Welcome Back, my Friends to the Show that Never Ends
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I've always thought this should be adopted as the theme song for the agency I work for. It seems appropriate, on-target and hints at the circus-like nature of the correctional process (on bad days, anyway). That, and I always liked Emerson, Lake and Palmer. I happened to hear this particular tune on the radio as I was driving home from work tonight.

On another note, I've read through the past few entries I made. They didn't end up being quite as coherent as I had hoped. But, they got cobbled together on scraps of paper in between other things I was doing and I see no real reason to re-write them.

I had intended to write about reaction to the Indian Ocean tsunami tonight, but I just don't seem to be able to put my thoughts together in a coherent way. Maybe tomorrow. Or, the next day. But then again, that is sort of the point. I see lots of hand wringing and commiserating and (no-doubt heart-felt) pleas to help and I don't have a problem with any of that. The sentiment is good and generous and I am in no way denigrating the outpouring of feeling and financial aid. And while I get a bit testy about those who suggest that in some way all those deaths are somehow our fault because we are rich and they are poor, I am not trying to suggest that we shouldn't help. I think my point is that it is easy to point the finger at the West, in general, and the US, in particular and say that it is our fault. If you look around you can find someone who thinks everything in the world is our fault. But before we get too smug and self-satisfied in our hair shirts, think for a minute exactly what it is that we (the US in particular) could have done to prevent all these deaths.

Should we have spent the money necessary to install western-style modern infra-structure in all populated coastlines of the affected areas whether the people there wanted it or not? Imagine the howls of outrage that would rise if we imperialistic capitalists tried to export the trappings of our material lifestyle in such a manner. Imagine the howls of outrage that would rise because we were subverting the stability of the governments of the region by undermining them and making them look impotent and dependent on the US. Imagine the howls of outrage that would rise because we were destroying the lifestyles of indigenous peoples. Imagine the howls of outrage that we were raping the environment.

Or perhaps we should have donated trillions of dollars to the governments of the region on the condition that the money be spent on tsunami warning infrastructure? Do you think that would have produced meaningful results in, say Suharto's Indonesia, for example? Do you think there would have been eager acceptance of such a thing, or do you think the governments involved would have been insulted by such a patronizing, paternalistic gesture?

Or maybe we should have donated the money to that paragon of virtue and good management, the United Nations? Do you think they could have prevented a substantial number of these deaths?

Tell me what we could have done? Or, tell me what we could have done that would make these deaths not our fault, except not be rich and powerful.

So, spare me the guilt trip. It is a sad fact that no matter what resources are available, preventing deaths in these kinds of "Acts of God" isn't a priority for any government anywhere, until after a disaster of this nature because there are just too many competing priorities. We don't have the complex weather forecasting systems and storm warning notifications and Hurricane Hunters flying planes into the eyes of hurricanes in the Caribbean because we are rich. We have them because we are rich AND we got tired of people dying in hurricanes and tornadoes and floods.

Another sad fact is that all the people who are expending their energy trying to make me feel bad because this is my fault because I live in the decadent West, will have moved on to trying to make me feel bad about living in the decadent West for some other reason in a couple of weeks. That is, in fact, the show that never ends. If those people really cared about the people in the Indian Ocean region, their energy might be better spent trying to tap into one of the things that is best about the American People: their generosity in times of crisis. Now is the time when something is most likely to be done to prevent something like this is the future and now is the time we should help.

And if you still feel guilty about living in a rich country, feel free to diminish our wealth a bit by doubling your contribution.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Thursday, December 30 2004 03:28:52 AM

More Medicated Reality
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For what it's worth, I'm back with more of this drivel.

Ok, let's assume that yesterday's young man goes on with his life doing his mostly ordinary stuff. He gets married. He has kids. He is a bit grumpy and pessimistic, but basically pretty ordinary, he thinks. Occasionally he gets depressed, but he figures that's just part of life. Then he hits one of those patches where lots of things happen to and with his family. He ends up in the hospital with chest pains. He is relieved to learn it wasn't a heart attack. The doctor thinks maybe he is depressed and prescribes an anti-depressant.

The no-longer-quite-so young man notices after a few days that there is a profound change in his outlook on life. He realizes the anti-depressants are working. He is no longer driven by anxiety and fear. He is no longer worried about what other people think of him. He goes about his life doing things because he wants to or thinks he needs to. He is no longer driven by what he thinks he should do. He feels free. He feels happy. He never wants to go back to living the way he did for all those years.

Now he is experiencing life in a chemically altered state. Does that make everything he thinks and the things he learns about life and the changes in his philosophy and beliefs invalid? Can he trust what he now thinks he knows about the world? How is his current experience qualitatively different than his LSD experience?

