Arsen Darnay's Blog, page 26

Headliners: It’s Time to Reinvent

Here a headline that caught my eyes this morning, in the Wall Street Journal:
Auto Sales Zoom, Helped by Low Prices at the Pump
When two phenomena coincide in time, a relationship of cause and effect is not thereby established. Obviously. Ducks at Lake Wolverine are frequently honking their way south in V-formation just as I drive south to the only near TrueValue hardware store. The connection? None that I can detect. That handy store is closing now. The owner couldn’t find a buyer—hence I will have to drive farther away in the future, using more gas. Is that the reason I’m not in the market for a new car?
I’m told that the average person uses 729 gallons of gas a year*. We’ve had five months of decreasing prices, from somewhere around $3.52 to $2.74 per gallon on December 1. That makes a drop of $0.78 per gallon in the period. Suppose that drop came on July 1—all in one fell swoop. That would have saved the average buyer $237 in those five months. The average price of a new vehicle is $32,086. So a $240 saving in five months “helped” to motivate people to spend $32,000? Honestly?
To write this took me roughly 12 minutes. Shouldn’t the headline writer have spent that much time to see if that headline made any sense? These days people don’t correct, refresh their knowledge, think, or more potently yet, reform. We are only ever reinventing everything. It’s time therefore for headline editors to do a little reinventing of their craft.
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*Per person usage of gasoline ranges from a low of 281 to a high of 729 using different sources and different miles-per-gallon estimates. I am using the highest estimates. With the lowest, the savings would be $91.26.

A Sample of Originality

One of the most notable characteristics of G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 book entitled Orthodoxy is its originality. I’m now on my second reading of this book—and that because Chesterton’s style is also quite original, a kind of quick and bubbling flow of thought that, turns out, is highly systematic; but the underlying ideas shift with great speed. I expect to say more later, but now a quote that struck me:
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful. For example, Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. He has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive. My Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only early Christian who ought really to have been eaten by lions. For in his case the pagan accusation is really true: his mercy would mean mere anarchy. He really is the enemy of the human race—because he is so human.
The Blatchford here mentioned was probably Robert Blatchford. Wikipedia’s article on  him (link) begins thus: “Robert Peel Glanville Blatchford (17 March 1851 – 17 December 1943) was a socialist campaigner, journalist and author in the United Kingdom. He was a prominent atheist and opponent of eugenics. He was also an English patriot. In the early 1920s, after the death of his wife, he turned towards spiritualism.”

Early Hints of Hell

A Wall Street Journalbook review today (of Alex Epstein’s The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels) says, in a prominent lift-out in big type: Renouncing oil and its byproducts would plunge civilization into a pre-industrial hell—a fact that developing countries keenly realize.
Now of course I love that word “renouncing”—as if as a collective we actually would or even could. But, sure enough, the rest of the statement has the smell of truth. When we run out of oil, we’ll certainly know it.
Perhaps Mother Nature, a bit irate about having her deep-lying blood sucked, is giving us early hints. What with global warming (or is it aging and unmaintained infrastructure), power failures are a whole lot common. As I think back over the last four decades or so, they were extremely rare earlier in that period and much more frequent in the last decade. At our old house we experienced a slew of them in the last five years—due to maintenance neglect by Detroit Edison. Having moved, we’ve already had one of those—due to weather.
Around here everybody is on wells—and the wells need electric power. Those who’re on the sewer system need electricity to send the waste to those pipes. Power failure means not only no water but, for the more advanced, also means no flushing. The work around, what with a lake next door or bordering the lot, is to haul water; and to go across the street to toilets that still empty into septic tanks. That still leaves sump pumps in those houses lucky to have basements. As for heating, furnaces don’t function without current either although they burn gas. A sensible but expensive solution is to invest in a full-sized generator, in effect a power plant for a single house only. Cost is around $10,000. These systems come on seconds after a power failure and everything stays on. They’re fueled by natural gas. Plans are firming up around here to have one of those babies installed in the near future.
Meanwhile we hope that our descents into pre-industrial hell won’t last but fractions of a day—and it isn’t raining heavily while they last—so that the sump pit in the basement doesn’t overflow. But after the gas runs out too, as inevitably it will, it will be time to rip that gas-fueled contraption (it looks like a stack of logs) out of the fireplace to see if it will actually burn wood which, by then, we’ll have to saw by hand. While the saw lasts…

Black Friday Blues

The National Retail Federation has done its survey of shopping this Black Friday weekend ( link ), and the papers are echoing the numbers. Retailers have experienced a drop in participation, measured in dollar sales per shopper ($380.95 this year), in four years of the last seven. In the same 2007-2014 period, retailers saw gains in four years as well. One might say that sales are fluctuating, year by year. Sometimes up and sometimes down:
07 08 08 10 11 12 13 14 down up down up up up down down
This overall pattern doesn’t spell vigorous growth signaling that the imagined “normal” will return.
Some 133.7 million shoppers participated (down from 141.1 million last year). By my calculations, that number corresponds to nearly 55 percent of the U.S. adult population over 18. Viewed like that, Americans are still decidedly bargain hunters, by and large. By a majority. Therefore hand-wringing and eye-raised headshakes are inappropriate.
People like me who dream of a genuine change in public behavior must not feel encouraged. A downturn in consumption, however desirable, also signals, in our system, unemployment or growing under-employment. What the Great Recession has done is to shake public confidence enough so that big-time shopping sprees are, say, only done every other year.
The retail business has reason to feel the Black Friday blues—but it may be doing it to itself. Every year, the period of the sale is extended both backward and forward in time. People know this. They also know that an industry, beset by panic, will keep prices at abnormal lows right up to Christmas and beyond—to get rid of the inventory still left over.
Any year now, the next year’s Black Friday Sale may begin as early as December 1 of the year before. Why, come to think of it, today may be the first day of Black Friday 2015.

