We Regulate Ourselves

 

It is boring to say that, by definition, we give up something with every restriction we place on ourselves--whether individually, by consensus, or through our chosen government. Be they calories, speeds, alcohol, farm-animals-on-city-lots, loud sounds, awful odors, fire hazards, 2x3 stud walls, nudity, coal-fed fireplaces; we allowed them in the past. Yet, in many places we personally or collectively decided to restrict or disalow them because we thought the change would make ourselves and our community better. We thought speed limits and fire codes would save lives; they did. If we were to believe that a high percentage of people who have died from mass shootings in the last decade would be alive today if we had restricted our pleasures and traditions we might make the sacrifices and limit our pleasures and change our tradtions. This is what civilization does to itself for itself--in a terribly haphazard yet hopeful way. And, when experience and evidence show enough of us that our good intentions and hopes were misplaced (as with prohibition of alcohol, urban-egg-laying-hens, bare breasts) we reverse course and remove the restrictions--in a haphazard yet hopeful way. Folks will remind us of how good things used to be—of how pre-agriculture, pre-speed-limit hunter-gatherers had the good life. And, you know what? In so many ways it was good, but they never stopped trying to make it better. In a terribly haphazard yet hopeful way, they did.

CONFESSION: WHY I NEITHER WATCH NOR LISTEN.

 I can't remember how many years it has been since I watched a (let me call it) State of the Union speech. I will read about the latest one tomorrow. My enthusiasm for listening live has long since waned. Tonight I had an insight as to the possible when-and-why of the waning: the response speech. Whether my president is Republican or Democrat I believe he or she has the responsibility to speak to the Congress as president, and Congress has the responsibility to listen as Congress. Yes, I do accept that we have two parties and that Congresspeople and presidents speak and listen as members of parties. They also speak and listen for their constituents--should not every state and every congressional district be asked to respond live-and-immediately as to how the president's speech will impact its share of the land-and-people-scape? The response speech is a ceremony requiring an absolute opposition; an opposition that must be drafted before the president's speech is delivered. Whoever came up with this idea had, in my opinion, a ridiculous idea. It swears with our Constitution. Rather than merely accept the partisan content in the presidential speech, the ceremony begs for partisanship over statesmanship from the president. It also removes my sense of duty to watch and listen. I want to kill the ceremony. One way to do so might be for presidents to return, for a decade or two, to the tradition of reporting in writing to the Congress on the state of our union. Opposition parties, whichever, would be less likely to respond in kind knowing that few people would find a reason to read what they write. Amen.

MMT: Incompetent government will try that and impoverish the nation.

 The margin between success and failure can be very thin. Sometimes incompetents can be lucky, but sometimes competents can be unlucky. This ties right into Modern Monetary Theory and why it should not be dismissed with, "Well the government can just print money whenever it wants to." Incompetent government will try that and impoverish the nation.  Competent government will spend in ways that look to be good investments for the nation and will have a good chance that its investments succeed well enough to more than make up for failures and bad luck. It will enrich the nation. While both liberals and conservatives will be more competent (in my not-so-humble opinion) once they become converts to MMT, they will still argue like hell with each other.

no room for saviors

 Alas, only a god can know who qualifies as you might have them qualify, and I would wish they would qualify to participate in our democracy. I have known barefoot, illiterate people who I believe a god would judge to be wiser than I. The Constitution was prescient in dulling the knife of  mere humans in charge of making the cut as to who qualifies. We must remember that imperfection is in the core and the corps of us and of the biosphere.The incompetence of genes trying and occasionally failing to reproduce correctly has made us and other gene-based life in our biosphere what we are. Our failure to ever govern ourselves perfectly has made us strive again and again to form a "more perfect" (aka, 'better-but-still-imperfect') union". Without imperfection there would no room for saviors.

Thrill of Deomocracy: Turrialba, Costa Rica ... 1986

Turrialba, Costa Rica; 1986. An election by people celebrating democracy that happened to lead to a Nobel Peace Prize.

