We All Scream for Ice Cream

Since I wrote my last post on competence, something has happened to remind me that competence is the precursor of high quality, and incompetence leads to low quality.

My wife and daughter and son-in-law went together to buy me a gift for Father's Day: a White Mountain hand-crank ice cream maker. We like home-made ice cream, and we make a fair amount of it. Historically, the White Mountain ice cream makers have been regarded as the best. Expensive, but reputed the best.

So, yesterday evening we went over to my daughter's, and the box was put in front of me. I opened it, we put it together, ingredients were mixed and I started cranking. That's when the trouble started.

It's a simple machine; you turn the crank, the gear on the end of the shaft turns two other gears which rotate the canister in one direction and the dasher in the opposite direction, while the ice and salt in the outer wooden bucket lowers the temperature of the mix.

But on this one, as I cranked, the gears kept jamming. Crank a couple of turns, jam. Back it up, crank half a turn, jam again. Eventually I figured out that if I pushed in on the crank, hard, while turning the handle it would go a little longer before jamming again. Forget any ideas about the kids helping crank the thing.

Then, after about fifteen minutes of disjointed cranking, the ice cream began to thicken a little bit (not done, just beginning to stiffen) and the gears started to slip, between jams.

We finally got out my daughter's old machine, transferred the ice cream mix and ice to it(minus some metal particles that had gotten into the ice cream) and finished it while my son-in-law and I tried to figure out what was wrong with the White Mountain.

The first thing we noticed was that the gears were rough castings, coated with a finish, but no lubrication (and no, the instruction book did not say to grease the gears during our assembly). They were also fitted together very loosely, and did not mesh tightly together. There was a lot of slop in the gear box. There was also a lot of slop where the dasher shaft came through the canister top, about a 3/4" hole in the top for a shaft about 9/16" in diameter, which is how the metal particles from the gears got into the ice cream. Even the wooden bucket was not that well made; my grandfather was a cooper (barrel maker) for Seagram's, and over the years I have learned at least enough about his trade to spot whether such work is done well or not.

We finished the ice cream in the old machine, ate it all, and came home. I got online and started looking up "White Mountain Hand Crank Ice Cream Machine Problems", and found our experience was not unique. There were a number of glowing recommendations, but there were also a number of complaints. One of the glowing reviews that seemed to come up on every site was from a person who had had a White Mountain for twenty-three years. But most of the negative reviews seemed to be from people who had bought one in the last four or five years. The problems seemed to be of three major types: leaky wooden buckets, metal shavings in the ice cream, and the gears jamming and slipping.

White Mountain is an old company, dating back to the 1850s in New England. But like many other companies I have seen, the ownership has changed repeatedly in the last fifty years or so. The booklet in the box was marked "Holmes Group, Inc." Holmes is a maker of portable electric heaters, fans, and air cleaners. But the invoice from the online retailer called it a "Rival White Mountain" model. It turns out that both of these companies are owned by an organization called Jarden, which owns both Rival and Sunbeam, Holmes, Coleman and a batch of other producers of sporting goods, small appliances, smoke alarms, playing cards, and all sorts of unrelated things.

The old White Mountain ice cream makers were made in New England. Mine had no markings anywhere on it to say where any part was made, but there was a small item on the carton, "Assembled in the U.S.A. from Foreign and Domestic Components."

So we have yet another instance of a product from this country with a good reputation for quality that has gone down the drain. Forget about craftsmanship; just order parts from various countries (whoever is cheapest), slap them together and ship them out. And don't bother with testing the product; as long as it goes together, ship it out to the retailers.

This is not just individual incompetence; it is corporate incompetence, at all levels. The product reviewers who had tried to get the company to honor the "Five year warranty" had problems getting the parts to fix their machines, too. This is not a complicated machine, and they are charging a premium price for it. They are living on their past reputation, and it is beginning to fade.

I am not going to frustrate myself dealing with the warranty. We have a return authorization from the retailer, and I am going to send it back. It will cost us for shipping, and a restocking fee, but will probably avoid a lot of frustration. And in the future I will do what I can to avoid buying any products from Jarden and its subsidiaries.

