Dead Seals: Back Again

A dead seagull on the beach at  Plaice Cove, Hampton, New Hampshire, about two weeks ago reminded me of the occurrence of dozens of dead seagulls  last Fall, followed by a two week latency period of the appearance of tens of dead seal pups, followed by adult seals washing up all along all three beaches here.

These are not called "charismatic mammals" for nothing.  People walking their dogs stop and look stricken.  (Not so for the dogs, who are mainly curious, but restrained by their owners.) 

Last year the government--remember that thing the Tea Party wants to kill?--swooped in and removed the bodies, and ultimately, through laboratory investigation discovered it was avian flu which killed them, which explained the connection between the gulls first, then the seals.

In the case of this particular seal, the gull pictured (bloody beak and all) was responsible for the loss of its eyes.  This gull has a broken wing and goes for whatever is easiest, and those seal eyes were just too tempting. The seal didn't mind. He's not feeling any pain now.

As I was taking these photos, a passerby told me he'd seen a dead seal up the beach, across the North Hampton line, a week ago.  Neither seal showed any evidence of trauma, shark attack, nets. 

We are thinking avian flu, of course. New Hampshire had its first case of seasonal influenza this week. 

If this is a virus which has jumped species from bird to mammal (seal), the fear is its mutations may make it capable of jumping to dog and to human being.

For now, the good folk of Hampton are not alarmed for themselves. They are unhappy about the seals. You never see them in Hampton, except when they wash up, unless you go sea kayaking half a mile offshore, or sometimes, in some spots, surfing.  But you know they are out there, living their seal lives, zipping to and fro. 

The beach at Plaice Cove never looks the same, day to day. Some days there is seaweed three feet thick covering half the beach. Some days no sea weed, just a spray of round rocks. Some days neither rocks nor seaweed, just hard packed tan sand.  

But today, there was something else. Something we've seen, to our dismay,  before.  

He looks so perfectly adapted to his environment, dappled coat makes him look like a pile of rocks on the beach. He is sleek, and strong, and well padded for the cold water. But he is dead now. What killed him was likely something too small for him to see or to fear or to  sense.  A chain of amino acids which found its way through his nose, down his respiratory tract into his lungs. And, if that is true, the same thing is happening to others, out there in that gray ocean, a few hundred yards beyond where we can see them.

Megan McArdle: The Parallax View

From here in New Hampshire, the world looks different. A slight majority of the people I meet every day fall into the group of people who may have graduated high school, worked in the Shipyard (Portsmouth Naval) or on a lobster boat or on their dairy farm and the problem they have analyzing economic theory or political debate is they have no theoretical basis for thinking; they have only their own limited experience. When they start to talk about the proper role of government they start quoting, often unknowingly, Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.  

Megan McArdle has the opposite problem--she is very adroit at the abstract, but she, from all appearances, has only a limited exposure to life in the trenches. 

And she apparently has read Ayn Rand uncritically. And likely Animal Farm, too. She thinks "cutthroat capitalism," which creates vasts gulfs between the 1% and the 99% , is  necessary to protect that  most important driver of progress, Innovation.

Innovation took us from the stone age to the iron age to the industrial revolution to the information age. It is the basis for the most essential forms of human progress.

Ms. McArdle's problem is she, like Milton Friedman before her, has not the faintest notion of what real motivation is or what real innovation is, or what drives it.

Milton Friedman believed the only mechanism necessary to keeping drug companies from producing teratogenic drugs (those which cause birth defects) is the threat of lawsuits--as if a lawsuit would help a child born to a mother who took thalidamide. Mr. Friedman believed the FDA should be dissolved--prevention being a public health value of little monetary benefit.

Ms. McArdle  thinks that abstract thing which has wings, the inspiration to try something new,  is only possible from men and women who are dazzled by the prospect of earning huge fortunes. 

This may have been true for some people: perhaps Bill Gates was driven by the desire to be the richest man in the world, maybe Steve Jobs too, although I rather doubt that was what motivated either in the beginning. I suspect they were competitive, driven sorts who wanted to beat the other people in their game and would have, whether they lived in a socialist state or a freewheeling economy, but I cannot know that.

But consider some real innovations and where they came from. 

Let's start with the Internet: created and nurtured and developed by government employees on salaries whose names we never learned and then given to the world, where entrepreneurs like Jobs and Gates could use it to get rich.

Consider RADAR, developed by British government scientists during World War II, who were never made rich by this technology which remains a critical tool in weather forecasting and the world's  air transportation system.