Our Butterfly Gallery

This time of year, in recent years, we like to remember the brighter season when butterflies are visiting. With that I thought I’d end November on that same note. To be sure, with the move now well behind us, we have also left behind our Butterfly Ranch (Rancho Mariposa). But we are at least mentally preparing to see our friends at this new location too—and to make it welcoming to Order Lepidoptera.
Meanwhile, of course, butterflies are still in motion—constant motion, you might say—on the ceiling of our sunniest upstairs room. As a mobile. Air heated by our floor-hugging radiators keeps them turning, turning near the ceiling, and what with the fascinating design of this genre of sculpture, kinetic sculpture as it is called, our paper creatures exhibit a quite life-like behavior. They move so much that it was quite a labor to find one photograph of a dozen that showed them all fully.
We got to wondering about mobiles. We’re very fond of them. Another, with swallows, hangs downstairs. Who made the first of these? I was dubious of discovering a single inventor, but Brigitte had a name in mind if only it would come up with it. With that encouragement, I went on a search and discovered Alexander Calder (1898-1976), an American sculptor, and the originator of this genre. The first mobiles of the sort shown here, thus moved by currents of air, date to 1931. They were named “mobiles” by Marcel Duchamp, a fellow artist, in 1932; thereafter Calder classed his immobile sculptures “stabiles.” Mobiles took the world by storm after a 1946 showing in the Galerie Louis Carré in Paris.
We live in a world of mobility—and mobile device. Ours, sure enough, go back to about the time of our birth. The kind you carry around with you, to make you mobile, are a bit too complicated for such as us entirely to master.

Fata Morgana

We’re late in the fourth year of the Media-named Arab Spring as it touched Egypt. The popular uprising that resulted in Hosni Mubarak’s resignation began on January 25, 2011, in Tahrir square in Cairo. Since then Mubarak resigned  (February 11, 2011), Mohammed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, won the presidency (June 30, 2012); he was ousted from office after a year (July 3, 2013), replaced by Abdul Fattah al-Sisi (June 8, 2014) who, like Mubarak, is a general. Today the Egyptian court trying Mubarak for his crimes as a ruler dropped all charges against him, members of his family, and his top associates. The demonstrations that immediately erupted appear to have been put down promptly. And we’ve still nearly two months to go before the fourth year is over.
When Arab Spring began, The Guardian, in a February 5, 2011 story, had this to say ( link ):
25 January is a date that will be forever remembered in Egypt. That was the day when the Egyptian people decided to end the country’s last pharaonic dynasty with a people’s revolution. 
I genuinely wonder if that date will really be remembered—considering that this revolution withered on the vine—this despite the fact that for a brief spell the Muslim Brotherhood, which is at least in part representative of Egypt’s Muslim population (94.7% of total), succeeded in gaining but not in holding on to power. The “people’s revolution,” to use The Guardian’s words, represented a small portion of the 5.3 percent, with perhaps a few percent of secular Muslims thrown in.
The Guardian’s lead is the sort of thing that caught my eyes early on and caused me to keep following the twists and turns of this story since. I am no more fond of military dictatorship than the next guy, but what interests me is our own Western faith in the inevitability of Progress. It is that faith that labeled this whole affair an Arab Spring. It has turned out to be a kind of a mirage. And living now in what looks like the slow-motion shatter of democracy here—or its transmutation into something quite alien—makes the whole notion of “exporting democracy” to other totally unsuitable realms, like Afghanistan, seem so benighted. 

Old Soldiers and Old Habits

Brigitte was clipping papers this morning early when two thoughts occurred to her. The first was: “I’m such an inveterate clipper.” The second—which is quite natural with her—was to wonder about the etymology of that word, inveterate.
Sure enough, telling me about it, and asking what my guess was—“And just tell me, don’t look it up yet!”—she provided her own guess at an etymology. It was that that veterateportion might have something to do with veterans. My own clumsy attempt is not worth wasting time on. She was quite right.
And that is because the word veteran comes from vetus (generic veteris) meaning “old, aged, advanced in years; of a former time.” This much courtesy of Online Etymology Dictionary. By a slight twist and turn, the root is used in inveterate as meaning “of long standing” and therefore “chronic.” The “in” here means “of.” Brigitte is a paper clipper going way, way back. Old clippers never die, you might say, they just snip away…
Which made me wonder about that phrase. Here is what seems to be its origin. I found it here . General Douglas MacArthur used the phrase and made it newly famous. As always with true wisdom, it had is roots in everyday life, here of soldiering. The text follows:
Old Soldiers Never Die
There is an old cookhouse, far far awayWhere we get pork and beans, three times a day.Beefsteak we never see, damn-all sugar for our teaAnd we are gradually fading away.
cho: Old soldiers never die,        Never die, never die,        Old soldiers never die        They just fade away.
Privates they love their beer, ’most every day.Corporals, they love their stripes, that’s what they say.Sergeants they love to drill. Guess them bastards always willSo we drill and drill until we fade away.
Another and perhaps more authentic version (it dates from 1900 and was written by an anonymous soldier) is to be found here .

