Giving Up?

I freely admit to spying on neighbors.

However, I'm not sure you should even call these ones neighbors. House flipper realtors don't really count as neighbors.

I saw a couple in a white SUV on the driveway, talking to the "owner" flipper. I watched from my window. The conversation did not look congenial.

At first, I thought maybe it was a potential buyer, then I started wondering if it was the realtor. The couple was a man and a woman, but the woman was a lot older than the man, so I didn't think they were husband and wife, but maybe colleauges.

It looked like the owner was sort of arguing, maybe not in a contentious way, just trying to get his points across, and the couple looked like they were utterly unconvinced.

Later, I noticed that their footprints in the snow showed that they went to the front doors of the house where the electricity disconnection notices were still posted. I also noticed that the owner backed into our yard and made a mud rut with his back tire.

The next day, the real estate agent's sign was removed.

News of the housing markets just keep getting worse. I went through the back yard around the pool last night, looking for a cat and noticed that there was 2½' of water in the pool equipment room. Obviously, the drains are clogged with leaves and debris. It's possible that the cabana that they removed used to keep the water out and the deck that they replaced it with does not. I wonder how much damage the water is doing to the pool heater and filter? More money just evaporating away.

I wonder if we'll see a foreclosure sale sometime?

Postscript:

I called the realtor. It was another exercise in unreality. The secretary had a guy call me back that didn't even know that their company was listing the property. He kept trying to engage me on the phone, even when I figured out that I needed to talk to Pamela. Truly Dave, you are an idiot.

Pamela is his kindred spirit. Maybe they are brother and sister, their mental processes were certainly a match. Pamela said that they were going to "re-list" it. This is another meaningless buzz word that can mean anything they want it to mean, similar to the way they would tell us that the house was "under contract", which we were supposed to interpret as meaning that they had someone interested in buying it, when it really meant "I don't want you to think we are losers".

Pamela (if that is her real name) said the house is now $900,000 (down from $1.2 million - 25% off! that's a real sale!). They would be willing to take $875,000, as is. That means that for $900,000 he'll finish working on the house. Then she proceeded to tell me about the granite counters they are going to put in the guest house.

If this isn't like putting makeup on a pig, I don't know what is.

Fear and Control

When Heath Ledger died last week, it was unexpected. I remembered him mostly from A Knight's Tale, where he was pretty funny. Everyone remembers that Heath was in Brokeback Mountain. No one I know watched that movie. I didn't even know what it was about. The movie got awards and recognition, so that usually tells you that it's good, but I wasn't about to walk up to the counter at Blockbuster video rental and plop down a "gay flick".

I heard the scenery in the movie was beautiful, but I thought it was a gay romance film. When Heath Ledger died, I decided to rent the movie. My wife and I watched it last night.

Spoiler alert. You may want to skip the next 3 paragraphs if you haven't seen it. It was a good movie. It was sad. I kept thinking that it didn't seem realistic that they were really in love, it seemed just like actors playing a role. That's true for most Hollywood movie romances, as far as I'm concerned. We kept waiting, wondering where the movie was going. I did not know it was set in 1963 up to the late 70s/early 80s. The movie was about suppressed romance. The two characters were gay, but couldn't come out of the closet, or truly express their love for each other or live together.

Then, Jake Gyllenhaal's character Jack Twist dies. When Heath's character Ennis Del Mar contacts Jack's widow and parents you see the true cost of their actions. They denied themselves their whole lives until it was too late.

It wasn't clear to me what happened to Jack. Earlier, Ennis had told a story about some gay ranchers being tortured to death, possibly by his father, that set the tone for the whole movie. Ennis was scared to go public because he had seen clearly what can happen to gay people in his world. I missed a brief part where they showed Jack being beaten by some guys in a field. Before my wife told me that, it was not clear if Jack actually died by accident or was killed for being gay. It seems clear that Jack's parents knew their son was gay and his mother at least was sympathetic about her son's plight and Ennis's grief. I guess that's part of what made it so sad. This guy loses his lover and can't even properly mourn for him. Jack's parents even told Ennis that Jack wanted to live with him on a ranch out there, so they knew that Ennis was Jack's true love. The father wasn't very pleased about it, but he also was not overly hostile toward Ennis.

It's odd that in the movie, Heath lives, and in real life, he died. Some of the tone of the movie, the tragic death of someone before their time, parallels real life. Who knows what Heath Ledger would have been like if he had lived.

Talking about the movie afterwards, I remarked that fear of homosexuality wasn't always around. The Greeks were fairly open about male homosexuality, and there was no stigma about it. My wife pointed out that Christianity imposed the restrictions. It's all about fear and control. You're supposed to be afraid of the consequences, and that's how the church maintains their control over you.

On one hand, things seem to be changing. There seems to be more understanding and a greater tolerance by society at large about homosexuality. However, the church is fighting back, as they see their control slipping. The ability for men to be openly gay gains ground a little bit each year.

