Back in the saddle again....

Well, after leaving this blog alone for a year or so, having decided to heed some pundit or other who had proclaimed that blogging was dead since any fool could plainly see that it had been replaced by some other web 2.0 technology, I'm back.

A brief status report:
--the cellphone reception is still nonexistent here (I think I groused about that back in 2006)
--Citibank does not seem to have gotten its act together yet (but at least it's mostly staying out of the headlines now, which makes me feel better)
--Our military alarums and excursions continue; they ebb and flow and if President Eisenhower is not spinning in his grave, it may be because the bearings he was spinning on are worn out. It's unnecessary to say that the man was 100% right about the military/industrial complex. There's no military draft, of course, so nobody cares from that perspective.
--Between the Lakes Group continues to re-publish (e-publish) history. We've expanded from just CD-ROMs as the publication vehicle to include downloads. That's the commercial message, and of course it would be great if you would take a look at our website and maybe buy something.

Anyway, Up a Dirt Road is back. Hopefully we'll be better at avoiding distraction this time. Talk with you soon!

Military Service options in 1964, redux

Larry Pressler, whom I don't know and whose writings I'm not familiar with, had an excellent op ed piece in the New York Times this morning. The setting, of course, is the not-uncommon phenomenon of someone, years after the war in question, embellishing their war record -- in this case, the Attorney General and candidate for Senate from my home state, where the Dirt Road is located.

Pressler's point is that draft evasion became a high art during the Vietnam conflict. It indeed was. I personally was against the war, took deferments to finish college and grad school, and then, suddenly, was 1-A -- in other words, all set to go. It occurred to me that people today probably have the illusion that things back then were binary -- either you were in the Army and went to Vietnam and "fought" or else you were a profound slacker.

It was nowhere near that simple. At that time there were lots of options. Here are the ones that occur to me, in considering my own situation. I am sure there were many more for people who were otherwise situated, but this is a start:

--You could keep getting student deferments until you were over 26 (seems to me that once you were past this ripe old age, your draft board would call you only in a dire emergency). I did get invited to continue for a PhD, but by that time I was sick of school and eager to get on with life.

--You could flee to Canada (I did not seriously consider this option, but I did know a few people who did).

--You could join the clergy (one denomination was actively courting me to do this, but I cannot say I seriously considered it) and get a clergy deferment.

--You could qualify as a Conscientious Objector (there were several gradations of this, most of which meant you still had to serve but were not going to be able to tell any war stories later on and would be branded forever as a coward -- up to an ultimate level of conscientious objection that resulted in the decision to spend one's military service time in jail). You had to be pretty credibly against war in all forms and have been so for a long time in order to become a certified CO, and I didn't have the track record -- nor the belief structure -- to claim this, although I knew people who did and did.)

--You could (if you could find a unit that would take you) join the Reserves or National Guard. I did investigate this option, since what it entailed was six months on active duty for training, and then six years of monthly meetings, plus two weeks of training each summer, and virtually no chance of sustained active duty or deployment. Those were the days when the Reserves and the Guard were essentially the militia, not the kinds of outfits that actually served in war overseas. There was the unspoken promise that the only time the Reserves would get activated was if there was a major land war, a la World War II, and while the National Guard might also get activated to help with a natural disaster, they were still pretty much citizen soldiers. There were two downsides here. The first was that you were stuck with monthly meetings for what seemed to be an eternity, and furthermore your summer was shot, so to speak, at training camp. The second was more subtle: you would never get to tell war stories.

--You could be physically or mentally deficient (or you could fake or self-induce a condition that would make you 1-Y (which meant you would be drafted only in a real national emergency) or even 4-F (which meant you could never be drafted). I was superstitious enough that I didn't pursue this -- although, again, there was plenty of advice around about how to do it. Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" is substantially about this route.

--You could let nature take its course. That meant either volunteering for the draft (which put you at the top of your local draft board's list to go the next time they got a levy) or just killing time until they got around to calling you -- or not. Since I had discovered in grad school that nobody was hiring people who were draft-eligible (although all the big companies wanted you to come back to see them once you got out), I killed time initially, and finally, after talking to a whole bunch of people about my options, volunteered for the draft. The draft was a two year active duty commitment followed by four more years in the Reserves -- but generally the inactive Reserves, which meant that you only had to go to meetings or training if you wanted the extra money.

--You could have planned ahead to serve, gone to one of the military academies or been in ROTC, or gone to medical school, and served as an officer. This was a four or six year active duty commitment, often with subsequent time in the Reserves. I knew people who did this, lots of them.

--You could have enlisted in the Regular Army as an enlisted man. This was a minimum three year active duty commitment, with four years if you wanted to enlist for anything attractive. This was a non-starter for me; I simply lacked the dedication that led my father to join the Regular Army in World War I.

--You could have gotten married and bred. (I put this last because as a 22 year old guy just as the sexual revolution was kicking into high gear, this was automatically the least desirable alternative.)

Anyway, that's the list as I can remember it. There were all kinds of subsequent ramifications and alternatives (including enlisting and then deserting -- knew one guy who did that, and going ROTC and becoming a CO when levvied for Vietnam -- and I knew one guy who did that, too).

One last point: because you were drafted or on active military duty via some other door did NOT mean that it was certain that you would ever get anywhere near Vietnam, and even if you got there, that you would ever go on a combat patrol or exchange gunfire with anyone.

