Thoughts on the 10 year anniversary of 9/11

I visited Columbia for the 10th anniversary commemoration of 9/11. Organized by the Chaplain's office, the morning memorial was a solemn but also modest and low-key affair on Low plaza. My sense is that this year's 9/11 commemorations will be the last at Columbia. With Osama bin Laden killed, years of vitriolic partisan clash and conspiracy-mongering sapping our collective will to fight (see Mao's guidance on psy-ops in guerrilla warfare), and our imperiled economy the proximate concern, most Americans believe a decade on is the appropriate time to relegate 9/11 to history. By now, most 9/11 remembrances are sanitized of determined resolve to fight the enemy and more akin to recalling a unique disaster (like a plane accident or hurricane) than an ongoing contest. Republican and Democrat politicians both want to move on from the war. The problem is that the mission that our nation undertook after 9/11, what we knew then would be a Long War, is not finished. The enemy continues to vigorously compete. I'm glad YAF put out its "Never Forget" memorial on College Walk . . .

<aside> Ron Lewenberg was right - Students United for Victory should have stayed focused on non-partisan support for the war effort instead of widening its focus to become Students United for America. When I made the decision to alter our course, SU4V was struggling and our founding purpose seemed too narrow to sustain a long-term life for the group. I believed redesigning SU4V to SU4A was a needed boost. I was also ambitious, aggressive, cognizant of the short window for student activists, and unwilling to take a step back. SU4A's mission of unifying Americans and solutions for the nation's challenges, including the War on Terror, reflected my deeper concern for America and was important, too; the SU4A concept is vindicated by the partisan gridlock, acrimony, and compounding problems our nation is afflicted with today. But the practical, unintended consequence of widening the focus from SU4V to SU4A is that SU4V's founding purpose was diluted and distracted from until eventually, SU4A lost the mission of supporting the war effort altogether. I designed the SU4A mission to be plastic around a set of core values in order to adapt to the needs of the nation, but that plasticity led the group to devolve into meaninglessness. In hindsight, SU4V's original tasks of countering misinformation, encouraging sober discourse, and maintaining non-partisan support for the War on Terror outweighed the broader SU4A mission. Since 9/11, our highest elections and national policy decisions have been influenced by popular opinion on the War on Terror. SU4V's mission and character were unique at Columbia and its founding purpose, while narrow in scope, should have been preserved. That said, weighing the alternatives in 2002 wasn't simple. I'm not discounting my contemporary analysis that SU4V would be short-lived without the SU4A redesign. That Ron was right doesn't necessarily mean I was wrong; SU4V was struggling and, in the short term, SU4A did work as intended. But the fact is SU4A failed to survive in the long term, and SU4V died with it. Knowing what I know now, I would have tried harder to preserve SU4V in its founding form, even if its survival would have required contracting the group to marginal production and a modest size. I could have innovated other ways, as we did with ICRA and the ROTC movement, to pursue the goals I conflated in SU4A. My call and my mistake. </aside>

. . . The War on Terror is like fighting cancer and quitting the treatment halfway guarantees a weakened body left to the mercy of an evolutionarily toughened disease. Certainly, the economic cost of the war is a key consideration. Economic power is a prerequisite of military power and America's economic standing is shaky right now. Assuming we don't abandon the struggle, the question is how we adapt to keep up the fight at a sustainable - and a winnable - level. It could be that we actually will compete more agilely against the terrorists when we're forced to adapt and innovate with less funding and resources. Coupled with a defter footprint, less media attention could mean more creative room for our operators, too.

