The Blog of Jason “Jayce” Olshefsky

Ali and I had a late breakfast at The Blue Horizon Restaurant (1174 Brooks Ave.) As diners go, this is one of the best: of late my number one qualification is that my coffee stays full — and not only did it not get empty, it barely hit the halfway mark. The food is good diner-grade food and the prices are low diner-grade prices.

We left around 1 or so and on the way home I thought, “I should just take Brooks Avenue” but I got on 390 anyway. As I was getting on the ramp, I saw that traffic was at a standstill. We got in line anyway, figuring it would clear up. However, a steady stream of emergency vehicles kept coming. Some cars behind us rushed ahead to get to the second lane, but we were in no hurry and didn’t mind being one of the last ones through. State Police closed 390 at Brooks behind us and were directing all traffic off the highway. A State Police officer started having cars entering at the exit turn around and drive the wrong way up 390 then turn off on the exit. We followed suit. It’s the only time I’ve ever driven the wrong way on the highway. It was wild — it made me feel all sophisticated like I was driving on The M1 or something.

We decided to see what happened so we got back on at Mt. Hope but traffic ground to a halt around Scottsville Rd. Police were directing all traffic off the highway at that point as well, but we could see a multiple-car pileup — rubbernecking, we saw at least 6 cars involved. The hill formed by the new tunnel under the runway for the Scottsville Road access road had caused drifting snow to form a whiteout and had coated the road with snow. As it turned out, there were way more than 6 cars involved: 36 in all. As you’ve probably heard on the news, one young girl got killed and there were about 20 people taken to the hospitals with various degrees of injuries. The accident was apparently caused by a driver who stopped in the middle of the white-out.

People say the “cause” was the driver who stopped, but that was just the final straw. A whiteout totally sucks and there’s no ideal solution. Initial wisdom says that if you can’t see, stop, but it’s also a highway, so you don’t stop. Second best is to proceed slowly. In my opinion, that means very slowly compared to highway speeds (i.e. 20-30 miles-per-hour) but judging by the damage to cars, it appears that people scarcely took their foot off the accelerator and instead plowed into whatever was in front of them at full-bore. Then again, it was clear skies and dry roads right up to the bend, so only the properly attentive drivers even had a chance.

I also think it’s interesting that nobody faults the airport. If it were a private residence and they had put up a privacy wall, they’d have hell to pay. But because the airport presumably wanted to extend a runway to accommodate larger planes, it’s all good — dead girl and all. I’m not so much advocating suing the airport, but I’d like to see a fair assessment. Rather than let it slide with a passive-voiced “the conditions were dangerous,” I think it’s important to realize that prior to this construction project, this was not an issue. And as such, to determine if there is something that can be done to change the structure of the tunnel to prevent these kind of conditions from forming again.

Ali and I headed to the Dryden Theatre at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see Strange Culture. The movie is a haunting mid-process reenactment/documentary of what has been happening to Steven Kurtz.

Steve is an art professor at SUNY Buffalo (17 Capen Hall, Amherst, NY) and a member of a group called The Critical Art Ensemble. He was working on several projects with his wife, Hope when in May, 2004, she died in her sleep. Steve didn’t know what to do so he called 911. When police arrived, they saw the petri dishes of bacteria cultures they were preparing for one of the art exhibits and called in the FBI. Steve was detained for 22 hours and questioned under suspicion of bioterrorism (but not actually arrested — just illegally detained). His wife’s body was taken away and the local coroner ruled her death a heart attack caused by a rare congenital condition. The FBI then took her body and did another autopsy coming to the same conclusion.

So when they were unable to bring him up on charges of bioterrorism, the Department of Justice has filed mail fraud and wire fraud charges against him and a scientist (Robert Ferrell) he worked with to obtain the bacteria samples (which are harmless, by the way, and readily available through the Internet). Steve was not able to bring up details of the case but a woman he’d been working with (I can’t seem to find her name anywhere) was able to fill in details Steve was not permitted to.

Basically mail and wire fraud is a civil case — one brought by one party against another when they feel defrauded. The Department of Justice is trying to expand their power by bring it to trial as a criminal case: although neither party involved with the transfer of the bacteria feels defrauded, the Department of Justice is charging both parties with willfully violating the implicit contract between them.

Oh yeah, so anyway: the movie. They used a mix of actors performing reenactments and actual participants discussing the facts of the case. Since the outcome isn’t yet determined — Steve has not yet gone to trial — as a documentary, it has a, well, “special” feel to it. Ordinarily you’d expect a documentary to be released after the fact; to put a nice bow at the end of the story to say what happened. Well this one didn’t. And as such it’s rather unique to leave that huge story arc just dangling off the end of the film.

