is, but if you only deal with people who share your moral values, you will have a very constricted world. Also, if you see yourself as moral and thus a good guy, then you will see those who you judge as immoral as the bad guys.

This is especially true in foreign policy. It is not that a country should turn a blind eye to immoral behavior, but that a country cannot afford to lose allies for common goals. A country cannot even understand another country if it treats it solely as immoral and has little if any relations with it.

We've seen it over the last century as the U.S. cast China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Libya as pariahs. None of these countries have had leaders whom I would consider paragons of civic virtue, but we do have to share the world with them. We have managed to forgive China and Libya, but we still hold the others at arm's length. And our difficulties with them continue, especially when our President uses derogatory names toward them. Granted, a brutal dictator should be called a brutal dictator, but we still have to deal with him, if for nothing else than our national security.

The real statesmen will find those areas of common interest and failing that, use the interests of the "immoral" country to achieve an action that suits our interests. If we don't understand the "immoral" countries, we'll have little opportunity to discover their true interests.

See also my article Know thine enemy.

Education philosphy in three words

Education consists of three steps repeated over and over:

Observe
Change
Practice

We need to observe our surroundings, our teachers, our reading, and other persons or things we wish to learn from.

We need to change our behavior toward our goal: adapt to our surroundings, change our surroundings, understand our teachers and so on.

We need to practice how we've changed.

The hard parts are observing well, deciding how to change, and actually following through with sufficient practice. Having patient teachers and associates helps, but we need also to motivate ourselves to learn.

The "Real" Story from Iraq

Harry Welty posted on his blog a link to a letter from a Marine officer in Iraq. It was published in Time.com as "The Secret Letter from Iraq". The author wrote to friends and acquaintances but his letter soon circulated far beyond that circle to retired generals, the Pentagon, and Capitol Hill.

I think anyone who purports to understand what's going on in Iraq should read it.

Genesis of Justice

A couple of months ago I borrowed a book by Alan Dershowitz on terror, but I never got around to reading it, even after renewing it. I checked other books of his at the Duluth Public Library and was intrigued by The Genesis of Justice: Ten Stories of Biblical Injustice that Led to the Ten Commandments and Modern Law.

Dershowitz is a lawyer, law professor, and a Jew who has studied the Torah and other religious writings. As a Jew, he is proud of the tradition of arguing about the Torah, the Talmud, and tradition itself. In fact, one of his favorite stories is Abraham arguing with God about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Dershowitz thesis is that the stories of Genesis lead from anarchy to tribalism to a civil society. In the beginning people were on their own and had to defend themselves against others. Punishment was promised but never materialized. "Eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and you will die." Killing is forbidden, but Cain lives a long life.

Later people lived by trickery to survive against stronger foes. Jacob tricks his brother Esau into giving him his birthright and later tricks their father into giving Jacob the blessing intended for Esau. But the price of those who live by deception will themselves be deceived. And punishment is often passed on to following generations.

However, as people saw that evildoers got by with their deeds and that future generations were not punished, the belief in an afterlife arose where punishment was meted out forever. That such punishment was given or not give could not be proven by observation, only by faith.

God also changes as Genesis unfolds. Dershowitz writes "the God of Genesis ... is a petulant, vengeful, demanding, and petty God, as well as a forgiving, merciful, life-affirming, and even repentant God."

Dershowitz very much believes in this God. However, I see more that God is created in the image of Man. As human societies develop they change their ideas of God to match their current situations. From a need to sacrifice to appease God, to a sense that law is from God, to a sense of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God.

Whatever your view of God, The Genesis of Justice is a fascinating read of biblical and legal scholarship.

Wimpy moderns

I wrote this on Friday night and had hoped to post it yesterday, but...

Brimson - sometime before 5:30 p.m. the power went off. How did Abraham Lincoln do it? I am sitting in our cabin relying on a Coleman lantern. I can see well enough, but I have to sit with my notebook (paper that is) propped on my knee.

I called the power co-op to report this; a recording told me that power was out in Brimson and they were working to restore it.

We went for a walk because Jan was getting a headache from the lantern fumes. It was getting stinky.

There was a full moon behind some clouds and I got some interesting photos. I don't know if they will be sharp enough. [They weren't.]

I was getting cold and we walked back to the cabin. Just as I turned up the lantern, the radio came on, signaling the power was restored. [The time was about 7:30.] Now I have a window open and a fan going to clear the air. Ah, I hear the clink of coffee beans; Jan is making coffee.

