Election 2008

I'm happy with the way the election turned out. American will be a better country for it.

McCain ran a terrible campaign. He didn't do a good job of defining himself; the thrust of his campaign was to associate Obama with unsavory characters. Poor strategy: (i) many of us instinctively ignore negative political ads, and these were fairly stereotypical in that regard, and (ii) while a good portion of Americans do care about that sort of thing, they were mostly already in the McCain camp to begin with.

Of course, McCain's disastrous blunder was his choice of Sarah Palin as Vice President. She clearly appealed to the Republican base, and appalled everyone else. The killer was the meta-effect: you didn't want to vote for any ticket involving Palin, and you were scared to vote for someone who either thought she was competent to run the country, and/or didn't really bother to carefully vet someone for such an important position. Yikes.

Who knows how well Obama will govern, but I look forward to him rolling back some of the more damaging actions of the Bush reign, and restoring America's honor and moral strength.

The Failure Of The Republican Party

I've been a lifelong liberal, but have generally tried to appreciate what the Republican Party brings to the table, and that most of us are trying to do the best for our country.

But I think the Republican party has been heading down a wrong and disappointing path in the past decade or so. Instead of having core principles, they have defined conservatism as some combination of whatever Bush wants and whatever Democrats want.

One of the few conservative groups to maintain their integrity is The American Conservative, and let me just steal some items from their current cover. The Bush Administration has managed to

• Start an unnecessary war under false pretences


• Shred the Constitution


• Crash the economy


• Expand entitlements


• Ruin America's reputation


• Nationalize banks


• Spy on citizens


• Try to federalize education

Not exactly compatible with core conservative values. And yet the Republican-controlled Congress and courts went along with Bush without much more than a whimper; certainly with no serious opposition. I expected better from the Republican party. I expected more people to stand up for what they claimed to believe in.

George W. Bush will not be treated kindly by history; certainly he has been the worst president of my lifetime so far, and has been shamefully enabled by his party.

Quick-Blogging

Haven't been doing much blogging lately. I love it, but would rather spend my free time doing things than talking about things.

I've been doing a sort of mental blogging in the car during my daily commute: thinking of things to say, and organizing and phrasing thoughts. It's fun, but doesn't give me that final feeling of getting things off my chest. I miss that.

I decided last night that I'm going to try to resume blogging, but will try to minimize the time hit by giving myself a limit of ten minutes to write a post. Starting with this one. I'm curious to see how that will turn out. Will I start writing junk? Or will the time limit help me focus, and filter out verbosity that didn't need to be there.

Not sure if ten minutes is the right amount; maybe five minutes or fifteen will be better. We'll see.

Album Review: R.E.M, Accelerate

R.E.M. albums seem to come in one of two varieties: carefully composed or much more spontaneous. For the former category, think Murmur, Automatic for the People, or Up, and for the latter, Reckoning, Monster, and New Adventures in Hi Fi. Both styles have their fans; I had a roommate once who thought that Reckoning was their best album ever, which amazed me since I considered it one of their weakest. We agreed to disagree.

Accelerate falls firmly into the more spontaneous category, regrettably for me. The album has been heralded as a return to form for R.E.M, as opposed to their later, moody albums from 1999 on. And it is a return to form, in the sense of having harder percussion and louder guitars. The good news is that it's probably easy to predict if you'll like this album. If you think Monster was a great album, then you've gotta get this one. If Murmur is more your style, you may want to pass.

For me, R.E.M's strengths have always been melody, mood, and, in the early days, rhythm. None of those are really on display here. Most of the songs come off sounding flat, monotone, and, ultimately, empty. Only three songs hold my interest: Supernatural Serious, the hit song, the title track, and Hollow Man, which is good but sounds like they didn't work it out enough.