I asked about whether Steve knew that this particular art project would make people so upset — as an artist, I think there’s some desire to have an impact, but rarely is it true that jack-booted thugs really do kick down your door. He said they were working on several projects not mentioned in the movie. One of them was about germ warfare (and what the samples were largely for) to help people understand just how ineffective it really is. I mean, if you look at the facts of the anthrax scare from 2001, 17 people got infected and 5 people died — and this was military-grade antrhax. It’s a crappy weapon, yet we’re conditioned by our government to cower from it — remember all about sealing up a room with plastic and duct tape in case of an attack?

I cannot begin to express how disappointed I am at the United States Government and the people who blindly support it. It’s stupefying to me to believe that a few innocent people need to be used as scapegoats so that our laws are stronger??? It is beyond logic and beyond hope to me.

I had a hard time getting to sleep and I ended up watching TV for a bit. I stumbled on an episode of Charlie Rose on WXXI re-run from December 1, 2005: an interview with John Hope Franklin shortly after he published his book, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin. I caught bits-and-pieces as I went in-and-out of feverish sleep.

I did catch a discussion on slavery, though. Franklin’s view is that for America to really get over slavery, we need to acknowledge that it was a pivotal part of building America. He also made an argument for reparations in an intelligent manner. I don’t remember it completely clearly, but he said that it wasn’t as simple as white people writing checks to blacks. I gathered that his intention was that it was not the monetary compensation that was important — for that alone is meaningless — but that it was the whole process of accepting that it happened, understanding that it was an important part of America’s development, realizing the effects that have carried to today, and preparing to heal those wounds and close the gaps.

Here he was a man born 50 years after slavery was abolished and who has grown through the slow process of stamping out the flames of racism. As I drifted off, I recall him talking about how slavery is alive today. All those ideas seem to have stuck with me.

So I got to thinking about slavery: what is it?

Well it’s white slave masters with whips in the South beating blacks to pick cotton while they got rich. Something like that, right? I imagine that on average slaves were treated like work animals: they were given minimal-but-adequate food, shelter, water, clothing, and health care, they were forced to work, and they were not allowed to leave of their own volition.

So then I connected that with minimum wage. Consider a married person with 2 kids working 40 hours at New York’s current minimum wage of $7.15/hour. Working a full 52 weeks nets you $14,872 a year and at the end of the year, you pretty much pay no income tax. Let’s round that off to $1,250/month. You’ll need a place to stay, so that’s like $700/month, then gas and electric will cost another $250 or so. Groceries for a family with 2 kids you might be able to sneak for $200/month if you’re frugal. So that’s $1,150/month in basic expenses leaving $100 for “incidentals” like health care, clothing, and, oh yeah: transportation.

Let’s say you manage to enroll in night classes for a better-paying job (which is the only “acceptable” way of bettering yourself — unlike a well-paid person who is free to take classes in scrapbooking, for instance, without nearly as much sneering and harumphing: a clear double-standard if you ask me). But then the car breaks down … *whip crack* … or your kid needs a tooth pulled … *whip crack* … or you fall ill … *whip crack*.

Just making it through one year without some “mishap” qua “financial disaster” happening is a lucky year indeed. Add to that that you need to be infallible — for human error is not an acceptable portion of the equation. (But remember also that by the luck of the draw, you’re probably somewhere around average intelligence and average skill, not superhuman.)

Oh, you say, but there’s a safety net of welfare. Yes, a safety net indeed — wherein you accept your minimal-but-adequate food, shelter, water, clothing, and health care, on the condition that you follow the rules and take any job you’re accepted for. Given your skills, the best you can hope for is another minimum-wage job. By the way, good luck paying off that debt you now have too.

But there are people who have escaped the cycle, so it must be possible. Possible, yes, but likely no. It requires determination, skill, and luck to all come into confluence. Without all three, the cycle stays closed.

So in the end, I think that’s maybe what we need to realize about America: that it took determination, skill, and luck to get to where we are today. Then perhaps we can admit that “minimum wage” approximates “slavery” well enough to call them equivalent. And then we can look at how America operates today and realize that our present view of “prosperity” is predicated upon owning slaves.

And then, maybe we can start to talk about ending slavery once and for all.

I started thinking about how it’s the start of 2008 and what I can be hopeful for. And by “hope”, I’m referring to a “belief that things will be better in the future”. Not necessarily a specific time period, but I guess “in my lifetime” or “reasonably soon”. Something like that.

I watched this video on YouTube called How It All Ends by a high-school science teacher named Greg. In it he outlines the response to the possibility of global warming in terms of risk-assessment. Either global warming is happening and caused by us, or it isn’t, and either we do something about it or do nothing. His argument is that there are two positive outcomes: we do nothing and the threat of global warming was false, or we do something and it was true but we fix it. However, if we do something and global warming wasn’t happening then — the worst case — is that we have a large economic hit; if we do nothing and global warming is happening, then — the worst case again — is that there are floods, droughts, and famines on a scale humanity has never seen. His bet, therefore, is to just take the economic hit and not worry about it.

