Finally, A Presidential Candidate Almost Just Like Me...

As an occasional pundit more than a little interested in a politics and the use of power (a frequenet subject of this blog in one fashion or another), the goings on the 2008 Primary Season have been of great interest to me. While I hope I do not make the frequent mistake of many in believing that political leaders can fulfill escatological hopes for the bringing of heaven on earth (unlike some people), I nonetheless am a firm believer that the quality of our leadership is of great importance and that in a democratic republic where the ultimate accountability for leaders rests in the people, if one does not participate in the political process, one has no right to complain about the results. This does not mean I always agree with what leaders to choose from, or that I agree with all of their behavior in various elected offices, but I believe we have to do the best job we can as wise stewards of our freedom from tyranny and (whenever possible) oligarchy. That is the subject of another rant, though.

Occasionally, though, I find a candidate who, unusually, reflects my own rather quirky views and personality. Such is the case this year. However, first, I must begin with a story. In 2000 I was a freshman at the University of Southern California when it came time to vote in the primary. As the primary approached, I was an undecided voter, not knowing much about Sen. McCain and not being an enthusiastic supporter of George W. Bush (despite voting for him in the general election of both 2000 (in California) and 2004 (in Florida), I never have been an enthusiastic supporter of him). However, I had the chance to witness Sen. McCain speak in person at Bouvard Auditorium just before the election, and I found him to be an immensely sincere and passionate speaker, worthy of my support (he got my vote, despite losing the primary and the campaign).

Once 2008 came around, I thus already was interested in Sen. McCain's campaign, though matters looked rather grim in the last half of 2006 as anti-war fever swept the nation and the Republican party started resembling the nativist (anti-immigrant) Know-Nothings of the 1850's, another tumultuous and highly polarized time in our nation's history. Though I disagreed with Sen. McCain on some aspects of his proposed solution to illegal immigration (namely, those parts which suggested amnesty), as a long-time resident of areas with high amounts of immigrants, I see the need for a comprehensive immigration solution that encourages legal immigration and harshly punishes those companies that employ illegal immigrants and make it easier for them to engage in normal business practices (see Wal-Mart, Bank of America, etc.). As a graduate student in engineering, I also see the need for reforming the H1-B (work visa) program, which is in shambles as the high supply of qualified foreign graduate students (who could greatly benefit this nation) is mostly prevented from finding legal gainful employment. As someone, therefore, who was familiar with the immigration situation, I was more than a little sympathetic to McCain's position as trying to negotiate a comprehensive (and necessarily compromise) solution.

So when McCain won New Hampshire, and then South Carolina, through the support of moderate Republicans (I would personally consider myself, like McCain, moderately conservative--and there is substantial, though not total, overlap between our positions), I was interested in helping out the McCain campaign in Florida, which I did. I happened to volunteer three evenings at the McCain office when I didn't have class during the week, and helped pass out stickers and signs at a McCain town hall meeting in The Villages (where I even got to escort a New York Times reporter to her seat through the relatively, but thankfully not violently, hostile audience), and attended a McCain rally in Tampa on Primary Election Eve. When McCain won a larger-than-expected five-point win the next day, I was quite pleased.

But I was less than pleased with the response of many conservative pundits to McCain's growing momentum. The same conservatives who had supported Thompson (of an 86% lifetime conservative voting record) considered McCain (of an 82% lifetime conservative voting record) an apostate to the Republican party, almost as if one was voting for Hillary Clinton. Various conservatives said that if McCain won the primary that they would not vote Republican in the final election (thus perhaps giving the election to Hilary). It puzzled me that many conservative Republicans would be so hostile to someone who was mostly (though by no means entirely) in favor of their positions.

Then again, I often puzzle why, in my own circles, those who are conservative consider me to be such a radical revolutionary when in reality I am far from it. Certainly, I am a pugnacious maverick who enjoys tweaking the establishment now and again, and certainly I have some longstanding issues with authority (which I will be the first to admit). Intriguingly enough, I found many of the same parallels in McCain's own life. For one, he received many demerits in the Naval Academy because he would not stand for the arbitrary and capricious use of power by upperclassman over underclassman. Here was something I wholeheartedly agreed with. His noble stand in Vietnam not to take advantage of his father's position as admiral in getting out of the Hanoi Hilton out of order and in thus submitting himself to an additional five years of torture and imprisonment was a noble stand for his comrades in prison, worthy of my highest respect. Here was someone who did not dodge or avoid the draft or use political influence to gain a cushy spot in the National Guard, but someone who suffered for the sake of fairness and justice as a prisoner-of-war.

It appeared to me that the reason why McCain is so universally loathed by conservatives (see Rush, a man whose right to speak I defended in my first editorial as an pre-teen in a western Pennsylvania newspaper, and others) was not because of his positions on such matters as the environment, immigration, and finance reform, but because he was not beholden to them. McCain's independent streak, especially shown in his combative and pugnacious personality, not his positions, is accountable for his unpopularity. His appeal with moderate voters lies in the fact that he is willing to work across the aisle (a rare quality these days, probably testament to the fact that he's not a baby boomer) and considers the good of the United States and all of its people above the slavish adherence to the establishment. This, inspite of the fact that he usually (over 80% of the time) agrees with that conservative establishment.

In fact, as a student of history, the situation between McCain and the Republican establishment mostly resembles the curious fate of Stephen Douglas, Illinois' Senator and frequent opponent of my favorite president of all time (Abraham Lincoln). Throughout the 1800's, the base of the Democratic party was in the South, and until the Civil War this base held most of the positions of great authority in the Supreme Court and in party leadership despite being a minority among the population of the US as a whole for almost all of that time. In 1860, Stephen Douglas ran for president, and sought the nomination of the whole Democratic Party. Despite usually supporting the south, they considered him ideologically impure thanks to his opposition of the fraudulent Lecompton Constitution for Kansas, which would have made Kansas a slave state due to the votes of a bunch of illegal Missouri border ruffians and the boycott of the election by anti-slavery Kansas (who organized their own government based in Topeka). Due to this supposed "heresy" to the southern Democrats, and his unwillingness to countenance a national slave code to protect the right of slaveholders to carry their "property" safely all over the United States, the Southern Democrats refused to support his candidacy, even though he was the only Democrat capable of beating the Republicans in a momentous election (does this sound familiar yet?). After a heated and ugly campaign, the Democratic party split, Abraham Lincoln won the general election, and the rest is history.

Let us hope that the Republicans do not repeat this folly in '08. But in order to do so, they will, in all probability (it looks at this point like McCain is going to win a heavy majority of the delegates on Super Tuesday, with a heavy advantage going away for the nomination) have to deal with the fact that McCain will be their man in 2008. Will conservative pundits "hold their noses" and see behond the pugnacious spirit of McCain to see someone who represents the best chance to bring Americans beyond the polarizing politics of Baby Boomers engaged in the long culture wars, with a concern for the fate of our planet as well as the security and well-being of our nation? Will the threats of party activists to avoid voting be empty threats, or will they be acted upon? Much remains to be seen, but either way, I cannot help but feel for Sen. McCain, for despite his human flaws and imperfections (such as we all have), he is a man whom I deeply respect, and in whom I see a great resemblence in temperament and political opinions to myself. To see the depth of hostility shown by people who agree with him at least as much as with his two rivals (Romney and Huckabee) is to see the irrational hatred and hostility that I have long struggled against in my own battles against my own establishment (despite my substantial agreement with it). I suppose everything can be forgiven, except keeping an independent mind.

(Don't) Send In The Clowns

Today I read a particularly amusing article that stated something that made me feel a little less unusual. The article states that children uniformly dislike clowns, and that even older children are sometimes afraid of them and cannot explain them. When I was a child I was seriously afraid of clowns, and even now I don't like them. What is it about clowns that are so universally disliked by children, and what is it about clowns that make adults think children like them? I don't know the answers, but I can give at least a little bit of perspective.

Why Children Don't Like Clowns?

It is possible that a large part of what makes children not like clowns, at all, is the fact that clowns are fake. Children, in all the experience I have ever had (either being a child or being around them) are pretty genuine. The only children that tend to be private or practice pretense usually have something seriously wrong going on in their lives, and have learned that hypocrisy usually from parents. Otherwise, children are very open and honest about what they want and what they don't like, even when they say they are being sneaky (I find this particularly amusing). However, clowns are not genuine. They have paint covering their faces, masking their identities (not likely to lead children to trust them). Furthermore, they have smiles painted on their faces, and children are pretty good at telling a fake from a genuine article. Somehow most of us lose the ability to do that as we get older, probably because it's so distressing to be in a world surrounded by fakes (especially when most people fake to be accepted by the other fakes), that to search for the genuine article is a fruitless and thankless task. Children, not being burdened by this, tend to see (rightfully) the clowns as fakers, and as untrustworthy fakers at that.

Why Do Adults Think Clowns Are Okay For Kids?

This is perhaps the more inexplicable question. Clowns, like a lot of other entertainment, were originally for adults. The clothing for clowns resembles that of the "fool" in royal courts. Ironically enough, the fool was dressed foolishly, but was given the (rare) privilege to tell kids the truth. Nowadays clowns dress foolishly and tell a bunch of pablum to an often unwilling audience of young folk. It is probably the flamboyance of clowns that makes adults think they would be suitable for kids. After all, clowns typically dress in bright colors and act silly. So do children--but children do it honestly, out of a (usually) innocent heart. Clowns are pretenders. Perhaps adults are insufficiently aware of the need to teach genuineness to their children, and so conspire to foist all of these lies upon children that make them bitter and cynical towards adults (see "The Tooth Fairy," "Santa Claus" and any number of other such lies). Perhaps parents would better serve their children by simply letting children be children, play innocent games (while keeping an eye on them to make sure they stay safe), and tell them the truth, and provide for them entertainments that are similarly honest (this may be a difficult task). That would be a better choice than to foist a bunch of creepy adults in makeup and bad clothing on children. Don't send in the clowns. Seriously, don't.

