Monthly Archives: May 2013

Nemaha County, KS

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Memories of my youth. Continue reading →

About the only way that Nemaha County, KS, would make the news is if a tornado touched down there. That is what happened yesterday near the town of Corning. It must have been a pretty big storm; I heard about it on the radio. I was not surprised to learn that no one had been injured. Nemaha County is a pretty large place — over 719 square miles — and the total population is only a little over ten thousand, about half as densely settled as it was in 1900.

I have spent some time in Nemaha County. In the late 1950’s or early 1960’s my uncle, who was a priest of the Benedictine order, somehow got assigned as the pastor of St. Bede’s Church in Kelly, KS, which is about seven miles from Corning. The church is still there, I think, but according to the Internet it is “served” by a priest from another parish. I wonder what became of the rectory, the house next to the church, in which my uncle, officially Fr. Vincent, but Fr. Joe to all of my family, lived. I stayed with him for one week per summer for a few years. When I became too urbane and sophisticated for this, my sister took my place.

Having lived all of my life in either the city or the suburbs, I found Kelly to be an unusual place. It was as rural as it could be, certainly more rural than the only other farm town that I had ever heard of, Petticoat Junction. Despite the name, none of Kelly’s residents were Irish. All, or at least nearly all, of them were Germans. I heard my uncle explain once where the name Kelly came from, but I do not remember.

As I recall, “downtown” Kelly consisted of only two retail establishments, a combination gas station and post office and a feed store. I found it wonderfully strange that postmaster was a part-time job in Kelly. By the way, my uncle’s official address was, at least according to TheCatholicDirectory.com, 7344 Drought St. When I mailed letters to my uncle, I addressed them to “Fr. Vincent, Kelly, KS.” He assured me that that was more than sufficient, and he was right. I wonder whether he would have received it if I had erroneously sent one to 7346 Drought St. I am pretty certain that there were no houses on his “street” within a mile of the rectory, and, in fact, I cannot recall any dwellings at all.

The parish provided my uncle with a car, an old grey Buick (or maybe Pontiac) that he absolutely hated. One night we heard on the television news that someone had escaped from a nearby (by Kansas standards, within one hundred miles is definitely “nearby”) prison. Fr. Joe shocked me by unlocking the car and putting his keys in the ignition in hope that the fugitive would steal it.

Fr. Joe was a Renaissance man. He was an accomplished athlete and scholar. He had a degree in economics (!) from the University of Chicago. He was very adept at painting. He was well-versed in history, literature, and classical music. He loved to hunt and fish, although in his later years he did most of his hunting with his camera. I think that he loved to spend time in the outdoors with his dogs more than anything.

My uncle and I played golf together occasionally. We usually played at the golf course in the county seat, Seneca, a metroplex with a population of over one thousand. The public golf course there had several unique features. The first thing that one noticed was the lack of a clubhouse. Instead there was a metal box in which one inserted one’s brown (explained later) fees. The box also contained score cards on which the distances of each of the nine holes was recorded.

The small map on the scorecard made it clear that the holes were laid out in a more-or-less rectangular fashion around an out-of-bounds area in the middle of the course. That area looked like an abandoned field, but it was actually the landing strip for the Seneca airport. So, yes, during the round a plane might very well land or take off within a few yards of the course.

It goes without saying that the course was flat. My recollection is that there was a noticeable hill on either the seventh or eighth hole. This was only a slight impediment in late summer when it was so dry that the ball would routinely roll for an extra thirty or forty yards.
SandGreen
The most memorable feature of the course, however, did not come into play until one’s second shot on the first hole. At that point most golfers could see the flag, but there were none of the usual indications of a putting surface — short grass, elevation, sand traps, etc. Instead the hole was surrounded by a circle of perfectly level ground from which all vegetation had been removed and replaced with a coating of sand. When your ball reached the “green,” you picked it up and remembered where it was. You then took a metal rolling device and made a two-foot wide path from your ball to the hole. Then you putted on the dirt and sand. When you were finished, you used a rake to turn the green into something that a Japanese gardener would be proud of.

You have missed your chance to play on this unique course. Its greens were converted to grass while I was in college, and it is now closed. Someone built an 18-hole course a couple of miles out of town.