I was also thinking about female heterosexual sexuality. Islamic fundamentalism has sought to suppress this aspect of life, with little true success. We in the west don't have much problem seeing this as restrictive, against human nature, and inherently wrong, but we turn around and apply the same restrictions to gays.

I guess we still have some growing up to do.

Amy & Janice

Is it just me, or does Amy Winehouse (self destructive Brit pop star) look suspiciously like Maggie Wheeler (who played Chandler's annoying girlfriend Janice in Friends).

I'm just saying.

Tobacco & Alcohol

In order to buy Tobacco and Alcohol, you have to be 18 & 21 years old. In the grocery store that I went to this morning, there is a litte tear-off calendar that states "You have to have been born after this date..." in order to purchase either tobacco or alcohol. The dates were 1/18/87 and 1/18/90.

The cash register (which nowadays are computers) was being rebooted when I was buying lottery tickets, so I had the tickets in hand, but not the change. So there was this pause where I had to stand there and wait. At first, I didn't realize we were waiting for anything, and I was just standing there spacing off, staring at the date calendar. Then, when the cashier explained what we were waiting for. By then, I had latched onto the dates and was trying to remember what I was doing at the time.

I mentioned it to the cashier, and she said she had gotten married just before the 1990 date. I remembered that sometime around mid December, we had record cold that year. I was driving my brother's old Chevette, and there was snow in the street in front of the Batallion. I thought I was being smart when I drove through the snow, pulled a u-turn, passed the parking spot, pulled another u-turn and parked in the ruts. I saved myself being stuck in the snow, I thought.

I had just gotten back from 3 years in Panama and was not used to the cold yet. I did not have adequate cold weather clothes, and I was wearing an Army uniform, anyway, which wasn't the warmest choice you could make to begin with. The temperature dropped to -25°F with the wind chill below -40°F It was a record cold day. When I left the office to either go home or go out to lunch, the car started, but would not move. I was surprised, because I had specifically planned for this problem and taken actions to prevent it from happening. After digging the area around the tires out, it still wouldn't move. Somehow, I figured out that the brake pads were frozen to the disc. I had to jack up the car, remove the tire, and get a small blowtorch and heat up the pads to get them to release. I had heated up the brakes and packed them with snow with my fancy maneuver, and the melted snow refroze and held the brakes tighter than if I was standing on the brake pedal. I drove home for Chistmas that night and heard on the radio that the U.S. had invaded Panama, just 2 weeks after I left my 3 year tour there.

As for 1987, that was right after I first arrived in Panama, on December 28, 1986. The first thing they did after New Year's and inprocessing was to ship me out on a deployment to the Chirique province of Panama, up on the border with Costa Rica. I spent 45 days there, inspecting construction and flying around in helicopters. It was very cool, except for the fact that I was newly married, and my wife was cooling her heels in Manhattan Kansas, waiting for me to tell her to come down to Panama with me. I stayed in a tent with the aviators, and each night, they would quiz each other about flying helicopters. It was like extended school. They would ask questions like, "do you get more or less lift on a more humid day?" And about 7 variations on that theme. They verbally practiced loss of power, autorotation, and all the other tricks of the trade.

To me, it's not about fretting about how old you are getting, but more about remembering all the things you've done in your life.

So happy birthday, youngsters! Have a beer and a cigarette for me, because I'm staying away. That stuff will kill you.

These Colors Run

I have a visceral aversion to seeing the flag on the ground. My noexistant neighbors can't pay their bills, so I don't know why I would expect them to respect the flag.

This house kind of reminds me of the current fascination with "The World Without Us". A fascination that I will admit that I share, which answers the question, if humans suddenly vanished, what would happen to all our buildings and works? This is the scientific equivalent of the Left Behind series, where people suddenly vanish in the rapture.

The house next door appears to be an experiment trying to figure out what this would look like in my neighborhood. My favorite part of the experiment is when the animals come back. Thank you foolish house flipper for the the deer and wild turkey.

House Next Door - Unplugged

It has seemed that the person that bought the house next door and the strange contractors that worked on it were complete insane, but they talked up a good story about how great! they were doing, and on some level, you want to believe them.

Apparently, they were not doing that great, as evidenced by the fact that last month their water was shut off, and this month, their electricity was cut off.

With the looming housing crisis, you have to wonder what will happen, and just how bad the place will look when it finally gets sold. I had a handyman/contractor come by last week to look at a busted storm window, and he said it would only be worth about $500,000 if it was in perfect shape, but he thinks $350,000 would be more likely, given the amount of work that needs to be done. I wonder if they still want $1,200,000 for it.

