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