Vox, Velocity and Vectors Vaults to Victory

I was treated to an amazing performance at Dickinson College on Saturday night when I attended a joint performance mounted by the music and dance departments.  The evening drew together modern minimalist music from Philip Glass and others, piercing light show visuals creatively projected on the black main drape, and helium balloons.  Taken together I found myself at turns gasping, laughing, and scratching my head.

Sometimes we were in deep space as depicted above.  In this piece the dancernaut may well have been working alongside Anne Hathaway in Interstellar for her ability to move across the stage untethered from Earth's gravity.

Later we attended a cocktail party that viscerally captured the social energy, awkwardness, venom, and gayety one often experiences when music and adult refreshments mingle.  When the twirling dancer above was slain by the party at the close I jolted in my seat at her sudden demise.

But my favorite piece came at the conclusion with the homage to one of my childhood favorites,  The Red Balloon.

We were shown this movie year in and year out when I was in elementary school.  The entire school was brought together to journey with a young boy and his red balloon through the streets of Paris.  No words are spoken yet we come to love the boy, his balloon, and their friendship.  Here the dancers evoked that same feeling with the help of real red helium balloons as one dancer discovered, selected, and eventually lost her red balloon.  The emotions from the whole movie were beautifully evoked transporting me to my primary school in suburban Philadelphia, circa 1973.

Were it not for my intrepid freshman daughter, Carrie Gillespie, my son -- her twin, Ben -- and I would never have spent such an luscious evening surrounded by light, music, energy, and emotion all showered upon us by the amazing talent on display at Dickinson's Mathers Theater last Saturday night.  For more on the performance, go here.

Thanks to everyone in the performance. Bravo!

When random is calculated

This report from today's Dallas Morning News carried the jump page headline, "KC killings called quick, random".  The online version doesn't have the jump page so this headline doesn't appear here.  But trust me, it is in the print version today, April 15, 2014.  Click here and read the story if you want to know why I wrote the letter below to the Editor of this award-winning paper:

Who defines "random" as "calculated"?

Your jump page headline of the Cross killings grossly misleads readers at best, and at worst it frames his calculated, heinous slayings as unpredictable, chance events that could have happened to anyone anywhere.

The report chronicles Cross's lifelong anti-Semitism, bigotry, and fanatical devotion to the twisted ideology of white supremacy.  When he went to the Jewish Community Center to hunt and kill Jews he was taking the next step in his lifelong quest.  How can you describe this story as "random" just because a local cop used the word?

I'm from Boston, birthplace of ideas like the 2nd Amendment.  I suspect and fear that the Texas tilt towards gun rights quietly bends your word choice to promote notions like, "Hey, well, you can't outlaw crazy; look how he randomly killed his victims?" when in fact Cross was hunting Jews.  Change the headline to "Jews hunted down" and next you'll have to consider the fact that the Founders enshrined our right to bear long rifles that took several minutes to load and fire one shot that usually missed its target...not the right to bear the military-grade hardware Cross so loved.

Make Docs Pay for Healthcare

I find it intriguing that no one is asking this question: why, when doctors choose to give away their services, are the rest of us forced to pay for their largess?

The Regan era law requiring ERs to treat the uninsured sure doesn't help.  But that law feeds upon the medical profession's ethic that drives docs to give free medical service to those who can't pay.  I'm not saying they shouldn't treat people who can't pay.  But if one of my advertisers (I sell ad space for Newsweek Daily Beast) asked for an ad in the magazine but said they didn't have the money to pay, I'm fairly sure management wouldn't raise every other advertisers' rates by 1% to cover the cost.

Advertising isn't healthcare.  But somewhere along the line docs who are duty-bound to give away their services successfully passed the buck to me and everyone else who pays for health insurance.  Let's ask the medical profession to back up their ethics with action.  Rather than forcing consumers to buy health insurance let's force medical accreditation boards to allocate X% of doctors' time to serve the uninsured.  Remember Northern Exposure?  Kinda like that.  But on a national scale.