I agree with Richard Landes. Too many leaders, political and cultural, responded to 9/11 with nearsighted partisanship rather than patriotism, and retrenched in their preferred beliefs rather than a sober assessment of what we need to do to solve very complex problems and defeat a focused, aggressive enemy whose competitive advantage is powered with those same problems. A few celebrities at home have even sought to actively undermine our war effort as barbaric, a monstrous conspiracy, and a purposeful distraction from social priorities. Before 9/11, global critics - not only competitors, but some beneficiaries of Pax Americana - maligned American world leadership as a dangerous "hyperpower" that must be reined in and controlled. Since 9/11, many others have accused America of being the root cause of the world's problems, even as we're struggling against truly toxic entities and championing liberal reform. Their narrow perspective implicitly excuses anyone opposing us - even terrorists - as righteously standing up to American hegemony while also, tragically, implicitly dismissing anyone who cooperates with America - even courageous liberal reformers - as illegitimate, a lackey at best or traitor at worst. The commitment to blame America is so extreme for some, they've even blamed the body count from the terrorists' assassinations, mass murders, and other depravities on the US. Early in the 9/11 debates, I described this enabling outlook as 'terrorist-as-proxy', meaning people opposed America in the War on Terror not because they necessarily shared the terrorists' cause, but because they ascribed their various grievances against America to the terrorists' struggle. The terrorists have learned to use this self-destructive Western mindset by tailoring their propaganda to the blame-America-first narrative.

Our choices in the War on Terror on 9/11 were to try harder with our limited pre-9/11 strategy, full isolationist withdrawal, a killing war, or armed intervention with fundamental liberal reform (as opposed to simple democracy). We chose to fight for a liberal peace and reform of a dysfunctionally crippled, conspiracy-addled part of the world. Radical political Islam seems to be a zealous religious version of Communism that promises a similarly centralized systemic antidote for the evils of class, individualism, and capitalism, and shares Communism's killing hatred of liberalism. In the 3-way contest between Islamists, old-school dictators (and would-be dictators), and liberal reformers, the liberal reformers don't have a chance without our intervention. In that part of the world, liberal reformers are by far the weakest group and opposed by killers. If we abandon the liberal reformers, they're dead.

The enemy is 4GW, resilient, adaptable, thinking, and manipulative. He thinks pragmatically in the big picture and long view, while partisans in the West often seem deliberately obtuse. The enemy is totally committed to the revolution for a new world order. For the 9/11 attacks, the terrorists didn't need prodigious resources, merely the will to win by any means necessary and masterful use of our vulnerabilities, preferences, and beliefs against us. Meanwhile, the enemy protects himself by embedding in the black-market areas (eg, narcotics, smuggling, failed states) outside of the normal authority of our world order. The dictators of nation-states are within our conventional reach; the Islamists are not.

Our goal of liberal reform in the War on Terror is bottom-up and must begin with change at the granular personal level. The changes we need to happen have a much better chance of taking root in Iraq than in Afghanistan, but New York Times article Many Iraqis Have Second Thoughts as U.S. Exit Nears by Michael S. Schmidt hints at the psychological obstacles to liberal reform there. With great sacrifice battling vicious illiberal forces on Iraq's behalf and enormous investment into the new Iraq, America has given Iraq the opportunity for liberal reform, but if Iraqis are unable to overcome their modes of thinking, we can't make them do so. The article shows Iraqis sensing the opportunity for a better future slipping away, but their handicapped thinking is sabotaging their ability to seize the opportunity. (It's only human of them; as Richard Landes explained above, Westerners are equally suspectible to trapping themselves with handicapped thinking.) The situation reminds me of the subjects on the A&E show Intervention: with the reality of the American military's departure facing them, now may be the moment where Iraqis are finally ready to change with the proper assistance from us. The competitive illiberal forces inside and surrounding Iraq have not been neutralized. We should continue to play an active role assisting Iraq, though our future guidance may not be predominantly military in character. America's Iraq mission should adapt, not end.

On a personal level, 9/11 knocked me off my plan to find my life path at Columbia. Contemplating the ash cloud downtown that was the World Trade Center, aware of the notorious history of American college students in the Vietnam War, I felt a powerful responsibility to support America, especially our soldiers going to war, as a new student and recent soldier on campus. I became a columnist and campus activist and passionately debated about the War on Terror and American hegemony and leadership. I learned what naive passionate activists often learn: doing your best to make a difference may only result in a disappearing difference in the long run, no matter how promisingly flashy the immediate returns. My classmates who claimed the best way they could respond to 9/11 was to succeed in their chosen niche were right after all. Student activists who give up their self interest for the cause do so at the risk of becoming less than they could have been, which means they'll have less to bring to the table in the long run, for themselves, their future family, and society-at-large. Lesson for student activists: think of yourself as the goose that lays the golden eggs. If you give in to the temptation to sacrifice yourself in the now, then you may have too little to give in the future. (That's not to say all my activist efforts were wasted.) For all that I did at Columbia in reaction to 9/11, though, I feel as though I still have unfinished business - that I have not done my part. But what can I do? Perhaps as others move on, they'll leave room for me to work that otherwise would not have been open. Maybe the folks who stay behind will be able to do more. Or maybe bureaucrats will occupy all the available opportunities to make a difference and squander them.

