First stop as a tourist.

The battlefield is like a battlefield. Some plains, a hill, a nice cemetery, and memorials. This one is interesting from the standpoint that the side that won the battle got to write most of the content even though the memorial is administered by the losing side’s parks service. About half of Custer’s army was born in Europe. And I’m wondering, after they killed their horses in order to give themselves something to take cover behind, how much optimism remained among Custer’s troops.

Custer's Last View (might have looked different then).

Also: There were a lot of bikers in the area. I guess the Sturgis thing started over the weekend. If you’re 70 years old, I’m not sure that wearing a jolly Roger bandanna makes you bad ass. Not entirely sure is all.

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This was the “follow up” to With the Old Breed, which is the greatest first-person account of war I’m aware of. It was written by the same guy, Eugene Sledge. Unfortunately, it turns out that 100 pages of musings about sitting around in China after the war isn’t quite as gripping as actual war narrative.

This is going to be a short post.

• They should have taken the last 20 pages of China Marine, when Sledge actually gets to go home, and put it at the end of With the Old Breed.
• And then the rest of it they could have posted on his website or whatever.

The last 20 pages or so were very cool and brought satisfying closure to the overall story that began with With the Old Breed. Just that the China that filled the first 80 pages was pretty bland. A lot of discussion of how it was annoying to still be in some amount of danger even though the war was over as well as talking about food and walking around Beijing.

Endut.

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1. Lung cancer: 157,400
2. Car accidents: 42,443
3. Breast cancer: 40,600
4. Prostate cancer: 31,500
5. Prescription drug reactions: 31,000
6. Suicide: 30,602
7. Murder: 20,308
8. Hypertension: 19,250
9. Illicit drug use: 17,000
10. AIDS/HIV: 14,175
11. Poisoning: 14,078
12. Suffocation: 5,555
13. Gallbladder cancer: 3,300
14. Drowning: 3,281
15. Terrorist attacks: 2,986

It’s tricky identifying *one* cause of death (e.g., was the cause of death smoking or lung cancer?), but I don’t think that negates the point here. Even at its height, namely 2001, terrorist-related deaths in the US were not particularly significant compared to other causes of death. When you further amortize those deaths across the decades with few if any terrorist deaths, the number becomes even less significant.

I don’t think there are a lot of good ways to die, but death is clearly inevitable. The more society does to curb death, the more it seems to restrict the quality of life. Laws, agencies, and procedures put into place since September 11, 2001 have done this and done so in the name of preventing a cause of death that may be dramatic, but is one that has never been significant. These costs and infringements on personal liberty are a sop to irrationality.

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And for as extremely polite as they are to your face, southerners are the most impolite drivers in the country. There, it’s been said.

Meanwhile, cool battlefields and cemeteries:

This is an artillery piece from the Yorktown National Battlefield. For as important a battle as it was (it was the last major action in the Revolutionary War), there wasn’t a whole lot to look at. OTOH, the movie was informative and didn’t make me hate George Washington like Mt. Vernon’s did.

Some monument commemorating the battle. The setting is pretty, fwiw. I’d rather have died of a musket shot here than most places.

This artillery is from the Petersburg National Battlefield. There was a lot to see there. It was sort of the South’s last hope at keeping the North out of their one industrial center in Richmond. Was struck by how similar the tactics here were to those employed in World War I (a lot of trenches, stalemates, and unfortunate runs across no-man’s lands). Also thought that the whole thing with the Pennsylvanian miners digging tunnels under the Confederate lines in order to blow them up with dynamite was pretty cool, even if it wasn’t decisive or anything.

On a side-note, Petersburg is as run-down a town as I’ve ever visited, but otoh lunch specials at the Chinese place in town were under $6. There may be a correlation.

Here’s what the Blandford Cemetery looks like:

It was kind of cool. The church there was, after the war, turned into a “memorial chapel”. The Tiffany Company donated stained glass windows for it, with one window for each state that was aligned with the South (including Missouri and Maryland). I pointed out to the tour guide that the windows’ backgrounds corresponded with the actual direction you were facing (e.g., the western windows had mountains in the background, eastern had ocean), which apparently had never occurred to her. Maybe they don’t get many visitors.

