Father or Rich Neighbor?

“With liberal grace and serene naiveté, the pagans modeled relations with the gods on political and social relations among themselves. It was the Christians who substituted the paternal model, basing relations with God on relations within the family, which is why Christianity, unlike paganism, would be a religion of obedience and love.
…
If God is a father, there is little to do but pray to him. But if the gods are patrons, one can offer them gifts and receive gifts in return, symbolizing a friendship between unequal partners, each with a life of his own; indeed, there would be no reason for men and gods to enter into relations at all were such relations not in the interest of both parties. If the human partner behaved any more humbly, he would not be acting like a free man. People smiled when women went to temple and told the goddess Isis their troubles. Such intimacy with the gods was plebian. A free man knew how to maintain a proper distance between himself and other men and between himself and the gods. He did not abase himself before his deity. Leave it to the common people to spend all day in the temples waiting on their gods like slaves, behaving like valets and hairdressers before the statues of their deities.”
From “A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium”, chapter Tranquilizers in the section on Pagan Rome.

Such a temptation to think that everyone is like us, only (in this case) they wore togas and liked fighting Gauls. This is why period pieces in film and literature are so convincing, when they should really be anything but. To interact with such people would probably be a disorienting experience.

These two worldviews, Christian and pagan, would seem virtually irreconcilable, and yet a couple hundred years later they ended up in a rather peculiar forced marriage!

You need a happy family, or an example of one, to formulate a positive image of God. Otherwise Heaven is as frightening as a drunken parent. No problem for the Roman, reconciling earthly disfunction with heavenly perfection - heaven was as dysfunctional as Roman society!

Through a Glass Darkly

“Meanwhile, the disciples had returned from the city, and wondered to find Him talking with a woman [the Samaritan woman by Jacob’s Well]. The relations of the sexes, even in common life, were very narrow and suspicious among the Jews. That a woman should allow herself to be seen unveiled was held immodest, and for any woman to let herself be heard singing a song was almost unchaste. In Judea a bridegroom might be along with his bride, for the first time, an hour before marriage, but in Galilee even this was thought unbecoming. Trades which brought the two sexes in any measure into contact were regarded with suspicion, and no unmarried person of either sex could be a teacher, lest the parents of the children might visit the school. In Rabbis especially, even to speak with a woman in public was held indecorous in the highest degree. “No one” (that is, no Rabbi) says the Talmud, “is to speak with a woman, even if she be his wife, in the public street.” It was forbidden to greet a woman, or take any notice of her. “Six things,” we are told, “are to be shunned by a Rabbi. He must not be seen in the street dripping with oil (which would imply vanity); he must not go out at night alone; he is not to wear patched shoes (which in certain cases would be carrying a burden, when it was unlawful to do so); he must not speak with a woman in a public place; he must shun all intercourse with common people (for, not knowing the Law, they might be ‘unclean’); he must not take any long steps (for that would show that he was not sunk in the study of the Law); and he must not walk erect (for that would display pride).” Though higher in position and respect among the Jews than in other Eastern nations, woman, at the time of Christ, was treated as wholly inferior to man. “Let the words of the Law be burned,” says Rabbi Eleazer, “rather than committed to women.” “He who instructs his daughter in the Law,” says the Talmud, “instructs her in folly.”
- The Life and Words of Christ, by John Cunningham Geikie

After typing that I looked at the yahoo homepage and saw an advertisement for sexy underwear with seven mostly naked, heavily photoshopped ladies standing in a row. Treating the models so overtly as sex objects, the image is pornographic even if it is not explicit. Extra credit for the banner’s title: “I love my body” – astonishing that the examples they show us are of women who didn’t like the bodies God gave them and got new ones through fanatical activity and elective surgery. Look how different our cultures are. How can I relate to their world and experience across such an expanse? They, narrowly channeled through life by stultifying rules and laws – hedges and walls that divide humans and prevent closeness. Too many of us, imagining we have full liberty of action and interaction between the sexes, instead reduce those around us to mere objects, fulfillers of cultivated fantasies, and set up elaborate fashion systems that are so rigorous that no more than a handful can fulfill them. Giving and receiving of love between the sexes is only on the most physical and superficial level.

Who is more restricted by rules and mores?

How foolish these old-timey Jews seem – outward signals that one is free of pride can be just as prideful as any other action that “looks” prideful. But how would they judge us? They would judge our ethic of self-worth-through-sexuality harshly.

