Primate Brow Flash

Seems like a corny song until, after about one minute, they forget all about potato salad and just focus on freaking me out.

Kate posts, How we get to talk without interruption (Or IM Part II)

Frank, who was having an angry day before I bit his head off over some minor thing, told Kate this evening that he wanted her to get a divorce.

I have been a rage-a-holic with him recently. I come out of nowhere with yelling and lay waste to his stability. He is left shaken and, I’m afraid, humiliated. My temper surprises me most of the time, too, so I am often yelling before I even know what is going on.

I guess the first thing to get over is my identity as a non-asshole. The second thing, as Kate suggested, is to tell the kids, mainly Frank, that I am seeking to change this behavior. Kate is wise in these matters.

Come on, though. He’s drawing a maze on the back of his home work instead of doing his homework and after I tell him once to knock it off, I see he is doing it again. So I go over to put my head near his to calmly tell him to leave the maze for after he’s done. Then I notice that all his stuff is floating on a thin film of water that has mysteriously covered the entire table. So I start loudly pointing out this fact.

I have to remember that he is 10X more on the ball as a first grader than I ever was as a third grader. I have to remember this while picking up all the dripping Hausaufgaben and I still have to remember it when he tells me I missed a spot after I dry off the table.

“Could you stay in bed all day and think?” (from Prompt Generator)

I’ve never done it, but I believe I could. In high school, I honed a skill of disappearing into invented worlds with amazing coastlines and idiosyncratic physics. It could be that the desolate environment of my high school induced a kind of artificial Asperger’s.

The worlds include the artificial surface world I invented in Geometry class after the teacher asked us to imagine an endless plane with x and y zooming off to infinity. This world was richly carpeted and tiled, had forests of sofas and basketball oceans. The structures I came up with were repeated in fractals across endless the endless plane. Humans were plucked from this earth and strewn across the vast landscape….

I spent 3 or 4 hours a day in the pool during high school. I can’t think of another sport that requires less attention than swimming. You can’t talk to anyone. You can’t trip and fall down. You don’t have to remember any plays or worry about where a ball is. You just have to remember not to inhale under water and avoid cracking your skull on the side of the pool. After a few thousand laps, I had almost mastered these two skills. So, the rest of my time was devoted to turning my brain into an entertainment console, a world creation algorithm.

These worlds I invented have embedded themselves and I can get back to them fairly easily even today. All the wiring is still there. I invariably come to some conundrum in the world, like how do all the women equitably share the males they trap and how do they have babies without pain and how do we grow food without dirt and what happens to human feces if there are no insects and I have to spend a lot of time thinking my way around these problems.

This idea of staying in bed all day is so antithetical to our values that I’m feeling leery of admitting how well I could do this. Non-productive time is really frowned upon unless, of course, we are consuming something while being non-productive.

NPR : Alan Greenspan interviewed by Terry Gross. It is worth a listen.

He has this to say about entitlements:

The real problem is not now, it is our utter lack of attention or failure to even want to confront the very substantial problems for financing Medicare especially in the years ahead and I must regrettably say that is true both for Republicans and Democrats. I’m listening to the debates amongst those who are seeking the presidency and nobody is recognizing what every technician has been telling all of the politicians that this issue has got to be addressed. If we don’t its going to create very serious fiscal problems for the country. It’s not the current data that is so critical. It is, basically, the failure to address the future.

He goes on to state that there is no way to solve the fiscal problems only by raising taxes and that services will have to be cut and if we are going to do that it is important that we communicate that fact immediately to the retirees making plans based on expected support from Medicare. He predicts that upper income groups will find themselves paying 100% of their medical costs.

We drove to Gooseberry Falls State Park for a camping trip to celebrate our friend Michael’s birthday. We arrived after dark. Maureen grew increasingly anxious as we turned onto smaller and darker roads in search of the campsite. A car signaled us to stop by flashing its lights and the driver approached our window out of the darkness. The driver stuck his pirate head and fake hook in our car and addressed us in pirate talk because this was Michael and it was international talk like a pirate day. I could hear Maureen in the back start to whimper. Whatever her imagination invented to inhabit the end of this dark road, I’m sure it wasn’t this manic pirate. Michael got out of character as soon as he realized Maureen was scared. After the initial shock, Maureen couldn’t get enough of the pirate. She kept asking where the pirate was and if he was sleeping, etc.

We took a wonderful hike the next morning around the lower falls and along the shore of Lake Superior. At the end of the hike, I slept through a geology film in the cozy dark theater of the visitor’s center.

It rained the whole time. As soon as we packed up our tent to leave on Friday afternoon, the sun came out and the radio predicted beautiful weather for the weekend. I secretly prefer camping in the rain and sitting under a tarp all day with a beer in my hand. Kate, on the other hand, did not enjoy being wet even though I carefully dried her bare feet with my shirt whenever she got in and out of the tent in the middle of the night.