Killing Time

I had a manager one time that kept suggesting that I visit every Winery in Kansas to sell filters. This was something that I knew was a waste of time, wineries do not buy the kind of filters I sell. Every week, he would call and ask me to update him on the efforts, even though I told him it was fruitless. It got on some upper manager's task list somewhere and they couldn't just let it go, someone somewhere expected it to be done and they had a report with a check box on it that they had to check off every week for some worthless meeting where they'd be asked if they checked off all their boxes. I wasn't getting paid to just visit the wineries, I wouldn't get paid unless I ever sold anything to them, and I deemed the effort fruitless, so I didn't do it. Asked pointedly by the manager why I wasn't doing what he suggested, I told him it was too much effort and not worth it. He started lecturing me about how easy it would be for me to do this, which was supposed to convince me to do it.

I realized that it was easy for him. He just had to talk to me for 3 minutes once a week and check a box on a report. He didn't appreciate how difficult it would be for me to do it because I was expending the effort, not him. So I came up with a new axiom in my life, which I refer to constantly now.

It's easy to spend other people's time.

It takes no effort to tell someone to do something. They have to do the actual work, spend the actual time. When it takes no effort, it's easy to lose sight of the value of the time spent making something happen.

"Why don't they just ..." You've heard it a million times. People pontificating on the problems of the world, or of their coworkers, family, or friends. Blithely prescribing simplistic solutions to complex problems with a dismissive wave of the wrist. Ask them to actually roll up their sleeves and expend some effort and you'll see how popular the idea is even with the main proponent of it.

Once you recognize this annoyance, you'll see it everywhere, but the real trick is to not do it yourself. How many times have you visited someone's house and said, "If this was my house, I'd paint the kitchen blue." or carpet the patio, or build on a deck, or make a fish pond, or add on a room. People don't like to hear that about their homes, or their lives, or even the way they open a peanut butter jar. When you start to scale yourself back from doing this, you realize that there is a subtle difference to the approach - a new axiom:

People will take a suggestion much quicker than "direction".

Would you rather be told to do something or have someone make a casual suggestion that you could follow or reject without any offense? Being told to do something brings out a rebellious streak in me anyway. Even if it's something I was planning to do anyway, I don't like someone reaching into my life and pushing buttons and pulling levers as if I was their robot or slave. I have to quell the immediate swell of resentment that flares in me any time someone "orders" me to do something. If I think about it, I realize that true free will is not sacrificed by occasionally doing something at the direction or suggestion of someone else. I still have the choice to do it or not, it's still my decision. I still have to calculate if the result is worth the effort if I'm the one that will be doing it.

If you turn it around, it gets really interesting. If someone comes to you and says, "I want to do this" you have to recognize when you are simply being informed versus when you are being roped in. If they are simply informing you about something they are going to do in their life, why would you want to mount objections? If it doesn't cost you any effort, the best thing you can do for someone is encourage them. What kind of friends would you want? Supportive people that are telling you positive things and giving you encouragement, of course. It's also really simple to be that person. They may want help looking at it and thinking about it, but if they're not asking you to commit money or effort to the cause, then why bother shooting it down for no reason? Just because it's something you personally wouldn't do for yourself doesn't mean you shouldn't let them do it.

Social Isolation

I listened to a podcast of an old radio program from 2004. It was talking about the phenomena of flashmobs that was briefly popular around the time Dean was the front runner for the Democrats. I remember Dean had figured out how to generate campaign contributions from the Internet and there was supposed to be a whole new era of social interactions based on contacts made on the web.

The program was interesting, because these two reporters decided to participate in this website that arranged group meetings between like minded people. Supposedly, if you liked Belgian beer or Dutch impressionists, you could sign up and you would be invited to meet with several of them to discuss your common interests. While the woman kept going to these bars and seeing no one there from the group, the guy kept going and meeting Irish Ex-pats at rowdy pubs and other fun things.

The program then morphed into a discussion of Social Isolation. This is supposedly something that is increasing either despite or because of the Internet. She talked about how people actually interact with less and less people and that they are feeling more and more alone.

Part of our isolation has to do with the polarization of America. The increase in political polarization has spread to personal rejectionism. On a personal level people aren't just polarized one of two ways, but are ready to completely reject others because of any one thing they don't like. In politics, rather than just disagreeing with someone over an issue, people now tend to listen until something is said that they don't agree with, then label their target and reject everything about them. The problem is that everyone is an individual and we will all have some trait that others don't approve of, so it's possible to reject everyone. It also seems easier nowadays to keep away from others than to interact with them. This leads to Singularization, or the isolation of the individual.

This even happens with friends, because everyone changes over time. What is it that makes friends drift away, and why is it so hard to keep in touch once you start to drift? I've been cleaning out my parents' personal mementos, and it is amazing how rich their early lives were of friends and acquaintances. It made me think about my own life, all the people I've known over the years and how so many of them are no longer in touch. Drifting apart is not always from rejection over some trait or offense at some act, sometimes it's just a lifestyle effect. You find yourself not doing the same things or available the same time anymore.