But remember the last “catastrophic event” that was to happen?: the Y2K bug. And what happened? Nothing. And why? Because we took the economic hit of fixing everything we could find. And what did people believe? It was all a lie to start with.

So likewise with global warming, if I’m out there saying “travel less” and “use less energy” and that becomes forced upon people and then nothing bad happens, people will simply believe that global warming was a myth. They’ll blame us “global warming freaks” for ruining their lives. And then if catastrophe does strike, they’ll blame us “global warming freaks” for doing the wrong thing and not fixing everything for them. Therefore, my best bet is to quietly go off and figure out how to live in the catastrophic post-global-warming world without being seen. But that’s not really hopeful at all — it’s just surviving disaster.

The catalyst for this post, though, was in trying to do taxes. I wanted to get my taxes done early because I’m self-employed and need to hand over checks to the U.S. Government on a regular basis. If I don’t estimate correctly, I get hit with a huge fine. But I can avoid it entirely if I file by January 31 and pay everything I owe. The only problem is that the forms I need from my bank and mortgage company won’t arrive until after January 31, so it would be essentially illegal to file before January 31. So I’ve got my fingers crossed that I won’t get in trouble.

I really wish taxes were simpler, but it’s only me and other small business owners that even see it. I remember puzzling about how bad it really was in the 1990’s — after all, the company I worked for handled all the hard stuff, and at the end of the year I’d fill out a few lines on a 1040EZ and get a check in the mail. Awesome! What’s wrong with that system?

But worse is that I actually write a check to the government. If I don’t, I’d go to prison which I don’t want to do. I don’t want the government to kill more people in Iraq, but my voice is not represented in the U.S. Government — I still have to pay taxes, though. [And here I thought that’s why we fought that big war 230 some-odd years ago against England.] My big lament, though, is that I voluntarily sign the check to pay fund the war. If I were just a regular working person, I could claim that I don’t get a choice — that taxes automatically come out of my paycheck.

And it’s not like we’re getting out of Iraq any time soon. It’s a question of “how many Iraqis do we need to kill before they believe in freedom?” The real answer is, “we are the problem,” but W. doesn’t believe in being wrong. By the way, what ever happened to Osama bin Laden? We apparently failed to hang him, so I can only imagine he’s planning another 9/11. I don’t see any hope at all on that whole situation.

It used to be fashionable to help the poor — to ensure they have food, shelter, and water. Somewhere along the way “shelter” got eliminated, so it was just to feed the poor, but lately it’s food stamps and welfare that are crippling the country. And water? Well if you can’t afford to buy the clean stuff in the bottles you deserve what you get. What’s next, air?

What about providing youth programs to keep kids off the street? Nah: just get more police to shoot them when they form gangs and start killing people. Health care? Hopeless. Public education? Hopeless.

The other day I was riding home from the Public Market — I took my bike with the trailer to get stuff — and I went to turn onto my street. I had to get into the left lane and I didn’t see anyone behind me. As I turned into the turn-lane, someone tried passing me just at that moment and broke off the mirror on my bike. I was less than an inch away from getting knocked off the bike, and barely a foot away from being killed.

But did they stop? Hell no. I was just an obstacle in their way — a nuisance. Probably some worthless beggar who’d be better off dead than alive. I mean, can you believe that I thought I was permitted to ride on the street? That’s for cars, moron!

And so goes the last shred of human decency: that nearly killing someone else is okay — in fact, it was my fault anyway for making them decide whether they needed to touch their brakes.

With that goes the last of hope.

So I did the cost-of-gas analysis last week and now I got to wondering if the cost of natural gas was high enough to justify electric heat. I first heard about this from someone who was building a workshop. They were trying to figure out if they should bother to install a gas furnace or if electric heat would be cost-effective — so I got the bug in my head about the conversion between the heat energy in natural gas and that in electricity.

So here’s the deal: like last week, we have the cost of gas heat (C_g) and the cost of electric heat (C_e) which, at the break-even point will be the same:

C_g = C_e

And what we want to end up with is a break-even point where the price of a unit of natural gas (P_g) is some constant multiplied by the price of a unit of electrical energy (P_e). This is where it gets a little funny because I’m just going to assume the efficiency of a gas furnace is 80% and that an electric heater is 95%. In other words, the total heat in a cubic-foot of natural gas has a certain amount of chemical energy that can be converted to heat, but a furnace is not perfectly efficient at recovering that heat as usable heat in your house (i.e. some necessarily needs to go up the chimney to get rid of the carbon dioxide). Electric heaters are much more efficient as the easiest thing you can do with electric current is to turn it into heat — it’s more like 100% efficient, but I’ll assume there’s some cable losses in the house and maybe it has a fan that does non-heating work.

It also gets a little funny because when I talk about the total cost of heating, for purposes of determining the conversion factor between prices-per-unit, it doesn’t matter how much heat — just that it’s the same amount. So let’s say it’s 2000 Calories — like kilocalories or the Calories in terms of food. Trust me. It’ll be a fun result.