With the exception of legal defense against a criminal charge, I can think of no other profession in which services provided for those who can't pay are underwritten by everyone else who can pay.  Since healthcare is a unique service with limited price elasticity, a universal potential market, and morally freighted in every dimension, it has to be treated differently than other markets.  Turning our legislative guns to the root of the problem -- doctors who have to give away their service -- will lead us to a more just and effective solution.

People die in war

The mess in Afghanistan over the civilian victims of Robert Bale's shooting spree got me to thinking about some basic facts we seem to have forgotten about war.  People die in war.  War is horrible, unpredictable, and must be avoided if at all possible...but not at all costs.

2,551 civilians were killed in the 9/11 attacks.  That's when this war started.  Don't be fooled, we are at war with the people who launched those attacks.  The problem is that this is a modern asynchronous war with an enemy that doesn't hail from a sovereign nation or wear a uniform.  If the people, nay the government, of Afghanistan hadn't given harbor to our enemy we wouldn't be there.  But they did.  So we are.

So, this is a war and we are in it.  I'll go a step further.  We should be in it.  And we should finish it...or, as hawks like to say, win it.  And that means more people are going to die. But since our enemy won't wear a uniform or follow any international laws of war (a term that always brings a wry smile), we are going to kill civilians.

All we can do now is prosecute the offenders and keep fighting the war.  An NPR headline asked whether Robert Bale's shooting spree will alter White House policy in Afghanistan.  I hope not.  Bale is, at best, a troubled soul who should've been removed from the field of battle sooner.  But my suspicion is that hundreds of "Bales" went undetected in Vietnam.  Thousands probably went undetected in Hitler's army (and I'm not talking about the ones who were following orders when they murdered millions upon millions upon millions of Jews, Catholics, gays, Poles, and anyone else who was unlucky enough not to be born with the right stuff).  And in the history of peoples at war I'd guess hundreds of thousands of "Bales" have gotten away with murder.

The good news?  We're still a nation of laws, not men, so Bale will be punished.  We're also a nation that hates war so we're likely to end this one as soon as we restore some level of pre-9/11 security to America and our allies.

The Vacant Occupation

On the Occupy Wall Street site, at www.occupywallst.org, they say,

"The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%."


What are you talking about?  What greed?  What corruption?  This is the most vacant, most intellectually sloppy protest I've ever seen.  With all the problems we face as a nation, to camp out in America's cities against "greed and corruption" is ignorant and absurd.


America is among the least corrupt countries in the world.  According to Transparency.org America is less corrupt than every other member of the UN Security Council except the UK (ranked as the 20th least corrupt country beating the US at 22nd).


And as for the "greed" of the 1% -- are you really protesting against greed?  Seriously?  What's next, sloth? Followed by lust, gluttony, avarice, vanity, and pride?  You might as well put them on the list.  In fact, I'd go after pride or vanity first.  I've always found it more odious than greed...but that's just me.


I heard older members of OWS on the radio comparing their protest to the civil rights movement.  I'm too young to claim a piece of that storied struggle but to compare "greed and corruption" to racism and sexism is insulting to the civil rights movement.  I don't think greedy people lynched anyone.  I don't think the "corrupt 1%" held other humans in bondage, beat them with whips, stole their babies, or...you get the idea.


I know over 9% of Americans are out of work.  And I know many of them have been out of work for a very long time.  It's incredibly frustrating and difficult.  I got laid-off in July 2009.  Thankfully I was given the chance to work for myself and I'm staying afloat that way.  But please, people, what exactly is your point?  What do you want to change?  Who do you want to put in charge?  What is your idea?  

The colonists who sparked the American Revolution had a clear idea: leave the crown, start our own country with new rules.  The seceding South knew what they wanted.  MLK and the civil rights protesters knew where they wanted to take the country.  What do you want? Or is it just sloth and gluttony run rampant in the absence of work and purpose?