Consider the CT scan, which revolutionized imaging in medicine--developed by government scientists in England, i.e. by the National Health System, which Ms. McArdle dismisses as  a killer of the innovative spirit. 

Consider the identification of the plague, done by a free lancer who never made a cent for his discovery and he was the first to develop an effective serum to treat it and he never got a cent, but he did get the satisfaction of saving the lives of lots of Vietnamese villagers. His name was Alexandre Yersin.

Medicine is filled with men and women who worked in government labs or on government grants to: 1. Cure polio (Jonas Salk) 2. Identify the AIDS virus  3. Map the human genome  (in a race with a private enterprise)  4. Develop rocket science which was necessary to launching satelittes which was necessary to the world wide web.  5. Develop statin drugs to prevent coronary artery disease (Goldstein an academic, supported by government grants.)  

The list goes on and on in science, medicine and engineering.

And don't forget the military:  Government to its core, with nobody making all that much money, but men and women perform amazing feats of bravery and adaptation and innovation because they have developed great loyalty to their own primary group, their platoon or company. These folks are motivated by the desire not to embarrass themselves, primarily and by a lot of other things they lump under the rubric "Honor, Country, Duty."

What motivated and continues to motivate these men and women,  is the challenge of the problem, the possibility of changing lives, the thrill of solving a problem their peers could not solve and getting congratulated by men who matter to them. 

There are always those who are motivated differently:  They are in it only for themselves, and they often succeed. Lt. Dick in Band of Brothers was a perfect Ayn Rand hero; he would disappear whenever the fighting got hot, and reappear whenever the medals were handed out.  He wound up promoted to higher ranks and was last seen by the men who actually fought the battles when he appeared on a stage with the commanding general.  Selfish, successful, ruthless and thoroughly detestable, but a real Ayn Rand man.

Men like Tony Fauci and  Henry Masur at the NIH,the people at the Center for Disease Control, at the high security labs working  in Hot Zones with Ebola virus, these are men and women who innovate, who do work which makes society progress, none of whom are motivated by the prospect of making millions.  This the innovative core of America, out there, driven not by greed or money or desire for fame.  This is the real world, not the imaginary world of Ms. Rand or Ms. McArdle. 

Ms. Rand is dead. 

Ms. McArdle still has a chance to go out to the NIH, which is in her own backyard, and hang out among these government doctors and scientists, or to go to the National Bureau of Standards or to go to NOAA or any of a dozen other agencies where Innovation and motivation are alive and well.

Maybe, if she gets out of her office, out from behind her computer, she'll have a change of heart.

Megan McArdle: Blind to Science

 "A greater gap of incomes between successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs (thus greater inequality) increases entrepreneurial effort and hence a country’s contribution to the world technology frontier. We show that, under plausible assumptions, the world equilibrium is asymmetric: some countries will opt for a type of “cutthroat” capitalism that generates greater inequality and more innovation and will become the technology leaders, while others will free-ride on the cutthroat incentives of the leaders and choose a more cuddly form of capitalism."
--Acemoglu, Robinson, Verdier article cited by Megan McArdle in The Daily Beast (italics mine)

Some disclaimers here:  1. I have never enrolled in an economics course beyond high school 2. I do not know the breadth of experience of Megan McArdle, who has written about economics for The Economist  3. My bias is somewhere to the left of Lenin, where it is reasonably easy to deduce Ms. McArdle's is somewhere to the right of Henry Ford.

Having said all that, I was fascinated by Ms. McArdles piece in The Daily Beast, because 1. She tried to examine what it feels like to live in a country with substantial government support for workers' vacation time, for healthcare, for pensions, for childcare, and what she said matched my own very limited and outdated experience. 2. She was intellectually honest enough to examine her own previous position that we should "privatize" Social Security and discovered this would likely not only destroy the pensions of the pensioners but wreck our economy and likely take the world's economy down with it.

What she could not do was to give up her dearly held faith that "innovation" is a precious, mysterious, greed-driven thing that only occurs when you dangle exorbitant amounts of money in front of "job creators,"  or "innovators"  or "technology leaders."

Actually, there is ample evidence this is a patently false belief.

 If you look at innovations in health, medicine and science, many have been accomplished by men on government salaries, living modestly, but consumed by the thrill of the work in front of them, the intellectual challenge of it. Everything from the internet, to micro technology to a vast array of new classes of drugs have come from men who had little personal economic gain motivating them, but a lot of pride in their work, a lot of intellectual curiosity and the satisfaction of being able to dream big in their work,  because they didn't have to worry about the bean counters demanding to see a return on the investment in their laboratory equipment.  

