Month: November 2013

We had our second Thanksgiving tonight. This one was at home. Then we laughed at the University of Alabama Crimson Tide. That more than made up for the pain of Michigan’s loss to Ohio State. Ha ha ha.

How is your holiday weekend going?

Charities.

Most mean well.  All donors  mean well.  It’s unfortunate that like retail stores eager for “Black Friday” – when their operations move from loss to profit in the year – charities are also dependent on the holiday season to boost their collections.  Also more than enough people offer to volunteer to serve a Thanksgiving meal to the hungry.  As if they aren’t hungry the other 364 days in a year.  Consider year round giving to whatever charities you support.

My focus here is on those Christmas centered charitable programs.  

One with the very best intentions that gets it wrong is Toys for Tots.  Not wrong in the collection of massive amounts of toys but in delivering those toys.  The children show up before Christmas and are handed a gift that they unwrap on the spot.  For the poorest of children, that leaves them with nothing to open on Christmas.  For the not quite as poor, it’s just an additional toy.  

Ethically, also find it problematical that Toys for Tots is a United States Marine Corps Reserve program.   Is it such a good idea to have the poor children at a young age associate getting a toy with  the military?  However, the major alternatives aren’t unproblematic – there’s the Jaycees and there’s The Salvation Army.  Capitalism or Christianity.  Oh well, it is Christmas after all.  

Whatever the Jaycees do, it appears to be extremely localized.  Some limited to accepting “letters to Santa” and writing a response.  Some go a step further and collect and delivers toys.

For well-branded and organized Christmas giving that is also localized, the Salvation Army does an excellent job.  (It’s Back To School Assistance programs are also excellent.  If you want to see happy children, be a “Shopping Buddy.”)  If you have some spare cash and can’t be bothered with much of the Christmas frenzy, nothing too much wrong with dropping some cash in one of those red buckets if one can consider good deeds as on a higher plane than very bad words.

A program that does toys for children better than Toys for Tots is the Salvation Army’s Angel Tree..  The toy selected is, or close to, what the child has asked for, and it’s delivered to be opened on Christmas morning.  The child doesn’t have to publicly appear and be identified as poor.  The Army works with other social service agencies to identify those in real need.

For the more ambitious, there’s the Adopt a Family program.

There’s one slight deficit in these programs – not for the beneficiary but some donors.  Before getting to that allow me to describe an adopt-a-family for Christmas effort with the very best intentions that got it wrong.  

A women living in an upscale retirement community (what I half-jokingly refer to the more bucks than brains geezers) spearheaded this a few years ago.  She solicited one gift for each member of the destitute family from her neighbors.  That’s not one gift for each of those in the sponsored family, but one gift for each from each donor.  She also let it be known that she was donating two gifts for each family member, not so subtly raising the ante for her neighbors.  The neighbors didn’t balk.  They ended up with half a truckload of gifts for one family.  

The donor neighbors were never entirely clear how this family came to the attention of the organizer.  (It wasn’t through the Salvation Army.)  Nor exactly how destitute they were.  They were living in temporary housing at the time.  It was an overwhelming amount of stuff for one family.  Stuff that would have to be carted to their next house.  One woman that participated in the gift delivery wasn’t convinced that the family was even poor.  The donors each probably spent between $75 and $300 and was easily affordable for all of them.  But the whole effort left a sour taste for most of the dozen or so donors.

What the donors got that the Salvation Army doesn’t offer is the opportunity to meet the family.  (That’s also what many of the Toys for Tots volunteers get.)  What they lost was the goodwill that could have turned a modest collective effort into an annual neighborhood tradition.

One formal adopt-a-family story.  

When I floated the idea in the office I was working in, all but one of my co-workers walked (ran?) away from me.  One of the “Ts” was eager to help and welcomed the opportunity to buy a toy for a poor child.  She contacted the Salvation Army that supplied a list of families remaining in need for “adoption.”  As most of the cost would fall on me, “T” agreed that we would only consider the small families.  We eliminated from our consideration those requesting expensive gifts.  (Today’s version of i-pads and i-phones.)  The most modest of all families had our hearts.  The little girl wanted a doll and the boy a truck.  The mother some perfume and the father a shirt.  I could do that with or without “T’s” help.