We Get the Media We Deserve

Yesterday I heard a news radio guest blame the media for something.  I think it was the way Amanda Knox's friends and family were able to bend it towards their will.  It doesn't matter.  The point is this:  we get the media we deserve, the media we demand, and the media we want.

It's always been this way.  But now with citizen journalists (like, say, me writing this) anyone with an internet connection and a computer can publish anything with impunity (the button above to put this on the web is labeled "PUBLISH").  No longer must you amass the wealth to build or buy printing presses and distribution channels.  Citizen journalists don't see their keyboards as an access point to a sacred public trust they way Editors and Journalists (cap "E", cap "J") did in the past.  Remember how the White House press corp during FDR went to pains to help him hide his wheelchair-bound presidency?  They believed the public good would be ill-served by promoting his handicap.  Publishing photos and telling stories of his infirmity would violate the sacred trust of serving the public good.

Yet even way back then when everything in America was great (smell the sarcasm?) newspapers gave people what they wanted.  The stories of Capone were irresistible to read and therefore to print.  Never-mind the bloodshed, tell us more!  People wanted it.  The media delivered.  But pre-internet, pre-cable news, pre-24/7-always-on-media-era there existed a nobles oblige culture among Editors and Journalists that tempered stories (now called content) to serve, as much as possible without hurting profits, the public good.

The democratization of media through the web has bypassed that tempering culture, crushed it under billions of free form websites.  We should've seen this coming when Springsteen sang "57 channels and nothing on".  Cable lowered the news media standards.  With the cable laid and the infrastructure built the operators went searching for stories...I mean content.  Among the takers?  Cable news shows that could now reach a ready-made audience without assembling a network of local stations, stations who themselves had had to invest in distribution infrastructure and programming.  The web and cable media are all competing for one thing:  your eyeballs.  And print media needs to compete with them too for subscription and ad dollars.  So print has to lower its standards too (see: USAToday--aka McPaper; The Week--cliffs notes of everyone else; and the decimation of nearly every other print brand unwilling to drop their standards).   Nobles oblige?  Standards?  Fact-checking?  The public good?  A sacred public trust?  Huh???

We have the media we deserve.  So stop blaming them -- by which I mean us -- for over-reporting Chris Christie, salacious stories from Hollywood, or ruining the occasional innocent reputation.  Don't like it?  Change the channel.

China Poisons its People, not Apple

"Chinese environmental groups accused Apple Inc of turning a blind eye as its suppliers pollute the country," begins the Reuters piece I found on HuffPo about Apple suppliers poisoning the Chinese.  It's the Chinese government who is poisoning its people, not Apple.  Apple merely lives by the laws of the land.  If those laws, or lack thereof, permit operation of a plant that poisons, change the laws or write the regulations.   


Once upon a time in a place called America companies poisoned citizens in places like Love Canal, NY with impunity.  Why?  They were following the laws...mostly.  Eventually, citizens made companies stop poisoning them with legislation like the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (1948), the Clean Air Act (1970) and the Clean Water Act (1972).


Some argue these laws and subsequent regulations drove jobs to places like Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and eventually China.  There's truth to that argument.  But which of those countries has surpassed America in living standards, wealth, and global dominance since 1948?  Seems we made the right call. (Something to consider in the current debate over jobs vs. government regulation).


Apple is a public company, not a country, community, or deity.  Apple answers to shareholders looking for..wait for it...profits.  It's not up to Apple to write the laws of the lands where they or their suppliers operate; it's up to Apple to follow the laws written by the governments of the lands where they do business.  But when the power of government doesn't derive from the governed in places like...wait for it...CHINA...then the governed don't really matter that much.  The government would much rather attract factory jobs no matter the cost to the environment or its people's health.  (Does anyone remember how China had to blast the smog out of Beijing pre-Olympics?)  It's the Chinese government that's responsible for poisoning its people, not Apple and other companies who abide by the laws of their land.


So spare me the "Apple is evil" storyline.  Place the blame where it belongs...with the Chinese Communist Party.