I listened to an essay from the series This I Believe where this guy talked about the assumption of The Basic Decency of People. It was interesting. This guy talked about how he would get mad at people in traffic for costing him half a second. He talked about his parents, who lived in Germany and had found a way to forgive the Germans for the atrocities of WWII. He operated under the assumption that people were basically decent. All his actions followed from this basic assumption. It was an interesting concept to wrap your head around, and really, when you think about it, probably well justified. Most people, if they are not decent, probably think of themselves as decent. There are few hard core criminals, chronically selfish people, or generally thoughtless people. Most people are just working their way through life and would like to be thought of as one of the good people. One woman remarked that when she ran into people in traffic that did something irritating, that she would make up a story about them. They were a doctor and they were rushing to the hospital, or something to make their actions seem reasonable and forgivable.

When it comes right down to it, wouldn't that be a good way to look at everyone in life?

Religion and Rhetoric

I got into a short exchange of emails with a coworker recently. He sent me a link to a report on National Geographic from a Russian scientist (actually, the head of the Russian space program, and not necessarily an expert on solar cycles or climatology) that said that there was no human induced global warming, it was just the sun putting out more heat. The proof was that the Martian polar ice caps were shrinking as observed by new Martian satellites, like Earth's polar ice caps. I quickly found another report from about 6 months later by a panel of climatologists. This report went in more depth and said that the sun did indeed have cycles, but that the current warming was greater than the sun cycle alone could account for. It specifically cited the other report and said that it was wrong. The Russian was only looking at the last 3 years, in any case. I knew that any good experiment or research about a theory would account for baseline conditions (how much solar energy is coming in to the planet) and adjust their findings, so in my mind, the later study had more weight, seemed to be more professional, and seemed more thorough. I copied the link to my coworker with a short comment about how the first study was discredited. My coworker, who must be a global warming skeptic, replied to me that he read the second article and found it to be full of rhetoric and opinion.

My initial reaction was that I now knew that he was a global warming denier, and that any evidence or study supporting global warming would simply be disbelieved by him. The second reaction that I had was an emotional distaste of the word rhetoric. In the battle between science and religion, I like to believe that scientists dispassionately cite facts while religionists emotionally cite beliefs without any proof or support. And here someone was calling a scientific report "rhetoric". My reaction was one of taking offense to the statement.

When I realized how irritated I was about this minor issue, I had to figure out why. First, I looked up rhetoric. There are many meanings to the word. The first one says "the undue use of exaggeration or display; bombast". I think that the connotation he was after. That the content was empty and the language was deceptive. If you read more, you see that rhetoric is also considered to be a highly studied method of speaking, usually to try to persuade, sometimes to deceive.

This reminds me of the Dover Pennsylvania Intelligent Design trial. The trial details were very interesting. They said it was like attending an evolutionary science class. One of my favorite parts was when they discussed scientific theory. Anti-Evolutionists like to say that evolution is only a theory. They are using the layman's definition of theory, as in "harebrained idea". Akin to something you dream up in the middle of the night after drinking too much tequila. Scientific Theory is when you propose an explanation for something many observers have witnessed and studied, and the results are reviewed by peers, tested, and torn apart if found to be weak. A mature scientific theory is something that is generally accepted and is used to help understand the world better. Gravity, electricity, magnetism, and germ behavior are all theories. People aren't going to start floating away and you aren't going to get sick from failing to forward that email your Aunt Nelly sent you just because gravity and germ theory are just theories and therefore not valid. Scientific Theory is like bedrock. You can count on it enough to build something to last on it.

Biblical literalists don't know what else to do. The first big famous crisis between church and science was when Copernicus used science and careful observation to put the sun in the center of the solar system. The church did not like the thought that man was not at the center of all things. There have been many other conflicts since, and when people started using geology to date the age of the earth, and started realizing how old fossils actually were, religious scholars that had been telling everyone that the world was 6,000 years old were seriously threatened by this. Darwin studied under one of the most famous geologists of the day, and was influenced to come up with his theory of evolution by learning about the extreme age of the world through geology.

Religious fundamentalists probably feel threatened by this because they think that if people start finding that things in the bible and things we've been told by religious authorities are not correct, then the whole bible is in question. They fear the house of cards effect.

I don't think all global warming denialists are also religious fundamentalists, but they follow the same pattern. The conservatives are under the influence and sway of religious fundamentalists in this country, and pick up on their attitudes and talking points, even when they don't mean to. Conservatives - with their heavy influence of capitalism and it's basic tenet that glorifies conspicuous consumption, fear what will happen if society peeks behind the curtain and actually starts to understand what is going on and what is at stake. And our divided political climate plays into that fear. Those at the pinnacle of society, in regards to wealth and influence, fear the restless masses. What if they rise up and take away all that is dear and precious to them? Scratch the surface of most denialists, and I believe you'll find someone that shares these fears.

Intellectual Property

I think a lot about what sounds like such a dry subject.

Who owns information?

Can you own information?