“T” did the shopping.  I only added some some nice soaps to the list of what the mother had asked for, a package of Christmas cookies, and a small grocery store gift card.  “T” stretched our dollars to get just a bit more for the children.  We would wrap the gifts later in the office conference room.  One by one our co-workers checked out what we were doing.  A couple of the guys said, “Here’s ten bucks to make that gift card larger.”  One woman said, “I was thinking that a new wallet would be nice for the mother.”  Encouraged by “T” and my positive response, she went and bought one.  (Please understand that this was the first time this mid-fifty year old woman had ever donated to anything.)  

The next day, the office tightwad, showed up with a ceramic angel she’d made that she wanted to give the little girl.  Then added, “I was thinking that the father could use a new belt.”  That bowled me over.  Another guy handed us some money saying, “Get the kids a bit more.”  The other “T” helped wrap.  One of the other guys offered to deliver the “pack” to the Salvation Army.  Everybody in the office ended up contributing in some way and only in a way that they were comfortable doing.  Collectivism has a way of making we mortals just a bit better for a moment.

Still, we would have liked to have met the family.  Not for any thank yous from them.  Not to be present when they opened the gifts.  Nor even to be identified to them as the donors.  Just something more than our own imagination of “our family” that also preserved the dignity of the family.

Something more like what may be but a once in a lifetime experience: A Magical Christmas

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been on a roll lately. It’s a shame that Alec Baldwin lost his show on MSNBC because he’s actually a gifted interviewer. The program he did on 2001: A Space Odyssey was one of the coolest things I saw on television this year. But Baldwin isn’t the victim of gay rights “fundamentalists.” He’s responsible for his fate. It’s not appropriate to use gay slurs against anyone who annoys you, and you can’t expect advertisers to tolerate it. I don’t really care about what Baldwin secretly believes or how you want to define the word “bigot.” Mr. Coates’ important contribution to this debate is that he has the ability to convey what it is like to be part of a group (e.g., blacks, Latinos, women, gays) that doesn’t have the luxury of globally dismissing people who hold at least partially ill-feelings towards them.

The ability to “globally” label anyone is a privilege that people who live with a boot on their neck don’t really enjoy. We see people as complicated, because we must, because your tormentor one moment might be your liberator the next. This is not theoretical. In 1863, General James Longstreet led an Army that kidnapped free black people and sold them into slavery. Ten years later, Longstreet was leading black soldiers in a courageous, if doomed, campaign against white terrorists in Louisiana.

And if we are honest with ourselves, as the president would say, we know this isn’t theoretical, because we know ourselves.

He also reminds us, again, of the uncomfortable truth that throughout our country’s history a lot of black boys and girls had fathers who were white supremacists, which is somehow similar to how a gay boy or girl must suffer when their parents are anti-gay.

If you are gay your father or mother could be a “homophobic bigot,” but you might well love him all the same. For a significant period of American history it was common for black people to have fathers who were white supremacists. Some of us hated our fathers. But for many of us, the feeling was somehow more complicated.

Mr. Coates brings a perspective that has been lacking in our political discourse. He’s risen about his West Baltimore roots without ever forgetting where he came from. He can look back with regret on some of the attitudes he was born into without distancing himself from that culture or failing to represent it fairly and honestly.

When he calls Alex Baldwin on his bad behavior, he brings a certain credibility. Coates has unlearned a lot of things, which means he knows that Baldwin doesn’t deserve a pass.

Whatever you think of Edward Snowden’s behavior, his decision to steal and leak troves of information about the activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) has already led private industry to massively ramp up their efforts to foil governmental and criminal snooping on their networks because real damage has been done to their reputations.

The tech industry’s response to revelations about NSA surveillance has grown far more pointed in recent weeks as it has become clear that the government was gathering information not only through court-approved channels in the United States — overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — but also through the massive data links overseas, where the NSA needs authority only from the president. That form of collection has been done surreptitiously by gaining access to fiber-optic connections on foreign soil.

[Brad] Smith, the Microsoft general counsel, hinted at the extent of the company’s growing encryption effort at a shareholders meeting last week. “We’re focused on engineering improvements that will further strengthen security,” he said, “including strengthening security against snooping by governments.”

They are also applying pressure on Congress to rein in the NSA.

