Government Motors

On Facebook a friend (a relative actually) noted that “work is being done now to transfer ownership of General Motors to the government. ‘Government Motors’, the new GM. scary.”

Why scary?

It’s not as if General Motors has been well managed before now.

The Federal Government will own a majority of GM, it’s true, but the Canadian Government, the United Auto Workers and current bondholders will also have shares. Those organizations may not make it seem any better, but multiple owners makes me feel better. The intent is to sell the stock once it has value.

Uncle Sam will own the majority of the stock, but it will not manage the company day-to-day. Government workers won’t be on the assembly lines or designing the cars.

If, as most of our political leaders determined, we need to sustain GM (and Chrysler) for economic and national security reasons, than it’s better, I think, that we actually get stock for our money and not just loan IOUs.

Is it also scary that the Federal Government manages air traffic control? I’ve not seen any planes falling out of the skies.

Is it also scary that the Federal Government sends checks to more than 100 million people who depend on Social Security every month? I’ve heard complaints of red tape but none that people don’t get their money timely.

Is it also scary that the the Federal Government runs prisons? I haven’t heard of federal prisoners running loose across the land?

And so on. I’m not saying that the Federal Government is perfect — I had 30 years experience within it to learn differently. I am not saying that taking over auto manufacturers is something that we should be pleased was necessary.

I am saying that taking a temporary majority ownership in General Motors isn’t cause for particular alarm.

July 9th

Ed Ames, the singer and actor, is 82. Ames, whose parents were Ukrainian Jews, played the Indian Mingo on “Daniel Boone.” He was responsible for the classic incident with Johnny Carson throwing a tomahawk. Ames threw at a two-dimensional silhouette and managed to add some three-dimensional anatomy. Ed, with his brothers Joe, Gene and Vic — the Ames Brothers — had several top hits in the early 1950s. Their actual surname was Urick.

Donald Rumsfeld is 77.

Doctor and author Oliver Sacks is 76 today.

He has devoted his career to studying people with unusual neurological disorders, and writing about them so that they seem like real people and not just case studies. His first book was Migraine (1970), about migraine headaches, and it got good reviews. In the 1960s, he started working with survivors of the sleeping sickness epidemic that occurred between 1916 and 1927. These people had been in institutions ever since, still alive but in unresponsive bodies. Sacks noticed that many people had similar reactions as people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, so he decided to treat them with the drug levodopa. Many of them woke up and were cognizant for the first time in 40 years. But it was extremely stressful for many of them to have lost so much time like that, and most of them went back to sleep. Sacks wrote a book about it, Awakenings (1973). In 1990, it was made into a movie starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

He went on to write several more books in the same vein, including Seeing Voices (1989), The Island of the Colorblind (1997), and the best-selling book of essays The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), about people living with a variety of neurological disorders. His most recent book is Musicophilia (2007), about the sometimes bizarre connections between music and the brain, and the ways in which music operates on everyone from people with severe neurological disorders to ordinary people who can’t get a tune out of their heads.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Brian Dennehy is 71 — guess he’ll be playing one of the old folks in any re-make of Cocoon. Dennehy won a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award for his portrayal of Willy Loman in the 2000 made-for-TV presentation of Death of a Salesman.

Chris Cooper is 58. Cooper has appeared in over 50 films and television productions, winning a best supporting actor Oscar for Adaptation.

Jimmy Smits is 54. Smits was nominated six times for an Emmy for supporting actor for L.A. Law. He won once. He was nominated five times for best actor for NYPD Blue. No nominations for his work as Senator Bail Organa in Star Wars. But then, he was elected President on West Wing.

Tom Hanks is 53 today. Hanks has been nominated for the Academy Award for best actor five times, winning for Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994). His other nominations were for Big, Saving Private Ryan and Cast Away.

Kelly McGillis is 52, Courtney Love is 45, and Fred Savage is 33.

And Orenthal James Simpson is 62 today.

Redux post of the day

Posted here originally two years ago today.

Last week NewMexiKen read Daniel Gilibert’s Stumbling on Happiness. This is an informative and funny book by a Harvard psychologist that explains how our brain, mind, memory and emotions work — and why they lead us to such poor decisions about what makes us happy.

As Malcolm Gladwell has written about the book, “If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me.”

Trust me, too.

First, because Gilbert is an amusing writer, throwing in unexpected delights.

