Leaving/Arriving

You only leave home when home won’t let you stay.

― Warsan Shire

In the past two weeks, over 14,000 Afghan refugees have arrived at Dulles Airport.

They represent one-half of one percent of all Afghan refugees, but differ from most because they're our allies. 

Their loyal service to our troops is now a death warrant at home.

I hope you'll take a moment to donate whatever you can, to help them resettle here.

I want to raise $911 by 9/11 and am using Facebook to do it

Your money will go directly to Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area, a nonprofit group doing effective work on the refugees' behalf.

Facebook pays all the processing fees, so 100% of your donation goes directly to the nonprofit.

Wring a little justice from an unjustified war. 

Donate now.

And thanks!

10 New Rules for Answering Customer Surveys

If you want a booming business, you have to create raving fans.

— Ken Blanchard

Want to turn a raving fan into a raging one?

Send him another goddamn survey.

"What’s the deal with so many companies sending surveys after you interact with them?" David Meerman Scott recently asked. "It is crazy for a company to do this."

I think it's worse than crazy.

I think it's psychopathic.

In their quest to "engage" us, marketing and customer-service managers have so abused the survey, they've turned a valid instrument into a vicious irritant.

It's time for customers to strike back.

Here are the 10 new rules for answering customer surveys:

1. Drop everything and respond to every survey immediately, regardless of the time-investment. Senders will think you're serious. You might even win a prize.

2. Regardless of your name and gender, always identify yourself as "Semolina Pilchard."

3. When asked to describe yourself, always answer "I Am The Walrus."  

4. Answer every Likert scale question in the negative. ("Never," "Very poor," "Not at all important," "Strongly disagree," etc.)

5. For all other types of rating questions, answer by choosing the worst rating. (For example, "Extremely unprofessional," "Extremely dissatisfied," "Not at all helpful," etc.)

6. Regardless of its purpose, answer every multiple-choice question "None of the above" or "Other." When asked to specify "Other," always answer "Everybody's got one."

7. Answer all binary scale questions "No."

8. Regardless of its purpose, answer every open-ended (write-in) question "Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe." The only exceptions are the two questions below.

9. When ask to supply "Additional comments," always answer "Comments, comments, comments, comments."

10. When asked to suggest improvements, always answer "Send me money, not surveys."

"Each time you contact a customer you should be providing something of value," David Meerman Scott says.

Rule 10 reinforces his sage advice.

So go ahead: apply these rules to your next survey.

You'll love the results.

Alone. Unread. And Ready to Die.

Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope.

— Kofi Annan

This week, CNBC reporter Donie O'Sullivan conducted a brief interview with a Trump supporter—and a true American nihilist. 

O'Sullivan asked if the man whether he planned to get vaccinated.

"Our days are numbered," he said. "It don't matter."

A cohort of killjoys like this man walks among us.

Perhaps Covid-19 is a divine instrument that will rid us of all the nihilists like him; I often wonder.

In any event, I place the blame for rampant nihilism in America today not on globalization, urbanization, or declining church attendance, but on the source of so many social woes: illiteracy.

When people read, they take hope—hope in progress, hope in their fellows, hope in their leaders, hope in themselves. They "read to know they're not alone," as writer William Nicholson says.

Today there's a hope gap among America's illiterate. 

They're alone, unread, and ready to die.

"It don't matter" is their worldview, and on that ground they can justify anything: shooting their enemies; trafficking in drugs; swindling their customers; trafficking in teenage girls; spreading Covid-19; you name it. 

"It don't matter."

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, one-fifth of the US population is functionally illiterate. And they're not all immigrant peasants, as conservatives insist. Among the 43 million illiterates in the US, 15.5 million are White (14.5 million are Latino; and 13 million are Black or "other").

Illiteracy affects our entire society:

• Illiterates are sickies. The Milken Institute reports that illiteracy results in $238 billion in excess healthcare costs every year, a dollar amount equaling the annual healthcare costs for 47 million Americans.
  
  
• Illiterates are sponges. The National Council for Adult Learning reports that illiteracy costs $225 billion in crime, joblessness, and loss of tax revenue due to joblessness, every year. Add that to the healthcare costs and we're wasting over half a trillion dollars annually on them.
  
  
• Illiterates are criminals. In addition, the US Department of Justice reports that 75% of prison inmates are illiterate. (Criminals can't read, so we throw the book at 'em.)

And then there's politics.

How many right-wing nihilists are nihilists because they're illiterate?

