State of the Me: 2025-2026 edition!!

Back in January when this year first started, I expected that it was going to be one of those "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times" years, but it kind of ended up being a "just keep swimming" year. Here's why:

Why was it the best of times?

With my current job, I think I've finally triangulated upon the role I want to play. You may recall that I'd thought my earlier job was the best one I'd ever had -- and it was, until it stopped being wonderful. This new job, however, is better. It has a lot of the same advantages of my earlier job, without some of the disadvantages.

I don't want to go into too much detail about my job on a public-but-not-professional blog, but I'll just say that it's a job that requires a very particular and unusual set of skills, and that I happen to have a particular and unusual set of skills that matches amazingly well. Not to pat my own back too hard, but they were also lucky to find me. They'd had people resign from this position during the trial period in the past, and my predecessor (who did the job for 3 years), had only ever intended to do the job temporarily.

If this coming year goes well too, I'll post more details about it in next year's "state of the me". 😁

Why was it the worst of times?

With Trump's re-election, the US's descent into fascism is dropping to horrific new lows, with people getting randomly rounded up and sent to gulags with no due process, etc. and the hegemony and military might of the United States makes this bad news for everyone.

And how were these pillars of good and bad tempered over the course of the year?

Regarding my job -- even though it's what I want to do, it's really hard work, and it has cost me more time and energy than I would like. I've gone back up to working 80% -- and I know that I have one day off per week -- but it hasn't been enough to get the projects done that I want to get done.

As I said last year, the #1 thing I wanted to do in 2025 was to get back to work on my comic book again. I really want to be spending my free time on artwork again, and -- while I did succeed in laying some of the groundwork -- I still haven't succeeded in getting to a place where I can wake up on a Wednesday morning and just work on the drawing some new panels. I'll explain below what I ended up doing instead. But really getting back into drawing my comic book is now my #1 personal goal for 2026.

The "worst of times" was tempered in a different way.

As I wrote back in 2016, I had hoped since the days of G.W. Bush that people would react to the terrible job that he did by working to turn things around. Instead I learned that there is no rock bottom, and that no matter how incomprehensibly broken the US political system seems at any given point it can get worse.

When G.W. Bush and co. faced no consequences for war crimes and extreme incompetence, that paved the way for Trump to take it to the next level in terms of stupidity and just openly looting the country. Then, after a brief pause of the Democrats thinking that things could just go back to normal by pretending like everything is normal, that monster got elected again on promises to do worse than he'd done the first time.

But the weird and unexpected part is that I think the US finally did hit rock bottom. I have absolutely been avoiding an "accelerationist" strategy because I didn't believe in rock bottom anymore -- but it actually looks like after watching this past year of Trump and the billionaires take a chainsaw to what's left of the US, the tide may be turning and the pendulum may swing back in a real way.

That may just be my social media bubble telling me what I want to hear, though, so I'm not counting any chickens yet....

But Trump has succeeded in ending America's dominance over the rest of the world. As I said earlier, Trump is so dumb that he doesn't realize that he's throwing away something valuable. His ego depends on his skill at deal-making, but his only deal-making strategies are trying to charm or bully people.

By taking the mask off of kindly old Uncle Sam, Trump has shocked the rest of the world into realizing how dangerous it is to cede so much power to the US. And by picking a fight with every country at the same time (aside from an handful of fellow despot/criminals), he has given other countries the motivation and ability to reclaim some economic and military sovereignty.

So I guess that means that instead of "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times," I was in "just keep swimming" mode. I actually thought I had used this phrase before in a "State of the Me" (to describe a year of just trying to make incremental progress on my goals for the future), but this post is the closest I could find.

But now that I'm in my 50's, I'd like to mix up my metaphor a bit. My new motto is more in line with the famous saying:

Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water,
After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.

Naturally I want to stay goal-oriented, but one of my intentions this year has been to appreciate my day-to-day life more.

Every morning I get up at 6 and do my "morning chores" -- which is usually just making tea and loading and/or unloading the dishwasher on days when I have to go to work, but also includes laundry, prepping the garbage/recycling, and light gardening, depending on how much time and stuff to do I have. This is a time of quiet reflection and of physical activity that gets me going, and is almost meditative. (Coincidentally? there's a word in Japanese the means both relaxation and doing laundry...)

(If you're wondering where my wonderful husband is in this picture, he generally does other chores, like loading/unloading the dishwasher in the afternoon and making dinner.)

To that end, one mini-project that has eaten some of my project time this past year was to make compilations of old songs that I wanted to listen to -- ones that take me back. In the beginning of the year I made a set of "hits by year" (which still needs some work, but it was a good start), and then more recently I made a database of all of the tracks of all of the Christmas albums I've collected over the years. I had last done this in 2002 (back when we burned the compilations onto physical CDs). It was getting to be time to do it again (just copying collections onto a hard-drive this time).

The problem with Christmas albums is that they invariably have a few tracks on them that I do not like -- and more commonly it will be that an album has a handful of good tracks but the rest are unlistenable. And, no, I do not trust any streaming service to do this for me. To any reader who is mentally screaming "No!!! I hate Christmas music!!!" -- I hear ya. I hate a lot of it too, but I love a lot of it because of the variety of musical genres represented, and especially because of the connection with the past.

Anyway, I made a database of all of the good tracks (of which I have about 350), including tables of the songs (about 130) and artists (more than 160), plus language/instrumental and a rating system. I then wrote a quick algorithm to mix them up by song/style/artist and automatically copy and normalize them into 31 sets -- an "advent of music" as it were -- so I can listen to them all without hearing a track I don't like.

Maybe sometime I'll write out an update to my long-ago post about the carols that I like. My current list has been influenced by my kids -- we also have a special family Christmas song compilation which is mostly funny Christmas songs that we've all found over the years.

Then there were a couple of other projects that I hadn't really planned to spend as much time on as I did.

First on that list was Totally Normal Town -- as you'll know if you follow this blog (if anyone does...).

I did not anticipate how many months it would take me to make all of those buildings. And it's still not done!! See here and this video:

 

But focusing on Totally Normal Town was partially inspired by my new "Chop wood, carry water" viewpoint because this time in which my kids are available to do creative collaborations with won't last forever. And Nico had done such a clever job of writing and directing the Totally Normal Town story series, that I didn't want to miss this opportunity.

Both Nico and Leo have been working on some amazing creative projects of their own -- I can't link to them because they're not public, but you would be impressed!!

Then there was the whole Japan thing (which I will fold into my usual "language learning" category).

For a few years we'd been planning a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Japan, which we took in March. Emmanuel was the one who most wanted to do this, but of course we all have stuff we love from Japanese culture: sushi, video games, fast trains, Totoro, etc., so we were all happy to make the trip -- and we had a fantastic time!!

It was so much fun that Emmanuel wants to now do it again -- which we're planning to do in 2027 (but not take the kids this time). Emmanuel also made a lovely set of photo albums of our trip as a family Christmas present. I just wish we'd been making photo albums more often for the past 25 years. My kids have (ironically?) seen way fewer photos of their memories growing up than I did of mine as a kid, back when photos were physical objects rather than data sitting on some filesystem...

We also spent a bunch of time learning Japanese -- and didn't stop after the trip ended. I actually thought 2025 was going to be my year for really making progress on Schwitzerdeutsch, but the problem is that this little Renshuu app for learning Japanese is so much more fun to do while lounging in bed (sometimes before, sometimes after my morning chores) than any of my Schwitzerdeutsch materials. But 2026 will be my Schwitzerdeutsch year for sure!! (Or maybe 2027)

Speaking of the past 25 years, we had two lovely weekend celebrations for our silver wedding anniversary -- one to see an opera at La Scala in Milano, and another in which we visited friends and family in Paris. 

As usual, I haven't done a lot for Main Street Plaza this year, but I'm pretty psyched that a major ExMo podcast has been promoting the Brodies this year, so I hope we'll have a really great year for awards -- and maybe even get some good conversation going again.

But my biggest goal for 2026 (aside from all of the goals discussed above) is to help my two boys to make progress on their own long-term goals. I don't want to go into too much detail here since it's not my story to tell, but I hope to have some good news about their progress for next year's edition!!

Happy New Year, and here's looking forwards to amazing things in 2026!!!