I think their “hedge about the Law” has a lot in common with our rules of fashion. It’s a way for a self-selected elite to establish social standards of value and importance that put them at the top and others below. It is a competitive system, never about inclusion, only exclusion. One is always being judged against others, and the continual amplitude of effort and zeal leads to the most maddening and ridiculous brinkmanship.

Alternate Ending to 1984 Where Winston Becomes a God Instead of an Animal

Picking up the action in Room 101. First paragraph is from the book:

The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then - no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment - one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats.

He was suddenly struck with a curiosity so powerful that he nearly forgot where he was. What was Julia’s worst thing in the world? What hidden fear, known only to O’Brien, stalked her hidden thoughts? Winston remembered his love like a hazy, half-forgotten dream slipping back into memory. With ferocious affection he imagined her alone and afraid in the same chair he was now in. He imagined throwing himself between her and some huge, dark, dreadful thing.

The rats were right before his eyes. The wire pressed into his cheek, and the cage snapped into place. O’Brien had only to depress the lever. Winston saw the end. If he waited a few seconds it would all be over.

He clenched up his will and resolved to wait a few seconds. He imagined that by waiting he might somehow protect his beloved from that same dreadful thing.

A few seconds passed. The door of the cage tremored and lifted a centimeter or two, and then stopped. One rat shuffled madly trying to get through the narrow space while the old one stared at him with malevolent eyes, but to Winston the world froze in place. Moment after moment the worst thing in the world was about to happen.

O’Brien broke the impasse by casually releasing the lever, snapping the cage door back shut, as if something had occurred to him that he wanted to say before causing the dreadful thing. “You are,” he said, “perhaps -

Winston shut out the words and closed his eyes. Why wouldn’t the dreadful thing happen? Then he realized – this was the worst thing in the world! This was Big Brother’s greatest and final claim to his loyalty! If this was not enough to make him love Big Brother, nothing would be. It was a dangerous thing for his tormentors to give him this final choice, for beyond it they were powerless. This was an act of desperation on their part.

In Winston’s mind he and O’Brien switched places. They were weak and he was powerful. He was doing the worst thing in the world to O’Brien. They needed him to love Big Brother. They needed him to agree with them, while he needed nothing from them.

He opened his eyes, and everything fell away from him: the rats, the walls of Room 101, the halls of the Ministry of Love, the bunkers, buildings, guns, tanks and floating fortresses, the secret police with minds like machines, the careful beetle-like men crawling through the Ministry of Truth, and men like O’Brien with their calculated madness. Every inch of it was a cruel façade over the face of the universe, obscuring all real meaning and value. It dropped away, and he was left with himself. He was free. The fear and hatred that had animated him so long were gone.

He loved Julia.

There’s a confusing and conflicting array of data and numbers being bandied around about the state of the economy. Reports on this or that new number give a wide variety of pictures about how things are going.

Oh no! Job numbers are down!
Oh yes! Manufacturing orders are up!
Oh yes! The stock market is up!
Oh no! Housing starts are down!
Wait…but home prices are up!
We’re losing our shirts!
No, the recession is actually over – everyone celebrate!

What does it all mean? It seems like the more information we have, the more confused we get.

There’s a problem with the way we are using all these numbers. Before explaining, I’d like to introduce a concept:

THE REAL ECONOMY

The economy is actually split into two different parts – factions we might describe as real and fake. The “real economy” is exactly what it purports to be – the portion of the economy that is real. The fake economy is, in certain crucial ways, artificial. What’s the difference? The real economy is what people themselves are willing to do with their time, energy, and resources. The fake one is dependant on what government does with the resources that it gets from borrowing, printing money, and confiscating from us.

I should be clear that not everything that the government does is “fake economy”. There’s nothing fake about a government takeover of health care, for example. That portion of the economy will be real regardless of who is running it. I am talking about things that, if government wasn’t doing them, they would not be done at all. That is the fake economy.

Example: Recently our leaders in Washington decided that Americans weren’t buying enough cars. American auto manufacturers were already being kept on life support by tens of billions of government largesse, but still people weren’t buying enough of their cars to make them healthy again. So, to support those companies and their unions, government pledged three billion dollars of our money to subsidize the purchase of new autos.

Predictably, auto sales during this time were extraordinary, as consumers either advanced a planned auto purchase to take advantage of the program, or were convinced to buy autos they didn’t need and couldn’t otherwise afford.