No study exists to answer the question. 

But studies do exist that show that right wing people are out of touch with factual reality:

• Four in 10 Republicans believe the flu is more deadly than Covid-19, although Covid-19 is over 11 times more deadly (Brookings).

• Six in 10 Republicans believe Biden "stole" the presidential election (Reuters).

• Three in 10 Republicans believe Qanon's conspiracy theories (Survey Center on American Life).

Are these right-wingers out of touch because they don't or won't or can't read? 

I think so. 

They're alone, unread and ready to die, because "it don't matter."

When people read, they find hope.

When they don't, they are hopeless—in both senses of the word.

NOTE: Embedded links in my posts lead to sources and other good stuff.

Winnie and Nancy

During the height of the Blitz, Winston Churchill finagled an invitation to spend weekends at Ditchley, the 300-year-old country house of Ronald Tree, a friend and fellow hater of Hitler, 75 miles outside London.

In requesting the open invitation, Churchill was bowing to his security people, who feared that Hitler would eventually target the prime minister for assassination if he spent every weekend at Chequers, his official country residence.

Tree, who invited Churchill to "use the house as your own," was a member of Parliament and richer than Croesus, having inherited a chunk of the $125 million estate of Chicago retailer Marshall Field. 

In addition, Tree had married his cousin's widow, Nancy Field, and so acquired his late cousin's chunk of the estate, as well.

Nancy was an American, Charlottesville-born and bred, and, like her former neighbor Thomas Jefferson, showed a knack for home décor. 

She had stuffed Ditchley with furniture, fabrics and art, all carefully arranged and orchestrated, and was thrilled on any weekend to showcase the house to Churchill and his family, guests, bodyguards, cronies, and staff.

Churchill was impressed, and for good cause. 

Nancy's touch, which emphasized color, comfort, and informality, ran to every nook and cranny of the place.

Her aesthetic—labeled by one designer "humble elegance and pleasing decay"—would become legendary throughout England and the very model for the "country home interior," still a prevalent motif today.

Churchill loved the "large and charming" house and its over-the-top rooms so much that Ditchley became his second home—and home office. 

He escaped to it from London throughout the Blitz, as described by Erik Larson in The Splendid and the Vile, staying for weekends which saw bouts of hard work interrupted by board games, dinners, garden strolls, and movies (the house had a home theater).

No slouch, Nancy leveraged her tastemaker's touch after the war, buying the London design firm Colefax & Fowler.

The firm specialized in country house décor, blending faded colors, chintzes and painted furniture and antiques in dreamy, romantic arrangements. Nancy turned it into a design powerhouse.

Referred to at her death in 1994 as the doyenne of interior decorators, Nancy was said to have "the finest taste of anyone in the world."

Above: Interior designer William Eubanks' English country manor-style home in Memphis.

How to Be a Bad Tourist in Croatia

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

— Herbert Simon

It's easy to grab attention on social media, hard to hold it. 

Attention-grabbing headlines (like the one for this post) assault us moment by moment.

But the vast majority of the posts attached to such headlines fail to pay off.

Like a damp Chinese rocket, they fizzle upon launch, leaving us vexed and perplexed. (I read the whole post about touring Croatia and still haven't a clue how to be a good tourist there.)

Most social posts disappoint readers because their authors aren't rewarded for legwork, but only for eyeballs.

All you find when you read these posts, at best, are vapid opinions, impressions, clichés, and half-truths. 

Hard research and data are absent.

Economist Herbert Simon blamed readers, not writers, for the failure.

Humanity has a habit, Simon believed, of coasting through life without seeking data; in fact, shunning it.

We make all of most important decisions—about ourselves, our families, our businesses, our habitats, our government, and our planet—based on half-assed data-gathering.

He called our method of decision-making satisficing (satisfying + sufficing).

To satisfice is to settle on a course of action that's acceptable—that suffices despite your lack of data about causes, conditions, and consequences.

Usually, that mans we choose the very first option that presents itself, and never the "optimal" option.

Simon believed we are fundamentally—perhaps genetically—allergic to data and that most serious problems we face are "computationally intractable."

Only artificial intelligence, he believed, could save mankind from its penchant for bad decision-making.

I'm sure if I asked a supercomputer to advise me about being a good tourist in Croatia, the machine would tell me to stay home and read journalist Slavenka Drakulić's 250-page Cafe Europa Revisted and maybe leave Croatia to itself.