Category Archives: Talk Amongst Yourselves

Patronizing Behavior

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I have been called many things in my life, but this latest is different, “Patron.”

Last evening I attended the final hours of a silent auction for the benefit of the Riverwest Artist Association.  As the auctioneer read off the list of winners, my name came up a few times.  After the second, “Looks like we have a patron here,” was the comment.  I consulted, via text, my friend J, “True. You most certainly are.”

“I just never was called that until U so dubbed me just 2 weeks ago.  Still getting used 2 the title,” I replied.  “Enjoy it.  It’s a good one.  And ur efforts are very appreciated.  Particularly these days.”

I suppose some background is in order.  My firm has recently moved into new offices.  Large offices.  Offices with lots of empty walls, high ceilings, and the sort of vibe which just calls out for art.  I have an extensive art collection, but have not purchased much in the past few years because I have run out of places to put it.  Walking through the new office space I commented, “We’ll need more artwork.” “That’s your job,” my boss fired back.  Okay then, I took him at his word and begun an acquisition binge which has only now, with last night’s auction, reached its end.

I am not a wealthy man, but I am well off enough to invest some money in art.  In these troubled times I consider it to be my own personal economic stimulus plan.  Art is a good investment, it appreciates in almost all market conditions and has more intrinsic value to its owner than any paper investment does.  Stocks may offer more upside potential (and risk) and bonds may offer more reliable earnings, but they’re not much to look at.  Art; art is a joy to be around, it betters our lives, improves our surroundings, adds to the human experience, and it appreciates.  You can’t beat that.

So, I am now a patron.  “Everyone’s happy when the collector shows up,” I quipped at a recent benefit art sale.  Oh, those were the innocent days, when I was merely a collector, before I undertook this patronizing behavior.  Well, if I have to be something, I guess being a patron of the arts isn’t so bad.

So I encourage everyone to go out there and buy some art.  You cannot find a better way to inject money directly into the economy than spending it on something created by people with no economic sense of their own (artists) who will immediately take that money and spend it on the essentials of their life.  Go find a student art show, of which there are always plenty this time of year, and buy buy buy!  In Milwaukee, go to MIAD, whose senior thesis show is on display until May 9th, or check out any one of the UWM School of Art thesis shows, such as “expose(d)” at the Kunnzelmann Esser lofts, or the Union Art Gallery, or Innova gallery.

Or, check out one of the numerous benefit auctions.  I have attended two of these in the past week, and gotten wonderful pieces of art at ridiculously low prices, all while benefiting good causes.  You see, not only do artists, as a breed, have no economic sense, but they also tend to be outragiously generous, and give away their work to worthy causes much like a drunken lout dispenses his opinion.

You Can Kiss My Toxic Asset Goodbye!

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Is it just me, or is anyone else getting just a little tired of hearing “Toxic Asset” as though the term were something we should all just accept, like “Home Improvement” or “Nightly News”?  I mean, come on, “Toxic Asset”?!?  What is that, a pseudo-ironic rock band name, like Iron Butterfly, Led Zeppelin, Grateful Dead or Velvet Revolver?

Who coined this phrase?  Toxic Assets… How about “The Scattered Shards of Countless Shattered American Dreams”  At least that would reflect the actual basis of these stakes.

What is the flip side to a Toxic Asset; Healthful Liability?  Invigorating Death?  Happy Foreclosure?  Gleeful Depression?

Count me out.  I want to call these what they are — Bad Bets.

Weasel Words From A Three Headed Dog

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Following President Bush’s announcement regarding an auto industry rescue plan, this morning, Cerberus Capital Management (the owner of Chrysler) issued a press release which says, in part:

In connection with the loan to be provided by Treasury, Cerberus has agreed to utilize the first $2 billion of proceeds from Chrysler Financial to backstop the loan allocated to Chrysler automotive. In addition to this, Cerberus believes that concessions by all relevant constituencies will be required to facilitate a full restructuring and recapitalization of Chrysler. In order to achieve that goal Cerberus has advised the Treasury that it would contribute its equity in Chrysler automotive to labor and creditors as currency to facilitate the accommodations necessary to affect the restructuring. Unless Chrysler’s labor costs can achieve parity with the foreign transplants, and without the restructuring of Chrysler’s debt, Chrysler cannot be restored to long-term health and the government loan will be unlikely to be fully repaid.

