Happy Year of the Rat

Famous People Born in 1908

[Update January 6, 2009: I've posted a list of Famous People born in 1909. The new list has pictures and short descriptions of each person.]
[Update Nov. 13, 2011:  Famous People Born in 1910  and Famous People Born in 1911. Also, Famous People Born in 1913.]

As we move into 2008 it seems useful to look back to get some perspective. Doing that I found on brainyhistory.com a day-by-day list of events for 1908. You can click the link to see it. The page included people born in 1908. [If you're looking for events or people born on specific days in 1908, that's how the brainyhistory list them.] I thought the people list more interesting. This list of people seems to be US centric, though I spotted some European born people and at least three African Americans.

Of all the people on the list only two appear to be possibly still alive. Deadoralive.com says that Claude Levi-Strauss is still alive. But it didn't have George Kimble, a famous geographer, listed, so I couldn't tell. I have not double checked all the dates that I got from brainyhistory.com. However, for all the people who did not have death dates, I googled and got added the death dates with and *, mainly from Wikipedia.

Abraham H. Maslow 1908 - 1970 Alistair Cooke 1908 - 2004 Amy Vanderbilt 1908 - 1974 Arthur J. Goldberg 1908 - 1990 Bette Davis 1908 - 1989 Cesare Pavese 1908 - 1950 Claude Levi-Strauss 1908 - Edward R. Murrow 1908 - 1965 Edward Teller 1908 - 2003 Estee Lauder 1908 - 2004 Frank Leahy 1908 - 1973 George Kimble 1908 - ?? Harry A. Blackmun 1908 - 1999* Jacob Bronowski 1908 - 1974 Jimmy Stewart 1908 - 1997 John Kenneth Galbraith 1908 - 2006* Joshua Logan 1908 - 1988* Lawrence Welk 1908 - 1992 Lyndon B. Johnson 1908 - 1973 Leo Rosten 1908 - 1997 Louis L'Amour 1908 - 1988 Milton Berle 1908 - 2002 Quentin Crisp 1908 - 1999 Rex Harrison 1908 - 1990

Richard Wright 1908 - 1960 Robert Morley 1908 - 1992 Rosalind Russell 1908 - 1976 Simone de Beauvoir 1908 - 1986 Theodore Roethke 1908 - 1963 Thurgood Marshall 1908 - 1993 William Randolph Hearst, Jr. 1908 - 1993* William Saroyan 1908 - 1981 Yousuf Karsh 1908 - 2002 Mary Hemingway 1908 - 1984* Eddie Albert 1908 - 2005* Lefty Gomez 1908 - 1989* Paul Brown 1908 - 1991 Ethel Merman 1908 - 1984 Carl Albert 1908 - 2000* Rene Daumal 1908 - 1944 Greer Garson 1908 - 1996 Henri Cartier-Bresson 1908 -2004 Pauline Frederick 1908 - 1990 Carole Lombard 1908 - 1942 John Holt 1908 - 1967 Osbert Lancaster 1908 - 1980

Who are they all? I don't know them all, but there are at least three US Supreme Court justices, lots of actors, a great photographer, newsman, comedian, a US president, an economist and ambassador to India, the psychologist who authored the Hierarchy of Needs, a baseball player, a congressman, a key architect of the atom bomb, several writers...

I thought it would be interesting to see how many people born in 1908 are still alive. That is a fairly complicated question to ask it appears. The best I can find is the number of centarians, but that is everyone over 100. Actually as of today, most people born in 2008 would still be 99. Here's the Google-answer for the question: Number of 100 year old U.S. citizens per 100,000 population for various dates.

In 2000, there were 50,454 centenarians in the United States, or 1 per
5,578 people, or roughly 18 per 100,000
In 1990, there were 37,306 centenarians in the United States. or 1 per
6,667 people, or roughly 15 per 100,000

Apparently the numbers before these are less accurate. But the researcher did provide this as well:

In 1900, there were 46 centenarians per million people in the US, or
4.6 per 100,000
In 1930, there were approximately 35 centenarians per million people
or 3.5 per 100,000

So, there are a lot more today (18/100,000 rather than 4.6/100,000 in 1900). I'm guessing the drop between 1900 and 1930 might reflect the 1918-20 flu epidemic.

