How is it?...

How is it?...

Here we are living a few weeks shy of 2010 and my airplane seat today was 14D, which was right behind 12D.

Get your boogie man on.

In other news, a hardshell f-style mando case fits crossways in an overhead luggage rack on a 727. It is kind of amazing what traveling with a mando case does to your status in an airport. Banjo players make eye contact and smile at you.

I'm in Sarasota for a 4 day training class in Appreciative Inquiry. The GoM is lapping about 50 yards from my hotel window making the cool December weather more or less irrelevant.

Tilting windmills...

Tilting windmills...

I went on line this morning to the websites of both of my senators and my congressman and sent them the following emails. Probably a waste of my time, but I did it anyhow. Maybe if you do the same something will happen.

Senator Lugar,

I'm deeply concerned about the health care debate.

We need health care reform and we need a public option of health insurance. I urge you to support the public option for health insurance. This is a matter of justice. We need affordable health care for all in our country.

I know you're concerned about the cost of a program. I am too. But I'm more concerned about the cost of continuing our current path.

I'm tired of being manipulated by special interest groups who stand to gain from blocking reform. I'm sure you've read of Wendell Potter, the former Cigna VP of Marketing. If you haven't, I encourage you to watch this interview: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/watch2.html.

Please support health care reform.

Health care debate...

Health care debate...

If you're unsure about the health care debate, watch this.

1968...

1968...

My friend JohnL sent me this email this morning:

I received an email this morning from a friend that included a 1968 quote from Robert Kennedy. It struck me as timeless, words worth remembering as we continue to struggle with the challenges of our troubled economy and its human fallout. It also reminded me of a conversation that we had some time ago regarding the Country of Buhtan, and its quest to measure the quality of life of its citizens via a “happiness index”. I seriously doubt whether many American economists will put much effort into quantifying the GNP measurement criteria espoused by Robert Kennedy.

Worthy thoughts to start the week:

"We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods," Kennedy said. "We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones Average, nor national achievement by the gross national product. For the gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highway carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them. The gross national product includes the destruction of the redwoods, and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads . . . It includes the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our country.

"And if the gross national product includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of public officials . . . the gross national product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile; and it can tell us everything about America - except whether we are proud to be Americans."

Great oratory.

Tomorrow morning I head north for a five day retreat. I'll be back a week from tonight, so keep an on my place while I'm gone.

Twitter...

Twitter...

Maybe this won't be funny if you're not on Twitter. Mainly what I've found Twitter useful for is connecting to great stuff like this. Which is kind of like lifting yourself by your hair.

In memory...

In memory...

Read this deeply moving remembrance of CPTer Tom Fox.

Vital to national security too...

Vital to national security too...

When I saw this earlier today I had to double check that I wasn't reading The Onion.

Larry Flynt says that the economic downturn has been mirrored by a sexual downturn. "Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex... With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind. It's time for Congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America."

And he knows how to help.

I want to say 'fucking amazing' but this is a family blog.

Christmas...

Christmas...

I've been wondering what to get my mother for Christmas. What do you think? Is this the cat's pj's or what?


If you don't know what you're looking at, don't feel bad.

Its a 9mm hand gun, designed for people with arthritis or other handicaps so they too can defend themselves against terrorists and gangsters.

The word is that it this handy little device will be covered by medicare. Meanwhile the gun lobby is chortling.

One can hope this is a hoax.

Sigh...

Hoax or no, you only find this in America.

Actually, I shouldn't dis my mother. She could handle the real thing if she had to.

Road trip...

Road trip...

Everyone is buzzing about the CEOs of the big three driving from Detroit to DC. Good for them, I say, even if they had to be shamed into it.

Of course we'll never know for sure if they are cynical or sincere. Do we get to judge that?

Speaking of cynical... A couple of posts caught my eye earlier today. This retelling of an old Ford/Toyota joke would be funny any other day of the week.

The comment about the oracle isn't funny. In about 1982 someone asked W. Edwards Deming which companies would be practicing his philosophy in 50 years. He responded with a growl "The ones that are left."

Then if that isn't enough, check out this list of the 10 worst companies of 2008. I'm not sure if my favorite quote is from Roche (“We are not in business to save lives, but to make money. Saving lives is not our business.”) or Chevron (“We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this.")

What do you think?

On a less cynical note...

In my own corporate life, I've launched a new blog. Check it out. A prize to anyone who reads the first posts, understands them, and doesn't fall asleep. I'm also dipping my toe in other social media like LinkedIn and Twitter.