I re-learned a number of things about cotton on this trip. The kids had one pair of wool socks between them. Everything else was cotton. When we do this again, there will need to be a significant retooling of wardrobes.

I am printing and saving this article so that I can use it to explain our times to future generations. It has everything. Corporate-speak, inability to look past the end of your own nose, class insecurity and subdivisions in the Nevada desert.

Reading the end of Assassin’s Gate, I found the best phrase ever: “mental self-sufficiency”
This explains everything. You’ve decided what is true and have stopped receiving inputs because you have everything you need inside your head. It is easy from there to project what you need to see as an overlay on the world. Packer makes a good point that Iraq is the perfect canvas on which to project our beliefs.

Mental Self-sufficiency is our political culture at this time. It is more important to defend what you know against the other side than to accept new inputs.

From the prewar period through the invasion into the occupation and insurgency, an ascendant, triumphalist right and a weakened querulous left took more interest and pleasure in the other’s defeats than in the condition of Iraq or Iraqis. in this country, Iraq was almost always about winning the argument.

The end of the book speeds up from there, into a screed against our political culture, against the Bush administration and against pundits of the right and left. It is kind of jarring after all the chapters filled with personal stories and illuminating interviews, but needed, I guess. Needed because for all we’ve been through, there is no indication that we’ve learned from the mistakes in Iraq. That is the scariest part of this whole thing for me, our political system’s inability to accept new information and adapt to it.

We got a windfall from a friend. His former religion had a requirement of storing food for the Coming Global Shitstorm or any personal shitstorms that might come in the meantime. Free of this regulation, he unloaded it. He gave me 12 cases of carefully canned food. We’ve been eating it because it is getting past the expiration date. I have a feeling this is a faux pas in Mormon circles. Probably eating your stash is something you never admit to.

It is high quality food and well preserved. The soup mix alone could feed us for the winter.

Anyway, here is a disturbing montage of me enjoying this food. I had to add some hot sauce, but otherwise it was quite edible.

Frank: “Did he really shoot a man just to watch him die?”

The Assassin’s Gate features a Marine who researched insurgencies and wrote a book called The Sling and the Stone. Google books offers a preview of it. Google books is challenging Amazon as the first stop for book information and excerpts. The interface for previewing a book is so much easier to use than Amazon.

He talks mostly about the definition and evolution of “fourth generation warfare” (4GW). Most important quote to ponder:

… pro-administration commentators maintained that the resistance was surprising and was a new type of problem.

As debilitating and regular as these attacks have been, this kind of warfare is not “new” or “surprising” but has been developing around the world for the last seven decades.

Aha. Assassin’s Gate mentions how touchy the administration and CPA people were about words like “guerrilla” and “insurgency” they just couldn’t face that reality and couldn’t admit that it might have been predicted or at least prepared for, or at the very least, recognized when it began.

I like what I can preview of The Sling and The Stone. For one thing, it effectively does away with this attitude we have of “hey! guerrillas are not fair. We beat you and you are still fighting. Also, no fair hiding. Come out where you can feel our withering firepower like the brave 3GW enemies in Halo”

The Sling and The Stone credits Mao with the invention of fourth generation warfare that features soldiers that can melt back into the population and choose when and where to engage the enemy, use the media and other networks to fight.

The first practitioner to both write about and successfully execute a concept of 4GW, Mao Tse Tung, was 19 in 1912…

Hey! Ever hear of Michael Collins? He was doing this before anybody. I think I’m going to write to this Hammes fellow and see if he can take time out of being a kick-ass military historian and answer.

Michael Yon’s postings about Iraq are some of the best out there. He doesn’t write to please anyone, from people who feed off the spectacularly bad news about the war to “politically compromised” generals who want better control of public perception. His style of picture-paragraph-picture seems to bring the action closer than anything else I’ve come across. He doesn’t shy away from cheering on the soldiers he is embedded with.

Soon we met up with a group of 1920s men; I counted 19. They were outfitted with AKs and ammo pouches. Most did not want their photos taken, but this man wanted everyone to see, and he threw his arm around one of our soldiers and pointed to my camera. Our guys do not trust the 1920s, but the relationship is working when it comes to killing al Qaeda and reconstruction in Baqubah. Al Qaeda only knows how to kill and intimidate. 1920s are concerned about water projects and so forth, and they help with more than fighting. Their goals include returning Baqubah back into civilization.

Michael Yon : Online Magazine » Blog Archive » Ghosts of Anbar, Part IV of IV

I’m reading George Packer’s Assassin’s Gate. I’ve seen a few of his articles in the New Yorker and I’ve been reading his blog. Reading his book makes me feel like I’m hanging out with him. He writes detailed descriptions of visiting the homes of all kinds of Iraqis, accompanying U.S. soldiers sorting out disputes at gas stations, navigating the maze of power in the green zone, chilling with his bodyguards in the middle of the night when he was too nervous to sleep.