Microsoft, Google and Yahoo also have joined other major tech firms, including Apple, Facebook and AOL, in calling for limits to the NSA’s surveillance powers. Most major U.S. tech companies are struggling to cope with a global backlash over U.S. snooping into Internet services.

As a result, pressure is building on Speaker Boehner to allow a vote on the USA Freedom Act, which has growing bipartisan support. The administration has already announced a change of leadership at the NSA and is debating splitting the leadership of the the NSA and the recently established U.S. Cyber Command.

At a White House meeting of senior national security officials last week, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said he was in favor of ending the current policy of having one official in charge of both the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, said the individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Also, officials appear inclined to install a civilian as director of the NSA for the first time in the agency’s 61-year history.

Ideally, Congress would hold hearings aimed at getting to the truth about the breadth and effectiveness of the NSA’s programs, and use what they learn to craft sensible reforms, but I fear any such effort would become a partisan brawl, with Republicans running amok and Democrats circling the wagons in response.

Real reform is rarely possible without a degree of outrage from the American public, but even the exploitation of the porn habits of Muslim “radicalizers” has so far done little to raise the ire of most Americans. This particular story is rather bizarre. If some fiery imam likes to view pornography in between crafting jihadist incitements against the West, that information could indeed be used to discredit them among their followers. But we could just say that they like kiddie porn or sex with animals or pork sausage biscuits or anything else we might think up. The truth of the allegations is only preferable to lies if we can demonstrate their truth. And the NSA isn’t about to demonstrate to the world how they discovered the porn habits of the “radicalizers.” If they aren’t going to “show their work” then the whole process is pointless.

The truth is, however, that knowing about the personal sexual habits of our adversaries is useful for blackmailing them and recruiting them to work for our side. The same is true about their financial habits. A crude version of this type of spy craft was used in this season of Showtime’s Homeland, where a senior Iranian spy was recruited as a U.S. agent after the CIA discovered that he had stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from his own government.

The concern is that the government will use the same tactics to quiet domestic critics. Another concern is that the level of intrusiveness the NSA is pursuing is causing so much harm to our relationships with our allies that it is doing the opposite of keeping us safe. The desire for Total Information Awareness is understandable, but tapping the phones of foreign leaders’ of friendly countries isn’t likely to increase cooperation and intelligence sharing.

I know policy-makers want information when they ask for it and don’t want to be told that getting the information they seek is more trouble than it’s worth, but that really is the case sometimes. It would be easier for the NSA to say ‘no’ to some requests if Congress told them that they had to say ‘no.’

In any case, because the NSA couldn’t keep what they were doing secret, they lost the right to keep on doing it. These revelations harmed the tech industry that the NSA was obligated to protect. So, now the tech industry is at war with them on both the security and the legislative fronts.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the  Grand Canyon. The photo that I will be using is seen directly below. I will be using my usual acrylics on a 12×12 gallery-wrapped canvas.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

 

Since that time, I have continued to work on the painting.

A look at this week’s changes my cause one to think that I haven’t spent much time with the canvas.  In fact, there have been 7 different versions of the buttes to the rear since last time.  I just couldn’t get the colors right.  Finally, version number 7 came out right.  The body color looks like a paler version of that seen in the main buttes.  The blue shadows also seem about right.  In the process of revision, there is another happy result.  The balance of light to shadow is now more to my liking.  As to other changes, the foreground butte to the extreme right has received a paint lighter in color and with a visual texture.

The current state of the painting is seen directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week.  See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

Apparently.  Conservative voices counseling for meaning and simplicity might as well pack it in.  Stuff won the War on Christmas.  No such thing as too much stuff for humans.  The more stuff we have the more we want.  If you resist, you’ll get weeks of non-stop news about people fighting for more stuff.  Gray Thursday.  Black Friday.  It’s coming folks.  The Christmas décor that went up in the stores weeks ago was the cue.  Ready, Set, Go Shopping.

(GWB had his pulse on Americans.  We’re not people but consumers.  Go Shopping!  It’s the multipurpose response to happiness, sadness, shock, and awe.)