Conversely, the anti-depressants are supposed to be rectifying deficient neurotransmitter levels in the brain. Perhaps the 20 odd years he lived with these chemical deficiencies were the years he was "chemically altered." Maybe everything is fine now and it is those 20 years where his experiences and knowledge are suspect. Maybe the experiences of the first 20 years of his adult life are chemically tainted? Maybe it is all valid, in which case maybe Leary and Alpert and others were right when they thought hallucinogens were a chemical shortcut to the spiritual (an idea I'm not all that comfortable with as I grew up Protestant enough that I can't accept that you can take a pill and find God). And what about those moments of peak experience, those rare times like personal triumphs or the birth of a child where the brain gets flooded with endorphins and the other various components of the chemical soup that accompanies euphoria? Are those experiences valid? If you start excluding some of these event-induced chemically altered states, you end up excluding all experience that doesn't occur when you are in a normal, un-enhanced, un-stressed, un-stimulated state, and how much of that do any of us actually experience? Is it really as simple as saying that if the experience occurs due to a legal chemically altered state it is valid but if the chemical is illegal it isn't valid? That life experience gained while drunk counts, but that gained while stoned doesn't?

I don't have any answers to these questions. No matter which way I turn with these ideas, I end up affirming something that leaves me really uncomfortable. I tend toward thinking that all experience is valid, up to a point, and it is what you make of it. But then I look at some of my clients who definitely don't live in the same world I do and I'm not comfortable with that idea, either.

I just don't know. I'm not entirely convinced that I need to know (or at least that it makes a difference if I do), but I keep working at it anyway. It gives me something to do when I can't sleep.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Wednesday, December 29 2004 04:14:51 AM

Cheap epistemology and chemically induced reality
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Yesterday I was talking about the meaning we assign to experiences and whether how or whether those meanings come to be valid. Tonight I'm going to get into some hypotheticals. Keep in mind that I'm not a philosopher. I flunked one third of the philosophy courses I took in college. I'm not trying to deal with this in the sort of precise, rigorous analysis that would make good philosophy. I'm just asking some questions about things that bother me, hence the "cheap epistemology" reference. Anyway this is not about scholarly precision, its just ordinary, everyday perception of reality.

So, lets assume there is a young man. He's a mostly ordinary guy, floating through life, doing ordinary young man stuff. He is happy, sad, angry, frustrated... all the ordinary kinds of states of mind ordinary young men experience. He never gives thought to the matter. He accepts what he experiences and what he learns about life as valid.

One day this young man heads out to the country. On a riverbank near a railroad bridge he takes LSD. His perceptions alter radically. He begins to hallucinate. He can see the grass growing. He can see the bridge bending and the sky underneath the water as the river inverts.

Eventually, he experiences a profound sense of oneness. He is not in the world. He is the world. He is part of everything. He is the growing grass, the buzzing flies, the river flowing, the breeze blowing. He looks around and is certain that everything is as it is supposed to be. The sky as it is, the tree just so, the particular bush in just that place, the dead deer carcass by the edge of the river, everything is just as it should be. As it needs to be. As it was meant to be. He sits there savoring the experience for an indefinite amount of time. Never during the experience does he get so lost that he doesn't remember that it is chemically induced. There is always a little voice in the back of his head saying," isn't that an interesting hallucination."

Having experienced something he imagined to be akin to oneness with the universe, even if chemically induced, he developed an affinity for eastern religion, which he pursued with varying intensity as time went by. The question is, was that experience valid. Are the things he thought he learned during that experience real and meaningful? What about the things he experienced later because his chemical experience left him open to the ideas he found in his study of eastern religion. Or are these invalid because their precursors were chemically induced? Are the changes in his faith valid?

Tomorrow: more altered states.

 

by Cziltang 
Posted: Tuesday, December 28 2004 03:42:04 AM

A Wonky Christmas and Epistemology
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Well, my Christmas entry was, in retrospect, probably not the most tasteful thing I've ever done. I apologize to anyone who was looking for something meaningful and uplifting, but then again, if you were looking for that on my web site you probably deserve what you get. And, in what must surely be a karma thing, if it makes anyone feel better you can take comfort in knowing that our Christmas Day went completely wonky a few hours after I posted that nonsense.

The Head Rat has seizures infrequently, but started having them Christmas morning. It isn't life-threatening or anything, but it isn't something she wanted to be doing under the Christmas Tree, so to speak. So, I sent Rat, Jr. off to Grandma's to do the traditional family thing with the rest of my family and the Head Rat and I stayed home while she recovered. I won't say we didn't miss the traditional thing, but it was kind of nice to spend the day quietly at home. She's been through a lot in the last few years, so it wasn't all bad. And, my Mother sent home a huge box of leftovers with Rat Jr., so we didn't miss out on that tradition.

While we were home, I started thinking about how we experience events. I know that the Head Rat doesn't remember everything that happens while she is having a seizure and I was thinking about how it is that she remembers the pieces of the things she does remember compared to how I remember the same events from a different (and obviously more comfortable) perspective. I've been thinking for some time about how we assign meaning and experience "reality" under different conditions. Without getting into heavy details and the fine points of Epistemology, I'm just thinking about how we assign meaning and more importantly how (or whether) we should consider our assigned meanings valid under certain circumstances. Most people are familiar with the phenomenon of police reporting that interviews with several eyewitnesses to an accident will all describe the event differently. There is, at least theoretically, an objective series of events that occurred up to the point of the accident (unless you get into the realm of those philosophers who deny anything external is real, but I am, if nothing else a pragmatist, and just can't let go of the idea of an objective reality, so I'm going to stick with it). Different people assigning meaning to (partially?) perceived external events. That's sort of where I'm going with this, but in the end, I don't really know about how anyone else perceives anything, so I'm sort of stuck talking about how I perceive things under different circumstances in the hopes that it is descriptive enough to get my meaning across.