I can cite chapter and verse in the world of medicine, but I won't belabor the point. 

I do want to cite a counter point:  When making money is the only motivator out there, innovation is just as likely to whither as to thrive: Consider the case of antibiotics. Bacteria are tough and flexible little critters. You can develop an antibiotic which kills millions of them but what you get left with is the bacteria who happen to have the mutation which makes them impervious to your antibiotic, so you have to develop a new antibiotic to kill those. And then you need another for the next resistant bug. 

The problem is, antibiotics don't generate a big enough chunk of total income for drug companies.  They generate millions, but not as much as a drug which does not cure a disease but simply controls it, a drug for hypertension or for high cholesterol. Drugs for chronic, incurable diseases generate much more money, because patients have to take these drugs daily for the life of the patent. Antibiotics typically are necessary only for a week or two and then you need to find a new patient with a new infection to sell the drug to. 
So commercial pharmaceutical companies, with an eye on profit margin, are loathe to spend much time or money or innovative brain power on antibiotics for bacteria or vaccines for viruses, because that is simply not where the money is.

This means commerce actually inhibits innovation in critical areas. Thank God and thank the federal government for programs motivated by the common good rather than by the dollar.

McArdle also suggests the practice of the American government subsiding research for private pharmaceutical companies in America has resulted in the innovations in drugs and devices which have supported the medical benefits enjoyed by the freeloading economies of Europe who don't have to spend their money on innovation in pharmacy and medicine but can simply buy the new stuff from America without having invested in all the research, much as Europeans buy iphones produced by the innovators at Apple.

This may be true for some drugs, but for many, like the statins, innovation did not come from men in pharmaceutical companies who were willing to take big risks develop drugs,  but from academia, which is supported not by university dollars but by government dollars in the form of research grants.  Same for the polio vaccine, same for influenza vaccines, all of which save more lives, keep more people healthy than the  innovations of all the drug companies in search of profit combined.

In short, it's nice to have a government looking out for the public health, and it's fine to have a vibrant pharmaceutical industry.

It's really nice to have the two working together: Insulin is a case in point. This was discovered, developed and applied by three men working at the University of Toronto in 1921, who were motivated by the suffering of patients, by their own sense of history, by their own egos, by a drive for glory, but not at all by the dollar.  When they got a workable molecule, they needed a drug company to invest the money and technology to mass produce it in a safe form. Eli Lilly was only too happy to cooperate. A nice merger of intellectual thrill and financial opportunism.

Not all the "cutthroat incentives" to discover great things arise from a lust for financial reward. In fact, in science, until the 21st century fewer arose from men chasing dollars than from men chasing glory, by which I mean, the Nobel prize, but more often the simple admiration of their colleagues who could actually understand the problems they faced and the genius it took to solve them.  The big deal was not the contract they had signed with some company but the great moment of presenting their work in front of several hundred colleagues at a conference and seeing them rise to their feet and shout out praise. For these men, the men who developed insulin, the polio vaccine, the antibiotics we have relied upon, the oral drugs for diabetes, the CT scan, the MRI, the reward was not being elevated to the 1%, but the reward was the admiration of their peers.

Hollywood moments, where an audience of ignoramuses rise to their feet, clapping hold little joy for the real scientists and engineers who make the discoveries which change life for the rest of us--because these clapping fools do not understand the process and the genius behind the discovery. All the adoring throngs understand is the effect, not the cause. 

So, these economists are not giving you science. There is no science in economics, only mathematical models, which, as far as I can tell are more often simply a smoke screen for bias. Innovation can arise from salary men. Just ask the guys who developed the rockets in Germany and the Soviet Union, who innovated in this field for years before the entrepreneurs in America could even be interested, because they could not see the money in it.  

Or ask the Brits who developed radar. These men had no financial motivations. They were lowly government scientists saving their country and providing generations to come with the best weather tracking system we have to this day.

The problem with economists talking innovation is they are neither engineers nor scientists. They are just economists. 

That's better than being a politician who uses the bogus theories of the economist, but the economist is just a dreamer. 

Americans

How do you know people?   And what makes a person real? 
Before I begin this bizarre line of thought, a little story. 
Working in the Emergency Room of The New York Hospital, thirty odd years ago, I stepped into a patient cubicle to see a woman with a cough and a child. The patient was a seventeen years old,  from Spanish Harlem. She  had gathered up her 5 year old daughter, taken a bus the thirty blocks to the hospital at midnight, because she was coughing and had a fever.  After I finished examining her, I wrote  her a prescription, and her daughter grinned up at me brightly and said, "I know you."
"I don't believe we've met before," I told the urchin.
"Yes, I've seen you on TV."
"Yes," agreed the mother, "General Hospital. We watch it. We've seen you on T.V."