So now what we’ve got is that the cost is the unit price * 2000 Calories:

2000 Calories * P_g = 2000 Calories * P_e

Obviously the 2000 Calorie factor cancels out — but I’ll leave it there for a while.

Now let’s turn to the electricity. We pay for electricity in kilowatt-hour blocks. If I go to Google, I see that 2000 Calories is 2.324 kilowatt-hours. If I factor in that 95% efficiency, I’ll need 2.447 kilowatt-hours to make 2000 Calories of heat.

Now gas gets kind of weird [great, more weird, right?] because it’s delivered in hundreds of cubic feet (ccf) but billed as therms (100,000 British Thermal Units or 100,000 BTUs). RG&E does the conversion on the bill: 1.0136 therm is 1 ccf. Again turning to Google, 2000 Calories is 0.0793 therms. If I factor in that 80% efficiency, I’ll need 0.0991 therms to make 2000 Calories of heat.

So now what I have is:

0.0991 therms * P_g = 2.447 kilowatt-hours * P_e

And since P_g is in dollars/therm and P_e is in dollars/kilowatt-hour, it all works out to dollars-equals-dollars which is perfect.

Moving stuff around, that’s:

P_g = 2.447 kilowatt-hours * P_e / 0.0991 therms
P_g = 24.69 kilowatt-hours/therm * P_e

In other words, if you take the price-per-kilowatt of electricity, and multiply it by 24.69, you get the price-per-therm of gas for the same amount of heat.

I had signed up for ConEdison Solutions GreenPower (which is all renewable wind and hydroelectric) so there’s separate sections for how much electricity costs. On the last bill I used 363 kwh and paid ConEdison $36.12 and RG&E another $20.93 (-$19.38 in fixed charges for the privilege of being a customer), so that’s a total of $37.67 in charges based on a per-kwh rate. Dividing the total by 363, I get an overall cost of $0.104/kwh.

Doing the conversion, if my gas cost is higher than 24.69 * $0.104 = $2.57/therm, then it’s cheaper to run electric heat.

I used 157.1 therms of gas, but 3 therms are included for “free” in my $14.38 customer charge and $0.62 “bill issuance charge” — $15.00 total. I paid $209.20 for gas with all the surcharges and such, so removing the $15.00 fixed charge, that’s $194.20. Dividing by the 154.1 therms used, that’s $1.26/therm — just about half the cost of heating with electricity.

But hey, now you can do the math yourself with your own bill. If it’s easier, you can round up the conversion to 25 — so the break-even point is when the cost of a therm of gas is 25 times the cost of a kilowatt-hour of electricity.

Oh yeah, but what about the fun with the 2000 Calorie number? That’s about a day’s worth of food, right? So if I ran on electricity, it would cost 2.447 kilowatt-hours * $0.104/kwh = $0.25, or if I ran on natural gas, that would be 0.0991 therms * $1.26/therm = $0.12.

I was thinking about how people travel to a distant gas station to get gas that’s cheaper. I mostly thought of it as a waste of time, especially with the 10-gallon tank in the Civic. If I filled it all the way, a 5 cent difference in gas price would net me all of 50 cents. So if I’d be willing to cross the street, but not cross town — driving the distance isn’t free.

So what’s the break-even point? Well let’s say the price of the cheapest fuel we can get without going out of our way is P0. Further, let’s assume we fill up about the same amount — like if we run similar errands each week, we might need to buy half a tank each week. Let’s call that volume of fuel V0, so we pay C0: P0 * V0. So now we see fuel at a cheaper price, P1, elsewhere. But it’ll use more fuel to get there, so we’ll have to now buy a volume of V1 instead, costing C1: P1 * V1. How far out of our way should we go to still save money?

The break-even point is when the two costs are the same:

C0 = C1

which is also

V0P0 = V1P1

but we want to talk about distance. The ratio of the the distance traveled to the volume of fuel used is your fuel efficiency or “gas mileage” in miles-per-gallon:

E = D/V

we can rearrange that so

V = D/E

and substitute above so

P0(D0/E0) = P1(D1/E1)

Now, if we make a broad assumption that the efficiency is about the same — that your gas mileage is the same whether you go to one place or another — then we get:

P0(D0/E) = P1(D1/E)

and we can eliminate the efficiency factor on both sides leaving

P0D0 = P1D1

So let’s say that P1 is some percentage cheaper and that D1 is some distance further:

P1 = ( 1 - cheaper ) P0

D1 = ( 1 + further ) D0

And then substitute P1 and D1 to get:

P0D0 = ( 1 - cheaper ) P0 ( 1 + further ) D0

And now we can cancel out P0 and D0 from both sides:

1 = ( 1 - cheaper )( 1 + further )

But what we want to know is how much further we can go — for now as a percentage of how far we usually go before filling up. So we get:

1 + further = 1 / ( 1 - cheaper )

or, deriving some more:

further = 1 / ( 1 - cheaper ) - 1
further = 1 / ( 1 - cheaper ) - ( 1 - cheaper ) / ( 1 - cheaper )
further = ( 1 - ( 1 - cheaper ) ) / ( 1 - cheaper )
further = cheaper / ( 1 - cheaper )

So in other words, we’d need to travel less than (further) percent further to come out ahead which is the percentage cheaper divided by 100% - the percentage cheaper.