Who born in 2008 will be on this list in 2108? Among all those babies born will be a host of people who will go on to be world famous. So treat them with respect. You never know what the will achieve.

[November 2008 Update: I'm posting writings by and/or about Claude Levi-Strauss in honor of his 100th birthday at the end of November.]

Hosting Files - scribd.com

Nathan, commenting on the Lebow post, said he'd try to get a better copy of the article posted on scribd.com. I've been looking for a place to host pdf files for this blog so I can actually put up good links to texts. So thanks Nathan.

AIFF - Orange Revolution

OK, one more, then that's it.

Orange Revolution has particular relevance for paranoid leftist Americans. Are the powers that lie behind the Bush administration going to accept defeat in the 2008 presidential election [I'm not predicting defeat necessarily, just a scenario] and allow for a peaceful transition to a Democratic president? They didn't in 2000, and there's been suggestion that they election manipulation in Ohio gave them the election in 2004. So, if you believe that they are capable of anything from tampering with votes, voters, voting machines, etc. or even declaring a national security emergency and postponing the elections indefinitely, this is a movie you need to watch.

The ruling party, despite dictating to the media what they can say about the election and the candidates, is still losing to opposition candidate Yushchenko going into the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election. Yushchenko even survives a poisoning that knocks him out of the campaign for a month and leaves his face disfigured. It's clear the government is manipulating the elections and the polling. According to the DVD blurb when Yushchenko is delcared the loser:

They come into the streets by the hundreds of thousands, from every part of the country. Their election has been stolen, and they have come to defend their votes. They march in protest, set up tent cities, and form human barricades around government buildings, paralyzing all state functions.

But this documentary, which has interviews with many people in Yushchenko's campaign, also shows that the campaign had been expecting this result and planning for these mass demonstrations well in advance. They had gotten the tents, had set up procedures for food, bathrooms, music and all the sound and video equipment with it, and on and on, including donations to pay for everything. So when the election results were rigged, the Orange party were ready for the hundreds of thousands who showed up, in a snow storm. And they had contacts in the government to find out what was happening and how to counter.

Americans have a lot to learn from Ukrainians about how to win back a stolen election. In 2000 perhaps Americans were too lulled into the belief that we have fair democratic elections. In 2004 we have less of an excuse. But if the election is stolen in 2008 there will be no turning back and we'll have no excuse for not being prepared. If the Democrats are not watching this film and talking with the participants in preparation for November 2008, then they aren't doing their job.

I would note that at the end of the film it says on the screen that Yushchenko's party fought amongst themselves and things weren't terrific. But it seems to me the point is that the party in power, who were using that power for their own ends rather than for the people's, were not allowed to steal the election and keep in power. Whatever problems Yushchenko had in ruling, were less serious than had the old regime stayed in power.

198 Methods of Nonviolent Protest and Persuasion

This is only the first 34. This is from RANT - A Trainers Collective.


FORMAL STATEMENTS
1. Public speeches
2. Letters of opposition or support
3. Declarations by organizations and institutions
4. Signed public declarations
5. Declarations of indictment and intention
6. Group or mass petitions

COMMUNICATIONS WITH A WIDER AUDIENCE
7. Slogans, caricatures, and symbols
8. Banners, posters, and displayed communications
9. Leaflets, pamphlets, and books
10. Newspapers and journals
11. Records, radio, and television
12. Skywriting and earthwriting

GROUP REPRESENTATIONS
13. Deputations
14. Mock awards
15. Group lobbying
16. Picketing
17. Mock elections

SYMBOLIC PUBLIC ACTS
18. Displays of flags and symbolic colors
19. Wearing of symbols
20. Prayer and worship
21. Delivering symbolic objects
22. Protest disrobings
23. Destruction of own property
24. Symbolic lights
25. Displays of portraits
26. Paint as protest
27. New signs and names
28. Symbolic sounds
29. Symbolic reclamations
30. Rude gestures