The US at the time still maintained a huge force in Europe, and from my basic training company, probably 40% were sent there for the remainder of their hitch. Since civilianization and outsourcing of the military's support functions had not yet begun, there were a huge number of roles for soldiers in the continental United States that had nothing to do with combat. In fact, I remember hearing the statistic (true or false) that only 10% of the active Army in 1965 was really apt to be involved in combat operations in any way.

More later on this, but I thought that this might be interesting information for those tempted to see the whole Blumenthal thing as binary.

Regulation creates jobs

It's so obvious that stating it should be unnecessary, but clearly many people do not get this fact: increased regulation itself CREATES JOBS.

This restatement of the obvious was prompted by a CNN announcer who, in discussing whether "green investment" would create jobs a few minutes ago, said that it "would only create more regulations" -- implying that regulations create themselves, publish themselves, and are complied with by themselves.

The fact is that creation and implementation of regulations is a highly labor-intensive process -- sometimes giving rise to whole new regulatory organizations with new jobs at all levels. Once regulations are in place, ongoing compliance with them invariably creates staff positions in the organizations being regulated as well as increased reporting responsibilities in line organizations that increase labor hours.

Furthermore, these new regulatory jobs tend to be stable. You can lay off the third shift if you are not selling as many automobiles as you were, but you can't lay off the people who support the regulatory compliance processes -- or if you do, you had better get ready for big regulatory problems.

Do companies hate to pay for regulatory compliance? Of course they do! Hence business propagandists attempt to deny the societal benefits of increased regulation -- which include new and better jobs.

About Bonuses....

After a little bit of goading, I finally decided to rise to the bait about making bonus recipients and amounts public for companies that received bailout cash.

Frankly, I started out absolutely bipolar on the subject. One part of me remembers the years at Citibank when, regardless of what I had done for the bank that year, there was no bonus at all. In fact, it seems in retrospect that the more I produced, the less likely I was to get a bonus at all. It occurred to me that I would have been embarrassed to admit that I did NOT get a bonus, never that I had received one. The subject never really came up. We didn't discuss bonuses in those days. However, I also remembered that bonuses in those days were not intended to be part of basic compensation -- as they were for my wife, who worked for an investment banking house, and who always felt that she was under-compensated (probably because of her gender).

The other part of me was filled with righteous populist indignation. I don't need to rehearse all the arguments raised in this camp. They're pretty compelling, too. Furthermore, I'm led to believe that the old scruples about discussing bonus amounts are pretty much gone in most of the financial community.

Finally tipping the balance for me was a post I saw on Facebook, wherein the poster declared that publicizing bonus recipients and amounts would be wrong because it might put spouses and other family members at risk of populist rage. With Lou Dobbs stirring this pot vigorously every evening on CNN, I have to concede that it's possible!

However, where I finally came out on this was here: if a bonus recipient had clearly demonstrated modesty and a great desire for privacy in his/her earlier career (i.e. before 2008), then they ought to be able to continue to have it. On the other hand, those who made no effort to hide the fact that they were obscenely wealthy; in fact, were ostentatiously obscenely wealthy -- have no real claim of a right of privacy now that being ostentatiously obscenely wealthy has lost its cachet.

Did the ostentatiously rich worry that their spouses might be victimized by kidnappers or blackmailers when greed was good? No? Then why should a new-found concern for their spouse trump the public interest today?

Ultimately, we're all accountable for what we've done, even if the wind is coming from another quarter now. It seems to me that it's only fair to let the chips fall where they may.

Quiet on the Dirt Road

We had a beautiful day today. Temperature was in the 50's, sun was shining, no wind to speak of -- a great day to take William the dog for a walk along Between the Lakes Road (the dirt road of this blog title).

We walked from our patch of lakefront along the road to the bridge that separates the two Twin Lakes -- about a mile, I guess. Walking there, we saw no humans whatsoever. No cars, no one working around houses, nobody biking or walking.

We turned around at the bridge and walked back. About half way, we spotted a man jogging in the other direction. William, who is fond of people as well as dogs, stood on his hinder legs as the man approached, said hello, and jogged on. Then William returned to his role of walk companion, followed by a nice long wade in the lake -- the ice is nearly out now.

The remarkable thing was the absence of other people. In a normal year we would have seen construction workers involved in building or renovating along the lake or on one of the roads leading off it. Probably, on a nice day like today, there would have been a few people out just driving around, and, since the road is also a designated hiking trail in our township, probably a few hikers as well. But just the one jogger ... it seemed strange, at least until I contemplated the economic scene.

Even up a dirt road, people are pulling in their horns. The only construction project I'm aware of on our road is our own, wherein we plan to construct a foundation under an end of the house that lacks one. Even the choice of project is indicative of something -- it's not a new coat of paint, or a gazebo, or a deck -- nothing decorative or frivolous or even fun. It's something utterly utilitarian -- a foundation. It holds the house up. It keep the house warmer.

Yet it is also fundamental to future improvements of that end of the structure.

Let's hope there's a metaphor there!

Paying Taxes

Today, two people whose political persuasion I share bit the dust, hopefully permanently. In one case, they did not pay taxes on the value of compensation they received. In the other, they did not pay taxes because it was just a household employee -- and because their peers did not pay taxes on theirs either.

I'll cut the person who did not pay taxes on the perks some slack. When no money changes hands, it's hard to place a value on services. It's still not right, but I can see where, absent a 1099, it's easy to overlook compensation.

Regarding taking household help off the books, however, I take no prisoners. It is a despicable, scummy thing to do.