In other words, Cerberus will essentially sell the automaker (“contribute its equity”) to the unions and it’s creditors. This is really no surprise, and echoes the frustrations expressed by several lawmakers in the past two weeks. The firm had taken Chrysler private with the intent of splitting off the profitable Chrysler Financial and then dumping the Chrysler Automotive. The recent economic upheaval has soured those plans, until now. With the intervention of the government, Cerberus now feels it is in a position to simply walk away from Chrysler Automotive by essentially dumping it on the unions and creditors.

Cerberus, which for those of you not familiar with mythology, is the name in Greek and Roman myths of a three headed dog which guards the gates of Hades, to prevent those have crossed the River Styx from escaping back to the land of the living, seems to be living up to that name. They have led their unions and creditors across a financial River Styx, and is now taking steps to ensue that they will never return to the land of the living.

Only we risk being dragged along…

Sobering Shopping

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I just was shopping at Target, late night, getting those last minute gifts for the out-of-town crowd. There was a mostly happy and deliberate group of shoppers, carefully going over shopping lists in the toy isle, looking confused in the small electronics isle.

Speaking for myself, after a few false starts I did pretty well. A few kids and a couple adults will most likely be pleased when they dig into their stockings, or look under the tree, or whatever. It was in that somewhat buoyant spirit of the successful warrior, then, that I approached the checkout lanes. I sidled past the woman with the overflowing cart and moved towards the next register, there was only one person in line and she had only a few things.

As I reached over to grab the little red plastic bar to separate my stuff from hers, I saw that this young woman, who didn’t look more than 19 years old, had only three items: two sizes of Pampers and a pregnancy test multi-pack. A shiver ran through me; I suddenly felt very frivolous and a little smaller.

I watched her go as I asked for gift receipts for the niece’s MP3 players. That young woman had paid her bill in singles and change. She asked for no gift receipts.

I assume she was hoping for some sort of Christmas miracle, I wonder which?

With all the heart I can muster.

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In 1987 I was working for the local hands-on science museum, Discovery World, and part of my job was to beg companies to donate material to our cause. This was not really a task for which I was a natural choice – I am not really a salesman, and not a fund-raiser. As a matter of fact, due to internal politics I was forbidden from fund raising; I could only ask for “stuff.”

 

We were working on the “Health Is Wealth” exhibit, a compendium of stations, 23 in all, covering many aspects of whole-body health. We were looking for a blockbuster addition to this exhibit, and as artificial heart research was very much in the zeitgeist I was tasked with trying to get one. Being a novice and an innocent, I called up Symbion, the firm formed by Robert Jarvik, the inventor of the first practical, implantable, total artificial heart (TAH); the Jarvik 7. “Hi, This is Nic Bernstein calling from Discovery World museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I am calling because I see that you have just removed a heart from a local man, and we were wondering if we could get that unit to display in our new exhibit…”

 

Yes, I actually made that call, and the response I received was much more polite than you might expect. “Well, we have received that heart from the implanting hospital, Saint Luke’s, but under FDA guidelines we have to disassemble the heart, test the components and then return the whole works to their labs.”

“Oh, well I guess that makes sense… Have you got any suggestions for me as to how I may be able to get one? We would really like to exhibit one, and seeing as a local man just had one, and local interest is high, it just seems like the time is right.”

 

“I tell you what, we cannot give you one, all of our hearts must go to an FDA approved transplant site. But, I can tell you this: There are two sizes of hearts, small, for women, and large, for men. Turns out that the large is really too large to implant into anyone’s chest cavity, so we are only using the small ones. St. Luke’s has a large one that they ordered for training. It can never be used, since it is too big, and since it hasn’t been used, they don’t have to return it to us or the FDA, and they need to purchase a new, small unit to train with. You should ask them.”

 

The next call I placed was to the communications director at St. Luke’s. “Can you give us that training heart that you have? I understand that you cannot implant it, and it would just go to waste otherwise…” I asked. “Tell you what, Nic, I am going into a board meeting right now, let me see what I can do.”

It was all that she would say, and nothing was promised. I put down the phone and waited…

Two hours later the phone rang and it was the communications director form St. Luke’s. “If we were to give you the heart, just how would you exhibit it? How would people see it? I have ten minutes and then I have to get back into the meeting.” she said.

 

I was stuck cold. I hadn’t thought it through this far… “Well, what we would like to do is have a display where the visitor would place their finger into the plesthysmograph that you gave us, and they would see their pulse on the heart monitor you gave us, and then the artificial heart would start to beat in synchronization with their own.” I offered. I was really loading up the stables on this one…

 

“Okay, I think I can sell that,” she said, “I’ll call you back in half an hour.” I was both proud and scared out of my wits. I waited, and worried about what I would say to Eric, my engineer.