Due to the prominence and popularity of this program (which you probably remember as Cash for Clunkers), there was no risk of people thinking that improved auto sales meant the economy was recovering. But government is spending trillions of dollars every year right now to prop up the economy, and its activities are affecting things in ways that are very difficult to measure.

(This, by the way, is the role government tries to play in economic downturns. Rather than tough it out through the trough of a depression before things eventually improve, government papers things over. People are too poor and scared to buy anything right now, so government steps with loads of money, spending to make up some of the difference. Essentially, government deficit spending replaces consumer spending and investment, in hopes that this will lessen the severe parts of a depression. By providing artificial demand for cars, houses, stocks and so forth, the government hopes to gin things up until the storm is over and the real economy has recovered.)

Now we can circle back to the confusion about what’s really going on in the economy. We already know that the fake economy is doing great – free money from government for people to do things that no one else is willing to pay for. What we really want to see is an improvement in the REAL economy – people being willing and able to spend more of their OWN money and invest and work hard and so forth. Unfortunately, these two economies are very difficult to separate and the economic numbers that get reported usually include the fake numbers as well. Thus, when (for example) home sales go up, it is hard to tell how much is because people really want new houses and are willing to sacrifice to get them, or if they were just doing it because government made it practically free and riskless to buy one. It’s like holding a magnet next to a compass and then trying to point which way is north.

This is something people have a hard time perceiving. We are very used to relying on certain measures to describe economic progress. Numbers that describe unemployment, real estate, and the stock market used to give a somewhat more trustworthy indication of how things were going, but right now they are largely reflecting the effectiveness of various government programs, rather than any underlying strength and optimism. Housing and stock market numbers in particular are so heavily reliant on government money and support that they have almost no meaning right now.

So, if all the various measures of economic productivity are tainted by meddlers in Washington, what SHOULD we be paying attention to so we can understand how things are really going?

Well, one of the main causes of our ongoing depression is the over-indebtedness of the American consumer. Beguiled by easy credit and the false promises of an ownership society where everyone owns a house and gets rich, Americans have gone into debt at levels that haven’t been seen since the run-up to our last great depression. (Our government is also assuming trillions of dollars of debt every year, but here I am talking just about private non-government debt.) Over-leveraged and deeply in debt, Americans have had no stomach for the investment, indulgence and consumption that are such a large part of our economy. Certainly American debt levels will have to decrease – a lot – before the sort of recovery Wall Street and Washington are waiting for can happen. See the graph.



It shows the total debt held by Americans, in trillions of dollars. Since 1997 the amount has more than doubled, before finally leveling off at the start of the depression last fall.



So at least it isn’t going UP any more, but it’s rather distressing to see that, in more than a year, the number hasn’t moved down very much. There’s still a long way to go, and Americans, jobless and living in homes worth a fraction of their previous value, are having a hard time managing it. Until we work off a significant portion of this debt, it will be hard enough for people to pay for food and mortgages, much less the conspicuous consumption that fueled our chimerical global boom.

For all its importance, this important statistic has been largely ignored by government and the media. Instead, our leaders are wasting time and trillions of dollars trying to maintain an artificial status quo. In fact, by subsidizing and encouraging big-ticket purchases, government programs like the first-time homebuyer’s credit and Cash for Clunkers have served to INCREASE consumer debt. They are pushing us in exactly the wrong direction right now.

See the attached graph. It shows the various assets currently held by our nation's Federal Reserve, compared month-to-month. The numbers are in billions, so there are approx. 2.1 trillion dollars in assets at this point. There are all sorts of things: treasury bills, ownership of troubled companies, assets bought from troubled companies that those companies could not sell to anyone else, along with other sundry things.

Notice how the total sum went from less than one trillion to over two trillion practically overnight when our ongoing depression started, and has hovered around that point since then. This means they had to come up with over a trillion dollars (either borrowed or created out of thin air) to buy those assets and augment their balance sheet.

Now notice the asset class "MBS". Know what that is? It stands for "mortgage backed securities". What happens is, a bank lends a homebuyer money to buy a home. This mortgage represents an asset - an expectation of future income for the bank as the buyer pays off the mortgage, balanced against the risk of the homeowner defaulting and not paying the mortgage back.

However, banks don't always intend to keep these mortgages. Instead, they bundle hundreds and thousands of these mortgages together into what we call MBS's, and sell them off. The buyer of these MBS's then get the revenue from the homeowners paying off their mortgages. If everyone pays off their mortgage, then the MBS is a profitable asset. If enough people default, it is not, and the buyer doesn't get back what they paid for the asset.

