Rebane's Ruminations

“Come, let us reason together …”

"The time has come," the Walrus said./ To talk of many things:/ Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—/ Of cabbages—and kings—/ And why the sea is boiling hot—/ And whether pigs have wings."  Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

George Rebane

Older readers will recall President Lyndon Johnson’s famous use of that phrase as he invited opposing politicians to join him in deal making.  Although history shows that after ‘reasoning’ with ol’ Lyndon you almost always walked out scratching your head, counting your fingers, and wondering after the health of your wallet.  But it’s hard to say no to your counterparty when he issues a civil invitation to come and reason together about a disagreement you may have.  It’s the penultimate invitation during a dispute that quickly achieves ultimate status, the more publicly it is issued.

In these pages we now have a significant history of debating literally every issue under the sun (well, almost); I have yet to find a single subject that has been out of bounds.  Now that doesn’t mean that we always conduct ourselves in ways that generate light instead of contributing to global warming.  But most of us do try to put our best foot forward instead of in our mouths.

In spite of that, we more often than not wind up talking way past each other, realizing that we are really trying to convince the anonymous middle road reader – I’m assured that they do exist – who pores over our deft arguments that firmly nail our stand.  Quite often these arguments wind up sounding daft instead.  So I’m going to list some steps that in my field have almost always led to a working compromise or even a meeting of the minds.  And applying this discipline to the business side of things, I have seen amazement in people new to the approach.  They are astounded by how easy it is to come to a closure – whether that means a working agreement, or a detailed understanding why none is possible, and where the ‘give’ must occur to make progress.

My consternation has always been that so few people understand or use this straightforward method to sort out their differences.  And, as you may have guessed, I have found the people of various hues of collectivism to be most resistant to this process.  So here are the steps –

1.    What’s your objective or purpose in resolving the problem/dispute.  This can be stated in words.  All parties don’t necessarily have to agree on the objective, but they should know what each is trying to achieve.
2.    How will you measure progress/achievement?  What is the metric that will satisfy or confirm for you that you are either making progress or achieving your objective?  The metric can be a proxy – e.g. number of marriage licenses issued for, say, the number of new households formed, or for the survival of the institution of marriage.
3.    It would be useful if the parties agreed on the metric, even though their stated objective or purpose would be at variance.
4.    Are some kinds of re/solutions unacceptable?  Are there any constraints on the alternative solutions to be considered? What are they?
5.    Generating alternative solutions is the hard part, and anyone can now participate, whether they agree on the objective or the evaluating metric.
6.    Are there any data sources for input to the metric that will not be accepted – i.e. how will the input data be vetted.  Here one can posit that some data set is correct, and return to its acceptance at a later time.  Hypothetical data can also be used to determine the sensitivity of the metric to variations in or accuracy of the data – i.e. does it make a significant difference?
7.    Put the ‘solutions’ through the metric.  Calculate the value(s) of the metric(s) and see what kind of changes in the solution alternatives will help maximize (or minimize) the metric.  At this point all parties should be closing in on agreement, or knowing why their effort is turning out fruitless.  Learning will have taken place.
8.    If there is a will, go back a few steps, change things and try again.  But stick to the paradigm.

What if your counterpart doesn’t want to play this game?  What if he just wants to shout his (baseless?) opinion past you.  Then you know he’s not serious and has an agenda in the debate not based on any acceptable form of reason, and that he’s probably there to jack you around.

Once more –

1.    State objective/purpose
2.    Select/define progress measure
3.    Constrain solution/outcome alternatives
4.    Generate/present alternatives
5.    Crank data for solution(s) through metric
6.    Evaluate results

The Antifragile Taleb

If you see fraud, and you don’t shout fraud, you are a fraud. – NN Taleb

George Rebane

Among other things Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a flâneur, mathematician, probabilist, systems thinker extraordinaire, philosopher, elitist, and most certainly a curmudgeon.  I ran into him years ago when doing some research in financial engineering.  He had just quit being a successful Wall Street trader, and got a job as a college professor exploring and disseminating (mostly his) ideas about “decision making under opacity.”  The more I read him, the more I wanted to be like him when I grew up – so I became his student.

Readers may have heard about Taleb when they first ran into the now well-worn notion of a ‘black swan’ event (q.v. and here and here).  Besides numerous technical papers on things like low probability events and infrequent happenings, he has written three books for the intelligent reader – the man is also extremely well-read, well-traveled, speaks several languages, and does not readily suffer fools nor write for the thinking impaired.  Fooled by Randomness (2001) was his initial foray in which he introduced Black Swan to a wider audience.  Because the book also introduced realworld risk taking in a new and revealing light, it was immediately picked up by the investment and banking communities, and we began seeing ‘black swan’ in the popular press.