Book recommendation...

Book recommendation...

I just finished Wendell Berry's "Life is a Miracle". Here are my notes from my post in GoodReads:

Berry continues to astonish me. This is not a fast and easy read; you have to work and pay attention. But Berry writes as a prophet of our times and has put his finger on a core - maybe the root - cause of dis-ease in our century.

He writes a critique of rationalism and scientific thought that we need to pay attention to.

A few memorable passages:

"For a while I proposed to myself that the only things really explainable are explanations. That is not quite true, but it is near enough to the truth that I am unwilling to forget it.

"What can be explained? Experiments, ideas, patterns, cause-effect relationships and connections within defined limits, anything that can be calculated, graphed or diagrammed. And yet the explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable. Explanation is reductive, not comprehensive; most of the time, when you have explained something, you discover leftovers. An explanation is a bucket, not a well.

"What can't be explained? I don't think creatures can be explained. I don't think lives can be explained. What we know about creatures and lives must be pictured or told or sung or danced. And I don't think pictures or stories or songs or dances can be explained. The arts are indispensable precisely because they are so nearly antithetical to explanation." (p113)

"The time is past, if ever there was such a time, when you can just discover knowledge and turn it loose in the wold and assume that you have done good.

"This, to me, is a sign of the incompleteness of science in itself - which is the sign of the need for a strenuous conversation among all the branches of learning."

"In our present economic predicament, ethics, ecology, environmental law, etc. won't as specialties have much corrective force. They will be used to rationalize what is wrong." (p145)

I'd really enjoy a conversation about his book with Lew and Irregular Reflections.

Don't do it...

Don't do it...

I've been listening to the rumblings about bailing out GM and Ford with my tax dollars. I have a three word response: DON'T DO IT.

For the last 25 years I've been watching the American auto industry from near the inside. They don't deserve any help. They make crap. They've had all the time in the world to change that. Instead they've foisted big stupid SUVs on us and missed the whole point of quality improvement. There is a reason Toyota and Honda have been building manufacturing plants in this country while the US companies have been closing theirs.

Don't get me wrong - it will be painful. A lot of people - a lot who don't deserve it - will lose their jobs because of poor management. But the alternative - bail outs forever - will never work.

I read somewhere that the Japanese realized 30 or 40 years ago that they could take over the US auto industry in a few years. But they reasoned that they shouldn't because then nobody could afford their cars. Instead they've taken a long term view.

If there is a bail out, it has to be tied to a complete restructuring of how they do business, and that is a cultural change that has a snowball's chance in hell of happening.

So please, don't do it.

Dusting off Roosevelt...

Dusting off Roosevelt...

With all the turmoil in the financial and political markets these days, I'm not surprised to see FDR dusted off and quoted.

Comments from his 1932 campaign are being trotted out, presumably as justification for ramming through the $700 Billion bail out.

The "mirage" of American economic invulnerability has vanished, along with "much of the savings of thrifty and prudent men and women...

We need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer...

The country needs and - unless I mistake its temper - the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."

I once heard it said that FDR's genius was not that he got it right, but that he was willing (based on the advice of a broad, diverse group of experts) to try. And if that failed, to try something else.

What a contrast to what we've had the last 8 years: get advice from a diverse group of experts, and readily admit to failure and try something else. We've had 'My way or the highway' and 'If you question me you're not a true american' and 'Leadership is persevering with your original vision because it is right, even when everyone else says it is wrong.'

I also want to point out that this speech was made in May 1932, three years into the Great Depression, not prior to the 1929 crash.

The Barn Owls have been doing a little of their own dusting off, reviving a song that came out a week after the 1936 election:

Just hand me my old Martin for soon I will be startin'
Back to dear old Charleston far away
Since Roosevelt's been re-elected, we'll not be neglected
We've got Franklin D. Roosevelt back again
  Back again, back again
  We've got Franklin D. Roosevelt back again
  Since Roosevelt's been re-elected
  Moon liquor's been corrected
  We've got legal wine, whiskey, beer and gin

I'll take a drink of brandy and let myself be handy
Good old times are coming back again
You can laugh and tell a joke, you can dance and drink and smoke
We've got Franklin D. Roosevelt back again
  Back again, back again
  We've got Franklin D. Roosevelt back again
  We'll have money in our jeans
  We can travel with the queen
  We've got Franklin D. Roosevelt back again

No more breadlines, we're happy to say the donkey won election day
No more standing in the blowing, snowing rain
He's got things in full swing, we're all working and getting our pay
We've got Franklin D. Roosevelt back again
  Back again, back again
  We've got Franklin D. Roosevelt back again
  Since Roosevelt's been re-elected
  Moon liquor's been corrected
  We've got Franklin D. Roosevelt back again

Bev usually introduces it with "Go Dems!"