Eric

Paragon Sports warehouse sale

Paragon Sports is holding its annual warehouse sale from 9/8/11 to 9/18/11. The merchandise on sale is mostly shoes and clothing and various athletic gear. A salesman explained to me that as the bins and racks empty, they're being refilled from boxes of mixed items, which means something you can't find today could be brought out later. Or not - you just have to come back and find out.

I've gone each day hoping to find a cheap pair of Vibrams, but no luck. There have been Vibrams in the bins, just not in my size. The closest I found was a Euro 47 (roughly US 13) pair for about $45. The sale prices are advertised as 50% to 80% off the retail price. Winter and ski/snowboard outer wear are an additional 20% off the sales price.

I've bought a pair of Crocs Classics ($9, retail $30) and New Balance CT1004 tennis shoes ($56, retail $115) for walking, a Bonfire Radiant snowboarding jacket ($80, retail $200) for everyday winter wear, and a Marmot Whitehorse down parka ($80, retail $375). I don't know how much use I'll get out of the Marmot parka, because it rarely gets cold enough in NYC for a parka designed for bitter winter weather, but almost-80% off the retail price was just too good a deal to pass up for a well-regarded product I might use.

Eric

Hurricane Irene thoughts

My thoughts on Hurricane Irene are limited to NYC and the NYC media and government.

The effect of Irene on NYC was anticlimatically mild after all the hype. There was a windy rainstorm on Saturday night, but certainly nothing close to a hurricane. I made it a point to walk past the mayor-ordered evacuation Zone A and out onto the end of a Hudson River pier during the windiest and hardest rain of the storm, about 1-2 am Sunday. When it was announced that Irene's eye had arrived in NYC at 9 am Sunday, the rain by that time had actually lightened to a drizzle with a mild breeze. While the wind picked up later on Sunday, though still nothing near hurricane levels, the rain stopped altogether. Sunday - the day Hurricane Irene was supposed to rampage through NYC - dawned in fact as a beautiful day in the city with blue skies, cleansed air, and a welcome brisk breeze.



The NYC media did report the facts on Irene, but they also sensationalized their coverage with the direst spin of Katrina-esque flooding and windborne destruction. Even as the hurricane was downgraded to a tropical storm, the media acted as though the danger remained as high as for a hurricane. Even as it became apparent on Sunday that the impact of Irene on NYC was normal for a hard rainstorm, television reporters seemed to go out of their way to seek out low-lying areas and dips that normally flood during rainstorms to serve as backdrops for their continued breathless reporting. The television news, deployed throughout the weekend in 24-hour crisis mode, seemed invested in the idea of an epic natural disaster befalling NYC, and in the absence of an actual disaster, selectively spot-lighted and exaggerated whatever photogenic storm effects they could find. Local politicians, angling for relief funds from the state and fed, dutifully played along in interviews. As it became obvious the storm danger was over, the on-scene reporters looked increasingly foolish as they exclaimed incredulously about motorists driving through waterlogged intersections, pedestrians out strolling, and even beach-goers enjoying the water.

I don't fault the media for warning New Yorkers earlier in the week. Harsh weather can become dangerous if you're caught in it unprepared. It's not a bad thing for people to be more conscientious about emergencies and generally resilient. Predicted weather can change unpredictably, for better or worse. I'm reminded of when the weather office in my last unit forecasted a typhoon (an Asian hurricane). Weather is serious business in an aviation unit, so I thought of Traci's dad (RIP), who was scheduled to drive on a long business trip. I called her to warn him, which she did, but Traci's dad ignored my warning. That predicted typhoon turned out to be a normal rainstorm, too, and I felt foolish and embarassed afterwards. It happens. Where the NYC media beclowned themselves was sticking stubbornly to their disaster reporting even as it became obvious to their audience that there was no disaster.