Notice that the Federal Reserve owned zero $ in MBS's as of February of this year. This is because it really isn't the Fed's business to invest in the real estate market (or any other non-government market, for that matter). However, starting in March they have started buying them at a consistent pace of $100 billion every month. Since the total asset level has remained relatively flat, they have sold other assets to buy these MBS's.

While I don't have an exact figure on mortgages originated every month, this $100 billion per month represents a substantial percentage of all new/refi mortgages that month. It could be 50% or more. Basically, they are buying half or more of all the mortgages formed every month. Thus the Federal Reserve "owns" millions of houses, and also owns the risk associated with all those homeowners being able to pay off our mortgages.

This is not the only way our government is meddling in the real estate market, but it is one of the largest and most significant, even though most of my readers probably haven't heard about it. Combined with the efforts of other agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with the FHA mortgage relief, free $8,000 tax credit for first-time buyers, et cetera, our government is influencing the real estate market, property values, and mortgage rates, to an astonishing degree. And $100 billion a month in MBS's is an enormous amount of money - $1.2 trillion a year. That is almost the amount of the entire budget deficit our government will run this year.

Questions:

1. Why would they do this?

Answer: Keeping real estate prices artificially high is one of the major priorities of our government. Buying up all these mortgages helps accomplish this in two ways:

First, mortgage rates have to stay low - very low - unprecedentedly low. If rates go up, buyers have to spend more on interest, meaning they have less money for the house itself. They'll also be less willing to buy in the first place. So prices go down. The government has tremendous power to influence the interest rates that everyone has to pay to borrow, and they've used all that power to get mortgage rates down below 5%.

The problem is, a 4.85% rate isn't very lucrative for a mortgage company, particulary in the very scary economy we've got right now. People are being laid off in droves, and mortgage defaults are a mounting tsunami. They'd rather charge way way more for a mortgage, even to a "safe" borrower. Since they can't, in many cases they'd rather just sit on the money than take on the risk of a new mortgage. So even though rates are enticingly low, lenders aren't willing to lend the money. This is one of the reasons it's been hard to get a mortgage for the past year. With fewer mortgages granted, sellers have a hard time finding buyers and prices go down.

By buying up so many MBS's, however, the Federal Reserve takes that risk right out of the lender's hands! So what if the borrower loses their job? - that's the government's problem. So what if the rate is a rinky-dink 4.7%? It doesn't affect the bank! The lenders and mortgage companies are motivated to go ahead and write whatever mortgages they want, because ultimately the risk for many of them is taken off their hands by our government.

Thus sales are up, rates are down, and real estate prices stay much higher than they would without trillions of dollars of our tax money propping the whole market up.

2. How much longer can they do it?

Answer: Take a look at the graph. Even while buying $100 billion of MBS's a month, the Federal Reserve has not increased the overall value of its portfolio. They have sold off or retired other assets, and rather than using the money to pay off debt or return it to taxpayers, they are using it to buy mortgages. The problem is, they can't do this forever because they will eventually run out of other assets to sell off. Right now MBS's constitute about 1/3 of the Fed's portfolio. Let's assume they can't sell off the US Treasury notes they continue to accumulate, so that's $700 billion they can't touch (the subject of another essay - they really can't sell those right now without some very frightening consequences). That leaves about $700 billion in other assets - seven months max, assuming they can sell EVERYTHING (which they can't). So sometime in the next six months, they will no longer be able to keep buying up MBS's the way they want to. Next year they'll have to choose one of the following:

a. borrow more - basically double the government's deficit for the year
b. create a trillion dollars out of thin air - that will dilute the value of every dollar, sabotage our savings, and make it harder for our government to borrow money
c. stop buying the MBS's

3. How much risk does this represent?

A lot. The government is stockpiling enormous risk in these mortgages. If unemployment increases unabated and mortgage defaults continue to pile up, these MBS's will have billions and billions in losses that taxpayers will have to cover. Additionally, if the market changes and real estate values go down like they really should, more and more people will be underwater on their houses, and be motivated to walk away, increasing MBS losses even more. Finally, in such a scenario the Federal Reserve will have a very rough time selling these risky assets to anyone else. "We" will be stuck with them.

4. What might happen when they stop buying $100 billion every month?

Mostly the bad things I described in #3 will happen. At this point they cannot stop buying these things without a whole host of Really Bad Things. They are going along with it, hoping that the economy will heal before they run out of money. If it doesn't (which, with 10% unemployment and enormous private debt, it won't), they will probably feel forced to borrow more or turn on the printing press to keep buying MBS's, taking on more and more risk as they try to avoid the unavoidable.