Postscript:

I didn't mention that before our walk we had a cold supper, mostly by eating Saturday's lunch on Friday evening and having Friday's supper for lunch on Saturday. We do all of our cooking at the cabin on a hot plate or with a microwave. We could have pulled out the Coleman stove, but we would have had to use it outside with fading light. Poor wimpy moderns!

I checked the Two Harbors Chronicle online for any news of the incident and found none. We thought maybe a car hit a pole. Nothing in the Duluth News Tribune either. If I hadn't written this, I wouldn't have emailed Co-operative Light & Power. I bet I receive a reply tomorrow. A lot better than calling or emailing some far-off call center that doesn't even know where Brimson is.

Deliberate or pontificate

I was looking for material for Harry Welty to use in his debate with Rod Grams and Jim Oberstar on Almanac on Twin Cities Public TV on Friday, October 13. I think he should be taking the high ground instead of all the finger-pointing that is going on. Although they are striving for a seat in the House of Representatives (8th District, Minnesota), they should keep in mind the idea that the U.S. Senate has been called the "greatest deliberative body in the world". You can't deliberate if you take fixed positions and put down those who have other positions.

The first quote I looked at was by Sen. Margaret Chase Smith in June 1950. Although her words apply to the witch hunts that had already started against citizens, they apply equally to the blame against members of the opposition parties.

Great cities need three great things

Barb Kolodge, a heavy equipment operator for Duluth street maintenance wrote an impassioned op-ed piece in the Duluth News-Tribune, October 6, 2006. She asked readers to write the city leaders whether we think streets are a need or a want. I sent the following to the mayor, two councilors, and the director of public works.

I just read Barb Kolodge’s op-ed piece in yesterday’s News Tribune.

I think good streets are a need. I appreciate the work the city has done on E. 8th St., the upper end of Woodland, and Snively Rd. Our vehicles appreciate the smooth ride (except for the sunken sewer grates) and our backs are in better shape. But there is so much left to do.

A great city needs three things – a great police department, a great fire department, and a great transportation system. Transportation includes streets, sidewalks, and public transit. Police and fire have been great, but unfortunately there are those who want to cut back these. Transportation is a mixed bag. There are streets and alleys that look like third world roads. I’ve mentioned how pedestrian-unfriendly some sidewalks are. Buses are in good shape and most drivers are friendly, courteous, and skilled. But given the streets, riding a bus can be a jarring experience. BTW, when was the last time you took the bus regularly?

If police, fire, and transportation are not great, nothing else matters. You can build all the fancy buildings you want, but if the infra-structure is not great the buildings will matter little except to those outside the city.

Freedom and democracy except in...

Very frequently President Bush talks about freedom and democracy in his speeches, but he doesn't seem to realize how much his policies are eroding them in America. His administration is deciding who is guilty without benefit of courts and makes many attempts to stifle criticism. There may not be a direct link to the incident Garrison Keillor reported in his column, "Old Scout", published in the Star Tribune on October 4, 2006, but it is indicative of the atmosphere created by this administration.

Keillor wrote that he was to speak at the Highland Park Methodist Church in Dallas. He was met by security guards with walkie-talkies. Some welcome for an invited speaker. He was shortly told by three people "that this was the Bushes' church and that it would be better if [he] didn't talk about politics." He was even asked not to mention his latest book, Homegrown Democrat. So, he made a parody of how he didn't have to worry because he was a citizen, had money, and his grandsons were years away from being in military service. He was applauded!

Read the article if you can. Also read Homegrown Democrat. It is a heartfelt telling of his disappointment in the loss of civil society in America.

Dessert or a table for the next customers

In my latest Reader Weekly article, "Why pick on McDonald's and Wal-Mart?" I wrote that super-size portions were often found in small, locally owned restaurants. I didn't mention desserts which often are more than one person can eat. Earlier this year I had a piece of chocolate cake that took me two additional days to eat.

On the other hand, many servers don't ask if customers want dessert and present the check as soon as the customers are finished with their entrées, if not before. This happened to three of us yesterday. Long after the server presented our check she asked if we would like anything else. We looked at each other and said, "Too late!"

It is surprising that restaurant managers don't train their staff to sell. Many servers always ask for drink orders first, but a lot never ask about dessert, coffee, or after-dinner drinks. Maybe they are ready for a break, or maybe management would rather see turnover of tables. Considering that, except for coffee, these items are often higher-margin than the main course, one would think it would be standard policy to make sure customers had all they wanted before presenting the check.