His next book – surprisingly titled Black Swan (2007) - expanded on the topics of risk that now reached into public policy making, and embraced people familiar with behavioral economics.  Somewhere in there he caught the attention of Nobelist Daniel Kahneman, who along with Tversky RIP, founded behavioral economics, and documented the foibles and fables of human decision making in his recent Thinking, Fast and Slow (2012), a must read in its own right.

And after letting a few more years pass and his popularity (notoriety?) grow, Taleb decided to gather his own near and far thinking into one volume that he purports as his summa, Antifragile – Things That Gain from Disorder (2012).  The book runs over 570 pages with diagrams and squiggly laden technical appendixes.  In the process of covering the extension of his ideas to what Taleb calls antifrigility, he takes the reader through a wonderful journey of western philosophy going back past the Greeks.  Heavy emphasis is shown to Mediterranean civilizations since Taleb is an immigrant from Christian Lebanon, and all things Levantine (including things Arabic) are firmly embedded in his double helix.  But the reader also learns about fine foods and wine available in various hideaways all over Europe, as he is regaled with the inner workings of complex systems that have been intelligent enough to adapt and even thrive in hostile environments – Man happens to be one of them.

MOOCs and the education revolution (addended 9jan13)

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my 4jan13 KVMR commentary.  I last covered MOOCs in my 21aug12 post.  This post has an addendum that explains in more detailed how intelligent MOOCs can be designed to deliver complex instructional sequences that are not available in traditional learning environments. ]

Let’s consider higher education for bit tonight, especially its cost, relevance, and the impact of learning technologies on traditional ways of delivering education products.   Our post-secondary education and its graduates are the national jewel that affects every American’s quality of life.  As a stake in the ground, consider that our population growth has slowed to under one percent per year, which still translates to adding almost 3M people annually.  With demographic lags, we currently pump out about 4M young people a year into our job markets.

Everyone knows that they will earn more, the more post-high school education they get.  And everyone is told they are college material, and are encouraged to borrow money and apply for scholarships to pay for college.  This encouragement has been so successful that outstanding student loans now amount to over $1T nationwide.  On the whole, it’s hard to see how much of this debt will be paid off given that many or most college students select majors that don’t teach marketable skills.  The Atlantic reports that “53% of recent college grads are under- or unemployed”.

Distinguished professor Richard Vedder of Ohio University tells us, “In 2009, spending by Americans for post-secondary education totaled $461B, an amount 42% greater than in 2000, after accounting for inflation. This $461B is the equivalent of 3.3% of total U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and an amount greater than the total GDP of countries such as Sweden, Norway and Portugal.”, adding that  “…more than 17 million college graduates were ‘underemployed’ in 2008.”   For many college graduates ‘Would you like fries with that?’ is a recurring theme across the land.

Many educators and employers, especially those who can’t find enough qualified workers, tell us that not everyone needs to go into debt getting a mushy major.   Most high school graduates are not ready for a college education, and would do much better for their careers by learning a marketable skill set that is confirmed by various accepted levels of certification.  And to do that, more and more young people and older workers needing to change careers are turning to online education and training courses.  The acronym to remember is MOOC – massively open online course.

Singularity Signposts – IBM’s TrueNorth advances cognitive computing

George Rebane

A few days ago IBM published a very short paper titled simply 10¹⁴.  It summarized the first successful testing of TrueNorth, IBM’s cognitive computing testbed funded under DARPA’s SyNAPSE.  That program “calls for developing electronic neuromorphic (brain-simulation) machine technology that scales to biological levels, using a cognitive computing architecture with 10¹⁰ neurons (10 billion) and 10¹⁴ synapses (100 trillion, based on estimates of the number of synapses in the human brain) to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that scales to biological levels.”

It so happens that the human brain contains about 10¹⁰ neurons and 10¹⁴ synapses in a system of relatively few highly organized and repetitive pattern recognition structures arranged into hierarchies.  This is a major advance in the current fanout of intelligent machines that seek to replicate the functioning of the human brain.  Right now TrueNorth runs only about a 1,500 times slower than the human brain.  But that will soon change.