5. What should they have done instead?

Good question, and one I'm not qualified to answer. But my opinion is that the problems they are trying to avoid are unavoidable, and that their efforts are essentially in vain. So they really could have done NOTHING and, I think, been better off. The way to recover from a bubble is to let the bubble pop. Unfortunately, even now our government is enthusiastically pumping air into the real estate bubble, and it's costing a lot of money to do so.

6. What should we do?

Food storage. Stay out of debt. Don't fall in love with the things of the world - reserve your love for your families, friends, and God. The prophets were really, really right about that stuff. All our idols might crumble before our eyes, but our future is bright if we remember what really matters.

Search this

Didja notice the WSJ article today about ask.com's new marketing campaign in the UK, and the resulting fallout? The campaign is less about them and more an attempt to play up fears of Big Brother Google controlling information channels on the internet.

Time out - right now a tall Argentinian is standing IN my cubicle, conversing loudly with his dad and brother over the cube walls. I find this rather aggressively rude, breathtakingly audacious. Who does that - like, ever? Ever, in the history of the universe, who walks into another person's workspace in such a way? In Argentina they do, I guess. He walks out, then back in, out and in again, now he's standing there and listening. My personal space is being violated. I am not a confrontational person, so haven't said anything yet. And don't know what I would - he's the son of the owner and founder. Perhaps a "no trespassing" sign. Better use the caps lock - unleash the fury!

Okay, about ask.com. I find their attempts at a sort of weird mainstream-guerilla-counterculture hybrid that doesn't build or promote or even really mention their OWN brand to be exceedingly curious, but not as curious as this:

"The online criticism (of the campaign) hasn't been the company's only problem. Soon after the ads appeared, bloggers noticed that searching for the word "Google" on ask.com pulled up this comment: "Don't be a droid - use different sources of information" next to a drawing of a man on puppet strings and a link to ask.com's anti-google web site. Mr Lanzone says the link was put up by overzealous staff, and was quickly removed to avoid any doubt about the impartiality of the site's searches."

Nothing like exploiting the channels of information you control to decry just that sort of exploitation.

More to the point, I love how they gloss over it: "oh, no big deal; some of our staffers got a little carried away and manipulated our search engine to suit their proclivities." Like it's no big deal, like it happens all the time. If quality of information is a positive good for ask.com and its users and exploitation a hiss and byword, wouldn't this bring down a sort of holocaust on the marketing hacks that tampered with search results? Instead it's a little faux-pas that's fixed and forgotten.

The subversive part of me wonders what sorts of search results I'd like to manipulate. Imagine! What would you like a searcher to see when they query Sanjaya, erectile dysfunction, or the Hawley-Smoot Tarrif?

But there are economic concerns at stake. No secret that a search engine will show results its creator designates. And this leads to a question worth pondering: what are the economic, societal, and investment consequences of the information atmosphere that is being shaped in the electronic age? Where the power to promote and restrict certain information rests in the hands of a relative few?

The utopian vision of the internet and unfettered communication offered the idea that people would be able to communicate with pretty much whomever they pleased. Are the many and various channels many and various enough to overwhelm any effort to restrict? Do people care enough to find what they WANT to find? Or are they happy with whatever pops up on their yahoo! home page? And what are the consequences of THAT? Have you noticed the rolling-up and consolidation of promotional power in the various media? Disney promotes its films on ABC. Yahoo pumps up its media partners with "news" stories on its main page. The same names are seen wherever you look, it seems. Britney, Paris, and Xtina, yay!

Birdie

I am watching a nature show about winged migration. A bird with a broken wing is being stalked and attacked by sand crabs on a sea shore. Now there is a pulsating, shifting pile of crabs atop the bird, eating it. ! What a fascinating series of images! There are many archetypal rivalries in the natural world - lions and gazelles, sperm whales and giant squids, dogs and mailmen, gerbils and fax machines. I could never have imagined that birds and crabs would share a place among them. The crabs have a strange, darting attack that would be hard to take seriously - they walk sideways, so they are leading their attack not with mandibles or claws, but with their quick, slender legs. Imagine being confronted by a mugger who pranced towards you sideways, not even looking at you.