Reflections on the Music of 2007

As I am wont to do on occasion, I would like to take this opportunity to write down some of my thoughts on the popular music I liked the best for the year of 2007. Music is rather important to me, as I tend to strongly associate certain situations and experiences and powerful emotions with specific songs that, in effect, say what happened or what I am thinking or feeling. Overall, I was not particularly pleased with the music on the radio, as much of it struck me as rather repetitive. In fact, the music I really liked this year was unusually odd and obscure (I usually like relatively mainstream music). Without any further ado, I will reveal my favorite songs of the year, and explain why they struck me as particularly noteworthy.

Mattafix - Living Darfur

Perhaps the most obscure of my favorite songs of the year, I first heard this song while watching MTV Europe on the Israel extension tour after the Feast of Tabernacles. This uplifting and yet deeply emotional song about the benighted area of Darfur, with its plaintive chorus ("You shall rise...you may never know if you lay low lay low") and other touching lyrics ("See tears that flow like rivers from the skies"..."There's disaster in your past, boundaries in your path...sooner or later we must try living," and so on) gave this song a deep personal meaning for my own life, as well as the struggle of the millions in Darfur who, to this day, face the ferocity of the Sudanese government-supported janjaweed.

Sara Bareillis - Love Song

Perhaps the most upbeat song among my favorites of a rather tense and stressful and not particularly enjoyable year, this song is still rather bittersweet, probably the reason it was a favorite of mine. In a driving piano beat (I am most fond of piano ballads), Miss Bareillis sings a song to a lover about not being able to write love songs on cue based on requests or threats. Love songs must flow from within, from genuine emotion, and are not trophies or commodities. With lyrics that are much more biting and bitter than the peppy beat would indicate, the song reflects fears about love and creative talent being exploited by those who do not really feel the same, a frequent concern of mine.

Robyn & Kleerup - With Every Heartbeat

Another obscure song among my favorites, this song (like "Living Darfur") was not released as a single in the United States, and I also first heard it while in Israel. This song is a sad techno song about bravely facing heartbreak and the pain that takes place with every heartbeat. The song is, obviously, not a happy one as a relationship faces its definitive ending with the knowledge of the suffering that is occurring. "So I don't look back...it hurts with every heartbeat..." Sometimes a song like this expresses one's feelings, and this one did.

Aly & AJ - Potential Breakup Song

Another song whose upbeat music masked rather dark lyrics, this particular number follows the trend of the last two songs in reflecting upon a troubled relationship nearing its terminus. With lyrics as sarcastic as "you're not winning until you're winning me" and "let me repeat that, I want my stuff back," this song lets the deadbeat partner know that his time of taking his girlfriend for granted is nearing a close. Obviously, this was a year of endings more than beginnings.

Hilary Duff - Stranger

Like many of the songs I watched on Rotana while in Jordan (the Arabic music television channel), this song has an Middle Eastern dance beat, and is also about the ending of a relationship. In this particular case, the song is about a dysfunctional relationship falling apart where one of the people pretends to be friendly and affectionate in public while being dark and hostile in private. Indeed, the difference between public and private appearance is probably what makes this one of my favorite songs of the year, especially given the autobiographical importance of the material (given the falling apart of her relationship with Joel Madden, lead singer of Good Charlotte).

Miley Cyrus & Billy Ray Cyrus - Ready, Set, Don't Go

I never thought that a song by Billy Ray Cyrus (most famous for "Achy Breaky Heart") would be on any list of my favorite songs, ever, but this particular song about children growing up and leaving home touched a particular nerve for me. It is a foolish parent that tries to hold on to children after they are ready to go. Wise parents train their children well and give them legacies and equip them to succeed on their own. Foolish parents heap burdens upon their children and try to sabotage their independence. Obviously this is a point that needs to be learned better in some families.

Bucky Covington - A Different World

One of the less polished members of the 2004 (I believe) American Idol finalists, Bucky Covington did an excellent job with this viewpoint of a young GenXer (which I happen to be) musing on the different world now than it was for us growing up without as much technology or as much protection from the dangers of the real world. It is interesting, nonetheless, to reflect upon the results of a different childhood and upbringing. Reflecting on the generational difference between the GenXers and the Millennials of a useful thing. It also helps that most of this song applies to my own childhood.

Maroon 5 - Wake Up Call

This song is a rather biting reflection on a hot-tempered discovery of cheating. The video to this song is not very morally appropriate, but the material of the song itself if something I find grimly humorous given my own fierce (if seldom expressed) temper. With a chorus like "Wakeup call, caught you in the morning with another one in my bed, don't you care about me anymore, don't you care about me, I don't think so..." what is not to like/appreciate?

Overall, my favorite songs of the year are a combination of country songs, dance pop songs, rock songs, worldbeat songs, and adult contemporary songs, a pretty fair cross section of the music that was actually good this year. There were a couple of humorous rap novelty songs, and some pretty good R & B songs ("No One" by Alicia Keys deserves special mention, which avoids being on this list only because "no one" was present all year as that special someone, and that song is crying out for a devoted lover). No album was as excellent from start to finish this year as Keane's "Under The Iron Sea" was in 2006, but we shall see if next year has more consistent musical material.

On Parenting, Spears Style

With the recent announcement that her sixteen year old daughter, Jamie Lynn Spears, is pregnant, mama Spears had the publishing of a book on parenting delayed indefinitely. One reason, perhaps, is that Mrs. Spears is not, in fact, a very good parent. After all, her oldest daughter has been married twice (once annulled, once divorced), has two children by a backup dancer with a yen for knocking up young women (who is still, shockingly, a more fit parent than she is) and hangs out with a decidedly bad crowd (Paris Hilton et al.). Now the younger Spears daughter, the star of some Nikelodeon show I've never seen called Zoey 101, is pregnant by her 18 year old boyfriend, and her mother didn't even know what was going on because she always did what she was told (!) and never missed curfiew.

While it is not surprising that the series of unfortunate events that has befallen the Spears family has delayed the publishing of what was likely to be a highly fictitious, if somewhat humorous, book about parenting perhaps for good (or at least until the furor dies down about the behavior of the Spears girls), there are nonetheless some serious questions about parenting that Mrs. Spears could answer that remain, as of yet, unanswered. These questions make the claim that Jamie Lynn Spears wants to raise her children in Louisiana for a "normal lifestyle" (more normal than Hollywood perhaps, which is, I must admit, a rather surreal sort of place) a very dubious proposition nonetheless.

For example, the rise of Britney Spears is full of some odd questions. The Spears family was quite poor while Britney and Jamie Lynn were growing up, and Mr. Spears (curiously absent in most accounts of the Spears family) was unable to provide for his family. That made the young and perky Britney a very early breadwinner for her family through her talent in winning beauty pageants (a southern tradition I admittedly know little about). Her appearance on Star Search also provided her family with some much needed cash (as did her work on Disney's Mickey Mouse Club, no doubt), but also raised some serious questions about her parents. For example, Britney's debut as a 10 year old on Star Search was a very sulty performance that belied her youth, and very early on there was a harsh dichotomy between what appeared to be innocence and precocious sexuality. Obviously there are some serious questions about how that came to be (witness, for example, the naughty schoolgirl nature of "...Hit Me Baby One More Time," her first hit with the simultaneous proclamations of her virginity and desire to remain pure until marriage).

In the case of both Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears there appeared to be a public facade of propriety that obviously hid something far darker within. Where exactly did these young ladies learn to practice pretense so well? How exactly were these young women brought up? From all appearances, the two were thrust into fame and placed, as it were, in harm's way without being prepared for the harshness of the real world. Did Mrs. Spears desire to be famous herself, vicariously through her talented daughters, or was it the desperation of being unable to find financial stability through the male breadwinner of the house that led her to use her daughters in order to achieve financial success and public honor?

These questions, and other serious ones, remain unanswered. The riddle of Mr. Spears and the malign impact his failures as a father and provider on his daughters is also an important one. After all, by all appearances, the Spears girls show a proclivity towards decidedly shady male companions. Britney, for example, dated Justin Timberlake (famous himself for his desire to bring "sexy back" and for his exposing of Janet Jackson during that imfamous Super Bowl halftime show) before having a Vegas wedding with a friend (quickly annulled) and then marrying a backup dancer who skipped out on his previous girlfriend who was pregnant with his second child. Nothing says white trash like that Jerry Springer-ish saga. Jamie Lynn herself appears not to have been seriously committed to her baby daddy either, or else she was being especially coy about her private life in a way that appears to have spectacularly backfired on her. The proclivity of the Spears girls for deadbeat guys may have been learned through the example of their decidedly deadbeat father.

But, lest I seem to be too cruel, the travails of the Spears family are not (at least not by me) to be mined for a sense of proud superiority. Rather, they are emblematic of deeper troubles about the state of parenting. Lest we dismiss the struggles of the Spears girls as merely the signs of the corruption of Hollywood, we must examine our own family lives to see how the failures of parents reverberate in the struggles of their children repeating failed patterns from their own past. Rather, there is for me instead a chilling sense that the struggles of the Spears daughters are merely the struggles of many young men and women in our society writ large and in the gossip magazines. How can a young person without the experience of good parenting and with few examples of good parenting around them succeed in becoming a successful adult themselves? What is necessary to reverse the poor lessons of one's childhood unless one commits to very serious study and the diligent observation of such good examples as one can find? And even then, how is one to succeed when one has to create anew instead of merely repeating a good pattern from one's past, when it is difficult enough merely to follow what one has been brought up in from youth? These questions I ask not only for others, but for myself as well...