I have some particular circumstances I want to talk about, but I haven't quite finished fleshing out the essay, so the meat (or meat-substitute, if you are a vegetarian) of this discussion will have to wait for later.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Monday, December 27 2004 04:34:24 AM

Captain Obvious strikes again
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I've mentioned before that I run a website for my work. It's always been kind of awkward for me. It was supposed to be a place where various managers in our department would post essays and comments about the things that were happening at work. As it turned out, I've been the only one to write anything for it, so it has mostly become a sort of "Corrections 101" page for my staff. A lot of them are fairly green, by corrections standards and I thought it was a good idea to introduce them to some correctional theory and research that they might not be aware of.

The problem is that I'm not comfortable telling staff, "I just wrote another brilliant essay, so you should go read it..." But it kind of works that way (OK, minus the "brilliant" part). Still, it is perilously close to self-aggrandizement and while I'm not above a little of that, it just doesn't seem right at work.

I was talking about web sites with one of the staff tonight. I was trying to explain how RSS feeds work, since he has a news aggregator at home, but didn't know that he could get feeds from web sites other than just news outlets. So he asked me, "Why don't you do one of those for the work web site?"

I'm sitting there thinking, "Why didn't I think of that?"

10 minutes worth of work here at home, and I've solved my "self-aggrandizement" problem. Except, of course, now I have to tell all of them about it...

by Cziltang 
Posted: Monday, December 27 2004 04:20:18 AM

Mad World
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5:00 AM is a hell of a time to be up on Christmas Day if you aren't six years old trying to see what Santa left you. I've been doing the odd bit of cleaning in my office, waiting to wake up the rest of the family. Nothing much on TV all night. I finally gave up and turned over to the music channels. The irony of listening to audio with a static picture on a High Definition TV did not escape me.

I got these lines from a song called Mad World by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules (neither of whom I have ever heard) apparently from the soundtrack to Donnie Darko (which I've never seen):

I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
But dreams where I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had

Not quite the Christmas cheer you might have anticipated, eh? Well, I'm really not gloomy and depressed this morning, I just have an appreciation for a good bit of wordsmithing around a dark idea.

On what I consider to be a more cheerful note, it seems that at least some of the more mainstream have finally caught on to the reality that promoting self-esteem by trying to get people to feel good about themselves just for who they are is a crock. Granted, I work with criminals, who are in some respects different that "normal" people, but the research has been out there for several years that shows that programs designed to promote self-esteem in criminals not only don't reduce criminal behavior, but in fact, tend to increase criminal behavior. But this is from Roy F. Baumeister, Jennifer D. Campbell, Joachim I. Krueger and Kathleen D. Vohs in the Scientific American (via Instapundit):

"Boosting people's sense of self-worth has become a national preoccupation. Yet surprisingly, research shows that such efforts are of little value in fostering academic progress or preventing undesirable behavior"

Apparently it applies to the rest of us, too.

"The corollary, that low self-esteem lies at the root of individual and thus societal problems and dysfunctions, has sustained an ambitious social agenda for decades. Indeed, campaigns to raise people's sense of self-worth abound."

I am again reminded of the quote attributed to Ronald Reagan to the effect that it isn't that our friends on the left are ignorant, its that so much of what they know isn't true. As late as last month I was talking to an individual currently employed in juvenile corrections. We were talking programming and he was hard pressed to come up with anything they were doing that wasn't designed to boost the self-esteem of the delinquents. I also remember with considerable disgust, the programs Rat, Jr. participated in in school that were supposed to boost her self-esteem. In the long run, I think her self-esteem would be higher now if they had spent that time teaching her grammar and punctuation.

"And we have found little to indicate that indiscriminately promoting self-esteem in today's children or adults, just for being themselves, offers society any compensatory benefits beyond the seductive pleasure it brings to those engaged in the exercise."

Read that one again.

The main benefit of self-esteem raising programs is that it makes the presenters feel good.

I'm sorry (no, actually, I'm really not. This is just me being cranky.) Sometimes you shouldn't feel good about yourself.

There was a hoax circulating on the internet a while back that supposedly contained the 11 rules of life presented by Bill Gates at a high school graduation. Even given that it was a hoax, whoever it was that said this, gets it:

The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

My point is that the next time you hear some (no doubt well-intentioned) busybody gushing over some program to spend your tax dollars to improve the self-esteem of "our children," remember that what you are buying for your money is the opportunity for the "gush-er" to feel good about themselves.

