The Rogue Scholar

Weaving the Threads Together

It's impossible to cover absolutely every blog post, article, or story that appears on the Intarwebs because there's just too much worthwhile stuff to read and too few hours in the day to read it.  Having said that, there are a few things I've come across recently that I think deserve a bit of time out of your busy day.

I admit that the news about Swine Flu in Mexico gave me a flashback to working at NYAM, when SARS made the news. Two coworkers canceled conference trips to Canada, and my then boss postponed a trip to China.  Hong Kong effectively shut down for several weeks, according to a few people I know who'd been working there at the time.

Now, it appears to be our turn.

First, take a look at Elaine Meinel Supkis' excellent background briefing on the flu. The current  strain of Swine Flu In Mexico and California may be much ado about nothing (if you can call 60+ deaths "nothing") or it may turn out to become as bad or worse than the 1918 outbreak, or it could--and probably will-- turn out to be something in between. Education is key to keeping your balance when listening to the many sources of information on the topic. This is a good place to begin. 

That done, you might want to read James Howard Kunstler's blog post from today (where I nicked the previous link from).  Kunstler's a bit extreme in his analysis but that doesn't mean he's wrong. One point he makes is worth repeating here: public health crisis events have a way of screwing with the daily behind-the-scenes mechanics of life that we depend on, yet ignore when things are working to our satisfaction.  Simple things like public transportation, hospitals, electricity, hot and cold running water, food being trucked to the local supermarket, etc.  The systems that provide all these things get disrupted when germs have their ways with the people who make those systems run.  Some systems bounce back more quickly than others, and some don't bounce back at all. Just something to remember.

Charles Hugh-Smith has another rather more precise analysis of exactly this point, very much worth your time.

In the meantime, wash your hands, Lysol your office phone and computer keyboard, and maybe rely on Netflix and eating in for a few weeks.  Good luck!

Quote of Note

O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it…

-- Mark Twain, "The War Prayer"

Scenes from a "Tea Party"

According to some, Barack Obama is black. According to others, he is multi-racial. According to still others, he is African-American.

But according to the folks at Dick Armey's Freedom Works Foundation propaganda outfit, our president is apparently a Nazi, a Soviet Communist, a Subgenius, or Hitler.  I'm unclear as to whether that's in any particular order, or if the categories overlap in some strange way.

Fred Clark explains how. Enjoy! (Buy the book.)

Happy Civilization Day!

All right, so very few Americans are happy today, since this is April 15, the day when our taxes are due to be filed. I don't like to pay them, you don't like to, nobody in this country from sea to shining sea likes to pay them.  Generally only the very rich or the very poor routinely get out of paying them, the former group through the employment of clever, crooked, or connected lawyers, accountants, and financial planners and the latter by being broke. I mean really broke, the kind of broke that we middle class folks shy away from when we pass a homeless guy on the street (the Wall Street Journal has been known to refer to those individuals who are too poor to pay taxes as "lucky duckies.")  Yes, trying to keep a family of four afloat on $35,000 in NYC a year feels broke, but it's not when compared to true poverty. At any rate, if you're in the vast middle, you don't have access to your personal lobbyist to Congress but you're still hanging on to a sliver of the American dream, so you get hosed (or feel like it anyway.)

And yet, getting hosed is a relative term.  For instance, my vast personal fortune is the result of inheriting money from my grandparents. It's not enough to constitute actual wealth and prosperity, but it does mean real savings, which didn't exist before they passed on, and which to me was essentially free money. I didn't work for it, I didn't earn it in any conventional way except by being related to them. That said, their estate was in fact large  enough to get intercepted by the federal and NY state governments when they died and the money passed to their heirs. The taxes paid constituted a sizable bite out of the whole, but there was enough left over to provide a cushion in case things really went south. So, yes, it could have been more--would have been more perhaps with some astute estate planning my grandparents never invested in--but it still is better to have it than not to have it.  In short, I didn't get hosed, I got lucky. In my view, everyone in this country who has had (or will have) a similar experience, doesn't get hosed, they just get lucky. 

