El Gringoqueño

All a man needs out of life is a place to sit ‘n’ spit in the fire.

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What I Learned Tonight from a Bunch of Juvenile Offenders

December 13, 2006 /

No disrespect there, I assure you.  I just want to set it up properly.  I’m a college educated professional, with a background in Art, Technology, Engineering and ample business and life experience.  

But tonight, I felt insignificant, shamed, and incarcerated as I was within my own limits.

Tonight’s activity in the prison was to design Christmas cards.  We gave the young men paper, crayons, and color pencils and asked them to draw Christmas cards.  I offered that they should draw something they knew or draw something in which they were interested.  "What do you have to say?" I asked.

They busily set forth with religious iconery, scenes of nativity, presents, Christmas cheer, cars, Santa Claus and the like.

I sat with my paper blank with my head in my hands. 

I had nothing to say.  I’m not into blindly recreating religious themes.  As an American Catholic, I more resemble a Protestant, indifferent to the rendering of religious symbols.  Drawing a baby Jesus doesn’t come naturally to me.  Virgin Mary?  You kidding?  Three wise men?  Maybe, but it wasn’t coming.  Could I draw a camel?  I don’t think I’ve ever looked at one closely enough.  I thought about as many different Christmas or Puerto Rico images I could and rejected them – each and every one.

I was afraid what I had to say was not worth saying, that my drawing would suck, or be irrelevant.  I sat paralyzed by indecision and apprehension.  The more I sat, the worse it got.  I’m an artist.  I still look at some of my charcoals and think, "Damn I was good."  But today and recently… I just don’t know.

And these kids, disadvantaged, without the love of their parents or stable communities, and locked up as they were, happily drew whatever their hearts told them.  To quote Satchel Paige  "…dance like no one is watching." 

They did.  I couldn’t.

They seemed freer to me somehow.

Star Trek: A Bunch of Superstitious Calvinists

December 11, 2006 /

Yeah, you heard me right. Oh sure, Picard and his lot are all: "Some people believe in a higher power, but we here in the 24th century believe in the power of our human compassion, will, and nobility."

Bah! I say to you, Jean-Luc Picard. Bah! I say to you, Gene Roddenberry. Bah! I say to you, Rick Berman.

Two words: Prime Directive.

If that’s not belief in God, I don’t know what is. And it’s not just any God, but a Puritanical micromanaging control freak who’s already decided everything that will ever be decided.

Who came up with that Prime Directive shit anyway? Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t help you because it might affect some future event in a way such that it will not transpire in the natural (read: pre-destined) fashion. WTF? Is the future Federation a bunch of cowering Calvinists with their pre-destination crap?

I mean, really people, how did this escape unanswered for so long? Star Trek fans will go long and hard for the Prime Directive, that it’s somehow pure, clean, unencumbered by our messy superstitions, organized religion, God.

Look how advanced we are in the future, they say. That future is something for which to strive.

I suppose we look to that Prime Directive as some sort of ideal simply because we’ve seen how self-interested intervention in the affairs of other nations has ripped them apart and fomented so much suffering. The twentieth century, for example, is littered with meddling gone bad. Vietnam, possibly the crucible in which the Prime Directive was formed, is perhaps the best reason for its creation.

Then there’s the model of Switzerland, the model of, "Well, if you were meant to live, you will live. If you were meant to die, you will die. I cannot interfere." This Prime Directive of neutrality has somehow been held up as the ideal of behavior. We hold inaction as the highest morality. Do nothing, speak nothing, hear nothing, and all will cruise along at His will.

Don’t you see how loony it all is, you bunch of superstitious Calvinist freaks? We were not put here to play our parts in God’s little Broadway production, thank you very much. We were put here for, and only for, to live, to choose, to learn, and to love.

The noblest of all possible courses of action is not to withdraw, back away, and let it all transpire by some unseen hand. No, our best hope is to act in the best way that we know how with the information we have at moment. If a stranger needs a hand, we help him and damn the supposed later consequences. We don’t know much, and we can’t rely on God to push it all along like some divine universal machine.

Life is messy. We make choices. We make mistakes. We fail. We succeed.

What sort of world or universe would accept us into its cradle where we impacted nothing, did nothing, took no stock of our surroundings, and did not act as if we were the masters of our destiny.

No, Star Trek people, the Prime Directive is NOT good and noble. The Prime Directive is at best a "Hope for good but do not interfere" and at worst, a retreat from the universe of flesh and blood.

You may as well have not existed.

What if it’s not just incompetence?