Her: That *could* be what it is.

Me: Well, the sun is rising over the ocean in the eastern windows.

Her: Or is it setting?

Me: Assuming that’s the east, I hope it’s rising.

Although it’d be interesting if the earth started spinning the other direction. Kudos to her for keeping that dream alive.

Jefferson Davis’s grave:

Seems weird he was buried in Richmond rather than in Mississippi, where he was a senator. I dunno, whatever. He moved around a lot.

The cemetery is called the Hollywood Cemetery. There are some CSA generals buried there, IIRC, and a couple of forgettable US presidents as well. They also have this:

You just don’t hear much about the Jewish Confederate experience.

Monroe and Tyler Too were the presidents. I guess there are more forgettable ones out there.

And then driving out of Richmond, I cruised down Monument Boulevard, which includes monuments to six of Richmond’s favorite sons (most of whom were not from Richmond):

• (Gen.) Robert E. Lee
• (Gen.) J.E.B. Stuart
• (Pres.) Jefferson Davis
• (Gen.) “Stonewall” Jackson
• Matthew Fontaine Maury (renowned oceanographer (?!) and Confederate “Chief of Sea Coast, River and Harbor Defences” in Virginia)
• Arthur Ashe (the tennis player)

One of these kids is not like the others. Nice houses on the street, though. A lot of statues of guys on horses. One statue of a guy with a tennis racket.

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That’s the White House of the Confederacy. The exterior is pretty unprepossessing. The side shown above is actually the back — the front is plainer. Supposedly the back was done up more because it’s the side that faces the (James) river and the place where guests would have hung out. Richmond city planners didn’t exactly go out of their way to preserve the “sanctity” of the location. The brick hospital that surrounds it on all sides is one of the uglier hospital complexes I’ve ever seen in my life.

For that matter, Richmond’s an aesthetically disappointing city generally. The topography should lend itself to something cool, but it hasn’t happened. Probably because all the good stuff got destroyed in the war (although they’ve had 145 years to recover).

The white house is a nice mansion. The stuff inside was cool. Plenty of smoking parlors, very tasteful. George Eastman and I could’ve hung out there and felt at ease, although I guess we both probably would’ve been weirded out by the slaves there. The tour guide looked like he was half-man, half-bloodhound, but he knew the heck out of that mansion, Richmond, Jefferson Davis, and the Confederacy. And fwiw, Davis didn’t really live here very long. Three years IIRC.

It  also didn’t cost much compared to less historically-relevant mansions (I think the museum + mansion ticket was $12; I mean, not *cheap*, but not hilariously awful either).

The museum was all right-to-good. It didn’t hammer home the Civil War story of the Confederacy like I thought it would — mostly just short write-ups on key battles posted next to displays of flags and uniforms. They had some cool artwork that I liked though. I think this is the most famous Confederate painting that exists:

Depicts the last meeting of Generals Lee and Jackson — before Jackson died from pneumonia at Spotsylvania.

My favorite part of the museum, though, was the more proletariat-focused art. Like this:

These are just a couple of pencil sketches done by some confederate soldier. I’m guessing they’re depicting one of the better days in camp (fishing with your buddies, hanging out by the fire smoking your pipe), but I think it explains a whole lot more about the Civil War experience than does Stonewall’s revolver — not just in terms of content, but in terms of perspective. It also supports my thesis on humanity that even the most horrendous situations become normal to people over time. Yep.

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Of those two areas, I think I dug the early years part the most, maybe just because it’s a more-forgotten time. It covered a lot of “expansion era” Marine Corps activities, where the Corps acted as an expeditionary force in securing colonies in, frex, the Philippines.

Like the rest of the museum, these new areas do some cool stuff to help the visitor experience the history they’re viewing. Like in the Philippines occupation area, you walk through this “tent” and through one “wall” of the tent, you can see shadows of marines hanging out by the fire, wearing expedition hats, whittling sticks, and smoking pipes. It’s simple and not very data-rich, but it’s ingenious in its ability to convey how it might have felt to actually be a marine stationed in the Philippines at the turn of the century (minus the heat and humidity). No plaque could have conveyed that.

