Adorable Photo from the Archives, How Cute is This?

Old Barn and Grapevines

Prominade Down Faught Road

Vineyard Off Faught Road

Taken during our afternoon walk on another beautiful Sonoma County day

Social Networking Out of Control?

I’m I sucker for new sites, so now I have a new one to add to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, my WordPress blog, and Tumblr.  It’s called Posterous,and it supposedly lets you send one post to all of those sites.  This is a test, we’ll see how well it works.

On Lawyers and Torture

There’s been much commentary the past weeks over the legal memos released by the Obama administration, in which lawyers for the Bush administration were asked to give an opinion as to the legality of certain so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques (which were of sufficient severity and cruelty that most people would call them “torture”).  I’ve read the memos (which are available here), albeit not word-for-word, and find myself disagreeing with those who are calling for criminal prosecutions of the lawyers who wrote them.  Why?  Three reasons.

First, it ignores the difference between advice and action, between saying that something can be done and actually doing it.  The memos did not say, after all, “you must torture these people.”   The decision to engage in torture and the execution of that decision were taken by others.

Second, it misperceives the role of a lawyer.  When I read the memos, what I see happening is what happens all the time:  A lawyer gives an analysis of the law that permits his client to take an action that the client wants to take.  The lawyer gets there by using the same process lawyers use all the time, parsing down words and subjecting them to a hot gaze for long enough to make them melt.  This is the trade secret every good lawyer knows:  Detached from the real world, words have no meaning.  Or more accurately, they have any meaning.  So Bybee can say in his memo that waterboarding doesn’t cause “severe pain or suffering” within the meaning of the statute, because even though it may inflict “fear or panic,” it doesn’t actually cause any physical harm and therefore can’t cause “pain,” and because “suffering” requires some element of duration, and “the waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering.”  Thus waterboarding causes no pain or suffering.  An analysis horribly contrary to common sense and utterly lacking in humanity and wisdom, to be sure, but not irrational; you can read more ridiculous legal analysis daily in the decisions of courts all over the country.  The intellectual nature of their work drives lawyers and judges away from reality, into a place where you don’t really think about the realm of the living, where words do have — are supposed to have — some real, defined meaning.  The intellectual nature of their work drives lawyers and judges into a realm where it is easy to forget that it is an actual human being strapped to the board.

(A footnote here:  I would like to think that lawyers in public service have some more heightened sense of justice with a capital “J” when they do their work.  I know that I do.  I try always try to remember that although I do my work directly for staff who may want a certain outcome, or for a board who may want a certain outcome, that there is beyond those  folks an entity and, beyond that, a public, to whom I owe a duty as well.  I’ve been fortunate that the two almost never conflict, but I hope in a pinch that my advice is tempered by that recollection, and by common sense.  And to this extent, the memos are disappointing, if unsurprising.  But then I’ve never been in Bybee’s place.)

Third, expecting lawyers to act as firewalls for the protection of our liberties, or our values, is foolhardy.  At the limit, neither lawyers, nor judges, will stand in the way if the passion, the fear, the panic, the contempt is great enough.  The finely-honed reams of opinions and opinions and opinions of courts and judges disecting and analyzing constitutional rights finer and finer won’t hold up for one instant if the wave is high enough.  It hasn’t in the past, it won’t in the future.  God help us if we are relying on lawyers to save us from the truly unthinkable.  Read Bybee’s memo if you have any doubt about this.

The truth is that it wasn’t lawyers who planned and carried out torture.  It was our government, directed by our elected officials.  Prosecuting lawyers for failing to preempt our government’s moral mistake would be wrong.  They are not supposed to be our conscience, they are not there to save us from our own responsibility, and ultimately they can’t save us from ourselves.

Poisson d’Avril Excellent!

Sur France 2, cette émission m’a bien eu!  Je l’ai regardé le premier avril avec ma femme, et je l’ai dit, “je me demandais souvent si les éoliennes pourraient ralentir la rotation de la terre.”  J’ai vraiment cru cette emission!  Mais aujourd’hui je découvre qu’elle était un “poisson d’avril.”  Heursement, je ne suis pas seul … regardez le 114 commentaires ici.