As for the government response, I don't understand why the subways, trains, and buses were shut down entirely and shut down so earlier (noon Saturday). Shutting down the public transportation system shuts down the city. It was an unprecedented drastic preemptive action that seemed disproportionate ahead of the event and unnecessary in hindsight. Rainstorms are not rare in NYC; I can only imagine their fear was of massive flooding of the subway system by a storm surge of corrosive seawater, not rain flooding. But even in the case of a storm surge, the MTA should have been able to run limited service with a shutdown of the entire system held back as a last resort.

My guess is that the drastic preemptive actions, including the evacuation, ordered by the city were a reaction to the criticism of the city's response to the 2010 "blizzard". Having grown up in Queens and witnessed the city's response to previous heavy snowstorms, I thought the city's response to the heavy snowstorm last winter was normal. Only the harsh media criticism and subsequent politicization were new. Predictably, the consequence of punishing a normal response is the elicitation of an abnormal response in the future.

Eric

Class in America

In 2009, Sandra Tsing Loh (whose name is familiar but I can't remember why) wrote a disturbing and depressing 25 year retrospective on Paul Fussell's book Class for her Atlantic column.



Eric

WSJ: Depression in Command

Psychiatrist links depression with activist crisis leadership while stable minds are better suited for caretaker status quo management, or Winston Churchill versus Neville Chamberlain. About: Dr. Ghaemi is a professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine and director of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts Medical Center. This essay is adapted from his new book, "A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness."



Excerpt:

Great crisis leaders are not like the rest of us; nor are they like mentally healthy leaders. When society is happy, they toil in sadness, seeking help from friends and family and doctors as they cope with an illness that can be debilitating, even deadly. Sometimes they are up, sometimes they are down, but they are never quite well.



When traditional approaches begin to fail, however, great crisis leaders see new opportunities. When the past no longer guides the future, they invent a new future. When old questions are unanswerable and new questions unrecognized, they create new solutions. They are realistic enough to see painful truths, and when calamity occurs, they can lift up the rest of us.

9/4/11 up to page 110 thoughts: I've read about GEN Sherman, Lincoln, Ghandi, Churchill, and MLK. Unfortunately, the book is flawed by an unthoughtful anti-Bush, anti-GWOT prejudice; I view the GWOT as fitting the qualities the author describes. It seems these great empathic crisis leaders, who are rare, rely on being fellow travelers with both the objects of their resistance and their own normal followers. When it works, their movements are cohesive due more to effectively shared rational (political and/or economic) goals than a universal empathic journey toward agape. (The empathy v rationality theme reminds me of the conflict in Stephen King's The Stand.) For normal people who value more tangible goals, the values held so dear and articulated so carefully by empathic leaders amount to only so much pretty rhetoric. After their erstwhile followers eventually, and perhaps inevitably, diverge on their normal course, many of these empathic crisis leaders, although revered by their communities for their successes, come to view themselves as ultimate failures. These leaders aren't pacifist ideologues: nonviolent resistance is the preferred way to resist injustice, but not the only way; violent resistance is preferred to acquiescence. Ghandi and MLK, one a London-educated lawyer and the other a classically educated Christian American minister, were able to succeed with nonviolent resistance by defining their movements with intimate appeals to their objects' Western liberal values and altering their objects' political-economic calculations. Empathic crisis leaders succeed with deeply held convictions, their determination, empathy and realism. But what if the empathic crisis leader is resisting an object who is determined to resist back by whatever means necessary, with an incompatible perspective that views the crisis leader's justice as injustice for the object, and is less vulnerable to political-economic calculations? Then the empathic leader who prefers nonviolent resistance but refuses acquiescence takes on the violent resistance of the Civil War, World War II, or the War on Terror. What happens if the crisis leader's followers, who only pay lip service to their leader's values, decide that their rational interests are better served by decamping the resistance movement?



