Following Fashion

Today, I received the proofs for what will likely either be my last or second to last published science paper. For those curious, you can find it here. I have another idea for a paper beyond those, but likely won't ever get to it because I'm horrible at multi-tasking. Stick me with a fork. I'm done.

What happened to me in science is that I started to get very bored with the arcane minutiae of what a typical academic scientist gets paid to do and started thinking about broader problems in my field that I thought were much more intellectually interesting.

However I found out that when you do that you can't get funding. The scientific community - at least my little room of it anyway - tends to be geared toward minutiae. Write a proposal to look broadly and sweepingly at a problem and reviewers - other people in your field - often don't even understand what you're getting after. Speaking metaphorically here, they're studying one leaf on a tree or worse yet, one stomata on a leaf. You want to study the whole forest. And their mindset - the reductionist mindset - is that you can't possibly do anything of value thinking so broadly.

My view is that reductionist work is fine when a field is young. The pieces in the puzzle are still fairly big and when you put them together they still can make a compelling picture. But for mature fields, reductionism leads to even finer scale work. At some point the scale becomes so fine that ultimately the work doesn't matter any more. And that's probably true for much of the Earth sciences today including geophysics. It's just work for work's sake.

My proposals were interesting to me. But they weren't following the fashion of reductionism. I wasn't going to get funding anymore unless I went back to the leaf scale. And that stuff was boring beyond belief for me. You can't be a scientist in an academic setting without funding. It was time to leave.

This last or next to last paper followed my anti-reductionist leanings. I wanted to examine just why the average permeability (a measure of how quickly water and other liquids can flow through cracks and pores) of the Earth was 10^(-14) m^2. It's somewhat analogous to trying to understand why human body temperature is 98.6 degrees F and not some other number. What's magic about this number for permeability? And it turns out that the reason this is so is that the average permeability of the Earth is tuned to the average slope of the Earth and average rainfall of the Earth. If it rained less, the permeability of the Earth would be smaller. If there were less mountains, the permeability of the Earth would be greater. There's a real reason that the average is what it is; the number isn't chosen out of a hat.

Now I know that sounds like a very arcane result for the non-Earth scientist, but for a geophysicist, this is a very sweeping and broad statement. Getting funding for such an analysis would be next to impossible. And even though I think it's a very important statement, it's likely that given the reductionist tendencies of my scientific community, it will be ignored. Such is life. If you aren't going to be fashionable, you are going to have problems with acceptance. You just hope fashions change in twenty years and people somehow uncover your work then, scratch their heads and wonder, why didn't anyone else notice this before?

That said, this paper is going to get published. And the reason for this is that I didn't completely ignore fashion. At first I did. Several years ago, we tried to publish this paper with techniques that are considered to be archaic. I'm basically a very old school scientist who believes that if you can't solve something with a paper and pencil - if you can't reduce things down to their essence - you aren't thinking hard enough. I tend to use mathematical techniques that were devised at the turn of the twentieth century. I pound my head against the wall trying to simplify and simplify until I get it down to something compact and elegant. Then I'm happy.

Hardly anyone uses this approach anymore, virtually no one in my generation. No one even knows how to do it. I taught it to myself by spending month after month in the Math Library reading musty textbooks. Instead, when almost everyone solves a problem nowadays, they just throw a bunch of numbers into a computer model and look at the results. It's the current fashion. I find it as ugly and abhorrent as a polyester leisure suit. But people seem to find comfort in these computer models. I don't quite understand why, but they do.

In the first version of this paper, there was no computer model. It was just paper and pencil kind of stuff. I thought it was beautiful. But reviewers thought, "What the hell is this?" And it was bounced. It was bounced from Science. It was bounced from Nature. Clearly, something had to be changed.

My co-author said, "We need a computer model." I cringed. I know how to do computer modeling - it's what I was trained to do as a Ph.D. student - but I have no stomach for it; for me, it's an ugly and tacky way of doing science. But my co-author was right. We needed to follow fashion. So he and another guy crunched a bunch of numbers in a computer model; the paper got a lot bigger and had colorful pictures based on the computer simulations. It now followed fashion. And it was accepted for publication.

Is the paper any better for this work? I'm skeptical, but I'll defer to my co-author who has a better bead on this sort of thing and says it is. The bottom line is that science is like any other endeavor in that you can't just be good or even right; you have to play well with others. If they use computer models, you better use one too.

Fashion is of course a funny thing. Just the other day, my sweetie and I were at the airport and there was this twenty-something blonde girl wearing a pink hoodie with matching pink sweatpants. On the butt of the sweatpants, the word "Juicy" was stitched in big letters. I laughed to myself and noted to my sweetie that this was the tackiest piece of clothing I'd seen in quite some time.

My sweetie informed me that, tacky though it may be, it's fashionable stuff that you buy in high end department stores. You can see it here. The thing must cost less than 10 bucks to make and retails for over $170. Damn, why didn't I get in on the ground floor of this phenomenon? It looks like a...um...leisure suit except a little more tasteless. Everything old is new again.

Maybe paper and pencil based mathematical analysis will become fashionable again some day. I'm not holding my breath.

Bribes I Have Known

This is one of those posts that I know doesn't show me in a good light. It's why I'll never be a politician. But I have a pathological aversion to sugar coating. Some people just might go "ewww" when they read this. Ewww away. Here goes...

I'm not a particularly principled person although I do highly value trust and commitment in friendship. If you grow up in the environment that I did, you have to learn to be flexible on issues of honesty and integrity. People are in general frail and flawed. I am too. And I feel much more comfortable in environments where there is no pretense and words like character, ethics and integrity aren't thrown around like a softball on a baseball diamond. It's probably one of many reasons I didn't fit in the world of academia which is no more honest than any other place, but tries to pretend that it is different.

I grew up in a very old school kind of way. I learned a tribal approach to living. You took care of your own and that included family and friends. Relationships weren't instant things, but carefully nurtured. In the background, there was always the expectation that you be a "stand up guy" or a mensch. It meant when you said you'd do something for someone, you followed through. It meant you helped people out in their time of need. If being a mensch is a principle, then I guess I am principled. But that's quite a bit different in my mind than always following the straight and narrow path. Being a mensch isn't the same as being a Boy Scout.

One of the stranger aspects of my childhood is that I grew up bribing people. I did it for my father. If you work in construction as my father did, it's probably true that there's hardly a city in America where bribery isn't necessary. Bribery happens every step of the way in the construction of a building. Often, you need a zoning change before construction begins. There are planning committees and city councils that have to approve such zoning changes. Should you try to get any of this approved without some money to grease the wheels, nothing, absolutely nothing will happen.

Then there are final plans that need to be approved and all of those inspections at every step of the building process. Many of these people will have their hand out and they will find something, anything, to stall your efforts unless you bribe them. For example, when I was 16 I was walking a property with an inspector to get a final sign off on a concrete sidewalk. It was the last thing that needed to be done before we could get an occupancy permit. Tenants were scheduled to move in that week.

The inspector walked along that sidewalk as if there was a gold nugget embedded somehere in the concrete. And in a sense there was. At every seam he took out his ruler. And then he smiled when he finally found what he was looking for. "It's off by 1/4". Somebody could trip right here and break their leg."

"Will 200 do?"

"Yeah, that should do it."

"How about we go inside?"

"I'm in a hurry. Let's do it right here."

I pulled out ten 20s from my pocket and paid him in front of a busy street.

Now there was something about that incident that completely unnerved me, actually. I'd never done anything like that in such a public place. And as I counted the 20s out, I felt lousy. It wasn't the money. It was the prospect of getting caught. And when I got home I told my father about it. "I don't think I can do this anymore, dad."

"Good," he said. "That's why you're going to college."

My father had this idea that once you went up the educational ladder, the world became more honest and principled. But it isn't. People behave the same regardless of their education. I learned that from the get-go. That fall, I went to college and was trying to register for classes. Back in those days, you had to physically register by going from classroom to classroom and getting your name added to a sign up sheet. Usually, TAs and undergraduates were in charge of the process.

I got to the room for my calculus sign up. It was my last class to add and I figured there were a lot of sessions so I wouldn't have to worry. I was wrong. I wanted a certain time and I'd waited too long to get to the room. "Sorry, that slot is full," the TA said.

I looked at the TA sitting in front of me. He probably was 24. But that was seven years older than me and he looked ancient. "I really need this slot," I said. "I have a physics lab and other labs. They take up a lot of time."

"I'm sorry to hear that, but it's full."

Somehow my reflexes took over. I looked into his eyes. I had to determine whether: 1) he would actually take a bribe; 2) how much he wanted. I looked. I decided that this was a poor, unappreciated and underpaid TA who could use a little extra cash.

"I really need this class. How about if you do me a favor? Just add my name at the bottom. It's just one more person." I put five dollars on the table, which back then was a fair amount of money, at least for a cash starved student like me. He looked at the five.

"I guess since you don't have any other time available it's OK." And it was done.

Over the years, I've continued to bribe people now and then although it's been awhile. The last time was when I was in Bangladesh. Just to get my laptop in the country, I had to give someone twenty dollars. I can't say that I enjoy doing any of this. I always get a sinking feeling.

