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.