Apparently, in my hospital "whites"  I looked like someone on General Hospital on T.V.  A soap opera doctor. 
In the case of the child, okay, how would she know?  But what stunned me was the mother, who, granted, had dropped out of school at twelve to have a baby, but you would think she would understand those people on the soap opera were actors, and the stories were not really happening.  But no, for her, it was The Truman Show. She was watching "real" people living their adventures out in front of her on T.V.

Pictured above are three people, who are in some sense real people.  One is Bubbles, a man I feel I know very intimately, having watched him for 5 seasons, as he developed in front of me, as he grew, as he suffered, as he offered me and others his philosophy. But he is not "real."  His lines were written for him. A wonderful actor, Andre Royo, breathed life into him, but he is not "real."  

On the other hand, while Royo was standing around a Baltimore street, watching the film crew shoot a scene he was not in, a passing dope fiend looked him over and handed him a vial of heroin, saying,  "You look like you need it more than me, brother."
Royo calls that vial his "street Oscar."  He had passed for a real dope fiend.  He is a real dope fiend in the minds of millions. When they think of dope fiends, they think of the one dope fiend they know best, Bubbles, who does not really exist, except in the mind of Andre Royo and millions of Wire fans.

Then there is Andrew Hacker, professor of government at Cornell and Queens College, a graduate of Amherst College, his PhD from Princeton.  I have never met the man, in the flesh. We have exchanged emails off and on. He has written about the folly of our current university system and the class system which supports it. I feel as if I know the man, but I've never met him, in the flesh. He is a name in a book, an electronic image.  And yet we've communed through the cyberspace  and we've exchanged important thoughts.  He has spoken of experiences I've had without knowing the details of how I had them. He has clarified things in my life for me. Never met the man.

The last image is Cheryl Tiegs, who I really do not know. I have met her, in the flesh, however. She was visiting a friend at the hospital. I had admitted her friend and ushered her down the hall to her friend's room. We chatted along the way, and I never saw her again. I've read about her now and then in magazines. Of the three, she ought to be the most real to me, in that I can verify she really exists, or existed once. I actually  met her and talked with her. But I know next to nothing about her. She is, in a very real sense, less real to me, and surely I know her less well than either of the other two.

So what constitutes a real person? What is it to know someone else?

I would submit I know the fictional character who is Bubbles better than either Hacker or Tiegs. I know Hacker, whom I've never met, better than Tiegs, because we have exchanged ideas, shared thoughts.  Tiegs, whom I may have actually touched, is unreal, in that she is only a memory imprinted on some neuron somewhere, and in any case I never knew enough about her to really know her.

She is cuter than the other two, though.

Otter, Kelp, Man, Whale, Anemone, Global Warming

Okay, so here's something I heard on National Public Radio this morning, which is something, on some level, I'd like to believe because it means we could do something which feels good to save the planet.

This is the flip side of Upton Sinclair's observation it is difficult to bring a man to understanding, if his income depends upon his not understanding--i.e., people who have an investment in technologies or practices which ruin the planet for the rest of us but which make money for them, do not want to believe they are ruining the planet.

So, here's the story. Stay with me.

You have these kelp forests in the ocean. They soak up carbon dioxide like huge sponges--you remember carbon dioxide (CO2), the stuff we all exhale, which causes global warming when there's too much of it.  So kelp chews up CO2 bigtime. So we like kelp. 
But there are these animals called sea anemones which eat their way through vasts underwater sea kelp forests and strip them bare. 
So we do not like sea anemones.
Enter the otter. Adorable fellow. Floats on his back, plays and frolics. We like sea otters, just because they are cute. But wait, there's more. Turns out sea otters eat those nasty sea anemones, really clean them out. 
No sea anemones, and the kelp forests thrive and global CO2 plummets and everyone is happy. (Except the sea anemones. There always has to be a loser, it seems.)
But, now here's where man comes in, as usual, playing the role of disruptor and destroyer of cute mammals.

No, men do not hunt sea otters, much.
What men hunt is baleen whales. Almost to extinction.
And baleen whales are the main dietary preference for killer whales.
So without the baleen whales, the killer whales eat sea otter. Reduce their numbers from hundreds of thousands to just a few thousand and the sea anemones have no predator and their population explodes and good bye kelp forests, hello skyrocketing global CO2.