Competence

I have been thinking about a post on this subject off and on for months, but an article I read online last week triggered some more thinking, and over the weekend I had time to sort a bit of this out. Here is a quote: "I was led to believe that a powerful and active Federal government would be good for society at large, but unfortunately the Federal government's ability to be large and active is not as pronounced as its ability to be large, meddlesome when its help is not wanted, and slothful when its help is actually needed." (from "The White House and the Oil Spill" by Pejman Yousefzadeh, in "The New Ledger")http://newledger.com/2010/05/the-white-house-and-the-oil-spill/

I have said for years that the problem with Big Government, and Big Business as well, is finding people who are competent to run it. And this lack of competent people is becoming more and more a problem.

America was once a "can do" nation. The slogan "The difficult we do at once; the impossible takes a little longer" from the Army Corps of Engineers expresses this well. And for generations Americans as a people lived it out. Marvels of engineering and construction, settling a vast continent, the overthrow of enemies on both sides of the world by 1945, and subsequently helping rebuild the economies of our former enemies have all cemented this tradition.

But it would seem that in my lifetime this has changed for the worse. Our educational system has promoted ever-higher levels of education, but it seems to have resulted in a trading of educational credentials for actual competence; and there is a difference! In fact, there are a number of differences!

The higher education system focuses on reading, talking, and thinking. Competence is about DOING. Academics debate and tweak theories, and too often stay in the theoretical realm. Competence is based in Reality. Credentials at best imply that an individual ought to be able to do a particular task or work. But competence is experience and proven ability. Credentials may boost self-esteem, but competence builds self-respect.

Personally, in my college years I trained for two different professions. I am trained as a pastor, and as an accountant (in the late '70s I went to the University of Cincinnati for business classes, and ended up only a few credits short of the requirements at that time to sit for the CPA exam). One thing I heard during that time from a practicing accountant was that the most important things he learned about accounting were the things he picked up the year after he finished school. Over the years I have questioned people in other professions and they confirmed that their experience was similar. So, there is all too often a disconnect between the academic world and the real world. They spend time on things people in the real world don't need, and miss things the real world does need.

When I was in Bible college, some of the faculty members were pastoring churches themselves, almost always small churches in small-town or rural settings. The men who pastored the large churches were busy running those churches, and were not on the faculty. Years later, when I saw George Barna's note that the average church size in the US is 90-100 people, I realized that that is all the church size the seminary professors can handle themselves; and you can't really teach someone else what you don't know yourself. There is an old adage (it gets me in trouble with my schoolteacher friends every time I bring it up, but there is all too much truth behind it): "Them that can do; them that can't, teach it!"

Competence is about knowing what to do, and with it, what not to do. It is knowing how to do it, and when to stop doing it. And it comes by the experience of actually doing it, not just talking about it.

Grass Pharisees

No, not that kind, the green stuff all over the ground, what you always meant by "grass" before the 1960s. Now, I don't really mind grass, I don't dislike it or anything like that. It 's just that sometimes we move and find out our new neighbors have some kind of fixation on grass. Some people think their yard has to look as good as any golf course, and a few of them seem to measure it regularly to see if it needs to be mowed again.

Now I am not bothered that much by people like that; if they get pleasure out of their yard, that's okay by me. But too many of these "grass freaks" get all religious about it; they want ME to take care of my lawn the way they take care of theirs. And that is where I get bothered.

I guess when you come right down to it, I just don't care that much about having a perfect lawn. It does not excite me that much, certainly not enough to put in all that work to get it. I'll do other things, mainly on the house itself. Give me two-by-fours, drywall, paint, wire, pipe and a bunch of tools, and I'm a happy man. But grass? As long as it is reasonably green, and not too tall, that's good enough for me. (No, I don't water my lawn much; it costs money, and I'd just have to mow it that much sooner. Astroturf? If I had that much money, I've got better things to spend it on, like tools.) So what if there's dandelions? They're kind of pretty in their own way, and it's fun to see the fluff blow away. Raking leaves? Whatever for? better to let them go back to the soil where they are, rather than deplete the soil nutrients by bagging them up and throwing it all away! No, I do not get excited about cutting grass, or fertilizing it, or weeding it, or any of that stuff. I'll cut it eventually; I've never let it get so long that I found a car when I mowed the yard. But I don't do it enough to please those grass Pharisees.

