Should the Government have Secrets?

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It is very naive to think that governments should have no secrets. Here is an example: You negotiate the exchange of one of several American soldiers who are prisoner in a foreign country, and of course you want them back. The foreign country says: "OK, we will give this one back to you on the condition that you never say in public that we tortured him." It is horrible and unpleasant, but what are you going to do? Publish this in the media? What about not only this prisoner, but the other ones?

It is not an unrealistic example. One time, when Franco was still dictator of Spain, the Spanish government promised not to execute a political prisoner on the condition that his lawyers did not publicize the fact that he had been tortured. The lawyers were indignant because it is a disgusting deal and they went to the Press. The prisoner was garroted. What good did that do? It is easy to defend your principles with the life of somebody else.

The best example we know of secret deals happened during the Cuban crisis in 1962. We escaped narrowly a third world war thanks to a deal between the USA and the USSR about the withdrawal of US missiles from Italy and Turkey. If you think that you could have done better, go into politics or work for the State Department: don't blow what your Government does by publishing it to have your name on Facebook. 

If you dislike what your Government does, vote for the other guy next time. Half of the country does not like what the Government does, then it is the turn of the other half to be unhappy about it. We call this democracy, we have no need for traitors.

What the USA did wrong during the Cold War was very public and accepted by everybody at the time, such as favoring fascists over democrats as foreign allies. Maybe we should protest the crimes we know before we protest the conspiracy we don't.

Just a touch of racism

GA has passed tough immigration laws, with this argument: we have 10 percent unemployment here, let us get rid of the illegal Hispanics and give the work to Americans. As a result, farmers in GA have a tough time finding enough workers this season, there are still 11,000 jobs openings to work in the field.
Unrepentent Governor Nathan Deal now tries to give the jobs to probationers, and it does not seem to work either.
As a result our three local TVs here in Savannah report this with comments like: "Americans do not want to work in the sun for 12 dollars an hour." Of course they say "Americans", but they think "Blacks."
It is a ridiculous statement. It is not that people "do not want to" work in the fields, it is that they do not know how. Work in the field is intensive: you cannot take a bus to go home, you got to stick around the farm to start early, when the temperature has not risen yet. Migrant seasonal workers are used to it, they pack and leave their home for the season. Georgians of any race have lost this capacity: they want a job, but they also want to be at home at night. For Pete's sake, it is not just a "job", it is a different lifestyle. A policy like this can only be successful if you spend a lot of money educating people and encouraging them to become seasonal migrants, and nobody knows if it would work. And I do not think that probationers are especially "lazy", I think that months in jail are not physically and mentally preparing you very well for hard work in the fields.

All this lack of workers means less money for the farmers, loss of foodstuff, more cost for the consumers. Our governor has not thought things through. I am sure he will say that it is the fault of president Obama, his usual scapegoat.
We need immigrants or we don't: it should not be a matter of political ideology, but a matter of good sense. If our farmers need seasonal workers, why don't we give seasonal work permits to the people who can do the work?

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NOTE: Local stats say that about 8% of the white labor force in GA is unemployed compared to 14% of the black labor force. Black labor force is about one third of the total GA labor force (27%). Ga has 150,000 people on probation, about 2 times more blacks than whites.We got in addition 50 to 60,000 inmates, ruining the state finances, a testimony to the quality of our school system.

The greatest political mystery

No, it is not whether Sarah Palin will run, though a lot of journalists try to get us excited about it, like they tried with good ol' Trump who made them all look ridiculous, especially Anderson Cooper. Cooper said he was keeping Trump honest. And who is keeping Cooper honest, Donld Trump?
Trump got millions of dollars of free publicity out of his stunt, and it is just what he wanted: it does not matter to him what we think of him.
The greatest mystery to me is this. How come the same politicians, left and right, who appear so obnoxious, even odious on the floor,  appear to be competent, able and responsible in their respective committees?
Just spend 2 hours on C-Span and you will see that it is true. They are good people, left and right, in committees, and then they go posturing and insulting our intelligence in their general assembly.
What is going on?