I am sad that they didn't show the takedown - the moment where the quick, darting advances of the crabs offered an opening and they pulled down their prey. How did they do it? They can't advance and attack at the same time, so they'd need a rather immobile prey, wouldn't they? I suppose the crabs have been doing such things for a long time, so they have probably figured it out.

Another bird has just speared a large fish with its sharp bill. It cannot swallow it because the fish is still impaled on its lower jaw. Now it's figured it out. I have decided that birds are cool. I have long had an affinity for penguins, but will now extend this affinity to other species as well.

Melt-Banana song on Youtube

The Monkey Man.

Advisory: you'd better be open to new experiences.

Masters in History from the University of Wikipedia

Its weaknesses aside, one of my favorite things to do is query wikipedia.org. I like to read about things (concepts, objects, etc) that are often used but rarely considered - the neglected patches of our mental or cultural landscapes, if you will. Like what's the difference between an assasination and a murder. We all know they're different, but how?

I also love how pages are linked to each other. Such a bother in book form, it's a breeze on the internet, and I often swing, Tarzan-like, from page to page, and end up learning something awesome about something I'd never even thought to examine when I opened my browser.

Like, when was the fairy tale Cinderella first told? I have no idea. Turns out it is a few hundred years old - IN ENGLISH. There is a Chinese tale, hundreds of years older, from which Cinderella's original teller seems to have borrowed liberally.

I strongly encourage you read about it. On wikipedia, of course!

Mice turning into footmen is strange enough, I suppose, but the olde-time Chinese take on the story is outright bizarre. The wicked stepmother eats Cinderella's mother, for example.

Wait, what?

You heard me. And the ending is breathtaking. To me the elevation of the heroine and the corresponding abasement of the wickeds is an edifying denoument. It wouldn't have struck me as karmically necessary to crush them with stones.

You choose, you lose.

I am thinking if I have anything to say right now and nothing’s coming to mind. One thing: I notice that my desk is just ten or twelve feet away from the CEO’s. He has a cubicle, too. It will be HARD to convince management that I deserve an office.

Has everybody gotten over their election fever yet? Midterm cases are usually pretty mild. It is easy for the election to sneak up on Utah voters – hardly anyone advertises their candidacy on radio or TV. Contrast that to Arizona (where I spent part of last week) – yikes! A talk-radio listener gets warnings, sometimes stentorian and sometimes full of throaty passion, about all the horrible things that will happen to your beautiful state if so-and-so is elected to such-and-such. I wonder if Arizona voters’ minds are trained to take it all in – for me it all started running together in my head. Voting for whom will cause cancer? Which proposition will reverse the earth’s gravity? Which judge sets sex felons free and gives them your daughter’s cell number? These negative ads seem to cast an indiscriminate grey pall over the whole proceedings, and induce a voter to feel bad about everything.

Nothing like that in Utah! A benefit of one-party state politics is that you are never troubled to hear opposite views or dissenting opinions.

Working for a living

I am writing this at work, during my lunch break of my new job at a watch merchant's corporate headquarters.

So, if anyone ever wants an answer to the question, "What time is it?" they know who to ask.

This is a funny place, since there is an office, warehouse, and watch repair place all in the same building. It's like a big garage. Small companies are funny: the HR dept is 25 feet away from me, and marketing is about 10. I tread an imaginary border between operations and finance. I have a cubicle on a concrete floor in the middle of a big garage. Three feet away from me on the other side of my cubicle wall, craftsmen are tinkering with watches, fussing at gears and springs and hitting tiny things with tiny hammers. An aircraft-carrier-grade heater whirrs intermittently above. There are no windows on the walls. If I don't go outside and get some sun, I'm going to get all pale and wretched and start saying "Gollum" a lot.

Some folks are dressed like artists, some are dressed like businessmen, and some are wearing sweats and jeans as they lift and move things around.

It's funny how well the office people dress for their job in the garage. Dark socks, nice shirts, and so on. Almost as if to say, "I'm dressed too nice to move any boxes! Find someone else to do the physical labor!" At least, that's what I'm hoping my dress says about me.

People are pretty nice. I'm still trying to get to know them. A man just came by and said hi. He introduced himself to me and I asked what he does for the company. He answered, "I am the CEO."

Whoops!

World Cup

The final rounds of the World Cup of Soccer came and went last month. The football was entertaining enough, I suppose. The benefit of not having a job is being able to watch pretty much all 63 games, and after such an embarrassment of riches I became rather jaded. It was fun, however, to see how excited people got about the matches, and there is a particular thrill I get to hear a stadium full of fans scream when a goal is finally scored.