Emotional happiness is like that. It is the feeling common to the feelings we have when we see our new granddaughter smile for the first time, receive word of a promotion, help a wayward tourist find the art museum, taste Belgian chocolate toward the back of our tongue, inhale the scent of our lover’s shampoo, hear the song we used to like so much in high school but haven’t heard in years, touch our cheek to kitten fur, cure cancer, or get a really good snootful of cocaine.

… [O]r trying to predict how proud you will be of your spouse’s accomplishment without knowing which accomplishment (winning a Nobel Prize or finding the best divorce lawyer in the city?) …

“There are many good things about getting older, but no one knows what they are.”

Second, because Gilbert writes about us, human beings, “the only animal that thinks about the future.” Able to think about the future, we make predictions; we make predictions so that we can control our future. Gilbert explains we are captains of a boat on “the river of time.” We get pleasure from controlling the boat. We also get pleasure from controlling the destination, the place that will bring us happiness. The problem is, our future destinations are “fundamentally different” than they appear.

The book explains why. Happiness itself is subjective. Our imaginations are defective — our memory unknowingly fills in details that didn’t happen and forgets details that did; we base too much on the present; we rationalize outcomes, good becomes better, bad becomes worse. We are unable to recall our real feelings once an event has passed.

Stumbling on Happiness is not a self-help book. You may learn how you make decisions about future happiness, even why you make those decisions, but not how to make better decisions — at least not directly. But just learning may be a good start.

Hey, be careful we might need you later

English and American troops under British Major General Edward Braddock were routed by French and Indian forces near Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh) on this date in 1755. The leading colonial officer, George Washington, had two horses shot out from under him, his coat torn by bullets and his hat shot off, but — as you may have heard — he survived.

Balance

I read both Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness yesterday.

I was thinking maybe a couple of Bugs Bunny comic books ought to do it today.

What was that thing about stringing them up at the side of the road?

Jill says she’s in — and sent along this news story.

A woman with a long history of driving violations had a blood alcohol level more than twice the legal limit when she plowed into the back of a pickup truck on the Capital Beltway, sending the pickup over a guardrail and hurtling down a 60-foot embankment onto its roof in Montgomery County, authorities said yesterday.

The two men in the Nissan pickup, who were driving home to Virginia from a construction job site, were killed.

washingtonpost.com

Michael’s Number 2

31 million viewers watched on 19 networks, with 8.9 million watching on cable (CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Headline News) and another 14.3 million on the broadcast networks. Better ratings than Pres. Reagan’s funeral in 2004 (some 20 million viewers) but not quite Princess Di level (over 33 million).

CJR

That would mean of course, that approximately 273 million Americans did not watch.

But can they do the Moonwalk?

On Sunday, July 5th in Urumqi, the capital of China’s western Xinjiang region, thousands of minority ethnic Uighur residents marched, demanding a government investigation into an earlier incident – a brawl between Han Chinese and Uighurs in a toy factory in Shaoguan that ended with at least two Uighur deaths. Sometime during the July 5th protest the situation became very violent, Uighurs clashing with police and attacking local Han Chinese. Urumqi citizens woke the next morning to learn that over 1,000 people had been injured and 156 killed in their city. Government forces worked to quell the violence and to separate the newly-formed Han vigilante groups and the Uighurs still in the streets. Communications were shut off, streets closed, curfews imposed, hundreds arrested, and thousands of troops poured into Urumqi, which remains tense – several clashes reported even today. (36 photos total)

The Big Picture – Boston.com

Bread and circuses

In a week when the U.S. withdrew in Iraq and attacked in Afghanistan, when the governor of California declared an economic emergency and the governor of Alaska stepped down, it was Michael Jackson who drove the news agenda.

The dominant story ever since he died on June 25, the fascination with Jackson’s life and death filled 17% of the newshole from June 29-July 5, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. …
. . .

The Jackson story filled 30% of the airtime studied on network news and 28% on cable news last week. Within the network news universe, the more feature-oriented morning shows spent more than half their time (56%) on the story compared with 20% in the evening.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) has more.

Idle thought

It continues to amaze me that so many people assume that the price of their house will go back to its 2005-2006 value sometime soon.

That value was a bubble! An anomaly. An aberration.

Today’s prices are likely to be it for a while — if they don’t drop further what with all the foreclosures yet to come.

