If Thoughts and Prayers Have Force —
— please, please add your erg of lift to bearing tiny Charlie Miller aloft.
Danny’s son, Charlie was born very prematurely and has lost his twin brother, Oliver. In his favor, Charlie was stable from the get-go and is in one of the best NICUs in the country, with a record of coaxing tiny preemies into healthy kids. But, oh my God, he weighs only one pound, ten ounces.
Hold them up, hold them up/ Never do let them fall …
~ James Taylor, “Never Die Young”
Insert “Specter is Haunting ____” Pun Here
I’m embarrassed to admit that Arlen Specter has always been pretty much my idea of what a modern U.S. Senator should be. As a lifelong Pennsylvanian, I’ve had a chance to vote for him every time, and I never passed it up.
Mind you, I never did it with enthusiasm, either. He’s an arrogant man who doesn’t suffer fools lightly. He’s not likeable. Well, so what? There are certain job categories that ought not to be filled based on likeability. Senator is one of them.
But it makes him a poor patron saint. Which is why Republicans who are of an independent stripe, lik me, probably won’t ever have one of those.
His switch of party means nothing, in terms of his politics. He’ll keep voting the same way. I am sure he realizes he is in his last years, so he will pursue his remaining agendas — most of them harmless or beneficial to the nation as a whole — using the power of his political fulcrum.
He switched to get re-elected. He knows this state from stem to stern, having long ago transcended Philadelphia. Only Tom Ridge could stop him now.
When the Senate was set up, it was meant to be in large part above the fray and the popular tumult. The section of the Federalist devoted to it (about #62 through #69, I think) gives me the strong impression that Hamilton and Madison would have wanted it kept from the sweaty hands of party machines. They made no explicit mention of party machines because there were none then.
Specter, Mike Mansfield, Calhoun, that sort of person, who is secure enough and ornery enough to do and say what he senses is right. Who has devoted his leisure not to getting re-elected every few months, but to deepening the study of law and government and humankind. Who has an eye on the long-range good of the country, not the expedience of the party.
Do they all fail at that ideal? Of course! That’s the point of the Constitution. We’re not electing saints or philosophers. If there’s one thing the Founders knew, that was it. Everything in balance. The idea was to get great work out of elected men while they were chasing their venal and selfish ambitions. It was a good trick, while it lasted.
-Miles Lascaux
One ($5 Billion) Promise Too Late
Nearly lost in yesterday’s hubbub over swine flu and pork traders was the most recent update on the auto industry’s flailing. Apparently Chrysler, in one more last-ditch effort to avoid bankruptcy, will now be 55% owned by the UAW in exchange for renegotiation of workers’ pension funds. I find this decision rather sad.
It’s not widely known, but for a brief period in the early 1980’s Chrysler actually had an employee stock ownership plan (as did the other members of the Big Three, IIRC). Corey Rosen, head of the National Center for Employee Ownership, tells the story of its arrival and demise. Basically, the union never really got behind the concept, and demanded the company buy the stock back in 1985. The size of the plan was $162 million at its inception in 1981 – then 16 percent of the company’s value at the time- and each employee received $8200 when it was ended, roughly $16,000 in today’s dollars.
Now, look at the numbers today. 26,000 employees get 55 percent of the company in exchange for relinquishing $5 billion in retirement benefits. But Chrysler isn’t worth $5 billion right now – in fact, it probably isn’t worth $1 billion (hard to say, since the company is majority owned by a private equity firm, but its peer GM has a market cap of $1.12 B right now, and is a larger company).
So at the very best, that 55 percent equity stake is worth $500 million or so – basically as much as what they sold their 16 percent for over two decades ago. And that’s without looking at the lost retirement benefits. By any standard, this is not a very good deal for the automotive workers, and its chances of saving the company at this point are slim.
It’s pointless to gripe about what might have been, but it’s hard not to wonder whether things might be different now had Chrysler’s ESOP not been dissolved. As this article points out regarding GM, the right employee ownership plan could have offered one way of proactively bridging the gap between management and labor with regard to retirement benefits and salaries. There is also a small but growing body of research demonstrating a positive correlation between corporate performance and employee ownership, especially when paired with open management practices.
I believe that the future of the labor movement – and it does have a future – will be based on fostering employee ownership and workforce development. But this particular example has probably come far too late.
~ Maxwell
Road Rage is Altruistic?!
Short of the murderous kind, yep, says Professor Herbert Gintis, emeritus at the University of Massachusetts:
Mostly people think altruism is goody-goody or warm and fuzzy. But, the biggest part of making society work is needing to retaliate, wanting to hurt people who hurt you. It’s much more important than the precondition to cooperate, because if you don’t have punishment, you can’t get cooperation. Strong reciprocity can be cooperation and conditional punishment.