Walking Eagle by Mockingbird

At the latest Lake Superior Freethinkers meeting an unattributed story was circulated that President Bush was dubbed "Walking Eagle" at "a major gathering of the American Indian Nation in Arizona. The name "Walking Eagle" is supposedly a name of disrespect rather than respect. According to About.com's Urban Legends and Folklore, the same story was circulated in 2004 with Democratic candidate John Kerry as the subject.

Surprisingly, no one in the roomful of skeptics never questioned this story. I think the problem was that the story was so in character with our perception of Bush.

Freethinker Blogs

Tom Patten, one of the steadfast Lake Superior Freethinkers members, suggested that I start an LSF blog. I begged off in that it would be a lot of work. I did check on Freethinker blogs and found four:

http://www.freethinker.co.uk/
http://freethoughtguy.blogspot.com/
http://leados.blogs.com/blog/
http://thoughtsfortheopenminded.blogspot.com/

Only two have recent updates.

Lake Superior Freethinkers October meeting

This morning I attended the Lake Superior Freethinkers meeting to listen to Bill Payne's documentary on American voters, "50/50: The American Divide". For some reason he didn't show, and so we had an open forum instead. Contact information for the DVD is available at http://www.50-50movie.com/.

John Keturi, acting moderator, said that he had a solution to the squabbling in Congress - bring back dueling. As Charles Gessert stepped up to the mike, he replied, "The Republicans are probably better shots."

Charles Gessert told about the petition by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to the Kansas Board of Education to have its theory of the creation also taught. The theory of gravity is wrong; it is the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) who holds people down to the earth with his numerous invisible tentacles. The adherents of the FSM are also known as the Pastafarians. But be safe on the web; I discovered that the website of that name is only a come-on to many commercial sites.

Charles Gessert also made several observations during the following give and take. I take any blame for misquoting him or falsely attributing him.

We choose problems on the basis of the solutions that are available that fit our ideology. (Discussion of "war on terror")

To have democracy we must have confidence in the integrity of the elections. (Discussion of fairness of elections)

I asked people to vote what they believe, not against a candidate. If you vote according to the polls, you may be wrong. I pointed out how neither Truman nor Ventura were predicted to win by the polls. In reply to another speaker who mentioned the accuracy of the polls, I pointed out that statistical sampling is fine for widgets on an assembly line, but that people are too variable. Others pointed out that large number of people don't even respond to polls. An afterthought: the polls will never reach people who have only cell phones and no land lines; this means many younger voters will never by polled - shades of Dewey-Truman poll predictions.

Bill Sanville, a retired EPA employee, told about the closing of many EPA libraries, libraries that were open to scientists and made much research available to the public via the Internet. The reason is budget cuts. Somebody pointed out that the budget for the EPA libraries is $200 million, a drop in the bucket compared to much of the waste in the Federal government.

You can get over two million hits on "EPA" and "libraries". I chose the EPA Online Library System and entered frogs as the subject. I was shown 35 titles and chose

Sensitivity of Vertebrate Embryos to Heavy Metals as a Criterion of Water Quality

It was an abstract which said copies were available on microfiche or on paper at many EPA libraries. Could it be that certain people don't really want the public to know about such studies?

John Keturi said that a stable neighborhood can lose trust of one another if a single person can instill fear. I think he made this observation in a discussion of the "war on terror".

I didn't intend to be a minutes-taker and only jotted a few interesting thoughts down.

The Lake Superior Freethinkers is a loose coalition of people dissatisfied with traditional religion, and so there is no website or even contact person. It generally meets on the first Sunday in each month at the Radisson Hotel in Duluth, Minnesota. Coffee and conversation start at 9, brunch for $9 at 10, and speaker at 10:30 or 11. No topic or speaker were mentioned for the November 5th meeting.

Hunting and fishing rights are not unlimited

Hunting and fishing rights have been institutionalized in some state constitutions. This is not a good idea for two reasons. First, the constitution is not the proper place to define rights for a particular group. Shall we also put into state constitutions rights for runners, hikers, swimmers, and canoeists? Second, putting rights for a certain group into a constitution leads some to believe that their rights override those of other groups.