Best line of the morning

As the parent (or should I say survivor?) of teenagers, I love looking at these books.  Doesn’t matter when they are published, someone always believes “they” have the answer. Personally, I would have loved a “parenting” book on  ”how to hide the body”…

Awful Library Books reviewing How to Survive Your Child’s Rebellious Teens—New Solutions for Troubled Parents.

How now Dow?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average had an intra-day low of 40.56 on this date in 1932, its Great Depression bottom. It closed that day at 41.22.

34 months earlier it had been at 381.17; the drop was 89.3%.

(For comparison, we’re 21 months into the current bear market, down 43.7% since October 2007.)

The Dow did not reach the September 1929 level again in inflation-adjusted value until 1954.

How many of you expect to die?

Reposted from one year ago today:

“How many of you expect to die?” she asked.

The audience fell silent, laughed nervously and only then, looking one to the other, slowly raised their hands.

“Would you prefer to be old when it happens?” she then asked.

This time the response was swift and sure, given the alternative.

Then Dr. Lynn, who describes herself as an “old person in training,” offered three options to the room. Who would choose cancer as the way to go? Just a few. Chronic heart failure, or emphysema? A few more.

“So all the rest of you are up for frailty and dementia?” Dr. Lynn asked.

The New Old Age blog

According to Dr. Lynn, cancer takes about 20% of seniors, peaking around age 65; heart and lung failure, about 25% peaking around age 75; and old age about 40%, peaking around age 85.

Life’s a bitch, then you die.

Brown

Reposted from two years ago today:

NewMexiKen attended a talk Saturday evening by Richard Rodriguez. His presentation was sponsored by The Chicano, Hispano, Latino Program (CHIPOTLE) of the University Libraries at the University of New Mexico. He was excellent.

Rodriguez is an author and journalist, his most recent book being Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002). He appears on The NewsHour on PBS.

Rodriguez’s 75-minute talk was on the browning of the world. It was an anecdotal, amusing, entertaining and provocative presentation. My notes are fleeting but include:

  • The Senate voted to designate English the only language. Won’t they have to stop selling burritos in the Senate cafeteria? How could you even describe a burrito — tortilla, no, guacamole, no, chile, no.
  • We don’t speak English, we speak American. (German words, Spanish words, French words, American Indian words.)
  • Outside the U.S. there is no such thing as Hispanics. It’s a number of cultures not a race.
  • HBO did a documentary on white culture. It was 15 minutes.
  • The Census suggests there will be no racial distinctions by the 2020 census. The races are becoming too intermingled.
  • One of his aunts, like Rodriguez part Spanish and part Indian, married an East Indian. Their daughter, his cousin, is an Indian Indian. (And she married an American Indian so their child is Indian Indian Indian.)
  • Why is Barack Obama considered an African-American (i.e., black)? His mother was white.
  • He’d gotten a letter from a woman who’s father was Muslim and mother was Jewish. She didn’t know what she was but Americans think of her as the frugal terrorist.

These one-liners, of course, do not do the talk justice. Underlying it all was the theme that individuals everywhere are crossing racial lines — as they have for centuries in some cultures. It’s the browning of the world. And now people are crossing religious lines, too. Reacting to it all are the extremists, doing all that they can to stop the mingling.

July 8th is the birthday

… of Anjelica Huston. The third generation Oscar winner is 58. Anjelica won the best supporting actress Oscar for Prizzi’s Honor; she has two other nominations. Her father John was nominated for 15 writing, directing or acting Oscars, winning director and writing for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Grandfather Walter was nominated four times for acting Oscars, winning the supporting award for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

… of journalist and author Anna Quindlen, 56.

… of Kevin Bacon. He’s 51. And no, Kevin Bacon has never been nominated for an Oscar. He’s only a few degrees of separation however, from many who have.

Steve Lawrence is 74 and Jerry Vale is 77. Or vice versa.

Jeffrey Tambor is 65. Toby Keith is 48 (I like that bar too, Toby). Joan Osborne is 47. Billy Crudup is 41.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, was born in Zurich, Switzerland on this date in 1926. The Writer’s Almanac informed us in 2007:

She was the first medical professional to argue that dying is a natural process, and that patients who are terminally ill should not be forced to fight the dying process every step of the way. …

Her book On Death and Dying (1969) helped start the hospice movement, which has since spread around the world. She also introduced the now-famous concept of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Louis Jordan was born on this date in 1908.