Bien fait France 2!

This report on France 2 (scroll down for the video) totally fooled me on April 1.  It’s a news report about studies showing that windmills have the unintended effect of slowing down the Earth’s rotation.  Presented in a completely straight-faced style, it apparently fooled many more people than me, as evidenced by the 114 commentaries to this post.  When I saw the report, I said to my wife, “I’ve always wondered whether windmills would slow down the Earth’s rotation,” and I kept looking in the press for stories about this … until today, when I finally did a search on Google, only to discover, to my horror, that I’d been duped.

Well done, France 2!

This Drives Me Crazy

You may have seen the letter that appeared in the New York Times from Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president of the American International Group’s financial products unit, announcing his resignation because … let’s all get out our hankies here … he was criticized for being paid a bonus of “$742,006.40, after taxes.”  In the letter, he expresses his view of the unfairness of it all:  He stayed on after AIG’s collapse, he had nothing to do with the trades that brought the company down, he was working “10, 12, 14 hours a day away from [his] family” for $1 salary per year, just like AIG’s CEO, trying to do the right thing for AIG and the American taxpayers.

Apart from sad laughter at the incredible disconnect between this man’s whining, self-absorbed rant and the position he still retains in American society (as others have pointed out, he is in a position to give all of his bonus to charity and yet go on living comfortably), the thing that really drives me crazy in his letter is this:

You and I have never met or spoken to each other, so I’d like to tell you about myself. I was raised by schoolteachers working multiple jobs in a world of closing steel mills. My hard work earned me acceptance to M.I.T., and the institute’s generous financial aid enabled me to attend. I had fulfilled my American dream.

I started at this company in 1998 as an equity trader, became the head of equity and commodity trading and, a couple of years before A.I.G.’s meltdown last September, was named the head of business development for commodities. Over this period the equity and commodity units were consistently profitable — in most years generating net profits of well over $100 million. Most recently, during the dismantling of A.I.G.-F.P., I was an integral player in the pending sale of its well-regarded commodity index business to UBS. As you know, business unit sales like this are crucial to A.I.G.’s effort to repay the American taxpayer.

The profitability of the businesses with which I was associated clearly supported my compensation.

MIT?!?  I thought students who were fortunate enough to be accepted to MIT would do something constructive with their lives — if not engage in basic research for a university or a government, then at least go out and do research for a private corporation and, well … create something.  But no.  This man took his degree from MIT and became … an “equity trader,” someone who pushes ownership units from one rich person to another rich person, taking a little bit for himself out of each transaction.  Then he became a commodity trader, doing the same thing with little pieces of paper representing interests (or future contingent interests) in raw materials, taking, again, a little piece from each transaction and, no doubt, making a ton of dough by leveraging tiny, tiny movements in the commodities market.

So in return for the hard work of his two school-teacher parents, and to repay the “generous financial aid” given to him by MIT to allow him to attend, Mr. DeSantis has accomplished … what exactly?  Unlike someone who manages an enterprise that actually produces something, all of Mr. DeSantis’ efforts throughout his whole life have created, net-net, absolutely nothing.  He skimmed off tiny pieces of the products of others’ efforts — the miners who mined the copper he traded, the executives who managed the company who mined the copper, the drivers of the trucks who deliver the copper, the workers and executives of the companies who actually provide a market for the (real) copper by using it in things they produce.  These latter members of the capitalist, free-enterprise system earn their keep, in my view, because they really do something, unlike Mr. DeSantis, with his MIT degree and his trading programs.

