Dick Cheney is a Horrible Human Being

Dick Cheney is a truly horrible human being. I may have told this story before here but it bears repeating.

I was playing poker in Las Vegas and sitting next to a rather well-dressed woman — “well-dressed” in the sense that the jeans and blouse were “designer” and the jewelry was seriously real. Women make up but a tenth of poker players and well-dressed ones are rare.

I started the standard chit-chat with, “So where are you from?”

“Wyoming,” she said.

“Oh, Dick Cheney’s state,” I replied.

“Oh yes, Cheney’s state. I know him, you know.”

“What? Really?” I said.

“Really. He lives just down the block.”

At this point I assumed I was chatting with a Repbulican. She’s clearly wealthy. Lives in an up-scale community down the block from the Cheneys and is visiting Las Vegas during the WSOP. So I asked the obvious: “What’s he like?” And expected the worst.

She leaned over and said, very quietly, “He’s pure evil. Pure fucking evil.”

And we went back to playing poker.

One With Water

            It was mostly tumbleweed and sagebrush off to the south. In the north fields where the creek cut its twisting path it was grassland. All together, good cattle land, Wyoming’s high desert plain. Jonah liked the dry heat of summer, liked riding through the fields, puffs of dust kicked up behind him. He and Flo raised steakhouse grade beef. It wasn’t what they’d planned but, well, sometimes plans get handed to you. For nearly forty years they’d run Pop’s, Boise’s top steakhouse. Every cut of prime on the menu came from the ranch. But Pop died and suddenly they owned a couple thousand acres of Wyoming and he was back home being a cowboy, Pop’s boy. It had benefits though, one being he didn’t have to shower nearly so often.

            Flo was from Oregon, on the coast. She liked water and cruises. “It’s calming,” she told Jonah, “having water all around you.” Being on a boat didn’t bother Jonah all that much. Looking at all that water was okay, so long as it stayed out there. Sometimes they’d go to Vegas. Flo would get sun and water; Jonah’d get sun. She’d slather on sun block and lie by the pool. Jonah would take the truck out into the desert, climb in the hills and feel free.

            They moved back partly because of this thing Jonah has with water. It’s awkward but he’s been this way as far back as he can remember. He’s scared of it. As a kid on the ranch just the thought of a bath would make him tense, fearful. He was scared of it growing up and still scared now. Not of drowning or worried about slipping in a tub. It’s being in water, enveloped. Water was okay out there, over there. Water was okay to drink, make tea or coffee, even a bit slopped on his hands wasn’t awful. He’d shaved his head a couple of years back after Flo bought him an electric razor so that’s not an issue any more. When he showers it’s always fast, never easy. He goes as long as he can. Flo tells him when it’s time. She wrinkles up her nose and he knows.

            “I’m sorry hon. I’ve gotten so used to the way I am that it’s hard for me to tell.”

            “Not hard for others,” Flo said.

            Then Jonah got this idea to build a windmill. He liked wind, dry wind — and there was a lot there in the high plains. It’d come rolling down the side of the mountains and hills, across the open fields and there was so much of it. It wasn’t doing much good and maybe, he thought, he could harness it, like a wild pony.

            It was damn hard work. He had to figure out things he’d never thought about before, basic woodworking and construction, how to lay a foundation, how to cut curved braces for the walls, stabilize the structure, rig-up the blades, set them in flexible moorings so they shifted with the changes of the seasons.

            It took him nearly six months but he ended up with a high plains beauty, white at the base with wide hoop-stripes each making a gentle shift, first to off-white, then to cream and up to a soft gray up at the top. The way the color changed matched the way the day’s light moved. He carefully painted fake windows on the side and put on a red shingled roof. Every windmill Jonah had ever seen had a red roof so his did too. It was all wood except the blades which were fiberglass.

            “Don’t think I should use wood,” he said to Flo. “I’m no engineer, but I’m pretty sure that with the kinds of wind we get here we wouldn’t have a prop on that thing for long.” Flo just smiled.

            When Jonah was out on the range he could see the red roof from a long way off. From the south fields he could see the tips of the blades turning gently in the breeze, becoming a bright blur when the real stuff bent the grass and made the steers nervous. It made him smile. He named it ‘Haa.’