Not everyone sees it that way, of course. Andy of the DNC, Fred the Slacktivist and the eXiles give different examples of the crowd that staunchly believe that "no taxes are good taxes" on their websites today. I've heard of and read plans to fund cities  states and nations without levying taxes, and some of them are quite ingenious. Some of them may work if tried out on real life. But that's not the world we live in at the moment. We like things like roads, schools, laws enforcement, a social safety net, etc. And if we want to keep them, we need to pay for them. It's that simple.

The ugly truth that the anti-tax folks crowd never acknowledges is that taxes and government are normal for human society. Not mandatory by any means--Somalia, for example, has avoided both for some time now--but normal. Deep down we're herd beasties, no matter how badly we like to think of ourselves as individuals brimming with free will and self-determination. Grouping together under collective organizations makes us feel safer and happier than we would living solitary existences surrounded by hundreds of miles of fallow countryside. That's not to say, of course, that all governments in all times and places are necessarily of the same value to those ruled by them--a 12th century feudal lord exercised a very different type of power over his serfs from that which a 20th century democratic representative exercises over his constituency, for example. Not all government functions are equally valued by those who live under them, either, as a bit of observation over any budgeting process will show in a bout ten minutes.  And it's not to say that our current government is well run or even sustainable, but that's the subject of another post.  My point is that governments--by which I mean ruling bodies in one form or another--are by and large, things we like. If we didn't, there would be fewer of them and they'd collapse more quickly when they did form.

This ramble has gone on longer than I intended so I'll end here. Except to challenge my fellow libertarians and capitalists out there: if you want to get attention and promote your ideas, demonstrate their worth.  And I don't mean pushing lame ideas like piling into New Hampshire to stage a coup from within. I mean coming together to buy up a couple hundred acres of land, and building upon it a town where people would want to live, funded by rents and a few service fees and nothing else. It's been done before, so one imagines that it could be done again. Make it happen, make it work, make it work better for its inhabitants than the competition could, and you'll have everything you need to change the face of civilization itself.

If you can't make it work, however, just pay your taxes and stop complaining.

Judith Krug, RIP

From the pages of USA Today:

Library Advocate Judith Krug Dies of Stomach Cancer

EVANSTON, Ill. (AP) — Judith Krug, a director of the Chicago-based American Library Association and a founder of its Banned Books Week, has died.

Judith Platt, president of the ALA's Freedom to Read Foundation, says Krug died late Saturday at Evanston Hospital in suburban Chicago following a battle with stomach cancer. She says Krug had been ill for more than a year.

Krug's age was not immediately available.

She had been head of the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom since 1967.

Banned Books Week has been observed since 1982 during the last week of September. ALA officials say the event celebrates intellectual freedom.

Banned Books Week is a major holiday in the Frater home. Make it one in yours as well.

Why Write Diet Books? For the Money, of Course!

I heard this story on my local National Public Radio station this morning: Lynn Neary does a pretty good job on describing the diet book business. The link lets you listen to the broadcast, and it only takes five minutes of your day so I'd encourage you to do so.

It's simple, really.  People write diet books for the money.  Other people buy them because reality, as they say, bites.  Nobody really wants to think of themselves as horribly inadequate but--being human--we all are in one way or another, and deep down, I'm pretty sure most of us realize this. But therein lies the real trouble--most of us are damned lazy. I mean mentally lazy, what A.M. Rosenthal called enormous "rolls of fat around our bodies and our brains," in a NY Times Op-Ed column I remember reading years ago.  Real problems, like the kind that plague us from childhood on often contain a spiritual component and Americans are not often considered particularly spiritual.

So we diet. It's an easy fix to complicated problems, easier certainly than enduring real self-reflection and attaining genuine self-knowledge.  George Carlin said it best on a stage long ago (as best as I can remember):

"I think [the fitness craze in this country] is a post-Vietnam guilt syndrome of some kind. America has lost its soul, so now it's going to save its body. Bullshit, dude, it doesn't work that way. It doesn't work like that."