Ironically, I came to realize this because of my wife, who, at the time we actually had household help, was a -- get this -- INVESTMENT BANKER!

It was the late 1970s, and we had a baby at home, and we needed to hire a nanny (actually, she didn't live in, so I guess she was technically a babysitter). None of our friends admitted having their babysitters on the books. At least a few of the women we interviewed expressed a desire to be off the books.

My wife, bless her, said that if one was an investment banker, one, like Caesar's wife, must be above reproach. If you were the underwriter for a respectable corporation, like The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, for instance, and if you were an officer of The First Boston Corporation, your personal character was a reflection on both companies. They TRUSTED you to be totally honest and above board. She felt that one's failure to honor one's personal legal obligations was indefensible.

She made a good case, and she convinced me (I, the skeptic, worked -- where else? -- at Citi). We indeed did have our babysitter on the books. We paid our taxes. We don't know anyone else who did this. Everybody else cheated -- and not just the government or their employer or whatever shambles their own personal morals might have been in, they also shortchanged the employees -- the people to whom they entrusted the care and upbringing of their children.

Frankly, anybody who takes household employees off the books is either an utterly thoughtless and opportunistic conformist or else morally deficient. Both qualities should be disqualifiers for both public and corporate office. I am grateful that this appears to be increasingly the case, and can ask only that the trend continue.

Furthermore, where are the investment bankers of yesteryear?

Last of Citi for a while

It occurred to me last night that it's likely that Citi management simply does now know some of the things that we used to know when we worked there. There have been so many JDs, so many redundancies, and so forth, that it's no wonder that some of the secrets of Citi's success in the old days have been lost.

I don't mean to trivialize them, but I've remembered four tests that were in fairly common use within Citi a couple of decades ago, and I thought I would write them down. Maybe they would work today.

--Six Words or Less: If you cannot describe a transaction or a project in six words or less, one of two things is happening. Either (1) the transaction or project is too complicated to be executed successfully, or (2) you don't fully understand the transaction. I think I heard this one from Bob White when he was running the Operating Group. (Current situation: "Buy a new corporate jet". No room left to put in the fluff about trading in the old ones. No room for penalty clauses. Just the essence of the deal. Do you do it? No way!)

--The Headline Test: Imagine you are a headline writer for the New York Post. (This is a NYC tabloid that has never been particularly friendly to Citi, for the information of those in other places.) Describe your transaction or project in the most sensationalistic way you can in headline style. I don't know where I heard this, but I used it successfully for more than a decade in the Loss Prevention Unit. (Current situation: "Bankrupt Citi buys new jet". Like it? Think it will sell papers?)

--The Tombstone Test: This is a little esoteric, but imagine that, when deciding to what to put on your tombstone, your heirs decided that this transaction or project was going to be it. Then ask yourself if you would like to be remembered for the ages for this particular transaction or project -- and nothing else. I don't remember the source of this one. Current situation: "He received a $10,000,000 bonus the year Citigroup got government aid".

--The Mother Test: Think of your kindly old mother, in her kitchen in her apron. Explain your transaction or project to her. Once she understands all the nuances of it, does she approve? Or would she send you to your room without your supper? I think I heard this one somewhere in the Marketing department in Citi's Consumer Bank, but I can't say for sure. Current situation: too many instances to mention.

--I'd like to propose an additional test that was prompted by something I recently learned, and I call it the School Test: Determine what kind of academic specialty this project or transaction is closely allied with. Determine what kind of education practitioners of this specialty have. Is this education sufficient that proponents understand and can evaluate all aspects of the transaction or project? Current situation: Did you know that, if you get the degree at Columbia that says you can design derivatives, it will be in "Financial Engineering". Interestingly, you do cannot get it from the Business School or the Department of Economics -- you get it from the Engineering School. No knock on engineers, but you do have to watch them. They get far too focused on how things work, and tend not to consider the bigger picture. Enough said.

Now, I'd like to stop trying to figure out how Citi did what it did and focus instead on more pleasant aspects of life. Best of luck to them in once again becoming a preeminent financial institution.

Still more Citi

Something that I hoped I would never see happen has occurred: the Government has shown that it is smarter and more astute than Citi! Indeed, the seniors at Citi are so tone-deaf that Citi is better off under the management of the US Government.

In olden days, while Citi senior management was not immune to making the occasion dreadful decision, they were right a lot more often than they were wrong. More important, on matters where public opinion was going to be overridingly important, the seniors tended to listen to their more astute juniors. I think of folks like Paul Kolterjahn and Charlie Long whose opinions/instincts were regularly checked by the most senior folks.

Well, Paul is deceased, and Charlie is long gone. Either no one has risen in the organization and brought their common sense with them to take the place of these two gentlemen, or the most senior types have concluded that if they get paid this much money they MUST be infallible.

Both Charlie and Paul would have immediately internalized the episode of the Big Three automakers flying their corporate jets to DC to ask for a handout. Their counsel would have been for Citi to take the penalties, whether the MEP was approved or not, and regardless of the extent of the financial penalties involved, instead of accepting the luxury corporate jet. They would, in a long-vanished Citi, have saved the institution the humiliation of being overtly managed from Washington, DC.