Speaking of Supernatural Serious, I have to dock this album extra points for its presence. The song has a totally different feel, and is orders of magnitude better, than the rest of the album. I hate it when bands salt an album with a hit song that has nothing to do with the rest of the album; I always feel like a sucker when I get excited about such a song. (On a side note, isn't it odd that R.E.M has had three transcendent pop songs in the last decade: The Great Beyond, Bad Day, and Supernatural Serious, and two were non-album tracks, and this one was barely so. Man, why don't they make a whole album with songs like those?)

Oh well, every R.E.M. album is different, so I'll pin my hopes on the next one.

More Parenting Paradoxes

Following up my earlier post about parenting paradoxes, here are some more:

• I want my kids to become more self-entertaining and be able to take care of themselves more, to make it easier on me ... but I will be sad when they need me less and less.


• I want my kids to be confident enough to take risks, but not to put themselves in danger


• I want my kids to be able to figure out life, but I haven't figured it out myself, and can't teach them everything.


• If I take care of their every need, I remove much of the motivation for them to grow


• Qualities that can make a child hard to raise (e.g. being strong-willed, or highly sensitive, or strongly questioning) are useful qualities in adulthood.
  

New Perspectives on Daycare

I grew up in the 70's, when the culture wars in America were raging in earnest. One theater of those wars was whether mothers should take paying jobs or not, and one battle there revolved around the worth of public childcare. The conservative viewpoint was that childcare from a mother was always superior to that from daycare, and thus choosing a dual-income lifestyle always meant compromising your children.

Now that I'm old and have kids ... yikes. To an extent, I will agree -- a mother (or father) who is motivated, loving, and competent will most likely raise a child better than your average daycare. I wish all parents were motivated, loving, and competent, but I can't really say they all are. I'd rather see kids in daycare than staying with a mother who watches TV all day (and crappy daytime TV at that) and feeds the kids a diet of chips, twinkies and soda.

Of course, there's the whole issue of what mothers want to do. If my wife worked, and I had to choose between watching the kids or putting them in daycare, I don't know how that would play out. I love my kids, and like being with them ... but raising them alone five days a week ... yikes. That would be challenging, and chances are I would find my current career more entertaining and fulfilling.

Good parenting is hard, and not always automatic. There's something to be said for having your children raised by experienced, quality professionals. Of course, whether that's the average state of daycare in America is another subject ... don't get me started.

Perspectives On Corporal Punishment

Before becoming a parent, I would occasionally follow the debates about corporal punishment. My wife and I decided that corporal punishment was contrary to our values, and that it appeared to come with significant negative effects, so we would try to avoid it if possible. But that was in theory -- we didn't know what our take would be once we had kids and were in the thick of things.

Four years into it, so far so good. We think our children are turning out well, and we haven't seen the need to punish them physically yet. Along the way, I've had a few realizations that I wanted to share.

Like father, like daughter
One day while watching my kids play, and my daughter starting to misbehave, it struck me as amazingly obvious that if I were to use painful force to control her, then she would do the same to her younger brother if he was acting up. She learns from us, and if we hit, she will hit too. It's that simple. Of course, we can finesse it, and say it's ok for adults to spank but not children ... and if she spanks her brother then we will spank her to make her not spank ... and we would make that work in a sense, but the contradictions we would be embedding are clear.

Breaking the bonds
My kids trust that I will not deliberately hurt them. If I punish them physically, that trust goes away, and never really comes back. This is a little hard to explain, but that trust is too great a gift to throw away to deal with some misdemeanor. More to the point, we feel that trust is a great help in shaping her behavior; giving it up would make discipline harder, not easier.

A matter of energy
At the same time, discipline without corporal punishment requires a great deal of time, energy, and patience, at least in the short term. That's one advantage to corporal punishment. It's fast, and effective in the short term. In our increasingly double-income world, time, energy, and patience are becoming scarcer and scarcer. It might be great that corporal punishment is on the decline, but we should all be aware that taking it away can require more from parents.