Photo:

The World War I exhibit was also strong, although it started off with a short, made-for-museum video loop of a kid dressed up like in the old days hawking newspapers on an in-studio streetcorner. Hated that. The kid actor was terrible, like he was trying to channel Meeno Peluce. Children should *never* be allowed to act. I don’t know why I’m the only person who seems to have realized this universal truth. I guess this kind of intro might appeal to blue-hairs, but man it was tacky and over-the-top. To me.

The rest of World War I was good, though. They had a short Belleau Wood reenactment video (yes, made-for-museum) that I liked a lot. They did with it what I always thought every war movie always should have done (but did the opposite instead) in that I think they saturated the colors on the film. Most (recent) war movies (e.g., Private Ryan, Band of Brothers) have de-saturated the color (= made the colors less vibrant) in order to give them an “authentic”, sentimental, old feel. OTOH, every first-hand account of front-line warfare that I’ve read has expressed that, in battle, combatants’ senses have been in overdrive. In that sense, it seems to me like an over-saturated color palette would best convey the image of warfare and I think that’s what they did here. (I can’t prove that they saturated the colors, but they definitely didn’t de-saturate.)

They might have shifted things a little to the blue, too.

And for the sake of playing copy editor (how fun!), they had a sign there that referred to German soldiers calling the marines “teufelhunden” (sic). That’d be capitalized in German and pretty sure it should’ve been on the sign, too.

Also watched the museum movie this time (I guess I didn’t last time — it was totally new to me). It’s a great, engaging, and moving ten-minute branding video that hits everything it should and does it without feeling too sentimental, although it did include senators John Glenn and John Warner saying (in effect) that without the Marine Corps, they wouldn’t have become senators, which to me seems like a case *against* the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps: we make politicians! Yikesnothankyou, etc. IMHO. Perhaps Sens. Warner and Glenn also appropriate(d) funds for museums, which doesn’t lessen the problem.

The Marines are still really good at telling stories and this is still very possibly the most cogent, most nailed-it museum I’ve been to. With the new galleries, it’d be kind of a long day to go all the way through in one shot. I’m not sure who my audience is for this post.

Ending so with,

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The seller:

• Grew up in Brookline (a part of Pittsburgh).
• Went to the Catholic high school because he didn’t want to go to the Pittsburgh public high school.
• Put himself through high school making $0.50/hour doing odd jobs for the school.
• His father always wanted to move the family to Lincoln Place, but his mother wouldn’t let him.
• He bought his truck from a transit authority employee who lived in Lincoln Place.
• He thinks Lincoln Place is the best part of Pittsburgh city (although he might have just been being nice).
• He’s on disability.
• Before that, he did HVAC systems.
• Although when he first got out of high school, he did masonry work.
• His high school was a college preparatory school, although he had no intention of going to college — he just didn’t want to go to the Pittsburgh public school.
• Any time a teacher seemed unlikely to pass him, he told him/her that he couldn’t study as much as he wanted to because he had to work odd jobs in order to afford to go there.
• He got mostly C’s.
• He kind of thinks he might like to go to college now, although he’d prefer it if the classes were mostly three hours once a week, rather than three times a week at 45 minutes a pop.
• He went to a trade school to learn HVAC and that was all right.
• He has two daughters, both of whom attended Robert Morris (University).
• The one is brilliant and if you have her read 40 pages of something, she can recite it back to you.
• The other one takes after her father and if she reads those pages 40 times, can’t remember a thing.
• The younger one got talked into living on campus for her last 3 1/2 years by one of her professors who was concerned about her being otherwise unable to have the “full college experience”.
• As a result, she racked up $60K+ in student loan debt (her parents live about 15 minutes from campus).
• She only made three friends during college (= $20K/friend). Only one of those three still lives in Pennsylvania.
• She’s not very outgoing.
• The other daughter was smart enough to talk the school into allowing her to take night classes for her undergraduate degree because, she told them, she was poor and had to work during the day. She wasn’t poor — she just preferred having class once a week and at night.
• Now she wants to get a PhD, but he’s not sure she and her husband can afford that.
• Whenever boys would come pick up his girls for a date, he would tell them that if he smelled alcohol on their breath when they brought the girl home, they would end up being buried in the backyard.
• Although he and his father-in-law made their own wine and, when his kids were old enough (high school?), they were welcome to drink.
• He always invited their high school dates to come in and have a drink of wine, but none of them ever wanted to.
• His wife has seasonal affective disorder in the winter time.
• He’d kind of like to move to Florida for the weather, although Pittsburgh weather mostly affects his wife, not him.
• Plus, he doesn’t want to move because his daughters still live in the area.

