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

Thoughts of the day

The typical NYC pedestrian face is tense, drawn tight, with a furrowed brow. Long term, do I want to live in a city that makes its residents look like that?

The baddest-ass TV character line ever: "Don't try and threaten me, Mulder. I've watched presidents die." Cigarette Smoking Man to Mulder, X-Files, season 2, episode One Breath. Here's the audio clip of the scene; the closest I could find on youtube is a clip from the same scene following the quote.

Black Swan and Nina (Natalie Portman) remind me a lot of The Machinist and Trevor Reznick (Christian Bale). An all-time creepy movie scene from The Machinist: Route 666.

I have a mixed reaction to the new High Line. The elevated park is a status symbol with plenty of modern design and novel and hip in a trendy gentrifying neighborhood. But its dimensions are too narrow to serve comfortably as a park and the decision to preserve the foliage on the tracks shrank the pedestrian space even further. The High Line is really a walkway that doesn't need many people to become crowded. Even when uncrowded, its location wedged among buildings makes for a cramped closed-in feel. The elevated tracks were there and a decision had to be made either to develop the space or tear down the tracks, so the decision to repurpose the space as a park is justifiable. But the elevated tracks wouldn't have been constructed, where they're located, in order to build a park. There is also growing concern in the neighborhood about overdevelopment, which the High Line is enabling. 9/29/11 add: AM NY story about the High Line effect harming neighborhood businesses despite initial hopes of boosting them.

From the movie Glory, the campfire prayer scene the night before the 54th Massachusetts stormed Fort Wagner. Matthew Broderick's Army Colonel Robert Shaw, the commander of the 54th, is a study in officership.

President Obama's 33K troop drawdown timeline for the Afghanistan mission makes sense. 33K (out of 100+K troops) by end of next year is reasonable. Afghanistan is not Iraq, either in nature or significance to the War on Terror (Iraq - long view of environmental reform; Afghanistan - immediate need to exterminate terrorists), and the expectations and goals should not be the same for both missions. That said, reducing the Afghanistan mission means also pulling the liberal peace-building threads of the mission. Hopefully, the troop drawdown accounts for the consequences to peace-building.

Liberal, peace-building COIN is expensive, murky and drawn out, and often not apparently effective, but in a Long War that is absent a definitive defeat in which the enemy takes total control of the space and populace (eg, Vietnam War), COIN may be necessary to secure the long-term political component in the broader strategic picture, even without sufficient tangible returns on investment.

My reaction at Professor Nacos's blog to the revelation from the raid intel that bin Laden believed al Qaeda was losing the War on Terror.

Know what it is as well as what it isn't. What it does as well as it what it doesn't. Creation can be a mess.

All That Jazz, the semi-autobiographical movie by Bob Fosse, should be watched by teenage boys as a learning piece about girls and relationships. The 1979 classic movie reinforces a by-now familiar dismaying lesson that is repeated in article 12 Reasons Women Can't Stand Nice Guys (see the youtube interview with the author, a self-defined "cougar"). xsplat offers sensible advice: Go through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief, DABDA (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance), to clear-eyed acceptance of the death of romantic ideals (aka Utopian vision, indie film in your head), then learn to deal with girls clear-headed about self and them.

Kate Mulvey talks about her feminist life while bemoaning her belated recognition of the destructive lie of feminism. A later article by Mulvey sporting a different take. Links from here.

Taken In Hand is about wives who want their husbands to be the boss of their marriage as a traditional dominant Man. Interesting perspective because my relationship model has been equal partners in a team. I could be wrong. Atlantic article A Wifely Duty is an apt companion piece.

Interesting article by a Columbia J-school prof on the effect of DNA testing on legal paternity and legal paternal obligation. What's best for the child? What's best for the cuckolded not-biological father? What is the legal obligation of the biological father? How is choice factored? What about the individual wish of the child and father? Can the questions of custody and financial upkeep be considered separately? A complicated issue, a key one in men's rights.

It's a hard decision and a life decision - a fork in the road. Break down in order to free myself to become and build my life as an awakened man, the free realized me. But if I expunge my idealism, then what's left? Who am I, and what purpose, direction, and meaning do I have? Neo chose the red pill, but Cypher regretted taking it, and Quaid rejected it. Reminder: Neo chose the red pill from Morpheus in order to escape the Matrix, over the blue pill to stay as Thomas A. Anderson in the Matrix; I keep forgetting which pill is which, like I keep forgetting the 82nd Airborne is All American and the 101st Airborne is the Screaming Eagles. Neo took the red pill and won Trinity's love and found himself as revered, uniquely important, god-like powerful The One. Cypher took the red pill and became irrelevant and menial, his love rejected by Trinity, and bitterly watched her choose newcomer Neo, thus learning the Matrix was better for him. Quaid rejected the red pill and killed the pill bearer in Total Recall in order to stay as rebel Quaid rather than become ordinary Quaid or company-man Hauser. Don Quixote, knowing reality, deliberately chose to live as a dream. What's better and right for me?

Congratulations, Judy. I'm not surprised you're going into psychiatry.

18-year-old swimsuit model Kate Upton does the Dougie. Add 2012: Cat Daddy and Peter Cottontail.

Best Gen-X rom-coms - 1996 Jerry Maguire and 1989 When Harry Met Sally? Dorothy Boyd (27-year-old Renee Zellwegger) and Sally Albright (28-year-old Meg Ryan).

Somewhat 'eh', but worth noting: How to Beat Negative Thoughts. The hypo of a mean-girls co-worker happened to me.

Eric

Ender's Game quotes

Ender's Game Chapter 8, page 102: Listen, Ender, commanders have just as much authority as you let them have. The more you obey, the more power they have over you.

Ender's Game Chapter 9, page 149: Isolation is - the optimum environment for creativity.

Ender's Game Chapter 11, page 185-186: Partly because of Ender's influence, they were the most flexible of armies, responding relatively quickly to new situations. Phoenix Army would be the best able to cope with Ender's fluid, unpatterned attack. . . . Petra was not Carn Carby; she had more flexible patterns and responded much more quickly to Ender's darting, improvised, unpredictable attack.

Ender's Game Chapter 11, page 198: I need you to be clever, Bean. I need you to think of solutions to problems we haven't seen yet. I want you to try things that no one has ever tried because they're absolutely stupid.

* Ender's Game Chapter 14, page 275: Ender watched as all his squadrons moved at once, each responding to its own situation, all guided by Ender's overall command, but daring, improvising, feinting, attacking with an independence no bugger fleet had ever shown.

Ender's Game Chapter 14, page 277: Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, then happiness as we can manage it. So, Ender, I hope you do not bore me during your training with complaints that you are not having fun. Take what pleasure you can in the interstices of your work, but your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.

Ender's Game Chapter 15, page 309: Ender took part in the work, as much as they would let him; it did not occur to them that this twelve-year-old boy might be as gifted at peace as he was at war. But he was patient with their tendency to ignore him, and learned to make his proposals and suggest his plans through the few adults who listened to him, and let them present them as their own. He was concerned, not about getting credit, but about getting the job done.

* Ender in Exile Chapter 2, page 29: He realized that Han Tzu would take his training and turn himself into the perfect father. And much of what he had learned in Battle School and here in Command School would probably serve him well. Patience, absolute self-control, learning the capabilities of those under you so you can make up for their deficits through training. What was I trained for? I am Tribal Man, thought Ender. The chief. They can trust me utterly to do exactly what's right for the tribe.

Eric