Neary discusses a number of diets in her report and they're all roughly one part blind hope and two (or more) parts "discipline," but the one that caught my eye was The Writing Diet, by Julia Cameron. There's an excerpt in place from the book itself, which speaks to its purpose better than I could write it here:

I'm a creativity expert, not a diet expert. So why am I writing a book about weight loss? Because I have accidentally stumbled upon a weight-loss secret that works. For twenty-five years I've taught creative unblocking, a twelve-week process based on my book The Artist's Way. From the front of the classroom I've seen lives transformed — and, to my astonishment, bodies transformed as well. It took me a while to recognize what was going on, but sure enough, students who began the course on the plump side ended up visibly leaner and more fit. What's going on here? I asked myself. Was it my imagination, or was there truly a "before" and an "after"? There was!

I can't vouch for the worth of her workshop (I have never attended it) and aside from a somewhat (to me) bland writing style, it seems like a perfectly readable book. But I've been writing consistently for  over thirty years and while my weight has gone up and down in that time, writing, I'm fairly certain, had nothing to do with it. Writing has and does get me fired up in a good way, which is why I do it. And I suppose one could learn to harness that energy to do whatever one might want to be happier and more productive, but that's where it stops for me.

Diets are silly, potentially harmful to one's health, and expensive (buy the book!). I watched one diet after another wreck my mother's (and later on, my wife's) mental stability and health as they both lost hundreds of pounds over and over again across a period of decades.  You want to lose weight? Fine, here's what to do: eat food. Not the crap that comes in fancy boxes or plastic wrappers, I mean real, healthful food, the kind that comes off trees and bushes, or out of the ground, or off an animal that ate grass or bugs for a living. Exercise, too: a thirty minute walk a day should be fine for most people. Finally, don't obsess about your weight. That's all you have to do.  Keep your money in your pocket where it belongs.

Sex and Sin in the Big City

Just a fast note to those who follow such things: Ig Publishing has released another volume in their growing and truly amazing stable of non-fiction works.  This one is titled The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex and Sin in New York City, by Kat Long, a detailed work of history about those naughty bits we all know happen in the five boroughs every moment (to someone if not ourselves) in days past.

I haven't read the book yet but Susan Dominus of the NY Times did:

These days, pornographers, pundits and scientists are forever pondering what women want, but in 1913, at least, it was pretty clear: They wanted “The Inside of the White Slave Traffic,” a film depicting the sexual coercion of innocents into a life of brothels, and they weren’t going to let a team of New York’s finest get in their way. When the deputy police commissioner of New York brought six officers to the Park Theater to seize the film, the 500 or so women waiting to see the 9:30 screening nearly broke into a riot, waving their green tickets and making a mad dash for the door. The scene attracted several thousand protesters who joined the cause in sympathy, a crowd that dispersed only when the police brought in reinforcements. Never was a film purporting, in its own words, to “teach a great moral lesson” so ardently embraced by a group of young women. (The producers’ argument: Learn from the mistakes of our protagonist to resist the seductive ways of that dark, handsome stranger.)

There’s a great history of racy entertainment covering itself, if scantily, in a cloak of righteous education. Kat Long describes these protective measures, or ruses, in “The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex and Sin in New York City,” less a catalog of vice than an analysis of attempts to evade its suppression. Long promises at the outset that the book will demonstrate that “the agents for good and evil, in New York especially, are symbiotic.”

When it comes to illicit media, the agents for good and evil, even outside New York, are always symbiotic: pornography, in the experience of many moral crusaders, is like an infuriating weed that loves nothing more than a good pesticide, its strength only enhanced by efforts to tamp it down. But Long also chronicles the way that initiatives to eradicate vice only helped pave the way for its further evolution in the city. Try to eliminate drinking on Sunday by limiting it to hotels, as did the Raines Law of 1896, and suddenly every bar and saloon in Manhattan is putting up cheap dividers to create makeshift accommodations, ideal breeding grounds for prostitution, which thrived in the era of the so-called Raines Law hotels. Try to provide a place where working-class men can find a bathroom that isn’t in a bar, and from that solution — public restrooms — will come another challenge: gay (semipublic) sex. Close down the Continental Baths, a glorious, early-’70s gay pick-up spot, and make way for Plato’s Retreat, a heterosexual swinger’s club in the same location in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel.