            “Okay, Mr. Smarty-Ass,” Flo said one day. “Is that thing out there just to amuse you or do you think you might do some good with it?”

            That got Jonah thinking. He’d never really wasted anything in his life so why start now. He’d put the windmill where the wind was most steady, in the north pasture exactly fifty-eight paces from the sharp bend in the stream. He was of two minds about that field. The runoff from the mountain snows meant they didn’t have to worry about water but it made Jonah queasy, especially when the spring melt pushed it up near the top of the banks. Before he put up Haa he didn’t used to go there much.

            But Flo had a point. He got out the backhoe and started digging. First he cut one ditch off from the stream down to Haa and then another back and a short tunnel underneath her where he carefully set in a drive-wheel. He picked up a used wind-powered generator and set it up so that the blades powered the wheel to move the water.

            “Normally,” he told Flo, “folks use water to make power to control things. I’m doing it the other way ‘round.” Flo just smiled and cast on for a new sweater.

            Then he built a side shed onto Haa, this time with a real window so he could see everything working, watch water flow. He now had it running  gently in a long loop. Gravity brought it down slow from the creek; Haa sent it back up and Jonah discovered a quiet stillness, being alongside a soft stream that he made.

            Later, with winter starting to let everybody know she was just waiting for fall to get done being nice, Jonah got to worrying about water again. Mostly when he worried about water it was two in the morning and the worrying got done for him. He never had a lot of control over what popped into his head, odd fears, images, counting things, rhythms, tempo. Like with stairs. When he went up or down he would tick off each step by touching his thumb to a finger, one step for one finger. He used his right hand going up and the left coming down. He tried to make it come out even so that his thumb was on the pinkie when he was at the bottom and the pointer at the top. He knew which finger to start on for every staircase on the ranch and could look at a set of stairs he’d never seen before and get it right most times.

            When Jonah walked he counted steps. He had gotten so used to this he could stroll along talking to someone and still keep a running count. He knew how far almost everything in his life was from everything else by the number of steps it took him. This worked just fine for him but was a nuisance if he had to tell someone else how far some place was from some other place.      “What,” he joked to Flo one day, “do I tell a little-bitty ol’ lady who takes steps one-half of mine? Worse, can you imagine me telling some cowboy, ‘Well Sir, Sal’s gas station is exactly a hundred and eighty-four paces up Brindley Road from Joanne’s Coffee Caffee.’”

            This “semi-attention to detail,” which was what Flo called it, had advantages. Once Jonah got his mind onto something it would end up someplace different from where others would. Thinking about the little stream he’d run under the windmill ended up with him thinking about a pond. With Haa up and working, it wouldn’t be that hard to build another one a couple dozen steps or so off to the south. It could pull water over to the swale there and fill it up. The windmill could keep that pond honest, keep the water moving, keep it fresh.

            He dug out the swale a bit, lined it with state-of-the-art materials, managed to get in a truck load of rocks and stones and went to work on the new windmill. When it was done he dug a new channel off the one that ran to Haa. Then, feeling tired but satisfied, put in a couple dozen water plants. Bart at the nursery, which was precisely three hundred and sixty-six steps from Sal’s, sold him a wide variety, some to be kept in submerged pots, some on what would become little floating islands and others Bart said just toss in. They’ll grow on their own in water, which made Jonah’s chest tighten a bit, though less than he thought.

            And the north field was beautiful. Haa and Haa Too were turning smoothly in the fall breeze. The gentle rivulet trickled down, split in two with one channel heading back up to the creek and the other feeding the pond. Winter followed and the winds stilled and Jonah found, to his delight, that he could walk on the pond when it froze over. He made it. It was his pond.

            “You know, Mr. Smarty-Pants,” Flo said on the first day of real spring “now that you’re a water engineer or whatever it is you’ve become, why don’t you do something for the cattle? And, by the way, did you take a shower? Without me sniffing?”

            So, Jonah built another windmill. He named it Odah. “’Odahingum’ means ‘water’ in Cheyenne,” he told Flo. “Any more Haas would sound stupid.”

