My Thoughts on a Blog in its Nascent Stages

A friend e-mailed me asking about advice for building his blog....based on my experiences here, here are some thoughts.

(If you are detecting a pattern with my blogging, it's that I'm so busy with moving, etc, that original content is going to be a little rare for the next while....)

There are a few steps I would take:

• First is to post links to your blog from whereever people read about you: linkedin, facebook, a-twitter, etc. Your blog's first audience are the people that are interested in you, and by extension, your blog.
• Second, I would install something that tracks your blog's traffic. I use sitemeter, which allows me to see the patterns of visitors/pageviews. It does this by posting a little image on your blog, and then recording every time your blog (and that image) is loaded.
• Third, you want to reach people that are interested in your topic. That means finding other political blogs and commenting with your blog in the "website" or "link" title of the comment field - this will leave a link to your blog. Your website should have a quick, easy-to-recognize name/URL - willslack.blogspot.com is short and sweet.
• Fourth, you want to make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog via RSS, etc. Google/Blogspot makes this easy with a default link.
• Lastly, I would make sure that your blog has a strong design / content that makes it memorable - I try to have lots of interesting links up and down the rightblog  hand side, and while I'm not super-focused on visitor counts (I don't update enough for that), I do hope that my blog's content has some use to people - which is why they come back every day.

On TFA

A friend sent me this link, which reads in part:

Every spring without fail, a Teach for America recruiter approaches me and asks if he or she can come to my classes and recruit students for TFA, and every year, without fail, I give the recruiter the same answer: “Sorry. Until Teach for America changes its objective to training lifetime educators and raises the time commitment to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes. The idea of sending talented students into schools in high-poverty areas and then, after two years, encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity rubs me the wrong way.”

[...]

But the most objectionable aspect of Teach for America—other than its contempt for lifetime educators—is its willingness to create another pathway to wealth and power for those already privileged, in the rapidly expanding Education-Industrial Complex, which offers numerous careers for the ambitious and well connected. An organization that began by promoting idealism and educational equity has become, to all too many of its recruits, a vehicle for profiting from the misery of America’s poor.

The thesis of the article, in short, is that TFA has become a "stepping stone" for professional success, instead of a breeding ground for lifelong educators. The author uses the acceptance rates of Fordham vs Yale to support this thesis.

Flatly, I don't buy it. First, the author seems to make a logically false argument that the lack of progress in these areas is indicative of TFA's ineffectiveness, which is emotionally resonate but intellectually empty: it could just as easily be said that the lack of progress is because TFA hasn't done enough. Second, there's a good chance that the average student at Yale is probably more capable to pick up a teaching career out of nowhere than a kid at Fordham, given the kinds of students that enter those institutions (to be clear, we are talking about admissions, not educational quality). Third, there are solid arguments to be made that improvements are possible in public school education, though I think we face a crisis of parental responsibility just as great as problems within schools.

TFA does have problems: it is seen as a "good person resume booster," which ends its tour of service before people can really master their field. But I think there is a value and benefit with the cross-cultural connections that the author seems to deplore. No matter how elite or effete our surroundings, we must always remember that there is poverty and injustice all around the air-conditioned board rooms where decisions are made. Power carries a responsibility, and hopefully, TFA can help to build awareness of that responsibility - and the failures of this country to meet its obligations thus far.

First Day At Work!!!

Madly exciting. Lots of information. Awesome co-workers. Further comment will come once I actually know what's going on.

Lessons and Language from Abroad

One of the many advantages of travel is that you find out the cultural "rules" in your life are products of a specific time and place, not nearly as omnipresent as one might suspect. Witness the French nonchalance about the Red Light District in Paris, for example, and while I'm sure there are many more, I don't have anything but anecdotal data to go on.

My own experience on this came two years ago on a little hill in France called "Taize." There, English is the universal language, but the very low % of native English speakers means that "Taize English" deviates in a few ways, thanks to the surrounding French lanaguage influence:

Examples:

The "Washing Up" - It's never cleaning, its the washing up.