It Was a Feudal Vote

The business news today was OPEC’s decision to keep producing oil—rather than curbing production to force the price of oil back up. Nor surprisingly investors fled the oil producers and shifted their money to the oil users. Investors belong to one camp, OPEC to another: Investors are the flag-bearers of “capitalist economies,” OPEC is one member of another aggregation, that of the “market share economies.”
I last had occasion to comment on this subject back four years ago ( here ) when I contrasted “Feudal and Capitalist Economies.” That time I was contrasting Japan and the United States and said: “I characterized the first as ‘feudal’ because it tends on the whole to optimize in favor of large ‘tribal’ aggregates, communities—and the other as ‘detached from the community.’” I also said: “Market share economies aim at control and stability. Capitalist economies aim at maximum profit; they enter and leave markets based on gains to be realized, not to produce values in the long run.”
It’s not as if I favored tribalism. My emphasis is on community. The detached nature of capitalism, meaning its absolute focus on profit, makes it entirely unaware of community, large or small; and in those situations even tribalism is better.
OPEC is focused on maintaining its share of the market—and never mind the profits of its individual producers.
The odd thing about this entire phenomenon (the last fill-up at COSTCO cost me $2.73 per gallon) is that consumption has managed to drop enough across the world for such a thing to happen at all. The world’s public, at least in the aggregate, has been holding back on its consumption—not least driving less after losing a job. But oil so interpenetrates modern life that even a small refusal to consume can cause oil to plummet—and investors to scramble for more profitable stocks.

First the Stoics...

Brigitte sent me a link to an article, titled “The rise of modern Stoicism” by Joe Gelonesi. It is part of The Philosopher’s Zone here . The subject has been in the air around here for a while now—ever since Brigitte bought Martha C. Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire back in the Spring of 2013 and then we both read and discussed it over a period of months, with particular focus on the Stoics. The book is subtitled Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics.
The strong impression I carried away from that experience, particularly from the study of late Roman Stoicism, is how the decaying Roman civilization embraced that philosophy, how widely it spread, and how it laid the foundation for the very smooth acceptance of Catholic Christianity in those realms. Christianity gave that rational, if also transcendental, philosophy a genuine life. The subject is worth pursuing as an antidote to the chaos that now seems to be spreading almost virally.
When things go too far, the answer is almost always already present. Thus, while selfie sticks rise into the air, the (call it) re-moralization of society is also taking place. Concerning that last phrase, it occured naturally: we both also read a book, around about the same time, titled The De-Moralization of Society, From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, by Gertrude Himmelfarb.
Lifts the mood on a gloomy if warmer November day dark with a low pressure system and half-hearted rain.

A Grand Canyon Moment

When looking for pictures of a selfie stick yesterday, it seemed to me that a preponderance of photos showed Asians. That in turn reminded me of a Grand Canyon Moment in the 1960s. Of that in a moment. But first, let me say a little more about the selfie stick and all those Asian faces.
It turns out that the device I featured in yesterday’s post was invented in the United States, perhaps in Buffalo, NY. Buffalo is the address of Fromm Works Inc., the corporate entity that produces the QuickPod. That product appears to be the original selfie stick, invented by the company’s president, Wayne Fromm. It dates from 2004. Fromm Works is also the originator of many other very clever products, mostly aimed at children. So why is that product, and its look-alikes, so popular with Asians? One possible answer is that Alibaba, the Chinese Google-Amazon, promoted them heavily.
My own thought associations, linking the selfie stick to a Grand Canyon memory, seem to be reflecting some genuine process. Back many decades ago, when I first got into studying technology, I came across a saw to the effect that the French come up with the ideas, in the abstract, the Americans commercialize them, and the Japanese flood the market with them. Things have changed since then, but some such process is still going on.
Now my Grand Canyon Moment is told in a few words. I was travelling with an Austrian Engineer, a client of a company I worked for, J.F. Pritchard Co. We were doing a big job for an Austrian conglomerate, cleaning natural gas. The engineer and I travelled from Kansas City to the West Coast. On the way we stopped at the Grand Canyon for part of an afternoon. One of the places we visited was the gift shop. It was filled with Japanese tourists. They were rushing about picking up souvenirs, turning them over and looking at them, laughing madly, and then talking up a storm with further laughter. I got curious. Carefully I picked up one of the souvenirs too, turned it over as they had—and saw the cause of the Japanese amusement. Virtually every object commemorating the Grand Canyon carried the following message: Made in Japan.