Of course, in biology, nothing is quite so straightforward. Before the killer whales went after sea otters, which, after all are just little nibblets to a killer whale, they ate their way through harbor seals, gray seals, all sorts of seals.  But the lesson of this NPR piece was if man hadn't messed with the balance, there'd be plenty of baleen whales for the killer whales to eat and seals and sea otters and kelp forests and global CO2 levels would all be happily in balance.

You know there's more to this story--what about all those automobiles pumping out CO2 burning fossil fuels and what about all those farms with all those cows lined up in vast feeding pens emitting methane and requiring vast expenditures in fossil fuels to grow the corn to feed them?

But I like the story that says more sea otters, who are very cute. They come in to Hampton salt marshes to have their pups and if you think Labrador pups are cute, what 'til you see sea otter pups. 

I don't know who killed the baleen whales. Probably the Japanese, who we've had problems with before. 

But even the Norwegians, who we tend to want to like kill whales.

Nothing is ever simple.

Except sea otters are really cute.

Hope for Planet Earth

It was a beautiful day on the New Hampshire seacoast today, the sort of day Grace Metalious described which makes New England magical:

"In northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while. She brings with her the time of the last warm spell, an unchartered season which lives until Winter moves in with its backbone of ice and accoutrements of leafless trees and hard frozen ground. Those grown old, who have had the youth bled from them by the jagged edged winds of winter, know sorrowfully that Indian summer is a sham to be met with hard-eyed cynicism. But the young wait anxiously, scanning the chill autumn skies for a sign of her coming. And sometimes the old, against all the warnings of better judgment, wait with the young and hopeful, their tired, winter eyes turned heavenward to seek the first traces of a false softening."


That is as evocative of the coming of autumn in these parts as anything I've ever read. 
Of course, last winter Indian summer lasted right through until this May.

But walking around, Portsmouth today, it was easy to forget  about those grisly photos of the Artic ice caps melting.  A great blue heron flew over South Pond, and cormorants splashed among sea gulls and mallards and the air was crisp.

Where I grew up, along the Potomac, in Maryland, 7 miles upstream from the Capitol Building, that river was so foul when I was eight years old, you would never think of dipping a toe in it, much less swim in it. No life was visible along the banks, and you certainly could not have seen life, if any existed, inches below the murky surface. But, returning, my Odyssey in the north finished, I settled by the river at age 34, and was astonished to see the river transformed. The water ran clear, and you could see to the bottom in places, and along the banks, and see fish and beaver, deer, foxes, heron, even bald eagles all lived there. 

Many voices had been raised, including that of Supreme Court Justice William Douglas, to save the river, and factories upstream, which had been making their profits and dumping their waste into the river had to spend some money protecting the river, cleaning their discharge before sending it into the water.

So, the actions of mankind polluted the natural world, and the actions of men cleaned it up, where that one river was concerned.

I'm not sure restoring the polar ice caps will be as direct or easy, but at least, one might say, there is precedent. 

Of course, we had Rachel Carson and a lot of men and women who persisted in convincing the doubters.  Nobody has been as successful in convincing Republicans global warming is real. As Upton Sinclair noted, it is difficult to bring a man to understanding, when his pocketbook will be hurt by that understanding.

Rahm Emanuel: Teaching to the Test

I could be persuaded, but currently, I simply do not understand why Rahm Emanuel, and even President Obama, think it is reasonable to judge inner city school teachers by the performance,( i.e. by the test scores) of their students.

If those students went home to secure, loving homes, where at least one parent greeted them, sat them down after a family dinner and went over their assignments with them, read to them at night, took them on excursions to parks and museums, shuttled them to soccer practice, swimming practice, lacrosse practice, baseball practice, took them on vacations to Europe and Asia where they got exposed to different worlds, fed them, nurtured them, cared for them and conveyed to them  success is important, well then, sure, you can judge those who attempt to teach those kids arithmetic, reading, writing, geography, algebra, geometry by the performance of those kids on standardized tests. 

But if those kids carry their books home past drug dealers, if those kids themselves miss school days because they are working as hoppers and touts on the corners of their neighborhoods, if those kids live in apartments without any functional adult presence, if those kids are sleeping under their beds at night because bullets are flying through their windows, if those kids consider a package of Fritos and a bottle of orange soda a good, nutritious lunch, if those kids are entering their twelfth or thirteenth year engaging in sex to prove they are real players in their own social world, trying to get pregnant or to impregnate, if their goals are to get a job at McDonalds or stocking shelves at Home Depot and if their world view encompasses no more than their own side of their own city, well then, I don't see how anything any teacher can do is going to change their test scores.