Further down the ranks at Citi in the old days was the expression "FUMU". This acronym (we always loved our acronyms in the old Citi), of course stood for "Fuck Up, Move Up". While it was usually uttered when grousing about someone who had gotten a seemingly-undeserved promotion despite making errors in his/her old job, there was a good side to FUMU. It meant that, if you were doing an outstanding job, making an occasional goof was part of the learning (i.e. management development) process. And it meant that if you were really good, you could get promoted regardless. BUT you had to be really, really good! And, importantly, you had to have a good ear for cognitive dissonance.

What we have running Citi at present, regrettably, certainly and demonstrably are not good, and recent events bring into question their mere competence. And, furthermore, they are totally and irredeemably tone-deaf.

Thank God for the Government! Possibly, under Governmental management, a new management will develop within Citi, and it can return to some semblance of the Citi of the old days.

More about Citi

One concern about Citibank's long-term viability that has been simmering the back reaches of my mind for a couple of years now is whether there is still anyone employed there who knows how to run a bank. I don't just mean someone who can posture for the media and talk in code understood best by financial reporters. I mean someone who knows a routing/transit number from a cusip number, which end of a 10-K to start reading from, that a cash letter isn't a plea to the parents for more spending money. That ACH is not just the first three letters of achooo!

As I look around Citi today for familiar names, I find very, very few of them. True, a lot of the people I knew when I worked at Citi were within a decade of my age, and hence conceivably have retired on their own volition, but I also knew a lot of people at Citi who did NOT have any grey in their hair or wrinkles under their chins a decade ago -- the people who, if Citi is going to be viable in its pared down and resurrected form as a BANK, are absolutely essential for day to day operation.

Many or most of these vital folks did not have MBAs, and a good many did not have college degrees. More than a few joined Citibank a couple of decades ago because the Sanitation was not hiring when they got out of high school, but Citibank was. They started in branches as rack clerks. They started at 111 Wall Street as entry-level clericals in departments with esoteric names like returned items. A few (girls, back in the day) started at 399 Park as pages. Some (guys, mostly) started as tape-hangers in the big data centers.

Over the years, knowledge accreted to these folks, like barnacles on a ship's hull. These people, men and women, knew that if CAS was running 20 minutes late, there was a good chance that TTI would not have its network up by 7 AM and that there would be hell to pay in customer service from people who hoped to get money out of a CAT on the way to work. And, they knew what to tell the customers about it. Especially so after Branch 77, and then after Reg CC.

By the way, is CAS still running? You know, it was built in the 1970-1973 timeframe, and all the original flowcharts vanished when the elevator doors they were taped to opened (they weren't supposed to open -- that bank of cars did not stop on that floor) in the middle of the night and took them to the sump at the bottom of the elevator shafts. What wasn't lost then was lost when Bob White decreed that the vault where the CAS documentation was secured didn't need staffing, and immediately CAS was running on source code and a lot of memories.

I was happy to see Richard Parsons named as the new Chairman today. In his past he has the Dime Savings Bank rescue, and at least he knows what a bank does. Let's hope that he finds enough people still working at Citi who know what a bank does that they can have a dialog.

Sad about Citigroup

Although I've been retired from Citi for nearly a decade, I still view what is happening to that organization with sadness beyond what I feel about the negligible value of my remaining Citi stock.

The sadness, I think, is really about how that bank, whenever it decided that business opportunities were so important that risk can be ignored, has gotten into trouble -- although, in the past, we were generally able to pull things back from the brink. A secondary sadness involves the now-traditional Citi tendency to punish the messenger who brings the bad news, but I don't think that Citi has any claim of exclusivity here.

Happiness about my years at Citi, on the other hand, is definitely still there. I still remember the decade I spent in the Consumer Bank's loss prevention unit, when we (in no particular order) (1) discovered that it was possible to manage operational risk in a near-realtime mode and save the bank literally $ millions in fraud and operating losses already in progress (2) facilitated this knowledge transfer to Citi's credit card division (who said that the Citi silos were totally impervious to good ideas?) -- you can see the evidence of this knowledge transfer each time you receive a call from your credit card issuer asking about a purchase you've made that doesn't fit your profile (3) averted massive fines and penalties for what would have been violations of unusual currency reporting regulations by building technology that tracked such things; it was far more advanced technology than our counterpart banks in the NY Clearing House had (4) turned what could have been the debacle of Regulation CC into a web of new consumer services that helped the customer avoid bouncing checks while still effectively protecting the bank from kites (5) a few other things that I haven't had occasion to think of in nearly 20 years.

Conversely, I still remember the situations where Citi overreached: (1) when, in the early 1990s, there was huge pressure to book new mortgages in the branches just so the origination fees would hit the revenue side of the financials, with no concern for the backlog of nearly 5000 unprocessed mortgage applications that had accumulated in the back office (I helped knock that backlog down). (2) when, back in the 1970s, the Operating Group decided to cut over from a paper-based system for transferring securities to an on-line process with no parallel testing; parallel testing being perceived to be a waste of time -- I mercifully did not have to get involved in that one, but the "rock" of fails and differences was still being worked down a decade later. (3) when, circa 1998, our team of in-house encryption experts were told unequivocally that we were not permitted to have any contact at all with the newly acquired Smith Barney -- not even to include them as copies on policy memoranda (I still have no idea what that was all about). (4) when, again circa 1998, I was running projects converting Citi corporate and financial industry customers off insecure older funds transfer systems onto a modern, secure one, and I noticed that there was one company using the obsolete FICCM system -- a system notable for lack of both audit trails and user accountability -- that originated an order of magnitude more $$ of transfers than any other user of the system -- and I was told unequivocally that I was not to bother this particular customer with suggestions that they convert to a more secure system, that this customer (which happened to be named Enron) was the Way, the Truth, and the Light, a virtually perfect customer, and definitely the future of Citi.