Two Votes, Two Ways

It is a surprising day when Hugo Chavez, populist leader of Venezuela and fierce enemy of the United States, turns out to be an effective example of how a leader handles electoral defeat. On the other hand, the example of Russia's "managed" elections is a more common example of how autocratic governments can subvert the forms of democracy to obtain their desired vote. In examining these two cases, we can look at what it takes to run a successful democracy, and what sort of checks leaders need in order to avoid the corruption of a democratic society.

The Odd Case of Venezuela

Throughout the history of Latin America, there has been a cycle (a very depressing cycle) of fragile democracies that fracture between the interests of rich and poor, whites, mestizos, and "Indians," replaced by the rule of dictators (or caudillos) that promise economic growth or fairness to the people, at the cost of civil liberties and freedom, and end up resulting in a privileged class stealing the rich natural wealth of these nations and seeking control over all aspects of life. This cycle is not limited to Latin America (witness, for example, the African Continent, much of the Middle East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia), though it is very entrenched here and has been for the last two centuries or so.

This grim history of the failure of democracy in the region (despite the nearby example of one of the world's most successful republican regimes) now has, it appears, a rather surprising chapter in a particularly unlikely place. Hugo Chavez, the blustering and arrogant leader of Venezuela, had been riding high with large victories, and even overcoming a failed coup attempt. However, his attempt to revise the Venezuelan constitution to allow himself a lifetime term of office and the freedom to control all the press as well as the political and economic life of Venezuela, was too much for the nation to accept and was defeated in a narrow vote. Better yet--the spearhead of the opposition was not the fractured older leaders of the opposition, but rather intelligent and fredom loving university students who mobilized in the tens of thousands against the proposal. Even better still, it appears that Chavez will respect the vote, a much better outcome than could have been predicted before this weekend.

A question that merits being asked is how these particular events can serve as an example for others. It is noteworthy in this case that the revolt was led not by the corrupt leaders of the "old regime" but by the young. If there is to be genuine change, there needs to be a changing of the guard in leadership to remove the corrupt holders of power. Such removal needs to be by just and democratic means (as was the case in Venezuela) lest new corrupt powers take hold and entrench themselves just like the old ones did (witness the depressing aftermath of most revolutions around the world). It is easier to reject the leaders of the past for their problems than to build a more just society in the aftermath of that rejection, but having rejected a dictatorship for Chavez, hopefully the young of Venezuela can overcome the mistakes of their fathers and build a more just and more open society in place of the fiercely divided one at present. Hope springs eternal.

Russia's Managed "Democracy"

A more typical example of pseudo-democracies around the world is the case of Russia's election. Vladimir Putin sought to expand the powers of his government for his successor to continue along his lines of controlling the country and limiting dissent, giving power and wealth to his corrupt friends and assassinating critics and rivals. He managed this task through pressuring voters to vote in their places of work where they could be under the supervision of their bosses (and through economic pressure that jobs and financial survival would be dependent on making the "right" vote, which was of course whatever Putin wanted).

This is a typical example because the forms of democracy itself can be corrupted by authoritarian tendencies which may, for political reasons, which to have the illusion of popular consent even when that reality is not present. Popular support, even if it is received by illegitimate means, often confers the appearance of legitimacy that even bullies and tyrants like to maintain. Even the appearance of consent helps to reduce the threat of rebellion and uprising in the most unjust socieities. Most leaders are savvy enough to realize the need for these shows of consent (Soviet Elections, as well as the throngs of cheering masses desired by every dictator), as it gives them the (often undeserved) satisfaction of having done the will of the people.

It is possible, though, that Putin may have overstepped his bounds. Of course, he does not wish for the approval of the West in his election practices, but he does wish the respect of the West as well as economic help for his nation, and this is jeapordized by corruption that becomes too obvious or behavior that becomes too heavy-handed. Having the suspected assassin of one of Russia's heroes of democracy elected to the Russian Congress would appear to be a mean-spirited move designed to demonstrate Putin's control over Russia. Such insults often tend to backfire--managed democracy, like revenge, is a dish best served cold. There are, no doubt, many people who would wish to emulate Putin's example, as Putin emulated the behavior of countless dictators before him.

Life In The Uncanny Valley

According to students of robotic design and video game graphics, the uncanny valley is the zone between realistic and cartoony, where the robot or graphical image neither looks realistic enough to suspend disbelief or cartoony enough to be "cute" (think, for example, of anime, or superhero cartoons). Much recent animation and marketing falls into this uncanny valley, where an image is realistic enough to be threatening and not realistic enough to be anything other than creepy and strange.

I am somewhat baffled by many marketing decisions that move into this uncanny valley. Who are they trying to sell products to, anyway? The Heineken Draughtkeg (pronounced "draftkeg") commercials show a creepy looking robot-woman pouring beer out of her stomach, which is a giant keg. Perhaps the people marketing this product found that attractive--a sort of robotic electric Barbarella dispensing beer. Maybe it sells better in Europe, but I don't find that commercial attractive at all, in fact, I find it rather disturbing. Another example of this is in the recent Charles Schwab commercials, which have a slightly animated but still highly realistic rendering of various customers talking about the usefulness and attractiveness of Charles Schwab banking in sort of pseudo-interviews while they are going about their normal life. The problem is that the cartoons are neither obviously animated nor are they completely realistic. They are, instead, supsended at the bottom of that uncanny valley, uncomfortably real but not real enough to be human.

As I read an article today about a bank run at a British bank (the Northern Post), where customers withdrew 2 billion pounds (!) from their savings accounts over concerns about sub-prime mortgages and the problems of adjustible-rate mortgages that are developing in England and that have already read to some troubles here in the United States. Reflecting on that scene gave me some pause, as it reminded me of what I read about the beginnings of the Great Depression in the United States. When people lose faith in their institutions, in banks and governments, in stock markets, in their churches, in their families, in their schools, the consequences are serious. Much of how we live depends on trust, and the actions of those who do not trust, by disengaging from what is around us, cause the day of reckoning to come when the flaws of our systems become glaringly obvious and too powerful to ignore. We are watching history take place, and it is real, and yet it feels unreal at the same time.

Life often gives the sense of being in the uncanny valley as well. Some aspects of our existence appear to be almost dreamlike--such that we recognize them as real but also sense them as unreal at the same time. We disconnect from the full reality of it, either because it is positive and we are content to live in the fantasy, or because it is too horrible to deal with and so we must find some way of not letting the fullness of its reality sink in. There is a sense of deja vu, a vague sense of being troubled by contradictory pulls. Perhaps the marketers are on to something in their portrayals of this place. Without realizing the depth of their actions, they are responding to a contradictory feeling of reality and dream (or, for the more pessimistic, nightmare) and seek to profit off of this conundrum, not realizing that it is not an attractive situation, but rather a repulsize one.

Perhaps as well this problem affects us in our relationships with others. At times it appears that we are unable to relate to people if their problems and experiences are too alien to us. It is as if we are caught in that uncanny valley as well--recognizing that we are dealing with humans, fellow children of God, who are like us and have natures like our own, and yet we are unable to understand and relate to how they think and feel and behave, because we are cut off by unbridgeable barriers of experience. And so we are repulsed by others, because they are real and unreal at the same time, as if they were both human and inhuman at the same time. The same sort of paradox existed in the times of slavery (most of human history, in some form) where people were considered human beings (responsible for their actions) and yet property (unfree, without freedom or will, bound to people or to the land) at the same time. Masters (and slaves) were caught in this uncanny valley of combined recognition of reality and repulsion at the other being alien and foreign, and beyond worthiness of human kindness or dignity.

The uncanny valley is an example of what is known as cognitive dissonance, a paradox between two opposite thoughts/feelings/opinions that cannot both be true but both appear to be true. In the case of viewing robotic beer dispensers, this cognitive dissonance leads us to reject the commercial as ugly and repulsize, and to lower our opinion of Heineken. However, if we are dealing with human beings the problem is more severe. We are faced with the need of recognizing both human dignity and human depravity (both our own and others). We are therefore forced to recognize, if we wish to be truthful, that we and others are both created in the image of God and yet fallen beings as well in need of forgiveness, healing, and redemption. Unfortunately, this is not an easy thing to do.

Welcome To Wherever You Are

Sometimes in life, people would rather have a do-over because the results of an action are less than exemplary. Being a fan of music and sports, I have seen a fair amount of these recently. As I am a busy fellow, I will only look at these somewhat briefly. With that in mind, though, here goes.

"Gimme More?" No Thanks

Yesterday night, Britney Spears sought to initiate her "comeback" with a live "performance" of a new single entitled "Gimme More" where she apparently lipsynched rather poorly and demonstrated very lame dancing moves as well as less than trim physical condition. Her performance has been widely panned and some suspect that her career is over, comparing her unfavorably with her ex Kevin Federline. Furthermore, MTV was panned rather heavily for the desperation inherent in their decision to let Britney open the award show with her, um, performance as well as their decision to have most of the action take place in private VIP parties rather than in the televised show--which was shortened to increase the number of commercials and decrease the number and length of performances shown. Bad call.