And what about when the shoe is on the other foot? I give, but do I take? Once when I was teaching on the first day of a class, I got the typical "what does it take to get an A" question and I decided to joke. "Three K for an A." There was laughter. But after class, a student came up to me with an earnest look on his face.

"You know that's not a lot of money. For twelve thousand dollars, I could have straight As."

I looked at him and realized that he was right. If my "advertised rate" was real and was practiced by all other professors, he could be a perfect student without having to study at all for 24K a year, which was less than one year's tuition. It wasn't a bad deal in his eyes. I never used that joke again.

It's interesting to me that while I have been the briber, I've never been the bribee. It's not because I haven't received offers. I have and it hasn't always been about money. I don't get angry when people try. It's part of human nature to try, I guess. Usually, I simply and politely say no and that ends the conversation.

I decline not because I possess character and integrity. Those aren't my strong suits. I say no partly because I just think that it would be tacky for me to accept. I don't like being perceived as tacky. But probably more importantly it's about power and who's in charge of me. By accepting a bribe, I'm accepting my lesser role. Someone is lording over me. And that's not something that I can accept. It's simply too demeaning. It's not a matter of ethics or honesty. It's all about pride.

Construction isn't always filled with bribes by the way. I once remodeled my home in Palo Alto. An inspector came by and condemned my existing fireplace during the rebuilding.

"But this fireplace has been around for 40 years," I said.

"It's a fire hazard," he said. "By the old code it was fine. But not by the new code.

I looked the inspector in the eyes trying to determine what he wanted. And then I understood. This guy was perfectly serious. No amount of money could deter him from condemning my fireplace. If my father would have run into someone like this, he probably would have slugged him. But that's not my style. I just looked at the inspector in wonder. I was stuck. For the first time ever, I longed for my teen years when I could pull out some twenties and settle things right then and there.

Those Big Lies

Watching the campaign this year, you get plenty of pandering from both sides. McCain keeps trying to pander to the religious right. Clinton has tried to make friends with the working class by decrying trade agreements. Obama has tried the same pandering bit with the working class as Clinton.

That's all OK, I guess. It's part of politics to tell people what they want to hear and make public stands against perceived bogeymen that aren't really there.

Then again there is pandering that simply goes too far. The lies are too big. And indeed if the politicians doing the pandering would follow through on these "promises" the result would be disaster.

Let's look at the Republican side first. McCain has promised to lower taxes and keep Bush's existing tax cuts for the wealthy. Somehow, this will lead to a better country. And somehow to counteract this loss of revenue, McCain will find waste in government spending that no president before him has found. It's baloney. McCain knows he's promising a fairy tale.

Let's say that McCain was to follow through on his promise of continuing tax cuts that he once called irresponsible and create new cuts for good measure. This country would be bleeding red ink at the trillion dollar level. We'd have to borrow more money from abroad. The value of the dollar would sink even further on the international market. The end result could well be a recession, something that we have faced with previous efforts to promote the folly of supply-side economics. Basic services and infrastructure would be stretched while McCain pursued the same economic fairy tale as Reagan and Bush.

The fact is that we are living off infrastructure created in the Eisenhower years back when the top tax rate was 91 percent (let's not forget that Eisenhower was a mainstream Republican). Our infrastructure is now crumbling. We have entitlement programs that the public wants to maintain and aren't going away. We have a military program that both Republicans and Democrats view as sacred. And we have yet to deal with the full costs of health care in this country.

We have big government. It isn't going away. It is in fact going to get bigger because people want all of those services from government. We are going to have to pay for it. And the only way we can do that is by raising taxes. Supply-side economics has created a great deal of damage over the last 30 years; we can't afford any more of it.

Unlike Bush, McCain is not stupid. He knows all of this or at least I hope he does. Rather than being another spend without revenue, currency crashing Republican, my guess is that McCain, in response to a deficit crisis mixed with program needs, will have to raise taxes somewhere down the line should he become president. And his big promise of tax cuts will go up in smoke.

Why do people believe the big lie McCain has been laying down? I have no idea. Regardless as to whether a Republican or Democrat becomes president, expect higher taxes. We can't run a government on hot air.

Now let's go to the Democratic side. We all know the Democrats hate the Iraq War. I do too. We should have never gone there in the first place. But now that we're there, both Obama and Clinton are trying to sell the big lie that we can get out quickly. Obama says he will establish a rigid timetable for withdrawal. I understand the desire to leave. But we can't. And we won't. To leave anytime soon would be a complete disaster.

Don't like 100 dollar a barrel oil? Just wait to see what happens to the price of oil should we pull out of Iraq and watch it turn to a complete blood bath. To leave Iraq would cause untenable political instability in an area vital to the world's economy. We went into Iraq partly for its oil. We can't leave now because the consequences of a destabilized Middle East would be economically disastrous.

We will likely have to stay for decades. We have stayed in Germany for several decades and they haven't needed us there for at least 20 years. We have stayed in Korea for almost as long. We don't leave areas we consider to be economically and politically vital.

It is probably true that democracy is not viable in Iraq; like the Yugoslavia of old, they need some nasty s.o.b. dictator to hold the country together. Regardless, we made the mess. We can't abandon it. And we won't no matter what Obama and Clinton say right now.

Regardless as to whether a Republican or Democrat becomes president, expect a long term presence in Iraq by our military. My guess is that we're looking at 100,000 troops there for at least a couple of decades. Bush the elder didn't go into Iraq for this very reason; Bush the younger has none of the brains of his father. The Democrats will have to break their big promise. They aren't stupid; they know that they don't have a choice.

Why do people believe the lie that we can leave Iraq in a matter of a couple of years? I have no idea. As is the truth with taxes and government services, people seem to want to believe in fairy tales.

Stories From the Old Country and Beyond, Part 5

Note: I'm still getting a handle on doing audio versions. If I can get it down to where I can do a decent job in a half hour or less I'll keep it up most days. For those of you getting this via syndication, you'll have to go to the source page to pick up the audio.



Warsaw

When the siege of Leningrad ended, my father marched somewhere around 2000 miles (I haven't looked up the distance from Leningrad to Warsaw on a map) in six months with his troop. They slept fitfully in tents, waking up in the middle of the night when German aircraft flew by. Sometimes he said he was in the anti-aircraft and would ascribe his loss of hearing to having to handle the huge wheel mounted anti-aircraft guns. He blamed this anti-aircraft duty on his fear of flying as well. "The guns were so loud," he said. "I could feel my ears ringing in pain all of the time." But he wasn't particularly consistent with this anti-aircraft story. Other times he was a cook or a translator.

The Russian Army advanced. The Germans continued to retreat. Finally, the Russians came upon Warsaw, the last major city in Eastern Europe held by the Germans. It was clear that the Germans would lose Warsaw and the war would soon end. And now the ultimate betrayal happened, something that my fathers' colonel knew would happen but could do nothing about.

The word came from Moscow that the Polish Red Army would be the lead force in the assault of Warsaw. The ostensible rationale was that Warsaw was the Polish soldiers' mother city and they should have the honor of taking it. The soldiers bought this rationale completely. Not so, the Russian colonel in charge of them. He understood Stalin. In confidence, he told my father what he thought was going on.

"Stalin wants to get rid of the Polish Army. What better time than now?" Stalin was thinking ahead to the time after the war. He wanted Poland under his control and he didn't want war-hardened patriotic Polish soldiers resisting his efforts. Leading the siege of Warsaw would be risky for any troop. The soldiers would need air cover. But what if none came? They would be slaughtered. "We won't get air cover tomorrow," the colonel said. "I know it."

My father's colonel was right. The day that the Polish Army led the first wave of the attack on Warsaw no air cover came. And the army was slaughtered, about eighty percent of what remained of his troop died that day. His troop mates thought they would have the glory of winning back their mother city; instead they were the subjects of a cruel and deadly joke. He watched his friends fall while he stood next to his colonel. For my father, it wasn't just Stalin who was responsible. It was God. A mensch tracht un Got lacht.

The second wave attacked Warsaw, and this time the air cover was there. My father entered the city of his teen age years, back when he was free and happy chasing after girls. There was hardly anything left of it. Streets were filled with mountains of rubble. He went back to the street where he once lived. The house where he boarded had been obliterated.

When the fighting finally ended, my father took off his boots or tried to. For six months, he had kept his boots on because he had to be ready at all hours. The boots were cracked. The leather had holes. On rainy days, the water would go into one hole and be squeezed out another as he marched. After six months, the leather had joined with the flesh of his swollen feet. It was the same for all of the remaining soldiers in his troop. To take off their boots, they found some razor blades and carefully cut through the leather making strips. Then they slowly peeled the leather from their skin. "It was like peeling a swollen orange," he said.

He was lucky in that he didn't lose his toes or his feet. He did lose all of his toenails. And when the nails on his big toes grew back they were snot-colored green mixed with dark brown and thick like turtle shells. As a kid, I remember being scared by just how grotesque those toenails were. They were so thick you couldn't cut them. Sometimes he would go to a doctor to have them sanded down, but usually he would let them grow until they simply fell off and grew anew.