Signs of our times...

Signs of our times...

Yesterday I ran out to Menards to pick up a few things for a project I'm working on in my back yard. More on the project later. As I pulled away I passed the payday loan store on 33 and was astonished at their sign: "Bring in your unemployment check to arrange your loan".

I guess these people have to do what they can to keep their business going, but hello? should you really be loaning money to people who have been laid off? And if you've been laid off is now the time to be taking out a loan?

OK - maybe they're offering debt consolidation or something like that. But I doubt it. We're entitled to that big screen tv and we have the keep the economy moving.

Is anybody home? I'm going to get saddled with my share of a half a trillion - TRILLION - dollars in bad debt from stupid loans made by greedy bankers. And the payday loan sharks want to loan money to people who are out of work.

Minutes later I stopped at the Save-A-Lot to pick up some milk. On the way out I noticed this sign jammed in the median a couple of places around the entry like an election sign: "There's a fish stick dinner in your gas tank".

Huh?

And speaking of election signs, my neighbor has an "Eight is Enough/Obama - Biden 2008" sign. I find myself wanting to deface it with a can of spray paint: cross out "enough" and paint "too much".

What a great country.

Another perspective...

Another perspective...

My brother forwarded this essay with the comment that "we all know this stuff but it is still pretty tough when you see it in print."

If you follow that link you'll find that it has generated heated debate since it was first posted. Interesting stuff, and the discussion doesn't degenerate into name calling nearly as fast as one normally finds on discussion boards.

More...

More...

SomeBird posted an extensive OpEd piece from Eve Ensler on Palin. Read it now.

If you're getting sick of me posting about Sarah Palin stop reading my blog until after November 5. The more I read about her the more frightened I am. If you are an American citizen, I want you to get out and vote and send this woman packing.

Have you been following TrooperGate? Or the accounts of her First Dude's involvement in Alaskan government business? Or her lawsuit to stop federal protection of Polar Bears under the endangered species act? I love the quote from this article: "The lawsuit puts the state of Alaska, and particularly the Palin administration, to the political right of the Bush-Cheney administration, and that’s a rarified land where few venture."

Last year I followed John Niremberg's walk to Washington to demand impeachment of Bush and Cheney. John's website is still up, and you can follow links on the sidebar about the case for impeachment and what's at stake. (John has turned cynical and seems to have opted completely out of the political process, to which I say 'Yeah, but the world would be a different place if cynics hadn't split Gore / Nadar votes in 2000. The upcoming election does matter.)

Take time now to this video of Bill Moyer's Journal.

And then watch this video:


Then watch Sarah Palin and realize that she can finish what Bush, Cheney and Rove have started.

Copyright violation?...

Copyright violation?...

Posting this is probably a violation of copyright, but it has such a great opening paragraph that I'm posting it anyhow. The rest of it is worth reading too. It comes from Salon.com via a friend in NY.

George Bush with big hair

The hustling Evangelical with ethics issues and a chip on her shoulder could be our first woman president.
By Garrison Keillor

Sep. 10, 2008 | So the Republicans have decided to run against themselves. The bums have tiptoed out the back door and circled around to the front and started yelling, "Throw the bums out!" They've been running Washington like a well-oiled machine to the point of inviting lobbyists into the back rooms to write the legislation, and now they are anti-establishment reformers dedicated to delivering us from themselves. And Mayor Giuliani is an advocate for small-town America. Bravo.

They are coming out for Small Efficient Government the very week that the feds are taking over Fannie and Freddie, those old cash cows, and in the course of a weekend 20 or 50 (or pick a number) billion go floating out the Treasury door. Hello? Do you see us out here? We are not fruit flies, we are voters, we can read and write, we didn't just fall off the coal truck.

It is a bold move on the Republicans' part -- forget about the past, it's only history, so write a new narrative and be who you want to be -- and if they succeed, I think I might declare myself a 24-year-old virgin named Lance and see what that might lead to. Paste a new face on my Facebook page, maybe become the Dauphin Louie the Thirty-Second, the rightful heir to the Throne of France, put on silk tights and pantaloons and a plumed hat and go on the sawdust circuit and sell souvenir hankies imprinted with the royal fleur-de-lis. They will cure neuralgia and gout and restore marital vigor.