Benjamin Franklin, America's first great inventor, believed that no one should own an idea. He thought that inventions should be introduced, and others should be free to take your idea and make immediate improvements on it. This way, society as a whole would get the maximum benefit from innovations.

The "American" Dream (as well as that of many others around the world) is to come up with some creation and get rich quick. It's an attractive dream, and not one to toss aside lightly. It goes against the grain of many to give up individual rights, freedoms, privileges, or prerogatives in order to provide possible benefits to society at large. Some would say that to take away intellectual property protections would kill initiative and take away America's advantage as a technological innovator.

Let's look at another aspect of intellectual property. The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear that phrase is patented inventions. Copyrighted material is also intellectual property. Literature, movies, and songs are copyrighted in order for their creators to make money off of them. We get upset when someone in China makes a copy of a movie and sells it without giving someone in Hollywood any royalty payments. Many people did not get upset when millions of people copied musical tracks and shared them on the internet without compensating the music industry or the performers.

I was looking on YouTube at some outtakes from The Office, one of my favorite shows. Several people had taken their favorite moments and made little highlight films of the series. When looked it up again later, to show my wife, there was a message that said that the content was protected and had been removed from the site. It actually wasn't, I got around the warning and the videos I had watched earlier were still there. It occurred to me that they should want and appreciate that these little videos were being put together. The YouTube people aren't trying to pass off the work as their own, in fact, they are paying tribute to it. NBC probably couldn't sell little highlight films, so it's not like they are taking away from NBC revenue. You could argue that they are adding to it. The more people talk about the show, the more viewers they might get. You could say the same thing about most literature and music, the creators, in their fondest dreams, envision that their work will be enjoyed by the masses, widespread and popular. They also hope to get rich off of it, or at least that someone else won't get rich while they make nothing (ask Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes if he gets any money off all the window stickers of Calvin peeing on something).

So I have very mixed feelings about this. I don't like paying $20 for a music CD, but I don't think musicians should give away their craft for free. I would love to invent something someday and make a fortune off of it. On the other hand, if someone could invent the 100 mile per gallon engine and someone else could buy the patent and sit on it, depriving me of this useful invention, I would not be pleased. And I find it incredibly stupid that people are applying for patents for genes that the find in some organism, as if they invented it themselves. That's crazy - am I supposed to pay a royalty every time my pancreas secretes an enzyme just because some geneticist found it in the lab? More likely, the geneticist would work for some megacorp with a battalion of lawyers that is quickly applying for patents for everything the poor underpaid geek in the lab sees through his spectrograph.

When the U.S. went to war in WWII, they were hailed as out producing their enemies and supplying their allies to such a degree that we overpowered them and won the war. What a lot of people don't understand is that the government adjusted the rules of intellectual property during the course of the war for the good of the country (and world) as a whole. Aircraft designs, particularly engine designs, were freely copied between the various aircraft manufacturers. They were more than willing to do this at the time because there was more than enough work and profits to go along, as well as the fact that they wanted to win the war. This special circumstance would be worth studying to see if any of the lessons might be applicable to the broader issue of intellectual property.

Sometimes government and universities come up with knowledge that is then made available to the general public. Sometimes this is simply because they do not have an immediate commercial application for the new knowledge, but other times it is because the person making the discovery is not a financial person, but a scientific one. There will always be those that love to figure things out, just as there will always be those obsessed with how to make a buck off of it. Scientists tend to publish their discoveries in journals, such as Science and Nature, where the ideas are peer reviewed for validity, but also widespread to like minded individuals. On the world's stage, this has led to an ever widening sphere of shared knowledge that accelerates technology, innovation, and future discoveries.

I love this pure exchange of ideas, the innovation incubator that our universities have become. We have to somehow find a way to make ideas available widespread without having these commercial and financial concerns stifle development.

Mental Mashup

I like a phrase in the latest HP commercial with Gwen Stefani in it.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FhiIV6srJ0

She says that creativity is a mash-up of all these things you collect in your mind. She also says that creativity can't be turned on and off, it just sort of comes out.

I've often wondered about where ideas come from. I used to find that I would come up with revelations at odd times. For a few years there, they always came during gardening, but I've also had bouts of driving and running inspired creative thought.

I like to absorb as much information as I can. I admit, I'm an information junkie. When I was younger, I read books, magazines, and newspapers. Now I also browse the internet and listen to podcasts. Notice I don't list television as a source there. That's probably not entirely justified, but I just don't feel like it has much to offer in feeding the mind. It's more for turning the mind off and relaxing. I listen to so many podcasts now that I can't keep up with the rate they are generated. I find it very odd and gratifying from time to time when two or more podcasts, sometimes of very different genre, discuss similar ideas. Sometimes it's obvious, it's actually the same subject, but often, it's just analogous, which is more interesting.