December 7, 2006 /

Recent changes in the tax code of Puerto Rico have caused me to rethink a long held opinion about the nature of our politicians. The Jenius, over at his blog, rightly predicts that the underground economy in Puerto Rico will perfect itself as taxation wriggles into all legitimate economic transactions. Small micro companies will just take what little business they have further underground away from the grabbing hands of government, and more of them will do it better.

Medium-sized brick and mortar shops will either shoulder the burden or pass the cost on to the customer. Either way with rising prices, already pinched consumers will be forced to buy from the lowest supplier, those 800 pound gorillas with their cheap global supply chains and volume discounts. If small business owners try to compete on price their already compromised position further erodes to the point of survival mode. They are then either pushed into gray areas of the underground economy or out of business entirely.

The big global players are already earning money hand over fist, and if their position is eroded only slightly by rising consumption taxes, they have a number of options. They can negotiate tax breaks for their local hiring, get government handouts to build new facilities, low interest loans, you name it. They have the clout and the cash to get what they want, whether it be cheap goods, cheaper labor, or cheap government.

So where does that leave us?

I always thought that bad government policies through incompetence or malice had an effect to drive out entrepreneurial spirit, to foment low level corruption, and give unfair advantage to large imported global players (pharmaceutical manufacturers, retailers, fast food, national chains etc). But now I’m notso sure it’s incompetence or even malice.

What if their aim is to kill off the last of the local companies for us, as a favor to pacify us and give us jobs, to give us what we want, to work for the man, and play on the weekends, to be kept, taken care of, and have no responsibilities? Maybe these politicians know something we don’t want to admit or care to face:

We want to be kept and taken care of.

We would rather work for Wal-mart than try to start our own business, and the best to which we can hope to rise, the pinnacle, the ultimate, is to be a general manager in someone else’s plant, to be validated by the higher power the foreign national, the colonial overlord.

I hope it’s just incompetence… although at this point I’d even take malice.

Please tell me I’m wrong, please Puerto Rico?  Tell me it’s not what we want.

My First Forays into Typesetting with Latex

December 4, 2006 /

I’ve been busy copy-editing and typesetting Laura’s doctoral dissertation. I’ve always been a fan of Donald Knuth and his obsessive work in typesetting with Tex. Since my beloved wife is a Stanford Student, I figured, cool, I’ll use TeTex (Latex) to publish the thing, kinda like an homage to the their text publishing tradition. Also to thumb my nose at the Computer Science graduate students who don’t think anyone outside of their department uses TeTex/Latex. They provide a Microsoft Word Template for the rest of the school. Screw that.

Latex is not for the faint of heart, though. The text markup language has a pretty steep learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, you won’t know how you lived without it.

First: Here is what you get with a Latex source document.

  • Auto generated/indexed/enumerated list of tables and figures, complete with hyperlinks (in the PDF generated version) to their appropriate section
  • All the enumeration happens regardless of where the table is. You cross reference based on a reference flag, not text. So for example, you don’t write out, "see table 2.1" you just create a label to your table like so, giving it a human readable name (although it could be anything):

    \caption{\label{tab:Articles-with-Language}
    Articles with Language as Subject}

    and then you reference your table like this:

    The high percentage of articles on Language present
    in this local news section in contrast to a
    low percentage on Education (Table \ref{tab:Articles-with-Language})

    You never have to remember what table or figure number goes where with what table or chapter or whatever. You also don’t have to manually update your list of tables or figures. This lets the researcher get to the business of writing their paper rather than screwing around with formatting, which, let’s be honest, occupies a vastly disproportionate amount of the researcher’s time.

  • Benevolent Stanford students have graciously provided a complete thesis Latex style to take care of formatting for print/ebook publication. Even/Odd margin stuff is taken care of for you. Smart beautiful justification and hyphenation, footnoting, contents, etc is formated and beautifully handled.
  • Laura gets to write her stuff in OpenOffice, export it to Latex and I then format with Stanford’s thesis style sheet.

Here’s what it looks like:

screenshot.png

Now that I’ve gotten into this a bit, I’m addicted. I’ve seen how other people have published ebooks and to tell you the truth, they get them pretty wrong. There is no cross referencing, no hyperlinks to the sections, no footnote links, table links etc. In addition, with Lyx (frontend editor to Latex) you get to separate out your chapters, sections etc and have multiple people work on or copy edit at the same time. Since each is but a text file, you can use a source code versioning system like Subversion or CVS to track changes. This allows you to publish tight updated versions and divide up the work.

I highly recommend Lyx, Latex for any sort of professional publishing. It’s makes maintaining long documents of any sort simply a breeze.