Historic Upset

Life has been good the past couple of weeks if you are a fan of two-time defending I-AA champions Appalachian State. A trip to then #5 ranked Michigan ended up in the small school from Boone, North Carolina recording a 34-32 win that ranks as the first time in college football history that a team from Division I-AA has defeated a ranked Division I-A team. The loss led to a chance in the rules of the AP Poll, allowing Division I-AA teams to be ranked, and led to Michigan plummeting out of the rankings. A loss to Oregon this week brings the 0-2 Wolverines face to face with another struggling team, the 0-2 Notre Dame "Fighting" Irish, who have failed to score an offensive touchdown in two games against Georgia Tech and Penn State.

News At 11

There have been a lot of odd and quirky news stories that I lack the time to write about in depth, but have been intrigued by. One such story involves the explosion of a truck in Mexico carrying some kind of explosives that has killed over 30 people and injured another 150. Included among the victims were 3 local reporters who were presumably on the scene to cover the accident and instead became part of the story. Obviously, stories like this will make people a little jumpier over trucks being allowed to come in from Mexico to the US, given such a lax safety record. Other news stories, such as the discovery of "Kryptonite" in Serbia, are not new but are still rather entertaining to me. As usual, I will be on the lookout for more odd and quirky stories as the mood strikes me in case I feel like a blogging mood.

On Friendship

What does it mean to be a friend? I have lived a scattered life, long of the opinion that I was rather little liked and regarded, and I have spent too little time in reflecting and acting on what it means to be a friend, seeing as I thought I had very few people who were concerned at all about me. Perhaps it was rather self-centered, and mistaken, of me to think and feel this way, but so it is. We are all interconnected with each other, and our happiness and sadness, our triumphs and our trials all have an effect on those around us. We are, after all, to rejoice with those who laugh and cry with those who mourn. As I have reflected on the fact that I have a surprising amount of friends and acquaintances, I have also reflected on their lives and on the many connections between all of us, even after many of us have scattered far and wide from where we originally met and have not seen each other for years.

One of my classmates from high school recently got engaged. This is not terribly surprising, as it is the time of life where people tend to get married, but what struck me is that this person's wedding wishes were so frequent (I sent him wedding wishes myself) that he is not able to invite all of his friends to the reception. Certainly I can sympathize with his problem, and the way in which he is handling the large amount of well-wishers is quite admirable. Happy indeed is the man (or woman) who knows how well they are thought of by others. This particular young man graduated from the same high school as I did in the same year, but I did not know him closely then. We were both in Orchestra during high school--I as a violist towards the back of the section and he as the concertmaster--first chair first violin. It seemed that everything came so easily for him--he was charming, friendly, good looking, came from a wealthy and loving family, was stellar in school, in tennis, in playing the violin, and seemingly in everything he did. He was (and remains) active in various religious groups as well as his social activities. And yet he was and remains well-liked by just about everyone. About the only bad thing I ever heard about him was that his violin playing was skilled but not passionate, and considering the bad things I have heard about others (and myself) this is rather light indeed. And yet, despite the apparent ease of his life and of his frequent successes in so many years, no one (including myself) begrudges him any of his happiness. Instead we share in his joy over his happy life, and hope it will continue as such. As he is a just and fair and friendly fellow, his happiness and success does not come with resentment from anyone who knows him.

At other times, one must share sorrow and not joy when it comes to friends. One of my friends, for example, is having a rough time with stomach cancer, and I have not seen him (largely because I am sick right now and would not wish to pass on any germs to someone whose health is already in such a state as his), but I have sought to send my regards through other friends who are able to see him. The same is true for other friends I have--one of whom has been struggling with colon cancer for about two years now, and the father of another friend of mine whose pancreatic cancer has spread to other organs also. At other times, one must support friends whose struggles are not life-threatening illnesses, but such mundane troubles as car problems, or such serious life-issues as the breakup of a marriage or serious family difficulties. There is no shortage of friends in need indeed. When my friends suffer, I suffer with them. I suppose the same is true of others. We cannot be so consumed with our own lives that we are ignorant of what is going on with others--even if there is little we can do besides lend a sympathetic ear to them, or to spend our precious time reminding them that they are not alone and that they are in our thoughts and prayers. It is a terrible thing to feel and believe one is alone--and I would not wish that on anyone, much less those I care about.

At other times being a friend means helping in the labors of what friends seek to accomplish. I have many friends who, like myself, study and write about subjects of faith as well as of amusement. Even if I lack the time to do as much as I would like to help in the various labors of my friends, I will often help them edit and refine what they have written, which is what I would also expect of them. Sometimes this research is an areas I am knowledgeable in, and sometimes it is not. When I know something of the topic, I usually try to discuss this with the friend. If I do not know about the subject at hand in depth (and this does happen on occasion), then I will often take that as the opportunity to research areas I have not studied at length before. Having intelligent and intellectually curious friends is a good way to ensure that one is constantly learning and growing as well, and keeps the mind fresh. It is tragic to cease learning because one thinks one knows everything already. The greater my knowledge, the more profound my sense of ignorance, if only because I realize there is so much more that I do not understand.

I often wish I was a better friend. Often I feel that I am too concerned about my own thoughts and affairs to be the sort of friend I ought to be. Perhaps my friends may feel differently about this, and if so they are welcome to tell me, but I wonder often if I have shared enough in the joy and sorrows of those friends I have. A true friend is present in good times and bad, even if all one can do is provide moral support by one's mere presence and cannot actually do anything about a given situation. Sometimes that is enough. I know I am thankful for those friends I have, and I would hope they are thankful as well.

On The Randomness of Facebook

This past week, I have become a frequent visitor to Facebook, one of those popular networking websites that appeals mostly to teens and young adults through college age, with the occasional older person as well. The experience has been a useful one for me, because it has given me a much better perspective about a few matters I have long pondered. Since this is a blog given to much pondering, I will continue. Some of these lessons were ones I should have known, but lacked the perspective to put into a full focus.

On Moderate Popularity

I have never considered myself a particularly well-liked or popular person, despite being well traveled and generally talkitive and outgoing. Perhaps I am a bit biased by an early life in which it appeared as though I was a social leper, but I have never considered how dramatically my social life has improved in the last few years until I took a look at the amount of people on facebook who were willing to say they were my friends. Now, many of my closest friends do not even have facebook, even among young adults and teenagers, but over a hundred people so far have been willing to say they were my friends. This is a remarkable thing. To put it into some context, one of my roommates was much more popular around campus it seemed, and he certainly went to more parties and had more dates than I did. However, looking at his profile indicated that he had 78 friends, but nearly all of them in Southern California. Of his 78 friends, 59 of them lived in the Los Angeles area. Of my 118 friends in comparison, only 11 of them lived in my most popular region, Tampa Bay.

My Friendships Are Scattered

This leads to the next conclusion, one that had prevented me from taking a full account of my rise in popularity from leper to a moderately well-liked one. My friendships are scattered all over the US, and indeed, all over the world. I do not have any particularly large groups of friends in any one place. I have sizeable groups of friends in Florida, Texas, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, Washington, and a few other places, but they are not concentrated at all, and include a couple of friends in England and one in South Africa. Part of the reason for this scattering of friends is being in the Church of God, which tends to bring one into contact with a wide variety of people. But comparisons with other young people in the church of God on my buddy list (and there are many such people to compare with) demonstrates that while I share a great deal of common friends among people in the Church of God, most of them show a greater concentration in the area where they live. Even among my many friends who are not in the church, many of them, like me, have scattered far and wide in the course of interesting and complicated travels, and so my friends seem to be a bit more nomadic than most. My own moving around, my ties in a variety of different areas, and my lack of a strong social base among peers in my home territory (where I have lived the vast majority of life) have given me a false, and somewhat darker, picture of my social network than was in fact the truth. The truth is, I could travel in many areas and have friends and acquaintances there, at least a couple of people I knew and enjoyed spending time with. However, I don't have any one particular area whose pull of connections is so strong as to make that a place where I truly belong. In the end, though, my dispersed friendships can be a great source of strength provided I can summon the energy to keep up with them, which is the purpose of a site like Facebook in the first place.

On Memories

Joining Facebook has also been the opportunity to revisit a lot of memories of people I knew when I was younger. People who were not particularly nice to me in high school, for example, now inhabit a fair deal of space on my Facebook page, and I remember many stories about those whom I have added. However, the past is put into a different perspective when one reflects on where I stand and where they stand now. Many of us are graduate students, who have moved at least once from where we spent those years together. We are older, and hopefully wiser, and in my case at least, nowhere near as squirrelly and immature as we were back then. Remembering the past, even an unpleasant past, need not be depressing, so long as one knows how far one has come. On the other hand, some people have changed dramatically for the worse in their own moral lives, having fallen victim in college to serious immorality, even as others have become very mature and serious young adults. There are certainly cautionary tales that could be told as well as stories of coming to terms with what has been done but burying the hatchet, so to speak. Perhaps that is another purpose of Facebook I was not aware of. The act of putting one's life on a webpage in pictures and songs and stories puts one's life in a different perspective, viewing how we are interconnected, and how we have grown into the people we are today. If people are honest about themselves, it can lead to deeper connections with people as we find out some of what makes them tick and what is most important to them. I know it has been an eye opening experience for me personally.

For The Love Of The Game

In 1999, when I was a freshman at the University of Southern California, a movie came out called For The Love Of The Game, based on the novel by Michael Shaara (more famous for his excellent historical novel The Killer Angels, which was later turned into the film Gettysburg). I watched this movie while returning home from the Feast in Hawaii that year, and then bought the soundtrack, whose title track was an excellent song by Semisonic, a band best known for its hit "Closing Time," which uses the last call for a bar as a metaphor for birth. Anyway, I spent early Sunday afternoon with some friends of mine from Houston watching a particularly exciting baseball game, which led me to reflect upon many things.

