All posts by Steve Stern

Bradley Manning

Americana, War

Bradley ManningBefore, I start I want to acknowledge that Bradley Manning has much bigger attachments than most people and that includes me. He is one of the few people in the world that have been willing to make a huge personal sacrifice to do what they think is right.

Carol Burnett once said that Comedy is Tragedy plus Time. I think a corollary of that might be A Hero is a Traitor plus Time. Maybe you don’t think Bradley Manning  is a hero – although I think he is – and the judge has already ruled that he is not a traitor by throwing out the charge of  Aiding the Enemy, and it is still too early to look at Manning and see reality through the fog of our own preconceptions, but he has exposed to light a dark part of our National Character.

Today, most people think that Daniel Ellsberg, if not a hero, was a patriot and a positive contributor to our collective history.  But, that is now. In January of 1973, he was thought a traitor by the government and brought to trail under the Espionage Act as well as charges of theft and conspiracy. He would have gone to jail for up to 115 years if the judge hadn’t thrown out the case because of government misconduct. That is much less likely to happen in the military court where Manning is being tried.

What Ellsberg did do was embarrass the United States – or, more accurately, the Nixon, Johnson, and Kennedy Administrations, or, even more accurately, powerful, people in those administrations – by showing, in Ellsberg’s words, that the [Nixon and] Johnson Administrations had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance. Bradley Manning has done pretty much of the same thing only with alot more documents.

Among  91,731 other classified documents, Manning gave WikiLeaks videos of an American helicopter airstrike in Baghdad in 2007 and an airstrike in Granai, Afghanistan in 2009. Both airstrikes were most likely accidents and both were classified. The 2007 airstrike was  was against a journalist and two other men who were Reuters employees carrying cameras (the helicopter then fired on a van that stopped to help). The 2009 airstrike killed somewhere between 86–147 Afghan civilians (depending on who is counting).

We don’t like to admit that we kill journalists or civilians in our  hygienic wars and, when we do kill them, it often gets covered up. To kill journalists or civilians is embarrassing. I don’t think that making wars and killing seem civilized and controllable is in the best interest of the United States and I don’t think that the guy who exposes these cover-ups  should be put in jail.

Democracy is doomed without informed citizens, says Robert Meeropola, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s son, and I believe he is right. That is where I disagree with the Obama Administration. Maybe I don’t disagree with Obama himself, maybe he really does still believe in the transparency that he ran on. Maybe his administration is going after Manning only because they think they have no political choice, or, maybe they are only trying to cover their asses. I hope Obama still believes in transparency, but I don’t know and have no way of knowing, so I can only hope.

 

Some thoughts while buying tile

Americana, Around home

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A couple of days ago, Michele and I went down to Bullnose Tile in San Jose to get some tile for our bathroom floor. The place was packed and when I asked a sales person if this was usual, she said something along the line of Yea, everybody is remodeling.

It used to be that, as people made more money, they moved to bigger houses. That is the American way. In the 1890’s, or so, most people didn’t even live in detached houses, they lived in apartments or – later – multifamily housing. Even so, except for the very, very, rich, most detached houses were pretty small. Much later, when I first went to work for Shapell Homes in 1971, we -they? – were building homes in Milpitas, less than ten air-miles from downtown San Jose. Our smallest house was 1048 square feet and our largest was about 1850 square feet. Many of the people who were moving into those houses were moving out of 750 to 850 square foot houses in south Palo Alto or Cupertino.

When I left Shapell in 1976, our average house at Kimber Farms in Fremont, was around 2228 square feet. Kimber was about twenty miles from downtown San Jose. When the market crashed in 2008, builders were selling 2500 to 3500 square foot homes in Modesto about 85 miles from San Jose. In a reverse of what had been happening in the United States for the last fifty years, the houses that people are now remodeling are closer to downtown, older and, most likely, smaller than the big McMansions built out in what were the booming exburbs ten years ago.

Now comes what I think is the ironic part, those houses in Modesto are becoming the new slums as people, who can afford it, are moving back into – and remodeling – smaller homes in Milpitas and Fremont. Today, one can buy a nice 2250 square foot house in Modesto for $250,000; that house in Palo Alto – granted a very expensive place where your neighbor might be Mark Zukerburg – would be about Three Million! Palo Alto was never cheap, but lots of areas that were inexpensive are now being gentrified at an alarming rate. Even a 1200 square foot house in what used to be in the barrios of Redwood City now sells for $600,000.

In my imagination, I see a Christmas party in which  people go to the boss’es house that is smaller than their own and closer to downtown. On their one and half hour drive back home, they agree to start looking for a smaller house in Milpitas. Maybe even a house on which I was the General Superintendent in 1971.