Anyway, I see that the inmates finally succeeded in taking over the asylum. It's too bad. At one time, we at Citibank were really, REALLY good at risk management. Sic transit gloria Citi.

Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip

One of the real luxuries of living on a dirt road is that in the morning when the puppy needs to be taken out, you can go out with him in considerable solitude and wander around without seeing another person. Nothing against seeing people, but it is nice not to have to make forced conversation sometimes.

This morning, as we -- the dog and I -- were out walking along one of the paths out behind the house, and just after the dog across the swamp sounded off, a song came into my head. Now, when you are really in the boonies, when that happens, you can just go ahead and sing it out loud! In the burbs, in the city, even in the nearby villages, if you did that, you would get lots of strange looks, and, depending on the song, maybe even arrested. But here? No.

"Good morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip
With your hair cut just as short as mine"

Was pretty much all that came to mind, but I sang it anyway.

I thought I remembered my father, who had been in World War I, teaching me at least this fragment of it.

Anyhow, after we finished the walk, and I nearly fell on my butt because the trail was a little slick after the rain last night, I decided to Google the first line of the fragment. After all, Google is pretty remarkable!

I am happy to say that Google is indeed remarkable. It correctly found the song for me, on a website I had been unaware of about World War I.

Here's a link to an MP3 of "Good morning, Mr. Zip, Zip, Zip".

Enjoy it!

By the way, the website where I found it was http://www.firstworldwar.com -- probably worth checking out!

Been quite a while....

This comment:



The draft is the best insurance that we don't get into future wars fought for personal gain as this one has been from the very beginning. Even when the wool is pulled over the eyes of the citizenry long enough to get a war for personal gain like this one started, the reality that ANYONE's son, brother, (or daughter, or sister?) can become an infantryman at the whim of the government would have a remarkably edifying effect on everyone.

If we had had a military draft, Bush would have been unlikely to complete his first term, much less be elected to a second term.


which I posted the other day on Rick Green's Blog in the Courant made me start to think about how beneficial compulsory military (and/or civilian) service can be.

Anyhow, I figured, with a real dogfight coming the political arena, it is time to kick this puppy back into life.

Medical care in the Army and afterwards

Medical care in the Army and afterwards does NOT have to be second rate!

I know this from experience, and I know it as an enlisted man, as an officer, and as a veteran. I also saw how a Republican administration victimizes veterans -- and, as we are currently seeing -- victimizes wounded troops as well.

When I was an E-2 private back in 1965, assigned to the 25th Infantry Division, stationed at that time at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, a routine chest x-ray turned up some lesions in one lung that definitely got the attention of the Medical Corps doctors. Sufficiently so, in fact, that I was sent the next day to Tripler Army Hospital, in Honolulu, despite the fact that I felt fine. (The possible diagnoses I was sent with included "metastatic disease" (meaning cancer that had spread), pisiticossis (or something like that, some peculiar disease caught from poultry), sarcoidosis, and some deviant form of tuberculosis.

Well, Tripler was indeed a first rate military hospital. It was spotlessly clean, very well maintained (generally, if they knew what was wrong with you, and you were allowed out of bed, you helped maintain your ward to the best of your ability), and well staffed. Probably because I had an "interesting" condition (all doctors love interesting cases), I saw a lot of military doctors. But, interestingly enough, so did the other soldiers in my ward, most of whom did not have anything as unusual as I did.

A Brigadier General even flew in from Japan to look at me (okay, as one Captain later advised me, the general had also played some golf while in HI, but still...). They found a lesion on my eye, which was surgically removed, and well done. They performed a liver biopsy (not fun), and, because any hospital of that level is also a teaching hospital, it was done by a Captain, although he was surrounded by Majors and Colonels, all of whom advised him continually. (I would have been nervous as a witch if I had been that doctor!).

They did a definitive diagnosis (sarcoidosis), and they returned me to duty. I was able to compare that hospital stay with one in the private pavillion of Lenox Hill Hospital, on Manhattan's upper east side a few years earlier, and, although the nurses were better looking at Lenox Hill, the care was just as good in the Army.

Subsequently, after I got commissioned, I got a shoulder dislocation, which was dealt with promptly and appropriately by the Medical Corps doctors at the Post Hospital at Fort Belvoir, VA. While there, I also got several teeth filled by the Dental Corps. Those were amalgam (silver) fillings, and I still have most of them more than 40 years later. You can't knock that kind of workmanship!

Later, after I was out of the Army, I decided to see if the Veterans Administration could provide equally good care.

Yes, there was paperwork. First I had to establish that my disabilities were service connected, and this process took about a month from my first inquiry to receipt of rating of disability.

Then I realized that to qualify for actual medical care I needed to get a more than perfunctory disability rating. This took a bit longer, perhaps 3 months. I will admit that I did afford myself of the assistance of a "service officer" -- a veteran employed by the American Legion (or the Disabled American Veterans, actually I forget which) -- who advised me how to fill out the forms.

Two VA doctors saw me during this process, and although they were not as sharp as the Medical Corps doctors I had seen when I was on active duty, they were quite professional.

Then came the Reagan years. At that point things took a decidedly different turn. I got a letter from the VA saying that they wanted to check on my "progress". I showed up for my examination, and expected things to be as they had been before -- I expected that the VA would still care about the Veterans.