I finished reading the book quick reaction: The author compellingly supports the validity of his hypothesis and gives me needed hope and insight about my mental pathology and food for thought. His point is novel but simple once explained: certain mental pathologies, when applied the right way, enhance crisis leadership as much as they have been popularly known to enhance the arts. The idea rings true from personal experience. Crisis leadership, as a field of innovation, and interactive and expressive human endeavor, is much like an art form. Unfortunately, perhaps to fill a book with an idea that could have been explained more simply and concisely in a short paper, his presentation weakens when it departs from his basic descriptive methodology and attempts suspiciously simplistic, neat antithetical contrasts. The antithesis, as such, is less convincing than the thesis. When the book veers from the basic premise, Ghaemi seems less than rigorous, and right/wrong judgemental at times, and is possibly selective in his presentation (a no-no in scientific study). Already thinly veiled in other sections, Ghaemi's political bias overwhelms his work in the antithetical section devoted to "homoclite" Bush and Blair and the bad/wrong/lie Operation Iraqi Freedom and the War on Terror. His attempt there to claim he wrote as an honest broker weakens his credibility. The author has a follow-up article. Lots of reviews on-line, which I'd like to read. It seems Ghaemi's thesis has struck a chord ... or a nerve. Again, while an imperfect work, Ghaemi successfully supported his hypothesis, enough to give me hope. For the record, using the definitions laid out in the book, I qualify as empathic, depressive realist (too much so), and creative, but I'm not resilient. I'm more dysthymic and not hyperthymic, and become more cyclothymic when plugged into a cause.



Eric

14-year-old's 19-year-old babysitter

News report and humorous discussion. Odd that a 14-year-old would even have a babysitter.



Loni Bouchard looks like she could be Zooey and Emily Deschanel's little sister. A six-month illicit affair is a decent run for a teenager. The young man should be empowered from passing a critical rite of passage early in his formative sexual development. For the mom who presumably hired Bouchard to babysit her son in the first place, and then called the cops on her, all I can say is, one hand giveth, the other taketh away. I wonder where the dad is in this affair and what he might think of the situation?



Add: some news vid of Bouchard and more babysitter love.



Eric

Simple homemade mouse trap

Check out this simple homemade mouse trap. It works:



Mice have entered my mom's apartment through (presumably) pipes in the central heating system. It's not a regular problem but it's happened several times now. There's a heating unit in each bedroom and the living room, and we've taped over the floor-level openings of the units since discovering they serve as mouse portals. But tape adhesive loosens with age and we don't check them constantly. We haven't used poison in my mom's apartment because we don't want poison spread around the apartment nor any hidden decomposing mouse corpses. Traditional snap traps, humane box traps, and smaller mouse-sized glue traps have been ineffective. The larger rat-sized glue traps have proven to be my most effective tool for catching mice.

I caught the 1st mouse in a 20-pound rice bag. The rice bag was stored upright, in a plastic bag and box, on the floor of the kitchen, with the bag opening on top folded down. Yet we heard the mouse rustling inside the bag and saw mouse poop on the rice within the bag. Placing snap, humane, and glue traps around the rice bag didn't work - the mouse avoided the traps and got into the rice. After several days, I placed a large glue trap within the bag, on the rice, and folded down the top of the bag as usual. That night, the mouse was caught on the glue trap in the bag. We now use a large black binder clip to seal the rice bags.

I caught the 2nd mouse in the opening of the heating unit in my mom's bedroom. I heard suspicious noises coming from the heating unit and guessed mice were using it to enter and leave the room. I placed glue traps on the floor where I estimated mice would drop from the unit. It worked. A mouse was caught either coming or going, but my guess is it dropped onto the trap. After that, we sealed the openings on the bedroom heating units.

I caught the 3rd mouse in the living room next to the television. Mice will sprint across a room to go from point A to point B, but typically travel along the walls. The TV is against the wall next to the heating unit, which creates a blind turn. A mouse-sized glue trap at the elbow of the turn failed to catch the mouse, but I knew the mouse was using that path. After a few days, I placed a larger rat-sized glue trap next to the smaller trap around the blind turn and against the front of the heating unit. I actually witnessed the mouse peek out from behind the TV, streak over the smaller glue trap, and get caught in the middle of the larger glue trap.