I am currently in the middle of Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind (just published) wherein he goes into great detail on the type of structure and capabilities of a neuromorphic machine like TrueNorth.  Therefore I was happy to see this concurrent announcement of the next step toward Singularity from IBM, the company that also brought us Watson (here) and is now marketing that into several application areas beginning with medicine.

These advances need to be viewed in the context of today’s accelerating technology, and its disturbing impact on the workforces of developed countries (more here).  Their greater effect on humanity is already very difficult to predict beyond giving rise to the obvious redundancies of mediocre human talents.

Lamestream in the Limelight (updated 6jun12)

George Rebane

Ramirez nails the latest.  And did you hear – well, actually it was hard to do that – how the those self-adulating lamestream journalists all went silent the instant that the district attorney released evidence supporting Zimmerman against the hooligan who was pounding his head into the concrete.  Then all the spigots opened again when the judge revoked his bail on misrepresentation of available cash charges.

And now our President, you know the one who’s not a socialist, has awarded The Presidential Medal of Freedom to big time American socialist Dolores Huerta.  “The Heritage Foundation’s Lachlan Markay reported this week that President Obama has awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Dolores Huerta, a labor activist and honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.  As Markay notes, DSA describes itself as “the largest socialist organization in the United States, and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International.”  This is a story the mainstream media declined to cover. But Heritage is getting the story out there regardless.”

Just another verse from the lamestream’s theme song, ‘The Sound of Silence’.  I could go on, but you get the idea …

[6jun12 update] A more significant item 'overlooked' by and in the lamestream is Alabama's passage of the nation's first anti-Agenda21 legislation.  This is especially significant because of the chorus of the nation's useful idiots (especially of the local kind) who claim that Agenda21 is only a figment of fevered rightwing imaginations and has no bearing on America's property rights and individual freedoms.  On The New American we read from 'Alabama Adopts First Official State Ban on UN Agenda 21' -

The Alabama Senate Bill (SB) 477 legislation, known unofficially among some supporters as the “Due Process for Property Rights” Act, was approved unanimously by both the state House and Senate. After hesitating for a few days, late last month Republican Governor Robert Bentley finally signed into law the wildly popular measure — but only after heavy pressure from activists forced his hand.

Virtually no mention of the law was made in the establishment press. But analysts said the measure was likely the strongest protection against the UN scheme passed anywhere in America so far. The law, aimed at protecting private property rights, specifically prevents all state agencies and local governments in Alabama from participating in the global scheme in any way.

"The State of Alabama and all political subdivisions may not adopt or implement policy recommendations that deliberately or inadvertently infringe or restrict private property rights without due process, as may be required by policy recommendations originating in, or traceable to 'Agenda 21,' " the law states, adding a brief background on the UN plan hatched at the 1992 “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro.

Ruminations - 16mar2012

George Rebane

We watched a DVRd recent ’60 Minutes’ piece on a fifty year program by Texas ranchers to conserve over 150 African game species on their own range lands.  Through their own efforts they have taken contributions from the nation’s zoos and built up the herds/flocks, in the process saving many species that were on the brink of extinction in their native Africa.  The ranchers help pay for this by providing controlled hunting under the aegis of state and federal laws.  The animals are thriving and the enterprise has been a win-win-win all around.

Enter the eco-idiots, a breed that marbles our nation like a disease.  There is a faction that has been working diligently to make hunting of these animals illegal.  Their imminent success promises to shut down the entire conservation program/business.  Their only ‘reason’, besides rank insanity, is that the animals should be taken back to their native Africa and put on nature conserves where dysfunctional governments will allow poachers to kill them off.  In short, the animals should only live in their native habitat that can no longer protect them from extinction – period.

The program's nausea factor was increased by the female correspondent continuing to ask each rancher interviewee ‘If you love and want to save these animals, then why do you allow hunters to come and shoot them?’  The obvious economic answers washed off her little brain like water off a duck’s back.  Now consider the millions of like-minded viewers out there for whom such reportage makes sense.  Pass the barf bag please.

Anthony Watts has published another substantial summary of the scientific controversy over the now notorious temperature ‘hockey stick’ cooked up by Michael Mann over twelve years ago.  Locally, Russ Steele has been tracking the political controversy over anthropogenic global warming (AGW) that has become a public policy control tool for Agenda21 politicians, and article of fervent faith to the scientifically dimwitted.  The review of Mann’s latest book on this controversy again illustrates the sleaze in ‘the debate (about AGW) is over’ that is promoted by the politically correct grant hungry ‘scientists’ and their government handlers.