The movie, directed by Sam Raimi ("Spiderman") details a perfect game that is pitched by Billy Chapel (played with restraint in an excellent performance by Kevin Costner), a washed up pitcher playing in Yankee Stadium for a bad team (only recently good--the Detriot Tigers). As he plays the game he reflects upon his life, as his love (played not-very-convincingly by Kelly Preston) prepares to move to Paris for a job. One of the more convincing aspects, for me, of the movie is the way in which Billy takes a fatherly role to Heather, the daughter of his sweetheart, played very well by Jena Malone. One of the flashbacks involves Heather going to college, and she ends up at USC, which I thought was an amusing and touching detail.

Lyrics to "For The Love Of The Game" - Semisonic

In the morning of the first night of my life
I was feeling like I'd lost my inspiration
Then in the afternoon she walked into the light
To relieve me of my doubt and desperation.

She's not coming here to make herself a name
She only wants to play with me to see if she can win
And we both want it to happen.

None down in the bottom of the ninth with three men on
And she saw me like nobody's ever done before
Now in the glory of victorious dominion
She's receding in the sunshine down the corridor.

She's not in it for the money or the fame
She only came to play with me to see what place I'm in
And we both know who's gonna give in.

For the love of the game
Sometimes you've gotta cry a little.
For the love of the game
Maybe even gotta die a little.
For the love of the game
I made a sacrifice I never thought I'd have to make.

For the love of the game
Sometimes you've gotta cry a little.
For the love of the game
Maybe even gotta die a little.
For the love of the game
I made a sacrifice I never thought I'd have to make. (I made a sacrifice...)

Sometimes you've gotta cry a little.
For the love of the game
Maybe even gotta die a little.
For the love of the game
I made a sacrifice I never thought I'd have to make...

[End song lyrics.]

Anyway, baseball is a pastime I associate closely with my family. As I was watching the game, I wore my Pittsburgh Pirates shirt (even though the Pirates were not playing that day--the Astros and Padres were). When I would visit my father as a child/teenager up in Pennsylvania during the summer, we would often go to Pirates games on Sunday afternoons, not an uncommon way for fathers to try to bond with their children. Indeed, on this particular afternoon the game was originally planned to have a father and one of his friends in the church taking his daughter (my friend Kristin) and some of her friends to watch the Astros. Even the seats we had were with this goal in mind, as we sat in the right field, a few rows up in the closest area to the field, right next to the Astros bullpen. Luke Scott, a rookie for the Astros, plays right field, and one of Kristin's friends is particular fond of him. She and her brother (Jimmy, who went to Burlington Coat Factory on Friday with Kristin and I and with him many funny "hat" pictures on their myspace profiles were posted) were not able to make it to the game, though, because they were in Texarkana at the funeral of their grandfather, who had died of cancer on Thursday. So, they were not able to go.

Before I got to my seat, the Astros were already down 3-0. Richard (the father) and I had gone to get peanuts and beer (no beer for either Kristin and I), and due to the limit of 2 beers per person, my id was useful. Luke Scott had made a bad play on a ball and it ended up as a ground rule double, ending up in the row in front of where I was to sit. Too bad I was not there to catch it. By the time the first half inning of the game ended, Houston was already down 11-0 and their starter had been taken out of the game. I figured at this point the game would be a blowout, but it ended up being a compelling offensive game.

In the second inning, San Diego added to their lead, pushing it to 12-0, but in the bottom of the third the Astros hit a solo homer to spoil a hitherto perfect game from the Padres starter to make it 12-1. Then in the bottom of the fourth inning Berkman and Scott homered and Houston finally showed some offense, narrowing the deficit to 12-8, at which point the Padres starter, who was handed an 11 run lead before he even took the field, was pulled.

In the 5th inning San Diego scored a run on an interesting play where a player (with the last name of Bard) hit a fielder's choice grounder to the pitcher, and the pitcher threw too far to the left of home, letting a San Diego runner score. Then the catcher threw to second base, trying to get a runner out there, but failed. It was a strange play that left the stadium booing loudly. At the middle of the fifth inning, Houston was down 15-8. In the bottom of the 5th, Houston scored some runs themselves. With two outs, Biggio (whose name and number my friend Kristin had on her pink (!) Astros shirt) came in as a pinch hitter, but he did not reach base, and left two on to stop the rally. Before his out, though, the entire stadium was chanting his name. Biggio, you see, is past his prime himself, and is retiring at the end of the season, the last of Houston's famed "Killer B's". Houston ended the inning down only 15-11.

And so the game remained until the 9th inning, though there were some dramatic moments. In the bottom of the 7th inning, for example, after an entertaining seventh inning stretch where three songs were performed ("God Bless America," the Astros version of "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" and "Deep In The Heart of Texas" were played), the Astros loaded the bases with two outs, but were unable to drive in any runs with the tying run at the plate. At the top of the 9th inning, though, the Houston closer, Lidge, ran out of gas and allowed three runs, the last two coming from a blast to deep left field. Houston was unable to score any more runs, so in an exciting game with three errors (two by Houston and one by San Diego), seven home runs (four by Houston and three by San Diego), and fourteen pitchers (eight by Houston and six by San Diego), the game was over. By then most of the fans had streamed out of their seats, no doubt disappointed. After the final out, "Come Monday," played on the stadium PA. There is always tomorrow, or next season, for those who do not win today.

Im In Ur Yardz Huntin Ur Dukz

It almost pains me to write "I'm in your yards, hunting your ducks" that way, but such is the grammar and spelling of a humorous phenomenon known as lolcats. As I find the news around me (even sports news) to be rather grim much of the time, it is important to have something humorous in order to give one a bit of a chuckle, even a silly one, once in a while. First I will look at the structure of lolcat photos, some explanations for their appeal, and how they have spread into other areas besides cats (since I am not a particularly fan of cats).

An lolcat photo (or any other lol*insert noun here* photo) is made up of two elements. One is a photo, and the other is a rather goofy caption. The captions are generally silly, and say such things as "I Loves U" or "I Pronounce Every Day Iz Caturday" or "I Are Serious Cat. This Is Serious Thread" or "You're Adopted" or "Im In Ur Fridge Eatin Ur Foodz" or "I Made U A Cookie...But I Eated It" or "I Can Haz Cheezburger?". In other words, most of the pictures deal with cats in their normal (?) activities and focus on food, excitability, and affection (or the lack thereof).

What makes lolcats funny, besides the fact that people (including myself) are easily amused? For one, cats are pretty funny to watch. They often behave in humorous ways by lounging about, lunging at inanimate objects, steathily hunting like their wild ancestors, and so on. Some cats are cuddly and affectionate, and others are rather standoffish and unfriendly. Cats, for all their snobbery, have recognizable and occasionally charming personalities. What lolcats do is take these photos (some edited, some not) from the lives of cats and adds to them a sort of childish language that one could imagine cats thinking, putting an entirely new context onto the action of the cat and those around it.

It is surprising that no one thought of this idea before, but the creators of lolcats and memecats and so on deserve credit for an inventive way to have an honest and simple laugh. What is not surprising is that the idea behind lolcats has spread far beyond its original confines. A friend of mine from Wisconson sent me some rather humorous pictures he was submitting for an lolopera thread. These photos showed an opera singer (Jessye) with silly captions such as "Oh Noes, Drove Wif Da Top Down," "I C U," "Invisible Giant Cheezburger," "Mah Speeker Iz Too Loud," and so on. If opera fans are adapting something as silly as lolcats, one knows the phenonemon has spread far and wide.

I for one, do not see a problem in this. Perhaps some may find lolcats to be a bit silly, but I know I take this life way too seriously often, and generally need something simple and a bit quirky to laugh with/at sometimes. Lolcats generally lack irony or sarcasm or the other ways in which humor presents itself the most often. So, if you have a quirky and somewhat child-like sense of humor, may you go and seek out some lolcats for a laugh this most serious of Thursdays. It is, after all, a lot more entertaining (I promise) than reading a rant from me.

Bad Call

Though I am not a particularly big fan of professional basketball (I am more a fan of college basketball), I am a casual fan of just about every sport around (that I have heard of at least), and so I try to keep up on the news about basketball as I would most other sports. There has been a recent scandal in the NBA that might even be the largest the sport has ever faced involving mafia ties and gambling by a referee who apparently gambled on games he officiated. While the whole story has yet to come out, what has come out looks very damaging for the credibility of referees in basketball, the particular referee in question, and the NBA's image as a whole, even among a rather corrupt sports climate generally right now.

As the story goes, a referee by the name of Tom Donaghy, whose father was a college basketball referee (so being a referee is in the blood, so to speak) apparently had some gambling debts as he lived an opulent lifestyle in eastern Pennsylvania. He was apparently contacted by a low-level mafia figure over the debts and offered a deal that he couldn't refuse--the debts would be forgiven if he used his whistle to influence the point spreads of games he officiated and make his new associates happy. He apparently took the offer and refereered well enough to be given prestigious assignments, including playoff games. His whistle may have been twisted, but it was apparently not twisted enough to make him anything less than a well-regarded referee (which says something about the state of refereeing in the NBA). Now that his name has come out, information has come out that says that Mr. Donaghy may have been warned about his gambling problem by the NBA before the current FBI case was publicized. If this is the case, then the NBA stands as well to be culpable as they enabled him to affect the course of important games after this warning.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can now look back on some of the most important games that Donaghy has officiated and look at how his calls may have been tainted by other concerns. Once someone is found to be corrupt, their decisions fall under much harsher scrutiny. The arrogant dismissals from David Stern, the head of the NBA, about the lack of moral rectitude among referees appears to have come back to bite him. If a ref can be tainted and be considered a pretty good ref, who is to say that there are not more corrupt referees around? The following is a list of the games that, so far, reek of the most corruption:

Game 3, Western Conference Semifinals, 2007: San Antonio 108-Phoenix 101. This game is marred by bad calls, in particular a phantom (and delayed) foul that gave San Antonio three free throws in the 3rd quarter, and other foul calls that kept Phoenix Suns star Amare Stoudemire on the bench except for 21 minutes. The Spurs were favored by 4 points and ended up winning by 7, meaning the calls Donaghy made appeared to have accounted for the point spread in the game. Already a questionable game before the calls, the news of Donaghy's corruption makes this game, and the series as a whole, a tainted one, and diminishes the achievement of the Spurs in winning the NBA title this past year.