I remember one time - I was four or five years old - and I found one of his "turtle shells" on the bathroom floor. I picked it up and at first didn't know what it was. But then I connected the dots. I knew I was holding one of my dad's dead toe nails. I felt nauseated, dropped the toenail right then and there, and ran out of the bathroom.

My father made one last trip in Poland before leaving for good. I'll talk about that next time.

Matzoh Like It's 1999

Note: I'm playing around with audio versions of these posts. You can hear this one by clicking on the mp3 player below.


There's a certain kind of personality out there, the cheapskate or as he is known in Yiddish, the shnorer*, that many including me find irksome. The shnorer is the guy who when you go out for lunch argues with you over your three buck beer when it comes time to split the check (saying things like "it's only fair" or worse yet, "why should I pay for your drinking problem," etc.); but if he has a couple of beers himself, he magnanimously offers to save the hassle of working out the arithmetic and wants to simply split the check in half.

He's the guy who when you go out for dinner with your wives/girlfriends brings out his charge card so that he can get his airline miles, and asks that you pay him in cash. Fine. But when you notice he hasn't tipped worth a damn you end up putting some extra cash on the table so that the waiter doesn't starve.

At a bar with a guy like this? Don't expect him to ever offer to pay for your beer although if you offer to pay for him will smile and say thanks.

All of this is par for the course. It takes all kinds to make a world. Maybe he makes up for it by being decent in other ways.

But there is one thing I can't abide. Come Passover time, if you go to the house of someone like this for a seder you'll find out that the matzoh tastes a little stale. And there's a simple reason for this. If you look at the matzoh box in the kitchen, you'll notice the date in big numbers on the box and understand immediately that the matzoh is a year old.

What the shnorer did was to his mind ingenious. He went to the grocery at the end of the previous Passover and bought the leftover matzoh boxes for a half a buck apiece. He then saved them for the next year. If you challenge him as to why he did this, the response will be, "Why should I pay such outrageous prices for new matzoh when the old stuff tastes just the same?"

But it isn't the same. Sorry. It's been sitting in a box for a year. It degrades. Fresh matzoh is bad enough. Don't make things worse by using stale junk.

The Passover seder is a wonderful tradition. You do it twice a year. You might as well do it up right. A box of fresh matzoh costs three bucks or so max. A family of four will go through maybe five boxes over the course of an entire Passover, and usually five packs are around 12 bucks. It's hardly a major expense.

I note that my area of the country has a matzoh shortage this year. I don't know why. Fortunately, I bought a box a week before Passover (that's more than enough for my sweetie and I). But given the shortage, there will be no leftover boxes this year for sale for cheap in the Bay Area. San Francisco shnorers will be crying over this I know.

There is also another Passover crisis this year. Those little Tam Tam cracker matzohs aren't available at all. None. The venerable New Jersey company that makes them, Maniscewitz, has had too many problems with the operation of its new factory so it dropped Tam Tams from its 2008 lineup of products. For those not in the know, Tam Tams are Triscuit like crackers that are kosher for Passover.

Now I happen to know someone (who will not be named) who lives off those things during Passover. And when I informed her that no Tam Tams would be available, she curled her lips downward in disappointment. But then when she went to the store, she indeed saw a box! One box. A lonely box. They were whole wheat Tam Tams, but what the hell that's better than nothing. She snapped them up.

There was only one problem. She forgot to look at the date on the box. When were these things made? Not 2008 of course. Not even 2007. Try 1999. Yessiree Bob, those little crackers at the store were ten years old. And when she opened the box, the smell was not exactly inviting. So sad. Good thing she has a decent nose.

The moral of this story? There's matzoh that tastes like cardboard (the fresh stuff). There's matzoh that tastes like stale cardboard (the year old stuff). Then there's matzoh that probably can kill you. Stick with the fresh.

*Which of course means something a bit more encompassing, as most Yiddish words do. It means someone who is not only amazingly cheap, but always looks to get something for nothing.

Stuart's Half-Assed, But Maybe Not, Way of Estimating World Oil

Oh, last post I said we have about 70 years worth of cheap oil left on this planet. How did I come upon my estimate? Easy as Calculus 1. We've spent over one hundred years looking for economically viable fields of oil. That history should give us plenty of data to examine just how plentiful these fields are.

Intuitively, large fields should be much more rare than small fields. If they are like similar phenomena (earthquakes, rainfall, stock market changes, hitting streaks, etc.), the distribution of oil field sizes should follow a power law. As the graph shows above (albeit with limited data) it looks like it does.

It's highly unlikely, given the fact that we've been looking for so long and haven't found one yet, that we will find fields with over 100 billion barrels of oil in the future. It's also likely true that while there are probably untold fields that contain less than 100,000 barrels of reserves, the potential net revenue from exploiting them in this day and age is too small.

So we're left with fields with reserves in the range of 100,000 to 100 billion barrels to use. If you take the above data (admittedly not very plentiful since I haven't gone to the effort of identifying all of the one billion barrel fields in the world; this is a blog after all and no one is paying me for this), fit it to a power law curve and integrate (that's where the basic calculus comes in), you come up with an estimate of about two trillion barrels of extractable oil on this planet. That's from conventional sources. Add in another 50 percent for things like oil shale and tar sands and we're up to three trillion barrels of practical to extract oil.

We've used up about one trillion barrels already, which gives us two trillion left to burn and drive our economy. We're currently burning it up at a rate of roughly 30 billion barrels a year. You do the arithmetic on how many more years we have left to burn the stuff.

Now admittedly, these projections are very crude. I could be off by a lot. So could the experts who have come up with similar numbers. Estimating stuff like this is a very dicey business.

Anyone can play simple games like this. I find them fun to do. Then again, you're looking at someone who wanted to be an actuary when he was six because he heard you could play with numbers all day and get paid good money for it. The bottom line is that our oil resource is finite. But we haven't reached the bottom of the barrel yet and won't for quite some time. The sky isn't falling. And yes I know I've used two different metaphors in a row.

Beyond My Gas Station

Last week, I posted about my neighborhood gas station being featured in the NY Times for its 4 buck a gallon gas. I went on to state that we are not yet running out of oil. We're not even close. Some have taken me to task for this assessment. But I stand by it. Our worldwide situation with regard to oil availability is lousy, yes, but we shouldn't be panicking. The current panic is partly political and mostly caused by OPEC squeezing the world's balls by limiting production. But the oil is there. My admittedly half-assed guess is that it will be there for another 70 years or so. And if we haven't switched over to another energy source by then, we will have good reason to panic.

We currently have about a 40 year reserve of petroleum available world-wide. That's been true for at least a couple of decades. Despite increased demand, we keep finding more and more oil or taking known previously uneconomical deposits, like the tar sands in Canada, and redefining them as known reserves.

That said, the future is indeed lousy. Above is a graph of discovery of known major oil fields world-wide as a function of time. These large fields account for about 40 percent of all known reserves. Since the 1970s, we simply aren't finding them fast enough. We've found (including the big find in Brazil a few months ago) enough new big fields in the last 20 years to supply the world with about two years worth of oil. And it keeps getting harder and harder to find more. Most of the increase in our known reserves over the last few years has come about simply because we now consider tar sands to be a known, usable resource.

The era of major discovery of oil ended over three decades ago. In the continental contiguous US, the era ended about 70 years ago. The last major oil field we've found in the lower 48 was in 1999 and before that you'd have to go back to the 1930s.

Hoping for Alaska? Nope. Prudhoe Bay was discovered in 1969 and since then, despite active searching, there just hasn't been much found. The Arctic Wildlife Refuge has been known as a petroleum resource for decades and its reserves are estimated to be about half that of Prudhoe Bay. Want to drill in the Refuge? I'd rather not, but even if we do, it won't provide us with a panacea.

There are conspiracy theorists out there who believe oil companies are hiding untold reserves to keep prices high. Um. No. There are panicky types who believe oil companies are fluffing up reserve totals to keep confidence in the future of these companies high. Wrong again.

What's left on the planet to discover are a lot of small potatoes type of deposits. And I have no doubt we will find many of them. That will likely be where most of the exploration money will go in the next few decades.

But the current oil pricing panic can't be because our grandchildren will be hard pressed for oil. Financial markets don't think in terms of decades. No, the current panic is some irrational thing mixed with the production policies of a nasty cartel that has decided to economically rape the rest of the world. It certainly isn't about supply and demand. Our demand is not yet overextending our supplies.

For what it's worth, my country is currently is spending about 700 billion dollars a year for petroleum. And unlike other developed nations we continue to increase our demand because we don't have the discipline and leadership to conserve. I'd bet the house that gas prices will drop over the next decade as our current panic subsides. I'd also bet the house that, regardless of price, my dear country will suffer significant negative economic, environmental, and political consequences from our inability to conserve a finite resource. Happy Earth Day.

Take Five Steps, Swing Your Arm, and Let Go

(Monday seems to be turning into Election posts, and Friday definitely is Old Country Stories day. As for Tuesday-Thursday, who knows?)

One of the stranger elements of this campaign between Obama and Clinton is the inability of Obama to simply knock Clinton out. He's had a couple hundred million dollars to work with, a charismatic stump speech that fills stadiums, and a telegenic smile. Somehow, he still can't quite deliver that one big punch in a key primary.