"Permanent" - Directly from the French noun, a permanent is a on-location volunteer here for a longer basis.

"Responsible" - A noun, meaning the person who is in charge. The Responsible is responsible.

"Animation" - Fun, kid's play, activities

"Close" - to turn off, to deactivate, to end

"Brooming" - Sweeping, for people who learn the word broom and don't see the point in learning a different verb.

Why Electronic Medical Records Matter

Remember the Joplin Tornado? This is going to be my go-to anecdote for the foreseeable future.

“I knew that they would want to know my medications, dosages and what tests had been done, and I knew that I couldn’t remember all of it. The doctors in Springfield were able to pull up my records and ask me questions. It worked out beautifully,” he said.....

“If the tornado had hit a month earlier, before installing the electronic health record system in Joplin, St. John’s would not have been able to bring up our mobile hospital within a week’s time. We still would not be operational at this point,” said Mike McCreary of Mercy Technology Services. “Today, patients have continuity of care across all of our physician locations and the new St. John’s Mercy Hospital, and connection to the entire Mercy health system, because of our EHR [Electronic Health Records] and our ability to quickly re-establish communication services.”

McCreary noted that St. John’s patients also have access to historical medical records. More current health information was stored within the new EHR, and older paper records had been scanned prior to the tornado and are securely stored on servers located in other communities.

The EMR system? Epic's.

President Obaam just overruled the OLC

In which I lose a lot of respect for Obama: (NYT article)

WASHINGTON — President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.

Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.

A White House spokesman, Eric Schultz, said there had been “a full airing of views within the administration and a robust process” that led Mr. Obama to his view that the Libya campaign was not covered by a provision of the War Powers Resolution that requires presidents to halt unauthorized hostilities after 60 days

“It should come as no surprise that there would be some disagreements, even within an administration, regarding the application of a statute that is nearly 40 years old to a unique and evolving conflict,” Mr. Schultz said. “Those disagreements are ordinary and healthy.”

 Read the rest of the article. The White House knows that most people have never heard of the OLC, and they're going on that, forgetting that the OLC is a vital, vital institution, and that being cavalier with it (or portraying it as "just another adviser") is setting all sorts of bad precedents. One of the strongest controls on the foolishness that David Addington (Cheney's Cheney: nice in person but wiht crazy ideas about executive power) was the OLC and its refusal to allow Bush a free leash, as if the President could ignore the law.

Obama is now repeating the same mistake that Bush made, and which originally made me a supporter of him, but he's gone a step further by straight-up overruling the OLC. It's a horrible, horrible precedent and the ends do not justify the means. Not. At. All.

Rioting

Coverage of the Stanley Cup Riot has mostly focused on lamenting the foolishness and idiocy of Vancouver's wayward citizens (or, according to some account, visitors who came with the intention of rioting).

But this first-hand account by a cop and these photos/FB screenshots show something else - the potential depravity of the human spirit. I can't tell why these people went and did these things, but it seems like the riot was an "event" for them, a chance for them to try something new and do some really crazy stuff.

I don't think they realize (especially those are posting on FB) how much they hurt others. To them, society must be a bottomless pit of funds or a harmful malignancy that screwed them over. Nonchalance or anger are the only two possibilities that occur to me.

David Brooks is Right

David Brooks is absolutely correct here:

I’ll be writing a lot about the presidential election over the next 16 months, but at the outset I would just like to remark that I’m opining on this whole campaign under protest. I’m registering a protest because for someone of my Hamiltonian/National Greatness perspective, the two parties contesting this election are unusually pathetic. Their programs are unusually unimaginative. Their policies are unusually incommensurate to the problem at hand.

This election is about how to avert national decline. All other issues flow from that anxiety.

The election is happening during a downturn in the economic cycle, but the core issue is the accumulation of deeper structural problems that this recession has exposed — unsustainable levels of debt, an inability to generate middle-class incomes, a dysfunctional political system, the steady growth of special-interest sinecures and the gradual loss of national vitality.

