Realistic Malaise versus Irrational Exuberance

I recently listed to a podcast featuring a speech of President Jimmy Carter. The speech was given on July 15th, 1979, where he spoke about the growing energy crisis in the United States and our crisis of confidence that followed. This speech was dubbed the Malaise Speech and was universally derided as being very depressing. Given the energy crisis and the Iran Hostage Crisis of Carter's term in office, it is little wonder that Carter's entire presidency is thought of as a thoroughly depressing time.

Unfortunately, much of what Carter spoke about and focused on turned out to be prophetic.

One of my biggest criticisms of our democracy is that it has become a quick fix style of governance. Given the 2 and 4 year election cycle, our politicians are more focused on immediate concerns rather than long term problems and planning.

This reminds me of learning to drive. When I first got behind the wheel, I had a steering problem. I used to look at a spot right in front of the car. This made me swerve back and forth a lot. Some instructor or family member figured it out. They told me to look at a point down the road a ways and aim for that. This single comment immediately fixed my driving irregularities. I steered smoothly after that, with no jerkiness or shaking of the passengers.

The ship of state has a similar rudder problem. With a classic battle of one side yanking the tiller in one direction and the other yanking it in the opposite direction, as well as panicky naysayers screaming "iceberg!" every few minutes, we are jerking around all over the place.

The problem here is that people with long vision first have to take an objective and realistic look at where we are now, what we are doing, and where we need to be and what it will take. Some of these harsh realities are tough for people to swallow. People tend to plug up their ears and chant "I can't hear you!" when you say something they don't like. It is almost impossible to get elected on harsh realities.

I believe history has proven that leaders with a long view were the best thing for our country. Many people do not know that Abraham Lincoln was very unpopular through much of his presidency. Lincoln had a long term vision which was largely responsible for the eventual success of the Union in the Civil War. He also had a kinder reconstruction plan which was never put into place after his assassination. We'll never know how much racial turmoil may have been forestalled if he had lived through his second term.

Unfortunately, we now seem to be in an era of quick fix, short term, or unsustainable movements. Alan Greenspan called it Irrational Exuberance. He was referring to an unwarranted boom in the market, which eventually reversed and fell. The warning was not to get too excited about the latest economic fad, not to fall prey of schemes to make a quick buck at the expense of rational, safe, or slow plans. I think it's fair to say that the last 12 years have had a fair dose of these economic fads. The dot.com boom and bust, the stock market roller coaster ride, and the highly speculative real estate market are just a few examples. The unfortunate reality is that when people look around and see that someone has figured out a way to make a pile of money, there is a rush of people copying these tactics. Unfortunately, history has proven that most quick rises are followed by devastating falls.

So the person counselling conservation and development of alternate energies (including Nuclear - most people forget that Carter advocated nuclear energy and was himself a navy trained nuclear submariner) gets no credit for having the right ideas at the right time, and those with wild schemes to get rich quick or solve long term problems with short term fixes will never be short of followers.

Visions in the Mind's eye

I was out running a few days ago, on a slightly stormy overcast day, where the clouds took on this very pretty blue gray color. This is midsummer when the blue cornflowers are in bloom in the ditches and on the roadside. I noticed that the cornflowers were the same color as the clouds in the stormy sky.

I remember thinking that I did not have my camera, and it would have made a beautiful picture. Sometimes you have to hold on to the pictures just in your mind. You hope you can remember them well and recall them when you want.

I ran past a foggy cove of a lake the other morning and the air was heavy and still. There was a Blue Heron in the fog across the cove, full of sailboats. I watched his ungainly, gawky form as he struggled to the air and then coasted across the water with an improbable grace that seemed to defy gravity.

So often these quick flashes are not recorded and quickly forgotten. They make up the fabric of life. You wonder what your mind does with so many details.

As I drove across Kansas, I saw long views in the open plain, simple still and silent, yet complete and majestic. I've been caught up in the overlooked details in wood grain or random patterns of shadows.

You wonder if there is meaning in the visions as they flash by. It's easy to say that some things are simply meant to be appreciated. Some things are just beautiful, they have no special meaning. But these things come together to make up your life's experience, even if they aren't recorded or remembered. That gives them meaning.

Liberal Education

Political discourse being what it is in this country (two armed camps volleying shots at each other) it sometimes pays to back up a bit and see how we got into this mess.

One of the things I note most often is the way that the conservatives and Republicans say the word "Liberal". I'm sure if you're alive and aware in America today, you've heard the word slither out of people's mouths, heavy with scorn.