When I hear people say that the present crisis is an indictment of capitalism or of the free-enterprise system, I have do disagree.  The structures of the free-enterprise system are imperfect, but basically sound.  The problem with the system over the past 15 years is that we have come to believe that the economy can be sustained by people, like Mr. DeSantis, whose efforts don’t actually produce anything; traders and analysts and deal-makers.  Mr. DeSantis may tell himself over and over again that “the profitability of the businesses with which I was associated clearly supported my compensation,” but I suspect in his heart of hearts he knows that’s a lie, I suspect that he knows that his empty activity has contributed to the decline of the American economy even as it made him … and I’m going to use an intentionally loaded word here … unjustly rich.  Or maybe that escapes him.  Wisdom seems to be a characteristic that disqualifies someone from working as a trader at AIG, or Bear Stearns, or Lehman Brothers.

Perhaps Mr. DeSantis will be able some day to be retrained and do something productive with his life.

15 (Plus) Albums

Cover of Reckoning

My sister-in-law Yvette posted this challenge on Facebook:

Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. They might not be what you listen to now, but these are the albums that shaped your world.

I tried, but there was no way I could limit the list to fifteen.  The best I could do was to try to winnow down the list to 15 groups related to 15 specific periods in my life, but even then I couldn’t keep it to 15.  I’m a little hesitant to post this because I realize my selections are repetitive and somewhat … hmmm, how do I want to say this … well, perhaps boring is the right word, but then consider the source.  Here goes:

1. R.E.M. – Reckoning (1984) and Murmur (1983). I bought these two albums on cassette tape before making a driving trip from Portland, Oregon to the Midwest during 1984. That trip was memorable in many ways, none more so than being introduced, during long stretches of lonely interstates, to what was to become my favorite band. I still can’t hear Seven Chinese Brothers without being taken back to a hot August day driving on I-80 across the Great Salt Flats.

2. Jackson Browne – Saturate Before Using (1972) and For Everyman (1973). Emotional music for an emotional time. “There is a dance we do in silence….”

3. Neil Young – After the Gold Rush (1970). Gets on the list because it was a Christmas gift in 1970 from my first real girlfriend, Jeannie. Neither our relationship nor, over the long term, her attraction to men, endured, but my attachment to Neil Young did.

4. Stephen Stills – Manassas (1972). Odd choice, I know, but I loved this album when I was a kid. Underappreciated, in my view.

5. Eagles – On the Border (1974). I know, I know, don’t say it. I never listen to the Eagles nowadays, but I loved this album when I was in college, and to this day I think it is by far their best.

6. Bonnie Raitt – Bonnie Raitt (1971), Give it Up (1972), Takin’ My Time (1973), Home Plate (1975), Sweet Forgiveness (1977). Country and soul. Soundtrack to my entire time of misspent youth in Iowa City.

7. Jackson Browne – Running on Empty (1977). Soundtrack for my final two years of misspent youth in Iowa City.

8. Rolling Stones – Some Girls (1978). Sha doo bee, shat-tered shat-tered, sha doo bee. Oh, yeah, and all the other Stones’ albums, too.

9. Neil Young – Tonight’s the Night (1975), Zuma (1975), and American Stars and Bars (1977). Along with Some Girls, soundtrack to my law school days in Ithaca. Not exactly happy and uplifting, but consider the circumstances.

10. R.E.M. – Fables of the Reconstruction (1985). REMers debate the merits of this album (some love it, some hate it) but it hooked me on REM for good. Stuck in my mind forever with two others on my list, Life’s Rich Pageant (1986) and Document (1987).

11. Replacements – All Shook Down (1989) and Don’t Tell a Soul (1990). An odd sidetrip.

12. R.E.M. – Green (1989) and Monster (1994). These albums spanned the gap between my old life and my new life. I know most people say two other REM albums released during the same period (Out of Time (1991) and Automatic for the People (1992)) are better, but Green and Monster combine volume (lots of volume), playfulness, and creativity in a completely satisfying way. I’ve probably played Green more times than any other CD I’ve ever owned.

13. Jayhawks – Blue Earth (1989), Hollywood Town Hall (1992), and Tomorrow the Green Grass (1995). Quirky but emotional and satisfying.