And, oh yeah. Merry Christmas.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Saturday, December 25 2004 05:24:40 AM

Den Beste
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Yesterday I learned from Rishon Rishon (via the Smedley Log) that Steven Den Beste had written about why he gave up writing for his legendary USS Clueless web site. I've been thinking for a day now about what or whether to write about it. Pretty much everything I would say about it has been said (better) by others, but in my usual "dollar short and a day late" fashion I will add these (neither unique nor earth-shaking) comments.

When I started blogging I aspired to write like Mr. Den Beste. I harbored no hope of succeeding, having neither the depth nor breadth of knowledge necessary on the topics I wanted to write about. Still, I was inspired to try to be as dispassionate and analytical as possible. Mr. Den Beste gave me food for thought. For me, the elegance of his writing was that when I finished reading an essay I disagreed with, I had, not the vague uneasy feeling of disagreement you get when the logic is clouded, but a firm grasp of exactly why I disagreed. We were more than fortunate that he was willing to endure what he did to write as much as he did for as long as he did. I can only say I was privileged to have had the opportunity to read along on a daily basis.

Like so many others, I wish him well.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Friday, December 24 2004 09:13:05 AM

My poor baby
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I found this article in an e-mail newsletter that I check occasionally.

MOTHER UPSET SON STILL IN DETENTION

Late Tuesday night, a ten year old boy plunged a steak knife into the chest of his 14 year old brother during an argument over whether to watch TV or play video games. The 14 yr old is still recovering in the hospital. What is amazing is that the mother of the two boys is upset that her younger son is still in the juvenile detention facility. She says that the incident was just a mistake, and does not warrant the punishment and charges of assault and aggravated battery. She wants her boy home. Want to know where criminals and thugs get their start in life? Look no further.

Aw, c'mon. Boys will be boys, right? This is the kind of thing that drove me out of the Juvenile side of corrections more than 20 years ago. In three years of working with delinquent boys I came to the conclusion that a lot of the kids I worked with would be better off, relatively speaking, if not just fine, if we could have locked up their parents instead of the boys. Time after time we would see a kid start to get his act together and begin to take some responsibility for himself and then the parents would jump in an screw everything up.

I am no fan of the State raising children. By and large official institutions do a rotten job of raising kids. Yet, compared to some of the parents, the State is a regular Cleaver family. In the instance above I bet Mom's got a list of reasons as long as your arm why her baby is a victim and shouldn't be held accountable for his actions at any level and I bet none of those reasons are her fault. How completely devoid of contact with reality do you have to be to think that having a 10 year old kid who stabs people is no big deal? Or that having the little bugger running around loose is a good thing?

(I'm sitting here trying to picture this in my mind and all I can see is the image of Gollum giving Sam that sly look when Frodo stops Sam from killing Gollum at the beginning of Return of the King. And you have to wonder how the 14 year old is going to feel laying there in the hospital, knowing that Mom thinks his evil little bastard of a brother just made a 'mistake'?)

I pride myself on engaging in civil discourse. I avoid web sites that routinely engage in the same kind of frothing at the mouth mudslinging that is so popular on daytime talk shows. Yet, my regular readers know that personal accountability (or lack thereof) is one of the things that routinely leaves me teetering on the brink of civility when I write. I've just deleted some of that kind of nonsense and will finish with just this:

Sometimes I wish that people like the mother of this future client of mine could be arrested, prosecuted, convicted and executed for the crime of Aggravated Stupidity.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Thursday, December 23 2004 04:02:22 AM

Pleasant Surprise
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I've been contemplating doing some work on this website on my off days over the next couple of weeks. As a precursor to that I was looking over the website and was reminded how much I miss using Freemind to map out my essays. I hadn't bothered to install it on my new computer because I haven't had time to download the huge Java Runtime Environment file that you need to make Freemind work. I got to poking around on the computer and discovered, to my unmitigated delight, that there is a sufficiently advanced version of Java already installed on my computer. So, Freemind is now on my current system and I'm up and running.

If you aren't familiar with Freemind (or the concept of Mind Mapping) it is kind of like making an outline without (or with if you want to do so) all the numbers and letters (I think the official term is 'heirarchical information manager). Since I tend to think in ways that are, shall we say, less than linear, Freemind is really cool for me because when I realize that a certain idea belongs in a different section of the outline, I can just do a drag and drop operation and put it where it needs to go. Anyway, if you've got a newer computer and are interested, you might check to see if you have JRE 1.4 or higher on your system (or do the 90MB download from Sun Microsystems, if you've got a high speed connection) and give Freemind a try.

On a housekeeping note, I finally got my RSS links transferred to this computer, so I will try to remember to start making the RSS feed for my entries.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Wednesday, December 22 2004 06:21:27 AM

Off again, on again
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Well, the Kansas Supreme Court has issued a stay of its own ruling overturning our Death Penalty law to allow the Attorney General to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. So, the guys who were on Death Row a few days ago and then were off Death Row due to the ruling are now technically back on Death Row while we wait to see whether or not the US Supreme Court will hear the case at which time they will be either on Death Row or off Death Row depending on how the Supreme Court rules unless of course the Supreme Court chooses not to hear the case in which case they will be off Death Row when the Kansas Supreme Court issues the order to rescind its own stay of its own ruling.