We did make one of them happy this past year. We moved away from him and sold the house to somebody else. I don't know if his new neighbor is a grass Pharisee; I know he isn't a fixer-upper like me, because he bought a very fixed-up house from us. That house was in rough shape when we bought it, and the buyer got a very nice house when we left. That's what my wife and I do with houses: buy them run-down and cheap, and clean them up and make them nicer than we found them. We just don't do any more than we have to with the doggone yard!

I have written a few times about writings of Francis Schaeffer and the things he foresaw in our culture. But I want to take a little space this time to point out some things he did not see coming. I was re-reading portions of his 1979 book "How Should We Then Live" in which he saw a bleak future coming for our society. Some of his concerns are problems for us still, but others have changed in unexpected ways or been replaced by other problems, and a couple have possibly given new hope that he did not see.

One major change since 1979 that he did not foresee was the collapse of the Soviet Union, the breakup of the Warsaw Pact and even the secession of some of the Soviet "republics" like Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Russia today is still an authoritarian country, and possibly always will be; it would take generations for a people without a history of self-government to develop it from scratch. Likewise, the change of China to an authoritarian but somewhat capitalist state might have surprised him.We still have threats of war and terror, but now it comes from Islamic terrorists, not from Communists. It is still not comfortable, but there is a difference.

He also wrote about the use of "high-speed computers" by authoritarian states (Communist and our own) as a tool of oppression. But about the time of his death in 1984, the computer began to change from a tool for government, big business and academia to a tool for many ordinary people, with the arrival of the personal computer and the Internet. I saw some statements years ago that the copy machine helped bring down the Soviet Union; I once saw another that technology had allowed to KGB to tape so many phone conversations that they lacked the manpower to listen to and evaluate them all, and their system went down anyway.

Now, the further development of computers in the last twenty years has become a way for people to communicate across the country and around the world. And while governments may try to restrict the freedom of the Internet, their success may be limited. Recent events in Iran raise the possibility that regime may yet be brought down, in part, by the Internet and Twitter!

My last post was about "Climategate", and I heard a statement on a local radio show referring to Al Gore's claim years ago to have invented the Internet, which has now been used to cut the ground from under his Global Warming crusade.

The Internet has done something else as well. One of Schaeffer's concerns was the power of a biased press and media in our culture, especially to spin the news and even determine what gets reported as news. But that power has taken severe hits in the last few years. Talk radio and Internet news sources have eaten into their monopoly. In a number of cases in the last few years bloggers have broken major stories before the press did, and sometimes in spite of the press's attempts to ignore them. Climategate is only the most recent example; the Acorn videos gives another. When Dan Rather was pushing the letters reflecting poorly on George Bush's military service, it was bloggers who noticed, and published, that those letters must be forgeries because certain details in the print were possible on word processors and computers, but not on typewriters--and word processors and desktop computers did not exist at the time the letters were supposedly written. Bloggers are still around, but Rather is off the air. The power of the "mainstream media" has been severely reduced and may yet be broken.

And to add injury to insult, the Internet has been a major factor in the "legacy media" going broke. Newspapers are shutting down all over the country; the New York Times has borrowed millions and laid off many of its workers. The threat to them is two-pronged: competition from other sources of news on one hand, and loss of advertising revenue on the other (my wife and I have not bought anything from a newspaper classified ad in years, but we have bought several items, including our vehicles, from Craigslist). The downward spiral seems likely to go on for a while longer, and shows signs of taking down many magazines as well as newspapers.

So, some of the clouds Schaeffer saw thirty years ago have turned out to have silver linings. We still have causes for concern, some of them the same and some different; but we also have cause for hope. I certainly have enjoyed the friendships I have found online; some have been across the country, and some did lead to local face-to-face relationships. We will face the remaining problems as we have to.

"Climategate"

One of the hot topics of the last week or so has been what's called "Climategate" or "Climaquiddick" after past scandals. People are arguing over the significance of the leaked material, but a cursory reading of the emails certainly does look like certain scientists have played fast and loose with both the data and with the historic ethics of modern science. And quite frankly, I was not all that surprised by the revelations now coming to light.