November 2004, "The Brawl at the Palace," Indiana versus Detriot. This game, the infamous brawl that ended up with numerous players given lengthy supsensions for lengthy brawling on the court as well as fighting in the stands (between players and patrons) was officiated by Donaghy and others. Apparently this was not the first time Donaghy had problems with Rasheed Wallace, the combative Detriot player (who had threatened the ref a year before and had earned a seven game suspension for it). Donaghy and others were widely condemned for letting the fighting go on for too long, but now there are questions there may have been ulterior motives for the lax officiating with regards to the fighting.

Donaghy does not appear to have been a popular fellow among his peers, certainly not a proof of any guilt, but also a sign that he does not have any support already, much less after these allegations and the mounting evidence have come out. With Donaghy under police protection and a widening FBI probe exposing a lot of very unfriendly evidence, the picture for the NBA looks grim indeed. Where it will lead is a story that may yet be told in the days and weeks and months to come.

A History Lesson

Though I have thought long and hard about what sort of post to write next--I have been dissatisfied with the tenor of most of the news I have read, little of interest has been going on in my life, reflecting on Father's Day and the 4th of July left me with rather melancholy material, and I have been quite busy with graduate school. Though these particular reflections are melancholy enough, I figured it was a suitable subject to discuss on a blogger post, as many people who read this are, no doubt, well aware of my profound interest in both history. Fewer people are likely to be aware of my interest in the generational cycles of history, but recent newspaper articles and serious reflection, as well as my own particularly deep-rooted sense of pessimism have led to this particular post, which seeks to compare our times with the age of the 1920's, our last guilded age. Additional comparisons will be made with the 1880's, another time similar to our own with similarly serious consequences. Make of these comparisons what you will.

A New Guilded Age

I have read much in the past few years about the rising wealth of corporate magnates whose own tax obligations have lowered even as the economic health of the general population at large has been hindered through stagnant wages, a crushing burden of debt, and an increasingly regressive tax burden as societal interest in defending the common people, much less the disadvantaged of society, begins to crumble under the combined weight of moral decay and corporate plutocracy. Let us see how this is so now, and how it has happened throughout critical and dangerous periods of American history that our time, in many ways, closely resembles.

Most of the articles one reads about the comparisons between the historical periods in question (the 1880's and 1920's) and our own revolve around questions of class and distribution of wealth, questions that are of interest to me (but mainly for their implications on the moral justice present in a society). In all these three times wealth was concentrated in the hands of an ever-shrinking number of fabulously wealthy people who lived in obscene wealth and privilege while the general population suffered stagnation of wages (among the middle class) or a deterioration of economic position (among the lower classes). One important measure of a society's health is how equitably its economic resources are distributed. There will always be some degree of inequality in a society through the accidents of birth, differences in diligence, ability, and education, but such factors themselves do not make for extreme differences in wealth, largely because our own native abilities and inclinations do not vary over a huge range. Societies that demonstrate a lack of concern for social justice and for the concerns of those who are not well off (witness most of Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and so on) are precisely those countries which have the most unequal distributions of wealth. To the extent that the United States persists in its increasingly unequal distribution of economic resources, the fabric of society will become increasingly frail. After all, if those who possess an ever-growing percentage of wealth and power do not share in the insecurities of ordinary people, then the concerns of the majority of the population will not be reflected in the policies a nation conducts, unless there is social unrest sufficient to remind the wealthy and the powerful of their obligations to the rest of society.

There is some evidence that this is already taking place in parts of the world. Unscrupulous populists with mandates to forcibly redistribute wealth have taken power or consolidated their hold in several countries in Latin America (namely Venezuela and Bolivia), and nearly took power in Mexico. Meanwhile, social unrest over various issues have erupted in the US (over immigration), in France (over immigration and policies designed to harm young adult workers), in China (over government corruption and population controls), and in other places as well. These are not unconnected. As wealth becomes more unequal the institutions of society (whether tax systems, justice systems, or political systems) become more unjust as they reflect the interests of an ever-smaller segment of society. This in turn leads to growing apathy about the fairness and benevolence of government, unless an authoritarian populist leader can motivate these disaffected masses to rise up against the powerful and corrupt. Paradoxically, this furthers the corruption of the state because such leaders do not tolerate limits on their power from free presses and from independent sources of power, and so personal corruption based on cronyism replaces the corruption borne out of wealth. Furthermore, the institutions of democracy (such as an independent judiciary and the market economy) come under threat because of how they had become corrupted to serve the interests of the few instead of all.

It should be noteworthy at this point that in the present age as well as the 1880's and 1920's, immigrants became a common scapegoat for the frustrated longings of the masses (this was also true in the 1850's). In the 1880's, for example, immigrants from China were often the scapegoats for the stagnant wages of unskilled laborers. In the 1920's, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were the scapegoats. Now it is immigrants from Latin America as well as the Middle East. In all of these cases immigrants of distinctive appearance, religion, and social customs, whose streaming from areas under extreme stress led to increasing competition among native unskilled workers and created intense social unrest on both sides.

Though my opinions on illegal immigration are rather complicated and nuanced, the immigrants themselves are the symptoms and not the problem. Illigal immigrants (then and now) find work because of official corrpution that refuses to enforce laws, as well as corruption in businesses that seek to avoid paying market wages for labor or provide adequate working conditions. In the end, a few wealthy benefit and the majority of people suffer, though the suffering of the immigrants is often less intense because the situation where they came from is even worse. Intensifying the trouble is the fact that while unskilled labor conditions become increasingly unstable and threatening, there are increasing barriers to entering professional fields due to increased requirements for education and competence. When society ceases to be one and divisions between economic classes becomes hardened, the results are increasing social unrest.

It should be noted that these times are precisely those where the burden of taxation placed on the middle and lower classes is the most severe. During the Guilded Age, for example, income tax laws were declared unconstitutional because corporations were judged as falling under the persons whose rights were protected under the 14th amdendment. This was true even though those same courts denied those rights to the people actually defined under the 14th amendment--freed slaves and their descendents. When corporations have rights and people do not, something is terribly amiss in a society. In the 1920's, incomes were taxed while capital gains were not, and so the wealthy profited handsomely through stocks and property speculation (no comment) while the tax burden fell increasingly on the middle classes (whose benefits were typically in salary and not stock). In our times, we see property taxes and income taxes and estate taxes (which tend to affect the middle and upper classes the strongest) lowered while lotteries and sales taxes (which tend to most strongly affect the lower classes) increased. This skews the tax burden to the poor, who are precisely those who can least afford it and benefit the least from the expenditures gained from those taxes. Socities that rely upon the ignorance of the people to provide for their own unust gain play a very dangerous game.

It should also be noted at least briefly that these times are also precisely those where the national and personal debt levels in society reach the highest levels. Nations, banks, and individuals borrow and lend money at increasingly bad terms in order to keep up appearances, ever putting off the day when they must pay the piper and thus ensuring that the reprocussions of those decisions are the most serious possible and extend over the entire globe. Even if people realize the situation they are in, it is as if they lack the ability to do anything constructive about it, further increasing the strains on an increasingly tense situation.

Social/Religious Stresses

It is of no surprise that during these same times the social and moral fabrics of society also becomes frayed. It is foolish to speculate upon which is the cause and which is the effect between the various factors, but it is important to note that they are all interconnected, which would seem to indicate that there is a connection between them, possibly mutually reinforcing.

It is surely not coincidental that evolution has been a major issue in the last four periods of serious societal stress. In 1859, Darwin published his book "On The Origin of Species." In the 1880's, the doctrine of social darwinism, where the wealthy (the fittest) were claimed to owe no obligations to the "lesser" and "unfit" elements of society was defended and elaborated upon. The 1920's featured the Scopes Monkey Trial and the move to teach macroevolution in the schools. Today, of course, evolution is hotly debated, as the benefits of avoiding obligations to God and fellow man outweigh a concern for the objective evidence in the eyes of many powerful people (if not the population at large). A major reason for this is that Darwinian evolution, in its materialistic universe (without room for a just God who rules sovereignly over His Creation) and its appeal to the survival of the fittest (which would lower one's sense of obligation to the poor, the old, the sick, and the unfortunate) serve against the divine requirements of social justice emphasized repeatedly and strongly throughout the entire scriptures.

Meanwhile, these times are noted also for dramatic societal trouble about drug and alcohol abuse, abortion, euthenasia, immorality in dress, objectification of women, rampant problems with sexuality, violence, and so on (see the Great Gatsby for a comment on the situation of the 1920's, or any of the works of Nathaniel West). In all of these times there is a profound dissention between the standards of the youth and the declining hold of "traditional" morality upon the behavior of the population. Furthermore, these times show a consistent trend towards rampant materialism (see above note about evolution) as well as the importance of appearance over a rigorous attention to reality. Each of these issues alone is worthy of several ranting posts, but time and energy do not permit me to spend my 26th birthday this way.