I was inspired by the movie Good Will Hunting, of all things, when it came to education later in life. This guy is brilliant, and he taunts a Harvard or MIT student that what the student got for $100,000, he got for $1.65 in late fees from the public library. The movie Phenomenon also has a character that expands his mind simply by going to the public library. Actually, Thomas Jefferson had a great love for books, and was a voracious collector. He had a large collection of books that was amassed over his life which he donated to the government and started the Library of Congress. American founding fathers were well read, and wanted others in their nation to enjoy that same privilege. What inspired me about these examples is that the knowledge of the world is available to anyone with the time, desire, and devotion to simply pick up the books and start reading them.

How much information can we hold in the human mind? I've often wondered if the mind can actually get full. I know when my computer hard drive fills up, I have to start saving the stuff I need on other storage mediums and start deleting as much as I can so I'll have room for more. Does your brain work that way in some respect? If it does, I hope it's only deleting the stuff that is least used, and not anything important. I know if it does, it's not a process I'm in control of. I wonder if you do indeed have all the memories that you've ever accumulated locked away in your brain. If this is so, think of what happens if you die, how much knowledge dies with you.

Until that time, I plan on continuing to feed more information into the pile to see what grows out of it.

The Forever War

Joe Haldeman wrote a science fiction classic back in the 70s.

It was originally published as installments in the Science Fiction magazine Analog. Later it was published as a book and went on to win many awards and become quite well known.

My father subscribed to Analog, and I still do. I don't know if I read it originally in the magazine or as a book, but I know I used to have a dogeared copy of the book that I read several times. My brothers read it too, and we used to talk about it.

Recently, the author released an "Author's Preferred Version" of the book, as I heard on NPR from Nancy Pearl, author of the "Book Lust" series. Nancy is a librarian and prolific reader and has nice clean concise summaries of books that seldom fail to make me want to read the book.

So I went out and got the new version. It took me a day to read it.

Granted, I was sick (therefore immobile and not distracted) and it was familiar ground, but it was still impressive how smoothly the material flows in. A truly laminar work.

I did not know or realize until hearing Nancy Pearl's review that Joe Haldeman was a Viet Nam vet. He wrote the novel because of his experiences, which taught him that war is stupid and senseless. The chapters he was asked to remove and rewrite from the original version were deemed too depressing. Haldeman had great difficulty getting a publisher because they all feared that the public did not want another war protest book. Good fiction can divorce itself from the original inspiration and outline basic truths in a way that make you see universal rules that underlie our existence. I believe Haldeman achieved that with this book. I found myself throwing his thought template over the current situation, the Iraq War to see if any truisms emerged from it. There are definitely lessons that apply to all three wars, Viet Nam, Iraq, and Haldeman's fictional Forever War.

Beyond the depth of the work, there are also some very compelling and fun elements to it. I use the word fun even though it is somewhat inappropriate, but being a technophile, I love the gagets in this book.

While the stasis field, grenade launchers, missiles, gigawatt lasers, and immense ships with all their fighters and drones are interesting, the apex of his creation is the fighting suit. Part spacesuit and part exoskeleton, the suits tranform soldiers into their own tanks. They could be camoflagued with the flick of a wrist and enabled the soldier to see at any magnification or illumination he needed. They had unlimited food and recycling capabilities, emergency medical features, high tech communications, and finger lasers. Best of all, they had strength amplification circuits, so a person could leap incredibly high or crush things with their hands. Just this week, there was an item in the news about the military working to develop a soldier exoskeleton - possibly inspired by Haldeman's work? The other coolest thing about the story was that soldiers that lost a limb were taken to a hospital planet called Heaven and had their limbs regrown. Stem cell technology of the future.

Overpopulation, birth control, homosexuality, mind control, time dialation, future shock, and the inherent violence of the human species are all woven together in the story.

And it has possibly the most touching love letter I've read in the last chapter. So I would highly recommend this classic to anyone that enjoys a good action story, a good war story, or a good mirror to society and the human condition.

Stay the Course

At lunch today, my co-worker Nick remarked that he didn't know who he would vote for, since he didn't like anyone that was running. This during a phase in the election, just before the primaries, when we have a maximum number of candidates.

He's right, though. There are no good choices when it comes to elections. The people that make it through the election process are rarely what the country actually needs. And I'm not sure we would recognize what we need or elect a person like that if they actually came along.

When I was first learning to drive, I had a little problem. I tended to veer back and forth on the road. I had a problem that someone figured out and explained to me. I was looking at a point about 10 feet in front of the hood of the car. My focus was so close to the car that I was overreacting to every little bend in the road or movement of the car. Whoever figured out that I was doing this also had a cure for the problem. I remember being told to focus on a point further down the road, to lift my viewpoint up and align myself with where I wanted to be farther out down the road.

And so it is with the country. We elect leaders that are so short sighted that they have the country veering back and forth from the left to the right instead of barrelling forward and taking us where we need to go. Due to the 2 year election cycle, we are always campaigning. Leaders are not rewarded for making tough choices and fixing long term problems. They are rewarded by the public - this IS a democracy - for coming out on top of the most recent news cycle. And the people are to blame because we forget so quickly as a group. We forget the problems and mistakes that people make and re-elect the same bozos year after year to go back to Washington and raise funds for their next election rather than working on what the nation truly needs to have done.