 

Trump is really, really bad at the "art of the deal"...

I've been on Facebook lately -- perhaps a mistake, but I've been posting my Japan photos (which I may copy here as well). Following all of the latest crazy news makes me want to write out my own analysis. I'm not sure anyone is particularly interested, but I know that there's one person who will be interested: future me!! So I will write my thoughts here on my blog.

I just want to start with the obvious: Trump is really bad at negotiating because he's really dumb. I'd like to explain a bit because I've read a lot of analysis, but I haven't seen quite this angle:

Trump wants to believe that he's a good negotiator -- it's important to his personal identity -- but he's bad at it because his view of deal-making is too simplistic.

Trump sees deals only in one-dimensional terms. When he's the buyer, he wants the price to be as low as possible while the seller wants it to be as high as possible. If he gets the price down, he won, otherwise the seller won. And the only tools in his toolbox for this are (1) trying to charm the seller, or (2) trying to pressure/threaten/bully the seller.

A smart negotiator can see deals in multiple dimensions. The various parties in the negotiation don't necessarily want exactly the same thing, and in any negotiation there are typically more than two interested parties. To get the best deal, you find someone with a common interest or with a reciprocal interest.

A reciprocal interest would be when I have something that's more valuable to you than it is to me, and you have something that's more valuable to me than to you -- so we both win by trading. A common interest would be like "Trump is threatening my economy and he is also threatening your economy. Let's protect both our economies by finding which things we were selling to / buying from the US that we could trade between ourselves instead."

Having a reputation for being trustworthy is valuable because people are more willing to make deals with those they can trust to play fair. You get a reputation for being trustworthy by being trustworthy. Having good friends and allies is also valuable. You help them when they need it and they help you -- that's essentially been the basis of human society since the beginning of human society.

The US has invested heavily in its reputation and alliances for the past century or so -- and has reaped huge rewards in terms of influence and good will -- not to mention the incredibly lucrative position of having the primary reserve currency of the world. Sadly, America's reputation and alliances have been on kind of shaky ground for a while, and Trump appears to have flushed them down the toilet because he didn't recognize them as valuable.

Right before picking a fight with China, Trump did the dumbest thing possible and terrorized America's most loyal friends and allies -- not just threatening them economically but threatening their security and sovereignty.

No country has had a better friend and ally than America's best friend Canada. And out of the blue, for no reason besides stupid arrogance, Trump threatened to break Canada's economy in order to forcibly annex them. Maybe he didn't really mean it (if something he tries to do isn't possible, then it was just a joke, eh?), but Canada is taking the threat very seriously.

And Europe's big security fear at the moment...? Putin's territorial ambitions could lead to full-scale war. Ukraine is holding the line. America's military might dwarfs that of Europe, and Europe's dependence on US military aid gives the US huge leverage over Europe.

Apparently, however, Trump's plan to "end the Ukraine war on day one" was to hand Ukraine over to his buddy Putin by cutting off military aid. Now that Europe knows they can't count on help from their friend anymore, they're in emergency mode scrambling to build up local military might to make up for the loss.

This destroys America's leverage. I've seen it likened to shooting the hostage and then asking for ransom. Threatening to annex Greenland also doesn't help. If Trump decides to take Greenland through a military invasion, what's Europe going to do?

This is how Trump decided to lay the groundwork for his trade war with China. Xi has read his Sun Tzu -- he knows that the enemy of my enemy is my ally. Trump opened the game by handing Xi a lay-up of being able to credibly say to America's best friends "Let's stand up to this bully together."

These are countries that normally would prefer to help pressure China to be less authoritarian. But when your big best friend suddenly morphs into a big deadly-dangerous bully, anyone who can help starts to look good by comparison.

I'm actually starting to see friendly memes about cooperation show up in my Facebook feed -- from the Chinese embassy in the US (and I don't think I did anything to encourage them). My feed is also drowning in pro-Canada memes and in AI images about the beautiful friendship between Canada and Mexico. I haven't been actively "liking" them -- I think I'm getting them because I once googled whether there are any new bilateral trade agreements between Canada and Mexico, and I clicked on some articles about how they're increasing trade between themselves and with China. (Curse you lack of data privacy!)

I guess everything I've written here is obvious. It's just that I was flabbergasted to read a few posts by a pro-Trump Facebook friend who argued that the worldwide tariffs (and his later pause on the tariffs) were brilliant moves that served to "divide and conquer" the world, isolate China, and put the US in a position to lead a new global economy. The friend apparently got these ideas from Fox News, but I'm still astonished that anyone could seriously believe any of that.

You would need to (like Trump himself) be incapable of seeing things from anyone else's perspective.

And I haven't even mentioned the thing about rounding people up and sending them (without any due process) to secret and/or foreign prisons -- which should be the worst thing, but it's hard to rank the worst things these days.

In a sense, however, Trump has been very successful in his own goals. Using his charm alone, he managed to convince a multitude of [insert appropriate adjectives here] people to give him the most powerful position in the world -- where he has the opportunity to rob them blind by selling his influence to anyone who will funnel money into his otherwise-failing businesses.

It feels like this has to turn around at some point. Because almost every story has an arc where the protagonists learn something and everything is more-or-less OK in the end. But maybe that's just because stories are told by people who are currently surviving...?

State of the Me: 2024-2025 edition!!

The year 2024 is wrapping up -- which means that it's time for my yearly self-assessment!! (Buckle in, this is a long one...)

I need to start with my job because that is what consumes most of my time and corresponding mental bandwidth. It's kind of a long and technical (perhaps dull) story, though, so feel free to skip straight to the next section (world events), which is probably more interesting.

My Job

Here's a quick recap of the last few years:

For three years I held a job that was my favorite job that I'd ever had. Since the company was a successful and quickly-growing startup, I had the chance to exercise one of my most valuable skills: growing a startup company up to scalable mode (see my professional blog at startup2scalable.com). I was hired as a DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, and I quickly worked my way up to being the Tech Lead of the central DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure team of the company.

I had the opportunity to work with eight or nine dev teams (depending on how you count) -- helping them to get all of their applications running in kubernetes -- with continuous build-and-deployment pipelines tailored to each team's needs. I led weekly workshops and I assisted anyone who wanted help applying new technologies to their projects. And I got rave reviews!

Perfect, right?

Unfortunately, one of the selling points of that job turned out to be a liability. I had chosen the company because I wanted to do something to fight climate change -- and many of the teams I was working with were creating scientific models and other types of projects to help companies reduce their carbon footprint!

...But it turned out that almost all of the money was actually coming from selling carbon offsets. While working there, I learned not only that carbon offsets are questionable in general but that the company I was working for specifically was selling some especially dodgy ones. I learned this from the press like everyone else did. That said, I can't pretend to complete ignorance on this point -- I knew from the list of clients that we were green-washing some of the worst offenders in carbon emissions. But it seemed logical that they should be the ones paying for offsets, right?

Anyway, when the carbon markets imploded and my employer in particular took a thrashing in the press, the money dried up -- which meant throwing overboard all of the ballast such as diversifying their offering with digital solutions, etc. As you can see from my corresponding post from last year, however, I still had hope of some positive resolutions. Specifically, since one of my areas of expertise is helping companies grow from startup to scalable, I have corresponding skills in helping them downsize as well. I could have helped them trim their cloud infrastructure back down to startup size -- while keeping everything up and running.

So, yes, I'm saying I would have kept helping them (at least for a time) after finding out about their business. And the stress and worry of trying to play my cards to make that happen pretty much ruined my whole Christmas season last year. They didn't deserve it, but I had loved that job for three years, and I had the right skillset to really help them in bad times like in good.

The problem is that the top brass showed stunning incompetence, really the whole time. In particular, since they're not a tech company, they didn't have the idea in their heads that maybe the top engineers should be consulted regarding tech & engineering decisions. In their world, there are executives to make decisions and then there are tech/specialist cows to be milked.

Anyway, I could see the wrecking ball coming for my department, and as tech lead, I would be responsible for keeping things running while I didn't have the authority to make the decisions that would allow me to do so effectively throughout the downsizing. So I resigned. If they want to unplug things randomly, then they can explain to the various dev teams why their infrastructure isn't working anymore. I didn't want to resign, but I also didn't think I deserved to be made to take the fall.