Speaking of fans and thrills, I noticed a peculiar tendency of the shot selection protocols practiced by the television cameramen that were recording the game to broadcast to us. Whenever the narrative of the game requires a crowd shot, the cameras tend to seek out the comeliest young ladies they can find for a close-up.

I’m not sure people realize it, but this phenomenon is rather commonplace at sporting events. Long have nubile coeds come early to college football games so they can stand in the front row and show off their goods to the video cameras and photographers. At the World Cup, young ladies seeking this sort of attention will hold their nation’s flag up behind them. This creates a makeshift backdrop that advertises their loyalties and indicates, perhaps, which team’s players they are most interested in fraternizing with after the game. I have posted an ensample; we can see the typical characteristics: front row, flag, half a shirt, and a surfeit of team spirit. We can also see that Argentinean ladies are more familiar with armpit hygiene than women of certain other nations.

(For some reason, three of the four gentlemen over her left shoulder are not watching the game. They seem to be distracted by something else.)

I suppose it understandable that cameramen would seek the most pleasing and positive images possible, according to their own aesthetic inclinations. And there is hopefully not too much moral danger in seeing one immodest Latina. But I find ill portentions in television viewers being fed a steady diet of beauty and only beauty.

These sporting events are a perfect example. Tens of thousands in attendance look just like regular people, but the cameras aren’t so interested in them. The young lady above doesn’t look like them. She doesn’t look like hardly anyone. She possesses a physique attainable only by a few, and even then only by dint of fanatical exercise and invasive surgery. But she is the one we see when we watch.

Television would have us believe that those bulbous bosoms, trim figures, and clear, sharp features are what people really look like. Or should, at least. The logical realization of the illusion is not enough of a defense, for as we surround ourselves with illusory beauty our attitudes and perceptions are still affected. Trips to Wal-Mart and the DMV are mildly shocking for some of us – seeing the denizens of such places is a forceful reminder of what human beings really look like: saggy, scorched, brittle, and squishy.

Figure Skating

The reason for watching figure skating has always escaped me.

You might call it the gymnastics of the Winter Games: waifish girls contorting their underdeveloped, malnourished, twelve-year-old bodies into moves as athletic, graceful, and alluring as they are able.

Anyway, scads of you Americans do like it, and since American Idol wasn’t on tonight you saw some figure skating drama between West and East, the USA and Russia, Cohen and Slutskaya.

Surprise! This year both the domineering, fame-hungry parents of Western Celebrity Worship and the state-sponsored trainers of Totalitarian National Prestige Fabrication took a back seat to the nation of Japan, whose Shizuka Arakawa took top honors after lackluster performances by the Cold War powers’ leading lights.

I am not sure which motivational tools Japanese favor. Though, coming from a collectivist society, doubtless the young woman felt a great deal of pressure to not let everyone down, and was perhaps less concerned with individual fulfillment.

Unrelatedly, my right leg is twitching. It has been doing so all week. I do not understand.

I've been everywhere

I have been to:



create your own visited states map

Cheney's Got a Gun

What can be said about the Vice President of the United States shooting a guy? This is the first time the sitting Vice President has shot someone since Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton. In both cases, the man shot was an attorney. The attention of America’s mockerati has been focused on the story all week and I could not say anything funnier than what has already been said. Still, I AM glad to hear the Vice President is standing behind his decision to shoot his buddy; we don’t want any weak-kneed equivocating in our dangerous global climate.

And anyway, the guy he shot just had a heart attack as a result of the attack, so it’s not socially acceptable to make jokes until he’s recovered.

I have recently become aware of another un-mockable situation: The upcoming film “Date Movie”, not content with spoofing contemporary chick flicks, has decided to also spoof that recent BYU-influenced offering, Napoleon Dynamite.

This is utter foolishness, apart from the fact that Napoleon Dynamite is not much of a romantic comedy. As far as I’m concerned, ND is completely and utterly unspoofable. I mean, how can someone make fun of that film or its eponymous lead? I mean really, will you make the Napoleon imitator look like an uncultured, unpopular nerd? Will you assign all manner of human frailties and weaknesses to him? Will you make him prey to cruel pratfalls? People will simply think you are imitating him.

The greatest barbs of the satirist and parodist are always aimed at the self-important and self-serious, those with inflated egos and exaggerated gravity. Their main business is to make the serious unserious. There are few things less serious than Napoleon Dynamite, and he is thus immune to their ink-stained daggers.