MVC 1975

This first week of June, 2016 
I have the unpleasant task of cleaning out my office-studio so I can convert it into our new bedroom. I came across a 1975 copy of Petroleum Today. Puzzled, why would I save such a magazine? Clue, the cover displays a photo of a whale boat in front of a gallery: Martha's Vineyard! I opened it to the related article and this picture:

One-o-Cat

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Please help me (and ask your friends to help as well).

If you played baseball or softball as a youth, help me figure out where and how long the name survived from a game that pre-dated "baseball." Leave a comment at this blog.

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http://one-o-cat.blogspot.com
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Bilingualism is, indeed, good for us.

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If you doubted whether bilingualism is good for us beyond its obvious practical benefits, read a piece by:

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee for the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html
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... The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often ...
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Energy One Two Too

March 6, 2012, Weld County Colorado

near Grover and Pawnee Buttes

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http://komivesiangraphics.blogspot.com/2012/03/pawnee-buttes-2012.html

1968. Guatemala

1968. Guatemala

New Humanism, The Second Age of Enlightenment

 I wrote this to friends recently:

I wonder, if we were to manage to reduce measurably the negative outcomes of our age, if the age of turnaround might come to be called, "The Second Age of Enlightenment." That would give more credit to the way we learned to think than to the consequent way we  learned to live. I'm an it-is-a-lifestyle-problem guy myself, but I am uncomfortable with how much anti-intellectualism seems to have permeated all sides of the debate (if debate is possible between anti-intellectuals).

March 7 2011: David Brooks delves more deeply.
I encourage you to read it: [Click}   
What I had started to conceive of as "the Second Age of Enlightenment." Brooks' would call "The New Humanism"--better I believe.  He certainly describes it well, though I would add that a level-headed respect for science over pseudoscience will be part of it. After all, it is science (as Brooks explains) that is opening the pathways to the new humanism. No matter what we call the age envisioned, we should hasten out from our redoubts to welcome its arrival.

Let us stop arguing about global warming.

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Let us stop arguing about global warming,
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look around us,
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look to science,
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watch the weather,
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and agree that we enter an

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Age of Climate Instability and Deep Seas

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You may choose to call it an Acey-deucey.

Zoli

My father's cousin, Zoli Marton, has died in Budapest. The circumstances of our meeting were impactful  and memorable. In honor of Zoli and the gift of those circumstances, I post this long-long narrative poem.
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Instructions To A Stranger


November 1

At the train station, leaving the city,
buy two long-stem roses.

Tony Jackson
of the
Financial Times
wants a
New Model
of Economics.
.Published: March 29 2010.
.worth the trouble if FT makes you register (for free) to see it.

and
(you guessed it)

I call (long since) for a new model as well.

A Look Back :: page 1 of the first Plum Local

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.... click on image to enlarge it ....

Albarracin Spain: 9pm, March 5, 2009

We have snow here. It is cold and windy. But no better place for this weather can there be. Albarracin Spain: a medieval wonder. Out the window, along the narrow streets, in the 12th century. - Unlike Teruel & Cuenca, our last two stops, there is no modern town surrounding. We've seen much beauty this trip (Alhambra, Mesquita, ..., ...,) but 3 jaw-drop wonders: Sagrada Familia in Barcelona by Gaudi, Ciudad de Artes y Sciencias in Valencia by Calatrava, & this, Albarracin. - Yesterday we had lunch next to hot-wood stove, behind a split heavy-wood door, along what seemed an abandoned street, in another medieval village (population 36) higher in the mountains. . We were on a necessary detour. We planned to get here by that as return route from Cuenca today, but turned back as snow which was melting below deepend & continued to fall as we approached the passes. . As we sip from the wine bottle we didn't empty last night we wonder whether we will brave the cold winds out of the dark ages to return to the tavern where we had lunch for a snack and drink before snuggling in.

Paradox of Thrift :: Where's Our Story?