Worst Speech Ever?

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Like a lead balloon. Continue reading →

I have long thought that the greatest oration of all time must have been Pope Urban II’s call in 1095 at Clermont for all of Europe to journey to the Middle East to liberate Jerusalem and, especially, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher therein. This speech launched the Crusades, which definitely changed the course of history quickly, dramatically, and permanently.

My own feeble attempt at speechifying at the Life Master party held for Mary Eisenberg and Nancy Narwold was much closer to the other end of the spectrum. This is the gist of what I said:

Mary and Donna.

Mary (left) and her playing partner, Donna Lyons.

I have only played with Nancy once, so I must leave the task of overseeing her public humiliation to someone else.

Mary I do know. You probably are most acquainted with her from her weekday presence here. She definitely plays a lot. You may have even wondered if this was her whole life. I perused the results sheets from a few weeks ago. Here are my notes.

Her best was a 62% game with Roman Solecki, but it didn’t count; they were filling out the movement for the new 199er game. In just five days she also played with Donna Lyons, Carole Amaio, Judy Pyka, Ed Konowitz, and two sessions with Barbara Mindell.

There is no game on Tuesday afternoon. I am guessing that that must be laundry day.

What you may not know is that Mary also plays here on Saturday, usually with Lois Labins. But after Saturday’s game is when Mary’s OTHER life begins. She pulls on her Dale Evans cowgirl boots, drives to the airport, and flies her private jet to Kuala Lumpur, Abu Dhabi, or wherever. Sometimes it takes all night, but every Sunday morning she is there to assume her rightful place as the #1 driver on the Ferrari Formula One racing team.
Ferrari
Here she is: surrounded by her crew, strapped into her bright red four-wheeled rolling rocket, ready to zoom through the streets of Monte Carlo, careening this way and that, throwing all caution to the wind, and laughing at death.

But enough about the present; I want to address the future. We all know that many bridge players, when they finally achieve life master status cut WAY back on their playing. I solemnly advise you not to take that course, Mary; bridge is too important. But if you determine that you cannot keep up this arduous schedule, on behalf of the entire Hartford Bridge Club I beseech you: at the very least, DON’T STOP FEEDING US!

* * *
The speech bombed. Most people seemed to be mildly amused by the references to Mary’s exceptional club attendance, her many partners, her boots, and her cooking. The part about being a Formula 1 driver, which was obviously the core of the speech, elicited virtually no reaction whatever. Not even Mary understood what I was talking about.

It really is awful when you need to explain your jokes, but I wrongly assumed that the majority of those in attendance (120 people!) would be familiar with the following:

  1. Formula 1 drivers drive at incredible speeds — up to 220 mph.
  2. The races are held, not on oval courses that primarily require only the ability to make left turns, but on the streets of some of the largest cities in the world!
  3. Since her auto accident a while back, Mary has become a rather timid driver. In actual fact, she is even a timid passenger. I am by no means an aggressive driver, but the one time that she rode with me to Danbury (where she completed the requirements for Life Master!) and back, she spent much of the trips mentally retreating to “her private place” to relieve the anxiety of passing trucks or being passed.

I tried to paint (verbally) the impossible picture of Mary as a Formula 1 driver. I figured that virtually everyone there must have played with Mary at least once and that her reputation as a poor passenger must be widespread. I guess that I was wrong.

Or maybe people were unfamiliar with Formula 1 racing.

I suppose that it is also possible that it was just not that funny.

Sue and Ilene Make a Slam

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Don’t ask how. Continue reading →

Sue has often shared with me stories about the slams that she has made. I always asked the same question: “Did you bid it?” Prior to yesterday she always sheepishly admitted that she did not. This time was different, and that is an understatement.

Sue was holding this hand on Friday when she saw her partner, Ilene Mahler, open the bidding by playing the 2NT card:

♠ 6   ♥ K 10 2   ♦ K 9 7 6 5 4 3   ♣ J 7
Sue told me that she had bid 2♠ to transfer to clubs. I explained that she could not have made that bid because Ilene had already bid 2NT.

“Oh,” she said. “I must have bid 3♠.”

“What do you and Ilene play that that means?”