I don't have a punch line for this or even a pithy commentary. Its just another example of why collecting lawyer jokes is one of my hobbies.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Wednesday, December 22 2004 05:01:42 AM

Of Fate and Coincidence
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When the Head Rat's grandparents died last summer we became the keepers of the family history. We have the family photo albums, documents and other assorted items. Since we didn't have the opportunity to live close to them and have only had the financial resources to travel to visit them in the last few years, a good portion of these items we may never figure out the significance of, since there is no one left alive to tell us.

Among the items is a resin paperweight that has inside, a purple heart and another medal that was awarded to my wife's great-grandfather in WWI. There is also a framed certificate which has the same image on it as the unidentified medal. The certificate is in French.

Although I sometimes harbor certain delusions of grandeur, for the most part I am fairly grounded in who and what I am. And, I am, without a doubt, a lower-middle class descendant of farmers and a true Midwesterner at heart. Like it or not, around here people who learn French have upper class (or at least upper-middle class) pretensions. I don't know French, no one in my family knows French, none of my friends know French, none of my co-workers know French. So, I have this really interesting-looking certificate with my wife's great-grandfather's name on it and no way to translate it to find out what it is.

My Chilean friend (who I wrote about a few days ago) is a Mormon. He is quite active in the church and spends a great deal of his time and resources working with the Mormon missionaries who come to town. Now, I'm not a Mormon and am not particularly enamored of organized religion in general, but I have a great deal of respect for the Mormon missionaries. It takes a great deal of faith to go around trying to get people to listen to you talk about your religion the way they do. I've met several of them in the past few years and they all seem to be truly nice young men.

A few days ago, my friend took two of the missionaries assigned here out to eat. These two young men, one from Mexico and one from Ecuador, have been sent up here to work with the sizeable Hispanic population in the area. Quite by chance, in the restaurant they were seated near a woman from French Guinea. A conversation ensued and my friend discovered that the young man from Ecuador is also fluent in French.

This evening, the missionaries stopped by my work on their way home. The young man from Ecuador translated the certificate for me. It was kind of an interesting process, as the young man's French is better than his English, so he actually translated the certificate into Spanish and my friend translated to English from there. The certificate appears to be in appreciation of honorable service in the Argonne region in WWI.

So, because a woman from French Guinea happened to sit near a Mormon missionary from Ecuador in a restaurant he was taken to by an American citizen who grew up in Chile who happens to work for me, we now know a bit more about my wife's family history.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Tuesday, December 21 2004 03:47:20 AM

Christmas Presents
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I really don't like the Christmas season very much. I worked in retail when I was in high school and the first couple of years I was in college. That will put you off of Christmas faster than anything. Since I outgrew the whole Santa thing I've been kind of uncomfortable with the presents part of Christmas. For most of my adult life I haven't had the money to be extravagant at Christmas time and now that I'm a bit better off, I don't see the point in it. I hate crowds, so Christmas shopping is not enjoyable. If I need something, I buy it for myself. If I want something I don't need, I save up for it and buy it myself so I make sure I get exactly what I want. I just can't tell someone I want "X" for Christmas. It is almost like the presents ritual is a social obligation I would rather not be involved in, but can't get out of gracefully. Several years ago I even swore I would never set foot in a store that had Christmas decorations or merchandise displayed before Thanksgiving, but I had to back off of that when the grocery stores started doing it. As for the religious part of Christmas, I don't know why, but I see that as a private thing (as I do most things religious). It is about personal and family ritual and that is something completely separate from the commercial hype.

Anyway, that's just me and my own particular pathology. I know people who are into the whole decorating and presents and shopping thing, and that's fine for them. Luckily for me, the Head Rat feels the same way about it as I do, or perhaps even more so, so we've never ever bought each other a Christmas present in 22 years of being married.

That said, there are some presents that are meaningful and that I support wholeheartedly. One of my shift supervisors is getting one this week. He is taking a couple of days off and he and his wife are driving 15 hours to a not-so-nearby state to take advantage of an opportunity to have a video conference call with their son who has been stationed in the Fallujah area in Iraq since this past summer. I don't know who put this together, whether it was a government sponsored thing or privately funded, but in either case, whoever it was did a good thing. It was especially timely, in that my employee didn't find out about this until a couple of days ago. He and his family had been a bit down, as their second son shipped out for Iraq this past Tuesday.

So, to whoever set up this video call, and all the families and their loved ones who are in harm's way, I say an unabashedly heartfelt "Merry Christmas to All."

And, in a note to anyone out there who might be offended by my lack of political correctness: It is what it is. I'm celebrating Christmas (in my own way). If you don't want to, don't. If you are celebrating something else, that's fine by me. If my use of the "C" word offends you, feel free not to visit my web site in the future, that's also fine by me.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Monday, December 20 2004 06:19:10 AM

Slow day in the Ratlands
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Kind of a slow day today. Being medicated has pretty much killed any ambition I may have harbored earlier of actually accomplishing anything today. So, I've been alternating between trying to convince myself that I really, really want to work on some projects around the house and watching English soccer on TV. Codeine: the great de-motivator.