To bring this back to the real world, let’s start with the fact that most cars today can go 300-600 miles per tank. So it’s not unusual to get about 200 miles on a half of a tank. Now let’s say we find gas that’s 5 cents cheaper than other gas at $3.25 — about 1.5% cheaper. The percent difference is then (1.5%)/(1-1.5%) = 1.5%/98.5% = 1.52%. So if we filled the tank halfway, the cheaper gas would need to be 1.52% * 200 miles = 3 miles out of the way. That’s “out of the way” so if it’s a separate trip, it’s only 1.5 miles each way.

And that’s just to break even.

Alternatively, what if you could get gas at 10% off — something like $3.00 instead of $3.33. Then it’s a distance difference of 10%/90% = 11%. If you had to get close to a full tank and you could get 400 miles, then you’d still save money up to 44 miles out of the way.

The trap, though, is that it’s still not a lot of money. Like if you went 10 miles away, you’d have to get 420 miles of gas at $3.00 instead of 400 miles-worth at $3.33. If you were driving a truck that got 15 miles-per-gallon, that’s 28 gallons at $3 or $84 versus 26.7 gallons at $3.33 or $88.91 so you’d save all of $4.91.

But at least now you have a way to figure it out.

So recently I was involved in a discussion that didn’t turn out to everyone’s satisfaction. The scenario is this:

I was at a social engagement where everyone knew one another fairly well; in a small-group discussion when one of the participants — let’s say Jack — started describing a bigoted encounter he had with someone he associated with as part of his job. Just as he was about to quote the third-party, someone walked into earshot — let’s say Jill — who’s a member of the group who was targeted (and also the only person around who’s a member of that particular group). So Jack stopped and said, “I’ll tell you in a minute,” and everyone got quiet. I insisted that he continue and invited Jill to the conversation to hear — after all, this is a quote of an encounter, and not representative of his personal belief.

So we all talked for a few minutes. Naturally Jill was shocked but apparently not upset at what Jack had to say. Things went okay and the topic changed and the group broke up a bit. Jack asked that I never put him in that situation again. I apologize but add that he shouldn’t bring up such things in my presence because I would probably react the same way.

The universal response has been that I was wrong. I should have let sleeping dogs lie, let the conversation go fallow because Jill probably didn’t notice, and everyone would have been much more comfortable.

Now I don’t think my solution was ideal, but I think it was better than nothing. First of all, the argument that Jill didn’t hear anything is specious — for if it was indeed true, then Jack should have continued without pause, and clearly even Jack felt that Jill could hear him. Second, I don’t believe discomfort is as bad as it’s cracked up to be — for is it better to maintain comfort or point out something unethical? “Well,” you argue, “Jack wasn’t really being unethical, right?” At that moment, probably not, but I think that overall his behavior wasn’t purely right. Here’s what I think the chronology was in this case:

1. He had an associate who surprised him by saying something bigoted.
2. He disagreed with the sentiment but probably said nothing of it to avoid a conflict at the time.
3. I assume his association with this other person changed — perhaps he never needed to deal with them again, and perhaps he just avoids associating with them. But what he didn’t do was to directly address the issue — for instance to say that he was disappointed that such ignorance persists in this day and age.
4. When relaying the story, he was not proud of his actions — and he did not want to reveal that he didn’t defend the group to which Jill is associated.

Let me put it another way, this time with a hypothetical encounter. Two guys are talking. One is Jewish and the other is not. The one who’s not reveals that he works with a guy who’s anti-Semitic.

DAVE: “Don told me this off-color joke about Jews at work today.” (unspoken: “it’s okay to say this because it wasn’t me”.)
JOE: “So what did you do?” (unspoken: “such jokes reinforce that being Jewish is inferior in arbitrary ways and I think you agree that this is not true”.)
DAVE: “Well he’s my boss so I couldn’t do anything.” (unspoken: “I didn’t want to make him angry because I might lose my job — or worse. You know how those people are”.)
JOE: “What a prick.” (unspoken: “I would have hoped that you are a good enough friend to help me even if doing so is not to your immediate advantage. I feel disappointment because I now respect you less than I assumed I could”.)

On the surface, Dave and Joe seem more comfortable than if they dug deeper — for there is tremendous discomfort that runs very deep. But is that really healthy? Doesn’t it serve to reinforce bigotry? If Joe confronted Dave, I think Dave would react defensively — that he would be more upset about being called out for his lack-of-action than with the original situation.