Last night, I caught the 4th mouse in a bucket modified into a sort of camouflaged punji stick pit. The mouse had entered from the living room heating unit where the tape over the opening had loosened. I set out glue traps, baited with chocolate, rice, cashews, or chicken meat, in the living room and kitchen, including a repeat of the TV-heating unit elbow trap, without success. I found the linked mouse trap instructions on google yesterday. I modified the trap because my mom doesn't have the 20-inch-plus high container that the blog recommends, only a 10-inch high bucket. I decided to place glue traps at the bottom of the bucket so an acrobatic mouse couldn't climb or jump out. I trimmed the plastic borders so they would fit together better in the bucket and form a more-or-less contiguous glue surface. Rather than an unbalanced toilet paper roll, I covered the bucket with a paper towel sheet. The paper towel hid the glue traps from the mouse. I taped one edge to the bucket so the sheet wouldn't fall in with the mouse and possibly save it from the glue traps. I taped two thin plastic strips to the bucket on the opposite side to barely hold up the trap side of the paper towel. I baited the trap with a piece of cooked pork on the center of the paper towel because mice like meat (see youtube videos of cannibal mice), which I hoped is rare enough in a typical mouse's diet to overcome this mouse's hitherto trap-avoiding judgement. My mom had spotted the mouse in the kitchen so I placed the bucket in the same location of the rice bag. The 1st mouse I caught had entered through the top of the taller rice bag so I thought this mouse would find a way onto the shorter bucket. A few hours later, I noticed one corner of the paper towel was down, though the paper towel was still up and the pork was untouched. The mouse pictured above was caught.

7/14/11 update: There's at least one more mouse in the apartment, and it's not falling for the bucket trap. Smart. 12/22/11 update: For about a month, the mouse ran around the apartment with seeming impunity, too often in plain sight. Tried a growing number of multiple types of homemade traps of increasing complexity and different baits with placements spread around the apartment; all failed. Finally spotted the mouse running behind a plastic bag of magazines that was against a wall and recalled seeing the mouse around that general area more than other places. Placed a simple glue trap at juncture of wall and bag. The mouse ran onto the trap and was caught. Turns out the mouse had gotten inside the plastic bag, shredded the magazines, and made itself a den. For all the mouse's cunning and my creativity making traps and placing them, the mouse was finally caught with a simple trap placed inside his pattern of travel. The key was identifying the mouse's habit. The lesson learned is that there is a point on a mouse's route to safe harbor (escape or den) where habit, with perhaps an irresistable sense of imminent safety, overwhelms its sense of caution.

Lessons learned:

Mice, at least savvy NYC mice, will avoid traps they can see and possibly touch, regardless of the bait. Simply placing traps on the mouse's known routes of travel doesn't work. If a mouse can directly associate bait with a trap, it won't take the bait. The trap has to be camouflaged somehow. Mice don't seem to sniff out visually hidden traps, though.

Use larger rat-sized glue traps. Traditional snap traps, humane box traps, and smaller mouse-sized glue traps are largely useless for catching mice, at least when they're used in the open.

The keys to catching a mouse are knowing the mouse's behavior to use against it and deception. Mice, while cautious, will develop patterns. The 1st two mice were caught because I identified where they were dropping blind and placed glue traps on their landing spots. The 3rd mouse was caught because it knew it could go over the smaller glue trap it saw, but was tricked by the adjoining larger glue trap the mouse didn't know was around the blind turn. The 4th mouse was the only one I induced to go someplace different than its pattern, although I drew upon a previous mouse's pattern in order to catch it.

There is a point on a mouse's route to safe harbor (escape or den) where habit overwhelms its sense of caution. That's the point where a mouse finds the sense of imminent safety irresistable and is prone to make a straight line break for safe harbor. Place a trap at the spot on the mouse's path to safe harbor where a smart mouse gets stupid and abandons caution.

A blurry sprinting mouse looks bigger than its actual size. I thought the above pictured mouse was twice as big as it turned out to be.

Mice will run across rooms occupied by people during the day or lit at night.

A caught mouse will empty its bowels and struggle hard to free itself.

Mice can squeeze through small openings. Maintenance nailed a chicken wire barrier over the living room heating unit opening, but chicken wire warps and bends. I recommend using tape instead. Use strong tape such as duct tape. But even strong tape loosens eventually and needs to be rechecked.

Eric