Bin Laden and the reward that was not claimed

Who protected Bin Laden in Pakistan? We don't know. Any government turns out to have murky ideas as far as terrorists are concerned. If you doubt that, look at the history of the U.S.A. with colonel Khadafi. Is it clear to you?  What strikes me is that Bin Laden did not have a large force to protect him; he counted on anonymity rather than on the government. It is interesting. He probably had some protection, but not full support.
By contrast, I clearly remember the French village where the Ayatollah Khomeini took refuge in 1979: it was peppered with security officers from the Gendarmerie Nationale. They always had a police bus in front of the compound. Not only the protection was official, but you could see high antennas on the roof of the property: it was before the time of the Internet; Khomeini sent his messages by radio all over the Arab world, with the full complicity of the French. Murky, murky, and we have been in trouble ever since.
And how come the multi-million dollar reward offer had no effect? As I am very old and I have traveled a lot, I can tell you this: there is one very greedy person on every block of every town all over the world. No exception. Somebody sold Jesus, remember? Treason during World War 2 was common. What about Bin Laden?
There is something that we have not done right. I guess a lot of people would have liked the money and feared retribution: they wanted to stay home and enjoy the money, they did not want to emigrate here under our protection to enjoy it.  Our reward program abroad has to be modified: logic tells me it should have worked better than that.

The romantic governor Sanford

I was wrong: the lovestruck Governor came back in the news.
I was not impressed when he refused the help of the federal government for his state: the first part of it was fine, honest post-Bush Republican worry about the national debt. The second part: how he was going to deal with South Carolina's problems was totally absent. So, I thought he was not presidential material: either he was unprepared, or he lacked the drive to keep himself informed on unemployment and to take a positive action.
Shortly after that, he disappeared into a lovenest, which is, in my opinion, a problem between his wife and himself, not between the electors and the press.
The only problem I have is that he cannot stop talking. It is hard enough to have your husband saying that another woman is your soul mate, but to say that you are trying to fall back in love with your wife is adding insult to injury.
You think it would stop there. It does not. My guess is that Governor Sanford keeps talking because it is the only way he is still in touch with the woman he loves. So now we are told that he has a book deal? Chucks, it is only on fiscal conservatism, and it fell through. What about how he sacrificed his true love for his constituents?
I am sure his wife would like the book. He is adding a book deal to insult to injury ? To be called a "magnificent Christian woman", under the circumstances, would not cut it for me, I would feel that it means I am sowehow a good person, not a very attractive one.

Many a wife is left wondering how come she never saw that her husband was a prick.

Does torture work? YES it does. It would with me.

I am getting tired of watching young (compared to me, they are all young) reporters discussing whether torture works or not. Of course it works. I for one would tell anything to my dentist. Any American who is afraid to go to the dentist should understand that torture has a very good chance to work. Let us quit the attitude and use common sense. MOSTLY, it "works": many people would talk.
So, a lot of people are like me and would say anything under duress. Here come the questions:
1) Would I tell the truth or anything to please the dentist and escape the experience? What would you do?
2) Do I know anything interesting? I do not. Most of us do not know squat, and most of our enemies do not know squat. How many people who do not know anything are we willing to torture? Do we even know who is the enemy? In this kind of war, we don't. Where do we stop? Are we going to torture a hairdresser just in case he or she has heard something useful?
3) If torture is so efficient, how come we never learned where was Osama Ben Laden?
4) There has been a vast experience of torture in the last 60 years. Nazis tortured, got good information and lost the war. French tortured, claimed it saved lives and lost Algeria, Britain tortured and did not keep India or Ireland, the KGB tortured and communism lost.

You make your own mind. I think that the strength of Americans is that they can outsmart their enemies.
Let us not forget it: outsmarting is something Americans are good at.

Revamping the CIA

I have been wondering why it is that the CIA always has a worse rep than their equivalent in other countries. All nations have spies, and all spying institutions sometimes misbehave. We got spy scandals in every democracy I have known in the last fifty years, It goes with secrecy that bad stuff is committed and that a few traitors are somehow generated. We got to keep both down best we can.

So there are scandals galore everywhere: how come the CIA is always the only bad guy in the news? I think it is cultural: Americans are raised to tell the truth, to talk in you face and go for a good fight: dissimulation is just not American. It is not true for the British, who have been raised in the complex heritage of Victorian times: all their education is about keeping to the weather, keeping a straight upper lip and all the restraints of the rules of good conduct. They may like a good fight too, but they understand the need for secrecy much better. As for the French, they have a large practice of double entendre and an unhealthy respect for the authority in place coupled with underlying rage: it is why they always leak information.