Parenting Paradoxes

I read something recently that struck me:

• It's useful for parents to have a consistent parenting philosophy, but also to be flexible and able to adapt to the uniqueness of any given situation.

• It's important for parents to pass on family traditions and values, but also to allow children to be unique individuals.

• Encouraging children to express their thoughts and feelings increases the chances that they'll stand up to you.

• Children move toward independence and dependence at the same time.

• Parents can be delighted and enthused at the new things their kids can do, and simultaneously feel the loss of their child's younger self.

• When you cultivate independence in your kids, they sometimes become independent in a way that leaves you out.

• Parents can love parenting one minute, and hate it the next.

• Your biting, hitting, pushing child can actually be evolving into an empathetic, caring individual.

• We're preparing children to live in a world that we can't possibly imagine.

-- Taken from Becoming the Parent You Want To Be; Laura Davis and Janis Keyser

Putting some of these together, you could say that the key paradox of parenting is that you are raising your children to not need you by the time they are grown. That's immensely hard to do.

Your Heart Walking Outside Your Body

"Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body."

--Elizabeth Stone

Isn't that a great quote? That's exactly how I feel. Of all the challenges of parenthood, the exposure of your heart is the most sobering and frightening.

Brett Favre Back?

So the latest news is that the Packers will offer Brett Favre $20 million to retire, instead of showing up at training camp. Since they would have to pay him his $12 million salary if he showed up, they are offering him eight million dollars to stay away.

Sheer insanity. You have a realistic chance to go to the Super Bowl with Favre. We don't know what the odds are that Aaron Rodgers will take you there at some point, but they can't be terribly high, given all the unknowns of an untried quarterback. Packer management is nuts, or, more likely, is letting ego get in the way of winning.

As a footnote, isn't it odd that the Packers are claiming that Favre isn't good enough to be their starter, but are deathly afraid of him joining another team in their division? That cracks me up.

The Randy Moss Dilemma

Ok, so I didn't blog at all during the entire 2007 NFL season, which was a shame, since that was one of the most interesting seasons in recent memory.

Looking back, one of the key questions was how the Randy Moss saga would play out. To recap the situation as of a year ago: Moss played brilliantly at Minnesota; arguably being the most feared receivers ever. Traded to the Raiders in 2005. There he stunk up the joint, and various reasons for that were offered: the Raiders were dysfunctional, Moss was lazy, was injured, or wasn't that good to begin with. In early 2007, he was traded to the Patriots for a fourth-round pick. Lots of controversy over that trade, and over whether Moss would be any good for the Patriots. Really. Look back at the written record, and you'll see opinions all over the map.

Well, the 2007 season came and went, during which Moss set a record for the number of touchdown receptions in a season, and helped take his team to the Super Bowl. So much for the controversy.

I wasn't sure myself how Moss would turn out with the Patriots, and I enjoyed, from an intellectual perspective, watching the season play out. As I'm fond of saying, I love following sports because it provides a window into real-world issues. Here, we had a case-study of character versus talent. The current thinking in sports commentary these days is that you should weight character over ability when hiring people. That a player might have brilliant talent, but if he has baggage it will come back to bite you.

We face this dilemma all the time in my company when trying to hire people. How much is pure production worth, as opposed to character, communication skills, and being a team player? I haven't found any easy answers to this question. I've worked with very bright but difficult people. Sometimes it turned out not to be worth it in the end, while sometimes they would propel our team to heights we never could have achieved with nicer, but less inspired people.

When is it worth putting up with the headaches that difficult people can bring? Beyond that, how do you integrate difficult people into the team, without disrupting team chemistry?

In Moss's case, it was pretty clear that most people were rooting for him to fail. Few of us have exceptional talent, but many of us can at least try hard and be a team player. It's comforting to us that those qualities should win out. And many times they do -- and sports has plenty of examples of that -- but many times they don't. In this case, the Patriots took a chance on Moss, and they found a way to inspire him without upsetting the rest of the team. I call that good management. They deserved their success.