Wiktionary explains the origin was from the days of flintlock and caplock firearms, “…where the half-cock position of the hammer was both a rudimentary safety and the proper position for priming the pan or inserting a percussion cap. The phrase was originally rendered ‘to go off at half-cock’.” The expression obviously came from the occasion time that the weapon unexpectedly fired when it was at half cock. The expression has evolved into describing someone who takes a premature or ill-advised action.
Author Archives: RF_Alum
Colorado School Performance after Millions Invested
The subtitle of an article by Jennifer Brown in the Denver Post is, “Colorado ‘turnaround’ schools received $50 million since 2010 but many have not improved.” “Among the 29 schools in Colorado that have one year remaining on their ‘accountability clock’ before the state school board could move to shut them down or turn them into charters, most have not made significant progress, and some have gotten worse.” The analysis of student achievement data for schools receiving federal “…School Improvement Grant funds (and) found little correlation between money and academic gains.”
A spokesperson for the non-profit Bellwether Education Partners commented, “If you funnel a lot of money to the same dysfunctional districts that have been running the dysfunctional schools, these are the results you should expect…What’s mystifying to me is that people thought the school improvement grant program was going to get dramatically different results from the dozens of other similar efforts at school turnaround in the past.” That statement reminded me of the saying that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.
The article is filled with statistics and examples, and it was obviously researched quite well. I wish there had been more about why school performances are so universally abysmal. There is one example of a new principal at a school “…where 90 percent of the kids are minorities and almost everyone is eligible for free or reduced lunch…” She realized she had to change the culture of gangs, drugs, and fighting. She used grant money to hire two additional assistant principals. They were told to learn the student’s names, greet them in the morning with fist bumps and high fives, and celebrate with them when they demonstrated good performance. The school had a 24 point improvement in math proficiency. Maybe other schools should try making the kids happy to be coming to school and acknowledging when they do well on a test. Refusing to allow gangs, drugs, and fighting would seem to be a good idea also.
Savers and Interest Rates
My father lived through the Great Depression and was forever nervous about whether he had saved enough to pay his bills after he quit working. He always saved all he could and put his savings into safe Certificates of Deposit (CDs). He had to move to assisted living and then began to fret that the interest he was earning wasn’t enough to keep him from beginning to use up the principal. I can’t imagine how upset he would be with the miniscule rate of return available to savers for the past few years. There must be millions of older Americans trying to figure out how to stretch their retirement savings to pay their bills while they earn less in interest than the rate of inflation.
The financial crisis resulted in the government intervening by “increasing the monetary supply” and reducing the interest on loans to near or at zero. It has struck me as beyond baffling that the result was a boom in the stock market while elderly savers suffered. I know I wasn’t the only investor who decided to take the additional risk of buying stocks with dividends that were higher than anything to be found in CDs. While politicians were railing against people who have money (the “investor class”), they supported policies that enriched those same “evil Capitalists” to the detriment of elderly savers.
I wonder when the millions of elderly savers who are voters will rebel against the economic policies that have punished them. I acknowledge that the current stock market has begun to look risky for the “investor class” that has been willing to take risks for higher returns. My father would probably say something such as “Learn from this and stick with CDs.”
The Federal Reserve has actually introduced negative interest rates into their recent discussions of the economy. Perhaps the “saver’s revolt” will happen when the message is that you will receive less than what you put in your CD when it matures?
Stalin’s Barber
This is an excellent book by Paul M. Levitt, but it is not the easiest book to read. The author is a professor of English at the University of Colorado, and I think he distracts from a great story to discuss literary figures. That might be a positive to those who are interested in Russian writers and poets. On the positive side, the book provides insight into a brutal time in the Soviet Union when millions of people were dying in the “Great Terror.” Describing the experiences of a barber who is sufficiently skilled to shave and trim Stalin is an interesting way to frame the historical fiction. There is the undercurrent of mystery as the barber realizes that he is barbering Stalin and body doubles. He works hard at attempting to identify the real Stalin by engaging him in reminiscences about his life experiences. That’s a clever way for the author to work information about Stalin into the narrative.
The book begins as the barber decides he and his wife have to leave the desolation of Albania and make their way to the Soviet Union where the rumors say life will be better. They are on a train that travels through Moldovia and then the Ukraine. There are women and children showing obvious signs of starvation holding their hands out begging for food. One woman beseeches him to take her emaciated son. A soldier declares the child is as good as dead and throws the boy “…off the train as carelessly as one would dispose of a cigarette.” That startling episode and vivid descriptions of “death trains” should be a warning that this book, which I’m convinced accurately portrays a brutal time, can be difficult to read. The prosecutor of the “show trials” proudly declared that “…confession of the accused is the queen of evidence…” in describing confessions extracted by torture. One passage in the back half of the book that “…the proliferation of labor camps and denunciations had turned the country into an asylum inhabited by cowed citizens too terrified to speak their minds or ask innocently, “Can you tell me why my husband was arrested?” (I suppose there could be some consolation that many of the worst officials who were the head of the Soviet secret police at one point or another as millions were dying in the “Great Terror,” to include Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, and Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, were all executed.)
