Top 10 signs that you may be a master's racer

10. It takes you 2 hours to warm up for any hard efforts
9. It takes you 3 days to recover from any hard efforts
8. Your easiest gear is a 42 x 21
7. You have raced on steel, aluminum, scandium, titanium and carbon frames
6. You look 10 years younger than you actually are
5. You look 50 years older than you actually are
4. Your musette bag has a ham and cheese sandwich and a bottle filled with espresso and rum
3. You have won 36 national championships but you only have one race a year that you can actually wear the jersey
2. Your average cadence on most days is 12
1. Even though you spent most of your career racing on a 12 speed with down tube shifters you now cannot live without DI-2

"33"

Brief examinations of 4 different views on the Universe

When trying to square away the injustice, horror and sheer nonsense of the world, there are a couple different schools of thought that one might turn to.

1. Judeo-Christian: The basic idea is that the universe is good. God is good. People are good. Sure, there may be evil in the world, but that evil is overcome by the good. This is a fight that must be fought but in the end the good will prevail because... well, because it is good. Maybe our lives will be full of suffering but we will be rewarded in heaven or the afterlife. Obviously there are many diverse beliefs encompassed in the Judeo Christian tradition, but they all share a relatively consistent view on morality: don't kill, don't steal, don't lie. Sure, some faiths may be more lenient about some of the "lesser commandments" such as cursing, coveting and not observing the Sabbath but these things are still frowned upon. Why are these rules important? Because the notion that suffering on earth will lead to a reward in heaven keeps the people from rising up. Of course, it also makes it easier for governments to mobilize armies to fight wars for them in the name of their God, their country and their moral beliefs about what is right and wrong.

2. Buddhism: Throw away all judgements you have made because there is no such thing as good and bad or right and wrong. There just is. The best thing we can do is to find acceptance. This is one of the key parts of meditation. Throw away the judgments we have made and just be there in the moment, a part of the universe. We have the habit of classifying everything into 3 categories: good, bad and indifferent. If you really think about it, can you name 5 things that you are not indifferent about but you don't judge as either good or bad? It took me a while to come up with 5. If we judge, we remove our connection withe the universe. The problem is that without judgement we leave ourselves unprotected because we have no control. Are we to just allow ourselves to drift at sea, being washed away into oblivion?

3. Capitalism: The optimists view on Capitalist philosophy is that life should be good. We deserve to live in comfort and ease and if we work hard we can have everything we want. The cynics view is that you need to get yours before someone else does. Either way, the basic goal is the same: accumulate a bunch of stuff that is supposed to make your life easier. The obvious question this begs is "what do we give up in order to attain this stuff?" Perhaps we lose out humanity. Perhaps we lose our own true purpose, whatever that may be. Perhaps we lose nothing. Personally, I see the bigger problem as one of unsustainability. Unless someone is looking out for the health of the system, we are all doomed.

4. Nihilism: For me, it seems a lot easier to make sense of the universe if you throw out any notion of the way things are "supposed to be". Maybe life has no meaning. Maybe it doesn't matter if we treat each other well or treat the environment well. Maybe our whole sense of morality is just a bunch of arbitrary rules that various institutions prescribed upon us in order to ensure their own survival. But there is clearly a danger when we ascribe meaning to absolutely nothing. Even Nietzsche stated this as the "danger of dangers". It doesn't take a whole lot imagination to see how this path could quickly lead to total destruction.

So there we have it: 4 different philosophies, 4 different ways to destroy ourselves.

Best Cover Ever!

Add Rwanda to the list of countries with better health care than the U.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/health/policy/15rwanda.html?hp

War is Hell

I have been watching a lot of war dramas, documentaries and such lately. Maybe I just don’t have the patience to read books, but I seem to respond better to the audio/visual format. I am not sure why I've been obsessed with war lately, but I think it is because I am curious about what could cause us to commit such hideous acts. All of these films have reinforced the point that war is hell. We civilians may not fully realize that war is hell to the extent that our veterans do, but luckily we have a thousand war movies to remind us of this. In fact, when you think about it, a great many war films really just make this point and no other, though they often include a lot of great special effects.

