Professional sports and life

Now that the football playoffs are here, it reminds me that professional team sports like football, if one but looks, teach many of the important lessons in life:

• Perseverance and persistence matter as much as talent, or perhaps more.
• Be nice to your opponents. You may be playing on their team next year.
  
• You have to show up to win.
• Practice, practice, practice!
• If a play repeatedly doesn’t work, stop trying it and try something else.
• Attitude matters as much as talent.
  
• When there is a free ball in the air or a fumble on the ground, everyone is an eligible receiver, whatever their position.
• The game is never decided until the final whistle. Or in the popular version, it ain’t over ‘till the fat lady sings.
• Every week is a new game.
• Keep your temper. Losing it is a good way to get your side penalized.
• It doesn’t matter how good you were last week. All that matters is how good you are today.
  
• Sometimes you have to take chances to get chances.
• It’s glamorous to be the quarterback, but then it’s the quarterback that is always the target of two or three very big, very fast , very determined defensive players. Sometimes it’s nice just to be an unimportant lineman.
• Never get too comfortable with your success. There is always a rookie or two in the wings just waiting for a chance to replace you.
• In general, simple and basic beats fancy and tricky.
• Always play the odds.
• Resist the temptation to take cheap shots. Your opponents will make you pay for it sometime in the next few plays.
• There comes a time for everyone to get out of the game and let younger players take over.
• Individuals never win. It takes the whole team to win.
  
• The trick to winning is to force the other team to play your game, rather than you trying to play theirs.

We are stardust

Nature is amazing. For example, did you ever think that all of us are basically made of star dust?

When the cosmos began, current evidence suggests that just about the only elements present were hydrogen and helium, with traces of lithium. Gravitation pulled clumps of dust and gas together until there was enough mass to begin to form a star, and when the mass was great enough for gravity to squeeze and heat the mass enough, thermonuclear fusion began to fuse hydrogen into helium. Late in a star’s life, when it runs out of hydrogen, it shifts to fusing helium, and then carbon and then heavier elements. Finally, at the end of its lifecycle, it blows out much of this material into the surrounding void, and that becomes the gas and dust from which the next generation of stars are born.

So our world, unusual in its concentration of heavy metals, is no doubt the product of several generations of stars, each generation fusing more of the lighter elements into heavier elements before blowing them back into the cosmic dust to be recycled into another star.

It’s awesome to think that we, and almost everything around us in our world, have been created in the massive thermonuclear furnaces of stars. It’s interesting that the creation myths in so many cultures have the first human being made of dust scooped up by some deity or other. In a sense they were right, we are all made of dust - star dust.

The myth of the “public servant”

Politicians and government officials love to refer to themselves as “public servants”. Now that we are getting into the next presidential election cycle, we will probably hear this often. Let’s get real here. No one in government is a public servant.

The American myth is that democratic government serves everyone equally. The reality is, and always has been from the beginning of central state control in any society, that the government, whatever political form it takes, disproportionately serves the powerful and wealthy, in and out of government. We profess to the shocked and outraged when we discover that someone has taken advantage of their government position for personal gain, but unless we are terribly naïve, we have always known that those in power cannot resist using at least some of their power for their own benefit.

Certainly the public, at least in our society, get something from the government. The powerful aren’t stupid. They know that in a democracy the government has to deliver enough benefits to keep the electorate paying their taxes and voting for the party. And when politicians compete for our votes, they know they have to promise to deliver something appealing, and even deliver at least some of what they promise. But in fact our government budget is so large that even if the powerful only skim off a few billion a year, there is still enough to do some useful things for the rest of us.

Politicians and government officials with power have been bought from time immemorial. Not perhaps so often with direct bribes, but certainly with little favors, re-election help, nice “fact finding” trips, campaign funds, jobs for family members, promises of lucrative jobs once they leave office, and the like. Notice the high paying lobbying and business jobs congressmen and high level bureaucrats go to when they leave government. Things are no different now than they have always been. There are certainly a few thoroughly honest politicians here and there, but there won’t be many because except for local and some state races it’s hard to get elected without powerful and wealthy backers who, quite naturally, expect something back from their investment.

Of course, democratic governments are not monolithic – there are opposition parties. But their battles are primarily over which faction of the powerful and wealthy will control the levers of power, not about who will work for the good of the people. This is every bit as true of the socialist and communist governments as of our capitalist government.

Even more duplicitous than the “public servant” claim is the “power to the people” slogan so widely used by revolutionary movements. What the people get is the chance to lose their homes, families and lives in the service of the cause. Notice that in the end the power, and all the nice perks that go with it, always goes to the leaders.

This is simply human nature. All institutions of any size operate by the exchange of favors between the powerful and their supporters. It’s sometimes called “networking” or “seeking allies”, but it comes down to the same thing – the local old boy’s/girl’s network scratching each others backs. It’s the way the world works, and always has worked.

Unless we are one of the wealthy and powerful who would benefit, we ought always to be careful about supporting the expansion of either the size or the power of government, however enticing the supposed benefits appear. Chances are such changes will help someone, but probably not us.

Recommended: Did Iraq Really Ruin the U.S.?

