Yesterday’s Thoughts

My pockets and back felt a sigh of relief last year when I started carrying a jimi wallet. Much less than a half inch thick and I can carry 5 bills and 5 cards in my front pocket.

I may be replacing the jimi with this paper wallet. I made one in about five minutes and a second one in two minutes. Lighter and thinner than the jimi, plus it carries the same contents.

The bonus is that it is made out of a single 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper. I’m fantasizing about all the things that I could print on that paper and what else I could stop carrying. Notebook - check, important phone numbers - check, emergency contact info - check, family photos - check.

Update - April 27 - After carrying one for a few days, I’m still happy with it, but I did make one mistake. I thought that since it was wallet-like, I could revert to my old pre-jimi days of carrying all my cash inside the wallet. It doesn’t really work. The wallet isn’t big enough to attempt to sort through the bills inside. It doesn’t open wide enough to discriminate between bills. Just carry large bills in the wallet and everything else loose in the pocket. When you need a large bill, slip it out.

From New York Times via Matt.

Our desire to believe in an orderly universe leads us to interpret the uncertainty we feel about the future as nothing but a consequence of our current state of ignorance, to be dispelled by greater knowledge or better analysis. But even a modest amount of randomness can play havoc with our intuitions. Because it is always possible, after the fact, to come up with a story about why things worked out the way they did — that the first “Harry Potter” really was a brilliant book, even if the eight publishers who rejected it didn’t know that at the time — our belief in determinism is rarely shaken, no matter how often we are surprised. But just because we now know that something happened doesn’t imply that we could have known it was going to happen at the time, even in principle, because at the time, it wasn’t necessarily going to happen at all.

Just like development, the current state of an idea in popular culture depends on the history of the idea and the random events that impinged upon it.

Here’s an amazing clip of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grapelli.

In the first scene, Django’s fingering is so light on the frets. Every note speaks volumes.

YouTube, making life better for you and me.

Updated embed, April 23, 2008.

Senator Clinton has decided that she is not going to apologize for her vote in 2002 authorizing the use of military force in Iraq.

If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from.

I heartily approve this strategy in principle. If more candidates would tell voters to vote for their opponents we would have a substantially elevated national discourse. Voters should be able to make electoral decisions based on the candidates’ policies and beliefs not on a pandering spin. Candidates attempt to be all things to all people, confusing the decisions that need to be made at every level.

In addition to approving of the strategy on principle Senator Clinton’s announcement makes it easy for me. There is no way that I’ll be supporting her in the primaries and very little chance that I will support her in the general election. The most important thing to me is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or who has said that that vote was a mistake. This is part of the deepest and most important issues facing the country today. How did we get into this fiasco in Iraq? How was did we go so far astray? Clinton’s refusal to take responsibility for her vote is part of the answer, but she has not learned from her mistake.

She has it exactly backwards. “As a candidate, Mrs. Clinton likes to think and formulate ideas as if she were president — her ‘responsibility gene,’ she has called it.” Failing to say that she was wrong is the opposite of taking responsibility. “She believes it’s self-evident that the Senate Iraq resolution was based on false intelligence and never should’ve come to a vote,” said Richard C. Holbrooke.

She’s not taking responsibility for her vote in 2002. She’s blaming Bush or the intelligence community for her vote. Yes, it is self-evident that the Senate Iraq resolution was based on false intelligence. It is self-evident today. It was self-evident to many people in 2002.

Clinton lacked either the discernment to notice that the intelligence was false or the courage to make the argument that the intelligence false. I don’t hold either the lack of discernment or the lack of courage against Clinton, or any other candidate. There was a notable lack of courage and discernment in American political life in 2002.

By refusing to take responsibility for her mistakes Clinton will not be able to learn from them. She is no more able to discern false intelligence today than she was in 2002 because her failure was not her fault. When false intelligence comes before her as President, how will she react? “It’s not my fault that I accepted false intelligence.” She is no more able to be courageous today than she was in 2002 because she doesn’t see that there were any other possibilities in 2002 and she doesn’t see that there are any other possibilities for a President than to “stay the course” and “don’t admit mistakes.”

Clinton is making the cynical bet that Americans are no more able to admit their mistakes than she is. I hope and believe she is wrong.

Gina Cobb believes that the President is gracious and decent.

In his prepared speeches, he makes a conscious choice to speak as kindly of his rivals as is humanly possible. His graciousness is more noticeable when the vitriol from his rivals reaches its apex — or at a time when his approval rating seems to be in free fall. What we have here is a decent man who takes the dignity and responsibility of the presidency seriously.

I disagree. You can’t reasonably speak of taking the dignity and responsibility of the presidency seriously when the President is issuing partisan slurs before a joint session of Congress.

Perhaps the President made a conscious choice to speak kindly, but his words betrayed him. During the SOTU, the President referred to “the Democrat majority.” The formulation, using Democrat as an adjective, is an intentional insult to Democrats, and a well known partisan ploy.