Those who have read a lot of my blogging, and people who have known me well over the years, are aware that I have had two favorite Christian authors for many years: C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer. I have often said that I read Lewis for his understanding and expression of Christianity and Schaeffer for his understanding and expression of our culture. (In the last couple of years, as I acquired Schaeffer's "Complete Works" set and read the books I had not been able to access before I increased my appreciation of his more specifically Christian material, but that has cropped up in other posts and may again.)

If Schaeffer were still alive (he died in 1984) he would not be surprised by these recent events either. While he had serious criticisms about the way the environment had been treated by our society, and even by those who were supposed to be Christians, he was also one of the first to notice that the "environmental movement" had been taken over by leftists as a tool to gain influence in society and government. And if you look at the actions being promoted to combat "global warming" many of them are top-down, coercive, government-imposed answers that will increase the control of a few over many.

The second thing I was reminded of was Schaeffer's discussion of the likely direction of science, in his book "How Should We Then Live" from 1979. He brought up the writings of Alfred North Whitehead(1861-1947), who had written that modern science had arisen because of the teaching of Christianity that God was rational and created an orderly universe. This belief made it possible for the early scientists to work out the things that became the basis of modern science. And Whitehead was not a Christian writer; he was a mathematician and philosopher but not even known to be a Christian at all. Yet he admitted that modern science grew out of the Christian view of the world.

But later in the book Schaeffer made a prediction. He declared that as science got farther and farther from the Christian worldview that made it possible, it would decline and tend toward two things: a high level of technology, and sociological manipulation. We certainly have the high level of technology; the computer I am writing this on and the Internet that carries it to whoever may read it are proof of that. But there are more and more signs that we have the efforts to use science to manipulate society as well.

And that is what is at the root of "Climategate": an effort to make the "science" give the desired answer rather than searching the data and seeing what the data actually means. These emails talk about "tricks" and adjusting data to reflect the desired outcome, and about refusing to share the original data so that someone else can verify your results (one of the basic traditions of the hard sciences), and even trying to discredit and silence any critics or skeptics. And one of the latest revelations is that the original, unaltered "raw" data was thrown out and all that remains is the fudged "data", which was doctored to match the theory, where a real scientist would doctor the theory to match the data! These are not real scientists; they are political hacks.

This one "Climategate" incident is bad enough. But there have been plenty of lesser scandals in recent years. A few years ago someone was claiming to have achieved nuclear fusion-"cold fusion" in his lab; it was later label a hoax, because no one else could duplicate the experiment successfully. A South Korean researcher claimed to have cloned multiple animals; he is now facing fraud charges, from what I heard a couple of weeks ago. The continuing emphasis and grant money for embryonic stem cell research, in spite of the failures in that area and the successes in adult stem cell research, are another case of ideology controlling science.

This last point is my own thinking. I am not a scientist, but I went through a pretty decent science program in my schooling many years ago. There was one assumption that underpinned all the scientific advances, all the work of the last few hundred years: trust. Scientists must be able to trust each other to work objectively and honestly. That is the real basis for duplicating experiments and peer-reviews of results, to make sure no one violates the trust of his co-workers. (Those early scientists who started the whole enterprise had grown up with the Christian view that people are flawed and may not be totally trustworthy at all times, so they went for, in Ronald Reagan's words, "Trust, but verify.") And that "Trust" component is exactly what is at stake here. The "Climategate" emails seem to indicate that these " scientists" have doctored data to fit their theory, ignored data that did not fit, thrown away the original data so no one else can check their work, and abused the peer-review process to silence anyone who might call them to account. This is no longer a scientific problem; it is a morals problem.

Hard Choices

I know I haven't written anything for a while; as I said to a friend lately, "Life is what happens while you were making other plans." But some things have been nagging at me for several months, and maybe I can get something down here.

There's been a lot of noise the past few months over the "enhanced interrogation" methods used on some of the captured terrorists by our government. I have to admit that a lot of the outrage on one side strikes me as politically motivated, because so many of these people have been putting down traditional morality for many years, and mocking anyone who seems to be associated with it. (I may have something more to say about this in another post, if I can get it written.) Yet suddenly they are up in arms over this misbehavior! They have excused all kinds of moral lapses among their friends and supporters, but let their political opponents commit a sin, and they are enraged over it.