            Odah was bigger; it drove a more powerful pump because the new pond had to be four times the size of the first. It also, Jonah understood, had to be deeper to get the right aeration for the steers and the plants and to keep the balances of nature just right.

            He dug a canal to connect the creek with the new pond and another one out of the far side and back again though it took longer than he planned. There were bends to build in and flow patterns to figure and stones and rocks to keep the edges from eroding and the banks had to be supported and the flow controlled and Jonah started to feel like that “water engineer.” By the middle of summer the cattle had a pond to drink from and Jonah had a third glorious windmill and a bit of bum hip. Bart fixed him up with a triple-load of pond plants and a dozen trees that they planted along the eastern shore.

            While he waited for the shade to grow Jonah got to thinking about things like sluices and gates, with timed controls. He now had a half-dozen little streams and canals all being run by the windmills and was beginning to feel, not so much like an engineer, but more like a conductor. He started work on what he thought of as his string section and by the time spring arrived he had four sluices set up. Two controlled the water-flow to the little pond in the swale and two more handled the big pond. A generator hooked up to Ohad’s winch provided power. The steers kept hanging around, staring at him, tilting their heads in that engaging way as he put in the barriers, set up the control systems, rewiring everything through a panel he’d set up in a second hut he’d built up near the outlet of the first stream.

            “It’s kinda loud, though, don’t you think?” said Flo, standing there arms akimbo. “All those machines.”

            It was. That pasture used to be quiet, just the sound of the creek, the wind through the grass, the steers munching, lowing. He didn’t see any way to block the noise so he figured the best thing to do would be to mask it with the sound of water. It took him another two months. He had to drain the big pond and the pain in his hip slowed him down but finally it was done: a double-ringed fountain with a full four-foot spray from the outer ring, a lower one from the inner and a spike of water up from the center. He put a movable cap on top of the spike that he could raise and lower remotely with a lever and control the fineness and reach of the arc of water from it. And it was done.

            When Jonah finished each day’s chores he would limp out and sit, by water, watch the surface ripples dance with the wind, the shadowy swirls form as each stream exited its windmill. He’d move the lever and the cap would go up and down on the main spike and he’d marvel as the late afternoon sun painted pastel rainbows in the fine arc. He would stare at water, for hours sometimes, just sitting and feeling the warmth grow though his heart and chest.

            Autumn came. He was spending less time with the herds and more at the ponds, watching the lilies shift in the currents, the two Haas and Odah humming, almost singing with the eddies at the narrow necks where each canal drew the water from the stream.

            “You okay, Jonah?” wondered Flo one late September day.

            “Never been better,” he smiled, picking up his cane. “I’m just gonna head back out, talk a bit with water.”

            He sat on the bank of the big pond, under the largest of the trees and held his knees as close to his chest as his arthritic hip would let him. As the sun set he rocked gently back and forth and felt the first pull, the first soft tug. Odah’s rickita, rickita hypnotic rhythms matched his movements, the soft breeze pushed the blades, the long grass hissed around him in tune with his heart.

            He lowered his feet, turned fully around and slid slowly down off his spot, head down, sliding, oozing along the wet bank, otter-like to the water. The coolness pulled him in. He never knew it could be like this. All the fear drained away. Gone the burden of weight. Eelgrass flicked lovingly against his cheeks, lily pads cast shadows on his arms. Such joy. Such peace. Jonah opened his mouth and welcomed in what was his.

Things We Know but Ignore: Education, Economics & Interrogation

Educators have known for decades that imposing uniform testing procedures in schools is a bad idea. They have also known for just as long that it is even worse if low scores are punished by withdrawal of funds and support. The reasons are obvious — or should be. When specific tests must be taken by all students teachers quickly stop doing serious teaching and fall back on teaching to the tests. Instead of working to impart broad-based knowledge and understanding, rather than fostering critical thinking (more on this below) the focus shifts to memorizing the materials that will be on the tests.

This isn’t education. It’s an exercise in regimented rote memory.

The problems get compounded when schools that fall behind find their funds cut, their supplies reduced, class sizes increased all of which, of course, makes matters worse.