I have been spending some of my time thinking about my next article for my work website. We're in one of those periods where there is great opportunity and a huge risk. We've hired 9 new staff in the last month. Managing the training for that many people is tricky. So much of what we do at work requires staff to think and make choices on the fly in accordance with our organizational values. (I know that sounds like management gobbledy-good, but I don't know how else to express it.) The problem is that it usually takes months of gradual, careful exposure to the routine and the unusual events that occur in a residential correctional setting to get new staff to internalize enough of our worldview for us to be comfortable that they are going to make good decisions most of the time. When you hire one or two new people at a time, the impact is relatively small. With 9 new bodies (which amounts to almost half again the number of our current staff) there is just no way to avoid major disruptions when the new folks are either afraid to make decisions or make things worse instead of better.

That is, however, part of the territory. And, as part of the territory, I'm now working 7:00 PM to 3:00 AM so I can do training with the new assistant supervisors on both 2nd and 3rd shift. I have to say it is rather enjoyable being around staff I usually only interact with via paperwork. The down side is that I'm completely disoriented as to time and day of the week. It appears to be Sunday afternoon, and I'm about to start getting ready for work.

To add to the disorientation, I couldn't find my keys when I tried to go for coffee this afternoon. Eventually, Rat Jr. found them in her purse. Unfortunately, she and her purse are in Nebraska visiting my sister. I found a spare key hidden in a drawer, so at least I don't have to walk to work this evening.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Sunday, December 19 2004 04:45:37 PM

Death Penalty
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For most of my life, I have been against the death penalty. It just seemed to me that the opportunities for misapplication were too great to justify such an irrevocable act. Over the years we've seen a number of examples of individuals wrongly convicted for crimes who have been freed based on advances in DNA testing. As a sociologist by education, I saw the studies that suggest that the death penalty is not a deterrent to murder because most murders are crimes of passion. As a corrections professional, my contact with criminals has suggested to me that in those instances where murders are committed through cold, hard, calculated acts, the death penalty probably isn't a deterrent, because the individuals who commit those acts assume that they are too smart to get caught. The death penalty appeal process is long and expensive, to the point of making it cheaper to keep someone in prison until they die than to execute them.

That said, in the past few years I have come to believe that the death penalty is justified and perhaps even necessary. This is an emotional thing. Like so many of the potential 'flashpoint' issues we face today I don't think anyone really makes up their mind about the death penalty purely on the basis of logic. Although it sounds perhaps needlessly flippant, I've come to feel that "sometimes you've just got to cull the herd," in the words of Dennis Miller.

We've had the death penalty in Kansas since 1994. We've only applied it six times since then and have yet to execute anyone. I was a bit surprised today to learn that the Kansas Supreme Court has declared our death penalty law unconstitutional because it gives "prosecutors an advantage when jurors were asked to balance aggravating and mitigating circumstances at sentencing." Frankly, given the legal technicalities available to defense attorneys, an advantage to prosecutors arguing for the death sentence for individuals already convicted of murder doesn't seem out of line to me.

Well, now we get the circus that comes with high profile appeals, as this is likely to be. And it probably means that the Carr brothers will spend their lives in prison instead of being executed. (The Carr brothers were convicted of forcing five people to withdraw money from ATM's and then engage in a variety sexual acts before they were shot while they knelt in the snow. One survived. I'm sure she's thrilled to hear about today's ruling.)

Now, this is the same Court that has previously ruled this same death penalty law constitutional. I guess they weren't getting enough press coverage. And since arguing about whether or not to teach evolution in school seems to be the exclusive province of the Kansas School Board, this seems as good a way as any. And, it is just another example of why what is legal isn't always what is right.

 

by Cziltang 
Posted: Friday, December 17 2004 05:41:20 PM

Better Late than Never
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I have a friend and co-worker for whom I have considerable admiration. He is, I believe, one of the truly decent people in the world. He has also been my right hand for several years. I owe him a lot.

His story is unusual. He is an American citizen, born here to Chilean parents working here. He grew up in Chile. He had the misfortune of coming of age in Chile during the Pinochet coup. He also had the misfortune of being an easy target for a spineless co-worker who was looking for a way to take the heat off himself when Pinochet's goons came looking for dissidents.

He told me once about being 'arrested' and 'interrogated' and hearing people being executed and bodies piled up and pools of blood on the floors of rooms he was held in. He was lucky, in that someone he worked for vouched for him and he was released with only a couple of broken bones and a bad beating. I have never seen him express hatred for anyone, ever, in the dozen years or so I have known him, except when he talked to me about Pinochet. And now, Pinochet is back in the news, indicted for the abduction of 9 dissidents and the murder of one of them during his reign in the 70's and 80's. He may or may not go to trial.