I had a friend about 10 years ago that I've since gotten out of touch with. This guy was a free spirit, a bit of a hippie, funny, fun-loving, and rarely serious. Not a corporate hack type, not a cubicle dweller, a guy that really wanted a job that allowed him freedom and access to the great outdoors. This guy was not at all what you would consider Conservative. The last time I talked to him was when I phoned him at random about 3 years ago. In the course of the conversation, he mentioned that he had been listening to a lot of talk radio and that he "hates Liberals". I remember the feeling I had when I heard this. If you've ever seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or The Stepford Wives, you know about those parts in the stories where the character realizes that their friend is no longer there in the person they used to know. They are now mindlessly serving a new heartless master. This guy didn't have a conservative bone in his body. How did he fall prey to the propaganda?

And it is propaganda. When the dripping with scorn word Liberal comes out of a Conservative's mouth it means a person that is completely deluded, out of touch with reality, and determined to destroy the country. You have to pay attention to this, because there are people making a great deal of money while shovelling this bile out to the public. There are people getting rich and benefitting immensely from working their hardest to divide the people in this country.

What does the word liberal mean? In the Oxford English Dictionary, liberal is an adjective meaning: 1) willing to respect and accept behaviour or opinions different from one’s own. 2) (of a society, law, etc.) favourable to individual rights and freedoms. 3) (in a political context) favouring individual liberty, free trade, and moderate reform. 5) (especially of an interpretation of a law) not strictly literal. 6) given, used, or giving in generous amounts. 7) (of education) concerned with broadening general knowledge and experience.

If you look it up on Etymology online at http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=liberal&searchmode=none, it shows where the word came from: from French circa 1375, "befitting free men, noble, generous," from the Latin word liberalis "noble, generous, pertaining to a free man". The root for liberal and liberty are basically the same, it means "free". Other earlier meanings are "belonging to the people", "people", and "nation, people". Other references speak about liberal arts where man's efforts are directed to intellectual enlargement that was deemed worthy of a free man (as opposed to being servile or mechanical). Other meanings are "free in bestowing", and "free from restraint in speech or action" or "free from prejudice, tolerant". These were not always seen as good things. At the time of the founding of our county, the accepted meaning was "tending in favor of freedom and democracy" and also "favorable to government action to effect social change".

So liberal is a word that has long since evoked a feeling of expanding one's mind, freeing yourself from the constraints of the past, and enjoying liberty in life.

It is also used to mean generous or ample. Who wouldn't want a generous helping of your favorite dessert?

So the next time someone expresses scorn for liberalism, they should be asked, "Are you against a generous helping of freedom?"

The importance of Tobacco

I've always suspected that the plants that humans have always focused on could become more important, that we intuitively have love affairs with certain plants for a deeper reason that has not been revealed yet.

I'm talking mostly about tobacco. When I was a kid in the 70s, they were bringing out all kinds of information about tobacco to get people to be aware and get away from smoking. This is the era that they stopped TV advertising and Surgeon General warnings started showing up on cigarette packs. We started to understand the addictive nature of nicotine, but we also understood that the burning weed was gumming up our lungs with tar. I remember hearing that there were some 300 chemicals in tobacco that we didn't understand. This aspect of the tobacco plant is rarely mentioned. You hear about the handful of chemicals in tobacco that were found to be harmless, but it's not clear to me how harmful these chemicals are if they aren't burned and inhaled. I always wondered if some of those other chemicals weren't things that enhanced health. It seemed likely to me, because you would think that smoking tobacco would kill you a lot faster than it does, unless there is something about the plant that is also helping the body.

I don't know that anybody else is studying this, but you hear about how one of the reasons they didn't outlaw tobacco outright was that there were so many farmers growing it. I thought that it might be a good compromise to force the tobacco companies to look at healthy chemicals in tobacco in order to change the use of the crop from an addictive killer into a beneficial crop.

People have had love affairs with a few other plants, some with no healthy or good use, others with some good and some bad uses. Coca (cocaine), poppies (heroin), marijuana, and coffee come to mind as examples of plants with an addictive use profile. Corn, potatoes, sugar, wheat, and rice are other plant that we've had a long association with.

I tried growing some tobacco for a while. The breeds were available for sale through Seeds of Change (www.seedsofchange.com), a cool seed catalog that touted the benefits of growing tobacco as an insect repellent for other plants in your garden. I bought some seeds and grew the plants next to some of the other vegetables I was trying to grow. They came up very healthy and I was fascinated at how easy they were to grow. One day, when I went down to check on them, I noticed that they looked horrible. They were being devoured by these enormous green worms. While this carnage was going on in my tobacco crop, with me thinking that the advertisements were wrong to say that it repelled insects, I finally noticed the adjacent rows of vegetables were completely bug free. So maybe it was not accurate to say that they repelled insects as much as they attracted them away from other plants.

This isn't the first time that something else was discovered while looking at tobacco. The first virus discovered by man was the tobacco mosaic virus. While concentrating on what was causing problems with tobacco crops, man discovered a whole new kingdom of life.