The sexual history of 20th-century New York, as written by Long, the co-author of the guidebook “Sexy New York,” has, at times, the feel of a whirlwind tour: Step up and see the sexually free flapper of the ’20s rebelling in a post-World War I rejection of staid social values; see the burlesque theaters thrilling the Depression-era man who’s down on his luck; see the pill liberate sex from reproduction. Along the way, the tour highlights some lesser-known figures in New York’s sexual history, among them its premier peep show entrepreneur, Martin Hodas, and the young women who flocked to the city as military groupies during World War II and came to be known as the khaki whackies.

Read the review.  Buy the book.

Books Are Burning

Books are burning
In the main square, and I saw there
The first eating the text
Books are burning
In the still air
And you know where they burn books
People are next
I believe the printed word should be forgiven
Doesn't matter what it said
Wisdom hotline from the dead back to the living
Key to the larder for your heart and head
Books are burning
In our own town, watch us turn 'round
And cast our glances elsewhere
Books are burning
In the playground
Smell of burnt book is not unlike human hair
I believe the printed word is more than sacred
Beyond the gauge of good or bad
The human right to let your soul fly free and naked
Above the violence of the fearful and sad
The church of matches
Anoints in ignorance with gasoline
The church of matches
Grows fat by breathing in the smoke of dreams
It's quite obscene
Books are burning
More each day now, and I pray now
You boys will tire of these games
Books are burning
I hope somehow, this will allow
A phoenix up from the flames

---"Books Are Burning" by XTC

Happy Anniversary, Iraq War!

RS Edit: I actually wrote this two weeks ago when it really was the sixth anniversary of the war, but just published it today. My bad for not realizing it would go to the top of the blog. Enjoy!

According to the AP today is the sixth anniversary of the current War in Iraq. Also according to the AP that particular venture has cost this country (i.e., you, me, and 300 million other taxpaying (or not) Americans) something like 800 billion dollars.

I've been reading Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos, so I started wondering what that figure really meant. Yes, it’s a shitload of money but it’s impossible to visualize. Even in Scientific Notation 800 billion looks like 8 x 10^11, which is easier to write but doesn’t really help comprehension. And bring ups a number of questions in my mind, including:

What does 800 billion buy these days? Let's think about it for a moment. With 800 billion dollars one could buy, pay for, or otherwise provide:

• 120 McDonalds cheeseburgers for every man, woman and child on the Earth;
• 8,422,850 "A-class" shares of Berkshire Hathaway (or the entire company 16 times over;
• 80,000 miles of rural highway  or 20,512 miles of urban highway. Let’s say that it would build a highway long enough to circle the earth three times;
• A pair of new 2007 Audi A3s in every driveway in NY state—not that you’d want to;
• The entire American space shuttle program 5.5 times over;
• 5,818,181 F-2 Raptors--enough to arm every country in the world with them several times over;
• Total health care to a population 8 times the size of the U.S., which means the entire populations of China and India.

These are not small things. And while I wouldn't suggest actually doing any of them, it does help provide a sense of scale to the numbers we're discussing.

Now that we have some sense of scale, we can ask a more interesting question: If, as is generally understood at this point in time, the invasion of Iraq was all about securing their oil for our use, then what would it have cost us to simply buy the oil we needed on the international markets over the course of the war?

Given: the U.S. uses about 22 million barrels of the stuff per day, and over six years (2,192 days including 2 leap days) that comes to 48,224,000,000 or 42.224 billion barrels of it.

That’s fine but as we know the price of oil changed drastically between 2003 and now. The only way I can hope to deal with this is taking an average of the price of crude oil each January each year from 2003 to now. It’s not the best method of derivation but it should work here.