So, since we know all this and since educators provided advice and counsel to government to deal with the looming crisis in American education (some say we’re passed “looming” — that we’re in full-crisis mode already) what does government do? It passes moronic bills like “No Child Left Behind.”

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Economists have known for decades that in a recession it is a mistake to try to close the deficit by reducing government spending. The reasons are obvious — or should be. This lesson was learned the hard way during the Depression when it became clear that Keynesian models were correct, that the way out of a recession is to throw money at it. In a recession people lose jobs, incomes are reduced or eliminated. When people have less money they reduce spending. When people aren’t buying things, manufacturing slows, workers are laid off and the cycle continues. The deficit continues to go up because tax revenues go down and the more government reduces spending the worse it gets.

The solution, as any economist can tell you, is for government to stimulate the economy. There are tried and true ways to do this: invest in projects that repair the infrastructure, increase the minimum wage, broaden welfare programs, increase and extend unemployment benefits.

Does this increase the deficit? Of course it does but it shortens the recession and hastens recovery. When that happens tax revenues go back up and the deficit is gradually reduced. Scores of studies have shown that for every dollar put into the economy in these ways the GDP grows by between a $1.10 and $1.20. Ten and twenty cents on the dollar is a pretty good return.

So what was done when the economy tanked in 2008? It passed a stimulus bill that was about half of what was needed and, even then, the GOP set up an unrelenting drum-beat that spending had to be cut or we would drown in debt. If anyone doubts the folly of that policy, a quick look at what happened in Kansas should suffice.

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Psychologists have known for decades that torture does not work. The reasons are obvious — or should be. Often the individual doesn’t have the information sought. Or he may be fanatically committed to his cause and willing to endure any amount of pain and suffering. He could simply provide information without regard to reality, especially if it fits with what the torturer seems to want. The organization or country that condones or carries it out suffers political and social condemnation. The angers and frustrations of groups whose members were tortured are inflamed and become an efficient recruiting tool for terrorists. Finally, and compellingly, being the torturer extracts a significant psychological toll. Depression, despair, guilt and symptoms akin to post-traumatic stress disorder are common.

The fact that it is also inhumane, unethical and violates virtually every basic moral principle that a civilized people live by doesn’t even need mentioning. In short, torture fails in all possible ways.

What psychologists also know is that other, benign interrogation methods actually do work. They involve the obvious: Establish a bond with the prisoner; find mutual beliefs that can be used as touchstones, as ways to build a sense of trust. When a prisoner’s guard is down he begins speaking more openly and the information sought can be slowly gathered from tidbits dropped, names let slip, locations mentioned.

So, knowing this, what do governments do? We’ve just seen, in bold and painful clarity what our CIA did during the Bush/Cheney administration.

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What do these three examples have in common? In all government went for the simple and quick patch rather than opt for the more measured and slower but effective solution — and the advice and counsel of experts was ignored.

It’s hard to develop solid teaching techniques that encourage thought, nurture curiosity and creativity[1] while still imparting needed core knowledge. It’s easy to make up stupid tests that make the public think that their kids are learning something when they’re not.

It’s not easy living through a consciously created mounting government debt. It’s tough on everyone, politicians as well as the public, to see decisions made that appear to threaten the economic integrity of the country. It’s easy to cut spending. It gets sold as a quick fix to the problem and makes the public think that things will get better when they won’t.

It’s difficult to learn the gentle techniques of questioning and probing to extract needed information. It takes time and requires delicate, measured exchanges. It’s easy to torture. It requires nothing but cruelty and violence, both are cheap and widely available and it makes the public think that we’re getting useful information when we’re not.

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[1] It’s a topic for another day but there are good reasons for thinking that many politicians do not want our children to be creative or to become critical thinkers. They want them to be obedient and quiet. Down that road lies ruin.

The Good Old Days

I really do hate “the good old days” gambit. I hate the “wisdom of the ancients” crap. I cannot abide the “we knew better back then” bull.