“In the Forties, bandleader Louis Jordan pioneered a wild – and wildly popular – amalgam of jazz and blues with salty, jive-talking humor. The music played by singer/saxophonist Jordan and his Tympany Five got called “jump blues” or “jumpin’ jive,” and it served as a precursor to the rhythm & blues and rock and roll of the Fifties.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

John D. Rockefeller was born on this date in 1839. The world’s first billionaire, Rockefeller essentially retired from Standard Oil in 1911. Even so, his taxable income in 1918 was $33,000,000 and his personal worth was estimated at more than $800,000,000. By then, he had already donated about $500 million to charitable causes. Rockefeller died in 1937 at age 97. Ron Chernow has written a recent highly-regarded biography, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.. The New York Times has posted Rockefeller’s obituary.

Nelson Rockefeller, grandson of John D., was born on his grandfather’s birthday in 1908. Rockefeller was governor of New York 1959-1973 and vice president 1974-1977. He died in 1979. NewMexiKen once attended a conference hosted by Rockefeller and saw him stirring his coffee with the temple of his eyeglasses. It was kind of endearing.

Best lines of the day

During our week off, I had a very dark day. First, I’m on the computer Googling things and I learn that Farrah Fawcett has died. I used to have her poster. Six hours later, I’m watching TV and I find out Michael Jackson is dead. I used to have his glove. But it isn’t over. I stumble to the kitchen to find solace in milk and cookies and find out my milk has expired. Seriously.

Three things in one day. That can’t be normal. So it gets me thinking, I wonder how many people die every day? According to the Internet, it’s somewhere between a hundred and forty-five thousand and three hundred thousand. That’s a lot of people. And the real tragedy is that we won’t read anything about most of those people, because they weren’t hot or good dancers.

Michael Diffie, The New Yorker Blog

President Lincoln

Just this evening I’ve finished reading William Lee Miller’s President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman, mentioned here last week. I have read any number of Lincoln books over the years, notably and most recently, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals and David Herbert Donald’s biography Lincoln. Miller’s book deserves mention along with these.

The book is more an analytical than a narrative history. It takes a number of events and topics and explains in detail how Lincoln approached them. In so doing, Miller makes a persuasive case for Lincoln’s remarkable, yet almost disqualifying personal characteristics for a political leader, and Lincoln’s indispensable, perhaps single, ability to preserve the Union and end slavery. Anyone with an interest in the era or Lincoln will appreciate this book. It is instructive, provocative, occasionally amusing, and at times moving.

(I would only add that it might, in places, have been improved with tighter editing.)

I haven’t read Miller’s Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography, despite owning a copy. It will be on the agenda soon.

Best line of the day

“I use my single windup, my double windup, my triple windup, my hesitation windup, my no windup. I also use my step-n-pitch-it, my submariner, my sidearmer and my bat dodger. Man’s got to do what he’s got to do.”

Satchel Paige

A few others:

“Just take the ball and throw it where you want to. Throw strikes. Home plate don’t move.”

“I don’t generally like running. I believe in training by rising gently up and down from the bench.”

“Money and women. They’re two of the strongest things in the world. The things you do for a woman you wouldn’t do for anything else. Same with money.”

“Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody’s watching.”

“You win a few, you lose a few. Some get rained out. But you got to dress for all of them.”

“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?”

“Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.”

Leroy Robert Paige

Stachel PaigeBaseball Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige was born 103 years ago today. A huge star in the Negro Leagues, Paige began pitching in 1926 and was the oldest major league rookie ever when he joined the Cleveland Indians at age 42. Paige pitched in his last major league game in 1965 (at age 59). He died in 1982.

In the barnstorming days, he pitched perhaps 2,500 games, completed 55 no-hitters and performed before crowds estimated at 10 million persons in the United States, the Caribbean and Central America. He once started 29 games in one month in Bismarck, N.D., and he said later that he won 104 of the 105 games he pitched in 1934.

By the time Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 as the first black player in the majors, Mr. Paige was past 40. But Bill Veeck, the impresario of the Cleveland club, signed him to a contract the following summer, and he promptly drew crowds of 72,000 in his first game and 78,000 in his third game. (The New York Times)

Paige first published his Rules for Staying Young in 1953. This version is from his autobiography published in 1962, Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever.

  1. Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.
  2. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.
  3. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.
  4. Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society — the social ramble ain’t restful.
  5. Avoid running at all times.
  6. And don’t look back — something might be gaining on you.