The other fifteen minutes of the discussion was mostly about weather.

Here’s the washing machine:

As it gets slowly walked back into position.

The water hoses that came with the house leak with great ferocity, so I have to go out and buy new ones. As a consequence, I had to raid my old suitcase for more underwear and t-shirts. “Clean, Dry Clothes by Friday!” is my new mantra.

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PS, Yes, I got the drum sander and started on the floors last night — will update on that later. Also got Red Dead Redemption and got started on that yesterday afternoon.

Your chance of death, YOUR CHANCE OF DEATH, is 100-percent, regardless of what lifestyle behaviors you pursue. You will die. You will not die twice or even three times. Just once. But definitely once. No matter what.

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First off, I’m glad that the TSA is finally getting around to their most important assignment: self-preservation through public relations. Otherwise known as scaring people into thinking that they’re still relevant.

I love these accomplishments, though. System wide, an entire week of travel, and *these* are the Great Results that the TSA has wrought. They found TWO “artfully concealed” prohibited items? I’m guessing someone figured out how to turn a laptop into a water bottle. Arrests for “suspicious behavior”? I’m guessing bloggin about how stupid the TSA is would be considered “suspicious” by the TSA, no? 32 incidents that involved a checkpoint closure — and they’re trying to make out like that’s a good thing.

Seriously. Hire a new PR agency, one that’s willing to go the full monty and give you something worth reporting on by trying to smuggle timed explosives through. None of the things on the list above necessarily had anything to do with a terrorist activity. It’s very possible to have a gun in your possession without trying to take over an airplane (I’m not necessarily advocating allowing people to bring guns on planes, but if someone were to get away with it — that’s not in itself dangerous.)

How about putting another line item on there for productivity minutes lost nationwide as a result of the “enhanced screening process”? Maybe that’s what they were getting at with the closure count.

Remember that Simpsons episode with the bear patrol? Lisa tells Homer that the rock she has in her hand is keeping bears tigers away because, well, she’s holding it and neither of them see any bears tigers around.

Homer buys the rock.

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More here.

Y’know, the Soviet Union started with good intentions. For that matter, so did the German Democratic Republic. I mean, sure, their politicians wanted all the power for themselves, but so long as they kept their populace safe, secure, and somewhat fed, who could mind?

Please wake up.

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Anti-individualistic, the fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity…. The fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.

Yes, I found this on Wikipedia.

To paraphrase, according to its father’s teachings, fascism is the governing theory in which the state is supreme and the individual exists for the sake of the state.

Endut! Hoch Hech!

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Just saw this on Cato-at-Liberty:

(The recording and interview with the guy are the good part, the rest of the clip is usual FoxNews grandstanding and chest-thumping.)

Seriously, though, how can anyone *not* have a problem with a quasi-police force at the airport that’s not responsible enough to inform people of their rights, but feels empowered to harass and detain (and arrest) people that, in one officer’s opinion, are “suspicious”. TSA is a cost without a real benefit. It’s a system set up by the state to make a system less efficient and deprive individuals of privacy and that can provide no actual evidence of preventing any sort of terrorism whatsoever. The only “benefit” of the current TSA is that it makes the soft-brained feel better about traveling on airplanes.

Willingness to exchange privacy and liberty for perceived safety was a great hallmark of the Hitler regime. If what people want is fascism, they should at least have the self awareness to say so rather than misappropriating words like “freedom” and “equality”.