“Transfer to clubs.” She had looked on her convention card, but I noticed that she had been looking at the 1NT section, not the 2NT section. I directed her attention there, and she reported that the line was blank.

“So what did Ilene bid?” I queried.

“She said 4♠!” Even though they were playing transfers, Ilene thought that Sue’s bid indicated a strong spade suit. If I had been in Ilene’s seat, I would have alerted the bid, and then, when the opponents asked what it meant, I would have responded “Nothing.”

“And what did you do?”

“I said 4NT, just hoping that she would bid something else or pass, but she took it as Blackwood. She had three aces, so she bid 5♠!”

“Did you mention your seven diamonds at that point?”

“No, I bid 5NT, but she took that as asking for kings. She had one, but she accidentally bid 6♥. My heart sank, but she quickly called a ‘finger fault’ on herself and changed it to 6♦. I was so relieved that I passed.”

So, not only did they reach the best contract. They managed to keep the strong hand concealed!

The play was easy. They had to lose the ♦A, but it was almost impossible to lose anything else. The best part was that 6NT would go down against best defense. They easily got a top board.

Sue asked me how I would have bid it. I looked at Ilene’s hand.

♠ A J 8   ♥ A Q 7 5   ♦ Q 8 2   ♣ A K Q
So, IMHO Ilene’s hand was slightly too strong for an immediate bid of 2NT. I would have opened 2♣ and then bid 2NT after Sue responded 2♦. I would have immediately bid 4♣ (Gerber) with Sue’s hand. When I heard about Ilene’s three aces, I would have crossed my fingers, rubbed my rabbit’s foot, and tried 6♦.

That is, I would have bid 6♦ if my partner had responded 4NT to my Gerber bid. The reason that I make that distinction is that the Gerber convention, which I might use once a year, seems to engender counting lapses in many people. By a strange coincidence I used it twice in the last two weeks. On one of those occasions my partner, who held a hand similar to Ilene’s above, responded 4♠ instead of 4NT. I took the plunge anyway, but with Sue’s hand I would have bid 5♦ after a 4♠ response.

On the hand in which my partner made a mistake I was castigated by one of the opponents for asking for aces with a worthless doubleton. Well, admittedly, it is a little dangerous, but when my partner has shown a balanced hand with over half of the deck, I think that it is reasonable to employ Blackwood or Gerber. The alternative is to bid one’s controls. However, when one partner has one or zero controls, and his partner has a lot, it is sometimes not feasible for the weaker hand to use that approach. In short, control bidding works better when the controls are split more evenly, or when the strong hand is the captain.

Incidentally, I play that 4♣ is Gerber if and only if two conditions have been met: 1) The first bid or the last bid by the partnership must have been in no-trump. 2) The last bid must have been 2NT or less. That is, 4♣ was a jump.

Population

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Musings on the explosion. Continue reading →

Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth made a strong case for immediate limits in the dispersal of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. He demonstrated a strong need for action, and, by citing the successful reduction in the levels of aerosols that were destroying the ozone layer, he gave a pretty good indication that humanity was capable of implementing the necessary measures to solve this problem. This was, I think, a common impression among those watching his presentation.

However, in the audience in which I attended the screening I seemed to be one of the only people who was shocked by what he said near the end of the film. He showed the following graph as an indication of the context for decisions about climate change:PopGrowth

Notice that even though the projected growth rate is slightly less than the current rate, the population in 2050 will be four times what it was in 1950! This made a great impression on me. What good will it do, I thought, to start using more efficient light bulbs if there are four times as many of us who need the light? Furthermore, a very high percentage of the growth appears to be taking place in developing nations. Can we really expect people in those countries to use less energy in the future when they use so very little now?

The overwhelming impression that was made on my admittedly ignorant perspective was that considering the projected increase in carbon dioxide emissions as a cause of global warming made less sense than considering it as an effect of the population explosion that could have many dire consequences, one of which was catastrophic climatic disruption. Surely, at the least, nations should attack the “capita” part of “per capita emission” as vigorously as they attack the “emissions” part. In fact, Gore has changed his emphasis in this direction at least a little, as is evidenced by this piece.