I still do not have an answer to the “why” question and I am not sure that I ever will. Historians have been pondering this question for thousands of years. What can be so important as to justify millions of lives being snuffed out? I am not yet sure what to make of this and I am not sure that I will ever find some great overriding message or lesson learned. But I do have a few thoughts. I apologize if my thoughts are not very well organized here. I am not trying to write a thesis; I am just making some observations.

1. The people that start wars are not the ones that fight them and the people that make the biggest sacrifices in wars are not the ones who enjoy the benefits of their conquests. Those that join the armed forces and consequently fight and die in war are not only the most brave; they are also the most physically fit and very often the most intelligent members of society. It also seems that there isn't much logic in predicting who lives and who dies in war. No amount of skill or athleticism really helps you that much; your fate is really only determined by luck and luck alone. This leads to a kind of "reverse evolution" where the fittest perish.


A ditch full of Chinese civilians killed by the Japanese in Nanjing province, 1938

2. Americans have a skewed and unrealistic perception of the effects of war. Our perspective is mostly one of victory and conquest. This may have changed a bit in the second half of the 20th century, but our losses have still been on a relatively small scale. This is not meant to minimize the sacrifice of our combat veterans in any way, but the scale to which we have incurred military losses in our wars have paled in comparison to the losses incurred by other nations. Let us take World War II for example. The vast majority of the people killed in the Second World War were civilians; a total of as many as 50 million. The United States had a roughly 1,700 civilian deaths. In our military, we lost nearly 417,000 soldiers or 0.32% of our 1939 population. The Soviet Union by comparison, lost as many as 11 million soldiers and 14 million civilians, a total of 14% of their 1939 population. In Germany 5.5 million soldiers and 3.2 million civilians died, a total of almost 10% of their total population. In Poland there were 240,000 military deaths and 5.5 million civilian deaths, the majority of whom were Jews that were systematically exterminated during the holocaust. Even countries that we barely associate with the war had significant civilian losses. Half a million Koreans, 3-4 million Indonesians and 95,000 Ethiopians were lost. In China, there were 10 to 20 million total deaths including military and civilian casualties. To add insult to injury, many Chinese escaped death at the hands of the Japanese only to be killed in the Chinese civil war, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, where as many as 78 million people died (mostly because of famine). Just to put this in perspective, that is equal to the total number of casualties of WWII on all sides.

A bombing raid at the beginning of the battle of Stalingrad

3. We are very lucky to have the stories of veterans and survivors that help us understand what war is really like. Modern special effects have also allowed us to get a much more realistic sense of the horrors of battle. But here in the U.S. most of these stories are told from a very American perspective. I have seen many different accounts of Iwo Jima, D-Day in Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge and Guadalcanal and I do appreciate all these accounts. These are stories that need to be told over and over again. Yet, I am also disappointed that there are fewer accounts of battles that the U.S. was not a part of. I would like to know more about the battle on the Soviet front, the Sino-Japenese war and the Saar Offensive in France. Maybe I just need to pick up some books…

Hitler and Goring at a Nazi rally in 1928

4. There aren't that many films about the causes of war. If we are to learn from history, it will take more than just an understanding that “war is hell”. This does little to help us learn from our mistakes. It isn't good enough to simply state that “The Nazis were evil”. True or not, we do ourselves no favors in making this gross oversimplification. One might argue that this attitude makes us even more likely to repeat the atrocities of the past. As soon as we dismiss a group of people as evil, we give ourselves an excuse to not even bother trying to understand and, yes, empathize. I see the same attitudes now towards terrorists. If we are really to learn from history we must try to understand the viewpoint of even the most despicable. How is it that the Hitler was elected in the most educated nation in the world? The Nazis by no means had unanimous support from the German people, but they were nonetheless elected. Why do the terrorists want to kill us? If we don’t try to understand evil, we cannot fight it.

The 9 hour Armistice at the Battle of Gallipoli

5. Throughout history, there are cycles in public opinion/political will that go back and forth between pre-emptive war and appeasement. Both have their downfalls. World War I and World War II are examples of the donfall of each of these attitudes, respectively. Many nations rushed into WWI because they believed in the “Primary of the Offensive”. This is essentially like a pre-emptive strike. The theory was that the one who stuck first would have the upper hand in conflict and when you have 6 empires that were [at the time] essentially equally matched, that upper hand is critical. Because their governments were unable and unwilling to negotiate a way out, 21 million people were wiped off the face of the Earth during WWI.