We know more today about almost everything than ever before. The social and natural sciences, medicine and, yes, philosophy and have given us, here in the early decades of this strained century, a better understanding of reality than we ever possessed before. The harkening back to some illusory golden era that keeps leaking out of the mouths of frightened Fox News commentators is little more than a pathetic bleat that has fear of the new tattooed on it. Nobody back then knew anything close to what the average anybody today understands. Examples: the big bang, antibiotics, vaccines, DNA, continental drift, organic foods, solar panels, iPhones, the Internet ….

But I have to admit that there’s one element of the past that I do miss and long for and wonder how we lost it: our relationship with the police.

I’m looking at 75 in a couple of months so I’ve been around for a while and seen a few things. I grew up, first in North Philly, in a working-class neighborhood, and then later in a suburb of Philadelphia that embodied the classic middle-classness we look to as embodying the American Dream.

After Ferguson, Brooklyn and Staten Island and Phoenix and a dozen, score, hundred, thousand other “incidents” with videos and eyewitness reports showing white cops kill, beat, harass, sodomize and intimidate black men and boys I cannot help but reflect on the good old days.

In my North Philly of the 1940s and ’50s, 17th Street and Godfrey Ave, at the wide intersection (I suspect it is actually not as wide as my memory of it), we played “wall ball” with a pinkie and “stick ball” with a half-cut one always offered underhand to a broomstick-wielding batter. We had ice-cream floats and cherry-cokes at Stein’s soda fountain and pitched pennies and baseball cards against the wall outside.

And we had cops. But they were not the looming, malevolent presence they’ve become. They were our friends. They sat at Julie Stein’s counter with us. Shlurped sodas with us. They made fun of us (appropriately, I now see) and told jokes and warned us about life out there … to the east, in another neighborhood (appropriately, I now understand).

They walked the beat. They didn’t cruise by, malevolently, in armored cars. They knew our names. We knew theirs. They made us feel safe. They were ours.

We were white. Oddly, we didn’t know it. They were white. I suspect they knew it. I never remember feeling fear, if anything I felt like we all were part of something larger, a community perhaps.

Today, things are such that even old white guys aren’t comfortable around cops. It’s weird but when I pass a police car these days I do not see my “friend” or a protector of the peace. I see something that I actually fear. Luckily, as an old white dude, I’m not expecting to get pulled over or roughed up but the main emotion I feel is an uneasy wariness.

These old days were better — and I’m not sure how this shift happened.

Roy Brindley, Degenerate Gambler

I promised to introduce you to some of the more interesting characters who wander through my world. Here’s one. I don’t know him personally, just through his autobiography — but I have known one or two of his soul-mates. This essay was first published in Poker, Life and Other Confusing Things which will soon be out in print form and, until then, can be downloaded from Amazon by chlicking here.

Roy Brindley has written his autobiography, Life’s a Gamble. It’s a book about life – with a little poker tossed in along with booze, broads, dogs, racing, a couple of bouts of “where the fuck am I?” and of course, a dollop of redemption when our hero discovers that his totally bat shit crazy life style just happens to work at the poker tables. We like to say stuff like, “Hey, man, poker is life.” Right? Right!

Brindley is a gambler, as the title tells you. He is a sick, demented, compulsive, self-destructive gambler with a deep streak of insecurity, an almost pitiable desire to be loved and accepted, a crazy longing for what he thinks is the “good life,” the “cash in pocket” life style: fast cars, big houses, booze, women and it’s all wrapped up in an ego the size of Ireland, which is where he now lives with the loyal Meg, their two children and a Ferrari with a blown engine and maybe, just maybe, the life he thinks he wants. Who knows? I, for one, wouldn’t put much loose change on his future. But I am rooting for him. He’s now got a contract with a major management firm, is sponsored by Ladbrokes, and does sports commentary on the BBC. But you can’t shake the sound of hoof beats in the distance….

Brindley gives us an insightful, sometimes painful tale of a working-class bloke from Southampton struggling: an unloved child in a family of emotionally distant compulsive gamblers, a reasonably successful greyhound trainer who blows it all on various hopeless bets, a life dropout living rough, begging on street corners with a cardboard box as his home and, 300 pages later, a successful poker pro with over a million dollars won in tournament and live play.