Therefore, given that:

Jan 2003: $27
Jan 2004: $34
Jan 2005: $45
Jan 2006: $58
Jan 2007: $65
Jan 2008: $95
Jan 2009: $45

The resulting average is $52.7 (let’s round up to $53/barrel)

So 42.224 billion x 53 = 2,237,872,000,000 or about two and a quarter trillion dollars. A bargain, you say! Well, maybe, maybe not.

$800 billion is just the official cost of the war, meaning supplemental outlays that were approved by Congress over the past six years for this particular overseas action. There are additional costs to be considered as well.

For instance, it’s been said that the cost of a single human life is something like $129,000, a price that’s used for cost analysis by health insurance companies. But that refers to the monetary value of a single year of life for an individual. For that calculation to work in this case, we need to consider average life expectancy as well. So, if the average life expectancy in modern day America is 77 years, and the average soldier is 25 years old, that’s 52 years of life that were cut short by dying in battle. 52 x $129,000 = $6,708,000. Rounding off American deaths to five thousand we get 5,000 x 6,708,000 = $33,540,000,000 or 33 and a half billion dollars.

On the other hand, what about 70,000 or so American troops who were wounded over there? Obviously, they are still alive, but they're not really expecting a normal life any more. For our purposes, let's accommodate this by saying their remaining life expectancy is cut by 25% or 13 years. Keeping the assumptions from the previous calculation, a wounded soldier can expect to live for another 39 years. 

So: 70,000 x 39 x $129,000 = $352,170,000,000 or 352 billion dollars and change. Total cost to American livelihoods: 385 and a half billion dollars.

Additionally, it’s been suggested that around a million Iraqis have been killed bring an added cost of its own (I know, I know, some of you will say American lives are worth more than Iraqi lives, but from where I sit, people are people and they’re all worth the same.) There’s also the argument that America really isn’t on the hook for non-American lives ended by American guns and ammo, but as the famous gentleman said, “you break it, you own it.” We killed them, directly or indirectly, their relatives will be thinking of ways to make us horribly uncomfortable (or dead) for years to come, and they’re part of the bill.

However, the average Iraqi (pre-invasion) life expectancy was rather lower than for Americans at 57. We’ll use the same age of death for this computation as we did with the Americans, 25. That means each Iraqi life was worth $129,000 x 32 (the difference between 57 and 25). So 1,000,000 x 129,000 x 32 = 4,128,000,000,000 or 4.128 trillion dollars.

Total (so far): 800 billion + 385.71 billion + 4.128 trillion = 5,313,170,000,000 or 5.31317 trillion dollars.

In other words this adventure has cost us a bit more than two and a half times what it would have cost just to buy the oil we wanted on the open market over the past six years.  (Assuming of course, that oil was all we wanted over there.)

There are plenty of other questions and costs we can consider, too.  A few that come to mind are:

What are the costs in lost productivity and economic activity in having a majority percentage (60% is a number I see a lot) of the forces there made up of reservists rather than professional troops?

How much oil was burned in the pursuit of this war by the U.S. armed forces?

How much of the stuff has been extracted from Iraq since 2003?

There's more I could say but this is long enough and I think I've made my point.  I thought this war was a bad idea back in February 2003, when my wife and I stood out in the bitter cold for six hours behind police barriers to protest the damn thing. I still think it's a bad idea. For all the fancy assumptions about costs and the value of human lives, I think it's fair to say that the loss of any human being to violence is going to be felt by someone. Some of those someones will take it badly indeed. Maybe blaming it on you and yours. Maybe trying to kill you and yours. And maybe succeeding.

None of it had to happen. For my two cents, we'd have been a stronger, safer and better country had it not.

A Long and Wacky Week

I haven't been posting lately for simple reasons. The most prominent one being that this week we endured a visit by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. (This is the organization under which our accreditation is formed and periodically verified.) Their crew of educators and administrations visited on Monday and Tuesday, spoke to us in the library and every other department, scaring the bejeesus out of everyone in the process, I'm sure. Certainly we in the school library spent buckets of time making sure that anything these nice people wanted to see could be presented with as  few problems and in as effective a manner possible.