At the Battle of Gallipoli, there was a point where there were so many dead bodies, it was said that you could walk from the mountains to the sea without ever stepping on the ground. The Allies and the Ottoman Turks negotiated a 9 hour armistice in order to retrieve and bury the dead. During this day, the soldiers that had been trying to kill each other met on the battlefield and in many cases shook hands. They remarked that “this is what happens when nations fail to negotiate”. The next day, they went back to killing each other.

Fast forward 20 years and with the horrors of the First World War still in recent memory; many nations would do anything to negotiate their way out of conflict. This was an attitude that the Nazis and the Japanese took full advantage of as they carried out their brutal conquests. Well before the War began in Europe, Germany had completed a massive re-armament, invaded the Rhineland, Czechoslovakia and Austria. The Holocaust was also well underway before 1939. It was not until they invaded Poland that war was declared. Even then, many nations (including the U.S.) declared neutrality. In East Asia, Japan had invaded China, Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. They had used Poison gas and dropped fleas infected with the Bubonic Plague. Aside from a few border clashes with the Soviet Union, it wasn't until they attacked Pearl Harbor that Japan met serious resistance from the Allies. History always forces us to ask the questions of “what if?” Could we have negotiated our way out of WWI? Could we have squashed the Axis before WWII became the deadliest conflict in human history? We will never know these answers. What we should learn, however, it that national policies of pre-emptive warfare and appeasement can both have devastating consequences.

French soldiers in a trench during the battle of Verdun, 1916

6. Aside from the question of whether or not the war is just, many of the battles fought and many of the casualties of those battles turn out to be utterly meaningless. In the battle of Peleliu, almost 10,000 Americans were killed or injured in order to secure an airstrip that would never be used. All but 200 of the Island’s 11,000 Japanese defenders were killed.

The battle of Verdun was the epitome of WWI era trench warfare. The French leadership was stubborn and unwilling to concede any ground to the Germans. The Germans high command knew at this time that they could not defeat the Allies with military might alone but they believed that they might prevail if they could inflict enough casualties on the French (even if they lost the same number themselves). So, for 10 months, the two sides hurled artillery shells and bullets at each other, leaving a quarter of a million dead and almost half a million injured. Similarly, the Battle of the Somme resulted in 10 men dead for every foot the Allies advanced into German territory.

At the end of WWII, as the Allies rapidly closed in on Berlin from east and west, Hitler launched a series of pointless attacks (including the Ardennes Offensive, Operation Spring Awakening and the Battle of the Halbe) that did little but add to the human cost of what was already the deadliest war in history. One might argue that war itself is pointless but when a conflict results in no objectives gained for either side combined with great casualties, it drives home the point that war is something to be used, if at all, only as a last resort.


A drone plane used in Iraq, 2002

7. “Modern Warfare” is a mixed bag. The term has many different connotations, but it generally refers to the shift from more conventional weapons such as swords, cannons and rifles to modern weaponry such as mortars, tanks, submarines, mines, airplanes and the atom bomb. On the surface this seems to be a more humane form of warfare. It distances the soldier from the actual killing. Today there are some soldiers that wake up in their own beds, go into work, remotely control drones that kill Taliban forces in Afghanistan, and then go back home at night. On the surface, this sounds pretty good, at least for our side. Not only is there no risk of death or injury for this soldier, there is also little risk of any Psychological trauma. Aside from the obvious point that things may not be so good for the enemy, the other dark side of “modern warfare” has been a shift from the battlefield to the city street.

There have always been civilian casualties of war, but now it is the civilians that do the majority of the dying. During WWI, 42% of the total deaths were civilian and most of these were due to war related famine. Civilian deaths rose dramatically in WWII to 71% but the key difference is that civilians were actually targeted (by both sides). Though famine still accounted for a large number of deaths, most of the deaths were because of “strategic bombing”, “population transfers”, forced death marches and of course, the holocaust. The alternative to fighting a battle in a battlefield is fighting in our own homes and in the homes of our enemies.

Annie and Carbon: Then and Now

His ears actually stick up now (you just can't see it)

Acceptance

Within all of us there exists the eternal conflict between the person we wish we were and the person we actually are. It is normal to hope that as we age we bring the two closer or at least onto speaking terms but really, this is a false presumption. In fact, it is entirely possible that for most of us the opposite is true. For as we age we become more and more invested in the path we have chose. Less willing (or able) to turn back and change course, even in insignificant ways. We become hardened and incapable of any change. As we sit there waiting for the world to come to us it moves away.