It happened in New Hampshire. It happened in Ohio. And it may happen again this week in Pennsylvania. Put Obama in a state with hard nosed working class white folks and more often than not he cannot win. Some would ascribe his failures in these states to racism. But that just doesn't hold water. Ohio and Pennsylvania have large black populations that march in lock step and have voted or will vote for Obama and those voters likely more than offset the racist whites. No it's something else.

I think the answer is pretty obvious. The very qualities that endear Obama to youth and the latte set are major turn offs for the working class. The big stadiums full of people chanting "yes we can" make Obama look like a show off in their eyes. And what's maybe worse is that when he tries to be a "regular guy" and gets up close with these people, he comes across as Kerry-esque. For example, the man tried to bowl and ended up scoring a 37. I was bowling in the 60s when I was five years old. You take five steps, you swing your arm and you roll a plastic ball about 60 feet to hit some pins. It's not that hard. My sweetie weighs all of 97 pounds, goes to an alley once every three years or so, and routinely scores 110. 37. My lord. You have to either have zero coordination or want to do badly on purpose to score that low.

Now personally, I don't care whether Obama can bowl or eat corn dogs with a smile, but appearing to be a regular guy is required of a presidential candidate. The bottom line is when he stops doing his stump speech thing and tries to rub shoulders with the hoi polloi Obama comes across as a namby-pamby, junk food averting, Whole Foods shopper. And that's why he can't close the deal.

The bloom is off the Obama rose. While ABC News can be criticized for trivializing last week's debate between Obama and Clinton, it is likely true that the hosts of the ABC debate would not have put Obama in their sights if the event had taken place during January or February when Obama looked like an invincible rock god. He's not a rock god anymore. Those hosts smelled his vulnerability.

Expect even nastier attacks on Obama in the future. Clinton cannot effectively attack him because of the double standard that says that women who are aggressive are simply nasty bitches. But the press can. And McCain can. Obama has said time and time again that he has proven as a result of the Clinton attacks that he can take a punch. Bullshit. Clinton's attacks have been mild by historical standards and if you ask the Clinton campaign, they say they've been holding back.

There is little doubt that Obama will win the Democratic nomination. And I still expect him to win the presidency, largely because of a historically large turnout by twenty somethings and blacks come November. But the fact remains that even with relatively light blows from Clinton, Obama is more than a bit wounded. And once the real game begins, the punches he's going to have to take are going to be harder.

Not only is Obama going to need a huge youth and black vote to win, but he is also going to have to find a way to look more like a regular guy in the coming months. The phase of the campaign where he can generate support and news from filling a basketball arena and having people shout "yes we can" is over. He's going to have to do the hard work of pressing the flesh. I suggest that instead of filling stadiums with people who are going to vote for him anyway, he take some time to learn some regular guy 101. Forget the stump speech. For godsakes, learn how to bowl.

Friday Old Country and Beyond Stories Part 4

Passover and My Grandmother's Craziness

We'll leave my father on the cusp of attacking Warsaw with the Russian Army for next week. Passover is coming up, and I've been thinking about my childhood Passovers quite a bit.

My family was very small. There were my parents, my grandparents, and my uncle and aunt all living within 20 miles of each other. But somehow this tiny family was incredibly Balkanized. There were tensions and strange alliances that held for decades. Here is the breakdown.

First off, there was never any worry that the husbands and wives would get divorced. Each couple seemed to be joined at the hip. There were no affairs and no flirting with others; they all seemed to have their hormones in check. For example, my father and mother loved each other dearly, and trusted each other completely. They even started to look like each other as time marched on, something that I found to be a little eerie.

Then there was my grandfather and grandmother. They truly did look like each other; then again they were first cousins so that's not hard to believe (yes, I come from Jewish rednecks). They had deeply tanned leathery skin from working outside all day, black hair that never seemed to gray (no they didn't dye their hair), high cheekbones and brown eyes. When I was little I thought they were Indians. Their relationship was stranger than my parents because my grandmother was truly certifiable as I'll probably talk about below; but again, like my mother and father, they were true partners in every way and worked together in business six days a week.

Finally, there was my uncle - my mother's kid brother born in 1939 right before the war started - and his wife, also a child of survivors. They were newly married, but joined at the hip as well.

It was the interactions between the couples that were a mess.

My father was always jealous of my mother having any surviving family, and he was particularly envious of my mother having a surviving father. There was never anything resembling closeness between my father and grandfather as a result. Plus before I was born, they once came to blows over something I'll probably tell about in another posting. They were both very strong physical laborers, very prideful men of few words with a history of pummeling people they didn't like. I can imagine that fight was nasty. And it was never forgotten.

My father and grandmother surprisingly got along well. But I think that was my grandmother's way of making my mother angry. She tended to be very affectionate and solicitous of my father, and not at all affectionate to her own daughter. There were probably a number of reasons for her dislike of her daughter. First off, my mother and my grandfather were extremely close. They had very similar temperaments and saw eye to eye on almost every issue. I could see the jealousy in my grandmother's eyes whenever she saw my mother and grandfather exchange confidences.

But mostly, it was because my grandmother was out and out crazy. She could function quite well in the day to day. She worked in the office of my grandfather's junkyard and sold stuff. But her grip on reality was not even tenuous.

For some reason, no one in my family recognized this but me. There were the little things that people should have noticed. She never went to doctors. Not once in all of her almost 50 years of living in the US did she ever go to a doctor's office. I asked her why once. She looked at me fiercely and said, "A doctor? He'll charge me money and take out my heart with a knife!"

Her fear of doctors also meant she never went to an optometrist and she was as blind as I was. When she would come to our house, she would shuttle me off to the bathroom so I would read the scale and tell her how much she weighed.

She loved me dearly, and I think that's why she would tell me things she didn't tell others. She would give me strange life lessons. For instance, she once told me that I should run as fast as I could when I saw a policeman otherwise, "He'll kidnap you, take you to a doctor and they'll cut out your liver." I didn't even know what a liver was at the time, but I knew my grandmother was nuts.

Then there was the way she would show her affection to me whenever we saw each other, which was once or twice a week. She would come looking for me, grab me, put me over her knee, pull my pants down, take out her dentures (she lost her teeth in the war), and bite my ass with her gums, shouting out between the bites in Yiddish, "He's so sweet! He's so sweet!" She did this until I was about six, when I was finally big enough to squirm away. Like I say she was crazy.

For some reason, whenever I told my parents that my grandmother was crazy, something I did quite often, they would deny it. They would never believe me. Years later, in Israel, I mentioned that my grandmother was nuts in a room full of relatives. They just nodded their heads. "Oh yeah," my great uncle said. "Ever since she had cholera, she was never the same." I didn't believe cholera caused her madness. But I felt relieved that at least someone else recognized what I first knew when I was five.

Anyhow, my grandmother, crazy or not, was by turns mean and distant to my mother. And this would hurt my mother terribly. When my uncle married, my grandmother seemed to immediately bond with her new daughter-in-law, another act of affection that my mother found difficult to witness. My mother would ask me quite often when I was in my teens, "why does she do these things to me," whenever she was slighted. I gave up trying to tell her that her mother was crazy by the time I was fifteen or so. I never had a good answer.

So the dynamics were thus. Each couple was like a tidy and well walled city. Outside those walls, things became very complicated. My grandmother liked my father. My grandfather loved my mother. My grandfather hated my father. My uncle hated my father for taking away his big sister and marrying her. My grandmother hated her daughter. My mother hated her sister-in-law because she wasn't good enough for her kid brother and because my grandmother showed her the affection she never received. It was even more complicated than this, but I'm purposely avoiding some issues of my own in this messy family.

Now this story, which has rambled more than a bit, was supposed to be about Passover. And the question is, where does a family like this - so close and yet so perpetually unhappy with each other's company - hold a Seder? And the answer was almost always at our house. While no one in my family was willing to recognize that my grandmother was crazy, they all knew she lacked the wherewithal to hold a Seder.

She also lacked basic sanitation skills. Her refrigerator was always filled with spoiled foods. Mold grew rampant. My mother would clean it out now and then and hear my grandmother's shouts and insults as she did it. Whenever I visited on my own, I would sniff everything she gave me to eat. I'd take food that was bad, pretend to eat it, put it in a napkin when she wasn't looking (which wasn't hard to do even when she was looking since she had, like me, 20-200 vision and as I noted above didn't wear glasses) and flush it down the toilet. That all said, she fed my grandfather every day and he lived to be 92. I still don't understand how. He probably did the same as me.*

Most years we'd hold Seders both nights at my house. My grandfather would lead the Seder the first night. My father would lead it the second night. My mother loved these events. She loved to cook and host people; she was a natural balaboosta. And here's the funny thing about my family. As contentious as it was the other times of the year, somehow people would behave themselves at Passover. But it was more than a truce. They would actually get along famously. They were relaxed. They would tell stories. They'd joke and laugh.

I never understood how this happened. It just did. I used to watch these people on Passover and just bask in the calm and good cheer. I'd wonder why on Earth we couldn't be like this the other 363 days of the year, but I never asked that question. It would have been considered impertinent. And I know what the answer would have been more or less. "What do you mean? We get along. Always. We're family. This is how family is. Such a question. What are you, crazy?"