 

 

Doing evil: Dr. Marta Shearing, Wernher von Braun, Larry Grisolano, Chauncey McLean, and Caesar’s Palace

Americana, Politics

rachel-weisz-the-bourne-legacy-14 Michele and I watched The Bourne Legacy a couple of days ago. If you haven’t seen it, the conceit is that – through a secret Government program called Treadstone – several top operatives have been chemically enhanced. They are both mentally and physically much more capable than the usual super-capable, James Bond type agent. Very early on, in the movie establishes that the people involved in running Treadstone are ruthless  and evil. When the program gets exposed, to cauterize the leaks and save their own asses, the project heads start trying to kill everybody involved.

Dr. Marta Shearing is a brilliant scientist working on the project because the science is so interesting. She semi-doesn’t know how bad and evil the project is (part of why she doesn’t know is because she really doesn’t want to know). This science that, presumably, could be used for good purposes is – in Treadstone – being used to make enhanced killers.

I just read the The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics will reprint a series of articles on space exploration that were first published in Colliers Magazine in 1952.  Wernher von Braun, along with several others, wrote the articles and I would have been about twelve when I first saw them. The articles were spectacularly illustrated and, as a twelve-year-old, that was probably their biggest attraction but what ever the reason, they drew me into the world of rockets and space travel (if you are interested, the AIAA will reprint them in their entirety).

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It wasn’t until years later, when I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, that I learned von Braun earned his chops designing V-2 rockets for the Nazis. Like Marta Shearing, he was a brilliant scientist who was willing to sell his soul to pursue the intellectual work he was interested in. According to Wikipedia, According to a BBC documentary in 2011, the attacks [V-2] resulted in the deaths of an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel, while 12,000 forced labourers and concentration camp prisoners were killed producing the weapons.  The forced labor was not von Braun’s concern and he makes a strong case that he really didn’t know about it and an even better case – although inadvertently – that he didn’t want to know.

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A couple of days ago, Richard Taylor sent me a New York Times article, Data You Can Believe In, that talks about a singular breakthrough in the field of television ad buying. Working on the Obama campaign, Larry Grisolano and Chauncey McLean, among others, developed cutting edge technology to much better identify where to spend television dollars to get maximum effect (using social media, it is also much more intrusive than conventional, now old-fashioned, methods). Without going into detail – that I don’t know -a pretty good argument can be made that they were instrumental in Obama winning the election. The problem is that the election is over, the need – in Obama’s case, at least – is over and Grisolano and McLean want to keep working on the technology.

That is where Caesar’s comes in. This is exactly the kind of technology that Caesar’s can use to get casual gamblers to make more trips to the tables and working for Caesar’s allows Grisolano and McLean to keep doing what they love. According to the article McLean treated his shift from selling Obama to selling Caesars as a small discomfort that was necessary if he wanted to keep working on the technological advancements he and his colleagues developed on the campaign.

Seeing these three separate stories at about the same time got me thinking about them as different sides of the same coin (will that analogy hold up?). Good people, brilliant people, moral people, doing immoral acts with almost no repercussions. Dr. Marta Shearing did evil work because it was interesting and, in the movie, she is forgiven and becomes Aaron Cross’s accomplice and consort. When Wernher von Braun came to the United States, all his past sins were excused.  He worked on our space program for NASA, and was instrumental in the Apollo Program. In 1977, he was awarded the National Medal of Science. Most people won’t even think Grisolano and McLean did anything wrong by going to Caesar’s and they will make alot of money working for the gambling industry.

I am not saying that these people are evil – hell, Shearing isn’t even real – but their acts hurt people. I don’t want to say that working for Caesar’s is comparable to building a rocket that, more or less, randomly killed people, but, while not as dramatic, what Larry Grisolano and Chauncey McLean are doing is contributing to ruining lives.

Capitalism has become our state religion and, if it is legal, what is done in and by the private sector is sacrosanct. It is never looked upon as evil, no matter how much devastation is done; maybe thoughtless at times, maybe evil as a byproduct, but decidedly not evil in itself (at least not by the same people who get upset at the government). There are honest reasons for holding private companies to a lesser standard than government. After all, governments can do alot more visible damage than the private sector and the people getting it done to – or on – them are usually not willing participants. Google knows more about us than the national Security Agency but Google can not put a person in jail for smoking pot, Google can not take away a person’s children for letting them ride in a car without a safety seat; our government has done both.

Still, private companies – the capitalist, or entrepreneurial system if you prefer – do major, systemic, long-term, damage . Damage to both the country and its citizens. Almost certainly, the private sector has done more harm than the government in the past – often aided or allowed by the government, it is true – and there is reason to think it will continue to. Few people think of McDonald’s as evil but McDonald’s has probably done more persisting damage to the health of this nation than all the people who are now in jail on drug offenses.