Things had changed. When I asked the doctor for ways that I could improve the mobility of the shoulder I had dislocated, he told me that he was unable to provide me with any care, that his job had recently become entirely and strictly that of reducing disability ratings. We talked for a few minutes, and it became clear that he was not really happy to no longer be practicing medicine as a VA doctor, but instead looking for dull-witted veterans who could be induced to say that they no longer had any disabilities so that their disability benefits could be reduced or eliminated.

My rating was not reduced -- in fact, one of the service officers suggested that I probably could get it increased if I wanted to push it -- but the change in the political climate was crystal clear.

It was clear that the relationship between the government and the Veteran was now an adversarial one. From the recent news from Walter Reed Army Hospital it is clear that things have only gotten worse.

A few good things about a military draft....

In case you think that there is nothing good that can be said about compulsory military service, I happened to note a few on Terry Cowgill's blog recently.

They are in comment #11 on the blog entry that follows:

http://tcextra.com/terrycowgill/2007/01/11/a-grim-little-talk/#comments

I'm glad, as always, to have comments.

Call me "Out of step with the regiment"

Relationships with Iran then -- and now

In a former life, I was a compliance and loss prevention weenie at Citibank, now Citigroup.

Back then, a couple of decades ago, an entity called Bank Melli had been identified by the Treasury Department as an official bad guy, an agent of a hostile state, namely Iran.

Bank Melli had a fancy office on Park Avenue, accounts with Citi, and a fancy international clientele. I can remember jumping through hoops to close down everything Citi had that even SOUNDED like Bank Melli. We kept them on the "pink list" -- the official paper listing that circulated to all the branches -- as "No Further Dealings" for several years. That list had sufficient weight in the institution that if some poor branch person should happen to process a wire transfer to an entity on the pink list, or, God forbid open an account for such an entity, they could be confident that their job was history and they would have an appointment with the US Attorney of the Southern District of New York.

Yet, from what I heard upstairs, despite all of Citi's efforts at being good guys in this, we still got pretty badly abused for having dealt with Bank Melli BEFORE they made the "big time" -- the Treasury Department list.

Now, I understand that a Chinese firm that is listed on the New York Stock Exchange is the prime mover behind a multi-billion dollar loan to.........wait for this...........IRAN, for the purposes of developing their nuclear industry.

The NYSE, evidently having little sense of history, appears to have decided to stonewall, rather that summarily delist the firm in question. (This sort of action -- cessation of all business relations -- was evidently something that Citi was expected to have done voluntarily back in the old days, even before Bank Melli made the Treasury List).

HOWEVER, the Chinese firm is an oil company.

I could leave this right here right now, and I probably should, once I suggest that the likelihood that the Treasury Department, under the current administration, would put that company on "the list" is very low -- and if, going a step farther, bowing to political pressure, Treasury should happen to do add them to the list, the likelihood that the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York would be permitted to discreetly mention this fact to the New York Stock Exchange is remote in the extreme.

Friends of Cheney, you know.

The Whacko Generation....

All within a fairly short period of time, I've seen: (1) an article about a 12 year old girl, a special education student, who was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for wetting her pants at school. (2) My daughter came up with some scandal from a high school in Texas where some of the girls were (gasp!) taking pictures of each other holding objects (not penises) with condoms on them and generally being disrespectful of adult authority -- like giving a teacher the finger. (3) And the New York Times had a scare article about the successor community websites to www.myspace.com -- most specifically scary for them was www.stickam.com -- where people as young as 14 might be permitted to exhibit live webcam pictures of themselves on line with no web nanny ensuring that they did not do SOMETHING that would bring the world to a speedy end.

The world of soccer has independently been screaming -- this time with extremely good justification -- about the ADULTS who scream at the kids, the refs, the coaches, and each other during games of kids as young as FIVE (5) years old.

Synthesis:

--I am quite willing to cut special ed students a lot of slack, simply because they have some otherwise-ableness that puts them in that category, and because they universally have to put up with a ton of crap about "riding the short bus" and so forth. Arresting one because she pees in her pants, even if it appears to be a defiant gesture, is a far greater indictment of the adults involved than it is of the kid.

--As my astute daughter points out about the Texas cheerleaders, Newsweek must have been awfully hard up for prurient content to print the article. (It reminds me of the five page spread US News and World Report did a few years ago about the legion of fifth graders who were allegedly fellating every male in sight.) The "cheerleader" tag was probably what made the story even moderatly titillating. Otherwise, it was just a story about kids behaving normally (for adolescents) and adults being completely over the top.

--I took some time and looked at stickam.com and have to say that it is pretty tame and routine stuff. There are a lot of kids from about 13 and up (some no doubt fudge their ages -- when did kids NOT fudge their ages?) of both sexes, a few older people (some older women, but mostly men in their 30s chatting up the teenage girls), and not very much at all in the way of prurient content. Most of the girls have something in their profiles to the effect of "If you ask me to show my boobs I will ban you".

Okay, COULD one of the men strike up an on-line acquaintance with one of these tamales and arrange a meeting? Yeah, sure -- if the girl wants to. And something perhaps is different from my own teenage years, when I saw girls I knew having surreptitious meetings with older guys from the surrounding towns? I'm sorry, but the way kids are instructed today about the perils of the internet, beginning in elementary school, no girl goes with a guy she meets on the web without full knowledge of exactly what she is doing.