Those childhood seders are why to this day Passover is my favorite holiday of the year. I don't like matzah. I don't like macaroons, sponge cake, matzah balls or any of the food associated with Passover. But when I think of Passover I think of relationships and how the human spirit can sometimes surprise you in a good way. Animosity in a family, and all families I'm sure possess a good amount of it, can be like a cloud that suddenly disappears. Even if it only disappears for a few days, it's still a miracle.

*I do note that my grandfather would sometimes come to eat at our house alone. The look of gratitude on his face as he ate just radiated from him. He would pause between bites. "Oh, this is good," he would say. "So good." It was as if he hadn't had a good meal in months, which was probably fairly close to the truth.

My Neighborhood Is Famous For Its Gas

I live in a funny neighborhood of tiny and not so tiny houses on postage stamp sized lots that is surrounded on three sides by Stanford University. In this neighborhood you can find a lot of people who look like slobs and who you'd never know have prominent jobs in Silicon Valley. Every once in a while, one of their faces will pop up in the NY Times Business Section and I'll go, "Oh, so that's what that guy does."

But yesterday, my neighborhood made the NY Times not for its big shot Silicon Valley executives, but for its gas prices. In the Business Section there was a big photo of a gas station where regular gas was over four bucks. I looked at the picture of the Shell Station with a Jack in the Box in the background and I thought, "Hey! That's my gas station, a mere seven blocks from my house." My neighborhood is famous once again.

Gas in California is more expensive than the rest of the US because of limited refining capacity. But it's expensive everywhere. My girl Hillary says it's due to Enron-style market collusion. I seriously doubt that assertion. Environmentalists would say that gas is high because we are running out of oil. That assertion is definitely wrong; the ratio of known reserves to daily consumption has stayed remarkably level for over 20 years despite high variability in the price of oil.

Here's a graph of oil prices as a function of time since the discovery of oil in the 19th century.



Yes, I know it's fuzzy. I believe if you click on it, you can make it bigger and probably read the thing. Anyhow, we have reached an all time historical high in oil prices as of late, even higher than the last crisis, which took place at the time of the OPEC oil embargo followed by the Iranian Revolution. And that's a key point. The oil markets rose back then because of supply issues and uncertainty in the Middle East. We were in a panic. In any market where there is a panic, there will be a spike in prices.

We're in a panic right now and the reasons aren't a whole lot different than back then. Once again, OPEC is making the world miserable by not satisfying demand. Once again we have political uncertainty in the Middle East. Add in a falling dollar due to a presidential administration and a Congress that have been fiscally irresponsible beyond belief and you have oil prices at record highs.

There are those who will tell you that we haven't seen anything yet. Oil supplies will diminish rapidly and prices will continue to dramatically rise. The only problem with this analysis is that we keep finding more oil. Just a few months ago, Brazil found an oil reserve about forty percent as big as that in Saudi Arabia. Kaching

Panics don't last forever. Expect oil prices to drop again in the not so distant future. My neighborhood gas station's prices will no longer be the stuff of newspapers. And what about the US dollar? It can't keep falling forever, but I doubt, given our inability to properly finance our expenditures and our hardened belief that taxes are too high already, that it will be particularly healthy for the foreseeable future.

Pop Music That Sort of Sticks

If you're a music nut who loves classic rock and has been shy about downloading music for free (not too many people have been shy it would seem), you just might be excited about the fact that The Rolling Stones recently dumped their entire catalog of oldies onto the cheapie music download site, emusic. Yes, for about 30 cents a tune, you can get all of those blasts from the past. zzzzzz

I never liked the Stones, even as a kid. I owned one Stones album at one time, Let It Bleed, but it is long gone. For me, the Stones were white British kids who played the blues badly. Keith Richards is one lousy guitar player. Mick Jagger's voice is thin and annoying. I never got just why they were popular. I do note that for nostalgia's sake, I did download one Stones tune from emusic, Gimme Shelter. Not a bad tune. But it's been done better by Patti Smith.

When it comes to rock music in general, my response is usually at best, eh. As an adult, it sounds like stuff written for kids and I haven't been a kid in a long while. And even as a kid, I had my doubts. I went to see Jimi Hendrix once, but that was because I really wanted to go out with this one girl and I figured she couldn't refuse a Jimi Hendrix ticket. I was right about that. But the concert bored me. I did get some kisses after, though. For a 13 year old kid, it was worth it.

I may be the only person in the world to have fallen asleep at a Frank Zappa concert. Even at 120 decibels, I couldn't help closing my eyes and taking a nap. In my defense, the friend I went with, a big Zappa fan, said it was an off night. I probably would have fallen asleep on a good night, too.

That all said, there are some rock and pop albums from my childhood that I haven't sold. I've even put a few of them on my iPod. Somehow, even though it's mostly kids music, they've stuck with me over the years. Maybe it's nostalgia. Maybe it's because the music is actually somewhat novel. Who knows? The tunes still make me smile. I'll probably listen to them now and then for the rest of my life. And here they are in no particular order:

The Beatles, Sergeant Pepper
Now this album is cheating a bit because it's barely a rock record. There's a lot of British dance hall kind of stuff here that sounds like it came from the 1940s. That's one reason why I like this album so much. Then there are all of the sonic tricks on the album that make it fun. Plus it's very whimsical and the whole conceit that this album is music from a band 20 years old is charming. The singer Aimee Mann wrote a dyspeptic piece about this album last year in the NY Times essentially saying that rock is much better now. Sorry Aimee. Nothing you or anyone else has done has come close to this one.

The Band, Music From Big Pink
My favorite American rock band playing my favorite American rock album. There are some great covers of Bob Dylan tunes. And the originals aren't too bad either. Everybody knows how to play an instrument.

Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited
I have a hard time listening to Bob Dylan because he's such an awful singer. I can't listen to his folk albums much at all for that reason.* But this one has some songs with a sense of humor and the band sounds like it's having fun.

Van Morrison, Moondance
Not a rock album at all. I smooched up storms to this thing and nostalgia about those smooches probably is why I like this thing so much. There's that sweet voice, the Memphis sound, and if you don't worry about the lyrics (which are just plain dumb), this is one fine album.

Graham Parker, Heat Treatment
The British New Wave came about when I was in college. It was pretty popular stuff, but this album didn't sell worth a damn. Mutt Lange, now Shania Twain's husband and the reason she sold zillions of records, produced this one. The energy level is high. The songs are solid. Probably the one true rock album I can still listen to from beginning to end.

Amazing Rhythm Aces, Stacked Deck
More country than rock, it's the songs that make this album shine. The musicianship is dicey. But oh my, you can't get any better than stuff like Third Rate Romance, one of the funniest and pithy songs written from that time. Well worth a listen.

Elvis Costello, My Aim Is True
This one is a hard choice, because I still love Elvis Costello. He still makes great music, probably the only person from that era who I can say that about. He came to Madison when I was in college and played this album in a packed tiny place. It was one memorable night, maybe my best night of rock and roll ever.

Randy Newman, Sail Away
This isn't really a rock album, but for me it's the best piece of pop from the 1970s. It's so well made and carefully constructed. And a few of the songs are as good as anyone ever wrote including people like Cole Porter.

Joni Mitchell, Blue
She sang like a bird, she was beautiful, and her songs had just the right balance of melody mixed with lyric. Every smart pop girl singer since then has been influenced by her. And none have been as good.

Tom Lehrer, That Was The Year That Was
OK, this is really cheating. It isn't rock or pop by any stretch of the imagination. But it came out in the 60s, so there! Tom Lehrer. One piano. Playing wonderful songs live. What's there not to like?

And now I'm at 10 albums that I more or less can't do without in the vein of classic rock more or less. Ten is more than enough. What about all of those other great acts from that time? Eh. They just don't do it for me. Taste, I know, is a subjective thing.

*Oh, I forgot. I have this double bootleg album called "Looking Back" that's a lot of fun, too. It's probably available digitally now in some form. It contains two live concerts, one with The Band (then called The Hawks) in London and one acoustic from Berkeley.

Yichus Makes The World Go Around

I was listening to a musician and producer talk about how he got to be successful. For years he'd been playing in crappy venues. One night he and his band were playing their hearts out in some shithole in Rock Island, Illinois and while he was playing he was thinking there's not a chance in hell they were going to get discovered here or anywhere else they were playing for that matter. He was despondent.

A little while later, he went to a concert of a hot band, snuck by security, and got into the dressing room of the front man. He was desperate. "How do I get to where you are?" He asked.

The front man said, "You need to see my guru." This was back in the 1970s when gurus were all the rage.

"OK, how do I do that?" The front man asked for his card. A few weeks later out of the blue he gets a call. The front man's guru will see him tomorrow. He goes. The guru gives him a new Indian name. In short order, he's playing with the band he snuck by security to see. And he has a career.