Recently, I heard a story about scientists using tobacco as a factory for cancer fighting agents. [See Science Friday's 7/28/08 show archives, if you are interested - http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200807253] They did it by infecting the tobacco plant with a virus that then produces the beneficial chemical. While this is another example of a useful symbiotic relationship (see my posting Symbiosis), it is also a good example of our love affair with the tobacco plant yielding a benefit for human health.

We often talk about going bioprospecting in the vanishing rain forests of the Amazon to find new plants with beneficial drugs, but I think we should be looking a little closer at the plants we already have a long relationship with.

Acceptible Risks and Excessive Adventure

I often notice attempts to make the world overly safe. This started when I was a kid and the parents would tell us not to get in the pool until a half an hour after eating. I knew it was a sham when I was little. It was caution taken to a ridiculous extreme. There is practically a whole industry built around the misconception that we must make everything safe.

I had a wonderful rant one Thanksgiving when I was 18 or 19 and it was snowing a little bit outside. We had all the relatives around, and thought it would be fun to go out and rent a movie to entertain everyone. My father got angry and asked us if we were crazy to risk driving in the snow just for a movie. I started a half serious, half comedic rant about taking risks. I remember saying that we would never have colonized the country or flown to the moon if we were afraid of risk. I remember using the line, "This country was built on wild risky behavior!"

I've also noticed that risks sometimes make us stronger. You could argue that you only get ahead by taking risks. But more than that, risk is often fun. The sense of danger is what makes the activity more enjoyable. Personal trials also build experience and character. The efforts to overcome obstacles sharpen our minds and bodies.

There are also non-human examples of trial, ordeals, and collisions that are dangerous, damaging, and destructive, but bring about benefits. Fire often shapes the prairie and the forest: burning away the old things brings new life. I was recently looking at an area on the prairie that had been burned down earlier in the year and teh sand hill plums not only survived the fire, but were thriving. I have also heard planetary scientist speculate that meteor impacts bring life to protoplanets. Sometimes this is from the water that they bring, and sometimes one species can only survive after an impact wipes out a competitor, as we rose after the dinosaurs were wiped out. While this brought death to some, it brought life to others.

I recently had dinner with a British guy that worked for a company with an excessive safety policy. I thought he was railing against the absurdity of the policy, talking about how company members were required to report coworkers over incidents of unsafe practices. He talked about how if you saw someone going down a set of stairs and not using the handrail, you were supposed to write up the incident and hand it in. When I agreed with this and told him that it was absurd and that some risks had to be taken from time to time, he disagreed and started defending the policy. I sited the example of a person going skydiving, and his response was that you alleviate all risk by training and using safe equipment. I countered by saying that man would never have explored or colonized the Pacific if they stayed safe and waited until they had thoroughly tested equipment. He was convinced that enormous efforts to pare down the last percentage point of risk was worth the effort.

I think he ignores the fact that a certain degree of risk has a strengthening effect. Recent studies have shown that continual exposure to certain strains of bacteria can bring disease resistance and may even fend off diabetes. Our society has tried its hardest to keep people away from any bacteria for too long. Antibacterial soaps, antiseptic wipes, and hair trigger disposal of food that is past its expiration date has kept us away from exposure to all bacteria (good and bad). The overuse of antibiotics in people and livestock has done little to protect us, it has simply toughened up the bacteria and made us more vulnerable. Now we have MRSA and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis because we trained these strains to resist everything we could throw at them. See what happens to the bugs when they are under assault? They get stronger. The same thing applies to people.

Granite Siding

We were told that this person wasn't going to be in the office one afternoon because he had to be at home for a person that was coming by to do some work on his house. This person is always getting work done on his house, and I was joking I was joking about how he was going to install granite siding. You hear about people putting granite counter tops in, a very expensive prospect, and the joke was meant to convey that this guy would be willing to spend very generously on his house. Then I realized that the first home men had, caves, had granite siding.

The funny thing about this thought is that it got me thinking. I know that stone is supposed to be a good building material because it slowly heats up during the day, keeping a house cool until the end of the day, where it supposedly re-radiates the heat, keeping the house warm at night. But years ago, when the home was a cave, you were underground. Now people that really want to save money on energy will build what they call an Earth-Contact home. This is a house like a basement with the earth piled up around it to keep it insulated. Basically, these supposedly high-tech homes are caves, just like the most primitive home.

Tribute to discontinued Podcasts

I've subscribed to a lot of podcasts over the last 3 years via iTunes. I feel like I got in on the early stages of the form. There was a time when people were making their own, and it had a very non-commercial individual peer-to-peer feel to it. While I've listened to quite a few podcasts that were not well thought-out, well researched, or well rehearsed, I've also lucked into many that were excellent, and some of those were discontinued. This posting is a review of some of the best of those podcasts.

