The Abominable 1222 Posi-Temp cartridge

Have you ever had to replace a broken cartridge valve for a shower/tub? I've done it now twice in my lifetime, and may yet have to do it again a few times before I go. 

The cartridge is the Moen 1222 Posi-Temp device, and in some ways it's ingenious. It allows a single handle fixture to control a shower/tub's water. You pull on the handle to open the water flow, turn the handle left or right to modify the temperature. They're found in tubs, showers, and tub/shower combinations.

The cartridge is small and easy to install, but after sitting in a wall and getting used daily for ten years they eventually wear out and break. Commonly, you'll find that you suddenly cannot close the faucet and the flow won't stop. Or maybe it starts leaking, or perhaps you can't control the temperature anymore. Anyway, it breaks and you'll have to replace it. Even if you get a complimentary replacement cartridge from Moen (they will send you one free if you're the original owner of the home), you'll still have to undergo the labor to perform the replacement work. You could hire a plumber, of course, but I'd recommend doing it yourself if you are moderately handy. 

Removing the shower handle is not difficult. The problem comes when you have to remove the old 1222 cartridge. The things tend to get stuck pretty bad in the brass valve body. The first time I had to do one of these, I pulled on the old cartridge and it wouldn't budge. I had to use a puller that allowed me to slowly use the power of torque to gradually pull the cartridge out, and I saw the cause of the resistance. There are rubber oval grommets on the left and right sides of the cartridge and as I was pulling them out, one had folded over on itself and created considerable friction. Fortunately, I was able to work through it and remove the cartridge. Putting the replacement cartridge in is super easy. 

But recently I had to do another cartridge extraction and this one was worse. I used the same tool I had before, but after reaching the maximum distance it could pull, the cartridge was still stuck. I used a pair of channel lock pliers to wrestle with the cartridge and managed to get it a little further out but it was really stuck good and wouldn't budge. I increased the force and the housing cracked and the cartridge broke in half. Now I had half the cartridge, a mass of plastic and metal, still stuck in the brass housing. Yuck. And you have to be careful here because if you damage the brass valve body you've just turned a $50 job into a $500 job. 

WHY? Why in 100 plus years of plumbing technology evolution have we not figured out a better way to manage this? Now I have to go caveman on this thing to finish what should be an easy job.

All right, it is what it is. With a mix of screwdriver, drill, chisel, and needle nose pliers, I break apart the innards of the remaining assembly and finally get it clear of the brass. During the extraction I could see the rubber grommets had sort of gotten stuck in the left and right passageways on the sides of the brass (where the hot and cold water come from). I wonder if that caused some of the resistance. 

I am not the only one dealing with this problem. There are dozens of videos on the internet of others dealing with this. Common approaches to resolving it are:

• Use a hair dryer or heating tool to heat the area and help loosen the cartridge.
• If the main valve rod breaks off the cartridge, use a drill and a tap to get a grip on the inside of the cartridge and then pull it out.

Both of those didn't apply to my situation. In my case, I had to literally tear the cartridge apart bit by bit. I did get the idea to use the drill from one person's video. You can CAREFULLY drill the side wall of the cartridge housing and this can loosen it.

The best solution for handy work though is to have the right tools. Here are two that can potentially make this job easier:

• The Lakeview Puller [LakeviewPuller.com]. This baby is $175 and probably worth it, if you're a plumber that gets called on to do this task regularly. It's similar to the puller I have now but it's longer and has a slot up the top and bottom to accommodate the rectangular panel at the base of the cartridge stem (the one identifying hot/cold with the letters "HC"). This tool is designed to attach to a drill, so once you're hooked in correctly, the drill will make fast work of the extraction, even if the grommets are causing issues. It's a great tool, but probably too expensive for someone like me that just does this once every 7 years. 
• Another tool option is the FlowRite ONA Puller [Amazon.com]. It's $75 at Amazon and has attachments that'll handle cartridges similarly to the Lakeview Puller, but with elbow grease rather than a drill. 

If the next cartridge I have to deal with proves to be a total bastard, I may go ahead and buy one of the above tools. A competent person can do anything, and a competent person with the right tools can do anything more efficiently.

The Job of Factual Verification

The title of this entry is from Jay McInerney's Bright Lights Big City. I read it a long time ago and don't even remember exactly whether the phrase was serious (did the main character work in a fact checking department) or sarcastic (perhaps a treatise on mundane work). But I thought about it when remembering an article in Vietnam magazine about the battle of Ben Tre. 

The article noted that at the end of the battle there was a US officer that quoted as saying "It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.," a quote captured by reporter Peter Arnett that would become one of the most famous lines from Vietnam and that would symbolize the futility of the war.

The Vietnam article says the quote is commonly incorrectly attributed to a US Army officer, claiming it was actually a US Air Force officer (although this was a long time ago and I'll have to find that issue and reread it - I reserve the right to correct this blog entry if I have misremembered the article). I have often thought of this claim and didn't have resources to challenge it. But recently I was doing some spelunking around on the internet and this quote came up again and sent me on an odd rabbit trail.