Jesus: Christmas Really Shouldn’t Be About Me

November 28, 2006 /

Host: We got this note from J a bit ago and have been waiting in anticipation for the Christmas season to figure out just what he’s saying. Christmas not about Christ?! How can that be. He’s the man though, so we figured we’d give him an opportunity to explain.

Welcome back, Jesus. I think we’re set here to beat the ratings from the last show.

Jesus: Cool, I’m glad to help.

Host: Okay, so you notice the decorations in the studio, right?

Jesus: Oh yeah, sure. I love it – the Santa Claus’s, the reindeer, the elves, garland, wreaths. I like the tree and presents too. Very festive.

Host: Doesn’t it bother you a bit, though? I mean, it is called Christ-mas. Doesn’t it bother you how secular it’s all become?

Jesus: I don’t think it’s secular at all. It’s actually all about giving and charity. Maybe sometimes we get carried away with buying stuff, but I’ll give you all points for getting close to the mark.

Host: So you don’t mind the secular giving aspect. How come though, you don’t like the Christ part?

Jesus: It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s kinda more along the lines of I’m a little bit embarrassed by the whole homage. Let me ask you something. My disciples called me Rabbi. What does rabbi mean in English?

Host: Anyone out there? You there in the middle.

Eli: Hi, my name is Eli. Rabbi means "teacher."

Jesus: Yeah, that’s it. They used to call me teacher. I loved teaching. A teacher is primarily what I am. Let me ask another question: if a student wishes to honor his teacher, how should he go about it?

Host: An apple? Clean the blackboard? Stay after class and organize books… do extra credit?

Jesus: Um, I think that’s probably called a sucking-up.

No, I’m after something simpler. Think about your teachers. Didn’t you kinda take them for granted? But doesn’t what they taught you stick with you to this day? Sure, a thank you is nice, but a teacher isn’t really doing it for the thanks. Look at the thanks I got, for Christ’s sake!

No, a teacher is happiest when his students fly, when he disappears into the wall, and his students take to the field and use that knowledge. A teacher takes the most joy in inspiring his students. A teacher loves his students. A teacher cares about what he is teaching. What he teaches is important. If the student thinks it’s important too… well, that’s all that’s required.

A student honors his teacher by following his teachings. A student that cares about the subject and seeks to improve and continue to learn is worth more than all the "Teacher of the Year" awards in the world. It’s even better than a fat salary.

So, Christmas is nice and all, but it’s sort of the shiny apple placed on my desk as you leave the classroom. I like apples, don’t get me wrong. I’ll eat the apple, but I’d prefer it if you would take my lesson home and eat it up instead.

So, Christmas? I like it. It’s a nice holiday, but I was born in September.

Keep up your good works. Keep and honor your brothers and sisters.

Happy Holidays!

Five Tips for Parents

November 24, 2006 /

Parenting is like war, in fact it’s so much like war, I learned everything I needed to learn from Gen George S. Patton. Here are my tips for raising successful well adjusted children (which mine are, thank you very much).

  1. "Never fight a battle when nothing is gained by winning." and "Failure to adhere to verbal promises will destroy your credibility." This means if you issue a decree or threat of punishment or reward carry through with it. If a child misbehaves, take action and stick to it. If you promise a reward, make it happen. You’re tired? Tough. The opposite is also true. Don’t make empty threats or empty promises. If a battle is not worth fighting, don’t fight it, and don’t rattle your saber. Children will figure out when you are tired, your supply lines thin, and your morale low, and then it’s nothing but work work work. When Daddy or Mommy say something, the kids had better well know you mean it.

    "Child, if you do not put your clothes away, you will not go to Grandma’s house."

    What will you do if the child does not put his/her clothes away? Are you actually suggesting that you will in fact not go to dinner at your mother’s or mother-in-law’s house? Just don’t fight this battle. Don’t make a threat when you have no intention of ruining the entire family’s night out over it. I see parents make this mistake all the time. First couple of times the kid dutifully picks up, but he quickly figures out he can leave his clothes on the floor and still go out with the family.

    Now what do you do? You’ve got to escalate the battle. Sounds like work to me. No, the best war is the war not fought. Just ask GWB.

    Make it easy on yourself and the kid. "Child, you have a choice. You can pick up your clothes now or when we get home. Which shall it be?" No threat, no reward. Just the way things are.

  2. "You must be able to do everything your soldiers do, and you must do it better than any of them." Be more capable than they are. Be that person they need you to be. If you are a soldier leading others into battle, you must be more physically fit, smarter, better trained, with more discipline, and more drive. If you are a leader of soldiers, you must be the BEST solder. Same thing with your kids. If you expect them to be honest, trustworthy, faithful people, YOU must be the best of those things. You must exceed the standard. If they can’t look up to you, to whom can they look?