One of the more notable accomplishments was a high school student named George Hageman. He did a podcast called Military History Podcast. There were 120 episodes in July 2008 when he announced that he graduated High School and would be going to Harvard, so he was discontinuing the podcast. George also posted all of his podcasts on a blog at http://www.militaryhistorypodcast.blogspot.com/. The one cool thing that I learned about George was that his grandfathers fought in WWII on opposite sides, one being Japanese. I wrote to him once and suggested that he do a podcast on General Nathan Bedford Forrest from the Civil War, and he wrote back, but did not do the podcast. I can appreciate it, I know he did scripts that were submitted to him, but even so, he put out about one a week for at least a couple of years through High School, which is quite a feat. You just know this guy is going to pop up as an author one day, with that much energy to burn.

Another favorite podcast was Brain Food by Kyle Butler. Kyle was a Canadian college student, studying engineering. He actually was a guest on the Naked Scientist Podcast, by the Journal Nature in the UK, answering a question about the amount of fuel soccer fans were wasting through extra drag by flying flags on their cars. Kyle had a great way of explaining things, and it would be great if he got his own television show some day, making science and engineering fun for the masses. He had a girlfriend that he popped the question to and they graduated and got married at some point, and the podcast just stopped.

One of the funniest podcasts I ever stumbled on was Logically Critical by some guy that never did give his name. He put out these diatribes for about a year and a half, and then begged off due to time constraints. His website is www.logicallycritical.net, which is still up as of the writing of this posting. He claimed that he would break issues down logically without extensive research. He had hilarious sound effects and lots of spot-on information that sounded off the cuff. Several of his episodes were about religion, which he claimed he wasn't attacking, but that it wasn't very logical. Some of his "Wacky Bible Stories" were hilarious. All he did was paraphrase sections of the Old Testament, and that was funny enough. He did great voices and sound effects. I got the impression that this guy didn't finish college and worked hard, possibly in a blue collar job, but was a lot smarter than he was "on paper". It sounds like he was capable of whatever he put his mind to, but didn't buy into bullshit organizational structures.

Another great podcast was the President's Weekly Radio Address. This was a spot-on parody of the actual President's weekly radio address done by the folks that produce The Onion newspaper and podcasts. The problem with this podcast was that they didn't even have to change Bush's words much, or make up anything to make him look like an idiot. I think they got discouraged and depressed because the podcast was too close to reality. It also wasn't changing anything. Making fun of Bush wasn't causing anyone to rally around the cry of "Our President is an Idiot!" So they shut the podcast down around the time that gas prices maxed out and during the maximum period of hopelessness in Iraq, just before the surge got underway. Whoever read the podcast had Bush's voice down pat.

There was a political podcast called CallBox 7 which was put on by Daniel Brewer out of Florida. He was an IT type guy, so he really had the editing down cold. He spoke openly about being gay and considered himself not a liberal, but a progressive. He was pointing out some very on the mark flaws with politics in this country and I was writing in to him from time to time (I actually got read on his podcast a couple of times, which was pretty fun). The problem was that Daniel did such a professional job that trying to keep up with a weekly podcast was killing his social life. So he took on a co-host, I think with the intention of splitting the load and not having to work as hard, but it ended up still being the same amount of work, but now with this other guy plugged in. Will Radik was from San Francisco, and they did it via a Skype connection, I think. I liked Will, but Daniel & Will had such different styles that it completely changed the character of the podcast. It wasn't better or worse, just less focused. Will was like the lighthearted comic relief to Daniel's laser beam rage at the machine. I left the podcast on iTunes and noticed that Daniel started podcasting again around the time of the conventions. The most recent format involved 3 guests that watched the first Presidential Debate together and then commented on it. It's always fun to listen to a Daniel Brewer podcast in whatever format it's in.

The last podcast I wanted to mention is Strong Bad Email. This is the only video podcast I'm mentioning here, and since I have always had iPod Shuffles (no video), I don't do too many video. Now this is basically a cartoon, but it's pretty creative and funny. My nephews and cousins like it, from ages 8 to 16, so it plays on two levels, funny for kids and funny for adults (similar to Toy Story movies or Bugs Bunny cartoons). This podcast stopped for a long time and recently started back up again, but it doesn't have the feel of something that will last, only because it looks like it would take a lot of effort and time and podcasters typically don't get paid for their efforts.

While many podcasts are produced by the BBC, Slate, NPR, Nature, Scientific American, or Science (big established organizations with large staffs), there is something to be said for individuals making their own podcasts. A definite democratization of broadcasting that gives you all kinds of viewpoints, unfiltered and un(self-)censored by any corporate masters. Long live the free voice of independent podcasters!