PRESSURES ON INDIVIDUALS
31. "Haunting" officials
32. Taunting officials
33. Fraternization
34. Vigils

These are the sections they have under Resources


Action Planning
Affinity Groups and Spokes Councils
Anti-Oppression
Consensus
Direct Action/Civil Disobedience
Health and Safety, Medical
Legal/Jail
Media
Spanish Materials
Strategy

Meetup.com Anchorage Beach Hike

I haven't been on a meetup.com hike since spring - too busy, too lazy, wrong time, wrong hike, lots of excuses. The concept is great - a website where people who want to meetup for some activity. But walking along the beach near Kincaid sounded just right and the time was fine.











We did ok coming down the steep embankment from the Jodphur parking lot. This big piece of driftwood was at the bottom, on the beach.








































We were eight people and eight dogs, all of whom will sleep well tonight.


















The strong tides in Cook Inlet tend to jumble the sea ice and leave a lot on the shore.

















Doug Van Etten, the mastermind behind the meetup.com adventurer group.






















The clouds were heavy, but there was a break on the western horizon all afternoon giving us a peak of the Alaska Range. I think this is Mt. Redoubt.

Baranof Hotel Gets Cheap Oil

While oil field support executives were running their legislative log rolling scheme from Room 604 of the Baranof, the hotel was already starting to wean itself from petroleum and using its own kitchen cooking oil to heat the hotel. There was a short item in the ADN Money section on Thursday, December 27, 2007. I couldn't find it through Google, but found what might be the source - what looks like a copy of a Westmark Hotel press release on a December 17 Reuters report. Baranof general manager Steve Hamilton said they started using cooking oil because the local incinerator no longer took the oil. They now collect oil from other Juneau businesses

The Baranof creates a mix of 1/2 vegetable cooking oil and 1/2 fuel oil
which is then used to heat the hotel.  The hotel can burn up to 2,000 gallons
of oil in one month and typically uses 10,000 gallons of cooking oil over the
course of the year. By using cooking oil, the hotel has reduced the amount of
fuel oil they use by 9,000 gallons a year.

So, with a little thinking we can find better ways to do things. Instead of paying someone to dispose of their waste cooking oil, they now save the cost of 9000 gallons of heating fuel. How many more clever alternatives are out there? It seems like we generally have to be forced to find them when business as usual doesn't work. Sounds like everyone is coming out ahead.

Environmental benefits from using vegetable oil include releasing fewer
pollutants into the air, recycling of carbon already in the system and a
reduction in carbon output. In addition, businesses in Juneau have found a
reliable way to dispose of unwanted cooking oil without running afoul of
environmental regulations. Employees from the Westmark Baranof Hotel pick up
the oil free at their doorstep each week.

Way to go Steve. And by the way, how come the ADN left out the environmental benefits in their version of the story? Or don't they talk about that sort of thing in the Money section?

AIFF and Mental Health - A Summer in the Cage, Autism the Musical, Body/Antibody, Oil on Water

According to the National Institute for Mental Health

An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older — about one in four adults — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.¹ When applied to the 2004 U.S. Census residential population estimate for ages 18 and older, this figure translates to 57.7 million people.².... In addition, mental disorders are the leading cause of disability in the U.S. and Canada for ages 15-44.³

Despite these statistics, we are, as a nation, dismally ignorant about the specifics of individual mental illnesses and the moral and ethical implications of how they work.

I didn't think I was going to write any more about this year's Anchorage International Film Festival, but I was able to borrow a few from the Festival office, and I just watched a powerful piece of movie making - A Summer in the Cage. It begins as a documentary about making a documentary about the basketball players at the Cage in Greenwich Village. But it turns into a film about one of the few white players, a guy named Sam, who takes over the director's life (and vice versa) and gets him to make the film about Sam, who is manic-depressive, also called bi-polar. It all worked for me - the photography, the story, the characters, the music, the lack of resolution. It had the magic.

