Learning Resilience in the Age of Turbulence

I realized today as I went through some of my past posts that my blog has gotten a bit too serious for my liking…and I imagine some of yours. Philosophical, economic and political debates are great, but if they aren’t peppered with some lighthearted fun they can make the heart hard. Even Tolkien and Lewis had a pint and cigar in hand as they approached the meaning of life.

While I enjoy sharing the things I’m thinking about, I don’t always get a chance to share more simple things, like what I like and dislike, the music I find myself coming back to again and again, cool art, great food and wine and the random products, trinkets, and designs that catch my eye and make me smile.

So, let’s put on hold the thoughts concerning AfPak strategy, peak oil, the philosophy of government and other black holes of thought and I’ll share with you the things I’ve been liking lately AND maybe even convince you that, yes, I do have a life.

Cooking through Ad Hoc at Home

Marelize bought me this cookbook for Christmas and I’ve been cooking up a storm ever since. While I don’t have much previous experience, Thomas Keller, decorated American chef and restaurateur, has laid out his cookbook in such a way that a novice can put together some surprisingly tasty home cooked dishes.

I made it a goal for 2010 to cook 10 dinners for the family.  It’s only February and I’ve already knocked out 5:

-Marinated Skirt Steak

-Pan Roasted Chicken with Sweet Sausage and Peppers

-Catalan Beef Stew

-Lentil and Sweet Potato Soup

-Blowtorch Prime Rib*** yes, I bought a real blowtorch to do this one

AND I had to try one of the desserts as well, so…

-Banana Bread Pudding

Bose QuietComfort 2 Acoustic Noise Canceling Headphones

Before purchasing these with some gift cards and birthday money I shook my head at the price and figured there was no way it could be worth it…I was wrong. In the words of Ferris Buller, these headphones are “…so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.”

2006 Chateau Pesquie Cotes du Ventoux Terrasses

Chateau Pesquie is a family estate located in the Southern Rhone Valley. I came across one of their delicious wines, the Cotes du Ventoux Terrasses, at my local Tacoma Boys and have become quite smitten with it.

This wine is a $13 bottle of wine drinks much more like a $30-$50 bottle. A dark purple wine with a jammy fruit nose. It tastes like a nice mix of dark fruits with some spices and a little bit of earthiness that makes it much more complex and interesting than 99% of wines in its price range.

The gentleman at Tacoma Boys who recommended this wine to me said I should buy a case. Of course I displayed my saavy consumerist skills by making some subtle comment about how I’d have to check it out for myself before buying an entire case….well, I’m writing this wishing I had listened to that vino sage.

So, there you have it, a few things that I’ve been liking lately. I hope you found this post fun and interesting. Let me know what you think. A refreshing change of pace OR an annoying distraction?

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Many know C.S. Lewis for his Chronicles of Narnia series or Mere Christianity, but few realize how much he discussed things like freedom and democracy.

From his book, Present Concerns, Lewis wrote an essay concerning equality. The following is a segment from that essay that I came across via The Beacon blog:

A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure. I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people—all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumours. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

This introduces a view of equality rather different from that in which we have been trained. I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent, I don’t think the old authority in kings, priests, husbands, or fathers, and the old obedience in subjects, laymen, wives, and sons, was in itself a degrading or evil thing at all. I think it was intrinsically as good and beautiful as the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It was rightly taken away because men became bad and abused it. . . .

But medicine is not good. There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. And that is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values: offers food to some need which we have starved.

When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget but as an ideal we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked.

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A presentation I’ve come back to many times over the past year – a brilliant call by Sir Ken Robinson to rethink our education system and how it is currently set up to kill, rather than nurture creativity. Enjoy!

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From Foreign Policy’s Reality Check,

Last month, an official told the Daily Telegraph that their country “has the greatest concentration of active al Qaeda supporters [in the West],” posing a threat to Britain and “the rest of the world.” The same article cited a fresh and ominous finding from the director of MI5. He estimated his service was aware of some 2,000 “radicalized Muslims” who might be involved in terrorist plots. That figure, of course, doesn’t include the population of plotters who have escaped MI5 scrutiny, like Abdulmutallab. As if to underline the threat, on Jan. 12, the British government banned two of the country’s most notorious Islamist organizations, Islam4UK and Al Muhajiroun, under a 2000 anti-terrorism law.

This goes back to my previous argument on why “preventing Al-Qaeda safe havens in Afghanistan” is a myopic strategy considering the nature of the opponent.  Al-Qaeda is a GLOBAL terrorist organization with members scattered all over the world. I question the notion that keeping them out of one country or two (Yemen) will significantly hamper their operations.