Nostalgia for a time when Christmas had meaning is mostly a fiction.  There was only less stuff and time needing to be filled in with something other than stuff.  However, as quaint as it was, there was something lovely about children without stuff waking up one day a year to open a gaily wrapped box with a toy inside.  Some without were even thrilled with a package containing a winter coat, new mittens, or socks.  (Deadspin suggests that such children may now be fictional.  Seen only in my faulty recollection of The Homecoming: A Christmas Story.  Nope not there either.)

Sarah Palin not withstanding, the American consumer finds plenty of meaning in Christmas.  “Madison Avenue” tells them so.  And if that’s not enough for some, churches and charities do their own Christmas pickpocketing.  The “Bah, humbug” folks engage in anti-meaning.  Different strokes.

Yet, it’s difficult not to participate in many Christmas themed gifting activities that promise “meaning.”  But mostly fail to deliver.  What follows are nothing more than my own personal likes and dislikes.

The Office or Workplace.

The bad:

1. Draw a name.  Buy a gift.  (Secret Santa is a more elaborate version.)  May be a conventional holiday tradition I detest most.  Ditto for holiday cards passed out to co-workers.
2. Holiday lunch at a restaurant.  There are two forms of this.  “Pink collar” –  employer allows an extra hour for lunch and employees can pay for and share a meal and drinks with co-workers. “White collar” – employer picks up the tab.  Both are problematical, but for mostly for different reasons.  
3. Pass the hat to buy the boss a gift.  Less common than #1 or #2.  Should be banned.

The pleasant:

1. Christmas Eve (or last work day before Christmas) sharing of snacks and/or treats.  Never seen a bad one of these.  If it includes a potluck breakfast or lunch with spouses and children invited (I enjoyed those very much), don’t muck it up with gifts for the children.
2. Boss and professional staff gifting to assistants.  Applies only when there is significant income disparity and the ratio of assistants to bosses isn’t high.  Most importantly the gift regardless of size is best when it demonstrates thoughtfulness towards the recipient.        

The good are improvements to or variations of the bad and pleasant.  Mostly discovered serendipitously.  
The only holiday lunch that I and most of my co-workers (the two “Ts” excluded) truly enjoyed was the one that almost didn’t happen.  (The next year it was back to the stiff proceeding at a costly restaurant where the two “Ts” could order the most expensive thing on the menu and fou-fou drinks.)   My job description didn’t include “in the absence of a manager, thou shall arrange the Christmas luncheon” in addition to keeping the whole damn boat afloat.  

There was probably much whispering among the staff  as to whether or not I had this covered.  When it became totally obvious that I didn’t, one of them spoke up.  After all the better restaurants had been booked.  Fortunately, a distant memory from childhood floated up – an association between Christmas festivity and a Chinese restaurant.  (No, I’m not Jewish that would have made it too easy.)  A nearby, nice Chinese restaurant, again fortuitously, could accommodate us.  The dishes we ordered were served in several rounds.  Placed on the lazy-susans at the center of the table..  We shared.  Joked.  Laughed.  And ate. The fun we were having was infectious.  A couple of glum looking, obviously office, groups that arrived after us cheered up.  The waiters became friendlier.  Even one of the “Ts” brightened up and the other “T” made an effort to do so.  Highly recommend a Chinese restaurant for an office Christmas lunch.

Or have it in March.  Or send the support staff off to lunch on their own in the spring with the boss’ credit card.  (The two “Ts” particularly liked that one.)

About those gifts for support staff.  This is really easy for anyone like the two “Ts.”  Both liked to shop and neither had much mad money.  Gift cards are perfect if the card is for where they want to shop.  Hit a home run first time out by getting one “T” a Macy’s card and the other “T” a Kohls’ card.  Not sure if their faces lit up more when they received their gifts or when they shared what they bought for themselves.  The cards were more like a burden to the other two who didn’t much like shopping.  Both needed something more personalized.  With a bit of listening later, neither was difficult to please.  Other than being as generous and thoughtful as possible there are no rules for this.

If you do anything at all, do try to get it more right than wrong.

Charities – tomorrow.

So, basically, the most interesting thing on the intertubes is the spat between Max Blumenthal and Eric Alterman. That doesn’t mean that the spat is all that interesting, unless you like debating the credentials and identities of Talmudic scholars, but it’s a slow news environment. No word yet on whether or not Jeffrey Goldberg has thrown either of them out of the tent.

.