So, we believe the heart of altruism is not only the willingness to cooperate and help — empathy and caring for others — but also this negative side of human nature: retaliation or retribution.
Let me give you an example that you would not even think is altruistic normally, but is: road rage.
What exactly do you mean by road rage and how is that altruistic?
Pathologically, it’s when somebody behaves badly on the road and you shoot them. Usually, though, when people drive through a yellow light or are in a wrong lane, people honk their horns, shake their fists at them. Our argument is that this behavior of getting angry at another driver, who you’re never going to see again, has strong reciprocity. It helps keep people honest.
If you don’t drive the proper way, some guy honks his horn and you feel humiliated; you’ve done a bad thing and you got caught. But he didn’t do it because he cared about keeping people honest. He honked his horn because he was pissed at you. This is true in subjective altruism. By honking your horn or yelling at someone for doing a bad thing, this is an altruistic act. It might have cost you something, not much. But it keeps the rules of the road going. It keeps people honest, so it’s an altruistic act.
You’re upholding the norm of fairness by hurting someone who was unfair. But you didn’t do it because you wanted to uphold a norm for the group. You did it because you were angry at the guy.
Calling Michael, um, Grant: hey guy, now you can feel good about feeling good about yourself on the road!
Lucky!
And not only me, but the people I could’ve killed.
As tweeted lately, I came as close as I ever have to falling asleep at the wheel — on a routine, relatively low-speed 13-mile drive on local streets. I was sure the drive was so short I’d be able to keep myself awake for the duration. And I fought to do so, and almost failed. One way or the other, I was never going to make that mistake again!
The tale in tweets (bottom up):
Lucky lucky lucky — me and the people coming at me. Fair warning!
Lucky to be alive tonight. Driving home from swimming pool, only 13 mi., SOOO sleepy my consciousness began to dissolve several times.
Notes toward a definition of what we’re doing here
Note to a longtime blogfriend & potential contributor about a month ago (if I’ve posted it before, forgive me; I’m entering the Repetition Years).
It’s auguring to be a somewhat nonpolitical place — not that anything is off limits. But politics doesn’t dig deep enough to get at what we seem to be longing for . . . our bearings.
Note today to a new political blogger seeking to exchange links:
Much appreciated, but I’ve just largely decommissioned AmbivaBlog and am spearheading a less political group blog, Ambiance, which doesn’t have a blogroll yet. It’s not that we rule out talking about politics, just that we have the feeling a much broader shift is underway and politics is just the tip of the iceberg, if that.
I hope the “we” is not presumptuous. This isn’t “my place.” So correct me if I’m wrong; or elaborate more on what you think is going on here, or would like it to be.
Squirrels: A Political Allegory [UPDATED]
One morning early this month, I noticed that my cats were riveted by something outside the glass porch door. Two sawed-off young squirrels, perfect miniatures not half the size of a grown one, plumy tails carried forward over their backs like comb-overs, were apparently taunting the cats — leaping on the screen, running up and down it, all but sticking out their tongues and flapping tiny fingers. They were either too young and dumb to know what a cat was, or they were smart enough to understand that these couldn’t get at them. They were having fun.
I had what a soft-hearted, mush-headed human being thinks is a good idea: I threw a handful of birdseed on the porch from last year’s failed bird feeder (which was, of course, taken over by squirrels) to keep them coming. Everyone was having such a good time. No harm, no foul.
And of course, they kept coming with a vengeance, sometimes two, sometimes just one, vacuuming up the birdseed and giving the cats’ nervous systems a workout.
I don’t know when it happened, but this morning I looked out and saw two young squirrels of very different sizes. One was about 2/3 the size of an adult and the other was tiny, about 1/3 the size. And lo and behold, the hefty one was driving away the little one. He/she/it seemed almost more interested in defending its territory than in eating: every time the tiny, obviously very hungry (to a human’s imagination) squirrel ventured timidly towards the food, the big one aggressively chased it off. Only then would the hefty one return to eating, literally scooping the seeds together with its paws and shoveling them into its mouth.
There are two possibilities here. One is that we have two siblings, one of whom is succeeding at the other’s expense. Happens all the time in nature. Two or three cubs or kits or chicks are born and the balance tips early on: one or more gain an edge and use that greater strength to gain more and more strength until the the weak ones starve to death. Baby birds of many species in the nest will even shove their weaker sibling overboard, or peck him/her to death. Parents do not intervene. It’s a jungle out there, and you have to be capable of looking out for yourself.
The other possibility is that the little one is simply younger, a baby squirrel from another, later litter, and the big one is chasing away a genetically unrelated (or less-related) competitor. In that case, it’s just a matter of first come, first served. Who said life was fair?
Having already screwed with nature by putting out this unnatural treasure trove of food, now what (if anything) do I do? The point is not what I do, but the political correlates of my conflicting impulses.