A colleague had suggested that I could start my own business, and I thought it would be a good way to recreate the situation I loved -- doing the DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure for a portfolio of teams and small businesses. I had expected that I might get some "garden leave" when I resigned (since others had gotten it). but nope. I had to work right to my last day. So I had with no income while trying to start my new business.

(By the end of 2024, the last remaining members of my team were laid-off -- which meant at least that they got a few months of garden-leave pay plus the right to collect unemployment right away...)

A learned a couple of important lessons from creating my own company:

1. I find paperwork so stressful that a single form I needed to fill out would lead me to waste multiple work days just stressing over it. 

2. While companies do sometimes outsource DevOps and Infra to consultants, they hire consulting firms, not freelancers.

So, ultimately, after several potential clients told me that they could hire me -- but not through my small business -- I gave up. After about two months of no income and no real prospects, I accepted a temporary contract -- even though it wasn't through my small business.

There are a lot of nice things about my current temporary contract, but it's been stressful because it's not really where I want to be long term.

Fortunately, just before the holiday season I found a new job that is right up my alley. I got it and accepted it. I haven't started yet (so I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch, so to speak), but I have very high hopes that this is the right move for me. Here's hoping the "job" section of next year's "state of the me" will be full of wonderful news!

In career-related creative projects, as I mentioned in last year's edition, I've been upgrading my hobby-server infrastructure. I've created a bunch of additional demo projects on my kubernetes cluster this past year -- though, unfortunately, I didn't have time to blog about as many of them as I had planned. Hopefully I'll have more opportunity to write for my professional blog in 2025.

At least I did get a chance to give a talk on kubernetes at the Cloud Native Switzerland Meetup. Here's the video of it:

World Events

The US election was obviously much, much worse than any of my personal worries about my career.

I was actually shocked and surprised that Trump won, and here's why:

Even though we were constantly reminded that the polls showed a statistical tie, I thought they were underestimating the enthusiasm, especially from women. Whenever reproductive rights were on the ballot -- even in "red" states -- reproductive rights would win. And with the fall of Roe v. Wade (not to mention horror stories rolling in about women bleeding to death in parking lots after being refused care), I saw the election as largely a referendum on women's right to bodily autonomy.

When the Democrats responded to the outcry over Biden's age by pressuring him to drop out -- and then when Kamala picked the most progressive person from her list of possible running mates -- I thought, "Wow, the Democrats are finally getting it right and doing stuff that people like!!!"

Trump is a convicted felon who is constantly criming so blatantly that he more-or-less openly ran on a platform of "I will treat the country as my own personal property and sell off everything that isn't nailed down and put the proceeds straight into my own pockets."

The fact that a majority of US voters would vote for that is an indication of a very serious systemic problem. I think the most critical problems are money in politics, misinformation, and election interference. With the media landscape as it is today, it's just too easy for the wealthy to manipulate public opinion. I don't know how to fix this, but I think that unless we can find a solution to this problem, fascism will just continue to rise worldwide.

(There are some additional US-specific democracy issues such as gerrymandering, lack of ranked-choice voting, Supreme Court politicized and open for bribes, other types of legal bribery, etc.)

The political commentators are now dissecting what Kamala and the Democrats did wrong, saying Kamala should have talked more about specific policies than about her middle-class roots. Sure, if she'd been shouting "Medicare for all" rather than campaigning with Liz Cheney, that would probably have helped.

One formerly-progressive news/commentary outlet that has recently taken a horrifying sharp right turn argued that Harris should done more to throw trans people under the bus, and applauded Trump's win as a referendum against the Democratic establishment. :(

If it was a referendum on anything, it was a referendum on the question of "fuck women." Most people were essentially voting on "vibes" (not issues), and there were too many people who just couldn't picture a black woman as president, even when the alternative is a doddering and incoherent criminal who is actively robbing them.

If there was any "tweak" the Democrats could have made that might have put Kamala over the edge, it's that they should have pressured Biden to resign right after the mid-terms. If Americans had had two years of getting used to seeing Kamala Harris as president, it would have made all the difference in the world.

Now I'm kind of at a loss. Up until November of 2024, I had had hope that future historians would view it as inevitable that when Americans had come right up to the edge of fascism, they roundly rejected it. Now I don't know what to hope for or if there is any hope left. We can't even look forward to Trump's unhealthy lifestyle finally finishing him off because is VP is misogynistic slimeball.

Around this time, readers might be reminding me that I don't live in the US. While my kids and I are still US citizens, we're also citizens of France and Switzerland, and we live in Switzerland. As far as France is concerned, they've got some problems too. We got the opportunity to participate in the center-left action to block the fascists in the French legislative elections, but all over Europe it looks like the far right is gaining. I hope that is a wrong impression.

Here in Switzerland, we recently defeated a massive nationwide highway expansion proposal. Thanks heavens I have the right to live in this island of sanity where people are rejecting the inefficient, dead-end path of car-centric transportation. Switzerland also serious issues, but at least on my one favorite issue, I got one bit of joyful news.

Creative Hobbies

My participation in ZEST (Zürich English-Speaking Theatre) continues to be a great creative-social component of my life.

Since I didn't learn my lesson from last year, I agreed to act as head of set dressing for the Spring production "Communicating Doors". I'm half joking -- it was a great experience and I'm glad I did it -- but I feel like it was sometimes more stress and responsibility than I had the time and energy to handle. I'd like to take on another "head of"-level role in some future production -- but not any time soon.

I really enjoy doing backstage work, though. It's a fun and not-terribly-stressful way to help out and be part of the production. As I mentioned, last year Nico and I volunteered to be on the stage crew for their November production of "The Lieutenant of Inishmore", and this year I worked backstage on the costume crew for "Dogfight", which was fun.

Due to a series of scheduling conflicts, I haven't been able to go to improv for about 6 months. The cool part is that Nico has been going by himself -- which I think is a good sign.

My other hobby organization (Main Street Plaza and MAA Books) had some cool developments this past year! Chino Blanco (of the exmo reddit) organized a panel at Sunstone that was intended as a reprise of a panel I had organized more than a decade ago. I even got to participate virtually! Monya Baker represented Main Street Plaza in person, and met some up-and-coming authors.

I'm really pleased with how the Sunstone adventure has livened up our little community! As of this writing, we're currently in the middle of our awards season -- the big yearly event hosted by Main Street Plaza. The voting for X-Mormon of the Year has been pretty lively, not to mention the many nominations for the Brodie Awards!

In family creative projects, Nico and I have been rebuilding Totally Normal Town, and I've got plenty more awesome original builds planned: a new mountain + castle for Elsa, a Japanese garden + temple & dojo, and some city buildings to flan the tracks of the seilbahn.

The only thing that's stopping me from building the next planned items is that as soon as I start on an original build, I get kind of obsessed and can't work on anything else for about a week. I don't have time to do that between now and our trip to Japan (see below), so I have to set it aside for now. But these planned builds are on my 2025 creative project goals list!

Then, to put this awesome city-under-the-stairs to good use, Nico took the lead in directing a new "film noir" murder mystery episode of out Totally Normal Town video series. This was fun for the whole family -- including some memorable performances by Léo and my husband. It also helped me get more practice with video editing. And Nico has got some great new episodes planned for 2025!!

I also succeeded in one of my personal goals of learning to make animations in Unity!! I had wanted to make some Pokémon Go videos for my channel, but I felt like I wanted a cool, animated intro for them. So I created the following:

Then I used it in two initial Pokémon Go videos: in Budapest and Scuol. As you can see, my video-creation skills still need some work, so that's another of my creative goals for 2025 -- to improve my skills with some new Pokémon Go videos.

I'd actually also like to try to make at least one more animation in Unity (so I don't forget what I learned about how to do it). And I'd also like to finally complete my stated Unity goal from last year which is to create a minimal Unity game that contacts a server (and collaborate with my kids on a corresponding game project).

Then the #1 thing that I'd really like to do by the end of 2025 is to pick up work on my comic book again.

It took me 7 years to illustrate the first volume!! That's why I set it down -- I felt like it was keeping me from working on all of these other projects. But now that I've made some good progress on a lot of my other projects, I feel like I want to work on my comic book in parallel. I have some good ideas for imagery, and I'd like to get back into the fun of world-building.