    I don’t know where we’ve gotten this from as a collective society that we can just live our lives for ourselves and ignore others, as if somehow we all live in our own little personal bubbles. You MUST always think of the other. If I let myself be unfaithful to my wife, I’m not just doing something that makes ME feel good (and after all if it feels good, how can it be wrong?). I’m destroying the notion that ANYONE can be faithful, that love has even a shred of value. If you are not honest, how can you expect your children to be so? If you decry the state of society for its selfishness, smallness, and lack of civility while you grab and scrape and hoard for yourself, who do you think your children will become? And don’t just emulate this great parent; be this great parent.

    From personal experience, it’s a lot more fun to be this parent too.

  3. "Do not fear failure." And "Go forward." This means you must move on. Don’t let your children dwell too long on their failures. If they need a time out, give it to them, and move on. What lesson did they learn? Use that lesson to further develop them. I would say this also works well by your own example. Admit your own failures. Ask for forgiveness when you screw up, show that you know how to pick yourself up and do better. If they see you don’t fear failure, they won’t either. Fear of failure is the big bogey man and needs to have his ass kicked and kicked hard.

    Jack Welch likes to say, "Hit ’em then hug ’em." Of course the "hit" is rhetorical. If you need to punish, do so, but then give ’em a big hug, let them know that their failure isn’t something to be afraid of. It’s an opportunity for improvement.

  4. "The more senior the officer, the more time he has to go to the front." As a parent, it’s your duty to engage your children. You must share with them the reality of things. Get up in their faces. Get in their business. Engage. Once you have abstracted yourself from your children and hide behind a desk far far away, you’ve lost the campaign, my friend. Spending time with them on the front lines, will show them that you care about them. With that closeness comes an esprit de corps that will enable your family squad to take on any challenge.

    This is especially important once kids grow into teens and the "cool" factor starts to invade. Parents invariably become "uncool." Fear not the uncool. Embrace it and get in there. Your kids will appreciate your presence in the end. As a captain in the Army, I used to hang with my troops. I’m sure I put a crimp in their style, but you know what, I knew what problems they had, what they were into, and was able to deal with it. They respected me because they knew I really cared about them. I’m not perfect, but my kids know that I care about them, and am willing to get in the foxhole and be shot at with them.

  5. "Every leader must have that authority to match his responsibility." Your children are leaders. Give them an authority commensurate to their responsibility. Guide them, don’t micromanage them. Set them free, but don’t abandon them either. Let them do the things for themselves that they should and can do. Do for them that which they cannot.

    Delegate choices to them. Which pair of shoes do you like better, this one, or this one? What would you like to eat for lunch, a sandwich or roasted chicken? If they are not accustomed to having authority to make choices, how do you expect them to make the right ones in a difficult moment under fire?

There you have it folks. Bet you didn’t think Patton had any good advice for parents, did you? Lest you think that any method inspired by Patton must be cold, hard, and cruel, I add this: We have never raised our hands to our children. We have never used any form of corporal punishment and have a strict policy against it. We have been consistent, firm, and present and the rest has taken care of itself.

La Paleta

November 1, 2006 /

We visited the inmates last night and brought with us an assortment of treats to share. Our group threw the young men a little Halloween party with chips, dip, soda, candy and a cake for good measure. We played a little party game, one of an audience participation charade-like sort and then shared some food.

I poured drinks and wiped spills and when it came time to leave, I looked to the bowl for a piece of candy – for the road, I thought. There was none to be found.

"Ay, no hay paleta," I remarked. One of the younger kids thrust his hand into his pocket and produced a lolipop.

"You can have this one," he said handing it to me.

"No, no, you keep it. I only wanted one if there was extra. Está bien, quedate con ella."

And smiling, he insisted, "No, it’s fine, I have another one in my pocket."

Jesus and Santa Claus Walk into a Bar

September 24, 2006 /

Host (talking over applause): Welcome back to our show.  Jesus popped in just a few minutes ago, so we dropped everything and decided to give him some air time. He seems hot to talk to us, so let’s hear what he has to say.

Jesus: Dude! Long time no see. How’s it been going?

Host: It’s been going okay. We’ve been fielding a lot, and I mean a ton, of questions about belief, faith, do you exist, etc. Are you some sort of CGI character or a slick video edit?

J: Hmmm, I could be, but you know it really doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter at all.

H: Okay, as always, you’ve got our attention. (audience buzzes with concern, whispers).

J: I’ll explain, don’t worry. Let me give you a heads up with what I’ve been thinking about for the past couple of months. And I’ll list them.

