R.I.P. Michael Scofield

After they broke out of Fox River I turned to a friend and said with my mouth full of popcorn, "What a shame, that's the end of that show."

She replied through her mouthful of popcorn, "Oh no, this is just the start!"

When I asked how she figured they could keep the show going after that she replied, "Next season they have to avoid recapture."

And so it came to pass. And if the serialized plot got increasingly silly as the TV seasons rolled on, who cared? Buttressed by a troupe of the biggest ham actors outside the Old Vic and a cliffhanger twist every 4-1/2 minutes, a story line stuffed with gratuitous violence and lacking even a molecule of redeeming social value added up to edge-of-the seat entertainment.

Yet all things must come to an end -- particularly when ratings plummet by half -- and the writers gave the show a wrap-up tonight that I think would satisfy the pickiest fan.

I raise my popcorn bowl in toast to all who worked on Prison Break. And in honor of Michael Scofield, surely the best brother who ever lived in a scriptwriter's imagination, I mentally fashion an origami swan.

Rest in peace, Michael.

The Lighthouse

The writings here are not limited to foreign policy issues and are more personal than Pundita essays.

I'm an American who's lived inside the Beltway for 20+ years and who was profoundly affected by 9/11. I have recovered from the shock of the attack, as much as I'll recover, but I have not recovered from the fact that the attackers easily got past the defenses of the world's oldest and most powerful democracy. I took that as a terrible lesson. Democracy is not something you achieve then leave to others to manage for you. The price of liberty is that everyone must be actively engaged to protect it.

The humor in the Pundita essays is an attempt to leaven the grimness of my outlook. I've taken my cue from President Bush, who has been even-toned (in public, at least) about the factions at home and abroad that don't want to confront that America is at war and don't want Americans to think we're at war.

The Lighthouse is a place where I can express my feelings outside the constraints I've imposed on Pundita's essays. I probably won't add to this blog very often, so I suppose it's more for my benefit than the reader's. It helps me remember who I was before the day thousands of my fellow citizens were murdered in cold blood.

Scanning the B-scanners

John Batchelor Program 12/11/04--the B-scan test)

Most "people problems" I've encountered in the workplace are a symptom of an unrecognized operations problem. If my experience is any guide, the problem is rampant in today's business world. In any case, many people are put in management positions even though they have never been trained to spot when a department problem is operational in nature. Without that training, childishly simple solutions are invisible to them. So they face an impossible situation, if they want to keep their job.

How they cope creates the "problem employee." If they have a really bad character, that's when you see coping behavior verging on the criminal, and even including it. But for heaven's sake, all it usually takes to correct the problem employee is changing or developing an operational procedure.

Why do so many departments resist operations manuals? From my experience, it's often because of the King of the Hill syndrome (females are not immune). The KOH became rampant when the paternalistic corporation virtually disappeared -- when companies stopped showing loyalty to good employees.

The KOH executive/manager insulates himself from being fired by keeping his knowledge of key procedures mostly in his head. The reasoning is, "Don't put it down on paper so someone can take over your job by following a list of dummy-proof instructions."

The problem is that in today's business world, you have to keep updating. The King of the Hill doesn't want to do that, because to update means setting out (revealing) the many key things to know about present operational routine.

So KOH keeps trying to make the inefficient procedures work -- and covering up what doesn't work. At some point, the sleight of hand creates hell in a department, which (in a large corporation) can spill into a division, then turn the entire company into hell.

So what I find unsettling about the B-scan test is that they're looking for personality types who are capable of adjusting to hell.

I just glanced through an article on B-scan and saw that it was adapted it from a standard test used in prison to spot a "psychopath." But adapting that test to the business place overlooks the obvious: prison is hell and when in hell, any coping mechanism that works is the rule. So, here's what the B-scan testing standard will unleash in vast numbers on the business world:

One of the worst candidates on this season's Apprentice (Jen) has gotten as far as the Final Two. This is despite the fact that she is a walking textbook of incompetence. How did she get so far in the competition? We eventually learn that she aced the system; she learned while going through college and getting an advanced degree how to provide all the expected responses.

Thus, Apprentice instructs on how an incompetent can end up at an executive level at a large corporation. Often, the company must decide while under time pressure. That means they have to choose the least objectionable candidate. Jen had learned this. She learned how to give answers to interview questions and present behaviors that make her the best choice from a bad lot. She knew that she was competing not against the best among the remaining Apprentice candidates but against the worst. She mastered the lowest common denominator.

That situation underscores what's wrong with the B-scan approach. It will lead to a Kafkaesque situation in the business world, if the B-scan becomes the rage. Corporations now seem to weight their hiring criteria toward mastery of spreadsheets and sales/marketing techniques. That means a great many managers who fit the criteria can't recognize an operational problem if stands up and shouts, much less deal with it effectively.