So my comic book goal for 2025 is to have the second and third volumes completely blocked out -- all pages filled with (empty) panels and text -- and I'd like to do any necessary technical updates/upgrades so that I have drawn at least a few panels before the end of the year.

In addition to my main creative goals, I have a list of smaller things I'd like to get done:

• Review the computerized music creation I'd done a couple of years ago -- see if I can squeeze anything good out of it.
• Update Mormon Alumni Association Books (add more books).
• Blog about my garden -- I learned a lot in 2024, but skipped blogging about it for some reason.
  
• Maybe another hobby website...

Family and Languages

I've grouped my family situation and my language learning goals this year! Here's why:

My husband has been wanting to take a trip to Japan for years -- and this coming Spring we'll finally be going on our trip-of-a-lifetime to Japan!! All four of us!

In order to get the most out of our trip, my husband has decided to try to learn Japanese. For the past few months, he's been using this Renshuu app to practice reading and writing Japanese on his tablet.

After learning French in grad school, I got the idea that I'm a person who likes learning languages. I got a bit of a start on various languages -- and in particular my husband and I had fun learning Italian together back before we were married.

My Italian is still pretty decent because we listen to a lot of Italian opera (and I learned the words to a number of arias). Plus it was just a fun thing to do together. We still have some little catch-phrases we sometimes say to each other from the "40 Leçons pour parler Italien" book that we read together:

• "Gli spaghetti italiani sono sempre al dente!"
• "L'Italia è il primo produttore mondiale di vino."
• "Ma è fantastico imparare una lingua straniera -- soprattutto l'italiano!"
• ...and some expressions from operas: "Poverino!" and "Eccomi!"

The difficulty I've had learning German in Zürich has kind of put me off of the idea that I'm "good at learning languages" lol, but when I saw my husband doing his Japanese lessons, I started to feel tempted. ...Especially after he found me the recordings for "40 Leçons pour parler Japonais" -- the Japanese version of my favorite language-learning series that I've used for both Italian and German.

Anyway, it's been very fun and even kind of romantic to learn a new language together like we did way back in the honeymoon phase of our relationship.

I've actually also improved on my German this year because in my current (temporary) job I have to speak German all the time. And my new Japanese-learning hobby has taught me some tricks that I can apply to my Swiss-German lessons after we get back from Japan.

Our kids are doing well and making progress in their studies. I don't want to go into too much detail because it's their story to tell, but I'll report any new diplomas that they earn. :D

So I guess that's where I'm at in a nutshell! I hope things will go according to plan -- and that things will get better and not worse for us and the world in the coming year!

A New Hope...

Mitt Romney released a statement yesterday calling out Donald Trump by name and forcefully denouncing his shameful response to recent Nazi events in the US. Romney's position is correct and his statement hit all the right notes.

Was it politically expedient for Romney to release such a statement? Possibly, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Strategic skills are important in a leader.

The problem with Trump goes far beyond the question of ideology. I disagree with Romney's ideology. I'm bringing up Romney to illustrate that -- ideology aside -- there's a big difference between someone who is qualified to be president and someone who, fundamentally, is not.

The endless stream of verbal diarrhea spewing out of Trump's mouth and Twitter feed is, unfortunately, one of his selling points in the eyes of some (very stupid) voters. Because he speaks his mind; he doesn't play games like a politician. But those supposedly positive qualities are just symptoms of Trump's underlying problem:

He's an idiot.

Trump does not have the faintest clue how the government works, and he is, frankly, too stupid to learn it. His skill level is not in the same universe with competence.

Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush unfortunately convinced the American people that it's not important for the president to be a smart person; that as long as he shares your ideology, it's OK for him to be a drooling moron -- because he can always delegate all that "knowing stuff" and "running the country" to underlings. This is a deadly belief because it has led the country to elect a man who is a full order of magnitude stupider than either Reagan or GWB (astonishing as that is).

At least Reagan and GWB recognized the need to delegate tasks to more competent people. Trump is so dumb that he believes his own bullshit. He sincerely, Dunning-Krugerly believes that he is a smart, savvy guy.

And now we are seeing the entirely predictable consequences of this deadly mistake. Hostile authoritarian regimes easily manipulate Trump with flattery. Crucial allies are at a loss as to how (and whether) to continue working with the US. Homegrown violent extremists receive encouragement from the highest level of government. Decades of delicate diplomacy over nuclear arms have been undone -- we're now one tantrum away from seeing millions of innocent people get killed by a nuclear bomb. In the space of a few months we've gone from relative stability (for those in the global North, at least...) to the most dangerously precarious situation we've seen in half a century.

Fortunately, the quality that makes Trump so dangerous may be his undoing.

Serious political commentators are finally starting to predict that Trump will be removed from office soon. Up until last week, it was still reasonable to dismiss that idea as wishful thinking, but the whole Nazi straw finally broke the camel's back. It's not just the that the statements themselves were so much more horrible than all of the other shit he's done -- it's also the weight of the accumulation, plus the fact that he has alienated essentially all of his allies.

The critical point is that the Republicans in Congress are finally starting to turn on him. Trump doesn't seem to understand that those Republicans in the House and Senate are currently the only people standing between him and jail. And he is just too. damn. stupid. to do a bare minimum of maintenance on those alliances that are so critical to his survival. Instead he has repeatedly demonstrated that teaming up with him is the fast track to finding yourself under a bus.

The thing is that -- regardless of what Muller's investigation turns up -- the things Trump has already done out in the open are sufficient to convict him. He is openly profiting from foreign governments through his hotels and other businesses, and he has admitted to firing James Comey for the express purpose of stopping an investigation of his campaign's ties to Russia. Muller's investigation will almost certainly turn up extensive money laundering and other crimes, but it's kind of the icing on the cake. The Republicans in Congress have more than enough evidence already to put him in jail -- the minute they decide it's in their interest to do so.

A Facebook friend recently made the astonishing claim that people have been trying to link Trump to Russia for nine months and have yet to turn up any "real evidence." In reality, the fact that Trump isn't standing before a court of law (yet) has nothing to do with lack of evidence. You've heard the expression "possession is nine-tenths of ownership"...? Well, we need a similar expression for the law. Nine-tenths of it is what those in power choose to enforce.

The Constitution of the USA does not automatically enforce itself. It is not going to magically come to life, jump out of its display-case, and snatch those foreign emoluments out of Donald Trump's thieving hands. People have to enforce it. And if Trump leaves office without facing justice for his crimes, then the United States of America will have a new precedent: the USA will simply become a country where the president is allowed to openly abuse his office to line his own pockets. This is why it is so critical for Trump to be impeached rather than simply voted out of office at the end of his term. The USA needs to establish a clear legal precedent regarding this type of corruption.

As an example of what I mean, consider the USA's current informal precedent with respect to torture. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are known to have had a hand in it. Torture, BTW, is a war crime, and they still need to stand trial for it. But instead of pursuing justice, Obama chose to merely issue an executive order that his administration would not torture people.

The problem with that choice is that Obama transformed torture from a crime to a choice that a president is at liberty to make. Thanks to that precedent, Republican candidates (including Romney) have promised to bring torture back. Naturally Bush/Cheney's choice to torture is worlds worse that Obama's choice to look the other way, but Obama's choice was nonetheless unacceptable. Torture is not an issue where it is OK to be the "compromise guy."

My hope for the United States is that Trump's flame-out will be so spectacular that the mainstream of US society will finally insist on fixing that legion of grotesque problems with the current American electoral system: gerrymandering, Citizens United (and all other legalized bribery), voter suppression, the Electoral College, electronic voting machines, unequal representation among the states and territories, etc., etc.

The only thing that could possibly redeem this monstrous nightmare reality show we've been living since January would be if the country learns something from it. And I mean really learns something.

Resistance is not futile (I hope)

Folks, we are in big trouble. Our current climate change reality is off-the-charts worse than the most dire predictions. With gigatons of methane melting in the arctic and going into the atmosphere, we are looking at a more than 10 degree increase in global temperature in the next ten years. Few ecosystems on Earth can survive that. Our species almost certainly can't.