US House approves $5,000 fee for official drilling protests, less federal authority over fracking

(RT) – The US House passed two bills that would demand a $5,000 filing fee for any individual that wanted to hold an official protest of a drilling project, and that would give the feds less authority nationwide over hydraulic fracking rules.

HR 1965, the Federal Lands Jobs and Energy Security Act, imposes a $5,000 fee for anyone wishing to file for an official protest of a proposed drilling project. An amendment to the bill offered by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) that would have clarified the fee to make sure it was not in violation of First Amendment rights was defeated.

In addition, the bill would allow for automatic approval of onshore drilling permits should the US Department of Interior (DOI) take over 60 days to act on an application. DOI would also be required to begin commercial leasing for development of oil shale – not to be confused with “shale oil” – which is rock that must be heated to about 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit to yield crude oil.

The House passed the measure, sponsored by Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO), by a vote of 228 to 192, with seven Democrats supporting it and only one Republican in opposition.

HR 2728, the Protecting States’ Rights to Promote American Energy Security Act

The other bill – HR 2728, the Protecting States’ Rights to Promote American Energy Security Act – would put more authority of hydraulic fracking in the hands of states that already have rules on the practice. Unless a state has yet to set guidelines on fracking, DOI would have no authority over whether companies disclose what chemicals they use in fracking fluid, whether water from fracked wells is polluted or whether anyone can request public hearings regarding fracking permit applications.

The bill passed the House by a vote of 235 to 187, as 12 Democrats supported it and only two Republicans did not.

Hydraulic fracking is the highly-controversial process of injecting water, sand and various chemicals into layers of rock in hopes of releasing oil and gas deep underground. The practice is opposed worldwide, as shown by global protests against fracking in October, for its damning environmental impacts.  

Supporters say it brings jobs and opportunities for energy independence, though detractors have pointed to exaggerated employment claims. Multiple reports have found any jobs created by fracking usually go to established, already-employed oil industry workers from places like Texas rather than local citizens.

Meanwhile, more money is being thrown at the US political class to support fracking, representing the rising popularity of it among energy companies. Calculations released by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics Washington (CREW) show fracking industry contributions to congressional campaigns went up 231 percent from 2004 to 2012 in districts and states where fracking has occurred. [Baker Hostetler]

The two bills have little chance of passing the Democratic-controlled Senate. Even if it did, President Obama has stated he would veto the legislation should it get that far.

○ Fracking to blame? Texas rocked by 16 earthquakes in last 3 weeks
○ USGS: Man-Made Earthquakes Update
○ Hydraulic fracturing explained – Report Frac Sand Minerals [pdf]

The most interesting thing I’ve seen recently in political messaging is the idea that WalMart costs taxpayers money by paying so little to their employees that they must seek public assistance to make ends meet.

While this messaging has the advantage of being true, it’s still something that no one was mentioning before.

With as many as 825,000 Walmart workers making less than $25,000 a year and a single Walmart store costing taxpayers nearly $1 million in public assistance, the need for change is clear. Taxpayers should not have to pick up the tab because Walmart refuses to pay workers a living wage.

Historically, I’d call this a conservative meme, but it is being picked up by progressive Democrats in a big way.

I feel no need to apologize for liking turkey, the NFL, or my extended family, so I have no problem with expressing my disagreement with Thanksgiving naysayers. Thanksgiving is, by far, my favorite American holiday, and it’s probably because it has no real religious component. For me, it is a reason to get together with great uncles and aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews. We get together and enjoy each other’s company and recipes, without any ideological reason for doing so. We do it just because we want to and because we like to be together. We don’t have to succumb to any consumerism by buying each other gifts, nor do we have to play make-believe about the reality of fat men who ride in sleighs or rabbits that lay eggs. There is no pretention involved. In my family, we don’t celebrate the first Thanksgiving or give it any sacred place. The only thing we hold sacred is the tradition of gathering, and we gather for its own sake.

I find Thanksgiving naysayers to be the most uptight and boring of people. I’m sorry if you don’t like your family, but that is no reason to blame Thanksgiving. If you insist on seeing the holiday as some kind of whitewash of the genocide of Native Americans, I am also sorry, but I simply don’t look at Thanksgiving that way. For me, it is simply a secular excuse for the family to get together and celebrate being a family. And that makes it the best of all holidays.