I don't have anything in general against hunting and fishing; I have many friends and relatives who hunt and fish. I do think hunting and fishing are expensive ways to get meat. I do get irritated at those who think that they have a right to hunt and fish anywhere they please, especially those who get angry when their intrusion is pointed out to them.

In Minnesota landowners are required to post signs if they don't want others to trespass or hunt on their properties. On the other hand, it is illegal to discharge a firearm within 500 feet of an inhabited dwelling.

Some well-meaning hunters honor the first but ignore the second. One neighbor to our cabin often shoots squirrels because they get into his roof. His cabin is less than 500 feet from ours. Another set of neighbors sight their rifles in their yard. Their yard is less than 500 feet from our cabin. And at least two of them are law enforcement officers. I don't feel endangered by their shooting, and I can't complain about the noise, other than its suddenness, because I run yard machines,

It only takes one hunter to alienate people against all hunters. Unfortunately there are more than one who ignore trespassing signs and who shoot within 500 feet of inhabited dwellings.

I've heard at least three shots in the woods near our cabin today. As the sound of gunfire carries a long way it is hard to tell if the hunter was on our property or a neighbor's property. But both properties are posted. Worse yet, we've had hunters fire down our driveway. We have found new shotgun shells in our driveway. One time a hunter fired down our driveway with our bright red pickup plainly visible. The driveway is also within 500 feet of three inhabited dwellings.

If hunting and fishing rights are to be codified in legislation or constitutions, the responsibilities should be clearly codified also. I think also, the burden of knowing where hunting is permitted should clearly be on the hunters. If hunters do not have permission of any landowners, they should restrict their hunting to government lands that are clearly designated that hunting is allowed.

See also my article "Why I give thanks hunting season is over".

What has America come to?

Congress has just passed Bush's bill on terrorism giving him latitude on interrogation techniques. First, Bush gets to decide who's a terrorist. Second, he gets to decide if a prisoner knows something. And third, he gets to decide how much emotional and physical stress he gets to put the prisoner under.

But will this extreme stress really yield results? John McCain was tortured by the Viet Cong to reveal the names of his crew; he rattled off the names of the members of a baseball team. A Norwegian resistance fighter was captured by the Germans who wanted him to reveal the location of a certain group. To get him to do so, they stuck a screwdriver in his kneecap and twisted. He held out until he was certain that the group was at sea on its way to England.

Do only good guys give no or bad information to their tormentors? Do only bad guys "spill their guts" to their tormentors? We seem to forget that our bad guys are somebody else's good guys. They may make heroic efforts to resist their tormentors. Isn't it possible that a few days before an attack a prisoner cracks and tells his tormentors there is going to be an attack on San Francisco and gives many details. Will this prevent the attack if the details are wrong and the target is really Chicago?

Even if these techniques seem to provide results, won't we lose allies and sympathy around the world? Future "coalitions" may be much smaller.

Snail email

A few weeks ago I wrote a column on naming things. I led off with my irritation that many people call postal mail "snail mail". I gave a few examples and scenarios where email is lost more often than postal mail.

Yesterday I had a weird example of getting a reply to an email before I received the original.

Harry Welty, candidate for the 8th Congressional District in Minnesota, sent his campaign manager and me a message at 11:11 a.m. The campaign manager, Chris, responded at 11:39. I checked my email after 2:00 p.m. and received Chris' reply but not Harry's original. I sent a message to Harry at 2:14 about it. Chris responded to my message at 2:20.

Harry sent another message at 3:06 which I got at 3:04. Harry's computer clock is fast. I responded at 3:11.

I checked my email at 6:48 and still had not received the first email of the day from Harry. I checked again shortly before 10 in the evening and found the snail email in my inbox. I sent a reply at 9:56 and Harry replied to my reply at 10:21; I had already gone to bed and didn't see that until the next morning.

I suspect that the first email got caught in a stack of emails because of heavy traffic. Other messages were put on top of it, and so it didn't pop out of the stack until much later in the day.

Weather as a metaphor for "truth"

So many people think they have a lock on truth: "Stay the course in Iraq" or "Say no to war in Iraq". As I sat in a coffee shop and watched the sky turn from sunny to cloudy to gray and back again, I thought the weather made a fitting metaphor for "truth", whatever that is,

The weather is not always either sunny or stormy. It changes from one partial state to another and then back. There may be big puffy clouds, there may be a gray overcast from horizon to horizon, or there may be gray with slits of blue. And if you go a few dozen miles away, the weather may be completely different.