Man. I can’t stand that anyone still thinks that “heightened airport security” is a good thing. Man, but I wish these guys would get on with it and succeed already.

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Stated Reasons for Continuing the War:

• Because “The Surge” is working. (Seriously, this was presented as an actual reason to continue the war in a Wall Street Journal opinion article.)
• In order to spread democracy to Iraq. (So how come we’re not invading Russia and spreading democracy there? Oh, right, because they’re already democratic — sort of like the German Democratic Republic was, I guess.)
• Because of 9/11. (?)
• To stop the terrorists.
• To establish a strong relationship with another oil-rich nation.

Stated reasons for ending the war:

• Because it’s an imperialist, racist war.
• Because too many Americans and Iraqi civilians have died.
• Blood-for-oil is wrong.
• Because we’re just encouraging the terrorists and ruining our international reputation.
• Because it’s illegal.

The problem with all of these reasons is that none of them get down to the details that matter. Instead, they’re all just bumper sticker-quality sound bites that seem to serve only to unite the masses within their respective teams. Ugh: humanity. It’s not about your team, it’s about good decision-making.

The only valid reason for continuing the war in Iraq is the belief that, from this point forward, the benefit to waging the war outweighs its cost. The only valid reason for pulling out of Iraq is the belief that, from this point forward, the cost of waging the war outweighs the benefit. While many of the above reasons hint at benefits and costs, none of them glance at the other side of the balance or are considered to the point of actually understanding the details from which to derive an actual value. If we’re going to argue mindlessly with opinions rooted only in our environmental and cultural biases, at least we could argue to those specifications.

Or, better yet, we could seek rational figures and probabilities that would help us determine the best course of action. It’s not hard to reduce the value of the Iraq war from this point forward to a mathematical equation in order to weigh the benefit against the cost: it’s just a net present value (NPV) evaluation. All we need to do is understand and quantify the costs (from this point forward) and then understand and quantify the benefits (form this point forward).

“From this point forward” because everything that’s already happened is a sunk cost and can’t be changed at this point.

Post over.

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(Re-read this after doing the thing about posts I hadn’t posted yet and there-during impressed myself. It’s still relevant enough, I guess — and there’s always Afghanistan.)

1. Seatbelt laws.
2. Patriot Act.
3. Airport security.
4. Airport closures for “suspicious comments” (and exploded batteries).
5. Homeland security.
6. DUI checkpoints.
7. Helmet laws.
8. Mandatory waiting periods.
9. Car seat laws.
10. School attendance requirements.
11. Having to register with your driver’s license in order to buy Sudafed.
12. Marijuana busts by helicopter.
13. Real ID.
14. Social Security identification for newborns.
15. Neighborhood speed bumps.
16. No Child Left Behind
17. Tax refund IOUs.
18. Increase in paramilitary police units.
19. State-enforced smoking bans in private establishments.
20. No-knock warrants.
21. Sorbanes-Oxley maybe.

Note: this isn’t a particularly serious piece of research or anything. But I still think I’m probably right. And I’m probably missing several major instances. Meh.

Power-fighting,

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Therefore, my hypothesis: it’s better to be living better in a dump than other people who are also living in a dump than it is to be living in a palace but living worse than other people living in a palace. Assuming that dumps and palaces are themselves closed, discrete environments of course.

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So I dunno. I think *most people* would say that the columns don’t matter nearly as much as the lines. They’d rather a positive outcome from a bad intent than a negative outcome from a good intent. In theory, I think most people would agree to that.

In practice, though, I think the opposite often occurs and people start valuing intent more than outcome. And then they do things like trying to spin a bad outcome as positive, because surely a well-meaning person’s action must result in something positive. Similarly, a positive outcome from a bad intent gets spun into something negative or is said to not have actually come from the mal-intender.

Anyway. I think the top row should always be preferred with NW > N > NE. On the other two rows, I’m not so sure. I think C might be better than W, if only because it was intended and therefore should’ve been expected. So maybe C > W > E. Similarly in the bottom row — I dunno. I guess I’d prefer it almost always if the person *meant* well, even if the outcome is the same as if the person had meant harm. At least someone who means well might have some other redeemable qualities outside the event in question.