I would say that live webcam chatting probably makes things safer for the kids than the previous text-only chatting, in fact! As the cops note, it is easy for them to pretend they are a 13 y.o. girl and by promising sex lure a dirty old man to a bust when using text-based chat room contact. It would be a whole lot harder to do with both parties face to face via webcam.

--With regard to soccer adults, I'll say that the adult behavior is downright appalling. I run a summer soccer program at Trinity Church, in Lime Rock, CT, and I do hear what the kids say about some of the parents/adults they encounter in local recreational soccer, middle school soccer, and travel team soccer. From what the kids report back, it's pretty clear that Goshen, CT, wins the title for the most egregiously offensive adults in my area, but the ongoing commentary in the Youth Soccer world about problem parents -- and problem adults in general -- makes it clear that there are similar whackos elsewhere, probably in even greater numbers.

--What has been going on for the last several years in Washington, DC, in terms of selfish, irresponsible and hypocritical behavior by adults in high level elected positions provides only more evidence that the generation that followed mine is completely bonkers. They are clearly the antithesis of what Tom Brokaw called "The Greatest Generation" -- namely the generation that preceded mine.

Interestingly, the generation that followed the whacko generation -- today's kids, teens, and twenty-somethings -- seem to be a whole lot more sane. Witness the special ed kid peeing in her pants, the Texas cheerleaders, and the www.stickam.com clientele. Their behavior is actually quite age-appropriate. It's a shame that the whacko generation can't deal with it!

An unflattering photo

I located this one quite by accident when I installed Picasa on my main PC.

You see, it catalogs ALL the pictures, not just the attractive or interesting ones, and, lo and behold, unflattering and even downright unattractive scenes can easily come back to haunt one.

The setting for this one was our back deck, and the occasion was the Trinity Lime Rock choir party during the late summer of 2005. I had been running around taking pictures of everyone else (that's become a preoccupation of mine since discovering digital photography) and suddenly, Courtney, one of the few kids present at this mostly adult gathering said "Hey, let ME take a picture of YOU!"

Well, what was I going to say, especially when the kid who posed the request had been my most faithful attender during the Summer Soccer program we had started that summer at Trinity, and had even gone and gotten me an ice pack when I pulled my hamstring trying to play an air ball like a 16 year old? And especially when the Rector was standing right there when she said it and would no doubt have backed the kid up 100%.

So, what I did say was "Okay, Courtney, you win. Go ahead, but just take one picture" and handed her the camera.

And this was the result. Thanks, Courtney! Even you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as my grandmother used to periodically say in contexts not too much different than this.

Hmmm. That probably works on several levels, as the lady (Grandma, not Courtney nor the Rector) was such a heavy duty member of the WCTU (stands for Women's Christian Temperance Union, for those born since, say, 1970) that she actually attended an international WCTU conference in Germany in the late 1930s as a delegate for New York State. And those were the days when you pretty much had to get on a boat to get to Europe! And that IS an alcoholic beverage in my hand, yes it is.

Well, some folks who knew me back when may recognize the pose, and even the hair length. I should probably have photoshopped the hair to a different color before posting it, but then it would not have been as humiliating. 

Cellphones come to Salisbury, CT

I read this morning in the Lakeville Journal that the chosen few in the center of Salisbury, Connecticut can now use their cellphones! After at least five years of delays of many kinds (including the inexplicable) the long-awaited Salisbury celltower went live last Thursday.

Out here, up a dirt road, in the howling wilderness of Twin Lakes, the situation is not as rosy.

After I read the article in the Journal about the new Salisbury cell tower being live, I grabbed the cellphone I bought a couple of years ago contemplating this great moment and walked up and down Between the Lakes Road seeking a signal. Even though I got no “bars” within a quarter mile of my house in either direction, I did successfully make a call from the junction of Between the Lakes Road and Twin Lakes Road (that's the nearest hard surface road), and was able to continue the call as I walked all the way back to my front door. However, the call dropped as soon as I walked inside. Attempts to re-connect indoors were uniformly unsuccessful.

I decided it was unlikely that the decision-makers would have much interest in us folks out in Twin Lakes, so I called Cingular customer service to see if there was some kind of repeater or signal amplifier I could rig up on a pine tree that might get me cell service in my home. They recommended that I get a newer, more modern phone (why did this not really surprise me very much?), and I took their advice.

After dropping $400 on a very fancy new phone that does everything but eat lunch (and may that too if I can only figure out the right buttons to press), plus all the desirable accessories, I brought it home and tried it out. Unfortunately, the situation was no better, but I am scheduled to receive several rebates sooner or later.

Given the number of years it has taken to get a cell tower in Salisbury, I’ve concluded that there’s no hope at all for officially sanctioned cell service in Twin Lakes in my life time. In considering the private sector as an alternative source, I know that nearby Lime Rock Park provides excellent cell service in their area and beyond, but we sadly do not have a race track up here.

Does anyone have a solution to the problem we have in Twin Lakes?

Gas Chamber

It's been a little while since I reflected on the beginning days of Army life, back in the mid 1960s, and the combination of very cold weather today with a slightly runny nose reminded me of one reasonably unforgettable part of Basic Training -- the gas chamber.

Although I noted that during the early days of the Second Iraq War there was great concern that poison gas or some other aspect of the CBR (stands for Chemical, Bacteriological, Radiological) weapon set might be used defensively by the Iraqis, and thus we saw figures garbed like spacemen prepared for the retaliation that didn't come, I'm not sure trainees are introduced to the subject of poison gas the way we were.