If you were a professional assessor and were hired to make a prioritized list of the biggest and most important problems that the nation has, that list would not reflect what we see on the news. Budget, health care, social security, medicare, national defense, space defense, and education and investment in research and technology. That's the highest priorities I come up with (given just a few minutes reflection). Instead, we argue about immigration. We don't even have honest arguments about any of the subjects. It's like a trial where both sides hire their expert witnesses that come in and give opposite views and everyone that wants their side to win thinks their expert is perfect and the other side's expert is a crackpot.

I was recently asked if I thought that America had seen its high point and if our greatest days were behind us. My answer to that is that if we don't correct course and learn to focus on long term problems, that it certainly could be a downward slope for us. But all we have to do is raise our focus up from the ground right in front of our feet and start looking at where we want to be a bit further down the road.

The Last Veteran's Days

On this Veterans Day, I was thinking this morning about how they have ceremonies for aging veterans each year. I wondered if there are any WWI vets still alive, so I looked it up. According to Wikipedia, there are 22 still alive, but of those, only a few actually saw combat. These guys are all 106 years old, more or less.

I read John Keegan's First World War this last year. It was a bear of a book that I had to force myself through. Not only is Keegan a fairly dry writer (don't get me wrong, he's an excellent researcher and the information is thorough, just numbingly so), but the subject of WWI is depressing as hell.

Short Summary: Europe spends 20 or 30 years expecting that there will be another war, and does nothing but plan for it. Some obscure and unimportant duke gets shot, and it turns out to be the trigger that sends a horrible cascade of events into motion. Enormous numbers of people smash into each other in great lines, and due to the efficiency of their modern weapons, are forced to dig in. They fight for almost 3 years in an almost static position, feeding millions of men into the action, to no effect. It reminds me of a great machine that is trying to keep a fire called war going, and human beings are the pieces of wood that it keeps feeding in to be wasted. And the war was a waste. Nothing was proved, nothing was gained. Even the victors were bled white and most of a whole generation of young men were destroyed. The war bled the countries' coffers dry and produced such an unhealthy environment that the worst pandemic to ever hit the world swept through in the months following the war and killed even more people that the war killed. Horrible things like chemical warfare were invented. As if the war wasn't bad enough, economic penalties for the losers were so harsh that a vicious hatred was stoked virtually guaranteeing the next war.

Even after all the evidence of the futility of attacking heavily entrenched positions, generals still ordered it and men still went forward into the teeth of the meat grinder. Can we even understand that thinking anymore?

It occurred to me today that those arrogant generals that kept ordering the fruitless attacks are all dead now and that maybe their way of thinking would die with them. Maybe when the last of them died, the urge to send men off to a fruitless, hopeless, meaningless death would find a final resting place in their cold lifeless corpses.

We already know it's not true. Each generation somehow forgets how horrible war is and starts a new series of wars. Maybe this is something that is hard wired into us, a genetic trait. Lord knows there's not much keeping our population in check. If humans were deer, there'd be an unlimited season on them. "Gotta thin the herd." Maybe war is the price we pay to avoid being hip deep in people. If so, it's damned inefficient.

After WWI came a series of little wars around the globe as people sought to push boundaries around and plant their flag in a piece of turf, or assert their domination over another group of people. Then the big countries went at it again. Hell, they didn't even wait a full generation between WWI and WWII. Some of the guys that fought in I were still there to fight in II. Dwight D. Eisenhower was a veteran of both, as well as Douglas McCarthy. Truman fought in the trenches in the first war and later gave the orders that finished off the next war.

Then there was Korea and Viet Nam as well as Gulf War I and the Iraq War. So we didn't learn anything about the costs and results of war. At any given time, there are dozens of wars going on in the world. The print and the network news don't even report most conflicts unless they get completely out of control. Would you like to venture how many ongoing conflicts there are right now? Wikipedia (see "Ongoing Conflicts") says there are 29. The death toll for these wars is mostly unknown, but it appears to be about three quarters of a million. The average conflict goes about 15 years back. Try typing "War Death Toll" into Wikipedia's search bar and gaze in amazement at the carnage from history. The Rwanda Burundi war didn't even make the list and I remember hearing that 1.5 million people were hacked to death with machetes in that war.

They called WWI the Great War and The War to end all Wars. I wonder if maybe the end of war, which would be great, is something of an oxymoron. They always say that those that fail to pay attention to history are doomed to repeat it. I don't think that's right. It's not that people aren't aware of what happened before, they just don't think it's the same thing when it's happening to them. Look at the Iraq War. Many of the people that worked the hardest to make the war happen came of age in the Viet Nam era. I remember when the Iraq War was going to start, there was this really small fringe of people that said that it was going to be another Viet Nam. I remember the reaction those statements got - mostly scorn. The average citizen thought that this was totally absurd. We would be in and out in no time. The problem with this war is that not many Americans think they are affected by it. I don't know anyone that died over there and only a very few that served. I don't know anyone that has lost a loved one over there. But I know that the world seems like a much more dangerous place because of all the resentment over our actions.