 

She called back in 40 minutes and said, “You have your heart! Make us proud.”

 

Shit! Now came the hard part.

 

I made the long trek down the hallway to the lab, and sidled up to Eric at his bench. “I have just had a very interesting conversation with St. Luke’s and I have to tell you about it,” I started. “They are going to give us a Jarvik 7 artificial heart.”

 

“Cool!” said Eric.

 

“But, I told them that we would make it do this…” I said, and went on to explain to Eric what I had told the PR woman that we would do.

 

Eric thought about what I said, and then he said something like “Well, I guess we need to find out about it’s control circuitry.”

 

The next day I called back to Symbion and asked my contact if he could put me in touch with someone in the engineering department. “I heard from Bridget that you got the practice heart!” he shared, “Good play. Talk to this guy…” and he gave me a name and number. A few minutes later I was speaking to the head engineer. I explained what we wanted to do, and asked if we could get plans for their drive systems. It wasn’t going to be that simple.

 

The original Jarvik 7 heart was a bulky, and balky, device which was pneumatically driven. The control cabinet was about 4 feet tall by 2 feet wide, and housed an air pump, and a pair of drive assemblies. The drive controls had a pair of dials on their face, one of which controlled pulse rate and one of which controlled the duty-cycle; the ratio between systoli and diastoli — the amount of time the heart pumped in versus out. These values were hard coded, so to say, and did not vary. In other words, if you had a Jarvik 7, you would get a dialed in pulse rate, say 72 beats per minute, and a dialed in duty cycle, and that was that. There was no variability, there didn’t need to be.

 

I was crestfallen. How were we going to synchronize a Jarvik 7 to the visitor’s heart if the control unit was fixed? Well, we soon discovered that was not going to be an issue as we were not getting the control unit, just the heart. I called the engineer again. “Well, I can tell you that you need this amount of pressure to cycle the heart, and that you need this amount of resistance, and back pressure, but beyond that, I don’t know what to say…” “We want it to track the visitor’s heartbeat” I said. “Well, if you get that to work, we would love to see what you’ve done, ’cause that’s way beyond anything we’ve done.” Oh goody.

 

Well, long story short, Eric did it. He built an analogue computer which performed quadrature upon the output of the plethysmograph and drove the parallel pneumatic drives to the heart. A week or two later our heart arrived, and we had to put it to the test. A heart pumps against a load; in the body that load is provided by the arteries and the miles of blood vessels and veins. In our test, as we had yet to construct our hydrostatic tanks, we simply immersed the heart into a bucket, “more than six inches deep,” we were told. I handed the heart to Jerry, a Bible thumping shop guy, after first connecting it to the pneumatic tubes. I placed the plethysmograph onto my finger and Jerry plunged the heart into the bucket, and we turned on Eric’s drive unit. The heart started to pulse, and Jerry yanked his hand out of the water and ran to the other side of the shop spewing oaths in his wake. I grabbed the heart to keep it from surfacing, and had the most bizarre experience of my life. I was holding my own heart under water, it seemed, as it beat in perfect synchronization with mine, and with a firm and resolute rhythm.

 

We had done it! We, a small and underfunded science museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, had designed and built the most advanced artificial heart drive system in the world! We made minor adjustments to the system after that, and ultimately we were unable to allow the visitor to experience that eerie, out-of-body, sensation that I had of holding my own heart in my hands, but we had to protect the heart.

 

We did send all of our design materials off to Symbion. We never heard if they used any of them, but in the ensuing years the dream of a totally-implantable artificial heart (TAH) gave way to the more pragmatic ventricular assist device, the intra-aortic balloon pump, and similar heart pumps, assists, etc. All of these new generation of heart savers share the quality of tracking the patient’s own heart rate, systoli and diastoli. Whether or not our work was used, we laid the path.

 

Tonight, as I write this, my friend Tom is having a pair of ventricular assist devices installed into his chest cavity. If all goes well they soon will help his heart, his scarred and stricken heart, and pulse and pump blood though his veins. I do not claim anything in this, but I would like to think that in our own way, due to our own imperatives, we showed a generation of heart surgeons and clinical engineers that it was important to consider the patient’s own heart, their own pulse, when designing the systems by which we would keep them alive.