The Ben Tre quote and its origins appear to have been the subject of much controversy. There are conflicting accounts of who said it, there are some who accuse Arnett of misquoting or even inventing it, and still others who claim to have witnessed it and directly attribute it to a name (Arnett did not reveal the name of his source, saying only that he'd spoken with several officers about the battle).

The most convincing appears to be a captain of the US Army Corps of Engineers, one Michael D. Miller. He's got his own website [nhe.net] where he posts some remembrances of his time with the engineers in Vietnam. He's proud of some of his team's accomplishments, such as building schools and hospitals for the Vietnamese (and he should be proud). 

Miller was stationed in a town called Rach Kein, 25 miles northwest of Ben Tre. One of the pages on the site is dedicated to Ben Tre [nhe.net]. He did not participate in the battle at Ben Tre, but after the battle he attended a press briefing, and Miller's testimonial is that US Army Major Peter Booris was the person who said the famous quote. It's not quite clear if this was in fact a press briefing at Ben Tre or at Rach Kein, but if we are to believe Miller's account of the origin of "It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it," then we have to figure it was in Ben Tre, where Arnett would have been. 

Still more questions arise as we keep digging. A 2018 article at Bloomberg.com has writer Stephen L. Carter pondering the etymology of the quote and ultimately finding that its gist existed far before Arnett's piece appeared. Carter notes several examples of the pyrrhic sentiment having appeared in WWII, the Civil War, and earlier. His earliest reckoning being from a 1908 Supreme Court case where Justice Edward White denied a modification to a law that he feared would change its meaning.

In Vietnam: A Visual Encyclopedia by Philip Gutzman, the entry for Ben Tre (pages 73-74) specifically states, "The quote was later revealed to have been made up by an AP journalist to add more drama to his report." This book is a big tome filled with interesting information but does not provide any attribution for its claim.

Another interpretation of the quote's origin is from Ralph Keyes. Admirably, Carter quite fairly includes mention of this in his article (although he quite unfairly [and twice] declares he's taking Arnett's word as unchallenged truth [in the absence of evidence we sometimes default to character, and given this I too would tend to accept Arnett's word, but that's me, a random idiot on the web...if you're a journalist, you have to go with what you have, not what you wish]). You can also read some of Keyes's argument here [aphelis.net]. Keyes brings an army major into the discussion, but not Peter Booris, rather one Phil Cannella. Cannella does not recall having said that exact quote but believes he expressed to Arnett, "It was a shame the town was destroyed," and considers it possible Arnett may have misquoted or embellished the statement. Arnett insists he got the quote right, and why wouldn't he to his deathbed and beyond? It made him fucking famous.

The Keyes piece also notes factual inaccuracies in the quote. Ben Tre was not completely destroyed as the quote indicates, and Ben Tre is too large to be a "town" and was a provincial capital. 

So, who said it? An army major or air force major, and which one? And were they misquoted? Did Arnett relay it exactly, or perhaps paraphrased with influence from a meme that started in 1908? 

The left wants to say the quote is perfect, and it certainly is a great sounding one even if fabricated. The right would say it was neither exact or accurate. The truth is I'm left with the same answer I started with: I DON'T KNOW. And that's the same answer anyone who wasn't there that's being honest has to give too.

I cannot offer a firsthand witness account. I wasn't there. Only two firsthand accounts exist that I know of: Arnett's and Michael Miller's. Miller seems to have a good case, if we can verify his army service and perhaps confirm the press briefing he attended indeed included Arnett. There could be other firsthand accounts, but as far as I know Arnett has no intention of naming the officer he quoted, although I'm not sure why that's sensitive. We're not giving up CIA spies here. Even if we had a dozen firsthand accounts, who's to say they aren't all bullshit? 

McInerney ends up being right both ways. Factual verification is important, challenging, mundane, and sometimes hopeless. 

Annual Memorial Day post 2022: The Limits of Freedom

The blog is not dead yet! The annual Memorial Day posts took a break the last couple years, but it was a weird couple years, wasn't it? 

Anyway, I'm currently reading Sebastian Junger's Freedom and it makes you think a lot about freedom and how it's become sort of the rallying cry for extremists and idiots everywhere who can't think beyond the confines of their own narrow experience.

Everything is seen in tribal extremes now. One side thinks freedom means it can do whatever it wants without government interference, the other wants to do whatever it wants, but wants selective government interference when the other side disagrees with it. They're both being ridiculous.

I've pondered before the concept of freedom without some security, and Junger discusses this too in the book, observing that freedom and security sort of exist on opposite ends of a continuum and often getting one means sacrificing some of the other. As I noted before, the thing a lot of people think of when they say "freedom" is unbridled freedom where they can do whatever they want. But that also means the bad guy can do whatever he or she wants. If that's the kind of freedom you want, where you have to coexist with criminals, tyrants, and car salesmen that can operate without consequences, then that's a pretty compromised freedom. 