Brindley’s a compulsive gambler, of this there is no doubt. He knows it and you will too. But, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the real problem isn’t gambling in any simple way. It’s losing. And as he loses he dreams, romanticizing about the big one, the “life-changer” of a win that will fulfill the fantasy.

Back in the ‘80’s Howard Sartin developed the ‘pace’ method for handicapping racehorses. Sartin was a psychotherapist who, frustrated over his lack of success treating problem gamblers, decided instead to teach them to win. The pace handicapping he claimed to have developed with some of his patients revolutionized the game. Sartin became something of a legend among horse players (count me among them). He was the first to break a race down into segments and to analyze the amount of energy a horse exerted in each. His major contribution was to point out that closers don’t really “close” – they merely slow down less than the horses in front of them. This might not seem important but if you bet the ponies you better understand the implications. His clientele, now playing with positive EV, were “cured.”

And so it was with Brindley. Poker took a pathetic loser betting the dogs, horses and sports and made him a winner. He is now in his forties, has his family and considerable wealth, but the reader knows that he could, in a New York minute, succumb to that irresistible tug to unwrap his bankroll and mix it up.

 ‘Roy the Boy,’ (his poker moniker) is another of those mugs in this game who pull me in. I just can’t resist a quick analysis of him – any more than he can pass a bookmaker without tossing a couple of quid on a nag at Epsom. At the core, Brindley seems to be a deeply sensitive fellow, albeit a rather fragile one. He is also ingenuous and open about his failings and honest about them to a fault, a tendency that often has unhappy consequences. He is so emotionally vulnerable that sessions of poor play, tournaments that end short of his goals (and hopes) can totally derail him, shake his confidence and wreck his game. He lets remarks that are simply one-offs from frustration get to him. A cavalier remark from Howard Lederer denigrating his play sets him off in a spiral of angst and depression. Simply getting needled by opponents in Vegas, a tactic designed to put players off their game, does just that.

There are cultural elements Brindley doesn’t seem to recognize. He learned the game in Europe where decorum rules, where even talking at the table is frowned on and he despairs over boorish Americans. But then, while doing poker commentary for British TV, he insensitively makes religious and ethnic slurs. He also ends up good friends with Tony Guoga (aka ‘Tony G’), one of poker’s most notorious trash talkers.

For someone who spent so much of his life in betting shops, at race tracks, casinos and poker rooms, he can be astonishing naïve. At Binion’s for the WSOP he spots a single-deck blackjack table, a card-counter’s wet dream. He starts betting $2 a hand, wins consistently, boosts his bets way up and then is astonished and appalled when he gets that fatal tap on the shoulder from a large gentleman telling him his action is no longer welcome. How this can be a surprise to someone who developed his own card counting system (apparently never having read or even heard of Thorpe, Uston or Snyder[1]) and was so successful that he got barred from every casino in England is beyond me.

He is also proud that he has survived this life without ever doing drugs. He seems not to realize that alcohol is a drug. He drinks copiously, explaining in a painfully defensive way that he likes to drink while playing poker, especially tournaments, because it calms him and allows him to focus. The tale of winning a tournament so plastered that he couldn’t make out the cards and then passed out leaving the loyal Meg to bag up the prize money should be a warning. It appears not to be.

He ends upbeat, believing he has vanquished his demons, mended his ways, overcome his insecurities and doubts. One can only hope….

A note: The book is written for a British audience. The old line rings true about the US and the UK: “two great lands separated by a common language.” Many passages will be cryptic to a North American reader and many words will be strange. But that’s okay. Just plow through; they’ll start feeling familiar after a while. You might wanta ‘ave a couple o britneys to help you work yer way t’rough the bits and bobs, then Bob’s your uncle.

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[1] Three of the legends of the world of the professional blackjack player. Thorpe was a mathematician who first worked out the statistical properties of the game that made card counting possible. Uston was a former stock market executive who developed some of the more intriguing ways of staying under the radar of casino bosses who were looking to quash the counters. Snyder developed some of the more sophisticated counting techniques and championed subtle strategy-shifts that they entailed. Snyder has, more recently, become active in the poker world.