We rarely hear our leaders discussing ways to bolster our relations with Muslims living in Western nations, yet this may be a far greater use of our time and money if we consider the above statements.  I suspect the reason it doesn’t get as much chatter on the airwaves is because it goes against the existing paradigms we have concerning warfare.  Simply put, few people in the American National Security apparatus feel confident operating in this “soft power” territory.

In “The Accidental Guerrilla” David Kilcullen asks the questions that come when reevaluating about these paradigms,

How, for example, do we wage war on nonstate actors who hide in states with which we are at peace, even within our own society?  How do we work with allies whose territory provides safe haven for non-state opponents?  How do we defeat enemies who exploit the tools of globalization and open societies, without destroying the very things we seek to protect?

Christian Caryl of the Foreign Policy article shows the real-life issues that arise as we attempt to answer these questions,

In the 1990s, policymakers desperate to address the concerns of the nation’s Muslims decided to foster the creation of Islamic umbrella groups. They also unwittingly fostered radical ones. For instance, Abdulmutallab invited extremists to speak to his college student group — but doesn’t seem to have done anything in London in contravention of British law. And he is not the only vivid illustration of how the institutions of democracy can dangerously blend with the institutions of jihadism.

Forays into the fight against radicalization in Western countries is a muddy affair at best, but its something that we’d better start figuring out soon. After all, I doubt the people of London would take to kindly to a strategy that involved firing missiles on their city from unmanned drones.

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Economist Jeff Rubin discusses the future of oil (peak oil) in an entertaining way that doesn’t take a PhD to understand. If you are a regular reader of Schaefer’s Blog this is a must-watch, even if you just watch the first 10 minutes.  Basically, Rubin lays out a convincing argument why triple digit oil, translating to $6-$7 per gallon at the pump is all, but inevitable and will probably come sooner than we think.  HT to Paul Kedrosky for this find.

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In a recent Washington Independent article, Spencer Ackerman asked the all-important, but seldom asked question, “Why Should Defense Spending Be Sacrosanct?”

It’s not popular to ask this question, especially if you’re a congressman because in doing so you’re bound to be labeled as not supportive of the troops.  However, the present course of the DOD is completely unsustainable. And in our current economic state ($12 trillion in debt and counting) I, like Ackerman and others, find it odd that there has been no serious talk of freezing the gargantuan DoD budget. In 2008, the US military spent more than the next 46 highest spending countries in the world combined (see here).

The spending problems come from personnel costs on one side — full retirement benefits for members who serve 20 years of active duty (most retire in their 40’s and now live well into their 80’s and beyond, a.k.a. 40 years of retirement pay), rising healthcare costs, salaries, housing pay, etc.  Equipment costs on the other — planes, bullets, tanks, UAV’s and an aging fleet of …well, almost every weapon system you can think of.  Just to send one combat troop to Afghanistan costs the taxpayer $1 million a year.

Almost everyone close to the organization knows we’re plowing ahead like a drunk driver headed for the cliff, but no one seems up to the task of fixing it.  Worse yet, much of the leadership seems bent on simply increasing spending rather than fixing a broken system.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is making a noble effort, but the military-industrial complex is a three-headed monster, devouring every plan formed against it through strategic lobbying, creative bookkeeping and a view of the world based more on fantasy than reality.

Ackerman cites an October assessment from the CSBA’s Todd Harrison who compares the DoD to GM, explaining (emphasis mine),

Another similarity between the two is that both organizations are in a period of disruptive change in the competitive environment. In GM’s case, its market share rapidly eroded as gas prices climbed higher, the economy slowed, and consumers turned to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. GM found itself building a fleet of SUVs and trucks that consumers did not want and could not afford. Similarly, DoD now finds itself saddled with a number of weapon programs whose capabilities are ill-suited for the types of conflict the military currently faces and whose costs have risen beyond what the Department can afford. Many of the new weapons being funded today are optimized for middle-of-the- spectrum conflicts—that is, conventional, military-on-military conflicts such as Operation Desert Storm in 1991. But adversaries are well aware of the United States’ overwhelming advantage in the middle and are instead moving to either end of the spectrum: irregular warfare on one end and high-end, asymmetric warfare on the other. The challenge for DoD, as it was for GM, is that the competition is adapting faster than it can keep up.

The last sentence is key, “…the competition is adapting faster than it can keep up.” Much of it has to do with the huge, inflexible, bureaucratic organizational structure of the DoD as compared the nimble, decentralized, open-source structure embodied by al-Qaeda and affiliate organizations. One bans twitter, facebook and gmail while the other uses the internet train to organize its cells all over the world.

Changing the DOD’s organizational structure is one thing, putting a freeze on the defense budget is another and one that may be a bit more realistic. However, none of this is bound to change anytime soon if we insist on keeping our country in a state of perpetual war.

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. – James Madison, Political Observations, 1795

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A couple weeks ago I finally got around to reading, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan after having it recommended to me by several people. I will never look at food the same way again.