Junger's best quote in the book says (paraphrasing slightly for format), "The inside joke about freedom is that you're always trading obedience to one thing for obedience to another."

What we really want is managed freedom, where compromise and diplomacy (as opposed to violence) are the preferred resolutions to conflicts in the exercise of individual freedoms, and meaningful consequences are a deterrent to those pondering actions of poor faith and a just denouement for those that actually do them (criminals, corrupt law enforcement, corrupt politicians, lawyers, etc.).

Why is that such a difficult concept for the modern tribes to accept? The unfortunate reality of human nature means there will always be some people that don't get the memo and will exercise their will in ways that infringe on freedoms and rights of others. People that smoke, to use a simple example. The compromise is that smokers learn to use dedicated spaces for their activity and refrain from doing it in zones marked as non-smoking. In other words, managed freedom. Yes, that's just a way to say, "life with some restrictions" but what are you going to do? To live peaceably with non-smokers, the smokers have to accept some rules. Otherwise we go back to the age of warring tribes roaming the country.

And those warring, nomadic tribes actually feature quite regularly in Junger's Freedom. He's makes interesting observations about how small bands of warriors were able to use mobility to remain elusive and defeat larger forces that opposed them. He's correct, at the tactical level, and there's an understandable admiration on his part for the success of the Taliban, the Native Americans, and the Vietnamese, all of whom defeated larger forces in historical engagements, multiple times. Junger notes many examples of how a smaller, poorer, agile group can often seem freer than the larger sedentary population that's anchored to a city and has traded nomadic traits for those of a farming community. The static community, he argues, grows fat and complacent, and becomes slave to material wealth. There are certainly truths and precedents to that. He notes that in boxing, even the lighter boxer has an advantage.

You have to be careful about treating such an observation as a tautology as the book seems to (at the mid-point; I'll revisit this sentence after finishing the book). Because in the end, the Native Americans didn't really win, even if some of them were never caught. This is because of two big things: 

1. Technological innovation: The United States eventually established a technological superiority sufficient to deny the opponent the capacity to hide, and to continuously push the advantage to a point where the differential in the societies' tech levels were too massive for the weaker group to overcome. The use of machine guns, night vision, and aerial reconnaissance reduce the value of the smaller group's mobility advantage. I'm being a bit facetious here; I don't believe the US used night vision and aviation against the Native Americans (the machine gun was enough). The point is that applied appropriately, a sufficiently advanced technology can compensate for tactical deficiencies. Perhaps not always, but often enough.
2. Culture. The larger group's culture, if sufficiently enticing, helps in two ways. First, it enables it to grow at a faster pace than the smaller group, which means that it will naturally overtake the tenable terrain. The Iroquois might not be stopped by the cavalry, but they'd be hard pressed to stop the inexorable creep of land developers and strip malls. Second, an alluring culture will even win converts from the youth of the small group. The only bulwark against this happening is education and parenting, and both of those things are slow long roads to haul; it doesn't matter what group or country they're from, teenagers are teenagers. Even if you managed to do well with it, Father Time is undefeated, and the old will give way to the young. When it comes to who wins the hearts of that youth, the stronger culture will win with few exceptions. As much as I laud the discipline and resourcefulness of the Native Americans, their youth did not universally shun the Caucasian ways. 

Ah, but wait, the Taliban did win in Iraq and Afghanistan, no? True, but it's a matter of perspective and how you define winning and losing. Some would say that wasn't a war at all but a mistake that the American's finally gave up on; admitting to a mistake is a win, painful though it might be. And tactically, I think it's fair to say that the Taliban didn't win so much as outlast the United States, just as they had with the Russians. The term "lose" applies only to a limited slice of history here. The Russians and the Americans are alive and well, just with a lot of eggs on their faces. They'll wipe that off ... and probably endure many more omelet facials before they're done. But let's be fair here; the Native Americans, for all their mobility and cleverness (and I too admire their history and culture), are not the reigning authority in North America.

What of the Vietnamese? Didn't they soundly outlast the French and the Americans? Yes, at that slice of time in history. And as it was in the gulf war, it was a horrific embarrassment in lives and money, but America lives stronger today than the day it "lost" in Vietnam. Better yet, Americans and Vietnamese have seemingly healed much, and veterans of those tragic days have traveled to each other's countries to reminisce and repair. Vietnamese that moved to the US have become some of the most successful Americans. In one gentle irony, Vietnam successfully transformed a bit of American culture. Nearly everyone I know loves Vietnamese cuisine.

While I may have some different thoughts about the book, I find Junger's observations fascinating, and Freedom does a great job of making the reader think. Clearly, for those that take the time to think about it, freedom is complicated and difficult. People that don't fight for it or that don't appreciate those that do and did, take it for granted. I think that's a big part of the problem we have today. Especially today.