SOTU STFU

Everyone already knows about it. Mother Sheehan was arrested in the Capitol Building before the State of the Union Address for disruptive behavior.

Her words. (warning! the zealous community members of that website have filthy mouths! read the 'comments' section at your own peril)

No charges will be filed, and the US Capitol Police have apologized for arresting her.

The online Left is screaming. I am always mystified by the general outrage when someone gets hassled by the Man in a prominent way. She was in that audience for political purposes and those purposes were achieved, albeit indirectly. Rather than just being on camera a few times with her t-shirt, she gets her first amendment rights violated while the nation is watching. Things have turned out for her about as good as possible. She gets free publicity, enhances her martyr status, can engage in a very public and shameful flaunting of her victimhood, and further cement herself in the pantheon of Liberal-Left public figures.

That, and she didn’t have to sit through a scripted, ritualistic, made-for-TV snoozer.

You’d think everyone on dailykos would be cheering. This will energize the base, get out protestors, raise soft money, sell t-shirts, and generally inspire the sorts of things leftists do when they're angry.

Crazy delicious

It seems that the more technology gives us ability to write or film anything and show it to the world, the more nobody seems to have anything to say.

These guys have nothing to say, but they say it with a certain perverse style:

The Chronic - WHAT? - Cles of Narnia!

That video has been viewed 3.4 million times in the past month.

Say, can you see?

Technological development has improved telecommunications, travel, sanitation, computing, and most anything else you can think of. We can contemplate the atoms of the Big Bang, send complicated devices to other planets, and steal music on the internet. We can even kill lots of people much more elegantly and impressively than ever before.

But post-modern fireworks are stupid.

Has there been any change? Any innovation? Any genuinely new thing in the last thirty years of technological development? Fireworks nowadays seem shorter-lived and smaller than their grandparents were.

We set some off on December 31. Put them on the street and lit them, or flung them in the air in hopes they would ignite mid-air. The most memorable thing about the evening was finding that Sean throws – well, not like a girl, but definitely in a manner unbecoming a former marine.

We got our thrills, but purely from supercharged snark and irony. My favorite was the Twin Towers firework. No, we did not pick it up on the streets of Damascus – as well you should ask. The idea of setting fire to some representation of the World Trade Center strikes one as slightly anti-American. Not so! This is in fact a sober and wholesome commemoration of America’s darkest hour – a day stained in blood, ashes, dust, and the echoed threats of hostile zealots from halfway round the world. What better way to remember it all than with your own little conflagration, right out on your driveway?

At least, that’s what the sellers of this product are saying. Now, to me fireworks have never seemed to have much meaning. Light fuse. Watch lights. Repeat. If there is some sort of higher symbolism, it escapes me, and I will need enlightening. I think what gets me is the similarity of the firework product to the actual World Trade Center. You don’t set fire to things you love!

The makers of the Twin-Towers-in-a-box foresaw this uncomfortable interpretation to this questionable activity. Writing on the top of the box sets us straight. “When you light this firework, you are not reliving the tragedy, but remembering the sacrifice and spirit of our great nation on that terrible day.”

Just below that it solemnly intones, “Remove lid before lighting.”

So anyway, we lit the Twin Towers and saw them burn for a few seconds in an extremely modest haze of sparks. Nobody would have died in that fire. Think twin engine Cessna rather than super jumbo 747.

It lit up with red sparks, then white sparks, and then purple sparks.

It seemed fitting, somehow.

"Allegedly"

A guy who used to be in the same LDS ward as me is in jail.

Story.

So odd to read about an acquaintance being tried for some heavy-duty felonies. The public record sanitizes his very identity, distilling it down to "a Salt Lake man." Strange. I'm "a Salt Lake man," too.

Bank fraud, forgery, ripping off friends and strangers alike - it's not looking good for Baylor Stevens. He could be in the hole for most of his natural life.

Of course at this point he has only been indicted, not convicted. But...let me put it this way: if most anyone else from that ward had been hauled in front of a magistrate I would be "shocked, yes, shocked." In this case it's more like, "hmm, that answers a few questions." I always thought him to be vaguely oleaginous, with the sort of reserved blandness you'll sometimes get from people who never really say what they think.

The article was still shocking, though, for it contains the appalling revelation that he is younger than me. I thought he was like 35. He has old eyes.

My mom wanted my sister to go out with him.

So, now what? Do we wait for stern and dispassionate justice to run its course, for better or worse? Or do we go ahead and make up our minds on the matter?