So it is with "truth". "Truth" shifts with conditions and with our knowledge. What we believed true yesterday may not be so today because many things have happened since yesterday. What we believed true yesterday may not seem so today because we have learned something new to us.

Always be wary of those who say they have the "truth". No one knows everything and the "truth" proclaimers may not have some crucial facts or may not be thinking about the issue from other perspectives.

Resistance is not stopped at the top

The reports yesterday of the alleged death of Osama bin Laden and of the differing views of the intelligence services and the President bring to mind some historical parallels that the President ignores at his peril. Both historical parallels have to do with thinking victory is assured by the destruction of the leadership of an opponent.

The earliest is the Ten Thousand of Greek history. Greek mercenaries were serving under Cyrus of Persia when he was killed in battle. The victors slew the Greek generals thinking they would demoralize the Greek soldiers. The Greeks elected new generals and fought their way from the Tigris River to the Black Sea, "fighting there way on foot, day by day for five months, through two thousand miles of enemy country, across hot and foodless plains, and over perilous mountain passes covered with eight feet of snow, while armies and guerrilla bands attacked them in the rear and in front and on either flank, and hostile natives used every device to kill them, mislead them, or bar their way." (1)

A more recent is the French Resistance, an uprising not led by the generals and politicians in exile, but ordinary people from all walks of life and many political persuasions. The Germans killed many resisters and their leaders, but the resistance just grew. I made a comparison of the the French Resistance and the Iraqi Resistance in "Occupation déja vu", an article in the Reader Weekly of Duluth.

(1) The Life of Greece, Will Durant, p. 460

Why "they" hate us

Inside Islam, edited by John Miller and Aaron Kenedi, contains an excellent analysis of the roots of Islam-based terrorism - "Why they hate us" by Fareed Zakaria, "Newsweek", October 15, 2001. See also the Newsweek version for some interesting current links.

The rise of fundamentalist Islam and the rage that feeds it is not centuries old, but decades old. It arises from the failed states that have arisen from half-hearted attempts at modernization based on Western ideas - socialism, secularism, and nationalism, all of which have shaped the successful states of Europe and North America. These states failed because they were ruled from the top down with little opportunity for participation or discussion from the people. In fact, any dissent was quickly squelched.

America is seen as the supporter of these failed regimes and the purveyor of the modernism that has failed the people.

Writing shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Zakaria makes the case for a three-point counter-attack against terrorism and its supporters - military, political, and cultural. The U.S. has partially succeeded on the military front, but it has failed or has not even tried on the political and cultural front.

The U.S. succeeded militarily in disrupting Al Qaeda, but its invasion of Iraq and subsequent political failure to fill the vacuum have spawned thousands of wannabee terrorists. The U.S. has also failed politically by alienating potential allies with its "our way or the highway" tough-talking bravado. It has utterly failed culturally because our leaders have little understanding of Islamic culture, especially Arab culture. See my article "Know thine enemy".

I don't hold much hope for change as long as we have a foreign policy for an election cycle rather than a foreign policy for a century.

All in all, a successful day

I've been a busy boy today, what with two singing events and redoing some of my website

I sang with the church choir this morning and with the Swedish Singers (Svenska Sångarna) this afternoon. In both cases I did quite well considering my often inconsistent singing. In both case we had a high E-flat which I managed reasonably well. I got most of the other notes also; at least my wife who stands near me said she didn't hear anything out of tune. That, dear readers, is high praise from her.

The Swedish Singers were invited to sing at the Cotton (Minnesota) Community Church Centennial. The church had been founded by mostly Swedish immigrants. We were invited to a late lunch afterward. I sat next to my friend Stan who I had bought to listen and he had sat next to a woman he knew.

The woman was a Swedish immigrant herself, coming at the age of three. She did not speak English until she went to school. It turns out she is my barber's landlady and is interested in joining the Swedish Singers. She cannot drive at night, and so if she is still interested when our next rehearsal comes around, I'll drive her. I think my price will be Swedish conversation.

The list of articles on my website was becoming unwieldy, and so I reorganized it into lists by year. The job was straightforward, but so many little things to do that it took all evening.

Thanks for visiting my blog. I hope to have more of interest tomorrow.

Paths to enlightenment

Another interesting "quote" from William C. Dietz's Runner:

In spite of all the wisdom that has been spoken, or preserved in manuscripts, each soul must search for enlightenment. There is no single path, but rather a multipicity of ways, some short and some long. Go forth and find your path, help others along the way, and enjoy the journer. For this is life.