The upshot? The Hans Brinker approach to dealing with antiquated operations procedures. Imagine your finger plugging the dike, day after day, then see how fast you would transform into the Employee from Hell. The solution would not be to define and correct your "personality disorder," which is actually a stress reaction. The solution is more emphasis in schools on teaching the operations side of business.

Many company disasters I've encountered could be fixed simply by writing up an operations manual for departmental procedures. I have seen departments that are straight out of Charles Dickens. Computers didn't help. The deparment just grafted the computer capability onto the Victorian-era way of doing things.

How is B-scan going to fix that problem? It's just going to produce more job candidates such as Jen in her performance on Apprentice.

As to whether B-scan will come to dominate the corporate world--from the article I just read, no doubt about it. "Literally thousands of [psychological] tests appeared in the wake of recent financial scandals and the Sarbanes-Oxley federal regulations..."Board members are scared," says Egon Zehnder, the world's fourth-largest executive search firm. "They want something objective in case of lawsuits -- like a test you can show the board and say, 'Hey, the guy's got good numbers.'"

Killing Purdy

I think James Cameron and Mark Burnett are in a special category of cinematic storyteller. They have the most important quality required of the tribal bard. Cameron and Burnett create storylines that do hand-to-hand combat with atavistic fears.

Burnett deals with more prosaic fears, of the kind Survivor and Apprentice 'reality show' contestants face: fear of being cast out of the tribe, fear of being humiliated by the tribe. Cameron tackles the big stuff: fear of humanity's limitations, fear of the wrath of the gods unleashed upon the tribe, the fear that humans are no match for the Unknown.

(The Alien can symbolize a new strain of killer microbe. The heroic Canadian doctor who put everything on the line--her life, her career, her reputation--to get SARS in a deathgrip is medicine's version of Ripley.)

Burnett and Cameron tell essentially the same story again and again. They recount the "Killing Purdy" game. The game takes its name from a man named Purdy, who opened gunfire on an elementary-school playground and massacred some of the schoolchildren playing there during recess.

After the school and playground reopened, psychiatrists set up hidden observation of the children during the recess periods. This was on the concern that the children would be scarred for life by the carnage they witnessed and the terror they experienced during the massacre.

To their amazement, the observers discovered that left to their own devices the children worked through their trauma by making the horrific incident they lived through into a game!

One child would play Purdy and 'shoot' the other children, who would fall down 'dead.' As the game progressed the children revised the event they witenessed until it reflected how they would liked to have dealt with it. They would kill Purdy before he could shoot at them. The next game might return to Purdy killing the children; the next might have the children killing Purdy.

This game, played out in many variations over weeks, gave the children a sense of mastery over the incident and allowed them to chop the killer down to human size in their minds.

That's what the storytelling of Cameron and Burnett does so well; it reflects the most important function of the tribal bard: Bogeyman-slayer.


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"Earth is our caretaker, not the other way around"

notes on 12/10/04 John Batchelor segment

Charles Pellegrino ("Ghost of Vesuvius" author) discusses buildup of carbon dioxide tonight. Several factors involved in the phenom but Charlie said scientists zeroing in on industrial fishing. Summary:

90% of fish gone from Atlantic ocean. Fish eat plankton, which eat phyloplankton that make up the vital 2% of ocean "crust," which cleans the air of carbon dioxide. With fish gone, the phyloplankton being destroyed at a great rate and thus not cleaning the atmosphere. This may be the chief reason for the sharp spike in increased carbon dioxide and thus, a factor in global warming.

However, fishing industries going bankrupt because of overfishing. So, carbon dioxide spike could resolve itself once the fish come back and eat up the plankton that are eating the phyloplankton.

Scientists also noticing increased activity in our sun; that could be contributing to global warming -- retreat of glaciers.

Charley says to remember that the earth can take care of herself; it's humans who are being cared for by earth -- but we must learn to be more in tune with earth laws.

Note: Google URL headline says James Cameron to make Ghost of Vesuvius movie based on Charley's book.

Election Day in Iraq

July 5, 2004
diary entry

News from Iraq so bad all week couldn't celebrate yesterday. Fell into a troubled sleep. In the dream, I wordlessly handed Iyad Allawi an old rifle. He broke into a huge smile and examined the rifle with reverence.

The dream couldn't have lasted more than a few seconds but I clearly remembered it when I awakened this morning. I was mystified. The rifle looked familiar but I'm not a gun person and know nothing about rifles. Then I remembered.

An original of the rifle was shown by the British host on last week's PBS installment of "Rebels and Redcoats." He explained the American invention took longer to load than a musket and couldn't take a bayonet, but that its range and accuracy gave the American guerrilla fighters a huge advantage over the British troops. It allowed the Americans to fight a sniper's war. He shot the rifle at a target to demonstrate its great accuracy.

What a nice dream. I guess somewhere at the bottom of my gloom yesterday I was celebrating July 4th.

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Quo Vadis?

The other night I read a popular blogger's comment that bloggers had been keeping the Congo story going. I thought of Bobby Block on the satphone, calling from somewhere in Africa, describing to John Batchelor what he'd recently seen of the fighting in the Congo. He'd witnessed atrocities, included cannibalism.