Several parts of the book remind me of Shirer’s Berlin Diary that so vividly described darkness settling over a country. Packer describes the black banners of radical Shiism begin to cover Baghdad. He offers glimpses of pre-Baathist Baghdad: A cosmopolitan city of Christians, Jews and Muslims once existed there, but only people older than 50 remember that. Now people with Jewish ancestry live in fear. Now it is all about if you are Shiite or Sunni. Suddenly that matters more than anything.

The book also offers a glance into the decision to go to war. This excellent excerpt sums it up:

In fact, the advocates of war - many of them - vaguely resembled vanguardists of earlier struggles. Daniel Cohn Bendit, who was known as Dany the Red in May 1968 when he was a youthful leader of the student revolution in Paris and has since become a member of the European parliament, debated Richard Perle a few weeks before the invasion. Dany the Red told the Prince of Darkness, “Your government has been behaving like the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. You want to change the whole world!” It’s possible to imagine that Perle enjoyed the comparison. An apocalyptic cast of mind, and the desire of a small group in possession of a big idea to push history in a dramatically new direction, belongs exclusively to neither the left nor the right. Often, it’s a characteristic of individuals who migrate from one flock to the other without pausing to graze on tasteless facts under the dull sky of moderation.

We, our entire country, fell under the sway of some hothead do-gooders and we are paying the price.

The endless cycle of mistakes and the administration’s reactions amount to shocking incompetence. Anyone paying attention has a sense of this, but reading the book and being exposed to some of the details made me sick in the deepest part of my guts. This visceral repulsion came from repeated willingness of officials to gloss over inconvenient realities or try to pass them off as someone else’s problem. Both in Washington and in the Green Zone, perception and image mattered more than reality. People were pushed aside and fired for bringing up inconvenient facts.

The best line of the book is:

“America seemed stuck in an eternal present”

Doesn’t that just describe all our problems?

One thing he doesn’t address is this argument that “oh, it’s the war critics’ fault for questioning everything and making the administration always worry about perception of the public.” Maybe a piece about having to manage public perception comes later in the book, but he keeps accusing the administration of making made way too many decisions based on what they thought the public would think and at the same time complaining that questioning of policy wasn’t vigorous enough. I am looking for an answer to the question, “well, don’t we want them to care what we think?”

Also, I’d like more discussion of how money flowed in Iraq. On one page he describes money being handed out to U.S. soldiers to be used in minor projects. For example, hiring Iraqis to unblock sewers. He cites complaints about this money not being distributed fast enough and U.S. captains not having cash to do everything they wanted to and missing opportunities. Then, on the next page, he cites $9 Billion disappearing under Bremer’s administration. Which do we want, free and fast dispersal of money or careful accounting? Can we have both? Did we have either? I would like to see a discussion of the money issue and I suppose this is for another book somewhere.

Finally, Packer always mentions what books the people he worked with and interviewed were reading. The book is full of “further reading” and so is his weblog.
Just a few of the books he cites:

-Strange Defeat by Marc Bloch
-the works of Leo Strauss
-Cruelty and Silence by Kanan Makiya

McGuire Bros Ditch Scooters - Loose weight

Originally uploaded by zummersweet

It took me a second to clue into the title of Matt’s photo. - I spent many hours pondering the pictures in the 1976 Guinness Book of World Records and I should have picked up on it right away. We did the St. Paul Classic Bike Ride yesterday. It was a magnificent day and Frank and Ted were lively companions. The urge to race swept Frank away on the home stretch down Summit avenue and I heard him talking smack to other bikers while we were stopped at red lights. Matt kept passing us with Ted in his trailer and that made for a madcap dash to the finish line.

Also, this guy scared Ted and Frank.

I found a back way to Menards through factory parking lots and alongside old railroad tracks. I had to pick up some paint and carried it home in my bike trailer. It probably took about the same amount of time as if I drove and it was much easier to navigate the parking lot. I like the way cars magically give me lots of space when I’m pulling a bike trailer. They can’t tell if I’ve got some kids in there or not. I kind of feel like I’m running through a parking lot holding a gun to a kid’s head screaming, “if anyone gets too close, the kid gets it!”

Redline Monocog 29er .
This bike promotes joy. It makes me do things I don’t normally do, such as going airborne, a state I usually avoid on a bicycle. The other evening, in utter darkness, I plunged down an unfamiliar trail alongside some railroad tracks near Snelling Avenue. When I got home I found 4 types of insects and 2 types of arachnids on my person, as well as lots of vegetable matter wedged into my sandals.

Hills mean standing up and tugging on the handlebars so that the cartilage between my ribs does all the work, in much the same way as the chitinous material between a dragonfly’s wings vibrates, causing the wings to twitch and the insect to fly. Using the cartilage between my ribs in this fashion causes some really interesting pain.

The idea of the 29 inch wheels is they present a larger angle to obstacles, causing less rolling resistance. The bike is super light and simple and offers great control. Not so fun for long road rides, of course. Redline is or was a motorcycle parts company that got into the BMX business and became THE BMX bike to have. My bike is basically a dirt bike for adults.