– The ascended master Teon,
An admonition to my students

The times are a-changing and the change is a-changing

Last Monday I intended to buy two stored-value cards for us to use on the buses. Usually I buy them from an attendant at the downtown transit center. The booth was closed and so I used the vending machine instead.

I had just come from an ATM and had only twenties. I knew that the vending machine gave change or, I assumed, let you make multiple orders on one cash insertion.

I stuck in a twenty and ordered a ten-dollar card. Instead of waiting for another order or spitting out a ten-dollar bill, the machine started clanking. Oh, no! I'm going to get back a whole roll of quarters! When I opened the door to take out my change, all those supposed quarters were golden. The machine gave change in one-dollar coins.

I thought of dumping them back into the machine to order the second card, but I needed smaller change and was enamored of these new coins. So I stuck in another twenty. I left the transit center leaning to one side with a pocket full of coins.

I gave ten to my wife when I got home and used ten during the week. It was fun to see a clerk look quizzically at the coins. I always explained what they were and where I got them; the clerks always accepted them without further question.

I think I'll ask for them at the bank from now on instead of bills. It is certainly easier to reach into my pocket and pull out the largest coins rather than pull out my billfold first. I know that I appreciated that ease in Canada with the one- and two-dollar coins and in Japan with one-hundred- and five-hundred-yen coins.

A quiet day in Woes-Be-Gone Woods

It's raining a bit too much to work outside at our cabin and I have to limit my internet usage.

I have to limit my internet usage because I'm limited to ten dial-up hours per month. After years of unlimited usage and now "always connected" DSL, the DSL terms put a limit on usage away from home. I checked and I have just over five hours left for this weekend and next. I'm going to be sure I'm prepared for each connected session.

I also have to check the terms of website storage. I had thought that I had 50MB available and even had a support person tell me I had plenty of storage left. On the other hand, the sales description and my account summary say 5MB and I'm at 11MB!! If this is true, I'm going to have to weed out some stuff on my site. My provider charges $9.95 per MB over per month! I paid less than that for 100MB on my 1GB card for my camera.

This is also the day I should start my next column for the Reader Weekly.

So, you may see an entry or two here today, but you won't see any picture-of-the-day on my website until I get back to Duluth and straighten up the storage situation.

Extreme partisanship may not benefit third parties and independents

We hear much talk about how people are fed up with the extreme partisanship on the political scene today. Many call for electing more moderate and centrists candidates. But will this be the year of the third party? Maybe not.

Peter Hutchinson, Independence Party candidate for Minnesota governor, comported himself quite well in a three-way debate in which the Republican and Democratic candidates wouldn't even look at each other. He has inched up in the polls from seven to nine percent. This despite having appeared all over the state.

I met a man at the SMDC Fitness Center who may be an indicator of the problem. He was talking politics with another man, something about not having good choices in the election. I interjected that he could vote for Harry Welty for Congress.

As we went from machine to machine our conversation continued. Finally I asked him if he had been a Republican; I thought he may have felt left out like Harry. He paused to gather his thoughts and said "Let me tell you something." He went on to say that the Republicans had screwed everything up so badly that he wants them out of power. To do so, he is going to vote for every Democrat he can. Once the Republicans are out of power, then he'll think about other parties.

I'm sure there are people to the right of the center who don't like today's Republicans but will do their best to see that the Democrats don't get into power.

I'm going to favor third-party candidates in my own political activities and votes. We have to start somewhere. But I don't think we'll see real change until some issue comes up that neither of the two entrenched parties is with the majority of the voters. It took a strong abolitionist sentiment, a sentiment that the Whigs and the Democrats did not show, for the Republican party to ascend and elect a President.

Unity or rule

Make what you want of this quote. It can apply to many on today's geopolitical stage.

By encouraging communications between systems, planets, and people, the ancients sought to bind their empires together. But those who wish to rule must divide populations rather than unify them. The ancients are gone. We rule in their place.

This is at the head of a chapter in Runner by William C. Dietz. The novel takes place in an intergalactic set of societies in which technology was downgraded and many transportation and communication systems have broken down for lack of knowledge to maintain them. Along with the breakdown in these systems has come a breakdown in social systems. The result is a rise in anarchy, banditry, and other self-centered behavior.