One son of the barber’s wife is a Soviet secret police official and a homosexual who is interestingly described as dispelling his homoerotic feelings by studying “…his signed photograph of Iosef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who had taken the revolutionary code word ‘Stalin,’ which combined the Russian word stal (steel) with Lenin…” He is also called “Vozhd,” “Supreme Leader,” “Soso,” “Koba,” and “the Boss,” among other names. The son inadvertently alerts the barber and his wife that their apartment is bugged. They take to going to a park when they wanted to talk about sensitive matters and notice the park is always filled with people even in freezing weather.
The barber, in Russian tradition, has various names, but settles on “Razan.” There are numerous descriptions of his skill as a barber. The trimming of hair and beard is described as being done in the “Turkish manner.” However, the feature that seems to gain Razan widespread admiration is his ability to use alcohol and a match to singe hair from the ears without burning the ears. This is described many times. Razan is declared to be “an artist” when he perform this little ceremony on Stalin (or the body double) during his audition. Perhaps to test Razan, Stalin tells a joke about himself. He says that he told his driver he knew the driver has told jokes about him and that are impertinent. “I am after all the Great Leader, Teacher, and Friend of the people.” The driver replies, “No, I haven’t told that joke yet.” Razan is given permission to laugh, laughs too loud, and then explains he wasn’t laughing at the joke but “…at the artful way you told it.”
Another joke is that an old man was at a May Day parade holding a placard that read “Thank you Comrade Stalin, for my very happy childhood.” A policeman tells him everyone can see Stalin hadn’t been born when the man was a child. The man replied, “That’s precisely why I’m grateful!” And another is that a dozen workers from the Urals were visiting Stalin, and when they left Stalin found his pipe was missing. He ordered the workers held and questioned, and then found his pipe. He ordered the workers released, but was told, “But Comrade Stalin, they’ve all confessed.” There is a hint of the fear that pervaded all the jokes. Telling a joke about Stalin would undoubtedly result in torture and execution or banishment to starve working in the Gulag. Continue reading
A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned
I’m using this expression as a companion to a commentary about saving and interest rates. According to the Phrase Finder its obvious meaning is, “It is useful to save money that you have as it is to earn more. Forms have been around a long time. George Herbert’s Outlandish Proverbs observed in 1633 “A penny spar’d is twice got.” Deciding to save instead of spend puts you a penny up instead of a penny down, thus “twice got.” The expression evolved to the current form, which is said is incorrectly attributed to Benjamin Franklin. The obvious wonderful message of the expression is that saving instead of spending is a really good idea.
Eisenhower: Portrait of the Hero
I picked up this book by Peter Lyon at a used book sale at the local library. I admit that I haven’t read the entire book, which has over 900 pages. I have used the book as a reference in my quest to research why the country decided to construct the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapon Plant. The book has excellent information about Ike’s role in shaping American foreign policy that relates to that subject. I was surprised by some information. Despite the title referring to Ike as a hero, the book often does not portray him positively. Roosevelt selected him to command the D-Day invasion because he was judged to be the general most capable of navigating the difficult political issues among the Allies. He indeed worked diligently to consider all sides in the planning and execution of combat operations and in the process of trying to make everyone happy made no one happy. My interpretation is that he worked very hard to appease Montgomery, who had a reputation for not wanting to move until he had forces at such strength levels that victory was certain. That didn’t go over well with Patton and other generals who wanted to strike fast and often. Montgomery would have been satisfied only if Eisenhower had stepped down and put him in charge.
A primary subject I wanted to research was the decision to invade France instead of Churchill’s preference to invade the “soft underbelly of the Balkans.” The selected invasion site had the strong military advantage that the logistics of delivering thousands of tons of material and replacement troops were achievable because of the relatively short route across the English Channel. The political advantage of invading through the Balkans was that it would counter Stalin’s desire to dominate Eastern Europe after the war was won. Churchill was convinced the invasion “into the teeth of the crocodile” in France would cost many more thousands of young soldiers, and he was brought to tears trying to convince Eisenhower to change the plans. I’m haunted by the prospect that a decision was made to appease Stalin that cost thousands more casualties than if Churchill’s plan had been accepted. Continue reading