Mr. McCain has decided to run as a former POW and a maverick, a maverick's maverick, rather than Mr. Bush's best friend, and that's understandable, but how can he not address the $3 trillion that got burned up in Iraq so far? It's real money, it could've paid for a lot of windmills, a high-speed rail line in Ohio, some serious R&D. The Chinese, who have avoided foreign wars for 50 years, are taking enormous leaps forward, investing in their economy, and we are falling behind. We're wasting our chances. The Republican culture of corruption in Washington hasn't helped.

And a former mayor of a town of 7,000 who hired a lobbyist to get $26 million in federal earmarks is now running against the old-boy network in Washington who gave her that money to build the teen rec center and other good things so she could keep taxes low in Wasilla. Stunning. And if you question her qualifications to be the leader of the free world, you are an elitist. This is a beautiful maneuver. I wish I had thought of it back in school when I was forced to subject myself to a final exam in higher algebra. I could have told Miss Mortenson, "I am a Christian and when you gave me a D, you only showed your contempt for the Lord and for the godly hardworking people from whom I have sprung, you elitist battle ax you."

In school, you couldn't get away with that garbage because the taxpayers know that if we don't uphold scholastic standards, we will wind up driving on badly designed bridges and go in for a tonsillectomy and come out missing our left lung, so we flunk the losers lest they gain power and hurt us, but in politics we bring forth phonies and love them to death.

I must say, it was fun having the Republicans in St. Paul and to see it all up close and firsthand. Security was, as one might expect, thin-lipped and gimlet-eyed, but once you got through it, you found the folks you went to high school with -- farm kids, jocks, the townies who ran the student council, the cheerleaders, some of the bullies -- and they are as cohesive now as they were back then, dedicated to school spirit, intolerant of outsiders, able to jump up and down and holler for something they don't actually believe. But oh Lord, what they brought forth this year. When you check the actuarial tables on a 72-year-old guy who's had three bouts with cancer, you guess you may be looking at the first woman president, a hustling Evangelical with ethics issues and a chip on her shoulder who, not counting Canada, has set foot outside the country once -- a trip to Germany, Iraq and Kuwait in 2007 to visit Alaskans in the armed service. And who listed a refueling stop in Ireland as a fourth country visited. She's like the Current Occupant but with big hair. If you want inexperience, there were better choices.

(Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country.)

© 2008 by Garrison Keillor

I'll sleep better tonight...

I'll sleep better tonight...

It is such a relief to know that global warming is a sham and that once america starts extracting oil from the continental shelf, all our problems will be solved.

I know this because my barber told me.

Sigh.

He learned it from Fox News.

It is also such a relief to know that there is still one remaining bastion of truth in the news media.

Catch that knee!

Drat - I couldn't stop it.

So now I have no one to blame but myself if I have a streak of bad hair days for the next few weeks. Never argue with your barber until you're out of the chair.

He conceded that there are gas guzzling cars out there and that we could do more to conserve what we have. I told him that I'd agree to off-shore drilling when the new car standard was 40 mpg. He couldn't go there: "We'll just have to agree to disagree because I'm not going to change my mind."

Which is, I guess, the same thing I said.

What I don't get is his theology. He says "He" won't let us destroy the earth.

What happened to man's free will? Isn't that the cornerstone of the religious right ...er wrong? (I saw a button on a liberal's hat tonight that read 'The religious right is neither'.) Aren't we free to choose sin or morality? Life or Death? Salvation or Damnation? Isn't it possible ....

S#*$ - don't get me started.

Classic...

Classic...

Since B has been out of the country, I forget about The Onion. This one is a classic.

Enough...

Enough...

Dusk is falling this July 4th and artillery shells are falling all around me.

At least that's what I think it is supposed to sound like.

I wonder what it sounds like to vets of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Or to the citizens of those countries.

I'm trying not to be a grinch about it, but I wonder. Like most Americans I'm quite safe. Would this be fun if we lived in the same conditions that people in Hebron, or Sadr City live?

I'm not a very good American, and the smoke is driving me inside.

Lawn mower safety...

Lawn mower safety...

I was alarmed to learn in the paper this morning of the guy arrested for mowing his lawn wearing only sandals and a dog collar. Doesn't he know that you should "Make sure that sturdy shoes (not sandals or sneakers) are worn while mowing."?

Somehow I was relieved to read that it was a riding mower.