But of course we need our spies and they need to be respected. It is time to stop playing "I am a good person because I don't like the CIA". Maybe part of the bad stuff that happened at the CIA did so because they could not recruit in a net large enough. So all these people who felt too good for the CIA are to be blamed too.

It is time for the CIA to have a good image: it will help the institution inside and outside. They should spend a few million dollars on self-promotion. They battled Communism by supporting good anti-communist books, so they know the power of books, they should support themselves with good pro-CIA literature. The trouble with present CIA mystery novels is that they are based on the British model, and it does not quite "take" over here, except if the hero is British. The key, I think, is to put the accent on outsmarting. Let us leak some stories where we have been outsmarting bad guys (there must be leak-free stories, there always are) and pay some popular writers to enhance the CIA image.
I am getting tired of that constant criticism of the CIA: it is like walking on your own foot.

Political lesbianism

Yesterday, Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) mentioned a congressman who said publicly that she was a cross-dressing lesbian. It made me laugh: for over 50 years, and I am now reaching 70, I have been a lesbian for all the men to whom I said no, and a whore if I happened to say yes. I thought this was specific of my generation, but it seems that we have now shifted from the general contempt for women to the ultimate political argument. Congratulations, congressman!

It does not say much about Miss Maddow, except that she is feared. It says a lot about the obscure ex-congressman Bob Ney (except that I did not infer that he ended up in jail): it tells me all about his age, his education and the quality of his heart.
HA! has-been congressman, you must have been a stud!

The other side of President Bush

I spent the years under President Bush more baffled than anything else: most of the time it was not clear to me how what he decided would help us, for instance despising European countries, delaying any decision about climate change, listening to conversations of American citizens, promoting "preventing wars": you name it, there was always something bizarre in what he did, something slightly "off", when it was not outright wrong..It left me with an impression of the man that was not satisfying. I thought he lacked judgement,sensitivity, good sense, and that most of his thinking was done by other people.
Well, I was wrong: since he left office, I have seen a very elegant side of the ex-president. He did his best to facilitate power transfer, refused to talk against president Obama, and there are moments when sweet petty revenge must be tempting. He said that he was moved by the emotion of people when President Obama was elected: it shows a heart that I had not seen before. And he refused to pardon Scooter Libby, which showed a personal backbone that I did not think he had.
Plus this: anybody who says he loves his country more than politics wins my heart.
So there is a good chance that the poorly rated president Bush will make a great ex-President. He would not be the first: Carter achieved that.
I am crossing my fingers.

Watergate and other mistakes

There was today an interesting paper about Watergate and the tapes transcripts by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times.

When you have a job and kids, you listen to the news, have a look at the paper, but you never have the time to study a political subject in depth. That is how a lot us ignore the facts an dwelve into conspiration theories or faulty judgments. For example, I never believed that I was told the whole truth about what happened to Apollo 13: every day when the accident happened the news stories were confusing and there was no objective link between all the things that went wrong: no explanation. It did not dawn on me that nobody knew at the time what was going on ; I only understood what happened when Tom Hanks, blessed his soul, made a movie about it.
During Watergate, I misjudged what happened because I candidly believed what the White House was saying. It did not come to my mind that the President of the United States would tell blatant lies. Since I retired, I had the time to read about 15 books on Watergate, and then I bought the tapes. You got to listen to the original tapes, though they are very difficult to understand, because listening to a "reading" by an actor gives you a very different take of what was said.
For what it is worth, here is what I think about Watergate:
1) Republicans who say that Nixon was a victim because "everybody else does it" never listened to the tapes. It is like saying nowadays that everybody is a Blagojevich: only fascists would say that.
2) President Nixon often sounds very uncertain, seeking advice: he lowers his voice, leaves his sentences unfinished and sounds rather pitiful. His "advisers" never have the guts to give him any advice at all. I do know that Nixon did not like to be contradicted, so this may be a catastrophe of his own making, but at some times President Nixon sounds unbearably lonely and surrounded by cowards.There is a lot of Richard III in Nixon, from the paranoia to Despair and die!
3) The tapes are extremely difficult, and instead of attacking Stanley I. Kutler for errors and omissions, one should just publish corrections and be thankful to the man. But of course it is less conductive to publicity than to attack him.
4) Howard Dean comes out as the worst lawyer in the history of mankind. And not a very decent person to boot.