There are, of course, two ways to limit the population growth rate: decrease the birth rate or increase the death rate. Massive wars and plagues might be used to implement the second approach, but nobody is arguing in their favor. So, as long as we are confined to the earth, we are pretty much stuck with decreasing the birth rate if we want to address the many problems caused by the excessive number of humans on our planet.

Analyzing the effect of birth rates is more complex than it may seem at first blush. The long-term objective of stabilizing population is achieved when, on the average, women produce one surviving daughter each. Thus, the replacement rate for developed countries, which have low infant mortality, is about 2.1. In the underdeveloped countries the replacement rate could be 3 or even more. Another important factor is the average age of the people. If the average age is low, then any decreases in the fertility rate will have a large effect in the long term, but in the near term, the population will still continue to grow at a startling rate. China, for example, has sustained a very low birth rate for a number of years, but the population has continued to grow because the number of young people at the time that the restrictive birth policies were implemented was enormous.

The list of birth rates by nation makes it quite clear that the African nations have by far the highest birth rates. Niger, with a fertility rate of over 7, is on top. Many developed countries in Europe and Asia have rates that are below the replacement rate. In general, the more developed the country the lower the rate. So, as Al Gore indicated, a primary strategy of population control should probably be the education of women in poorer countries so that they understand their choices better.

Don’t expect immediate results in Niger, however. Not only does it have the highest fertility rate in the world; it also boasts the lowest median age. Over half of all of its inhabitants are fifteen years old or less! Many of the other African nations with the highest birth rates also have median ages of twenty or less.

There is another strong factor, which is rather clearly indicated in this chart derived from the CIA’s “Factbook.” Outliers

This graph shows the relationship between wealth (gross domestic product per capita on the horizontal axis) and birth rate (vertical axis) for large nations. The relationship is a rather smooth curve with only three outliers. Angola is probably a special case in that its wealth comes almost exclusively from recently exploited natural resources from which most citizens have benefited not at all. In fact, the literacy rate for women is barely 50 percent. So, from a development perspective Angola’s dot should probably be moved to the left.

The other two outliers are Saudia Arabia and Israel, the centers of the Islamic and Jewish faiths in the Middle East. Some factions in those two countries are certainly engaged in a deliberate effort to keep the birth rate high. A similar effect can be seen in the United States, in which the state with the highest birth rate is Utah, the center of the Mormon faith. The Mormons have, for more than a century, maintained a one or two child-per-family advantage over other white Americans. It hardly seems coincidental that they have become much more powerful as a group over that period.

Other religious sects are now starting to emulate them. The Christian movement that has been dubbed “Quiverfull” encourages Christian women to have as many children as possible. Nancy Campbell is one of the most outspoken advocates of Christian women using their wombs as weapons (quivers are used to hold arrows, after all) in the war against the perceived opponents of Christianity, mostly the seculars.

So, IMHO the two best ways to prevent a global climate catastrophe are to lift the African countries out of poverty and to provide education to the women in the countries with high birth rates. The problem that will inevitably encountered in trying to implement this strategy is the wholesale and inevitable resistance from people of faith.

Will the necessary measures be implemented in time to avert disaster? I doubt it. There is no political will to implement the kind of drastic measures that the Chinese adopted. Even there the government is hard at work to move the nation into the category of “developed,” which surely would mean that the total emissions would increase drastically.

PatPaulsenIn fact, the only campaigning candidate for any political office whom I have ever heard mention population control was Pat Paulsen, who led the Straight-Talking American Government (STAG) party in a quixotic quest for the White House in 1968 and subsequent years. When his first campaign was over, a reporter asked him what he would have done if elected. He momentarily went off-character and replied candidly that the most important thing was to stop the explosion of the human population. I agree with him. As his supporters often chanted, “We can’t stand Pat!”

Guantánamo and Drone Strikes

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Color me ashamed. Continue reading →

I do not consider myself naïve, or at least in the last sixty-four years I have lost my naïveté about many things. For example, I long ago disabused myself of the notion that the United States was the only decent nation on the earth. I have long since learned that the history books that I was forced to read in my youth neglected to mention a number of shameful aspects of the American story: the treatment of the native Americans, the lynchings and segregation in the south that lasted well into the last century, our unhealthy fascination with firearms and prisons, the Trail of Tears, rampant graft and corruption, massacres of labor unions and protesters, and countless overthrows of governments in smaller nations that were not sufficiently friendly to American businesses. So, I have long since recognized that the American omelet was not created without the breaking of a few eggs.