In the end, two idealistic guys – actually more than two – are helping Caesar’s get more money out of their customers because the work behind it is interesting and that just makes me sad.

 

 

Tattoos and F1

Americana, Art

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Of all the things that I didn’t see coming down the pike from the future, I think that tattoos are at the top of the list. Much higher on the list than, say, hamburger meat manufactured in a lab – OK, we all knew that was coming – or truck farmers making a comeback, or smart phones. As an aside, to very loosely paraphrase Che Guevara, Computers are not revolutionary, they are bourgeois. Smart phones are revolutionary! End aside.

I so didn’t see tattoos coming, that they just sort of snuck up on me. I don’t watch much football on TV,  so that didn’t tip me off.  Sure, I read about Anglia Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton getting matching tattoos, still that seemed like an hyper-hip exception. By the time I saw the adorable Ana Pascal in Stranger Than Fiction, 

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with her tattoo being a big part of her charm – even though she was played by a tattooless Maggie Gyllenhaal – I knew something was up. Nevertheless, Ana was a nonconformist. What I didn’t expect was for Formula 1 drivers to sport tattoos.

They are, after all, ambassadors for the multi-billion dollar companies, such as Mercedes-Benz, that are often pretty conservative.

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When they are working, they even disappear into the car itself.

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The two best driver in Formula 1 right now are probably Fernando Alonso from Spain and Lewis Hamilton from England. Alonso drives for Ferrari which is famous for putting the car before the driver – I reminded everyone, including the drivers, that Ferrari comes before everything, the priority is the team. Rather like a family father pointing out the need to respect some family rules. Ferrari president Luca Di Montezemolo explained, after he tweaked the ear of Alonso who had the audacity to complain about his car – so I was surprised to see that he has a tattoo of a samurai on his back. Not so much that it is a samurai, but that it is there at all.

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But, when I saw Mercedes’ Hamilton’s tattoo, I knew it was a new world.

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Religion and violence

Psychological Musings, Religion

Maj General -1

Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson, 25th Inf. Div. (L) commander, addresses some soldiers in Iraq, before their departure to Mosul, where they will conduct combat operations for the upcoming Iraqi elections (Jan 05).

If god exists or not is a question I have given up asking. I live my life without a god and, with the possible exception of Sunday morning, the way I live my life doesn’t seem to be any different from the way most Christians do. I do live my life with a sense of Wonder; a sense that there is more to life than what we see and I like to call that Unknowable, the Divine.

I admire people who believe in a god…as long as they hold that belief lightly. I also admire people who do not believe in god and hold that belief lightly. What I do not admire is people who think they know god and know what god wants; people who know how god wants us to have sex or who know that god wants us to fly jets into buildings. But I also don’t admire people who want to blame everything on religion and believe the world would be peachy keen if we all lived like secular Americans with a separation of  church and state  (interestingly enough, it always seems to be somebody else’s belief that is the problem). I don’t admire people who think that life in the United States is the only right way of life and are willing to kill for it. Not kill to defend themselves when attacked like we were in WWII, mind you; but to go out and kill somebody because they don’t have our values of capitalism or the sanctity of life.

These thoughts were rekindled on this bright and sunny Sunday when I was directed to an article in The National Catholic Review through a post in The Dish by Andrew Sullivan & Co. The article said what I have been thinking and I want to pass it on because it says it much better than I can. Here are a couple of tidbits that catch a little of the flavor of the article but the entire article is very much worth reading (if you ever think about these sort of things).

Westerners are fascinated by the nexus of “religion and violence.” War on behalf of nationalism and freedom and oil and other such mundane secular matters hardly counts as violence at all. At the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Qatar in 2007, nearly four years into the U.S. occupation of Iraq, David Satterfield, senior adviser and coordinator for Iraq in the office of the U.S. Secretary of State, gave a speech condemning those in Iraq “who try to achieve their goals through the use of violence.” As the journalist Rami Khouri sardonically commented, “As if the U.S. had not used weapons when invading Iraq!”

What is important for our present purposes is to see how the religious/secular divide functions in our public discourse about violence. It serves to draw our attention toward certain types of practices—Islam, for example—and away from other types of practices, such as nationalism. Religion is the bogeyman for secular society, that against which we define ourselves. We have learned to tame religion, to put it in its proper, private place; they (Muslims, primarily) have not. We live in a publicly secular and therefore rational society; they have not learned to separate secular matters like politics from religion, and so they are prone to irrationality. We hope they will come to their senses and be more like us. In the meantime, we reserve the right periodically to bomb them into being more rational.

Check it out.