Best journalist in December: Derek Kravitz

I have been complaining about journalists quite often, sometimes here (see list on the right) many times while talking to a screen. It is not their fault: their training is atrocious, the money is short, the pressure is inflating their egos and they usually already think that they would do better than Congress (this I think too, but I do not show it on TV). Editors have no idea how exasperating trivia can be when you read them 20 times in a few days. I cant wait to see the end of the holidays and to escape papers on:
- the shoes of President Bush
- the absence of shirt of the president-elect
- icecream cones in Hawaii
- the illegitimate children in the Palin family


I am reading daily the New York Times (I finally forgave them for frauds that I thought were structural), the Washington Post because they are still honest and they have bright people, the Huffington Post because they come elegantly online, and the Los Angeles Times because they are always good on Latin America and the Middle East.

I have been pleased to read Derek Kravitz in the Washington Post recently. Here comes a young journalist that does not annoy me with the daily trivia. He picks up subjects where he has to dig information instead of choosing moody stuff where there is style and no content. The guy works: he has a future!

Derek Kravitz attracted my attention a few month back with a paper on Indian Affairs; I wish more had been done on the subject. There is a lot to tell. But I guess one gets to prove oneself nowadays by jumping through the hoops instead of chewing on a good thing. And today, I read with pleasure a paper entitled Homelessness Official Wins Praise With Focus on Permanent Housing HA! A journalist praises somebody in the Bush administration, it has been a long time! I wish we could find some more, because of course there are more: as a democrat, I keep thinking that a view of government without nuances is not good for democracy. This is the story of a civil servant who keeps trying: give me more. The subject of homelessness, once again, is worth more papers.

And if I could suggest to Mr Kravitz one more topic: there are one million children neglected or abused every year in this civilized country. A bunch of papers would be welcome on that topic too. Is this drug related? Ignorance related? Can we solve it with more daycare? Should we have more education for future parents? Dig this enough, you might change the worrld.

Laugh of the year with Dean Acheson (1893-1971)

Photo from medaloffreedom.com

I found by accident an advice that Dean Acheson gave to Harry Truman in 1960 during the primaries (Truman was not enthusiastic about Kennedy). Some Democrats this year would have been well inspired to listen to the old wise man!

" ABOUT OTHER DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES
" (a) Never say that any of them is not qualified to be President.
" (b) Never say that any of them can't win.
" (c) Never suggest that any of them is the tool of any group or interest, or is not a true blue liberal, or has (or has used) more money than another."

p184-185 of Among Friends. Personal letters of Dean Acheson, 1980

Politics of reconciliation is not reconciliation for politics

Billy Graham, President Nixon, President Obama, Reverend Warren: the temptations of evangelism.

How come people who call themselves "evangelical" are so often deprived of the most elementary compassion? They seem to lack the qualities that make a good Christian: Jesus was open minded, isn't it? I understand that it is the Dalai Lama who said "My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness", but it does not sound foreign to me.
I am all stressed out that after giving us a government of brilliant minds, our president-elect Obama picks up a preacher who is mean spirited and does not understand evolution (see the blog of Thoughts from Kansas and the comments.
Don't we have a good evangelist in this country? I have seen a few on TV that looked perfectly respectable. It is not the case of Rev. Rick Warren, no more than was the pastor Jeremiah Wright, even taking into account his oratory style: jealous and mean. I am mad at them, and I am not even gay.

But you never know how respectable exemplary people are. Many many years ago, there was in Belgium a big evangelical crowd to listen to Billy Graham. The set was a bit theatrical: some church members that I knew (people from my own church) had volunteered to get "converted" suddenly at the end of the preaching, in order to encourage the shy agnostics in the crowd to do the same. It is a small thing, it is not a sin or a crime, but I was not surprised, years later, to see that the same Billy Graham had advised President Nixon so well.

Bailing out Detroit

Yesterday, I was all in favor of bailing out the car industry because 1) I am worried about Detroit and 2) I am old and sentimental.
I should not have listened to the debate today; I changed my mind. I am so naive even in my advanced years that I thought they would come with a plan. They did not: they came with justifications for their need of money. With a few billions more, they cant even innovate, they are going to produce the same misunderstood cars and promote them through the same crooky advertisers.
I really thought yesterday, and that tells you how stupid I am, that they would come back and say stuff like:

- look, the average car price has been 40% of the median American salary every year since 1990: we are going to change that. Refrigerators and TV prices went down, we should do the same.
- We realize that hybrid cars are too expensive for now, we are going to propose a totally electric subcompact at a very low price and get into the low car rental with our unsold big cars. We are even going to offer a 10-days free rent of a big car to anybody who buys a small one. Most people buy bigger cars just to visit their mother once a year: let them do that for free.
- With all the battle for more electronics in everybody's car, we have forgotten that there is a market for cheap cars. We are going to look back at the Bug and the 2CV Citroen and produce an elegant go anywhere, cheap, robust little car with low gas consumption and low price for parts.
- We want to invest in a woman's car with stuff like a place for driving shoes.
- We are sick and tired of watching people take a buggy at the grocery store, fill it up, get everything out to pay, put everything back in, go to the car, put everything in the car and go to the house and take everything out again.From now on we produce our cars with a sliding buggy that stays upright, with a mechanism like ambulance beds. Furthermore, we are going to buy the patent to read the prices of the produces you buy directly in the buggy without putting them on a counter.

You see? That is a plan. Maybe not the best, but it is a plan.

Not only I am dangerously naive, I am also dangerously disappointed: let them die. Cut them in chunks and let a new generation of CEOs deal with each chunk.

With 10 billion dollars, you can pay and train 200,000 people for one year. Get 10 billions in reserve for pension plans(but it is not enough), 5 billions as a stimulus to small, bolder car makers. Who needs the old fusspots?

We need a car to love.
PS They are getting some money, thanks congress for that, but I still hope they will make better cars.

New definition of the tragicomic

Just look at this:
2006 pundits

A Matisse Looking for Owners

For Roni
This beautiful Matisse painting will soon be for sale. It has the most extraordinary and bizarre story going back to WWII, so here are a few words on the subject.

But let me start with my own recollection of nazi looting. People my age know that the Germans during WWII looted a lot of museums and private collections. Little as I was, I remember that the bells of all the churches from my native Belgium were taken to be melted and used for weaponry. When I was a child, people were too poor to have a watch: they usually got one for their retirement, and when people worked in the field, it was the sound of the bell that gave them the time. The loss of the bells was resented by all, but mostly by small children, because we believed that the bells travel to Rome and come back at Easter with eggs and gifts.
Some of our bells of course never came back from Germany. Belgium lost forever 3,358 bells to be precise. But some were found in Hamburg and came back for Easter 1947. These are the bells I remember. The whole country celebrated the return of our bells, and it did not matter what religion you had.
Belgium is a country of belfries. The city of Mechelen has a belfry dating back to the 13th century which is part of the UNESCO World Heritage. The city hosts an international school of carilloneurs.

During WWII, the Nazis stole art from all of occupied Europe and from their own Jewish countrymen in Germany. The saving of some paintings by the French resistance is illustrated by a still superb movie with Burt Lancaster: The Train
So, when a German citizen named Harry Fuld Jr. flew Germany in 1937, his belongings were confiscated by the Germans. He had a Matisse representing the hospital of Ajaccio in Corsica named the pink wall. The painting was discovered by the French in 1948 in Germany, hidden by the man responsible for delivering the poison to the gas chambers of Auschwitz death camp. Nobody knew who the real owner of the painting was, so it ended up in a museum in Paris.

Years passed, Harry Fuld died. But there were, all over the world people interested in the history of the looting, and families wanting their paintings back. Where do you find what belongs to you and how do you prove it belongs to you? It is almost impossible to win. But little by little the various French governments, with varying amounts of enthusiasm and perseverance, found the owners of about 60,000 works of art; 2,000 remained without an owner, about 10 percent belonging to Jewish families which have not been found. The rest is thought to have been taken in France and sold on the German black market. A catalogue of these lost paintings was published and an exhibit of about 50 paintings was shown in Israel and then in Paris from June to October 2008.
The Paris exhibit was at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme. The name of the exhibit was appropriate: Looking for owners. It is not small stuff: there is Ingres, Degas, Monet, Delacroix, Vlaminck. One painting by the Flemish painter Pieter de Hooch (The Drinker) did belong to Edouard de Rothshild. It had been stolen and it was found back in the collection of Goring. Later, it was given back to Edouard's daughter and she offered it to the Louvre.

The owner of the lost Matisse was found after many years of research by German art historian Marina Blumberg. It so happens that the actual owner, through a series of wills, is a British charity involved with emergency medical needs in Israel. So, they intend to sell the painting and fund more work with the proceeds. The French Minister of cultural affairs, Christine Albanel, gave back the painting to the rightful owners on Nov 27th and said that this would bear testimony to a major work of remembrance and justice.