Maybe if we were to mobilize 100% of all of our efforts, we can stop this, but it looks like we're throwing ourselves headlong into extinction, and soon. As the climate changes, agriculture will fail all over the world. The current situation in Syria is just a dress rehearsal. That will be everywhere in a few years. And instead of mobilizing to stop this, we will probably mobilize for war, and that will be the end of us.

Is there any hope? I hope there is! Massive cultivation of algae in the oceans might save us, but this and all other actions need to ramp up immediately. We need to get down to business on this like our lives depend on it, because they do.

Confessions of a former Nader voter: 2016 reflections

The US election of 2000 has been coming up a lot lately, so I think it's time to add a few remarks and updates to the lessons I learned and described earlier.

First off, I've heard people claim that the Naderites of 2000 simultaneously held two contradictory views:

1. The candidates of the two major parties are too similar to each other to warrant supporting one over the other, and 
2. A GWB presidency would be such a disaster that it would wake up and energize the populace to take to the streets and demand major changes.

This is not an accurate characterization. These two views were not widely held simultaneously. The first view was what was argued during the 2000 election and the second was a hope that started to develop about midway through GWB's first term.

Position #1 was specifically argued in the campaign literature that helped convince me. I recall sharing one article that talked about environmental protection legislation that passed under Nixon (or something like that), along with a bunch of other examples of positive/progressive legislation that had passed during recent Republican administrations, plus examples of bad stuff that during Democratic ones. It was quite the opposite of arguing that "A GWB presidency will destroy the country and bring on 'the revolution' sooner" -- it was more like "It's not going to make any difference, so let's vote for a new system."

And it made sense to me. They're politicians after all -- they have to compromise and reach across the aisle if they want to get anything done. So using my vote to protest the two-party stranglehold on the national debate didn't seem like an especially dangerous thing to do. (Particularly since -- as I said in the above-linked essays -- I sincerely didn't think GWB had any shot at winning.) 

The idea that Congress would explicitly, intentionally try to hamstring the president instead of trying to run the country is largely a new strategy for pandering to a constituency that hates Obama so profoundly that they'd rather see the country harm itself than see Obama succeed.

Once I saw how bad it was possible for a GWB to be, that's when I started hoping that people would get energized and motivated (as explained in my earlier essays). And to my horror, it didn't happen.

That's the most important lesson I learned from my experience voting for Nader. I think I was enough of an optimist to believe that once we hit rock-bottom, we'd start to pick ourselves back up. And sadly I learned that there is no rock bottom. No matter how incomprehensibly broken the US political system seems at any given point it can get worse.

GWB helped shape the new normal. When I was kid, torture was a war crime, period. Thanks to Bush/Cheney, whether/how to torture is just another campaign plank to be debated. Now we have Trump stating on television that he advocates deterring terrorists by killing their innocent family members, and it's not even considered his worst gaffe.

GWB dramatically expanded the electorate's tolerance for criminality and incompetence from the president. A huge portion of the electorate now thinks the president's job is just to be "the decider" -- picking among choices presented to him by his staff -- instead of having a thorough understanding of policies, issues, history, etc.

I'm not going to say that a protest vote is never appropriate. I abstained from voting in the previous presidential election because of Obama's human rights' record (specifically sending drones to assassinate people without any transparency or judicial oversight). But this is not the election for a protest vote. This isn't a choice between two basically-the-same bad choices. This is a choice between the status quo and suicide. The status quo is bad, but suicide is infinitely worse.

The fact that Trump is even considered a viable candidate is itself an illustration of the consequences of standing by and allowing a disaster presidency to happen.

Yes, this

I hate to post a link to an article unless I have some of my own commentary to add, but this article is more-or-less exactly what I've been saying for years.  Here's a teaser:

Put simply, we've learned a lot since 1787. What was for the Founders a kind of providential revelation—designing, from scratch, a written charter and democratic system at a time when the entire history of life on this planet contained scant examples of either—has been worked into science. More than 700 constitutions have been composed since World War II alone, and other countries have solved the very problems that cripple us today. It seems un-American to look abroad for ways to change our sacred text, but the world's nations copied us, so why not learn from them?

So, basically, we have a big problem...

The thing that most worries me about this graphic is the part up at the top where it shows that fossil fuel reserves dwarf our safety budget.  Will there be any way to convince people not to burn those extra few thousand gigatons if they're right there for the burning?

I have a hard time believing that there's any chance of our species refraining from rendering our planet unfit for human habitation...

Rethinking Economics 2: Lessons from Switzerland!!

See here for part 1 on the private sector vs. the public sector.

Reading a post on a favorite blog, I learned that the far-right wing news outlet World News Daily recently wrote an article praising Switzerland and Sweden for having strong economies despite the current economic problems throughout the developed world.

Said the WND author: "Other governments could learn something." I agree wholeheartedly. I have learned some fantastic ideas from observing how things are done in Switzerland!! Mostly a simple point that absolutely can and should be applied elsewhere.

First off, what I learned is totally outside the box of the current Republican-Democrat polarized thinking in the United States today. WND naturally looks for interpretations from inside its ideological box -- but even on face-value that's a little absurd. Sure the Swiss political system is economically right-wing by European standards (though, still, practically flaming communists by American standards), but Sweden? Does there exist a country that is more Socialist? Clearly what we learn can't be simply that the Republicans' ideas are right and the Democrats' are wrong (or vice-versa). Maybe it's something else!

Now, I don't know much about Sweden, but Ed Brayton (linked above) points out that while they have low public debt, they also have one of the highest effective tax rates in the world, so maybe the lesson is to actually pay for government spending rather than repeatedly borrowing in order to cut taxes again...? Seems as good an interpretation as any. But, anyway, back to the country I know something about: Switzerland.

Before attempting to apply the Swiss model, it's important to understand the ways in which Switzerland is unique. The key point is that Switzerland is a tiny country with a ton of money. And the fact that the country is relatively less socialist than its neighbors is in large part the result of the wealth rather than the cause. How Switzerland became wealthy is a long and complicated story -- I'll just mention that the highly lucrative and questionable banking industry played a non-negligible role, and staying neutral during WWII didn't hurt either.

Then, when more people have the means to find their own individual solutions to things (like quality child-care and early-childhood education, for example), there's less push to find common solutions. So, for example, if you have small children and don't happen to be wealthy, you're better off in neighboring France.

But the interesting part of Switzerland's story isn't so much where the wealth originally came from as what they've done with it.

Switzerland supports an astonishing amount of scientific research. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) gets more than a billion Francs per year (a Franc is about a dollar), and several other universities in Switzerland have comparable budgets. In addition to hosting CERN (a multi-national nuclear physics research organization), there's also the Paul Scherrer Institute (which I have toured) -- full of particle accelerators as well.

The research performed at these institutions gets applied in real-world practical applications. For example, the Paul Scherrer Institute studies proton therapy, which is better than traditional radiation therapy for certain types of tumors. Additionally, ETH provides assistance for people to start their own companies based on research done there. I've seen how effective their programs are -- I work for one such company. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Also, remember how amazed I was by French public transportation? Well, Swiss public transportation is even better. If you haven't lived it, I can hardly describe how quick and convenient it is to go anywhere in the country (including wilderness) without ever getting behind the wheel of a car.

Additionally, Switzerland is a world leader in healthy, organic, sustainable agriculture, and a trend-setter in terms of buying local, seasonal foods (or, failing that, buying fair trade items).

In the US, economic health is constantly viewed in terms of consumer spending. But most of these consumer goods we're talking about are fundamentally disposable, and typically aren't even produced in the US. A wise economist once said that you don't pay people to dig holes and fill them back in again just to fuel the economy.

Suppose that one country (say, Finland) chooses to make education the top priority, and turns "teacher" into a highly-respected, well-paid, coveted position. Suppose another country (say, Germany) chooses to create incentives to power the country with solar energy. Suppose another country (say, Switzerland) funds world-class science research institutions, plus a super-efficient rail network, and creates incentives for sustainable agriculture. Suppose another country (do I need to name names here?) chooses to buy a mountain of junk from China.

All of these purchases fuel their respective countries' economies.

But at the end of the day, one of these countries has a highly-educated populace. One of these countries has extensive renewable power (and all of the security that goes with it). One of these countries has a robust and innovative tech industry, not to mention highly efficient transportation and a clean environment. And one of these countries has an enormous landfill and massive debt to China.