And that got me to thinking. This was the fourth mental health themed movie that I saw through the AIFF. I guess if we aren't willing to talk about something, we leave it to the artists deal with it. And these films each did in totally different ways. The others were

• Autism the Musical
• Oil on Water
• Body/Antibody

Autism and the Cage were documentaries. For Autism, the movie making was low tech and succeeded because it didn't get in the way of the story. Cage was a very produced movie - it says "produced in association with the Sundance Channel - and it works well. The editor made good use of even the out of focus footage. Both delve deeply into the world of their mental health disorders to give us an intimate look at how the illness affects the individual and those around the individual. Each use the media of film to convey to outsiders what these conditions are like. Both films followed people with mental illnesses, not knowing where they would end up. Autism the Musical had more structure because it was focused on a musical being produced by a group of autistic kids. A Summer in the Cage was more or less a chance encounter that led the director, through curiosity and a growing sense of obligation (well, he told the story so that's what it looked like) to follow along for five years.


The two features were totally different. Oil on Water was ostensibly a feature film about the romance between an artistic young man and a beautiful model/writer. Only toward the end did it become the story of a schizophrenic. I left the theater with the sense that spreading the message about schizophrenia was the purpose of making the movie, and the interview with the producer Elle Matthews on the Writing Studio website seems to back that up.

On the other hand, Body/Antibody seems like a movie in which a character happens to be obsessive-compulsive. There's nothing preachy about the movie, this is not an 'educational movie,' it's just a good, dramatic comedy, that incidentally gives us a glimpse of what it means to be obsessive-compulsive. The director was at the showing and said he'd been fascinated by the disorder and had wanted one day to make a film that featured it. But it's the character who happens to have the disorder, not the disorder itself, that is the focus. However, the audience learns a lot about the disease. How, for example, can someone obsessed with cleanliness have sex? We find out. In addition to sex, it has that other essential ingredient of a successful 21st century movie - violence. Ultimately, I would expect that this movie will also serve as a greater vehicle for educating the world about mental health because it is basically entertainment whereas all the others are films about a mental health issue and they are troubling. This film could easily be released at the mall cineplex anywhere in the US and do well. The others will have a more difficult time getting that sort of audience. Autism, according to its website, will be shown on HBO and Cage was shown on the Sundance Channel.

For anyone who is teaching about mental health, I would highly recommend all but Oil on Water as excellent vehicles for getting the message across. They are real (including the language) and compelling and the basis for excellent discussion on the specific mental health issues they cover. Oil on Water has a more artsy look. I like artsy, but I had problems with the acting and pace in the beginning. It probably would be of interest to those with schizophrenia and their relatives and close friends.

Understanding about mental illness is critical in the United States and the rest of the world. In the US we have a basic story that says everyone is responsible for how his life turns out. Mental illness doesn't fit in that story. We'd rather believe that people are irresponsible, lazy, or evil when they don't behave appropriately. It's their own fault they don't succeed. What scientists are learning about mental health contradicts that story. One day there must be a showdown between our myths of autonomous man and the reality of mental health and illness.

These movies help show how powerfully, good movies can affect people's basic stories, by giving them an intimate window into the lives of people they otherwise would not know.

For earlier posts that touched on these movies see here and here for Oil on Water (I liked it better after seeing some other films), Autism the Movie and Body/Antibody are briefly mentioned in the first Oil link. Autism also has its own post. Body/Antibody should have had its own post, but I saw it late in the festival, so I hope I've done it justice in this post.

Picking the Right Story to Interpret the 'Facts'

Philip commented on the last post about Charlie Wilson's War:

Back through the 70s, I read a lot about the USSR. Current affairs and history, mostly dealing with musical life there. Between knowledge from that and talking to friends who had worked or studied there, I felt that the USSR was already teetering close to the edge before the mid-70s.

Hedrick Smith's _The Russians_ came out in 1975, four years before the Afghan invasion, during the middle of the short Ford administration. The book fairly clearly describes the already existing structural flaws that led to the collapse of the USSR fourteen years later.

It is possible that by forcing the Soviet government to spend more on defensive and counter-offensive weapons during the 1980s the US sped the inevitable along, but I doubt we'll ever know.