Mostly, however, I have to write this because I really want Tom to live and I have to do something with my fingers while he lays on that operating table and has this generation’s best and brightest install a piece of machinery into his chest to keep him alive long enough for me to tell him to his face how important he is to me.

My American Story

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Ballot Box

28th. February 1953

Dear Professor Lederberg,

Dr. Clive Spicer, who recently spent some time under you, has informed me that there might be a vacancy in your department for a graduate English student.

Such a project interests me very much and I would, if it is still open, like to offer myself as a possible candidate. Would you be so ‘kind as to let me have some further details  about it?

A. Bernstein

—

Thus began my American Story.

In 1953 my father bridled under the strains of life in post-war England. He had trained for a career in medicine, but after years as a corpsman during the Battle of Britain he had seen too much death. He had administered last rights in muted voice too many times and for too many faiths to ever face a career of dealing with patients, so he settled for research and teaching.

The post-war years had already taken him around the formerly occupied countries of Europe to help rebuild the medical establishment and treat the distressingly high rates of fevers and infections. He was released from service in 1948 after service as Emergency Lieutenant, War Substantive Captain, Substantive Captain, and finally mustered out in 1959 as Captain, the rank he carried to his death. The rank he would much rather never had taken.

My father, to put it direct, was eager, no fast, to get out of Britain and her post-war shock of austerity and deprivation. He had suffered already too much of that. Many tales are told of the Brits steadfastness and stolidness, in the face of Hitler’s unending siege, and indeed my father had witnessed his own home being destroyed by a V2 “buzz-bomb” and the virtually complete destruction of his country’s financial system. He wanted out, and NOW. He was tired of the straight jacket that England had become for him. He wanted the dream, the dream that had motivated so many emigrants from so many countries who flocked to the United States in those years.

I am having a little difficulty at present with the Bank of England in trying to arrange for the transfer of some of my Sterling assets to the U.S. I think that they will agree but time is running rather short…

The British were loath to let their citizen’s hard assets leave their shores. Indeed my mother, in 1977, fully 14 years after his emigration, had to fight to get the last of his bank notes released.
But I digress. Dad did get out, and he came to America, and met my mother in that lab in Madison, and they wed in December of 1954 and moved back to England when my father’s visa expired in 1955. They started a family, bought a modest semi-detached home, and finally, in 1963, moved back to the United States when he got a position at Marquette University.

On June 20, 1968, one day after his 46th birthday (I have just turned 46, so this is significant to me), and just two weeks after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, my father received his naturalization papers from this United States, his United States – He was a Citizen of these United States! He celebrated the fourth of July that year with an uncharacteristic enthusiasm.

He voted that November 4th for Hubert Humphrey. A Labour Party regular all his life in England he could not have done otherwise.

My own political awakening, born in 1968 when my parents hosted Students for McCarthy, came into its fullness in 1972 with the campaign of George McGovern. I was young, only 10 years old on election night, but I was a dedicated foot-soldier for McGovern, having distributed thousands of pieces of literature for him in some of the toughest wards of the city.

I still remember that election night, sitting in the local McGovern headquarters on Oakland Ave. and watching the polls come in.

I must digress here for a moment. Many of my friends these days know that I always watch the polls come in. For many reasons this is a remnant of that first election night I witnessed. I implicitly trust the democratic system, but I equally implicitly distrust the physical manifestation of that system.

My father came to the McGovern office at 8:00 to collect me and take me home. The next day was a school day and I could not be allowed to stay up all night. I was reluctant to go, to say the least, but I did.

In the car, on the way home, I looked at my dad and asked if he had voted. “Yes,” he said. ” Who for?” I demanded. He paused. “Nixon,” he said. “How could you do that, Dad?!? You know how hard we all worked on the McGovern campaign. How could you?”

“For once in my life,” he said, “I wanted to vote for a winner.”

We never spoke of this again.

—

In the summer of 1974 we were camping in Indiana when Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency of the United States of America. The first ever to do so. My mother couldn’t wait to call her brother John who had been a big organizer for Nixon in his home state of Virginia. I just had to sidle on up to my dad and …

… and say nothing. I wanted to ask him how he thought about his winner now, but I knew how he felt, and he didn’t need his snot-nosed kid to rub it in.

—

I am listening to Bruce Springsteen sing “Born in the USA” on the Hi-Fi right now. I can always appreciate that song even if I cannot identify with it. I was not born here, but this is my country as surely as it was my father’s, or my maternal grandfather’s – a seventh generation American.