If we are ever to halt this divergence we must find acceptance: of the people we are, the way the world is, and the fragility of it all. A large part of this is giving up any pursuit of happiness. There is nothing wrong with striving for greatness, but we should do it for the sake of greatness, not happiness. True happiness does not exist, only the idea of happiness. If we stop aiming for this impossible ideal; stop romanticizing our past and trying to move backwards; stop creating standards that nothing and no one can ever live up to we can finally cast off our shackles. Acceptance that we will never be the person we wish we were is the only way that we can actually get closer to that person.

Fifteen

I attended my 15th high school reunion Saturday. I almost didn't go because I had to work in the morning but I got out early and found my way up there. I was glad I did, although it was a little disappointing to see that only about 30 people (out of ~110) showed up. As expected, most of my former classmates were fat, married and had numerous kids, many of which were present at the event. Ann St. Claire, who was one of my better friends in high school, walked away from her 3 month old and asked me to watch her for a minute, which briefly sent me into a panic. I am not sure what made her think that I was capable of taking care of her infant child. If only she could see the state of my dying house plants... or if maybe she knew that I had abandoned my 2 cats without making any arrangement to have someone feed them she might not have left me with her child so readily. Luckily, after seeing the frightened look on my face, none of my other child bearing classmates made the same mistake.

I was not the most popular, best looking, smartest, or most athletic kid in high school. I was not completely unpopular; our Quaker school lacked the established hierarchy that many schools have, making it difficult or impossible to know who is at the top or the bottom. I was not ugly; I just lacked style and self confidence. I was not dumb; I just didn't have the natural genius or the work ethic to get straight As. I played sports; I just was never a standout. For all intensive purposes, the best word to describe me in high school would be "anonymous". This, I am sure, is why many of my classmates looked at me with a sense of bewilderment as they tried to remember anything about me.

There is a tendency to revert back to the behavior of our youth when we are around those we spent our youth in the company of. I remember going to Michelle's 10th year reunion in Seattle and seeing how it ended early because one of her classmates got in a fight with the bartender, eventually leading to the cops coming and shutting the whole party down. In my case, it was more that I felt myself revert back to a shy, awkward, self-conscious teenager. Having a few beers after the official ceremonies ended helped that situation tremendously.

Being that most of the people I used to hang out with were either absent or went home early to take care of their infants, I spent most the night with people that I never hung out with much at all in high school. After the bar, we headed to Adam Walter's house for some pizza, beer, beer pong, flip cup and weed. Whatever resemblance our reunion had to an adult gathering was quickly lost. Adam is going through a divorce right now and although his wife and kids were [obviously] absent, the signs of them were everywhere: photographs, kid's drawings, safety plugs for electrical outlets and toys everywhere. I have to admit that it was a bit surreal to be throwing ping pong balls into plastic cups filled with beer in the middle of this environment, though admittedly, the beer was Leffe. Too drunk to drive home, I passed out in a bed with 2 other people. When I woke up at 6 AM, I felt bad about leaving a house with quite a bit of pizza, beer and puke on different parts of the floor for Adam to clean up, but I wouldn't have even know where to start.

To me this all brings about the question of how you really know someone. I haven't seen most of these people in 15 years. They weren't there for everything that's happened in my adult life: college, careers, relationships coming and going, moving from place to place. And I haven't seen what has happened in their lives either. I wasn't their at their college graduations, when they passed their medical school board exams, at their weddings or when their kids were born. But do we know each other any less? Maybe we are a product of all our experiences. Maybe we continue to grow as we get older like magnificent trees. But maybe we begin our lives as wonderfully pure beings, slowly peeling away like the layers of an onion, until nothing is left but tears. Maybe the ones who knew us as children are really the ones who know us best; before we had traveled so far down our path of decline and decay. Before we lost all innocence. Before we became so cynical that we no longer knew what we believe, or if we believed anything at all.

Or maybe it is both. Maybe we are what we were, what we are now and what we will be all at once. Those that knew us as children and adults do indeed have a more complete picture, even if they only see a brief snapshot every five years because they can put that picture in context.

Unfortunately no one can see the people we have not yet become... or what we will never become.