The problem with resentment is that it doesn't die with the people that harbor it. They pass it down to their children, and it gets nurtured and preserved. One of the premises in the Serbian Bosnian Croatian Kosovar conflicts was some massacre that happened hundreds of years ago. I'd never even heard of it. No one alive today was there, much less effected by it. Our continuous chain of wars and atrocities stretching back to antiquity is like some kind of twisted perversion we keep feeding and never try to break free of. It's the serial drug addiction of the human race.

All that gloomy sentiment said, I have to say that overall, life is pretty sweet. You get to see interesting things, have good friends, love your family, and cherish sweet days with beautiful weather and glorious scenes. You get to struggle against disease and hardship, grow and learn, strive and achieve, and see the world change and history take place around you. People are basically decent, if you get to know them. There are few people on Earth that no one loves, that someone can't understand or appreciate. Maybe some of them only have animals for friends, but most people have someone that wants to have them around. And sometimes we send people off to war to stop things from getting worse, to preserve our way of life. Not many soldiers that march off to war think that they are doing something worthless. But in the cauldron of war, watching all the suffering and loss around them, I'm sure they have one thought in their minds - "If I get through this, I'm gonna do something to make life worthwhile."

We need to find a way to teach that lesson without war.

Energy Independence

I did a blog entry on this subject on September 5th. Obviously, I had been thinking about it for some time. Here's another story on the subject that I wrote on 8/18/04:

Energy Independence

It’s been 228 years since America has issued a good Declaration of Independence and I believe we are about 30 years overdue for another one. I think the only thing stopping us from embarking on a program of Complete Energy Independence is a misguided case of group-think. There are many cliches being repeated out there that stand in the way of our independence and I refuse to believe them. I would like to ask everyone’s help in breaking this dangerous cycle of negative group think.

We will never be independent of oil in our lifetime.
The major energy companies will do anything to hold onto their power.
It’s against the capitalist system to tamper with energy markets.
You will have to sacrifice freedom/fun/power/performance in order to save energy.
The average American will not stand for any change from what we now have.
There just aren’t enough alternative energy sources to replace oil.
You can’t expect a wasteful government to help develop new energy technology.
Big companies are in business for profits, not public welfare and won’t be interested in alternative energy.
Americans are too stupid to understand energy and technology issues.
We can’t do it.
It will take to long.
It’s too hard.

Look at these statements. How many are indesputably, undeniably true? How many of them cannot be challenged or refuted? None of them. Each statement is a self fulfilling prophecy of doom. If you believe them, they are certainly all true. Join me in crushing them and declaring to the rest of the nation, to the rest of the world, and in particular the Middle East that we reject all of these ideas.

Do you know what catapulted a young America past the rest of the world? Technological Innovation. In the early 19th century, we changed the way textiles were made. We put the entire process into one building and powered by our streams, we made new machines that cranked out cloth in quantities never before conceived. None of those ideas were new or originated here. They all came from Europe. These grand ideas were conceived in a Europe whose manufacturing guilds and trades were so entrenched that innovations that threatened those groups were simply not allowed. We were too naïve, crazy, young, idealistic, and enthusiastic to let that stop us. We shot past Europe in a generation and never looked back. We developed steam power and criss-crossed the nation with steamboats and railroads in one generation. We developed electricity and communications and knitted a far flung nation into a single unit in the next generation. We pioneered flight. We perfected the assembly line and mass production and developed the best standard of living in the world. We harnessed nuclear energy first. We saw space being exploited by our cold war adversary and passed them on the way to the moon and never looked back. The rest of the world has followed our lead closely.

We Americans can do anything we set our minds to do, our history proves it. As the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. We need to use our undeniable and overwhelming technological dominance responsibly. We need to move the world forward to unlimited energy sources not restricted to decidedly unfriendly parts of the globe. We need to develop renewable energy sources based on fusion, hydrogen, ethanol, wind, solar, geothermal, biological, and fuel cell technology. Maybe we’ll find something new with quantum physics that will astonish us all. We need to do it in such a way that we utilize the framework of the existing energy grid to make the transition to these new forms of energy. We need to find a way to use public money to help do this for the public good while also boosting corporate strength and health. This will provide jobs and help clean up the environment, but most importantly, it will put us strongly in control of our own destiny.

Once we have developed these sources and methods, we need to enrich our nation by exporting the technology to the rest of the world, and then push into space and begin the exploration and colonization of space in earnest.

We Americans can do this, I have no doubt in my mind. All we have to do is state our intentions and declare our independence. Do your part to help make it happen. Simply believe in us.