It is remarkable that the AGW question has not been submitted to a small panel of acknowledged experts who are independent of the government gravy train; a panel similar to the one assembled after the space shuttle Challenger disaster.  The amount of draconian public policy that has already been made by nations, and the more that is contemplated has all been done in the face of a constant stream of evidence that shows the error of the original and revised AGW conclusions.  Would such an issue of global importance be swept under the rug if it were not the only game in town that allows the socialist one-worlders to impose their diktats on the rest of us while we destroy thriving economies on the road to their new world order?

We are attending a Mercatus Center conference in Scottsdale.  As supporters of that institute at George Mason University, we have benefitted from their research into public policy issues that seek to buttress the preservation of rights summarized in The Bastiat Triangle (q.v.).  Of late I have become more and more impatient with what conservatives have traded for progress – namely, preaching homilies to the choir when they assemble (see my ongoing hissy fits about ‘Candyass Republicans’).  At these meetings we are regaled with speeches and presentations that document and memorialize noble accomplishments of free enterprise achieved under the umbrella of liberty.  We are again told how the future would be brighter for all, were we to successfully contain the many-headed monster of collectivism.  But everyone attending such conferences already knows this material chapter and verse, and that is why they wind up only being kumbayahs for conservatives.

This time, instead of having our bellies rubbed one more time, I would like to hear of some, or even any smidgeon of progress made in halting socialism and successfully educating our electorate, then students to reject the ‘solution by redistribution’ messages that originate from the Party of the Fixed Pie and wash across the land.  And if there is no such good news to report, then tell us what we can do to advance liberty and change direction.  Absent that, why gather us together to attend what can only be characterized as the moral equivalent of a wake?

Judea Pearl wins 2011 Turing Award

George Rebane

The Association for Computing Machinery announced today that it has named Dr Judea Pearl of the University of California, Los Angeles as the recipient of the A.M. Turing Award for 2011.  The announcement itself begins –

NEW YORK, March 15, 2012—ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Judea Pearl of the University of California, Los Angeles the winner of the 2011 ACM A.M. Turing Award for innovations that enabled remarkable advances in the partnership between humans and machines that is the foundation of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Pearl pioneered developments in probabilistic and causal reasoning and their application to a broad range of problems and challenges. He created a computational foundation for processing information under uncertainty, a core problem faced by intelligent systems. He also developed graphical methods and symbolic calculus that enable machines to reason about actions and observations, and to assess cause-effect relationships from empirical findings. His work serves as the standard method for handling uncertainty in computer systems, with applications ranging from medical diagnosis, homeland security and genetic counseling to natural language understanding and mapping gene expression data. His influence extends beyond artificial intelligence and even computer science, to human reasoning and the philosophy of science.

The Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing," carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc. It is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing, whose 100th anniversary will be celebrated in June at the ACM 2012 Turing Centenary Celebration that includes 34 past Turing Award winners along with Pearl.

"Like Alan Turing himself, Pearl turned his thinking to constructing procedures that might be harnessed to perform tasks traditionally associated with human intelligence," said Vint Cerf, chair of the ACM 2012 Turing Centenary Celebration, and a former ACM Turing Award recipient. "His accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence and led to extraordinary achievements in machine learning, and they have redefined the term 'thinking machine.'" Cerf pointed to Pearl’s innovation as a quantum leap from Turing’s "test" dating to the 1950s, when Turing set out to discover if machines could think. "Pearl's work on reasoning with uncertainty as well as his game˗changing contributions to machine reasoning about causality have had a pervasive influence not only on machine learning but on natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, computational biology, econometrics, cognitive science, and statistics," Cerf said.

The rest of the announcement may be read here.

Judea Pearl and I first became acquainted as colleagues on various defense research projects during the 1970s when he consulted for the small ‘black studies’ company that I headed during that period.  Subsequently our families became friends and over the years we spent many evenings in exciting discussions and song (Judea on guitar and me on the keyboard - Judea is an excellent musician in voice, choral, and several instruments.).  It was Judea who convinced me to complete my doctorate and join his small troupe of students at UCLA working on the various research tasks that served as the halo around the magnificent tour de force that Judea Pearl presented to the world when he showed how Bayesian networks could be constructed and correctly computed.

Once his 1988 Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference was published, Bayes nets became and have remained the state-of-the-art in machine intelligence.  Bayesian inference now is the standard in all applications that required correct probabilistic reasoning, decisions under uncertainty, and management of risk - in short in all human endeavors.  Every field that has not embraced what Pearl started with Bayes is now scrambling to catch up.