I know people make flippant remarks like that all the time, coming out of “Super Size Me” exclaiming with enraged gusto, “I’ll never eat another Big Mac!” In fact, I’m almost hesitant to make a comment like the aforementioned lest it cheapen a shift in my thinking that is actually quite real and startling even to myself.  I’m being honest when I say that Pollan shook my worldview and forced me to confront an industrial food system of which I had been willfully ignorant, partaking in its cheap delicacies without understanding the repercussions. I mean, its just food right? Maybe not.

“Eating is an agricultural act,” as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world — and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them.  There are things in it that will ruin their appetites. But in the the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kinds of pleasure that are only deepened by knowing.

There was a ton of information packed away in the pages of this book, but I want to highlight two main points, discussed in the opening chapters of the book that really caused me to pause:

We are a nation of corn-eaters

“But I rarely eat corn!” you say.  Do you eat any of the following:

• steak (corn is what feeds the steer)
• chicken, pork, turkey, lamb (all corn-fed)
• catfish, tilapia, salmon (all increasingly trained to eat corn)
• eggs, milk, cheese yogurt (once came from dairy cows raised on grass, now Holsteins tethered to machines, eating corn)
• soda and many juices (high-fructose corn syrup)
• beer (alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn)
• any processed food with starch, glucose syrup, maltodextrin, crystalline fructose, absorbic acid, lecithin, dextrose, lactic acid and lystine, maltose, MSG, caramel color, xanthan gum (all corn)
• Cheez Whiz, frozen yogurt, canned fruit, ketchup, frozen waffles, syrups, mayonnaise, mustard, hot dogs, salad dressing

As Pollan explains, “…the food industry has done a good job of persuading us that the forty-five throusand different items of SKUs…in the supermarket…represent genuine variety rather than so many clever rearrangements of molecules extracted from the same plant.”

So, you and I eat a lot of corn without even realizing it, but why?  Because its cheap.  And why is it cheap?  Because the U.S. government heavily subsidizes the corn industry.  As Pollan explains,

America’s farm policy was forged during the Depression not, as many people seem to think, to encourage farmers to produce more food for a hungry nation, but to rescue farmers from the disastrous effects of growing too much food – far more than Americans could afford to buy.

This system changed, however with the 1973 farm bill which replaced,

…the New Deal system of supporting prices through loans, government grain purchases, and land idling with a new system of direct payment to farmers…Instead of keeping corn out of a falling market, as the old loan programs and federal granary had done, the new subsidies encouraged farmers to sell their corn at any proice, since the government would make up the difference.

The history of American farm policy is vital in understanding our country’s food culture.  While the free market advocate in me has always abhorred the idea of agricultural subsidies, the discussion presented by Pollan shows the various factors which make the debate more than just a black and white issue.  However, regardless of the economic implications of paying our farmers to produce mountains of cheap corn, the fact is we end up subsidizing the most unhealthy calories in the supermarket.

Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.

For one of the fattest nations on earth, this isn’t welcome news.

We also eat a lot of oil

For some, the idea that we end up indirectly eating gallons of oil each year may be an even bigger leap than acknowledging the prominence of corn in our diets, but the unsettling truth is that we’ve built our modern-industrial food system on a foundation of cheap oil. From the chemical fertilizers that cause many of the crops to grow quicker and bigger, to the pesticides that keep insects away, to the gasoline used by tractors to harvest the crops and trucks to transport them thousands of miles across the country and finally to the packaging used to keep the food from spoiling — each link in the chain requires us to further rely on non-renewable resource.

How much oil is used? 50 gallons of oil per acre of corn, 1/3 gallon per bushel. “Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food…”

These costs are largely hidden to the consumer, but they remain nonetheless. What makes this scary is what will happen when a barrel of oil goes back to costing $150 or more and doesn’t mercifully come back down as it did a couple years ago. For a food system that relies on large amounts of oil to produce and transport its products, this spells huge increases in the price of food.  Unless we choose to opt out, which of course is what a large section of the book is devoted to teaching the reader how to do.

Pollan goes much deeper into the food system than just corn and oil.  He looks at the repercussions of feeding animals food they weren’t naturally made to eat, the treatment and quality of life of those animals, the somewhat disappointing realities of the big organic movement and why Whole Foods isn’t necessarily the answer, the vegetarian debate, the history of the modern food industry and even the challenges and unexpected pleasures of hunting and foraging for food in the modern world.

It would be hard to do this book justice without going on for another few thousand words.  So I won’t.  Instead, read this book and really chew it over (no pun intended…ok, maybe it was).  You, like me, may end up surprised at how much your answer changes regarding the question of, “what’s for dinner?”