It should also be noted that these times featured the growth of superchurches (the 1920's in particular) at the expensive of denomonational loyalty. Indeed, any kind of loyalty is particularly difficult to find in these eras of history. Such superchurches are also noticed today where pastors write Horatio-Algeresque tales (see the 1880's) invoking the gospel of plentitude (see the Prayer of Jabez for a notable example of this) and where wealth and success are often taken as signs of righteousness. This has the often neglected but rather pointed corrolary that failure and poverty are the signs of unrighteousness, which serves to bring the nastiness of the outside world into the confines of congregations. Rather than preach about the gospel of social justice that is found in the Bible (notice the first speech of Jesus Christ, or the consistent and fierce condemnation of those who abuse wealth and power in the Bible, especially--but not only--in the prophets such as Hosea, Amos, Jeremiah, Isaiah), the emphasis is on numbers (money, membership) to the detriment of deep and serious examination and application of the scriptures. As a result, even though religion is popular, the Bible does not exert influence over the lives of professed believers.

What Follows

This is predictably depressing, but worst of all is the reflection of what follows after these times and is the direct result of the processes of decay and segmentation found in eras like today. When one looks at what followed the last three eras that most closely resemble our own, the results are quite striking. In the first era, the period of trouble in the late 1850's was followed by the Civil War, the most catastrophic war in American history thus far, when a group of states led by privileged and unjust slaveowners sought to create an independent nation founded on freedom from government interference with slavery but the most draconian regulations on slavery and the criticism of it. The Guilded Age of the 1880's led to the prolonged depression of 1890-1896, which led to the birth of the American Federation of Labor and the Progressive reforms of the early 1900's (including antitrust laws and the first laws regulating the quality of food, among others). The "Roaring Twenties" was followed by the Great Depression and the rise of facism and militarism around the world, leading directly into the Second World War, the most destructive war in recorded history. Obviously, this is not good. What can be done about it at this advanced state is difficult to say, but when I look at the state of the world today, and the inability of people to deal with the full extent of the moral roots of this present state (including those people who see apocalyptic signs in these times) is not a pleasant one.

What will follow these present times, I do not know, but such times have never ended well. Perhaps one of the conflicts in our present society will lead to some bitter rift and ugly civil turmoil. Perhaps there will be a depression like that of the 1890's or 1930's, with delayed federal action to respond and laws that swing the pendulum too far to the other side in response to the current imbalance. Perhaps some unscrupulous leader will take advantage of the righteous indignation of people and promise unrealistic solutions in exchange for the further weakening of our freedoms and our democratic system. Perhaps there will be riots and unrest in the streets. I am no prophet, I do not know. What I do know from all the history I have been able to find on such times like these is that the situation will not be tackled until there is no other choice, and the solution will be more expensive and more troublesome than it has to be if the problem is dealt with sooner. We lack the leaders with the moral vision to understand the depth of the problems we face and the moral courage to deal with the problems and how they interrelate. What can be done about that, I do not know. History lesson concluded.

On The Ironies of Weather

Every summer, wise Floridians (and residents of other subtropical nations and states) become very familiar with the National Hurricane Center website (www.nhc.noaa.gov), with daily (or multiple-times daily, depending on how grim the situation is) readings about which tropical waves could develop into hurricanes and which hurricanes threaten the flat, reclaimed swampland where I reside. Having recently moved from a rare area in my city not in any evacuation zone to somewhere in Evacuation Zone A (meaning I may be particularly itinerant this hurricane season), I will be paying even more attention (if that were possible) to the business of hurricanes and tropical storms as I go about my affairs in work and school.

This particular year has started early with regards to tropical storms. Despite it being only the beginning of May, on May 9th Subtropical Storm Andrea formed in the Atlantic just off the coast of St. Augustine, slowly drifting west towards the state in dry, unfavorable atmospheric conditions. This brave little storm is already dissipating, but it marks the first storm of what could be a busy season. Ironically enough, some people (including Florida's Governor) were hoping that the tropical storm would bring some much needed rain to Florida. No dice.

What could drive people to wish for a tropical storm to hit Florida when the last few years have been less than kind to Florida in that regard (lest anyone forget, during the 2004 Hurricane Season, Florida was hit by four major hurricanes, the last two of which knocked out power where I lived for over a week)? In 2005 Florida was hit by another three hurricanes, one of which destroyed part of Miami International Airport (and delayed my flight back to Tampa from New Jersey, though it indirectly gave me first class tickets, so I suppose I can't complain too much). The reason is that Florida is as dry as my sense of humor right now.

Florida and Georgia are so dry right now that a swamp is burning (!) and the air quality earlier this week (thanks to a fire near Gainesville) was so bad it reminded me of the smog in Los Angeles (as well as my experiences with fires out there, which threatened Griffith Park Observatory earlier this week, one of my favorite spots in LA). One fire, the aforementioned fire on the GA/FL border, has burned over 100 square miles of land and is now threatening towns on the stateline. Another fire has burned part of northern Minnesota and is now heading into Canada. Drought conditions have prevailed over much of the United States, and the droughts are turning quite ugly as hotter weather has turned dry grass into a tinderbox.

However, other parts of the United States (like Kansas and Nebraska, and other parts of the midwest) are having floods right now from rather severe rains, the worst floods since 1993. Those floods, by the way, were so severe that they forced some towns close to the rivers of the midwest to move further away from the river to avoid being in the floodplains. If cities and towns in Florida were moved away from the floodplains to avoid damage from flooding, there would not be much of Florida left suitable for habitation, but I suppose that is another subject for another time.

It appears that, however you look at it, this year already is shaping up to be a wacky one with regards to the weather. A late start to winter in Europe created serious problems, and the end of winter featured dramatic temperature swings from spring-like weather to late blizzards. No matter what reason one uses for the weather being as it is, the weather is truly bizarre, clearly not right. While it may keep some of us glued to the weather channel (or various other equivalents), it should force us to think as well how much our lives and livelihoods depend on the fickleness of our increasingly erratic weather.

It would not surprise others to know that my life and livelihood, like everything else in my existence, has an ambivalent relationship with the weather. For one, I live in an area rather vulnerable to hurricanes, living near the coast (a bay, to be precise). However, as a reviewer of modular building plans, I get more work when modular buildings need to be built as replacements for destroyed buildings as well as construction trailers for building sites post-disaster. So, while I dislike disasters, and the stress that hurricane season brings for me as I stare at menacing looking storms in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean, I profit off of the same. Like the ironies of the weather, the ironies of my life are many.

On The Sinister People

I have a confession to make: I am a sinister person. I say this somewhat jokingly, but truth be told, as a left-handed person, I am a sinister fellow. Sinister, a word with nearly uniformly negative connotation and denotation, comes from the latin word for left. In Latin, as in Hebrew and Greek and many other languages, left is given a host of negative meanings and right is given a host of postive meanings. The word left even comes from the Old English and means "weak." It is worthwhile to note some of these relationships first before I go on:

Left/Sinister:

Bend Sinister: signifies the bearer of the coat of arms is an illegitimate child
Sinister is also contained in the names of villians in Marvel Supercomics as well as the Underdog
Sinister is also used as a synonym for evil.
Left does not only refer to the direction, but is also the past tense of "leave" in such expressions as "left behind."
The word left in French, gauche, means awkward or clumsy.

Right/Dextrous:

Dexterity, from the Latin word for right, refers to manual ability, as the opposite of clumsiness, and is often used in role playing games for statistics related to skill in tools and weapons.

Right is not only used for the direction, but is also a positive expression used in "right brain thinking" (referring to creative thinking as opposed to the narrow quantitative thinking known as "left-brained thinking").

Right is also the name of those freedoms which are most treasured and sought after (such as "The Bill of Rights" or the "Civil Rights Movement") and is used to refer to something which is correct and proper as opposed to something which is wrong.

Perhaps these are not noticed very frequently because most of the world is right-handed (different estimates figure the proportion of right-handed people to be about 85-90% of the total population), and it is easy to ignore what is common and obvious. In an entire semester of watching movies, I saw exactly one person writing left-handed, and he happened to be Marshall Mathers, better known as Eminem. When I saw Shawn Mullins write left-handed in the music video to "Everywhere I Go," I was pleased, because it is unusual to see people writing left-handed on-screen. Even had I not already noted that I am left-handed, the fact that I even bother to notice what hand people write with should give away that fact, because right-handed people are not prone to notice what hand anyone writes with at all, while left-handed people like myself are always seeking out allies in our battle against a world designed hostile and backwards for the sinister people.

During the Middle Ages, left-handed people were considered tools of the devil and were burned at the stake (I would not have survived in the Middle Ages for other reasons, notably my intelligence, my intolerance for unjust hierarchies, my outspokenness, and my religious beliefs, but being left-handed would have added to the reasons why I would have received the death penalty in those dark times). Even in the United States in the 20th century, left-handed students were beaten on the wrist until they wrote with their right hand--this happened to my father as well as my mother's father, both of whom were born left-handed but who had it beaten out of them rather literally in school.

Left-handedness plays a role often unrecognized in military history as well. In the Bible, Ehud, a left-handed Benjaminite, used his left-handedness to slay Eglon, king of the Moabites, by sneaking a weapon on the right side of his body, where the guards did not check. Later in Judges, the notably left-handed Benjaminites dealt two defeats to the rest of the Israelites before being nearly eliminated as a tribe. Many fortresses in the Middle Ages were built with towers with stairs ascending clockwise, which would allow a right-handed person to defend them easier.