14. Pavement – Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1994) and Brighten the Corners (1997). Another odd sidetrip. Eclectic, simple, odd, creative, artistic, and often moving, especially the latter.

15. Green Day – Dookie (1995). Don’t ask about this one. I’m not a particularly big Green Day fan, but I loved this album when it first came out, for its pure pop simplicity.

16. Indigo Girls – Indigo Girls (1989) and Nomads Indians Saints (1990). Expressive, unique, moving.

17. Uncle Tupelo – No Depression (1990) and Anodyne (1993). Rock and country and folk perfectly combined.

18. Son Volt – Trace (1995), Straightaways (1997), and Okemah and the Melody of Riot (2005). An offshoot of Uncle Tupelo, it’s a mystery to me why this band is not more popular.

19. Jay Farrar — Sebastopol (2001), Terroir Blues (2003), and Stone, Bright Lights & Steel (2004). Excellent solo albums by the creative force behind Son Volt.

20. Gerald de Palmas — La dernière année (1994), Marcher dans le sable (2000), and Un homme sans racines (2004). Creative and listen-able, en francais.

21. Others I really loved at the time, in no particular order: Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night (1965), Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Damn the Torpedos (1979), Flying Burrito Brothers, Close up the Honky-Tonks (1974), 10000 Maniacs, Our Time in Eden (1992), Pretenders, Learning to Crawl (1984), Creedence Clearwater Revival, Cosmos Factory (1970), Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Déjà Vu (1970), Stills-Young Band, Long May You Run (1976), Neil Young, Ragged Glory (1990), Fleetwood Mac, Fleetwood Mac (1975) and Rumours (1977).

I’m sure I’ve missed some, but these stick in my mind (or maybe more accurately, under my skin).

The Parasitic Professionals Retraining Act

The bankers and the big dog finance guys are taking a huge hit in the press and in Congress right now, the large bonuses being paid to people who don’t seem to have done a lot of good for their companies recently being fodder for a thorough bashing. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for those on the wrong end of things right now; these are, after all, people who’ve pocketed large amounts of money over the “good” years for activities that, in retrospect, don’t seem to have had much efficacy.

But once past the pure joyous schadenfreude of watching the ‘Masters of the Universe’ get a well-deserved whack upside their collective heads, it’s less clear what can, or should, be done to change a situation that’s clearly gotten out of hand. It’s not just that some people are making (or have made in the past) a lot of money. People will, of course, always be more or less envious of those better off than themselves, but the current public outcry over excessive compensation goes beyond that. It’s not run-of-the-mill class warfare we’re dealing with, but with something deeper and more troubling, which I can illustrate with:

A personal story, about a Saturday afternoon in May 1988: At that time, I was a senior associate at a large prestigious law firm in San Francisco. I got to that position by having extremely high college entrance exam scores, by getting high grades in college, by graduating Phi Beta Kappa, by getting high LSAT scores, and by finishing second or third in my class at an Ivy League law school. I say that not to be arrogant (those who know me will confirm that I’m no genius, and that I am generally distrustful of intellectuals and academics, excepting my father-in-law), but to make the point that I was one of the more able and successful individuals churned out by the (at that time, anyway) excellent system of education in the U.S. I had intellectual ability, a work ethic, and outstanding training.

So what was I doing on this particular Saturday afternoon in May? I was sitting in a conference room on the 30^th floor of an office building, sifting through copies of old insurance policies of the client, finding particular provisions in those policies, then using scissors to cut the provisions out and past them into the appropriate place in a large series of binders that came to be called The Tome. The client was involved in a large insurance dispute, having sued numerous companies who had insured it over a 40-plus year period. The judge in his wisdom had decided that he needed all of the relevant policy provisions placed in binders, so he could see on a year-by-year, provision by provision basis what the policies said. So on this Saturday in May I sat in one of my firm’s conference rooms, cutting and pasting, just like I’d learned in Kindergarten.

But it wasn’t just me. All around the Bay Area on this Saturday in May, other mid- to senior-level associates, representing the insurance companies, were sitting in their conference rooms, checking my cutting and pasting and, if necessary, calling me on my mistakes and cutting and pasting themselves.