That's what I learned from Switzerland.

The US needs to stop seeing spending for the sake of spending as a good thing -- especially going into debt to do it. America's children would be better off if the American people could find the political will to make it a priority to spend wisely for the future.

Rethinking economics 1: the private sector is the only true sector

Blogger Brent (of "A Mormon in the Cheap Seats") wrote an excellent post for faithful Mormons about how social services for the poor in the US are more about levelling the playing field than about creating dependency. While I agree with his main points, one thing that has repeatedly struck me about recent American political discourse is that discussion of government social spending has been framed almost exclusively in terms of helping the poor (and whether they deserve it, etc.). Yes, keeping people from starving on the streets is an important component of functioning modern society -- but it's not the only role played by the public sector.

Let's take a step back and talk about some basic economics. In a modern society, most goods and services are provided either by the private sector (individuals, corporations, private organizations) or the public sector (government, at the local, state, or national level). Each of these two sectors has its advantages and disadvantages (as I discussed here). Any good American can tell you that there are plenty of goods and services that are produced a lot more efficiently by the private sector, motivated by private profits. However, it seems like most Americans are unwilling or unable to accept that there exist critical goods and services that can be provided better by the public sector.

I know this sounds crazy, but hear me out. I think the classic example from economics 101 is the lighthouse. In a costal city, no private individual or corporation profits enough from the lighthouse to pay the entire cost of building it, but the entire city profits from the trade that is made possible by affording ships safe access to the local harbor.

A modern society has a lot of lighthouses (metaphorically speaking). Scientific research is a big one. Technology a cornerstone of modern industry, and scientific research drives technological advances. However, the private sector is horrible at scientific research because the profitable kind is the kind that sets out to prove "my product works and is safe". I assume that I don't have to explain that if you set out to prove a pre-selected conclusion, at best you will get something that superficially resembles science, but without the accuracy.

Another lighthouse is education. A modern society benefits from having an educated populace. However, there are (at least) two big ideological obstacles to having successful public education in the United States. The first is that people seem to believe that public education is some sort of "entitlement" -- which, in Americanspeak, means "Some free-loader getting undeserved money, goods, or services on somebody else's dime." The second is a pervasive American belief that the government can never do anything right.

This belief is so pervasive that many Americans aren't even aware that it is an assumption that they are making. For example, if the government provides some service badly (say, for example, public transportation) many Americans will immediately conclude that the problem is that the government is inherently incompetent -- rather than looking beyond that idea for other causes for the particular problem, or looking for examples of other governments that have provided the same service well (for possible ideas to emulate).

It surprises me how many people take it as an unquestioned article of faith that "we need to cut the government smaller." Regardless of what the problem is, that's always the solution. Now, certainly, there exist countries that absolutely would benefit from cutting their government smaller. But in the United States, after many decades of acting on this belief, maybe more random hacking at it (solely for the purpose of making it smaller) isn't helpful. Why not change to insisting on competence? Insisting that what the government does, it should do it well.

I know that "government regulation" is a dirty word in American English. But I would like to make the radical suggestion that while it's possible for government regulations to be done badly (causing inefficiency), it's also possible for government regulations to be done well -- achieving desirable goals for your society.

I saw an interesting illustration of this idea in a recent article in Bloomberg Businessweek. (Why was I reading Bloomberg Businessweek? Somebody left a copy of it in the train, and it turned out to be surprisingly interesting...) Anyway, the thing that struck me in the article was that in the US, government regulations are/were preventing people who want solar energy from installing it, whereas government regulations in Germany were instrumental in building a huge (largely private) investment in a solar network that is cost-effective, despite Germany not being a particularly sunny country. And the US public utility companies looking out for their short-term profits were a large part of the problem, so privatizing (a popular solution to government inefficiency) would do the opposite of helping. It's time to expect government competence instead.

How did Americans come to believe that the private sector is the only true sector? Here's my guess:

The cold war had a huge impact on American thought. A lot of what it means to be American is tied up in being the opposite of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union crumbled from within, it was almost universally interpreted by Americans as proof that the American way is the right way and the Soviet way was the wrong way. And this leads many people to the conclusion that the public sector is always wrong and the profit-driven private sector is the only true sector of the economy. (A secondary/related factor: too many educated people mistaking Ayn Rand novels for Economics textbooks instead of taking an actual Economics course.)

The problem with that logic is that just because having the entire economy run by a centralized public sector doesn't work, that doesn't imply that having the private sector run the whole economy does work. The culprit may well be a lack of balance. Indeed, the US seems dead set on becoming the example to illustrate that leaning too far in the other direction doesn't work either.

See also part 2: Lessons from Switzerland!!

Yeah, this is about where I'm at with Obama...

This article (which I found through Kuri's very cool good reads series) expresses where I'm at with this year's US election:

I am not a purist. There is no such thing as a perfect political party, or a president who governs in accordance with one's every ethical judgment. But some actions are so ruinous to human rights, so destructive of the Constitution, and so contrary to basic morals that they are disqualifying. Most of you will go that far with me. If two candidates favored a return to slavery, or wanted to stone adulterers, you wouldn't cast your ballot for the one with the better position on health care.

I used to say that at least Americans' belief in the Constitution ensures that they will fight for the rights outlined in the Bill of Rights. The Constitution should protect us from tyrannical government actions such as capturing people and holding them without charging them with a crime (and giving them a fair trial), such as unwarranted surveillance, and such as extra-judicial executions through a secret committee that selects supposed enemy combatants for assassination. But the Constitution can only protect us against these things if we insist that it do so.

I want to like Obama. I read his book and endorsed him because he seemed like a smart guy who could get the job done. And he supposedly was going to put a stop to the unconstitutional actions and human rights abuses of the previous administration. But by being the bi-partisan compromise guy on issues like torture, he creates strong unconstitutional precedents that will now be very difficult to ever roll back.

On the other hand, the main thing I learned from my foray into Naderism (and its GWB consequence) is that -- no matter how bad things are -- they can actually get unimaginably worse. There isn't really a rock bottom to hit where we can reasonably say "we can't go any lower than this" until our species is actually extinct.

So I'm not sure I want to encourage protest votes or abstaining from voting because God only knows what might happen next...

Ah, Switzerland, what will we ever do with you?

I wish I could understand Swiss politics -- it seems like this small-but-disproportionately-important country is always full of surprises!!

A lot of the exmo community lauded Switzerland's recent decision to stop issuing Mormon-missionary visas to foreigners who don't have citizenship in the EU. On the Internet, there was kind of a vibe of "Go Switzerland -- way to stand up to those annoying people knocking on your doors!"

I was conflicted about it though. On the one hand, I think the Swiss are right to classify Mormon missions as being closer to an unpaid internship than to charity work, hence it's reasonable to classify it as employment. On the other hand, I don't know all of the details of the whole restricting-employment-to-Swiss-and-EU-citizens deal, so I don't know whether I agree with it or not. And, most importantly, it's not as though this move were part of a consistent system of making religious organizations play by the same rules as secular non-profits...

However, they're not too bad at international law. If a foreign (former) leader authorizes torture and openly admits to it -- even if his own country shields him from the law and its consequences -- he can't come to Switzerland, at least, without risking arrest. Even though we're talking about a big powerful country that a lot of little countries would be afraid to provoke. Go Switzerland!

Scene at the Bahnhof

Part of the reason I'm so hard on the US is because I actually follow US politics. I read the stuff about the anti-immigrant laws in Arizona or Tea Party's latest antics, and it makes me want to tear my hair out -- it leaves me with the impression that the US must be the most militantly, wilfully ignorant country on the planet.

Then I remember that it's easy to wander around Switzerland with the (mis)impression that everything is candy-canes and lollipops -- as long as you don't speak German well enough to understand what people are saying...

Sometimes bad stuff is hard to miss, though -- for example, the cutesy-cartoon-racist political posters that are often plastered all over town. (I posted about them once before here.) Lately we've been treated to a new version of the "white sheep kicking the black sheep our of Switzerland" poster:



I was waiting at the train station with my son the other day, and the only free bench on the train platform had the white-sheep-black-sheep poster behind it. But my son wanted to sit down, so we did (with me muttering to myself about having to sit by this racist poster).