Certainly many of these issues can be traced to the various causes of wage inequality, among them skill-bias technical change, and they aren't the government's "fault" in the way the massive deficits from the Bush Tax Cuts are the government's "fault." Moreover, life now is much better than it was a few decades ago in many ways - we have cell phones, open communication, and longer life expectancy. But we could do better - much better.

And that's why Brooks is right. Both Bush and Obama had opportunities to be transformative in '01 and '09, and both rejected those - Bush asked us to go shopping, and Obama failed to capture the national imagination as he struggled with the recession and passing a healthcare bill, in addition to a dismal record of whistleblowers and civil liberties. Obama got away with these things because he was shrewd enough to know that he wouldn't get burned for them - and he hasn't. Our government is more and more inaccessible to the people, even as data and information comes at us via a multitude of forms and ways - Twitter and Facebook among them.

The thing about living beyond our means is that its easy to say but EXTREMELY hard to stop, because voters stop caring about deficits the moment their social security check or medicare payment is at risk. We absolutely must do some belt tightening - I am no Keynesian, and stimulus on top of stimulus won't correct the underlying issues of gluttony that weaken us. But we must fix entitlements, the tax code, and the ridiculous idea that the US can or should hold up the world. Our desire to do everything is causing us to fail in our own self-investment, and those chickens will come home to roost in coming decades.

Building E-Files

As I prepare to move to Madison, I'm very aware that every pound I bring to the city will likely have to be carried out/up/around the city, and in the interest of limiting my amount of "stuff," I'm trying to put all of my business cards/contacts into one master file.

This is difficult. It turns out that there are a glut of secure services that help us to combine phone, facebook, e-mail, and skype contacts together (while letting you invite you don't have on Skype - apologies to the 150 people that just got little notes about that). But after combining them, one then has to decide how to organize them. Making things more complicated, many of my friends from Williams have different employers that they didn't list on Facebook, making it very difficult to keep track of people.

I keep telling myself that this is a better system than the stuffed-full notebook that lives in our famiy's kitchen drawer, but as the hours drag on, I'm less and less sure of that.

My new employer was recently featured in this article about the massive green energy projects that are being undertaken in Verona, WI.

"Epic is an economic engine that's a Wisconsin outlier: A booming business that's about as far from the state's manufacturing heritage as you can get.
The company is moving to wean itself off fossil fuels in a big way.
Already, most buildings on the sprawling campus are heated and cooled with a ground-source heat pump system, which means the campus needs no natural gas for heating and no electricity for cooling in the summer.
About 1,300 solar panels were erected in recent months on a latticelike structure above an employee parking lot."

As you can see from the graph on the right side, Epic is a very quickly growing company; my work will be to help pick up some of the sales and projects that Epic's immense success is securing. But just as importantly, the reasons for that growth are immediately observable: Epic is a fantastic company, with fantastic methods and values, which produces a valuable project that does good and makes money.


I'm so excited to be starting my work there in a few weeks, but in the meantime, I'll have to settle for more research, in addition to preparation for my new life. Anyone selling a car?

Back in Decatur, B.A. in Hand

1000 miles, one hotel, and 4 aunts and uncles later, I'm back in Decatur, in the same room where I laid on the floor for hours, Facebook chatting about Williams with my first Eph friend. She didn't follow the path we were expecting of her during those hot summer nights; I suppose I didn't either, though my WOOLF letter from August '07 was pretty close to home.

And now I become an adult, with my own income, car (once I buy it), and apartment/condo/house (once I find it). Life goes on, but I think I'm ready. I'm so fortunate, though, to have friends from all over the US, in addition to people I met internationally and those from my childhood. I'm thankful for the adults and peers who have shaped my life, directing me to places where I think I was helpful (the Gaudino Board, the Honor Committee, etc) and those who tested me. Ultimately, I am stronger for those experiences. And so now, life begins.

Hopefully, I'll keep this blog a little more regular. We'll see.

Well, I'm done with college

And will post many thoughts on that......what I can finally have time to write. But for now, from the road, all I can say is that I miss Williams something awful. It was a wonderful four years, and I was glad to have it.