  1. How is believing in Santa Claus any different from believing in me?
  2. Does God answer prayers?

It’s kinda daunting when I put it like that, huh? I know, I know. You people sometimes think you’ve got me. Look, Jesus is like Santa Claus. I get it. I really do.

There are millions and millions of words written about why prayer doesn’t work, why miracles don’t happen, and why the breath of the universe has abandoned you on this insignificant blue world in the middle of nowhere.

I know it. I really do.

So, let me ask someone in the audience. Why am I different from Santa Claus?

Man (man gingerly raises hand): Hi, my name’s John, and you are different from Santa Claus because I can actually see you sitting there and you have saved me.

J: It’s nice to be recognized, John, but how do you know I’m me? I could just be a guy in flip flops in off the street from the local soup kitchen looking for some audience swag. How do you know who I am?

Man: You have a photo ID?

J: Nope. Let me help you guys out. You don’t. You won’t know it’s me. You can’t know it’s me. And you know what? It’s all right. Nobody expects you to. The short answer to the question: Why am I different from Santa Claus, is I’m not. We’re no different.

Host (palpable silence from the audience): Um, we’ve done enough of these to know you’ve got something up your sleeve… what is it, Jesus? Santa Claus doesn’t exist. How can you be no different from that?

Jesus: I’m just not. Look, let’s wade right into it, into that place you all fear to go. When we listen to those that would try to derail your faith, or explain away their own by saying that prayer doesn’t work, that the things for which you hope don’t come true, that miracles don’t happen, you will notice a pattern in their logic.

Want to know what it is?

H: YES YES YES… tell, us Lord!

J: Whoa, fella. It’s not that special. The straw man here is that everybody atheists and believers alike are looking for magic. You’re both looking at the same sweat stain of the Virgin Mary or weeping crucifix and saying alternatingly, ‘It’s proof that God exists’ or ‘It’s a hoax therefore God doesn’t exist’, and then there’re the fish eyes. Yikes, the depths to which you will all sink just to hold onto plausible deniability.

You’re all missing the point.

There is no magic. There are only knowns and unknowns, laws of the physical universe that you understand and those that you don’t. There is no Santa Claus. There is no God. Once you can throw out those two things, you can start to see the truth, see past the hoax, clear the fog and see for miles and miles and miles.

Once your mind is cleared from looking for me in the wrong places, you will be truly free. Miracles happen, if you look closely enough. Divinity is all around, in the smallest places, in the greatest places. Someday I promise you that spinal cords will be repaired. Someday I promise you that you will be able to grow back limbs, cure the blind the deaf. In fact, you’re already light years beyond where we were 2000 years ago.

It’s a miracle I tell you.

You have cars, efficient agriculture, civilized society (although you still have a ways to go), airplanes, space travel… the list goes on and on. I mean – get this – you people are actually considering plans to nudge asteroids on probable courses with your planet! It totally blows my mind. Do you know what a miracle that would be, and you’re starting to think about it!

Yeah, sure God doesn’t answer prayers, like Emeril, "BAM!" you’ve got new car. Congratulations. If you want that, get your ass to the Price is Right.

No, prayer, is more of a dream. If you dream something hard enough, you’ll get off your ass and make it happen, or talking about it will inspire someone else to do something. Or if you’re just around the hole enough, one day you’ll sink a hole in one.

Magic is either nowhere or everywhere. I know I just said magic doesn’t exist, but I had to kill it before I brought it back to life (little technique I like to use). Is it magic when a baby is born, when a flower blooms, when a cloud bursts? Just because you understand how something works, doesn’t mean that it is not special or mysterious. If you understand absolutely everything about a thing… you understand it so well that you find yourself contemptuous of it, take a step back and look with new eyes.

So here we are full circle. I wager no one in the audience would say they believe in Santa Claus. 

Except me.  I believe in Santa Claus.  I see him all the time in the mall. I see a ton of Santa Clauses, men who spend months perfecting their beards, honing their Santa Claus skills just to bring some joy to children at Christmas time. You adults know perfectly well where the presents come from, right? You’ve abandoned your simplistic view of Santa Claus, the guy with the flying reindeer who shoots up and down chimneys on Christmas Eve.  Why won’t you let your belief grow with your minds?  Santa Claus is alive and well.  I swear.  I know him.

Santa Claus is everywhere and he’s spreading. He started out as just a good man or a bunch of good men, they were real people who grew into legends who inspired others who then took that spirit, drank it in, imbibed it and became him.

And he’s here, alive in this room with us today. He died, but he’s here.  He came back.  And his love is everlasting.

Peace my brothers and sisters.

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