I have long had the honor of calling Judea Pearl my teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend.  Those of us who had the good fortune to recognize early his genius and accomplishments were amply rewarded by what he taught us, and how he guided our individual contributions (my own humble efforts were in machine learning and causality).  It is most appropriate that Judea now joins the pantheon of the recognized greats in computer science. 

‘Rural Myths’ – don’t worry, be happy (updated 2mar12)

George Rebane

There is no question that governments at all levels have become less efficient from the taxpayers’ viewpoint.  This inefficiency is felt from many quarters and with respect to applied metrics, ranging from ‘bang per buck’, through layers of onerous regulations and mandates, to the ongoing removal of freedoms often through gratuitous criminalizations.

We live in a county that, on the whole, is fiscally well managed.  However, in recent years many of us have started to notice some pretty significant lapses in how our elected officials do business.   As examples, we may consider the string of bad decisions made during the recent AtPac lawsuit (q.v.), the demonstrated and endured lack of competency in the county counsel’s office, and our county’s official discounting/denial of its unfunded pension obligations.  On all of these, the inquiring citizen faces a phalanx of tightly circled wagons, and is ridiculed for bringing up individual issues.

The portent of the county’s unfunded liabilities are undoubtedly the biggest sword hanging over our taxable heads.  The amount that the county will have to pay out in the future (the out-years) is actually a complex calculation, and depends on not only the legal obligation to the public service retireds, but also on how much CalPERS will have in our account.  We have to remember that PERS is just an investment manager for the retirement funds the county remits to it.  PERS has no obligation to do anything except disperse what is in the Nevada County’s account.  (And then we are in a risk pool with a couple of hundred other jurisdictions like the profligate City of Bell, which is a whole other dimension of risk.)

This account may go up or down, depending on the vagaries of the securities markets and how astute the PERS portfolio managers are.  Their obligation as a fiduciary is only to do their best, come what may, and also to tell us their best estimate of what our unfunded part is when payments come due.  And that is where the problems start.  Local jurisdictions all over the country are basically in arrears, and many cities and counties are on the brink of Chapter 9 bankruptcy.

In California, Stockton is our next city that is prepared to file.  The San Francisco Chronicle has a more complete report on the entire situation in the state, and it isn’t pretty.

Added to the above calculations we have at least one “side fund” and yet to be explained amounts of monies due that are not shown on the county’s financial statements.  The situation is murky indeed, and our electeds are not exactly leaning forward to clear up the obligations that are facing us.  What I would like to see is a chart like the one below that shows by year Nevada County’s total known and anticipated obligations with error brackets showing the high-to-low range.

For more a higher level perspective, we recall the 2009 quote by Mr Ron Seeling, Chief Actuary of CalPERS –

"I don't want to sugarcoat anything. We are facing decades without significant turnarounds in assets, decades of …unsustainable pension costs of between 25 percent of pay for a miscellaneous plan and 40 to 50 percent of pay for a safety plan …unsustainable pension costs. We've got to find some other solutions.”

And things have gotten worse since then.

The Value of Stereotyping

George Rebane

Stereotyping is the use of a template of characteristics that are thought to belong to members of a particular class more frequently than members of the general population of which the class is a subset.  The template of characteristics is also known as the stereotypical characteristics like, say, a plastic pocket protector full of writing instruments more often seen in the shirt pockets of male engineers than in the pockets of other men.

Stereotyping has gotten a bad rap in our society, and its use is roundly criticized in the public forum.  However, stereotyping, so as to assign or exclude someone from membership in a given class, is built in to almost every critter that lives on this planet.  Why?  Simply because it is a low cost survival technique that has evolved in all species to simplify quick decisions about the famous ‘Three F’ functions – feed, fight, or mount - important to everyone.

But if you understand the underpinnings of stereotyping, it can be a valuable tool in making all kinds of decisions, and also serve as a mirror for better understanding yourself.  I was motivated to write this piece when recently reading Daniel Kahneman’s monumental Thinking, Fast and Slow which dances around the subject without getting into the nitty-gritty of it because of the little math involved.  Kahneman, recent Nobelist and co-father of behavioral economics with the late Amos Tversky, is also a giant in the field of psychology.  In that field stereotyping comes up under the forbidding label of representativeness (q.v. – which is short for quod vide or ‘which see’, and I’ve concluded that its modern version is simply ‘google it’.)