Furthermore, I am not a pacifist. I think that some of the nation’s wars were justified by circumstances. I wasn’t happy about it, but I served in the army during the tail end of the Vietnam War. I am not bragging about this. I was a horrible soldier, and I never saw combat. In fact, I spent almost all of my short military career punching a typewriter, and I never went overseas.

For the first time in my life I feel ashamed of my country. Two articles that I recently read have led me to believe that the United States has completely lost its bearings. The first was a short piece by Jeremy Scahill in The Nation about the murder by the CIA (using drones) of three American citizens in Yemen. I was not outraged so much about the fact that they were American citizens as I was that the United States was engaged in cold-blooded assassinations of a citizen of any nation who is suspected of associating with “terrorists.”

When did this become acceptable behavior? Is the rationale “9/11 changed everything”? Did we not vote out of office just about everyone who used that as an excuse for eight years of boneheaded policies? Three presidents — Ford, Carter, and Reagan — signed executive orders banning assassinations. Nevertheless, in the last few years the United States has made many hundreds of deadly drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, two countries that have only the most tangential associations with 9/11 or any other such act. What has changed? Aside from the fact that bystanders are inevitably killed along with the person who is the target, what is the difference between a drone and a bullet fired from a gun? Yes, the person operating the drone need not be standing on the soil of the same country in which the target resides. Why in the world is this an important distinction? Maybe it provides political cover, but what about the morality of the act itself?

Two of the three Americans killed were not even the intended targets of the drone strikes that ended their lives. The other one, Anwar al-Awlaki, was supposedly a high-ranking terrorist mastermind. The only specifics that I have been able to uncover indicated that he was associated with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the moron who tried to blow up an airplane by setting his underwear on fire in the lavatory two years earlier. Are we really terrified by someone who (allegedly) came up with this mode of attack?

What happened to the concepts of trials, standards of evidence, and “innocent until proven guilty”? Of course, it is difficult to capture someone like al-Awlaki, who changed residences frequently in the hinterlands of Yemen. So what? It was difficult to capture Al Capone, too, but they finally did it. This is what we do in the United States — we capture bad guys, and we put them on trial. Or, at least that is what I had always thought. What is there about the War on Terror that has prompted the United States to abandon its most longstanding and precious principles?

The other article was in some ways even more disturbing. It is a synopsis of the memoir of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a man who has been in custody since Nov. 20, 2001, and has been held at Guantánamo for more than eleven years. He was tortured, but he never admitted to anything even when the American authorities threatened to bring his mother to the all-male detention center at Guantánamo. And he is not alone: 166 men are still detained at the prison (at a cost of over $1 million per year each); 86 of them have been cleared for release since 2009, but they are still interred!

The United States should be better than this. We did not need these reprehensible tactics to defeat Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini. What makes the Muslim extremists more frightening than these monsters? I just do not get it.

During the Bush administration I was angry, not ashamed. I had no respect for the people making the decisions in those days, and I trusted that they would eventually be ousted. They were, but nothing much changed, at least not in these two areas.

Here is a fact that Americans need to face: There are seven billion people on the planet, and some of them hate us. That should not give our government an excuse to kill them (and hundreds of bystanders) or to detain them (and dozens of others) without recourse to the judicial system.

Here is something else to consider. Our strategy in the War on Terror, as I understand it, has been straightforward: kill all suspected terrorists. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and sacrificed the lives of many thousands of people implementing this strategy for over eleven and a half years. Are there more terrorists now or fewer? Is it not conceivable that this approach, which I like to compare to trying to kill mosquitoes with a shotgun, is counterproductive?

There is a choice. Europe dealt with a serious threat from terrorists in the eighties. It took a long time, but using traditional police procedures and courts of justice, the Red Brigades were eventually wiped out completely. Does anyone really think that the approach that the U.S. is now using has any remote chance of being so successful?