I've seen some others who are conservatives themselves and are outraged that their leaders approved these actions. And many conservatives are saying essentially, "hey, it worked--therefore it was justified!" (Apparently many religious conservatives fall into this group, too.)

It seems to me that most people want to paint their own side as bright white and their opponents as totally black. The trouble is, life doesn't always work out that way. As a Christian, I believe we are all fallen people, living in a fallen, damaged world. Even the best of us fail at times, and at the other end of the spectrum there are people who are almost completely evil, doing good about as often as the best do wrong. Most of us land somewhere between. And one result of this situation is that sometimes things are not "black and white" with a clear choice. Sometimes you look at the available options and none is completely white, all are darker or lighter shades of gray. The principle involved is called "the lesser of two evils." I would even say sometimes it may be three or four evils, or more. All you can do is try for the one that is the least black, as far as you can tell. I have had a few times in my life that I had to make that sort of decision, on a small scale--nothing of any national importance or significance--and I am glad that I did not have to make any such choices involving life or death for other people. I am very glad I was not in a position in government having to make the choices about interrogating prisoners.

I do not agree with those who call the "enhanced interrogation" a good thing; I think it is an ugly thing. But I can see that it may have been necessary, or seemed necessary at the time. That still does not make it a good thing, and I think we need to recognize this. On the other side, those who did not have to make such decisions themselves need to show a little more humility and not be so self-righteous in condemning others. If they were in the same position with the same responsibilities, they might make the same choice. And if there really are some in elected office who did know about the matter, kept quiet until the uproar started, and then joined the chorus of outrage: these may be the worst of all.

"This is broken"

A few days ago my wife found a video of a conference presentation called "This Is Broken." It was pretty funny, showing all kinds of things people do--signs, policies, instructions--that don't really make sense. It seems there was a website with this title, now moved to another, focusing on "good experience" in business-to-customer relations. Their conferences are geared to helping businesses keep from making stupid mistakes that can drive customers away. But it's gotten me thinking about the brokenness in people, and in our society.

There is a school of thought that everybody is basically good, and if they just get their external problems fixed--poverty, lack of education, poor housing, etc.--everybody will get along fine. In the construction field, where I spent over twenty years of my work life, this attitude translates into "If everybody in the skilled trades is properly trained and licensed, everything will be done right." Well, over the last twenty years I've seen way too much shoddy work done by supposedly licensed tradesmen (not to mention all the car accidents seen and heard of caused by licensed drivers). The sad truth is, people do not always do what they know they should do, on the job and in the car and in a lot of other places, too. In fact, in all areas of life, the vast majority of people fail at times to even live up to their own standards, let alone anybody else's. And it's not just limited to the moral issues; none of us is a smart as we like to think, or as competent as we think we are. (The real problem with Big Government and Big Business is that nobody is really competent to run them!) We really are "broken."

Christianity and Judaism are the only religions that understand this. They teach that man was created good, but fell from that state and now is at best mixed--good and bad mingled in each person. We are now "broken," to borrow the term used in that video, and even the best of us cannot be counted on to do right all the time. And some are so broken they do wrong most of the time--from the petty criminals to the Hitlers, Stalins, and other monsters.

The problem is, most of us do not know and do not accept the fact that we are "broken." We go our merry way, leaving trails of misdeeds of various kinds and extents behind us. But we are, and we need healing. The Good News of Christianity is that God chose not to leave us in our brokenness, but to make a way for our healing. That does not mean the healing is instantaneous--almost all Christians do and say stupid and wrong things, because we are still somewhat broken even if we are on the right road to the healing. Some take longer on the road than others, some make little progress, and some of us take some pretty strange detours. And the healing is not forced on us; we have to recognize our need and accept it, which comes hard for many people. But God created us to have free will, and has chosen to respect our free will even when we abuse it by doing wrong.

So we as individuals are broken; the society and culture we live in are broken; our government and institutions, including our churches, are all to varying degrees broken. The best thing we have in all of this is the hope of healing, but we must put our hope and our trust in God, not in some broken person, party, or institution.