Now consider seeing a good looking woman, finely coiffed, beautifully dressed, and dripping with expensive jewelry, getting out of a chauffeured limousine in front of a fancy restaurant.  You wonder if she’s a member of the currently notorious ‘1%’.  More particularly, what are the chances (friendly word for ‘probability’) that she is a member of that exclusive class, given she has some of the stereotypical characteristics of that class that you just observed?  If you had been facing the other way and your friend told you that a woman just got out a car behind you; then without seeing her, what would you answer if he mused whether the woman belonged to the '1%'?

Christmas in 1949

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary which was broadcast on 16 December 2011.]

‘Tis the season for Christmas stories, so I’m going to tell you about my first Christmas in America.  The year was 1949.  Dad, mom, and I had arrived here in May on a troopship packed with east European refugees.  All of us had gone through WW2 on the wrong side, and then spent the last four years in refugee camps in Germany.  We arrived here with three suitcases and the clothes on our backs – no language, penniless, and literally no idea what was going to happen next when we got off the boat.

By December mom, dad, and I had gone through a hectic summer on a Connecticut chicken farm and were now living in a rented room with a shared bathroom.  It was located across the street from a noisy bar in downtown Willimantic, a poor New England ‘threadmill town’ that in 1949 already looked long of tooth.  Dad and mom had found work in the big threadmill as thread machine loaders – mom started working the day shift and dad was on the night shift.

Actually, mom had spent the summer in Essex as a dishwasher in a café, while dad and I worked on the chicken farm near Danielson.  Without going into the gory details, mom had a heart problem, and the extra heavy work in the threadmill did her in.  She spent most of the fall of 1949 in the hospital.

Early after starting fourth grade that fall, I wandered into the Willimantic fire department, drawn by the bright red fire trucks on display every afternoon.  My less than perfect English gave me away, and after the firemen quizzed me, they ‘adopted’ me.  Since my father was asleep during the day, there was little for me to do in our room except wake him up, therefore I was told to report to the firehouse every day after school for a hot meal, do a few light chores around the big fire engines, and play with the duty Dalmatian that was a resident of almost every fire house in those days.  My father approved the arrangement, and the firemen became my extended family to make up for the one I seldom saw during those months.  In spite of everything, that fall was exciting for a nine-year-old, I even got to ride on the fire truck responding to a couple of small fires.

As the weather got colder and the New England snows came, I looked forward to Christmas because, well, I had always looked forward to Christmas.  Even in the refugee camp it had been a festive time of music, hand-made decorations, Christmas tree, special church services, hope for a renewed life, and, of course, the anticipation of my present.  But this Christmas was going to be different because my mom would not be home until after the holidays, and dad would only get off on Christmas Day.  I knew that at dad’s $40 per week, presents were out.  Refugee kids become money savvy at an early age.

But I was also part of the fire department, and there was plenty to do to decorate and prepare the fire house for Christmas.  I was pretty much blown away by all the lights and bright shiny things and wreaths and boughs and the big Christmas tree that were part of an American Christmas.  The local Lutheran church had also taken us under their wing, and going to the Advent services was a real introduction to American Christmas music.  It was amazing how much more went on in an American church, especially during the holidays, than at the Estonian church that we had attended in the camp.

About a week before Christmas we found out that mom would be released from the hospital, and we would all be together in our first real home in America at 38 North Street, Willimantic, Connecticut, second floor.  With mom on the mend and expecting to go back to work soon after the holidays, things were again looking up.  Dad and mom were already talking of better jobs which would let us move into a real apartment with a bathroom.  We all felt that the way to an American future was beginning to take shape.

Then a week before Christmas my teacher told me that I was invited to a special Christmas party with a Santa Claus to be held at school.  I remember walking back to school through the snow in the evening.  The room was full of kids I didn’t know, there was a Santa Claus, and when it was my turn, he handed me a toy filling station with a garage and pump island on it.  It was used, but still in good working order.  I was more than a bit embarrassed by this, and walked home carrying the cumbersome filling station.

What had stunned me was that this was a Christmas party for poor kids, and I had been singled out as a poor kid.  But I knew that they had gotten something terribly wrong.  During and after the war I had seen plenty of kids and families who were really poor.  And I knew, that especially on this Christmas, I was definitely not a poor kid.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on these and other themes in my Union columns, and on georgerebane.com where the transcript of this commentary appears.  These opinions are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Merry Christmas.