Some CEOs have a big fall too

General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner is still hanging in there, but there is some cleaning going on. Image from USAtoday.com

From Bloomberg.com: Removing CEOs
``There's the feeling that next to financial services, automotive execs are the dumbest people in the world,'' said Thomas Stallkamp, a former Chrysler president who worked at the car company when it received emergency government loans in 1980. ``There are probably some symbolic moves that somebody's going to ask for.''

From the Times on line today:
"George Davies is stepping down as chairman of Per Una, the phenomenally successful fashion brand he created for Marks & Spencer (M&S)."
"Carrefour, the world's second biggest retailer, sacked José Luis Duran as chief executive today after shareholders grew impatient with the slow pace of reform at the struggling French group."

From CNN
co-founder of Yahoo Jerry Yang will step down from the CEO slot.

From Networkworld.com
Symantec on Monday announced that chairman and CEO John Thompson is retiring

Economists should work as chemists do

The notebook of Marie Curie, tragically, is smeared with radioactive fingerprints: people of her generation did not know how dangerous radiations could be. This image is from aip.org


If like me you keep a look on C-SPAN, you got to admit (surprise, surprise) that some people in Washington are smarter than you and me. So what is it that does not work? It is not corruption, we always have too much corruption, but not enough to justify our stagnation.
Some people get so exasperated by our muddy economics, that they would gladly let go of the federal reserve altogether (check for instance the interesting site of co-stumbler LesLafave here). But I am not sure that any ideology is the guilty part: past experiences show that zero intervention does not work and too much intervention does not work either.
I think that sometimes, smart people get lost in the details instead of keeping the aim in mind. They should do like the old chemists did.
Many years ago, a chemistry Prof of New Zealand, Keith Hunter,check him here told me that a chemist notebook should always start with writing down what is the aim of the experiment. In a chemistry notebook, you write down everything, because trivial things like using glass or plastic could explain why you have contamination or why you cannot reproduce earlier results. Why do you write down the aim? Because you can get lost in so many sub-experiments, such as checking the use of plastic vs the use of glass that your original intention can very well get lost in the details.
Dear economists, please work as chemists do. After consulting, getting counter-proposals, after the interventions of various ideologues, politicians and lobbyists, after incorporating all the details you had forgotten in the first place, please check again your final thoughts against what you first wanted to accomplish. Are you off course? Does your solution answer the question?

How my freedom withered

Do you remember all these governmental reassurances about the high professionalism of the terrorist surveillance program? It did not bother me: as my neighbor said: "If they want to listen to my conversations with my aunt Amy, they are welcome to it!" Most of us have a boring life. The problem is that there is no such a thing as high professionalism, so of course we now hear stories of American soldiers abroad being listened to and laughed at when they have intimate conversations with their spouse. I do believe that the temptation to listen to political adversaries is also very great, and if we do, it is the end of democracy.

The police, or maybe your offended spouse, can easily add a GPS to your car (without a warrant) or, would you believe it, in the soles of your shoes. Then of course with credit cards and internet information, almost anybody will know more about you than you know yourself, because one can apply mathematical models to what you do. Why we still refuse to have an identity card does not make that much sense any more: we just refuse to face the truth.

But the worst enemy of freedom is not the government, it is science. Most of what we call adventure is now a fake: the world has been discovered, and if you do not prepare adequately for a trip, you are just a fool. I know in the morning how to dress because I look at the weather channel. I know it is bad to smoke, to drink in excess and to have unprotected sex (who knew much about these three things fifty years ago?) I am overwhelmed by dieting advice and I am instructed to measure my waist and make penance if I want to live longer. I am told how many steps I should walk everyday; science has counted them. Recently, the environmentalists got on my back too, and every detail of my house is reconfigured.

It is all for the better good, but freedom?
Freedom has one foot in the grave and it is the price we pay.

Fame, Glory and other laurels

Yesterday, the press was still full of adrenaline, but there was not much to say in Washington, so my RSS feed came up with fascinating stuff about Mrs O.'shoes and the president-elect's barber.
I took my neighbor Imogene to the restaurant. She is 93, so the conversation was all about her health and about her cat, as it should be. But politics must have been on her mind, because she suddenly turned to me and said: "I am so glad that I never was famous!"
I'll drink to that. We raised our glasses and sipped our wine in perfect bliss.

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