Block sounded wrung out emotionally and he was physically exhausted and still in a very dangerous powderkeg region. I remember John telling him, "Keep yourself safe" and Bobby's wry assurance that he would try.

That conversation must have been about a year ago. I forget which newspaper Block was reporting for at the time--probably the Wall Street Journal but maybe The New York Times.

I've been listening to Batchelor's radio program since the third day of the US invasion of Iraq. I can't remember when I first heard him talk about the Congo but it was not longer after I started listening. He returns to the situation every so many weeks. More than any American media outlet, his program talks about situations across the African continent and keeps the Congo story going.

John is alive to the fact that Americans can't ignore any region of the world because the enemy doesn't. The situation in the Congo is made to order for al Qaeda so it bears close watching, as does all of Africa.

A grotesque irony of this war is that the enemy does a public service by forcing Americans to think globally. The enemy is quicker than Western governments at finding the weakest links in the developing world. Run him out of Afghanistan, run him out of Yemen, run him out Iraq, he just sets up shop somewhere else. Somewhere where human life is still cheap, where armies can be bought for a song and tribal blood feuds are easily exploited.

The enemy is very sophisticated. He's an oil patch expert; he knows every region where oil exploration is underway, where oil pipelines are being laid. He knows every petroleum route by heart. He understands globalized crime and banking and how they intersect He fights with a copy of the financial pages in one hand. For all his talk about hating modernity, the enemy thinks modern--more modern than most Americans. He understands the 21st century.

I'm wonder whether the blogosphere isn't heading toward the same mistake as the mainstream media. The mainstream pays so much attention to what their own members talk about that their attention is narrowed on their own world. That, too, the enemy exploits because he is a master at working on our blind side.

Last Man Standing

I, in America, listening to John Batchelor in Jerusalem talk with Robert Alter in Wales. They are discussing Alter's work to translate the five books of Moses. With millions sitting by the radio and hanging on every word, Alter is discussing....a word. "Seed" to be exact. How to get at the essence of what Hebrew scholars were trying to convey thousands of years ago? How to intuit what Alter terms "a little puffy cloud of abstraction," the significance the scholars attached to "seed" in writing about The Flood?

I scribble notes and ponder. For those of us who are awakening to the scale of this war and the nature of the enemy, it has become a duty to think hard on what is worth fighting to defend.

I remember overhearing my father ask my mother, "How could a country that produced Bach and Beethoven produce Hitler?" Of course it was a rhetorical question but small children don't understand the meaning of rhetoric.

It took me a few decades to work it out, but the answer to my father's question is that civilization is not self-perpetuating. It takes a conscious decision on the part of many people, a constant effort to be guided by conscience, a determination to struggle against barbarity.

Hitler was explicitly aware of that--although I didn't know this until I read an essayby Aisha Siddiqa Qureshi. Qureshi observes:

In his writings, Hitler clearly said that he is a barbarian who wants to express his primal instincts and Judaism says he can't. For him, not only is the concept of conscience "a Jewish invention; it is a blemish, like circumcision.. . .I am freeing man from . . . the dirty and degrading self-mortifications of a false vision known as conscience and morality . . ."

I don't know how much stock to put in Quershi's thesis that "people are and have always been willing to hate the Jews [because] they gave the world the concept of objective right and wrong." I think most who are prejudiced against Jews are not well-informed enough about Jewish theology to think about them at the level Hitler did.

But Hitler and his circle certainly understood that to take control of ideas of right and wrong they had to suppress attention to conscience. Can that really be done on a widescale basis?

Patrick K. O'Donnell, who was embedded with the Marines during the Battle of Fallujah, reported to John last week that they found many used syringes in the rubble; they also found vials of adrenaline and caches of cocaine. That explains how the enemy is able to wire his own wounded with explosives, wire himself with explosives, and remain in a fighting posture even when surrender is clearly not dishonor. The jihadi warrior in Iraq is a druggie. He arrives at the gates of his imagined paradise stoned out of his skull.

So, yes, it's possible to condition or drug a person into not referencing the dictate of conscience. The catch is that it doesn't seem possible to forge a society with such people. That's because the bedrock of human society is the ability to put oneself in the place of another; indeed, that is conscience.

If not for conscience there could be no civilization--not even "barbaric" tribal societies. For society to exist, people must be able to ask themselves, "How would I feel, if this were done to me?" when they contemplate murder or mayhem against another because of a slight.

So Hitler was talking trash by saying he could both create an Aryan civilization and destroy conscience. One can't have it both ways. But of course the Nazis knew this. That is why they had to conquer, in the way a junkie has to steal more and more to support his addiction. It was the only way to keep the illusion going that it's possible to do anything you damn well please to others and suffer no great consequence.

It is the same for the present enemy and his talk of an Islamic civilization. At their core the Nazis and Islamic terrorists are a murder-suicide cult. Last man standing shoots himself.


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