I recommend Victor David Hanson's recent essay Did Iraq Really Ruin the U.S.? Hanson's essays are valuable because, whether in the end one agrees with him or not, they do tend to give an alternative perspective on the world to the perspective offered by the media and the political spin doctors. Since Hanson is a historian, he tends to think within a longer-term framework than the more typical day-to-day "reactive" media.

The many and the few

The world is divided into the many and the few along all sorts of lines. There are the many followers and the few leaders. The many reactive and the few proactive. The many poorly educated and the few well educated. The many prey and the few predators. The many poor and the few rich. The many who don’t plan ahead and the few who do.

The Pareto principle or 80/20 rule seems to apply everywhere. 20% of the people account for 80% of the problems in the world. 20% of the people own 80% of the resources. 80% of one’s business comes from 20% of one’s customers. The skill and innovation of 20% of an organization carries along the other 80% of the employees. And so on. The many and the few again.

Of all these many-few distributions the one that interests me most is the difference between the few who struggle to see the world the way it really is and the many who are content to see the world the way they have been taught to see it by their families, their religions, their cultures and their peers. It is one of the few cases where each individual can choose whether to be one of the many or one of the few.

Of course none of us ever sees the world the way it really is. All of us have our vision clouded to one degree or another by our expectations and experiences. And the real world is far too complex and subtle to be fully grasped by any human mind. At best, and with great effort and persistence, we get only occasional tantalizing glimpses of reality.

Still, as Erasmus noted, "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king". Who sees the world more clearly than his opponents and competitors has the critical advantage. Besides, the real world is far more wonderful and fascinating than the simplistic myths we have created for ourselves. It’s more satisfying to be one of the few than one of the many.

The beauty of the cosmos

On clear warm dark nights I sometimes like to sit outside for a while before going to bed. We live high in the mountains, away from air and light pollution, and the stars are so sharp and clear that they seem almost be within arm’s reach. What always comes over me at these times is how vast, how unimaginably vast, the cosmos is, and by comparison how completely insignificant we humans are.

Two dim little stars that sit side by side in my field of view, perhaps seeming only as far from each other as the width of my fingernail, are probably in reality each one a vast galaxy of billions of stars, so distant from each other that light would take longer than the age of the earth to go from one to the other. And for every star bright enough for my limited human vision to see, there are billions and billions more in the sky that I can’t see. I keep Hubble telescope photos as wallpaper on my computer screen to remind me of this vastness every time I get too focused on human concerns.

I find the massive scale of the cosmos truly exciting. It stirs my blood to think of the intricate workings of all those elemental forces driving the nuclear furnaces of stars and binding the wheeling galaxies together in a unimaginably complex cosmic dance. Surely if anything was ever made in the image of a deity it is the massive galaxies, or perhaps the even more massive superclusters of galaxies. That some people would think, in the face of the incredible scale and majesty of the cosmos, that a small, weak recently-evolved mammal on a minor planet around a very ordinary star buried toward the periphery of a galaxy in a minor spiral arm would be the central focus of attention for whatever intelligence created all this vastness simply shows how unbelievably self-centered and egotistical we humans can be.

The writer of Psalm 8:3 understood: “When I look at thy Heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast established; what is man that thou art mindful of him….”

There are those who think science is cold and heartless, and that scientific study removes the beauty and magic from life. To get even a glimpse of what the natural world is really like, and of the incredible efficiency and complexity with which it operates, is to be filled with wonder and passion. Frankly, I feel sorry for those whose view of the natural world is constrained by the narrowness and unimaginativeness of human myths. The real world revealed by scientific study is so much more complex and beautiful and inspiring than any man-made myth could ever be.

I am reminded of the story of Thomas Becket, onetime Archbishop of Canterbury before he was murdered by followers of King Henry II. It is said he was much discomforted by being made archbishop until one night when he had a dream and saw himself as no more than a single drop of water in the ocean, and then was at peace with himself. I find something of that story in the realization that we humans are such a small, insignificant part of such a vast system, and yet we are endowed with the amazing ability to see (if we will only trouble to look) and appreciate the vastness and beauty of that whole system. Don’t tell me that science doesn’t have passion!

Can Iraq ever become civilized again?

Reuters News, Jan 16,, 2007

Baghdad - Bombers killed 70 people, many of them young female students, at a Baghdad university on Tuesday, one of the city's bloodiest days in weeks. In all, at least 105 were killed in bombings and a shooting in the capital on a day when the United Nations said more than 34 000 Iraqi civilians died in violence last year. Four United States soldiers were killed in a bomb attack in northern Iraq.

Its hard to see how Iraqis can build a stable government in a culture where, when they are not killing Americans, they spend their time killing each other, each other’s children, or even their own sisters and daughters. This is one of those cases where culture matters a great deal, and a culture that is this steeped in hatred and blood feuds and religious violence and tribal conflict and honor killings doesn’t seem to me to have much prospect of advancing in the world, despite all the glowing promises of the current American administration.

No doubt the violence is perpetrated by a minority of the population, but it wouldn’t be possible if the culture of the majority didn’t allow it to happen, and even condone it to some degree.