I know the study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, coming out of Harvard and Columbia says a really good teacher can have an impact on students as if they had gone to school for an extra "month or two." And with really bad teachers, the effect on test scores is equivalent to the child having missed 40% of the school year. (That part, the effect of poor teachers, I can believe. )

But, if just 3 % of black male ninth graders in the city of Chicago ever earn a degree from a four year college, can that really be the fault of some 8th grade math teacher?

I would pay inner city teachers not on the basis of the performance on standardized tests taken with number 2 pencils, but on the basis of:  1. The incidence of classroom wounds requiring a visit to the emergency room  2. The incidence of projectiles flying out of their classroom windows  3. Whether or not goals for penetrating wound avoidance was reached. In short, teachers ought to receive combat zone pay, and those in the inner city should be sent on Rest and Recreation breaks to Viet Nam or Thailand, just for a break.

Don't Matter Who Did What to Who...

"Don't matter who did what to who at this point. Fact is, we went to war. And now, there ain't no going back. I mean, shit. It's what war is, you know. Once you in it, you in it.  If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we got to fight."

Thus does Slim Charles explain to the king, Avon Barksdale, the immutable law of war.  

Stringer Bell has just been shot to death, and Stringer Bell was Avon Barksdale's right hand man. Everyone on the street assumes he has been shot in the escalating exchange of violence between the Barksdale organization and the rising young gang headed by the ruthless, ambitious and relentless Marlo. 

Of course, Barksdale knows the truth: Stringer was killed, with Barksdale's own complicity, in retribution for Bell's own duplicitous play to eliminate Omar Little using Brother Muzone as the executioner. But Omar and Brother figured out the ploy and cornered Bell, leaving his riddled body for the street hoppers and touts to ponder, to explain and to conclude Marlo was the killer, and that meant the war which was smouldering is now going to explode into  a major conflagration. All Barksdale need do is to give the word, or even to not  give the word, but simply to say nothing and his outraged troops will boil over and bring the war to Marlo.

Barksdale, hesitates. It does not feel right,  to unleash this onslaught when the target is actually, in this case, uninvolved. Slim Charles explains how irrelevant the truth is, when it comes to war.

Of course, The Wire is not really talking about  the complicated world it has created; it is talking about the real world; it is talking about invading Iraq, hunting down Saddam Hussein for unleashing the attack on the World Trade Center and for plotting to use his weapons of mass destruction.  We know all this, watching, because The Wire is airing in the years when Bush and his party went wild on Iraq, blundering into a fight with the wrong shooter.

Thus is the power of fiction to reach people who would never even want to think about  Bush, Iraq, politics or the eternal war this country has decided to wage.  We can see real life and think, "This somehow seems familiar, and wrong. I know it because I've seen it before..."  In The Wire.

Privacy vs Solitude

NPR ran a discussion of what privacy means in the 21st century Face Book world.
An author of a book about privacy made some thoughtful comments to the effect that wanting privacy is not the same thing as wanting to be a hermit.  He wanted privacy, he said, but he craved human contact and friendships.

He mentioned how displeased he'd been when a friend shared letters he had written with other friends. Those letters were intended for the eyes of only the friend to whom he'd mailed them, not for others.  He felt his privacy had been betrayed.

I would have thought he had been betrayed, even though the letters contained nothing particularly embarrassing, but you always have to make judgments about how much of a conversation you will share with others.  So the friend who showed the letters around betrayed a trust, but I'm not sure privacy was the issue.

If you meet a woman after work, bring her home for the night and your neighbor starts ringing your doorbell, inviting himself in, he is violating privacy. If he sees her leaving in the morning and mentions it to others, I'm not sure that's violating privacy, so much as being a gossip, but once you leave your own private space, anything is fair game.

When I was in college, I lived with a roommate, who often had people in our room, sitting on my bed, at my desk, fiddling with  photographs on my desk of people from home, looking in my closet to see what kind of clothes were hanging there. That violated my privacy, but it didn't bother me much, for reasons which will become clear.

My roommate spent most of his day in our room. I arose at 7 AM and was out the door and not back until 10 PM most nights, when I went to bed. I wasn't much of a roommate, if you were looking for companionship or a human connection.

I spent most of my day in the library, leaving only for meals or for class, or for a laboratory.  I studied at a carrell in the library, which was a desk next to a window and an air duct which made white noise. I could look out at the gates to the university and I could see students wandering about.