So then you ask, “what am I supposed to do about them? I’m not a bigot and I don’t support them. Isn’t that enough?” Let me just put it this way: are you confident and proud of your actions? And I don’t mean as a form of denial: can you really defend your beliefs, thoughts, and actions in a rational and sound way?

The reason why I live by this code is that it helps me get to sleep at night. For as much distress I cause in people, I need to come to the conclusion that I did the most right thing I could at the time — to be confident and proud of my actions.

I’m not thrilled about making Jack uncomfortable. I don’t know if it changed anything for the better, if it made Jill upset, or if it disrupted Jack and Jill’s relationship. But I think that what I did do was force Jack to reconcile his actions — for if he was proud and confident of his behavior, he’d have no problem facing Jill. (So I guess I have an ulterior goal to coerce other people to be the best they can be.)

The catch is that I don’t know if I read the situation correctly. If, in fact, things happened like I thought they did, then I’m proud and confident of my reaction. When I look at my own life experience and situations in the past like these, I think my assessment was correct, though.

Now if only I could forgive myself for things I couldn’t have known …

I headed out to the Dryden Theatre at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see Blowup. I had not seen it before but I was glad to do so. It settles well after a few days: it’s art-house and avant garde but still accessible. At least to me where I am now … I imagine it’s not unusual to watch this and just not get it.

The protagonist is a fashion photographer. At first he seems a bit eccentric — like a stereotypical artist-type from the late 1960’s: that Andy Warhol pop-culture variety. He doesn’t seem to agree with society on what has value and what does not — in fact, he seems to have no sense of some things having value and others not. From the beautiful women he photographs to an antique wooden propeller to music to food and drink to people — nothing is any better than anything else.

That is, until he examines his own work and discovers the trappings of a murder. He’s intrigued. It’s voyeuristic: he works from his safe and familiar nest, observing that which is most dangerous and visceral. And here the film perfectly captures that essence: inviting the strange into your safe haven through a portal — a window, a TV screen, or a photograph.

But then it’s all taken away. And in a brilliantly poetic finish, he comes to realize the balance between the real and the imagined — and through that, what has value.

So here we are, at the cusp of another end-of-year holiday season — dripping with the insidiously sticky notion that we should buy totems of love for people we can’t seem to find the time to listen to for the whole of the past year. Several thoughts cross my mind.

1

Last month I got this “Amish Friendship Bread” recipe from Ali from someone she works with. I did some Internet research and discovered that it wasn’t all that special — and probably didn’t even originate with the Amish. It’s basically a bread starter: a mix of yeast, flour, sugar, and (in this case) milk — a living yeast culture. The gist is that over 10 days you keep the starter alive (adding ingredients to feed it at one point) then split up the batch of starter 5 ways, make one batch of bread with one of the splits, and then distribute the other 4 to your friends along with the instructions.

My bread came out okay, but I wanted to shove the underlying philosophy back to tradition. I wanted to make it a personal experience, and an evolution. I wanted people to copy the recipe by hand then notate how they changed the recipe and what the outcome was like before passing it on.

Unfortunately, with Christmas shopping and all the frenetic activity, I didn’t have the chance. I read, though, that you can freeze a bread starter. So that’s what I did. I’ll work on it next year sometime.

2

In an article titled Fuck the Cheerleader; Buy a Gift Card, Save the World, the folks at Violent Acres outline why gift cards — particularly those Visa cash-like cards you can get at the bank — are such a perfect gift. The gist is this: you can’t be bothered to spend time with people you love, and everybody you know has more stuff than they know what to do with, so you’d like to get them nothing and them to get you nothing — perhaps just spend some Quality Time™ together instead. But, people get all uptight about not giving gifts. So instead of bestowing heavy politics on them about it, just get them a fucking gift card.

I have no idea what the cheerleader has to do with it.

3

No Impact Man is a guy — specifically Colin Beavan — who spent 2007 trying to minimize his environmental impact while living with his wife and kid in a New York City apartment. He posted an insightful piece recently titled The No Impact Dear Santa letter. I’ve been fascinated by Beavan’s trials and tribulations, but this particular post has this poignant personal observation: “I was thinking how when I talked to a bunch of third graders a while back and I said to them, ‘How many of you know the feeling of really wanting something and then when your parents finally get it for you, instead of feeling excited, you feel kind of disappointed and sad?’ Three-quarters of the kids raised their hands.”

Gifts, when given without the heart to back them up end up feeling hollow to me. Last Christmas I know I got some stuff. The only thing I remember offhand, though, is the scarf Ali made for me. I think that’s amazing. I don’t know how to knit things and although I think I can understand how it’s done, I don’t have the right aptitude to do the repetition right so it comes out. And she made it.