I've discussed in previous posts - particularly this one about "a black-hole bully, punching the nose of a passing galaxy" - how humans interpret facts based on the stories in their heads. Those stories - models, theories, narratives, we use many different words - get into our heads in different ways. Which story gets to be the interpreter of any collection of 'facts' at any point in time in any individual's brain, is a mystery. And I would wager most of us aren't aware of the stories we have that compete to interpret the world around us. Some we can identify - though they may not be the real story - others work in our heads without our ever actually articulating them.

Phil does a good job articulating the basis for his interpretation of the fall of the Soviet Union and he may be right - the Soviets were on the decline and, at best, the defeat in Afghanistan just sped that up. But I'm not so sure. The Soviet Union fell when the people stopped obeying. They simply withdrew their willingness to obey. When individual dissidents did that, the government could deal with that. But when the entire population did it, the government simply dissolved. (OK, this is my story, greatly influence by Vaclav Havel's "The Power of the Powerless". Click on the title for excerpts of the essay and here for a discussion that applies Havel's story to the US today.) The loss of young Soviet lives in Afghanistan and the eventual defeat in Afghanistan brought the people of the Soviet Union to the point of being able to withdraw their cooperation with the government. To simply stop cooperating with the regime. Then the radical capitalist crusaders with their "capitalism as the savior of humankind" ideology rushed into the Soviet Union to spread their Gospel. The initial euphoria dissipated as the pitfalls of unbridled capitalism - greed, inequality of wealth, followed by inequality of justice - resulted in a relative few Russians getting fabulously wealthy and the vast majority seeing their physical standard of living fall. Now, they seem to be sliding back into traditional Russian totalitarianism. So, Afghanistan may have made that moment of change possible. Without Afghanistan, things would have gotten bad, but they could have kept the Soviet infrastructure and more carefully adopted aspects of the market, as has China. The point of this post is not to decide who is 'right' but to illustrate how stories help us (for better or worse) interpret what we accept as 'facts.'


On NPR's Day to Day this morning (you can listen to it here,) the real Charlie Wilson says that the arming of the Mujahideen was his greatest achievement and he repeats the final message of the movie - that all we needed to do was fund the schools and infrastructure of post-war Afghanistan, and it wouldn't have left open for the Taliban to take.

But I can't help but wonder. At the end of the film we see Charlie Wilson half-heartedly, and unsuccessfully, arguing with his committee colleagues that they need to just put $1 million into education for Afghanistan. He worked a lot harder for arms than he did for education. I suspect his story is influenced by his own part in it all and his need to feel good about helping the Afghans defend themselves. But if he'd have fought for schools with 1/10th the zeal he'd fought for stingers, surely he could have raised a few million for schools. This "I did the right thing but Congress didn't follow through with schools" story doesn't quite ring true to me. Bringing the Soviet Union to its knees is a better story for Charlie Wilson, than bringing the Taliban to power in Afghanistan and allowing Bin Laden to train Al Qaeda there.

Charlie Wilson's War leads in part to today's war

George Crile's book, Charlie Wilson's War, gives an in depth picture of how things work in Washington DC, particularly how an unimportant Texas Congressman was able to get $100 billion worth of weapons and aid to the Mujahideen to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. The clip gives you as almost as much of the movie as the movie gives you of the book. You only get to hear Julia Roberts on the phone and you don't even get that much of Philip Seymour Hoffman who has the best role in the movie as a not usual CIA agent.



The quote from Congressman Wilson at the end of the movie suggests that it wasn't arming the Mujahideen that led to the Taliban taking over Afghanistan, but rather Congress' unwillingness to fund schools after the Soviets left. Did Wilson significantly speed up the fall of the Soviet Union by spearheading the arming of the Mujahideen? I don't know. I do know that the book should be read by as many people as possible given that the US is once again at war in Afghanistan. The movie also gives a glimpse of a refugee camp, another must see for Americans. The movie is entertaining, but not especially enlightening.

If you're taking a long plane trip, this is a great airplane book. It's really hard to put down. Watching the movie won't spoil the book, anymore than watching my short video will spoil the movie. See also the official Charlie Wilson's War website.