While my friend was living through the events in Chile, I was whining about doing chores around the house and other assorted mundane trivial nonsense. I only mention this because one wonders just how many people are here in America who have stories like these. How many have lived through similar events? If you have ever talked to one of these individuals, you can't help but be struck by how easy we have had it, those of us who have grown up here. And, how much we take for granted, a lot of the simple things in our lives. Like not being rounded up in the middle of the night and taken out and killed or tortured because someone said we were 'suspicious'.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Monday, December 13 2004 09:30:21 PM

Coping skills
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You may or may not have heard about the new Nativity Scene at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in London. The short version of the story is that the display features David Beckham (English Soccer star) as Joseph and Victoria (Posh Spice) Beckham as Mary. Additionally, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Prince Phillip are the Wise Men and Samuel L. Jackson, Hugh Grant and Graham Norton are the Shepherds. Needless to say, there are a number of religious figures who have expressed a variety of negative opinions about the matter.

From Reuters (via Yahoo) "This is worse than bad taste. It is cheap," an official Vatican source told Reuters in Rome. "You cannot use contemporary personalities as the central figures of the nativity ... And it becomes worse, if that were possible, if the people may be of questionable moral standing," he added.

A spokesman for Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of 70 million Anglicans worldwide, reacted with weary resignation to the "Posh and Becks" tableau. "There is a tradition of each generation trying to re-interpret the nativity but, Oh Dear..," he said.

Personally, I am in agreement with the London Times, which called the display "uniquely tasteless."

What caught my eye, however, in the midst of the rather predictable responses, was this from Paul Handley, editor of the Anglican Church Times:

"It is yet another sign that people feel they can play around with sacred things," he told Reuters. "God is not going to worry. He is going to cope -- but it is a bit depressing."

Wait a minute. God is going to cope? God, the omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient being from the Bible? That God? He's going to COPE?

How badly do you have to need to create God in your own image to imagine that he needs to 'cope' with anything. I've talked over the years with people who have some pretty abstract, watered-down conceptions of God, but how Casper Milktoast do you have to think God is, to have to reassure yourself that he can cope with some tasteless wax statues?

Now that, I find humorous.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Thursday, December 09 2004 06:14:11 PM

Comfort Zone
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We had an incident with a client at work a few nights ago so I got a call from my staff at about 3:30 AM. This isn't all that unusual. I get calls at home fairly regularly and occasionally one in the middle of the night. I don't mind; its part of the job, and given that I was awake anyway nursing the nasty cough and other assorted symptoms I've been trying to ignore for the last two weeks, the call wasn't a problem.

Since then I've been home sick, trying to handle the follow-up by phone and (to paraphrase a line from Eddie Izzard) it all wasn't working very well. A visit to the doctor's office and a prescription for cough syrup and four days rest has improved my outlook on the world a wee bit. The 108 e-mails I found waiting for me when I got to work, I could have done without.

I was pretty happy when I got my new computer up and running and was able to listen to music again while I was working. Except that it isn't working. I've gotten so used to thinking and writing in a quiet room that I'm having a hard time concentrating. I'm finding it very difficult to adjust to having the music on. (OK, I know the obvious solution, but music is really important to me.)

It occurred to me that this process of gradually getting used to things is pretty much the way our lives work. Things happen that we may not really like, but gradually we just get used to them and they become our reality. I know that when I was 20 and weighed 180 pounds I didn't just decide to put on 100 pounds. I got where I am a few pounds at a time over the last 25 years. I was never happy about putting on a little weight here and there, but I got used to it. Now I'm 45 and I have most of the health problems associated with being 45 and being at least 100 pounds overweight.

This is pretty much how it works with my clients, I think. I'm pretty sure that most of my clients didn't wake up one day and say to themselves, "You know, I would really like to spend a lot of my life lying, cheating and stealing from all sorts of people to support a really expensive drug habit." It is a much more gradual process. They get used to a certain amount of disorder and over time it becomes the norm.

This process works in the opposite direction as well. Think about learning any skill, like learning to play an instrument for instance. When you first start you have to think about the mechanics of just making a sound and then you have to start learning to read notes off the page. It is a difficult process in the beginning trying to remember where your fingers go when you see a particular note on a page and then making your fingers do it in time with the music. But eventually you reach a point where you see the note on the page and you don't think about it anymore, your fingers just do it. Gradually you get used to the process and it just seems natural.

Perhaps this is why Cognitive Restructuring programs are often effective with my clients. Un-learning to be comfortable with their current lifestyle is not an instantaneous thing. It is a gradual process and has to be accompanied by the process of learning an alternative. Without an established alternative they tend to fall back into old comfortable patterns.

So, what's the point? Is this just 'Cziltang's feel-good moment' for the day? Not quite.

The point of this little rant is that the process works for societies as well. Societies get used to things, both good and bad. This is why I believe that we should not be in any hurry to get our troops out of Iraq.

I know this is not a popular sentiment, but democracy is a skill just like anything else. In order for a society to get used to it, they have to be able to practice it. We've been at it for over 200 years and still haven't perfected it. It just isn't reasonable to assume that the citizens of Iraq will do so after one national election or that they will be comfortable with the process.