I guess the other question is whether intent has any importance whatsoever. A person whose outcomes are always positive should possibly always be labeled as “good” and any claims of that person to have had bad intentions more a reflection of the person’s own lack of self-awareness.

Just a thought.

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This seems like a classic case of Clayton Christensen’s “disruptive innovation” overwhelming a traditional business model. An old-school enterprise has to maintain its old-school practices in order to keep its reliable cash cow alive. As soon as they try to switch up what they’re doing, they risk starving the cow and having nothing to show for it. Shareholders won’t stand for *that*. The problem comes when people start overwhelmingly preferring soy milk and you’re entirely invested in dairy cattle. At that point the game’s just over and your job is to maintain your dignity and go out as a good loser.

I don’t see the benefit of expending energy to “save newspapers”. People want news, others want to provide it, but why does the NYT (or any other old-model business) need to profit from the exchange? Organizations are what they are and when they try to change their DNA, they usually fail (like when United Airlines decided they were more than just an airline and bought Hertz and Westin and started calling themselves “Allegis”). If an organization doesn’t start out with adaptation and evolution at its core, it risks getting innovated out of existence by better, later substitutes.

From a business perspective, I think the best course of action for the daily newspapers is to downscope in order to stay profitable as long as possible and when the reaper finally comes for them (next year?), be dignified enough to just curl up by the fire and quietly pass on. I’m guessing, instead, of course, they’ll start lobbying congress to keep them on life support and prop up their antiquated models and then we’ll all get to endure story after story on NPR about how society is toilet-bound due to the struggles of major newspapers. Or I suppose I could just turn the radio off.

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Biggest Question: How did they manage to hang out together for a month (longer?) without either of them ever learning a word of the other’s language?

Too Long By: 20 minutes.

Haiku Synopsis:

On island marooned,

Old enemies become friends

And then they blow up.

Grade: 7/10 (loses a full point for the ending).

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Nixon Library, though. Was mostly about his life and times, with strong focus on his political career. I came away from the career retrospective thinking he was a tragic figure, betrayed by his own ambition that repeatedly overruled principles (I think his downfall came when he defied his mother and joined the Navy). Otherwise, it’s a pretty good humble beginnings-to-ultimate power story up until the whole Watergate thing.

The library doesn’t actually bring up Watergate. And anyway, I’m guessing Lincoln did worse than Watergate to John Breckinridge and we just don’t know about it b/c the MSM was all deferential and stuff back then.

Nixon’s birth house (the library is located on the land that used to be the family farm) was neat, but then I sort of just like old houses. Seems like it used space more efficiently than a modern house would, although I supposed there might be reasons why homes don’t have master bedrooms coming off the entry way any more.

Here’s a photo:

Reflecting pool with old farm house in the background!

And the docents were friendly.

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Went to Sea World back in December. I’m now an annual member (because it cost the same as a day pass, that’s why)! The killer whale show is called “Believe!”. Right, so I *believed* in killer whales *before* even having to go to the show. May as well have encouraged folks to believe in lighthouses — they’re closer to extinction and at least *they* sort of do something good for people.

My favorite line: “…and she honors us by allowing us to work with her children.” If it *isn’t* okay to train killer whales to take part in for-profit public spectacles, then pretending that they’ve given you permission to do so might not make it all right. Maybe we should pray to Shamu and see if she’ll honor us by verifying.

To be fair, the show wasn’t *actually* about witnessing to the fact that killer whales exist — although the orca-as-God idea did seem to be its most forceful message. And it wasn’t like they were resorting to logic to explain their theme, which technically was about how if you dream of one day growing up to swim with killer whales, then it must happen!

Such an insidiously Gen Y sentiment. Good luck, kids. There are only likely to be about 50 whale trainers in your entire generation and you probably won’t be one of them. Not even if you pray to Obama like a good little boy/girl.

 

On the other hand, if only I had the faith of a whale-trainer, then the world would bow to my will!

Ugh. Sea World. If I were a drinker, I’d boycott Anheuser-Busch. And their shadowy Belgian parent company.

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