Now most people who hear this story probably think the key is this man's aggressiveness. And sure, that's important. But my take on the essential element in this story is different. If the guy meets the guru, and the guru's response to him is "meh," he's cooked. But the guru it turns out likes this poor desperate soul well enough that he gives him a new name. He's been anointed. He now has cred. In Yiddish, the word for this is yichus. And now that he has it, he can get that side man job that he could never have gotten before.

Yichus translates roughly into lineage or blood, but it also means evidence of any sign of pedigree or being anointed. We live in an uncertain world and we have to make choices, sometimes life or death ones. More often than not, yichus is the deciding factor.

For example, suppose you need brain surgery. You visit two doctors. They both look decent enough. On the wall in one doctor's office you see a diploma from an overseas medical school in Granada. On the wall in the other, you see a diploma from Harvard. Who are you going to choose? It may be that the Granada MD actually has a better track record, but you can't possibly know that. You have to make a decision. And chances are you are going to pick the one with the Harvard yichus.

We now have a president whose entire career and wealth have been built on yichus. He got into Yale because his father and grandfather went there. He became president because his grandfather was a senator and his father was a president. And his incompetence might suggest that using yichus as a means of selecting presidents is not a good idea.

And it probably isn't. It is highly likely that using yichus is a rather arbitrary way of making a choice for anything, presidents, doctors, musicians, you name it. For example, the Kentucky Derby is coming up. The horses that have been assembled for this event are carefully picked. If yichus were truly something you could bank on, every horse in the Derby would be descendants of horses like Secretariat. They aren't.

Horse owners probably waste all kinds of money making selections on the basis of yichus. Why do they keep doing it? They have to make a decision on what to buy and they have no real criterion. So they arbitrarily use bloodline as a barometer of future success.

We did much the same thing when I was on search committees for academic positions. Eight times out of ten, we'd pick people for interviews primarily because they came from lofty institutions and had well known advisors. No one on search committees had the time to look in detail at applicants' research records. So we did it on the basis of yichus. Undoubtedly, we missed some great potential applicants as a result.

In music, record labels use yichus, too. A record label has to pick a new act to back. All the acts look pretty much about the same and there are so many to choose from. There is bit of a tendency to pick a new act who has a front man of a famous father, preferably a famous musician. It's no wonder that Bob Dylan's and Leonard Cohen's sons were in bands that were anointed by labels. Like the offspring of Secretariat, they had yichus.

Yichus makes the world go around. In the absence of a rational framework for making choices, we have to find some way to legitimize our arbitrary and irrational ones.

Static Cling

That the Democratic presidential campaign has gone on too long is a given. It's even boring me and I love political campaigns. Because these candidates have talked themselves to death for over a year now all that's left is to dwell on gaffes. And of course there are gaffes aplenty. These people are human after all and that's true on the Republican side as well. McCain keeps mixing up Shiites and Sunnis. Clinton invented snipers in Bosnia. And now Obama has decided people who don't vote for him are just bitter dead enders who cling to religion and guns.

Gaffes certainly aren't unique to the US by the way. The Italians are having their own campaign right now and one of their top candidates, the ever tan billionaire Berlusconi, has gotten into hot water for saying, "The left has no taste, even in women."

None of this should matter. I certainly don't care. I'm surprised these candidates haven't made more gaffes than they have. They are visible 24/7. They are operating on little sleep day after day. And in this crazy information age we're living in all venues are equal. What a candidate says to a cashier in a 7-11 store is just as important, maybe even more important, than what he or she says on the Senate floor.

For what it's worth, I could have witnessed Obama's latest gaffe up close and personal. I was invited to that event. Probably a thousand people were. All I had to do was pony up $2300, and I too could have heard Obama put his foot in his mouth. But I am not giving any money to either candidate for reasons I stated in an earlier post: they are spending too much money as it is; they don't need mine.

I do note that I get invited to Bay Area Clinton fundraisers, too. And there's a funny difference between these two candidates when it comes to shmoozing with fat cats for money. With Clinton, it's explicitly stated up front that for $2300 you get a little photo session with Hillary. With Obama, the campaign goes out of its way to say that a photographer will not be there but if you bring a camera along, Obama will let you take a picture of him and you together.

I guess that means that Obama is a different kind of candidate. But for me, it means he's a bit of a dope. If you're going to beg for money, be a proper beggar. Don't expect a fat cat to shlep a camera to get evidence that he or she has pressed the flesh with you.

As anyone who has read this blog knows (probably too well), I'm not at all an Obama supporter although I expect him to be the Democratic nominee and will happily vote for him over McCain. And it's not because I'm a bitter dead ender who clings to guns and religion. I happen to believe in government. I think it can do a world of good. But I also believe that Obama's vision of government - Democrats and Republicans working together in harmony for a better America - is a dopey fairy tale.

There's more than a bit of Jimmy Carter in Obama. There's that same silly naivete. There is that same tendency to preach instead of inform. Both are actually wonderful preachers. By far the best commencement speech I ever heard was by Jimmy Carter; he treated the commencement like a Sunday sermon and it worked beautifully. When Obama gives his stump speech it too is a thing of beauty to watch. And his speech on racism - while not particularly interesting to me - was eloquent and would have made a good Sunday sermon as well.

But being a president is not the same as being a religious minister. And like Carter, Obama can be more than a bit of a scold. For example, Obama says time and time again that America's kids watch too much TV and eat too much junk food. I like government just fine, but I'm not interested in having a president tell America what its children should be doing with their eyes and mouths. I'm afraid - that like Carter - we're going to see Obama don a sweater and tell America to turn down its thermostats once he gets in office.

I expect Obama to win the nomination and also win the presidency. No matter how bad a president he may be, I'm sure he'll be better than the Republican alternative. But I would also like him to be much more than the lesser of two evils. For that to be the case, he's going to have to somehow develop a lot more savvy than he has shown on the campaign trail. It's not the gaffes that worry me about Obama. It's his swelled head, his laziness when it comes to details, and his absurdly naive vision of politics.

And this, honest to God, will be my only political blog posting of the week. Whew!

Friday Old Country and Beyond, Part 3
(OK, I know this isn't Friday, but I'll be out of town tomorrow and this post is extra long, so there!)

My Father's God

There was one phrase my father said more than any other. A mensch tracht un Got lacht. You can make all the plans in the world and God will laugh at you. It was more than just a catch phrase for him. It was his philosophy of living. Imagine all of your family, good humble observant Jews, being murdered, and you surviving, just barely, because you were kicked out of your home for your lack of humility and observance. You could respond to that devastation and suffering in any number of ways, I'm sure.

For my father, the war and his loss were proof that God did exist. To his mind, nothing else could explain the murder of tens of millions, the simultaneous immense evil of Hitler and Stalin. Humans could not collectively have created devastation in such an organized and systematic way without some help. God was there. And he was one nasty s.o.b. God was a sadist. A mensch tracht un Got lacht.

You prayed to God because maybe, just maybe he wouldn't do you in for fun. If you didn't pray to him, you definitely stood worse odds. That's not to say that my father was particularly consistent on this point. He ignored the Sabbath. He ate the occasional piece of ham and smiled as he ate, conscious that he was spiting God with every bite. When he read the Haggadah at Seders, he would stick in off-the-cuff rhymes in Yiddish under his breath making fun of the journey of the Jews across the Sinai. Maybe he thought that God couldn't screw him any more than he had. Who knows? More than likely he just couldn't help let his anger show through.

In my father's view, anything good that came to you, you did yourself through hard work. God could destroy it any second of any day. God never helped, he just rained on you or worse. Did my father believe in an afterlife? We never discussed it. My father was very much about this world.

When I told my father I was an atheist, he said, "You think you are, but you haven't been tested." According to him, there were no atheists in the world, just people who had not yet witnessed God's wrath. "At Leningrad, I saw my colonel, a man who said he didn't believe, get on his knees and pray. Everybody prayed."

The Germans surrounded and pounded Leningrad from the fall of 1941 until the spring of 1944 when the German army collapsed. This is where my father spent most of his war days, starving in Leningrad now known once again as St. Petersburg.

Eight hundred thousand people died in Leningrad due to starvation and illness over this time period. In the winter of 1942, the temperature was minus 40 and wood was barely available. To survive the soldiers would form bee-like hives in the middle of the night. You got 15 minutes in the center of the hive to sleep and then you were rotated to the outside to freeze, before you gradually worked your way back to the center.

The "bread" sometimes consisted of a mixture of flour cut with sawdust. And bread was all you received most days. In the winter months you ate snow for water. Sometimes you drank horse piss because the Russian Army took better care of the horses than they did the soldiers. My father was assigned to listen on the radio for German communications. Somehow the word that the Russians were drinking horse piss in desperation got to the Germans and they were discussing it one day while my father was listening on the radio. He heard the shock in the German officers voices. "These people are animals," one officer said. "We'll never win this war." That officer was prescient.

The strategy of the Germans was to starve the Russians out of their city. But how do you drive people out for whom deprivation has been a way of life of at least a half millennium? The Germans were learning a lesson that every army seems to forget. When the opposition is perpetually impoverished, there is nothing you can deny them that will make them surrender. The Israeli's are learning that lesson in the West Bank and Gaza right now.