Over the years we have used our financial and military might to prop up any number of tin pot dictators whose only redeeming quality was that they proclaimed (loudly, if they wanted to retain our support) that they were anti-communist. In Iraq we have the opportunity to support the development of a new democracy for the sake of democracy.

I can hear all my left-leaning friends saying, 'but Cziltang, we're really just in Iraq for the oil!' And my response is, 'and your point?' I don't for a minute grant the proposition that it is all about the oil. And I think there is enough evidence to soundly refute that position. After all, the easiest route, if we were really only interested in the oil, would be to install a puppet government. We've done it before and some might say we are reasonably good at it.

But, all that aside, let's assume for a minute that we are really only after the oil, and that we are only doing what we are doing to ensure that we can keep getting the oil. Why is that a bad thing? We are helping them rebuild their infrastructure, we are helping them set up new national institutions and promoting the democratic process. Oil sales are monitored (or in point of fact, scrutinized with a microscope) by the international community and are certainly of more benefit to the Iraqi people that they were under Saddam Hussein. How are they worse off than they were? And more importantly, how would they be better off if we were to remove our support right after their first national election?

Now, I don't buy that whole 'it's just about the oil' thing. I'm not stupid. I recognize that it is part of the equation. (After all, we aren't intervening in the conflicts in Africa, are we? But then again, our alleged European allies who have so much fine altruistic rhetoric don't seem to be doing too much there either, last time I looked.) I believe an Iraqi democracy is in our best interest. I believe a free and prosperous Iraq destabilizing some of the more repressive governments in the area is in our best interest. And, yes, I believe access to Iraqi oil is in our best interest.

Above all, however, I am a pragmatist. Whether you were in favor of us removing Saddam Hussein or not, the simple fact is that we are there, we've spent billions on the effort, and we need to stick around until the Iraqis have had the chance to get comfortable with the democratic process. If we really mean what we say about supporting the democratic process, we should be prepared to stick around for a while. (By the way, what is our exit strategy for getting our troops out of Germany?)

For a perspective on the situation in Iraq that you won't get from the major news organizations (mostly because it isn't bloody enough) please read this article at Iraq The Model.

 

by Cziltang 
Posted: Wednesday, December 08 2004 08:52:53 PM

So that's what it is...
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One of my more liberal friends has been taking a class at one of the local universities which required her to keep a journal. She was telling me that our conversations had figured in some of her journal entries. Enough so, I guess, that they caught the instructor's eye. And, for all my liberal friends who have been waiting for me to wake up from my conservative/libertarian delusions, I have some good news. Apparently my long, painful re-assessment of my worldview and the unsettling shifts in my political views aren't my fault. Apparently, none of this is real. Apparently my 25 years of working in corrections has not been without personal consequence. Apparently I suffer from a debilitating condition called "compassion fatigue."

I can't tell you what a relief it is to know that I'm not the person others want me to be, not because of my serious, rational analysis of the world around me and what I have seen of it, but rather because I have a condition. It isn't my fault. I would be the same old love-able leftist without all those nasty ideas about personal responsibility if I weren't sick. I just cared too much about too many people for too long, that's all. It doesn't have anything to do with the reality around me.

I'm so glad that someone who knows nothing about me other that from a few lines in a journal has been able to diagnose my leftist-debilitating condition. I feel so much better now. I have hope. But I do have to say this: if the therapy to correct this condition involves group hugs, I'll stay sick, thank you very much.

Actually, I have three responses to this news:

1) Compassion is not a survival skill.

2) I see this as another fine example of post-modernist wishful thinking. It couldn't possibly be that someone who once demonstrated all the politically correct attributes that I did could have willingly, consciously, and rationally come to a different conclusion about how the world works, so I must be sick. It can't possibly be that I formed an unpalatable opinion on my own. Since I've arrived at the wrong conclusion, there must be something wrong with me, but (in what I see as a truly delightful example of victimist thinking) it isn't my fault.

Sorry, I but I see that as wishful thinking and patronizing to boot. The possibility that my thought process is (at least marginally) lucid and could still lead to a politically incorrect, yet viable alternate interpretation of the world around me just isn't possible, so poor, misguided soul that I am, I must be sick. Ronald Reagan has been quoted as saying something to the effect that it isn't that our liberal friends are ignorant, its that so much of what they know is not true.

3) I am not without compassion, and I do not suffer from any diminished ability to feel compassion. I just generally prefer to direct that compassion toward the victims of my clients now, rather than waste it on the clients themselves.

I don't have a snappy, well-reasoned summation for this. I noticed today, while looking over my calendar notes for the last couple of months, that I quit writing when I started trying to get to work before 8:00 AM (I was previously going in around 11). I guess going to bed earlier has cut off some of my rumination time. Maybe I'll have that snappy conclusion worked out around midnight (but don't count on it.)

by Cziltang 
Posted: Wednesday, December 01 2004 08:26:03 PM