I looked forward to class, because it was the only time of day I actually spoke to anyone. I enjoyed the give and take in class, and often chatted with classmates on my way back to the library, but I did not stop off at the Ivy Room for coffee, and I did not ask much about them nor did they ask much about me.  I ate dinner alone in the cafeteria, timing my arrival for times when the line would be shortest. 

Classmates, who were in my classes sometimes drifted by my library carrell/cave and they kept their comments brief, not wanting to disturb my privacy.

I noticed, early on in freshman year, that many of the students who lived in my dorm were positively terrified of being alone. They would study together in their dorm rooms, with radios or stereos on. They went to meals in groups, hung out on the dorm porches or in the TV room. When they did go to the library, they studied in the open "reading rooms" where large tables accommodate six students and a glass partition separated a "lounge."  
My roommate would spend hours in the lounge, with his books on his lap, talking about French philosophers, slipping in and out of French, Italian and whatever language he had picked up that week. He could do fifteen different types of Rhode Island accents, and when he did them, you could hear the difference between Cranston, South County , the East Side and the West End.  He told everybody about all the girls he was interested in and about all his troubles. 
Privacy was not his top concern.

He told the rest of the dorm he lived with a guy he rarely actually saw. One of the wild boys in the dorm, a sort of real life John Belushi a la  Animal House, a guy who loved to roll bowling balls down the stairwells because each stairwell had a dorm room off it and the sound was thunderous inside those stairwell rooms. He also liked urinating down the stairwells on Saturday night after drinking a lot of beer. 

He was, I am told, terrified of me. I was, in his words, "The Phantom."  He had looked through my things, convinced himself I was an actual real human being, but a person who did not need other people, who actually was indifferent about human contact.

He was perplexed by my clothes. I had lots of good clothes, but usually wore only  a few different pairs of jeans or corduroy pants and shirts.  From my personal effects, he  deduced I liked girls, had know some attractive girls in my home town, but did not seem to need girls in college.

But, beyond his inspection of my artifacts in my room, he never violated my privacy. He said nothing when we passed in the stairwell. I usually just looked at him, in the eyes and said nothing. What I saw in his eyes was usually stone cold terror.

He knew I did my laundry in the basement of the dorm on Saturday nights when the rest of dorm was at the weekly party in the party room. It was the one time of week I knew there would be no competition for the washers and driers.  After the library closed Saturday night, was the one time I stayed in my room.  My roommate and everyone else was three floors away at the party. It was a good time to write letters to friends at other colleges and some who were still back home.

I was not at college to make friends or to meet girls. I was there to earn my academic merit badges and to get past it. I did not like many of the students I met and I intensely disliked some of the professors. 

But there were some professors, about half of them actually, who were not just likable but inspirational.  

After three years,  senior year was more normal. I moved out of the dorm, into a new dorm opened for graduate students, which had some space for undergraduates. I got a girlfriend and even went to a few parties. I hung out a little on the College Green, and met some interesting people. People knew more about me, but only what I wanted them to know. My girlfriend knew better than to advertise my life. That was a part of the trust between us. She had to tell her best friend where she was staying at night so they didn't start dragging the river for her body, but generally, we kept our relationship, "private." 

I liked that privacy. Our time together was between the two of us. There was no Facebook, no Internet but there was lots of gossip, lots of interest in who was dating whom.  I didn't need that.  Many girls seemed to need to know who was "with" who. It was sort of a competition. I did not want one of those girls. If being with me was about gaining social status, find someone else. Fortunately, I found a girl who respected privacy.

The only place I've ever had as much privacy since was in New York City, where there were so many people living so close together, they had perfected the art of privacy.

Henry Ford: A Really Creepy American

In times when the current batch of scoundrels seems dispiriting, it's sometimes reassuring to review those who preceded them, and today's outrages seem less unique, less apocalyptic.

Try reading Henry Ford's The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem. It's on line. It has been said to have inspired Adolph Hitler and others, and if you've ever read Mein Kampf   you have to believe it did.

What is really creepy about Ford's book is the apparent even handedness, something that sounds, at first,  like genuine sympathy and even admiration  for the Jew and the position in which the Jew finds himself. The Jew's Biblical law forbade him from lending money at interest, to other Jews, forcing him to focus his money lending on Gentiles. The Jew was dispersed and despised among nations of the world, without a homeland in Palestine, and he was treated cruelly, so he had to be resourceful to survive. So, there is a sort of pseudo there-but- for-the-Grace-of-God tone, in the opening. 

And then there is the scholarly pose--not all Jews are rich. Some live in poverty. (But even impoverished Jews wield power.) Not all financial institutions are run by Jews. Jews in this country are heavily out numbered, only 3% of the population.