Actually, I have to admit that I had already had a very limited introduction to poison gas before the Army ever got its hooks in me. That had happened a year or two before, when I had been at a rally for peace, disarmament, civil rights, or some other cause that back then was viewed as disruptive and un-American, and probably criminal. I had not been close to where the police had gassed the demonstrators, and all I had really gotten was a whiff of the stuff as it drifted over toward us. I remembered the smell, but it made only a slight impression on me, really, since back then one expected to get one's lumps from law enforcement if one even looked like one was protesting. (Sometime I'll tell in detail what a nightstick feels like when applied to a shin bone, and how easy it was to have something like this happen to one -- but that was in the pre-Army days, and today we are on the subject of the gas chamber in Basic Training).

Interestingly, there is a strong similarity between the smell of the tear gas known as CN (which I think is now considered obsolete, having been replaced with a gas called CS) and the smell of soft coal that was used to heat the barracks at Fort Gordon. So, when I arrived at Gordon I had a subliminal reminder of smelling tear gas earlier.

We had been issued gas masks when we arrived at Fort Gordon, but we didn't have to wear them around until around week four. Until then, they were just one more item to be out of place or dusty or not properly closed during barracks inspection. However, when CBR training started, that changed too. Suddenly we were wearing the damned things strapped to our legs everywhere we went. When you ran, they flapped. When you crawled, they got hung up on the barbed wire and on anything else you were crawling near. When you did the overhead ladder, they had the tendency to pull your pants down.

We drilled putting them on. Someone would yell "gas" or "spray" (the two ways poison gas was delivered) and we were to immediately hold our breath, get out our gas mask (which we were not permitted to call gas masks; they were only to be referred to as "protective masks" but we called them gas masks anyway) put them on, and, by blowing out, clear the mask of any gas that might have come along when donning the thing.

We had a small joke that involved the litany we were taught -- and which a lot of Army doctrine tends to get into. The litany went: "What do you do when you see that the enemy is launching a poison substance attack?" "Yell gas or spray and put on our protective mask, then see if any of our buddies needs assistance." The small joke we made of it was, instead of yelling either "gas" or "spray" depending on whether we were being gassed or sprayed as the litany intended, we would yell "gas or spray". Those of us with college educations found this kind of literalism highly amusing, but it does appear to have lost a bit of its humor over the decades. Sorry about that.

Finally, after a week of build-up by our platoon sergeants, one day we were marched to the gas chambers. It was a cold day, and nearly everyone had at least the beginnings of a head cold, and the march to the gas chambers didn't help much.

There were two rooms in the "gas chamber" building. By squads, we were first told "gas" and, once we had reacted correctly, we were led into the first room, and a gas grenade was set off in the middle of the floor. Then we were told to remove our gas masks.

That was a shock. Tear gas really does make you feel bad. Your eyes burn like mad and tear heavily. The skin of your face burns. What's almost worse is that your nose starts to run rivers -- real rivers! One guy in my squad had a stream of what is indelicately called snot descending from his nose almost at once. The sergeant yelled "if that snot hits the floor, you're gonna lick it up!" The trainee somehow sucked it all back in and it never hit the floor. That's a pretty good trick while you're crying, by the way.

Then, after we all had a few moments of real discomfort, we were led back out of the room and into the fresh air. Interestingly it took only a couple of moments before our mucus membranes calmed down and we had the enjoyment of watching the other squads go through the process.

The other room, we were told, contained a lethal agent, and, if we did anything wrong in there, we would be dead. One of the other guys in the platoon caught my eye and mouthed "Right!" since we had earlier had a discussion among ourselves about how this gas chamber thing was probably overrated, and in any case the Army did not routinely kill off its trainees.

In any event, room #2 really didn't make enough of an impression on me for me to recall what the sequence of events was. I do have a recollection of the smell of chlorine -- probably meant to simulate chlorine gas -- around the area. It wasn't a very strong smell, and probably could be duplicated by sloshing some Clorox around on the floor.

That was pretty much it for CBR training. We came from a generation that had learned to "duck and cover" in elementary school in the event of an atomic blast, so there wasn't much to teach us there. We got some textbook knowledge of atropine, which we would be issued in the event that a real enemy might gas us at some point the the future, but we never saw the stuff in real life. The bacteriological part was not covered at all, as far as I can remember, or if it was, it was in a brief mention in a training film that I (and nearly everybody else) no doubt slept through.

Actually, now that I think of it, we must have seen something about "germ warfare". One of the guys in my platoon had been a bio-chem major in college, and might even have had an advanced degree in it. Anyway, when we got our post-Basic assignments, he was assigned to Fort Detrick, Maryland. I remember that I, for one, had never heard of the place, and I asked him what it was and what they did there. Well, he HAD heard of Fort Detrick before, probably in grad school, and told me it was where the Army creates germ warfare weapons -- "You know, like in that training film we saw." So I guess we did see a training film about the subject. I had learned pretty early on that I could tip my helmet liner down onto the bridge of my nose and go to sleep -- as long as I didn't drool or snore.

Gas chamber was an interesting adventure, if nothing else. I'm reminded of it whenever I smell soft coal smoke, even today. I'm thinking that it's one more part of Basic Training that one really ought to experience if one is ever going to be in a position where you might order the use of tear gas -- or some other CBR agent -- on someone else in later life.

In view of recent events, maybe I should discuss how the Army introduced us to shooting rifles next without anyone even getting hurt. More useful knowledge.