Among the topics at our Tuesday Night Symposium (“symposium” means “drinking together”) of January 27 th was the “paradox of thrift.” How is it that in this time of down-spiraling economy we are bad citizens of the world and country if we be prudently thrifty with our personal resources? I’ll link you to Wikipedia and Paul Krugman to explain why-indeed-it-is and why-we-are. Yes, we are victims of this spiral, victims of those whose avarice, incompetence, and malpractice started the downward spin. Yet, when we respond rationally, protect ourselves, shorten our reach, practice thrift, we accelerate the spin. Our refusal to be as profligate as we were a few months and a few years ago is, collectively, a bad thing. This is true despite our apparent wisdom and virtue. That truth is hard for most of us to believe, no matter our political bent.

Perhaps our fundamental problem is that these negative economic spirals may depend on historic finance; they were of minor importance or non-existent in pre-history. That would explain why we don’t seem to have a countervailing instinct nor myth nor ethic to prepare us to be spenders when self-preservation and traditional virtue would prescribe thrift. We are rich in stories of the ills of profligacy and the virtue of thrift. Surely we must have many stories that urge us to fight the paradox of thrift, but I can only think of one—told as a parable by Jesus of Nazareth. He sided with the father who browbeats the son who puts his money safely under a rock rather than spend it (OK, invest) as did his brother. (In truth, I remember another story. It's the scene from the movie, Animal House, when Delta house has sunk beyond apparent potential for redemption; the beleaguered brothers look at each other and say in unison, "road trip!" Because I believe that only a mere handful of us find this story a call to virtuous action, it remains off the list.)

Are there human and other species examples which tell us how a defense against the paradox of thrift might look or feel? I think so. I’ll cite one example and hope for contributions from others.

I believe scientists call it “reciprocal altruism”. We might often describe it as the “hero instinct.” People knowingly-but-instinctively risk their own well-being in order to help others. It’s not hard to find examples. There’s the guy who jumped under a moving subway train to save a stranger . We call them heroes. We hold them in high esteem. While we generally disdain suicide, we are reverent toward heroic suicide. Also, we love stories of people who irrationally spend their riches or their meager resources to help others.

Beyond my stretch to include the parable uttered two thousand years ago, I don't recall stories that might cause us to revere people who spend profligately on themselves in order to help the larger economy in crisis. Apparently we need such stories. Outlandish? Well, why is it more outlandish to spend most of my savings to go private-goody-shopping in pursuit of common welfare than it is to spend the last breath of my life flinging myself over a grenade to save the lives of a few buddies? Clearly the goody-shopping sounds, to my ear, more outlandish. The reason, however, may be more temporal than eternal. The need for the grenade morality goes back perhaps a million years before there were grenades, whereas the need for my shopping spree has been rare, off-again more than on-again for only a few thousand years—too little time and consistency to embed an outland-ish ethic into instincts and inland-ish stories that drive our culture.

Thanks, NPR, for bringing us (Jan 30, 2009) the story of how Finland is trying to write a new morality tale urging spending over saving: Government officials signed on, and now the evil piggy bank is on posters. Finns see pro-spending commercials on TV.

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However, can this pitch top grandma's traditional lecture on the piggy bank--save, save, save? It can be found in the breeze everywhere, but NPR refers us especially to feedthepig.org.

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Hammer

Are you familiar with hammers of this type? What I know is that they were used by inspectors on the Northern Pacific Railway at Northtown Yards in Minneapolis into the 1960s. It was made by the blacksmith at Northtown. This hammer was my father's. I should somewhere have a smaller version that my father had the blacksmith make for me when I was a little kid. The genius of the hammer: the inspector could use the claw to remove the tack from a card on the side of a boxcar, place a new card, then, (using the hammer upside down with the tack secure in the claw) replace the tack without ever touching it. I saw this done the summer of 1961 when I worked on the section crew at Northtown. Was this tool a standard around the railroad world or restricted to one or a few places and railroads?