My father contracted typhoid in Leningrad. When the fever hit its peak, he said he saw a beautiful angel and felt her pulling his arm. He screamed out, "No! I'm not ready to go!" And then he remembered immediately waking up, his fever dropping.*

When the German's collapsed at Stalingrad, the war was essentially over. The Russians moved in on Leningrad, pushing from the outside and from the inside with the starved soldiers that included my father. The siege was broken. The Germans went into full retreat. And my father marched on for six months toward Warsaw, traveling about 2000 miles in 180 days.

When he reached Poland, he heard his second language - Yiddish was his first - spoken in the street for the first time in five years. But he couldn't find any Jews. None. He asked a Polish peasant, "Where were they?" All murdered was the answer. He marched through the Jewish pale, once home to millions of Jews, and he heard the same answer to his question in every shtetl. He didn't have the slightest bit of hope that his family survived.

Outside of Lublin, they came to the Majdanek extermination camp, hastily abandoned by the Germans. The rotting bodies were piled high. The stench made my father heave. The troop was concerned with the Russian POWs in the camp the Germans had left behind. My father wandered around looking at the bodies. His people. It was more than he could possibly comprehend. A mensch un Got lacht.

He thought about the day in 1939 he talked to his father, trying to convince him to leave for Russia. God will help us, his father had said. He felt the bitterness on his tongue. My father's best friend in his troop, an Armenian, found him amidst the bodies. My father felt his best friend's hand on his shoulder. "First they murdered us. Now they've murdered you," he said.

Shortly after he left the camp, my father walking alongside his colonel, felt the stare of a Polish peasant on him. My father was now a decorated soldier, a hardened corporal in the Russian Army. The peasant looked at my father with derision. People in Eastern Europe examine faces for their origin. It's part of the culture. They look at a person's features and try to decipher where they are from. Because of my parents, I find myself doing this frequently as well. And this peasant knew about my father with one look. "A dirty Jew," the peasant said. "Hitler missed you, eh?"

My father leapt at the man and brought him to the ground, pummeling him. Other soldiers had to pull my father off the peasant. His colonel was furious over this breach of discipline. He shouted at my father, swore at him. "You will be punished for this!" They stood there, the peasant still on the ground. Again, the peasant spoke. "Dirty Jew. Hitler should have killed you." The colonel asked my father what the peasant just said. My guess is that given the similarity between Russian and Polish, the colonel already knew. He just wanted confirmation.

There was a look of revulsion on the colonel's face and he turned to the peasant. "You were right to beat him," the colonel said. My father watched in shock as the colonel cooly and calmly brought out his pistol; without another word he shot the peasant in the head. Again my father felt nauseated, but he managed to hold his stomach back this time.

OK, that's where I'll stop this week. Sorry to end on such a gruesome note. But gruesome is what war is about.

*I had a similar dream once except I didn't have an angel grabbing my arm. It was four chubby guys in polo shirts and gray hair and beards singing to me, telling me it was time to go to heaven. I kid you not. A barbershop quartet was God's messenger. In my dream, I was irritated more than anything. "Hey, my dad got a beautiful angel when he was at death's door and I get you four ugly guys?" I said. "That's not fair!" The barbershop guys were a bit taken back by my insolence. "F*ck you," I said. "Go back and get an angel. I'm not going anywhere unless you do." And then I woke up.

Fabrications

A friend and wonderful mentor of mine died a while back. I first met him when I worked for him. I lasted a grand total of two weeks. He was very precise and meticulous. I'm not. I paint with a very broad brush. He was adept in theory and laboratory work. I'm not. Give me a differential equation to solve and I'm as happy as a clam. But put me in a laboratory and I'm a disaster. I'm way too absent minded. I forget things all of the time. I cannot, as a result, complete the most rudimentary of lab experiments.

I've been aware of this failing of mine ever since high school chemistry. And in college, I was so unnerved about the prospect of chemistry labs that I fulfilled my requirements by studying freshman chemistry by myself over the summer of freshman year so I could take a test to place out of the first semester. Then I took second semester via correspondence. There was no way I was ever going into a chemistry lab again.

Anyhow, this wonderful man hired me and told me that my facility with math was not enough. I needed to work in the lab and become competent. He was insistent on this point. I told him that I would try, but I didn't think it was a good idea at all. In my view, we were running two experiments. One was whatever lab work I'd be doing. The second was could I actually do anything of value in a lab?

In two weeks time, I screwed up one thing after another. There was a long term experiment that had been running for over seven years. I forgot something in the procedure and essentially killed seven years of work. And I was rightfully fired.

"You were right," he said. "I had no idea anyone could be so incompetent."

"It's not like I didn't warn you," I said in my defense.

"I've never seen such a thing. You should never, ever go near a laboratory again."

That was the end of my employment. But I still would see him every now and then. We would talk. He was about the same age as my father. He came from Poland like my father. He came from a wealthy family and spoke not a word of Yiddish, which I though was odd. But there was a bond of shared heritage between us and I felt like I could talk to him about anything.

He was a stone cold sober kind of man. He chose his words carefully. It was as if every word came from an oracle. He gave great and wise advice. And I believed every word he said.

There was a story he told me about coming to America. He told it to a lot of people. In August of 1939, he came to America for study at UCLA. His father sent him because or worries about Hitler and the prospect of war. My friend came to Ellis Island and the clerk looked at his papers for study. "What's University of California, Los Angeles?" The clerk had never heard of the school. He was convinced my friend's papers were forgeries. My friend was detained on Ellis Island for a month. War broke out in Poland. They couldn't send him back. Eventually, his papers were approved, but by then school started in UCLA and he couldn't enroll. The following spring he decided to enroll in Berkeley instead.

It's a good story. But it turns out that it's fabricated. When my friend died, his family found the paperwork associated with his coming to the US. He came in April of 1939, well before the war. The funny UCLA story? A fabrication as well. Having lived around talented b.s.'ers all of my life, I have a talent for b.s. detection. But this man, a mensch in every way you could possibly imagine, had completely fooled me.

Why change his date of coming to America to August? It makes the story more exciting of course. And the clerk not ever hearing of UCLA, that's a cute little narrative, too. When I heard that this story was fabricated I just smiled.

I believe we all have the need to invent narratives. It's hard wired within us. And we invent narratives all of the time concerning our own lives. Even if we have led the most exciting life anyone can possibly imagine, there is always the need to spice things up a bit and invent interesting details.

I think of my father telling stories back when I was a kid, and I wish I could hear them now. I'd be able to separate the real from the b.s. a lot better. But then I think, well this is how he wanted the world to see his life. And if that's what he wanted, isn't that in some ways better than the actual life he led?

I think of politicians inventing narratives as well. Clinton says she avoided sniper fire in Bosnia. Obama says he was a bit of a drug fiend as a teen. Those things don't bother me in the least. They're just being human. We all want to lead exciting lives whether real or imagined. It's as if our lives are a novel. Who wants to be the lead character in a boring novel?

Giving Your Money To Millionaires and Billionaires

A couple of days before April 1st, I received a broadcast email message from Obama's campaign requesting donations. I get these emails about once a week (as well as a once a week request from Clinton). What was interesting to me about this request was the rationale. The latest email from Obama said he needed the money mostly because it was the end of the month and he'd have to report his monthly fundraising prowess publicly:

"This will be the final report before the next series of primaries, and the results will be sized up and interpreted by everyone trying to gauge the strength of our campaign."

There it was. Obama didn't really need the money, folks. He just needed to look good. And sure enough, a few days later the big news from the press was that Obama raised 40 million dollars in March, 20 million dollars more than Clinton.*

The fact is that neither Obama or Clinton need this kind of money to run their campaigns. It's an incredible waste - over 300 million dollars and counting - that has been spent on advertising, charter jet travel, polling and lord knows what else. The public should give them both a boot in the butt for throwing away money. Yet people still are emptying their wallets.

More importantly, what all this money is doing is in fact cheapening the campaign. You don't need a mountain of money to get your point across on substantive issues. What you use megabucks for are 30 second ads and sound bites that often distort your opponent's positions and oversell your own. This campaign has in my opinion been the least substantive in my lifetime. And it's my best guess that one of the bigger reasons for this is that there has been too much money on the table.

Money has screwed up this campaign big time. Add in an increasingly shallow press, and you have a campaign where the information people need to make sound choices gets buried in catch phrases and gossip.

My view is that you have to be total idiot to give money to either Clinton or Obama. You're giving money to campaigns that already have a sea of dollars. If they've already spent most of it, that's their problem for being profligate.

By the way, Obama in his emails says that he's counting on the little guy. He doesn't want to be owned by fat cats willing to pay thousands for dinners. This is simply bull. The same week that I got his latest email, I also got an invitation from a local fundraiser to see Obama up close and personal for $2300 at a wine and cheese reception a few miles from where I live. So much for eschewing fat cats.

But I don't want to pick on Obama. If I get a call from either campaign asking for money, I'm going to treat it like a call from Bill Gates asking for spare change. They've got a lot of nerve asking me for money. And by giving them cash I'd be serving as an enabler in their efforts to trivialize campaign content.

Why do people donate money to campaigns that are already flush with cash? I have no idea. My guess is that people want to feel like they have a little piece of the election to call their own. They want to be a associated in some way with a winner. It gives them an emotional stake in their candidate of choice, kind of like putting money down in an NCAA pool makes you want to watch the basketball games.