But most of all is that she backs it all up with her love. Through joyful days and trying days she’s still there. It’s funny that it’s kind of like the scarf: stitch after stitch, row after row — before you know it, it’s something meaningful. You know what else: I remember picking out the yarn colors and she wondered whether green and orange would go together, but I insisted.

And you know? Somehow it works.  Twenty months to the day, in fact.

You know, I think I’m going to just define this right now. Like Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies, I seem to have stumbled upon another online truism. I’ll call it Olshefsky’s Rule of Behavioral Policy-Making. It goes like this:

During a discussion of behavioral policy-making, stating the challenge, “given any rule to control the behavior of others, I can show a way (1) how it can be circumvented, and (2) how it can be used to grab power” will inevitably lead to the parties-in-power proving it.

I realize it throws causality in a blender — one would never utter the challenge if the course of discussion were not already showing signs of heading in that direction. However, it seems uttering that specific challenge causes fate to intervene and ensure that a rule is used in both ways.

As proof, I offer two citations:

1. in the Burning Etiquette Yahoo! Group on October 4, 2007 (with an earlier reference to an informal prototypical version on September 27, 2007 that said “it is impossible to create an algorithmic definition that prevents abuse-of-power and that has no loopholes. You can do it as an academic exercise yourself or try me — I’ll tell you a way it can be abused and a way it can be worked around.”)
2. on RocWiki on December 11, 2007.

In the former case, the discussion was centered on changing the moderation techniques of the Colorado-bm Burning Man discussion list. As it stood, the regional Burning Man representative Ronnie Nelson had taken action to censor one of the members — according to him it was at the request of several members of the community for “posting too much”, although there was a clear conflict-of-interest in that he had an established personal disagreement with this particular member. A debate of policy ensued and he suggested that a separate discussion list be created for those parties interested in a new moderation policy. On September 24, 2007 he made a public promise to implement the rules created by the Burning Etiquette group — specifically that it was not a case of academic masturbation.

However, once we agreed on moderation guidelines, Nelson ignored the request to implement them. He then let the few detractors of the proposed changes run wild on the Colorado-bm group, making it seem that free speech needed to be restricted. Several people complained that the junk traffic was too much and quit the list because of it, but Nelson did nothing. In the end, he proved that a rule of responding to complaints of “too much traffic” could be circumvented (that detractors were allowed to run wild) and that it could be used to grab power (by holding it close to his chest as a threat to selectively silence voices supporting the guidelines.)

In the second, more recent case, a discussion began on a formal “acceptable use” policy for RocWiki. The author of the proposed policy, Phillip R. Hurwitz, had drafted it in response to then-undefined rules applied against him: specifically that comments could not be construed as harassing, offensive, or off-topic for the page. His claim is that you can’t both be an open community and also have secret “admin” police who claim authority through secret rules. To force the issue, he tried to change his Acceptable Use Policy draft to state that it was a formal policy. RocWiki Administrator RottenChester reverted these changes and locked Hurwitz from further changing the page. Another administrator, Dave Mahon went further and banned Hurwitz from changing the site at all for 48 hours as a “cooling off period.”

There is a secret rule against threatening or harassing comments and edits as demonstrated above. However, this can be circumvented — for instance that veiled threats by BadFish on December 7, 2007 on Hurwitz’s RocWiki page went unpunished. The administrators tend to believe that RocWiki is truly Democratic and the one person airing the hypocrisy of that notion is Hurwitz — and he has been conveniently silenced by Mahon’s “cooling off period”, demonstrating a grab for power.

It will be interesting to see how all this plays out in the long run, but as far as Olshefsky’s Rule of Behavioral Policy-Making is concerned, it seems to be holding up.

I headed to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see Hearts and Minds. I really wasn’t prepared for it at all. I watched in horror as the war in Iraq played out before me. I mean, if someone were to take the footage from this film, edit it together exactly the same way and release it today, people would definitely complain that it tries to make Iraq look like Vietnam. The only trouble is, this was made in 1974 as a postmortem documentation of the Vietnam War.

So here’s the play book to be used by leadership:

1. Fabricate a “threat” to America.
2. Identify a place where a quasi-rational claim can be made that the area is imminently threatened. Be sure to pick one where the language and culture are very different from English-speaking, Christian Americans.
3. Declare war on the “threat” and engage in combat in the selected area.
4. Align all dissent with support of the “threat”. Any disagreement with the position of the military and its hopeful outlook is “dissent”.
5. Declare the enemy to be less-than-human.
6. Make claims that the enemy does not respect life which gives them a tactical advantage.
7. Continuously claim that great progress is being made. Produce no undisputed facts.
8. Attempt to fine-tune military tactics and technology in an attempt to defeat an enemy who will never stop trying to defend their homeland against an enemy invader.
9. Ponder whether America chose the right allies and neglect that America’s actions are the wrong side.
10. Establish a “democratically elected” government — one that specifically supports the United States policies. Remove any government or authorities who disagree with U.S. policy.
11. Support troops that align under the new government and migrate military control of the region to them.
12. Disengage U.S. military involvement in the region.
13. Make claims ex post facto that all success was as a direct result of action taken, and certainly not a result of the United States leaving the region.