At one point I was taking a break, looking out at the fog creeping through the Golden Gate past Alcatraz, when it hit me – what an incredible, incredible waste of intellectual talent and effort. Me and my opposing counsel, the cream of the American educational system, sitting in conference rooms doing … what? Conducting experiments to find new renewable sources of energy? No. Seeking new cures for cancer, or lupus, or diabetes, or alzheimers? No. Discovering the workings of that most remarkable of organs, the human brain? No. Furthering man’s understanding of genetics? No. Exploring the new world of nanotechnology? No. Teaching a child, or an adult, to read? No. Researching ways to make traffic flow better, or to make the economy, or society, function better? No. We were cutting and pasting. Cutting and pasting. Cutting and pasting so that money might flow (or not flow) from one giant company to another giant company. And being paid ridiculous sums for our trouble.

The real problem with the big dog bankers and lawyers and financiers and brokers is not just that they get paid too much. The real problem is that their work inherently wastes human intellectual capital and effort by siphoning off many of our best and brightest into difficult, all-consuming work that ultimately does not create anything. Because what they do – “deals” and “transactions” and “cases” – are almost always zero-sum games at best, serial rearrangements of assets or companies or money, or all three, from one owner/pot to another owner/pot, a continuous churning whose ultimate beneficiaries are the very bankers and lawyers and financiers and brokers who suggest them. And who, it must be noted, profit handsomely from the churn, taking increasing larger portions of what Tom Wolfe in Bonfire of the Vanities called the “golden crumbs” that fall from the constant slicing and re-slicing of the corporate cakes.

I know the counterargument: That facilitating mergers and acquisitions and filing lawsuits and conjuring up new financing arrangements increases economic efficiency, thus ultimately decreasing costs and increasing productivity. Perhaps in a few cases this is true, but in most cases it seems the only sure winners are the deal-makers, with the other parties to the transaction – shareholders, employees, and all management except those at the tip-top – actually worse off after the transaction/deal/case is over than before.

Even if we were to posit some marginal benefit to the economy from the churn, I do not believe the benefit is worth the effort, particularly when “opportunity costs” are factored in. When you take many of the best and brightest and hardest-working products of our educational system, and put them into jobs where their day-to-day work is the intellectual equivalent of digging ditches, that is a huge loss to society, because not only are they not accomplishing much of real social benefit doing what they are doing, but that are distracted from applying their talents to problems and work that could produce real social value. I spend a Saturday cutting and pasting insurance policies into a binder, instead of researching … well, anything else. Each of the 12 other associates “opposing” me on our mindless case do likewise. Wasted minds, wasted work.

So what’s the solution? Here’s an idea I’ve had for some time: Congress should adopt “The Parasitic Professionals Retraining Act.” It would provide money for any professional now working in a parasitic profession (attorneys, bankers, financiers, stockbrokers, etc.) to return to school to obtain a degree in a science (physics, chemistry, biology, geology, etc.) If the recipient then works for four years in a research position or for a public entity, the money is considered a grant and forgiven. The program would be funded (God I love this part) by a supplementary, highly-progressive tax on any attorney, financier, etc. making more than $150,000 per year. A carrot and a stick, designed to provide incentives to make sure our brainpower and our efforts are more properly targeted.

The results could be amazing. We can take third-year associates who spend 60 hour weeks researching arcane legal issues or mindlessly reviewing documents and change them into third year engineers who spend 60 hour weeks researching how to increase the efficiency of photovoltaic cells, or into third year biologists researching new genetic therapies for diseases, or into third year chemists researching new materials that are less harmful to the environment. We can focus again on producing, rather than just rearranging.

All we need now is some language for the bill. I’ll start drafting, if you will. Post your drafts in the comments section, and I’ll take a shot at combining them. The Parasitic Professionals Retraining Act – change we can believe in (although … we might need a kinder, gentler name)