Much has been made this year of early voting, and I have endured innumerable entreaties to vote early myself. I have done this in previous elections, but I shall not, will not, this year. This Tuesday, November 4th, marks the 40th anniversary of my father’s first vote as a naturalized American citizen. On that day I will cast my own ballot, proudly, for another son of an immigrant. And I will smile at my father’s memory, for I know that he would have voted the same way – for a winner.

Mythology/History In The Making

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There are some significant trends in the current election which may well make for a very interesting, and very different, election night:

  • High Turnout
  • Poll Proliferation
  • Early Voting

The turnout in this election is likely to be the highest in modern times, and possibly the highest in American history.  Bill McInturff, John McCain’s pollster, in a somewhat self-serving analysis, is predicting well over 62% turnout.  It is already “Conventional Wisdom” that black turnout may reach 95% in many states.  Whenever an uncontrolled variable, like gross turnout, veers wildly out of standard deviation the polling models used by most pollsters will start to fall apart.

This separation between the polls and reality is complicated in this race due to many factors, some of which the major polling organizations have already prepared for, such as the proliferation of cellphone only lifestyles by younger voters (Pew already is polling cellphones) and some which they cannot adjust for, such as historical shifts in numbers voting.

Another exacerbating influence this year is the proliferation of polls and polling analysis websites.  A good story in the New York Times today reports on this, and with millions of hits daily spread between four or five sites, you know that there are a lot of people getting daily or even hourly updates on the current state of the race.  With as many as 30 polls a day, spread between national and state, and a surfeit of analytical sites, many people are, get ready for this, deciding the news for themselves, rather than relying upon a select reportariat to feed it to them.  Thus more uncertainty.

Lastly, early voting is happening in more states that ever before, and in many states this will lead to more uncertainty on election night than ever before.  “Why,” you might ask, “if people are voting early then we will know the outcome earlier, right?”  Well, not so fast.

While some states have exercised vote-by-mail or other early voting options for many years, like Oregon, and have built their systems around it, other states, like Wisconsin, do not actually have a dedicated early voting system and simply leverage their existing absentee ballot systems.  This can lead to extended waits on election night as these absentee ballots are sorted and counted and apportioned to their appropriate precincts.  This is a wildcard on many election nights, but with early voting accounting for as much as 40% of the tally in some states, expect it to be much worse this time.

Much has been made this year of the “Bradley Effect,” a much discredited theory which states that polls are skewed in favor of African-American candidates because people being polled may lie about their preference.  While numerous studies have shown this to be an untruth, there is significant reportage and first person accounts telling us that the real “Bradley Effect” — the under polling of Mayor Tom Bradley’s gubernatorial opponent — George Deukmejian was due to the failure of Bradley’s pollsters to take account of the high absentee voting that year.

So, what does this mean for you?

  • Well, for starters, pay no attention to the polls.  There is not a single polling organization which has a model which can account for all of this.
  • Secondly, vote!  Nothing can ally your own concerns about the state of the race like voting for yourself.
  • Next, get everyone you know to vote.  They deserve the same degree of surety as you do.  Besides, if you know them the chances are pretty good that they will vote like you.
  • Lastly, don’t expect an early epiphany on election night.  While we very well may know the next President of the United States a week from me writing these words, it may just as well take a day or more to sort out all of those early ballots.

If you, like me, want to see Barack Obama in the Whitehouse come January 20th, please follow those steps.  Please vote, make those around you vote, and then be patient.  This is truly history in the making.

    A Rant and a Question

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    Craig Ferguson had a delightful Rant in last night’s monologue, which my buddy Ken B. was good enough to bring to my attention. The YouTube video is here:
    Craig Ferguson Monologue – 9/24/2008

    What I’ve been wondering about is this: We keep hearing from our “leaders” that we cannot allow to let these institutions — AIG, Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns… — we cannot allow them to fail because they’re too large. Well then, why haven’t any of these leaders proposed new legislation to prevent any more such institutions from ever getting that large again? Why didn’t any of these leaders stand up when all of these mergers were happening over the past 25 years and say, “Wait a minute, if we let these guys merge then sometime down the road they’ll be able to hold us hostage for billions of dollars.”

    Well I guess one of our leaders would have to have been in a position of power for the past 25 years in order to do that, maybe head of the Senate Commerce Committee or something like that. I guess one of our leaders would have to have the heart of a reformer… Uh, Mr. McCain, why are you trying to edge off the stage right now?