“We’ve become a culture of technicians.  We’re all into the how of it and nobody’s stepping back and saying ‘But Why?’.”  – Joel Salatin, Farmer (my new hero)

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Judah James Schaefer was born early Saturday morning. He is 7lbs 1oz, 19 1/4 in. long, has what we initially thought was blond hair, but now is looking more like a very light brown, and has quite long feet and hands (I see a future Van Cliburn or Michael Phelps…not sure which).  As far as labors go, it went very well and quite quickly.  Marelize was a trooper as usual and Judah was born 5 hours after arriving at the hospital.

Everyone is excited to have Judah here finally.  Marelize, since she doesn’t have to carry a basketball in her stomach anymore.  Malone, so she can have a “real-life” baby to take care of, sing to and eventually (an educated guess) boss around.  And finally, I am excited because I now have a son for whom I can buy all sorts of wonderful things like hatchets (both the cutting tool and the book by Gary Paulson), guns, fireworks, etc.  I can also make my best attempt at teaching him the Art of Manliness.  He is a great joy and we’re so happy to have him in the Schaefer tribe.

Here are a few pictures from the last two days:

On the green they watched their sons
Playing till too dark to see,
As their fathers watched them once,
As my father once watched me
~Edmund Blunden

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Retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, a West Point Graduate who went on to earn a PhD from Princeton and later taught as a professor at West Point and Johns Hopkins before joining the faculty at Boston University, is the author of one of the best books I’ve read in several years, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. A conservative historian, Bacevich expresses his “dismay at the direction of the U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.” Mainly, the excessive use of military force as an instrument to remake the world in the way we see fit.

The interview is a bit dated (Aug 2008) so forgive the election year discussions…and the obnoxious commercial break in the middle of the interview, but the main thrust of his message remains important, maybe even more so on the eve of 30,000 additional troops making their way to Afghanistan, the “Graveyard of Empires.”

I welcome your comments on what may prove to be some more controversial talking points.  Enjoy the interview and sound off below!

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As a young boy, few authors captured my imagine, horror and delight like Roald Dahl, creator of such scrumdiddlyumptious stories as, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Witches, James and the Giant Peach and Danny the Champion of the World.

I found Mr. Dahl to be somewhat of an odd, mischievous old man.  In my imagination he was tall with knobby knees and bad teeth which he used to offer both large, gracious smiles and terrifying growls as the mood struck him.  He had a wicked sense of humor that made me giggle nervously as I hid under my covers with a flashlight, reading his stories into the wee hours with a box of Oreos as both companion and fuel.

Recently, I have begun going back through some of his short stories. In doing so I have found myself devouring his writing, just like old times, and more curious than ever about what made this man tick.

He, like myself, was a military pilot. He flew fighters for the RAF in WWII and was shot down over enemy lines in the Libyan desert, sustaining injuries that eventually led to his reassignment as an attache. It was this dramatic story, which he told to famous author, C.S. Forester, a short time later while stationed in Washington D.C.  Forester was writing for The Saturday Evening Post at the time and had stopped by Dahl’s office (much to Dahl’s surprise) to see if he could get the pilot to recount his tale so he could write a nice article about it.  Dahl offered instead to write it all down and send it to Forester who could revise as needed and make it his own.  A few weeks later Dahl received the following correspondence from Forester:

Dear RD, You were meant to give me notes, not a finished story.  I’m bowled over.  Your piece is marvellous.  It is the word of a gifted writer.  I didn’t touch a word of it.  I sent it at once under your name to my agent, Harold Matson, asking him to offer it to the Saturday Evening Post with my personal recommendation.  You will be happy to hear that the Post accepted it immediately and have paid one thousand dollars.  Mr. Matson’s commission is ten percent.  I enclose his check for nine hundred dollars.  It’s all yours.  As you will see from Mr. Matson’s letter, which I also enclose, the Post is asking if you will write more stories for them.  I do hope you will.  Did you know you were a writer?  With my very best wishes and congratulations, C.S. Forester.

His career took off from there.

In The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More Dahl looks back at his writing career and lists a few requirements for anyone hoping to become a fiction writer:

1.  You should have a lively imagination

2. You should be able to write well.  By that I mean you should be able to make a scene come alive in the reader’s mind.  Not everybody has this ability.  It is a gift, and you either have it or you don’t.

3.  You must have stamina.  In other words, you must be able to stick to what you are doing and never give up, for hour after hour, day after day, week after week, and month after month.

4.  You must be a perfectionist.  That means you must never be satisfied with what you have written until you have rewritten it again and again, making it as good as you possibly can.

5.  You must have strong self-discipline.  You are working alone.  No one is employing you.  No one is around to fire you if you don’t turn up for work, or to tick you off is you start slacking.

6.  It helps a lot if you have a keen sense of humor.  This is not essential when writing for grown-ups, but for children, it’s vital.

7.  You must have a degree of humility.  The writer who thinks that his work is marvelous is heading for trouble.

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