But what he does, having painted this picture of a really threatened "race," is to say, well, this is a creature with the morals of a cornered rat.

Then he goes on to describe the characteristics found in this species of vermin: A distaste for manual labor. A desire to always handle the money, not to learn the craft which begets the money.   The Jew is not an engineer who loves to solve humanity's problems; he is a parasite, who attaches himself to the engineer to profit from the vitality of the really admirable human beings.

There are three volumes and hundreds of chapters, and the really creepy part is thinking about the obsessiveness of this man. I mean, this hater really loved his work.

You can sort of imagine a serial killer of prostitutes, a man who just can't stop thinking about them.

Of course, as is so often the case, the things which Ford finds most loathsome in "The Jew" are the very things he must have sensed, on some level, to be very close to his own essence--the obsession with money, commerce, control, power. Even the focus on the Jew's avoidance of manual labor is intriguing--Ford, raised on a farm, sought out work which did not require so much brute strength. His own manual labor was limited to tinkering with engines.

There are echoes of Ford in Rush Limbaugh, right down to the patina of reasonableness, and of course, there is the obsessive joy in rolling around in his mouth the hateful names and fondling in his mind the hateful images.

It's a sort of primer of hate. Not the sort of mindless skinhead with the  tatoo swastika on his forehead type of hater, but a tweedy hater, who might invite you to sit down in his  parlor and drink tea with him, and just when you are thinking he's not such a bad guy, brings forth this rather scholarly sounding, thoughtful, pure venom.

I don't know much about Mr. Ford. I need to read more, although it's going to be tough. But I know he paid his workers better than most employers, hoping they'd buy his cars. He was inventive and had real virtues as a manager. He was one of the first to  imagine an economy of mass production and mass consumption.  In some ways, that just makes your skin crawl all the more:  You can imagine meeting the guy, shaking his hand in his office, looking into his smiling face, and thinking: This genial guy wants to gas millions of people.

Feeding Stray Animals

The photo on the top is the Republican Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina.  He said, "My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed."

Now, you may say, well he's from South Carolina. Or, well, he's like Rick Perry, not real bright. Or you may have any of a variety of reasons to dismiss his remark as an aberration. 

But it's not an aberration. It unmasks the monster.  It reflect a truth about this American Taliban party we call Republican. They really do believe kids who get free school lunches, people who get Medicaide, people who get Food Stamps, mothers to get Aid to Dependent Children are worse than undeserving. They are a sort of undesirable class. They are vermin to be controlled.

Actually, it turns out, there's more to the discussion. Mr. Bauer, who is a graduate of the University of South Carolina, explained  "You're facilitating the problem if you given an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. "  

This is just in case you you didn't get the point from the first part of the statement.  And we all know, there are some of our fellow citizens who can't think too much further than breeding. They are really just like dogs, who only think about breeding. You know who I'm talking about. (Remember, I'm speaking from down here in South Carolina, where we still fly the stars and bars on top of  the state house.)

The phantom has long been fascinated by the inclination of men to see in others the things they, on some level, feel guilty about in themselves:  So the man who snipes at Jews for being overly concerned about money, is focused on that because he himself is focused on money. 
And Rush Limbaugh, who sees sexual impropriety everywhere, in the simplest statements or postures of others--you have to wonder about why he is focused on that. And now Mr. Bauer, who knows those certain others out there who can't think much beyond, well,  "breeding." (Having sex, in case you hadn't figured that out.)

One mark of intelligence is the discipline to suggest, to not get tied up in knots over explaining. I know this because my own limited intelligence is on display every blog. But how much more intelligent is the stanza  from Ricki Lee Jones's "Old Enough"?

               Maybe it's that I took care of you too many times   
               And you grew weaker for a kindness
               Sometimes kindness from a friend can break a man.

Daniel Patrick Moynahan, Bill Clinton, all of us by now, are aware of the potential for debilitating dependency posed by certain social programs--but we are concerned to solve problems out of a basic sympathy, and, also,  out of self interest. 

Mr. Bauer, the Right Wing Redneck Republicans in charge,  not so much.

As for Mitt, and his tax returns. Well, the man does not admit much, but he does admit to paying only 13% of his income in taxes. All legal, because his Republican brethren have made it legal. But, really, how far is he from Leona Helmsley's comment, "Only little people pay taxes?"

Or, in Mitt Romney's world view, only little people pay real taxes--big people have Republican  legislators in their pockets to give them tax dodges.