The interesting thing, though, was that apparently folks hadn't let this message pass without comment. There were three messages written on it in ball-point pen:

Naturally, since I have the wrong skin color, I'm a bad person. And naturally I chose my skin color! (originally: Naturlich habe ich nicht die richtige Hautfarbe, also ich bin eine schlechte Person. Und naturlich habe ich meine Hautfarbe ausgewählt!)

Thanks a lot, SVP! They're so intelligent! (originally: Danke schön zu dem SVP! Sie sind so intelligent!)

I suffer every day because of my skin color... I didn't need a poster like this one to remind me. :( (originally: Je souffre tous les jours à cause de ma coleur de peau... Je n'avais pas besoin d'une telle affiche pour me la rappeler... :()

I don't really have anything to add -- I just found it to be an interesting urban dialog.

The Right Questions: Eric T. Freyfogle's "On Private Property"

Remember how I was complaining about ideologues' lack of new analysis? Specifically, the inability to use data and observation of human society over the past half-century to evaluate and modify beliefs and theories...?

Well, I had a clever idea of my own the other day! Instead of just complaining that I haven't tripped over any new ideas, why not wander over to the bookstore and look for some? And I found a real gem: On Private Property: Finding Common Ground on the Ownership of Land,by Eric T. Freyfogle.

What does private property even mean? What precisely can you expect to do to/with/on your land when your right to property is upheld? If you think those questions have simple, clear, well-understood answers, you're wrong.

On the most basic level, your use/enjoyment of your property affects your neighbors' use/enjoyment of theirs, and vice-versa. Land use disputes can't be simply interpreted as one side upholding the right to property and the other side opposing it. They're more reasonably characterized as a complex negotiation over how the rights and interests different parties interact. And, unfortunately, US court rulings on property disputes often tend to have an "ad hoc" quality -- instead of being based on a general, objective set of principles.

Freyfogle gives a fascinating historical overview of how our definition of property has evolved over the past few centuries. He uses a number of actual property-dispute court cases to illustrate the ambiguity of what is (and has traditionally been) guaranteed by the right to property. And he proposes a framework of ideas about how we can understand better what private property should mean.

Whether or not you agree with his answers, Freyfogle is asking all the right questions. There is nothing more mind-expanding than looking at familiar issues from a new perspective by analyzing the key assumptions. And the question of how land and resources are divided is going to be one of the most critical issues of our time as population pressure continues to rise to the nine billion mark. We're not living on the edge of the (supposedly) unlimited frontier anymore, folks, and it's time to think hard about what that means for our society and the world.

I'd like to recommend this book for online discussion. I would especially like to recommend this book for any of you who call yourselves "Libertarians" or "Objectivists" -- if you're going to hold up the right of property as the most crucial right, then it's in your interest to be sure you know what you're talking about. Unfortunately, unlike The Authoritarians (which we discussed earlier), this book isn't available for free download. It costs $16 from the publisher. Worth the money, IMHO, but I hope they'll eventually pasture it as a free (or very cheap) e-book at some point so it can enjoy wider distribution.

Still segregated after all these years: Jonathan Kozol's "The Shame of the Nation"

Seems like only a half-century ago that the U.S. Supreme Court declared (in Brown v. Board of Education) that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." And where are we today?

Still separate. Still unequal.

It turns out that -- while it's not so hard to eliminate de jure (legally-enforced) segregation -- de facto segregation is a bit harder to root out. Kozol reports that the poorest schools (in large, Northern cities) typically have a student body that is more than 90% black and Hispanic. Schools with a real mixture of races are actually quite rare in and around U.S. urban areas -- they're typically either almost entirely black+hispanic or almost entirely white+other. Even in areas of NYC where the residential neighborhoods themselves are fairly integrated, school choice programs within the public school system create a dynamic where the white kids get sent to one school and the black kids to another.

Kozol describes the harm. Poor schools often have major infrastructure problems such as overcrowded, dilapidated buildings with chemical hazards. It's not rare to lack playgrounds, not to mention basic materials like books and chairs for every student. When one school can spend $17,000 per pupil and another only $9000, it makes a huge difference (multiplied by the number of kids in the school) in terms of the quality of teachers you can attract and the supplies and infrastructure you can buy.

Since race is mixed in with the money situation, it makes the "haves" care that much less about the plight of the "have nots." Probably most of the people reading this post are right now saying to themselves "Of course the children of the rich deserve a better quality of education than the children of the poor because they're paying more in property taxes." When people call America a "land of opportunity," they don't mean it's supposed to have a level playing field. They mean that you can buy opportunity (if you have the money), otherwise you get a curriculum that is designed to produce docile, obedient, low-level employees.

Kozol argues that the de-facto segregation is itself a problem (apart from the money problem) because being able to interact easily and comfortably with people of other races is an important factor for success in a mixed-race country. I agree, as I discussed in my post European dream.

Unfortunately, the problem is incredibly difficult to grapple with. De-facto segregation is not illegal, and apparently is not covered by the Brown decision mentioned above. People who would like to see greater equality can do very little to stop the momentum of the current system. A major overhaul would not merely be expensive -- it would be a political impossibility. In today's America, putting equality and the common good above the individual's right to leave his fellows in the dust (if he can) is almost universally viewed as "communism" and hence evil.

This problem illustrates the difference between civil rights for black people and civil rights for gay people. Black people in the U.S. face major structural inequalities that don't have any simple solutions. The thing that's so infuriating about anti-gay discrimination is that it's just so gratuitous! You could pass a law that doesn't affect the straight majority, and problem is essentially solved. Refusing to grant gay people equal rights is like kicking them in the face just for the sake of kicking them in the face. For black people, it's not nearly so simple. The relevant laws and court cases have been on the books for nearly a half-century or more -- and the inequalities are still there. It's because there's no simple, obvious, fair way to even things out. Ditto for Hispanics and immigrants.

The most encouraging possibilities mentioned in Kozol's book are found in the few schools that really are integrated. Their success demonstrates that it's possible, and may encourage parents to do more to integrate the schools in their own districts.

So what's going to happen in Iran?

Like everybody, I've been following these daily images from Tehran. (Well, like everybody who hasn't discovered Twitter yet.) I wonder what's going to happen.

From what I've read, I understand one of the main problems with the Islamic Republic is that a body of clerics has to approve every action the government makes. This body of clerics is not elected and not accountable to anyone. (Well, not accountable to anyone who exists at least.) So even if the elections were democratic, and even if a reformist candidate were to get elected, there's a limit to what he could accomplish. It's not clear that it's even possible for them to solve their problems working within the system.

I just hope things get better and not worse. I keep thinking of that line from Persepolis when (during the earlier revolution) the mom says, "Well, at least things can't be worse than they were under the Shah..."

The commies and me!

When I was in high school, I started to get the impression we weren't hearing the whole story about communism. It was the '80's, and we heard plenty of stories about people bravely escaping from the evil Soviet empire, and all about how their propaganda paper was named "Pravda" which -- ironically -- means truth! Yet, I wondered what this cold-war stand-off looked like to ordinary people on their side.

It wasn't until grad school, however, that I decided to investigate. Politically, I'd gladly sloughed off religious social conservatism when I stopped believing in Mormonism, but I figured that the jury was still out on Reaganite borrow-and-spend supply-side economics. Then I started listening to Rush Limbaugh and some other right-wing radio shows. It began when my then-husband found them entertaining. I found them entertaining too, at first. But they gradually convinced me that their convictions were based on bile, anger, and especially ignorance and stupidity.

(Yep, it's true! I used to be a regular listener of the Rush Limbaugh show, back in the early days before all the scandals broke about his drug use and about getting out of military service because of a boil on his butt. The experience basically inoculated me for life against having any kind of respect for the Republican Party.)

Since I was anti-impressed by the right, the next obvious stop was to see what the left had to say. I started with Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States -- an excellent book, and a fascinating look at a familiar story from an unfamiliar perspective! I was sold on it immediately. My next stop was to check out the campus Communist club.