If you verbally slur and insult your rivals, and you do it as part of your Constitutionally mandated duties, you can’t really be called gracious, dignified, or responsible.

Update: The President has apologized.

Gina Cobb however has neither published my comment, nor retracted her assertion of the President’s decency and generosity. I think his responsibility speaks for itself.

The oath the president takes when assuming the office is prescribed in the United States Constitution, Article II, Section I

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

George W. Bush took this oath on January 20, 2001. The oath is defend the Constitution, not the people, the territory or the property of the United States.

The President is the Commander in Chief, but defense is an obligation in the hands of the people, and not the first. From the Preamble:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Bob Altemeyer is releasing his book, The Authoritarians in installments on his web site, a new chapter every week. This seems like an important book.

I didn’t pay too much attention to John Dean’s book, Conservatives Without Conscience when it appeared last year, and still haven’t, but apparently Dean based in book on Altemeyer’s work on authoritarian personalities.

Merlin Mann pens a statistically improbable sentence, “I suspect that children will eventually support some kind of thin-client email-to-affection gateway.”

One of the perks that I receive by virtue of being the President of the parent’s organization at my children’s school is that I occasionally get to attend presentations on education and parenting that I might not otherwise.

A couple of months ago, I heard a woman named Madeline Levine speak about her book about teenagers, The Price of Privilege. The full title of the book is, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids.

Ms. Levine’s points applied to American children generally. She has worked in both the South Bronx and Marin County and believe them both to be affluent environments, so she has an elastic definition of affluence. I believe this is an exact quote, “All Americans are privileged.”

I don’t want to run down her entire argument (buy the book, I haven’t) but she said one sentence that crystallized everything that she was saying for me. It wasn’t even a sentence, it was a fragment. Speaking of the power that comes with affluence she began talking about a parent who said, “I don’t want my child to feel ….”

Wow. It doesn’t matter how you end that sentence. It can’t be good. You are willing that your child be depressed.

Naturally, parents don’t want their children to feel hungry, or cold, or afraid, or disadvantaged, or unhappy, or left out, or bored, or any feelings that we identify as bad or unpleasant. As we have become more affluent, we have acquired the power to stop our children from feeling more and more types of bad feelings. Essentially all American parents can ensure that our children will never feel hungry or cold, and we work hard to ensure that our children aren’t bored or unhappy. With sufficient wealth you can even buy your child friends, or at least social acceptance.

These protective feelings for our children are a recipe for depression to the extent that we act on them. Having feelings is a profound gift. Living with, experiencing and negotiating their feelings, and the feelings of their peers, their family and their community is arguably the most important skill that we need to teach our children. Wealth allows us to keep our children from these feelings. Wealth allows us to teach them to avoid these feelings.

How can you experience your feelings if your parents don’t want you to have them? How can you learn to negotiate your feelings if you don’t experience them? How do you recognize the feelings of others if your own feelings are foreign to you?

Many of my most powerful experiences occurred in a six month period as I hiked the Appalachian Trail when I was 19. For the first time in my life I was hungry. I was thirsty. I was wet. I was dirty. I was cold. I was lonely. I was hot. I was alone.

I was alive.

This was hike was a transforming experience for me, not because I accomplished something that few people had, but because for the first time I moved into my body and inhabited it. The achievement that I had had, was the acheivement of living with, responding to, and dealing with my feelings.

The veils of civilization, and my parents wanting to protect me, and being able to protect me, had kept me from my feelings. Experiencing them was miraculous.

I believe we all have an innate desire to experience our feelings. Well meaning institutions keep them from us, an of course there is a point to that. There are experiences that no one should have to endure, feelings no one should have to manage. But lacking actual authentic experiences of feelings people will create feelings. This is where the cutting, and the drug abuse, and the acting out that Madeline Levine sees in her therapy practice arises.

If we can’t have democracy in the US?

Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs is complaining about the law firms that are representing, or attempting to represent Guantánamo detainees. According to the
New York Times, Mr. Stimson appeared on Federal News Radio earlier this week questioning the role of lawyers from almost 150 US firms in providing legal representation to detainees and suggesting that the corporate CEO who also employee these firms should reconsider. “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

What’s wrong with Stimson’s argument?

Well first off he appears unable to recognize that few to none of those detained at Guantánamo are guilty of anything, much less being guilty of attacking the US in 2001. The administration continues to maintain this fiction that everyone detained at Guantánamo, is in fact guilty, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. By July of 2005, 175 detainees had been found to not be enemy combatants, by the government’s own findings.

Secondly, if these detainees are guilty, there is only one was to establish this fact. A legitimate trial, with established rules of evidence and adequate legal representation. There is no other way. These attorneys must be present to establish Mr. Stimson’s claims.

Finally, Mr. Stimson, despite being an attorney in the Virginia bar doesn’t seem to understand democracy. The right to a fair trial by your peers is a fundamental tenet of democracy going back to the Magna Carta. If Mr. Stimson, as a representative of the US Defense Department, doesn’t understand the most basic aspects of democracy, how is that same Defense Department going to export democracy to Iraq?