In Vietnam the “threat” was Communism — a holdover from the 1950’s and even called the “Red Threat”. People were (and are) taught that Communism is a threat to freedom. In reality it competes with Capitalism as an economic system, but no more a threat to freedom than Capitalism is. The theory is (see above) that Communists are less than human — they act like hornets: their individuality is crushed by the goals of the collective so much that they don’t even fear death. They use lies and any immoral tactic necessary to recruit new members.

In Iraq, the “threat” is terrorism. We’re taught that terrorism is a threat to freedom. In reality, the tactics to stop terrorism are the threat to freedom: undocumented police searches, torture, secret arrests, and the suppression of free speech. The theory is (see above) that terrorists are less than human — they act like hornets: their individuality is crushed by the goals of the collective so much that they don’t even fear death. They use lies and any immoral tactic necessary to recruit new members.

So I started theorizing on what goes wrong — how did we get here again? I think the crux of it is that we supposedly have a representative government but that representation has failed. We expect our representatives to listen to the will of the people and to lead based on that will. We expect our leaders to find solutions that make everyone happy — to unify these United States rather than to divide them.

I spent the better part of my free time trying to develop a graph to represent the whole thing, mostly erroneously trying to represent population in some proportional way and also to present the data in a logarithmic fashion. But the gist is this: assuming that people are free to organize in protest of the government, the measure of “good leadership” is that few people choose to organize in protest.

The numbers in parentheses represent a population based on 300 million people — approximately the population of the United States in 2007. The goal of leadership should be to keep the percentage of people actively protesting as low as possible, and divided in support/opposition of an issue as balanced as possible. The ideal is zero, but if that cannot be attained, then equal numbers on either side should be the goal. This is represented by the outer ring with green toward the bottom “zero” point and orange indicating a problem.

The inner colored ring indicates likely types of problems. The yellow area between 0.01% and 0.04% is a danger zone for a politician, for between 0.04% and 0.6% is when their approval ratings will begin to drop. Between 0.6% and 10% is an increasing risk of revolution (in the case of activity on one side of an issue) or civil war (in the case that both sides are equally ired.) The red area above 10% pretty much guarantees violence.

Let me qualify this that it’s just speculation. I’m no expert in politics or leadership. I was just picking numbers out that “sounded good.” However, the I feel the underlying theory is valid: that the goal of leadership should be to minimize the need for protest. And that’s something else that I should reiterate: this chart is about the number of people actively protesting — that is, picket-signs in hand, involved in a march or other form of public dissent.

Now there’s three cases that a leader will typically be looking at: virtually no protest, protest that is lopsided, and protest that is strong but balanced. If there is little protest, then that’s a sign of a “good job” and the leader should look to fix other more controversial issues.

In the case of a lopsided protest — where there is a significant population that is protesting one side but very few on the other side — then there are several possibilities. One is that the protesting side is vehement about one facet of the issue, and in that case, the leader should have the wherewithal to re-frame to defuse its antagonistic component. Another is that the leadership is not representing the will of the people — and in that case, the leader should adjust their position and policies to be more accommodating of the protesters.

In the case of a balanced, strong protest, it’s the leader’s role to act as diplomat. They should consider whether another option — outside the spectrum of the opposing poles — could resolve strife. If they are unable to accomplish that, then there is the likelihood of bloodshed and the possibility of full-blown civil war.

So back to Iraq — if I recall correctly, protests against the war — the largest protests — are in the range of 200,000 to 500,000 people. In that range, we’re talking about 0.08% to 0.2% of the population. I am not aware of protests to support the war although there are typically a small number of protesters against the anti-war movement — a bit derivative, but (again, if I recall correctly) typically a small number. Perhaps 2,000 to 10,000 at most — 0.001% to 0.004% or so.

In this case, I think it’s the responsibility of our leadership to either (a) re-frame the war to make it amenable to anti-war protests or (b) to change policy to balance opposing factions. It’s clear that their efforts are squarely in re-framing the war: that it’s a war for freedom, or peace, or against terrorism — but the anti-war movement is not buying into it. This opposition is simply against the war. And in that case, the move should be to get out of it.

So then, imagine more generally if we actually had balanced leadership. Imagine if people had to protest in the streets to favor a war rather than to protest only to oppose it. Imagine if our country believed in peace so much that our leaders insisted that the people ordered them to start a war. Imagine if war was not the default action but the exceptional action — a complete reversal of our current policies.

But then again, what do I know about leadership? I can’t understand why anyone would resort to war when diplomacy and peace are alternatives. I guess I can’t stop believing in the ideal of “good leadership” — where the seemingly miraculous solution that appeals to everyone is commonplace and war is seen as the pathetic, stupid cop-out that it is.