I liked the campus Communists at first, and I participated in their club for a few months. Yet in the end they failed to convert me to Leninism. The key problem was the lack of new ideas and new analysis. Each group of ideologues seemed to have a favorite intellectual who has thought up some clever analysis fifty or a hundred years ago, but nobody seemed willing or able to evaluate and modify their theories based on observation of human society over the past half-century. The closest thing to modern analysis was when people would interpret current events in terms of their chosen beliefs, like holy writ.

Here's an example I found particularly frustrating: the fall of the Soviet Union. The right took it as complete vindication and proof that they're right, and my new Communist friends' position was no more nuanced. The Trotskyists took it as proof that Stalin had sold out the revolution, and the Stalinists took it as proof of the age-old claim that the revolution must be global otherwise the evil capitalists will destroy it. In short, nobody learned a damn thing.

For myself, I felt like it should have been possible to gather some data and do some socio-economic research about which things worked, which things didn't, and why. Take, for example, the idea of a centralized command economy, which I was reminded of when reading The Jungle recently:

Since the same kind of match would light everyone's fire, and the same shaped loaf of bread would fill everyone's stomach, it would be perfectly feasible to submit industry to the control of a majority vote. [...] As soon as the birth-agony was over, and the wounds of society had been healed, there would be established a simple system whereby each man was credited with his labor and debited with his purchases; and after that the process of production exchange, and consumption would go on automatically, and without our being conscious of them, any more than a man is conscious of his beating heart.

Okay, that was a clever and intriguing idea when The Jungle was published, back in 1906. But there's something wrong when people are still making this claim ninety years later, after some of the (rather obvious) flaws have become painfully apparent: production of all goods in a society requires far too much specific logistical management to submit every decision to popular referendum, and electing a committee to run not only the legal system but the entire economy means concentrating too much power in too few hands.

On the other hand, it's equally simplistic and stupid to imagine that -- just because the above doesn't work -- that proves that private interests are the most efficient providers of every type of goods and services a society needs. If you open your eyes and look at the evidence around you, you'll see that the private sector and the public sector each have their strengths and their weaknesses. It's not a question of choosing which one is "right" and which one is "wrong" -- it's a question of optimizing your strategy by using the best of both. There may even be other ways we haven't even thought of yet for organizing labor and capital to produce goods and services! With the rate that society and technology are changing, why assume the possibilities from a century ago are the only possibilities available to us today?

In retrospect, of course, I can see that it was unfair of me to expect this level of analysis from the campus Communist club. Clearly, what I was looking for was the Economics Department.

I had a few other, more legitimate problems with the club, however:

First of all, they were always on about the working class and labor unions, but -- as far as I could tell -- they didn't know anyone who was blue-collar and/or in a labor union, and didn't have any interest in meeting any. (I was actually one up on them since I was dating a bus driver, who, in fact, took me to see an actual Communist Party parade in Paris. That was a fascinating cultural experience! Unfortunately, the relationship didn't end very well.)

On top of that, all of their activities were focused on proselytizing and fund-raising (in preparation for "the revolution"). I wanted to do something that was a little closer to reality, so I helped organize an anti-war protest with them. (I talked about this in my Confessions of a former Nader voter posts.) To put it mildly, that demonstration didn't go quite the way I'd hoped. We gathered up all of the different Communist, Anarchist, Quaker, and other radical organizations in the area, and, let's just say, some of them were pretty weird (not the Quakers, BTW).

The worst part was when one person stood up to speak at the rally and gave a speech in support of Saddam Hussein. The second-worst part was visiting another local Communist club and noting that on their literature table they had a book called Rethinking Stalin. I know, there have been other leaders who have "cracked a few eggs to make an omelet" and are remembered as heroes anyway (see: The Bible), and yet I'm still not in favor of "rethinking Stalin." And the third worst part was when someone from one of the smaller radical groups stood up at the rally to denounce the goals of the rally. I met Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and others I couldn't identify, and boy-oh-boy did these guys hate each other worse than they hated any capitalist! If you've seen the "People's Front of Judea" scene from The Life of Brian, you might think it's an over-the-top exaggeration.

It's not.

And so ended my adventures with Communism.

The State of AIDS Today: Elizabeth Pisani's "The Wisdom of Whores"

A.I.D.S. has been with us for a couple of decades now, but how much do we know about it? Its story has unfolded through countless articles across space and time, making it a little hard to follow.

Enter Elizabeth Pisani, an epidemiologist (and excellent story-teller) who's been in the thick of the international fight against AIDS from its earliest days. In The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS, she gives the straight dope on what happened -- where, when, and why -- with a focus on using data and evidence to track how the virus is spread, and on how to use that knowledge effectively to stop it. She has no time for euphemisms. Both liberal hand-wringing about stigmatizing affected groups and conservative/puritanical fear of the realities of sex and drugs can be obstacles to solving the problem.

The central dilemma is whether or not to push the claim that everyone is at risk. Pisani argues (with some impressive evidence to back her up) that HIV doesn't spread efficiently enough to stray very far from the high-risk groups: sex workers, men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and people in southern and eastern Africa. The problem is that when you admit that AIDS won't kill us all, it's harder to drum up the sympathy (hence funds) necessary to effectively fight it, but when you exaggerate the proportion of so-judged "innocent" victims, you wind up with funds that have strings attached -- strings which tie your hands away from doing the very things that have been shown to prevent the spread of HIV: getting clean needles to drug users (including in prison), and getting sex workers and Africans to use condoms.

"He even mentioned non-believers in his speech..."

That was the first thing my husband reported to me when I arrived home yesterday.

As excited as I am about finally having Obama as president, I wasn't quite on the bandwagon of celebrating the inauguration. All that controversy over Rick Warren (and whether we should be having a prayer at all) kind of put me off the whole thing. Basically it's because I don't want to be the wet blanket who complains about a symbolic gesture when more important things are at stake, yet, at the same time, I didn't feel like watching the piety show. We have to defer to the in-group/loyalty value (as we were discussing on MSP) -- and to get any recognition at all for the out-group, it's important to reassure the in-group (Christians) that this isn't about displacing them as the true Americans. Calling it a necessary evil is perhaps a bit strong -- it's a necessary annoyance. So I figured I'd just read the Humanist Symposium Carnival version, and leave it at that.

Then I started getting excited, reading about it in the Swiss paper on my way home from work:



That makes two days in a row that Obama has been the cover story (not to mention that he was in the news all the time during the election season). As far as I can make out from my (extremely rudimentary, but improving) German, for the most part the Swiss like Obama, and they're very impressed that the U.S.A. has elected its first black president.

It may serve as something of a positive example. Here's the even-more-familiar image that I see staring at me around practically every corner wherever I go:


I attempted to photograph this thing myself, but this other person was a far more skilled photographer

I know, I know, I chose to move here where I'll be a "foreign guest worker" until retirement, dependent on the good will of my hosts. I don't really have a cause to complain since I knew what I was getting into. Still, it puts those people who were whining about feeling harassed by a few atheist ads on buses into perspective as the value of inclusiveness/expansiveness chips away at the value of in-group loyalty/privilege.

Now, probably some of you are probably itching to point out that the Swiss ad's crypto-symbolism is about the danger of dark people (like Barack Obama), not about white people like me and my husband. But the thing is I suspect that people who would be swayed by this ad probably have some opinions about the various nationalities of foreign white people as well. And apparently it's a mainstream position to believe that those rotten (dark?) foreigners are out to, well, peck Switzerland to death.

*sigh*

Anyway, back to President Obama's message of hope, encouraging us all to take on the challenges that we're facing. I watched it, and I thought it was fantastic! He said so many things that absolutely needed to be said. Apparently, a CNN commentator complained that it didn't have a strong phrase like "we have nothing to fear but fear itself" -- and it's true that Obama's key points were couched in long sentences or phrased as negatives. But I think Obama did it on purpose so that people would listen to the whole speech instead of reducing it to a catch phrase. He's already got "Yes, we can!" -- he doesn't need another one. I want to see the Christians and other believers on board for these noble goals, so I hesitate to begrudge them a prayer if it's important to them.

And, of course I appreciated that he explicitly included non-believers as Americans. Actually, it was clever that he threw in the thing about other languages right afterwards -- all the people who might have been saying "What??? I hope he's not talking about Spanish..." were too busy being distracted by "OMG!!! He said non-believers!" ;^)

Here's to inclusivity!!!