Well, the came, they saw, they asked many questions and on Wednesday they presented their generally positive findings. We're here for five more years as an accredited institution. (Yea!)

Wednesday was April 1, a.k.a April Fool's Day. Two things happened to me personally that made my life more interesting than I really cared for. The first was my wife who woke me up that morning saying, "I opened all the bills and put them on your desk. They're not bad. April Fool! They're really really bad!"

(I love my wife. I want to say that again. I love that woman more than I can describe in non X-rated language. But sometimes . . . yeah. Well. Guys, you know what I mean. Probably you ladies do as well. . .)

I got to work at 10 Wednesday morning and had just unlocked the door to my office when my boss pulled me aside and asked me to cover the desk until further notice. His reasoning was that the place was empty and he and the library manager needed to go to the Middle States presentation downstairs. No problem. I do a shift at the desk every day and since  we're not quite in finals week it shouldn't be too busy, so I'm there.

Then I find out that the public computers were not connecting to the internet. None of them. The private PCs were all right--the circ desk PCs, the ones in our personal offices are fine, just the public ones, which includes a PC lab of about 20 and 20 more in the library proper. 40 computers out of wack at a stroke. That is A Very Big Deal indeed.

IT came down, ran tests and declared that were are a victim of a virus worm. A big one that somehow manages to rewrite the task manager's scripts such that the PC is so damn busy running bogus instructions that it never even gets a chance to log on to an internet connection, even if one is readily available.  Every public computer was affected. In tech speak we are screwed, at least until they can run whatever patches they can find to repair the actual damage.

This is a major inconvenience for sure but not an Act of Total Destruction. Our books, after all, are fine. But our catalog, being electronic and thus only generally usable by a PC with an internet connection, is unavailable. But if a student comes to me at the desk and asks for a title, I can find it for him because those PCs work. In the meantime if a student needs to use a PC, we've been sending them to dedicated labs on the other floors. So far, so good.

The problem is being fixed: instead of trying to reverse engineer a virus patch (which they're not really equipped to do) IT took all of our nerfed PCs out and are slowly replacing them with brand new models. Ten got replaced yesterday, I'm hoping that they'll have finished with the work by Monday. Of course we've been asking for new PCs for going on two years now, and IT has been saying it's way too expensive and labor intensive to do that--but then pulling 40 PCs out of their department's collective ass isn't the sort of thing you can do in 24 hours. Orders that large from any major supplier can take 2-3 weeks to arrange (I know because I've had that job.)  And these are new machines in new boxes, so they didn't just fall off a truck. I find the coincidence interesting, but that's where I'll stop. 

That's all notable but not what interests me the most. What really got my attention was our students' reaction to the whole mess.  At first, we put a sign on the library door, a simple notice printed in Microsoft Word, saying the library computers are fritzed, please go to the other labs, etc. Nobody saw it. In my first ten minutes at the desk, I had to turn away twenty kids. Logical conclusion: we need a better sign. So we cleared off a much bigger white board and wrote the message in a big red marker, ALERT! LIBRARY COMPUERS ARE NOT WORKING and if anything, the number of students coming in to use them increased. Then we closed the door to the library but kids pulled it open and came in to work just the same. Finally, we put the message board in front of the doorway and then the kids noticed something was up. One girl pulled it out of the way, walked up to the desk and complained that the doorway was blocked. Another boy walked around the board and went past the desk on his way to use the PCs.

I understand 20-somethings. I was one myself, after all, even if that was sometimes last century. But my generation was drilled to look for signs in BIG RED LETTERS  that denoted something different about the terrain. And I grok that once they walk through those glass doors in the lobby habit takes over and to these kids it's just another day at school. Since many of our programs are geared toward business and public administration, it's interesting that they're not more on the ball or on the lookout for the strange and unusual--one of our big draws, for example is our degree in Emergency and Disaster Management. Habits can be dangerous when trying to analyze the unexpected and adapt to it.

Is there a lesson here? I don't think so. Just a long and wacky week in the edumacation business.