For what it's worth, people do this with their donations to colleges and universities as well. For example, Harvard has an endowment in excess of 30 billion dollars. It doesn't need donations. It can run fine on its own. It's so wealthy that it doesn't need to charge tuition either. But like Obama and Clinton, Harvard does have the chutzpah to constantly beg for money from alumni. And it gets it. Hundreds of millions of unnecessary dollars pour into Harvard's coffers every year from alumni. Now supposedly, Harvard alumni are intelligent. But I have my doubts. Why on Earth are these people donating money to an institution that is already self sustaining?

You can say the much the same thing about Yale, Princeton and Stanford alumni who donate money. Ditto for people who graduated from elite and billion dollar endowment possessing small liberal arts colleges like Amherst and Williams. Again, none of these institutions need donations. But they get them and I'm guessing it's because people want an emotional stake in these colleges and universities. They want to say that they are attached to an academic powerhouse in more than name only.

As a result, billions of dollars annually that could go to useful and essential charities are given to institutions already so awash with money that they don't know what to do with it. It's a very funny world we live in. Money that could be so helpful to people in need ends up in the pockets of millionaires and billionaires.

*That the press considers this to be major news indicates their shallowness. It's easy to report about dollars and polls. It's work to report about real issues and ideas. They need to get back to work.

Razzle Dazzle

Yesterday, I went to what is known in Nashville as a "guitar pull." But I was in San Francisco, so it was called a "songwriting salon." I like these kinds of affairs whatever you call them. A bunch of songwriters show up in one house and they play one song each. In Nashville, the house is usually a dump, there's some pizza, and you literally pass the guitar around. But in San Francisco, you get a freshly remodeled condo with a gorgeous view of the city and bay, and Vietnamese eggs rolls with peanut sauce. You get a first rate PA and a baby grand piano if you want. I'll take the condo anytime.

But in many ways, I'll take the music of Nashville anytime over the stuff I hear in San Francisco. It's not that I like country music. I don't. But virtually everyone at a "guitar pull" is trying to entertain with their music. Every songwriter is aware that a song without an audience is like a diary entry. They know that their personal lives aren't anything anyone wants to hear about.

In San Francisco, somehow the entertainment value of music tends to get lost. People sing about their personal troubles again and again. Lost boyfriends. Lost girlfriends. Sisters being abused by their husbands. The aim I'm guessing is to create art. But mostly it's about catharthis. That's all well and good. But personally, I don't want to hear it.

I honestly don't believe that pop music is about art. The chord progressions are simple. The melodies have all been done before. The language of pop music lyrics is too simple to lend itself to art as well. It's all very basic crude material to work with. Occasionally, a musician can possess the talent to take this rough hewn, predictable stuff and turn it into a kind of folk art. But that kind of musician is a rare beast.

For the rest of us, pop music is about entertainment. You have an audience. You need to razzle dazzle them. Make them want to spontaneously jump on a table and dance. Make them want to strip off their clothes and smooch the next person they see. Make them want to laugh out loud. Very occasionally, make them need to get out four or five hankies and have a good cry.

That's what songwriting and pop music listening are about for me. When I listen to or write a song, I'm looking for one of those four things above. I ask, do I want to dance, do I want to smooch, do I want to laugh, do I want to cry? If I'm listening or writing and the answer is no to all of those questions, I know it's not a decent song.

For me, songs aren't about personal carthathis. If I need that, I'll talk to a good friend or a shrink. They aren't about art. If I need that, I'll listen to some classical or jazz, and even there art is rare. It's about coming home from a rough day, turning on an iPod or a stereo, listening and feeling better. It's about restoring your view of humanity. Sometimes I need something simple - a good pop song - to do that. I don't think it's asking too much for a songwriter to have the generosity to use their talent to go beyond themselves and entertain others.

Link For The Songwriting Hounds

For the songwriters out there that read this blog, just a short note that the NY Times has started a weekly blog on songwriting, Measure for Measure. You can find it here. So far there have been posts by Andrew Bird, Darrell Brown (so far the only one that isn't a performer; he's Keith Urban's right hand man), Roseanne Cash and Suzanne Vega.

Friday Old Country and Beyond Part II

Stolen Years

My father was a fabulous storyteller. His English was fractured - it was by far the worst of his five languages - but storytelling isn't really about vocabulary or grammar. It's about cadence, pacing and tone. Whatever I learned in my gut about narrative, I learned by watching and listening to him as a kid. And I'm nowhere as good as him.

People would come from the neighborhood some nights, and instead of watching TV in their homes or playing cards, would sit in our dining room and just listen. Mostly he told stories about his experiences in World War II. It was a very Homeric thing. My mother would serve coffee, tea and cake and my father would hold court. I'd look at these neighbors mesmerized by my father's words and kvell. Just by sitting at the head of the dining room table and spinning a yarn, he held his audience in rapture.

If you listened to these stories enough times, you noticed that the details kept changing. How much stuff he made up on the fly I don't know. He was a very skillful b.s.'er and to this day I don't know what is truth and what is fiction. In general, he was angry and unhappy with a hair trigger temper, but when he told stories, there was a certain calm in him. You could be around him then and know there wouldn't be an eruption of his unhappiness. And maybe because of that, I liked to be around him when he told stories, just to see him temporarily at peace.

What's interesting to me is that I don't remember most of the stories he told, even though I heard them tens of times over. There was one story he told me privately when I was thinking about going to the Ukraine to visit his home town and he told me that I should never go. I'll save that one for later. I think part of it is in a blog posting a while back.

I'll start with his leaving Ludmir with his female cousin at the beginning of the war in 1939. He was about 20 at the time; she was probably about 17. How they crossed the border into the USSR, a few tens of kilometers east, I don't know. You can get an idea of what that might have been like from reading the autobiography of another Ludmir native entitled Man is Wolf To Man. Many people tried to cross and were unsuccessful. My father never mentioned any difficulty, but he was a very resourceful person, and it seems he already knew Russian fairly well.

They headed East to avoid the war by hoboing on trains and by foot. There were rumors that it was possible to get to America through China so he and his cousin travelled East thousands of miles to Tashkent. A wonderful book about this migration and what life was like in Tashkent is My Mother's Sabbath Days by the Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade (a writer that deserves far more attention than he gets). My father wasn't a reader of books at all and my mother rarely read them (perhaps she read one book every three or four years). But I gave my mother Grade's book one year and she read it straight through in a week. She said to me after that I shouldn't have given it to her, that it made her cry. But then she said to me that she had never seen her own life put so well on paper. "This is truth," she said to me in Yiddish.

Life in Tashkent was miserable. Living conditions were deplorable for the thousands of Jewish immigrants there. And the rumor of getting across into China was just that. People were house communally in makeshift shacks. There was little food. Sanitation was non-existent. People were dying of typhoid and other diseases. My father would go off into the forests and log trees to get by. He said the work was the hardest thing he had ever done by far. The axes were junk. The supervisors were tyrants. It was almost slave labor and many people broke or lost limbs and fingers.

In 1941, the Germans broke their pact with the Russians, and war started anew thousands of miles east. Millions of Russian soldiers were being killed in the battlefields due to the disastrous planning of Stalin and what was left of the military staff that he didn't execute right before and right after the war began.

Stalin was quickly desperate for soldiers of any kind. He "liberated" all Poles in the USSR, which meant that he would use the able bodied males for canon fodder in the Russian Army. In Tashkent, my father tried unsuccessfully to avoid being taken.

As a Polish Jew, he was placed into the Polish-Red Army. His combat unit, led by a Russian Colonel, consisted of a ragtag group of Jews, Armenians, and other undesirables. They were hastily trained and poorly equipped to fight with little in the way of guns or bullets. According to my father, they were immediately sent far west to help protect Leningrad.

It was a hopeless defense, and his troop, in the front lines with little discipline or experience, fell quickly. They had no loyalty to the USSR and knew they were simply there to use up German bullets. My father survived because somehow he became a confidant of the Colonel.

Sometimes in his stories my father would say he was a cook. Other times he would say he knew enough German to listen in on communications with the German soldiers. Who knows what the truth is on this matter? The cook story is kind of funny, because he was simply awful at cooking; I would dread my mother taking trips because of it. And I joked with him more than once that his cooking probably killed as many soldiers in the Polish Red Army as did Hitler. My father loved gallows humor like this. His response usually was that being a cook in the army meant that he had nothing to do since there was never any food.

While my father's troop had little fire in their belly, they marveled at the Russians, who would join arms and surge forward without bullets, crying out their allegiance to Mother Russia as they fell. What could produce such loyalty in the face of such a hopeless situation? He'd never seen such a thing.

Next Friday I'll continue this story. I'll end this post with what my father always said when someone asked about his age. He would tell them his age according to his citizenship papers (which was off by at least two years but that's another story for later). But then he'd always have a qualifier. It would go something like this.

"How old are you, Leon?"

"Forty six, but in truth I'm thirty nine."

"Why is that?"

"The war. I didn't live for seven years. They don't count."

Badabump. That was my father's kind of humor.