GWOT — What WOT?

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Back in March of 2004, Pawn quoted Christopher Patten on the “War On Terror” (the WOT in the Bush administrations Global War On Terror – GWOT – acronym).  Now another British luminary has forcefully joined the fray over this misbegotten fighting label.  David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, starts off with references to the recent attacks in Mumbai, then says, “The idea of a “war on terror” gave the impression of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.”  Here is a further excerpt:

The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists, or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common. Terrorist groups need to be tackled at root, interdicting flows of weapons and finance, exposing the shallowness of their claims, channelling their followers into democratic politics.

The “war on terror” also implied that the correct response was primarily military. But as General Petraeus said to me and others in Iraq, the coalition there could not kill its way out of the problems of insurgency and civil strife.
David Miliband: ‘War on terror’ was wrong | Comment is free | The Guardian

Here’s hoping that our soon to be President, Barack Obama, is quick to quit that locution and instead distill GWOT in the Iraq War and the Afganistan War and treat them separately as they should have been all along.

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…

Urban Holler – Part 1

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Three rivers run through the city where I live, carving valleys as rivers do. I live on an isthmus, a slice of land between one river and a great lake. On the east lies the lake, to the west and south winds the river. Along the eastern bank of the river, as it carves the broader and grander channel which made it the backbone of a major city, a series of small crooked streets rise up to the east and south, laying out an ad hoc street grid on that land which forms the armpits of these bends. Hills, too, rise and fall in this small slice of the city, and it all combines to forge a small neighborhood with a unique character, into which other residents seldom stray. That is where this story is set.

I walked along the street one day, a bag of groceries in my hand. The little Italian grocer is on one side of Wolski’s Holler, and my apartment on the other. There really isn’t a street that cuts the holler straight through, but with a little smarts you can figure a way. That is when I saw Pat, weaving a little bit, on the other side of the street. Pat looked as though he had decided to play hooky after lunch, and been drinking since then. He had a grin on his face which reflected his reverie at some private joke, and his gaze strayed from the gutter on his right to the rose beds on his left, but seldom straight ahead.

“Aye, Patrick. Top of the day.” I bellowed across the street. Pat raised one hand in a loose wave, and craned his head in my general direction. “Aye, who… Aye, Nic. How the hell areya,” came his slurred reply. “Coming from Wolski’s then?” I inquired. “Nah, the little place, ya know. There’s gonna be a biggie, a biggie at the little place.” he said. “A biggie at the little place, how ironic is~at!” he exclaimed, proud at his own phrasing. He waved that lazy arc of a wave once more, and veered up the pathway that led to his flat.

Before I could shout farewells at him, though, I heard the ruckus and saw the men spilling out of the little place, down the road a bit, and into the gravel strewn yard. They were armed, some of them, with large squirt guns, popular at the time, while others carried over-sized plastic baseball bats. One man wore an animal pelt over his shoulders and a pair of horns on his head, and shouted something foreign to my ears. Suddenly, from the eaves of a neighboring house came a volley of ping-pong balls, spraying this horned man and his front line of defenders. A great cry went up from the fighters, and more men spilled into the yard from the hidden paths which criss-cross the holler.

A melee ensued.

It was both grandiose and trifling. These grown men assaulting each other with a combination of children’s toys and home-made weapons of comical nature. It was like watching the Smurfs battle the Seven Dwarfs. I stayed to the periphery, but edged closer until I was just ten feet or so from the nearest combatants. That is when I heard the order.

“You there, get me some intel, stat,” was the bark coming over my left shoulder. I turned to find myself face to face with a horned man, but not the one I had observed earlier. I recognized his face, but did not know his name (a common occurrence in these parts). “But I’m not,” I began to protest, but was abruptly cut off. “Look here, we need to know if they have her. I need you to cut around over there,” he pointed towards a large stand of deep red peony to the far side of the yard, “and then around to the storm cellar. If she’s there, you’ll know. Then come back here and report. Got it?”

“Yes, but…”

“Good, now get a move on!”

He pushed me forward and the next thing I knew I was in a mad dash across the open expanse of a driveway with my sack of Italian sausage and provolone swinging wildly. I made the cover of the peony outcropping without even a glancing blow from a ping-pong ball, and then edged my way around to the side of the house and towards the cellar door. I wasn’t quite clear in my mind just why I was following his orders. I am not a follower by nature. Okay, I admit it; it was the girl. I had visions of some Polish Helen awaiting me, a damsel in distress, whom I could free from the clutches of the evil horned man. I got caught up in the fantastical story arc of someone else’s play world.

I rounded the corner of the next-door duplex and edged up to the cellar doors. From there I could see her.

I admit that I should have simply returned and reported what I saw, but I was just appalled at the inhumanity of it. There she was, immobile, her face clear and cheeks rosy, but her neck was wedged into the crack between the cellar doors, her body below. No one should ever treat a Barbie this way. That was my undoing. In that moment of hesitation I was spotted and in short order subdued, a hood over my head.

There was much jostling and shouted orders, much of it muffled. What I could make out didn’t sound good. I was to appear, I heard that much, as I was dragged along. Down the cellar stairs, if I had to guess, and plopped into a chair. My wrists and ankles duct-taped to the chair, finally the hood removed.

I was face to face with a Bondar brother, and I was confused.

In our next episode, our hero is tempted to switch sides…but, who’s side is he on? And what of OB and Schwartz, what role will they play?

Tune in next time for the further adventures of the Urban Holler

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?

For A Moment

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He looked at her face and for just a moment he saw it age — he saw the years fly by in seconds, her jowls settle, her dimples droop — he saw, in that moment, the face he might see decades hence.

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.

What Will Retirement Look Like

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A few years ago I was having coffee with a candidate for whom I was consulting. He put down the opinion pages of the newspaper and asked me what I thought of George F. Will. “I like his baseball writing,” I offered, “but on politics he is drifting rapidly towards irrelevancy.” Little did I know how right my dismissive words would prove.  And how soon.

Among the lessons of this election past is that there is no “conservative” movement left in the USA, at least nothing that a core conservative like William Buckley or Mr. Will would recognize.  The biggest threat to the conservative movement of Messrs. Will and Buckley was always the hearty embrace they gave to the Reagan coalition of religious fundamentalists and disaffected “Reagan Democrats,” those aging, white social-conservatives with whom Lee Atwater expanded the “Big Tent” Republican party of the 1980s and whom Karl Rove beguiled into sticking with an incompetent President Bush in 2004.

The problem with basing the coalition on these people is that while the by and large do not trust government they do at least like to be governed, and they like that government they have to function with some level of competency.  Over the past eight years the Republican party has proved itself to be singularly incapable of governing, whether a state, or a country, and these big-tent Republicans have deserted that tent just as quickly as they deserted an incompetent Democratic party of 1980.  The movement conservatives, by hitching their fate to that of an incompetent party have doomed themselves to the political wilds for the foreseeable future.

Mr. Buckley, through the grace of time, was saved the embarrassment of watching his own son bolt the last vestiges of the movement with his very public endorsement of Barack Obama, and subsequent ejection from the magazine Buckley himself had launched.  Will, on the other hand, soldiers on, a potent and frequent scold for the movement he loves, but which has left him behind sounding like just another old warrior who doesn’t realize that the war is over, his side lost, and the rest of the world has moved on to the next match.

You can read Will’s latest silent scream over here. While you’re at the Post, check out David Broder’s weighty analysis of recent voting trends and the sad fate it bespeaks for the GOP.