Do I let the cats out? You know what would happen — not what I intended: they would get the little one. (But then at least its existence wouldn’t be for naught. They also serve who only die and are eaten.)
Do I intervene on behalf of the little one, driving the big one away? This would be the liberal solution, but also the Christian one. God created all and He loves the weak — with their less obvious, less material strengths — even more than the strong. He just has an awfully funny way of showing it. But He created soft-hearted humans and bags of birdseed to redress the imbalance.
Or do I (pretending I haven’t already skewed things) “let nature take its course,” even secretly admiring its ruthless efficiency at selecting the most resourceful and robust?
Is the big squirrel the better businessman who drives inefficient competitors out of town? Or the amoral businessbrute who will do whatever it takes to succeed? Is it Bill Gates, enforcing the de facto monopoly of mediocrity that he got by being first out of the gate? Is it Wal-Mart, using the size it has already gained to prevent start-ups from getting market share? Is it an African kleptocrat stealing all the aid while the intended beneficiaries starve?
What I do: throw more handfuls of seed out there (bailing out General Motors? no, that would be an old, toothless squirrel) in the hope that Biggie will get so full that he/she staggers off belching before all the food is gone. And that’s exactly what happens: the little one gets a chance! But whether because it is younger or weaker, it is indeed an inefficient eater, picking up seeds slowly, one at a time, and leaving before it has made much of a dent in the remainder.
You just can’t help some squirrels. Even God helps those who help themselves.
~ amba
UPDATE: Just spoke to a friend, the same one referenced in the post on saving newspapers. I helped him write a foundation mission statement, and in the process learned a great deal about the futility, if not harmfulness, of much development aid. Out of the blue, he happened to tell me that in a project he once supported in Haiti, where an idealistic doctor is trying to produce peanut butter to nourish children’s brains in the crucial years up to age 5, even if they manage to get the peanut butter made and distributed to homes, the children’s stronger older siblings steal the peanut butter from the little ones and eat it themselves.
It’s Not About the Bike.
Danny MacAskill rides one as if it were a dressage-trained Lippizaner that moonlighted doing stunts in action movies.
My Hopelessly Quixotic Idea for Saving Newspapers
I was talking with a friend in St. Louis today, and he was telling me that he’d read that the ship’s captain held hostage by pirates had jumped overboard, not out of an excess of courage or desperation, but in a by-the-books strategy — to give allies the all-clear to blow the lifeboat out of the water. But, my friend said, they could not do so because President Obama had given the order that no one, no one, was to be killed.
But, I said, I thought Obama ultimately gave the order to kill the pirates if necessary.
No, my friend said, he never gave that order, he just took credit for it. The captain of the rescue ship issued the order, overriding the president’s order not to shoot to kill on the basis that there was clear and present danger to the hostage captain’s life.
That may well be true, I said, but then again it may not. There are people who are extremely eager to discredit President Obama who would say it even if it wasn’t true. And then there are his defenders who would deny it even if it was.
So how can we know what really happened?
We can’t.
My friend and I agreed on that: more and more, there is noplace to find objective, researched and documented truth (presuming there even is such a thing). There is left spin and right spin, and there is only faster or slower spin.
I told him about Snopes.com (he didn’t know it), and how reassuring it is to be able to go and check an urban legend or rumor with someone who has researched it. I said I didn’t think they vetted “news” stories so much, but of course what they do borders on the news and sometimes crosses that border. [UPDATE: And sure enough, Snopes has taken on the exact story about Obama’s wussy vacillation that my friend must have read and believed — drawing on NBC and Washington Times reporting. Go here to find out their verdict.] My friend and I lamented how newspapers used to at least have the reputation for fact checking and objectivity — “but they lost that a long time ago,” my friend said.
That was when it struck me: could this be a new (or renewed) role for newspapers?
The frightening thing about their demise, for those (few) of us who’d like to get at least a sense of what might have actually happened, is that there will no longer be even the pretense of, not even a half-hearted attempt at, reportorial and editorial standards. Everyone will just say whatever they want you to believe, and consume whatever propaganda tells them what they want to hear. There will be no investigative reporters who get paid to be our eyes and ears, who go to the ends of the earth to try to get a read on what actually happened, whether we (or “they”) like it or not.
Could newspapers do this? (Evidently the Washington Times is doing it — in this case, debunking a story that some of their readers might have preferred to be true.) Could they once again, or perhaps for the first time, become the Snopeses of history in the making, refusing spin of any valence (or reporting it as such), priding themselves on hunting, if not the Truth, at least the elusive, unbought, beholden-to-no-one Fact?
Two questions immediately arise: is there such a thing? Has there ever been? Or is every story Rashomon, the plot depending on where you stand?
And even supposing there is such a thing, is there much of an audience for it? Was there ever, or have “facts” always been whores in respectable dress?
Both painful, and pivotal, questions.
Ambiance 