The Bible even adds to the general hostility towards the left-side in Jesus' parable of the sheep and the goats--the goats (symbollizing those who are not to be saved) are put on the left side, and the sheep (symbollizing those who are to be saved) are placed on the right-side. Yet, despite the often negative connotations of the word left (and the awkwardness in writing and drawing left-handed), and even the various hostile theories about the origin of left-handedness in people (including high amounts of stress at birth and brain damage), left-handedness endures and even has some positive connotations--including a prediliction for high intelligence and creativity.

So, in the end, perhaps the sinister people of this world like myself can have the last laugh--left-handed people are likely the only ones who even notice what kind of handedness most people have, and they are better at tennis and other one-on-one sports (like boxing) due to the assymetry of handedness. Living in a hostile world does have its advantages after all.

On The Collatz Conjecture

Yesterday, during the monthly Florida Bibliophile Society meeting, a book collecting former math teacher with a profound interest in Lewis Carroll (of Alice & Wonderland fame) made some interesting comments on an area of mathematics I find quite intriguing. He spoke in particular on the Collatz Conjecture. A conjecture, in mathematical terms, is a supposition that appears to be always true but is not rigorously proven. There are, of course, several ways to prove a statement, which would change the conjecture into a theorem (which is rigorously proven and is followed by three of my favorite latin words--quod erat demonstradum, which mean "it has been demonstrated/proven."

Logic gives us several ways of proving a statement. One is a proof by contradiction. In this proof, we assume that the theorem is not true and then demonstrate that this leads to a contradiction with what is known to be true. For example, if we assumed a theorem was not true and then showed that if this was the case then 1 = 0, then we would prove by contradiction that the theorem was true. This is a particularly elegant form of proof, and I quite enjoy that as well. Other proofs seek to demonstrate that a statement boils down, eventually, to already proven statements, so that the theorem rests on the shoulders of prior statements (standing on the shoulder of giants, as it were). The immediate implications of a given theorem are considered corollaries, and are added to the pool of proven statements as well. Alternatively, theorems may be proven exhaustively, such that within a given range one can demonstrate that the theorem is true because one has exhausted all of the possibilities. I dislike this manner of proof because I tend to get rather bored of calculating algorithms and my attention has the tendency to wander, leading to mistakes in arithmetic. Since this is apparently a common affliction, generally computers are used in this form beyond the simplest of cases, because their attention does not wander (unless they use a Microsoft operating system and have a blue screen error, but that is another subject entirely).

I particularly enjoy conjectures because they are often composed of rather simple statements and can be verified to very large numbers, but because they resist proof by contradiction or traditional methods of proof, and because they make such grand claims that they cannot be proven exhaustively. One such example of this sort of conjecture is that the digits of pi and Euler's constant do not have a repetitive pattern, making them transcendental numbers. Well, this has not been proven (or disproven, for that matter) despite the fact that computers have calculated pi and Euler's constant to extreme lengths and have found (in the case of pi at least) that there are roughly equal numbers of each digit despite no discernable pattern.

Collatz's conjecture is likewise appealing to me because the conjecture sets two rather simple rules, one for odd numbers and another for even numbers, and these rules have been demonstrated to be correct to very large numbers, but because there are an infinite number of postive numbers, the conjecture cannot be proven true exhaustively. Furthermore, the conjecture has resisted a proof by contradiction or the traditional deductive proof.

The Collatz Conjecture has two rules:
If a number is odd, multiply by three and add one (3x +1),
If a number is even, divide the number in half (x/2).
The conjecture states that, eventually, any number will reduce, given these two rules, to one.

Some examples:

1 4 2 1
2 1
3 10 5 16 8 4 2 1
4 2 1
5 16 8 4 2 1
6 3 10 5 16 8 4 2 1
7 22 11 34 17 52 26 13 40 20 10 5 16 8 4 2 1
8 4 2 1
9 28 14 7 22 11 34 17 52 26 13 40 20 10 5 16 8 4 2 1
10 5 16 8 4 2 1

And so on...

It becomes apparent rather quickly that there is some kind of pattern in the way the rule works, and that once a sequence reaches a number already present in an existing sequence then it follows the same trail (for example, 11 would be 11 34 17 52 26 13 40 20 10 5 16 8 4 2 1). However, the proof of this conjecture has evaded the attempts of mathematicians of far greater ability than I (though, to be honest, it is not a difficult task to find mathematicians of greater ability than I am).

I consider such examples as this simple conjecture as evidence that the world in which we live, even when we look only at such narrow areas as mathematics which appear at first capable of exhaustive rational proof, nonetheless possesses aspects which we hold to be true even though we cannot demonstrate them to be true by logic. The world we live in, that is, requires something we call faith. If this is true in the world of number theory, it is certainly even more true in those aspects of life that are not as quantifiable. This may not make some mathematicians very happy, but it should nonetheless provide food for thought for those of us who are able to handle a bit more uncertainty and are able to reflect upon intelligence greater than our own.

Three Vignettes On The Life Of A Graduate Student

My life as a graduate student provides me with numerous opportunities for dry humor and (sometimes) dispassionate reflection on the quirks of higher education and my own place within it. Knowing that graduate education is still somewhat rare in the United States, and particularly rare in my family (I am the first person in my family to go to graduate school since my great-great uncle Willis David Matthias got his Th.D from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1927, but that is another story), hopefully my musings are not too esoteric or obscure.

On Americans In Graduate School

As an American in a graduate engineering program, I am a rather unusual fellow (regardless of whether I would be unusual on account of my own inherent quirkiness). The vast majority of my fellow graduate students in the School of Engineering, even at the University of South Florida, are not American citizens. Those that are Americans are often older students (many of whom have children only a little younger than myself), and many of the other students come from such diverse lands as China, India, South Korea, Turkey, France, Columbia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco. I happen to enjoy studying with such people, as they provide me the opportunity to learn about other lands and backgrounds beyond my own (and I tend to seek out such knowledge anyway). So, for me it is not the presence of people from other lands that is noteworthy. What is noteworthy is the absence of other Americans, particularly young Americans, from my classes. I know I am an odd fellow, but being interested in graduate school in engineering should not make me that unusual, I would think. What makes this rather amusing is that immigration law, which for me personally is a rather non-issue, becomes a very important matter for many of my classmates. One classmate, an undergraduate in a combination graduate/undergraduate program at USF, is from Columbia, and she was unable to go to a recent academic conference she helped organize because it was in Cancun and she did not have travel visa privileges. Other friends of mine face difficulties in finding employment because of a shortage of H1-B visas, with the liklihood that they will have to return to their home nations.

This becomes a problem in that many professions (such as civil engineering, my own) are moving towards making professional credentials more difficult to obtain, often to the point of requiring graduate school. With the above-inflation rise in college costs and the increasing length of time of non-productive (in economic terms) years spent acquiring an education rather than earning a living, coupled with the shortage in young people willing or able to study advanced degrees in science and engineering (and the difficulties in legally hiring educated foreigners to these positions) we face some serious problems. There appear to be no shortage of ambitious young adults in MBA programs, but when it comes to more technical studies the shortage is most glaring (and I have seen it with my own eyes). It appears as if my generation of students has understood that we value the acquisition of money above all else--above integrity, above truth/knowledge--and they have chosen their academic careers accordingly. What are we to do to ensure our nation has enough intellectuals to fill those emptying ivory towers, or even the ranks of middle-class professions like scientists and engineers?

A Nexus Of Cash And Corruption

It is a common thread of mine to comment on corruption in this world wherever it can be found, and recently I have found another occasion to comment on this. A scandal is breaking in the world of academic financing, as numerous university officials have been found to have had overly cozy financial relationships with a clique of financial organizations engaged in predatory lending to university students. While the universities implicated so far in the scandal are on the east coast (Penn, St. John's, and so forth), there are plenty of schools in other parts of the United States that engage in the same practices (and I know of some schools on the west coast that they could look into as well).

The university officials implicated in this scandal (and some government officials as well) received lucrative benefits from a few preferred lenders who apparently gave the universities (and those officials) bonuses based on how many students chose particular loan packages that contained terms advantageous to the lending companies and not as advantageous to the students themselves. Andrew Cuomo, the attorney general for the state of New York (a position that in recent years has inspired rather fiercely anti-corruption officials), apparently began the investigation at the behest of a lender who was apparently shut out of elite college lending on account of being unable to schmooze with the university officials and being unwilling/financially unable to engage in the graft/corruption that such college lending apparently entails. Perhaps the AG of New York should go after the credit card companies that camp out on university sidewalks continually with free t-shirts to give out. Maybe they are paying off university officials as well. That would not be surprising.

A Parking Rant

Actually, one of the benefits of being a commuter student (as I am now) is avoiding such people. When I lived on campus as an undergraduate on the left coast, I could only avoid such people at food speed, and those who know me should realize my foot speed is not terribly fast. Unfortunately, one of the annoyances of being a commuter student is the problem of finding adequate parking.

A few days ago, I received a survey from the University of South Florida about parking, which gave me the opportunity to rant to the people responsible for the travesty that is engineering school parking. (It is a rare treat in my life to be able to rant directly, and anonymously, to people who make my life more difficult than I would prefer). I was bemused by the attempts of the survey to advocate the use of Tampa's rather unacceptable public transportation service (known as HARTLine), as well as advocate future light rail projects to connect USF to the airport and a few other major places. (The question of how someone is supposed to get from where they live to the light rail and back, much less go to work as well, is left unstated).

I took the opportunity of the survey to make a few choice (but non-profane) comments about the incompetence of those responsible for parking at USF. Of course, these are the same geniuses who removed an entire parking lot from student use (for who knows what reason) some weeks ago while the Spring Semester is still in session. Parking was crowded enough before, now the situation is even more untenable. I do not appreciate having to walk half a mile from my car to class, especially not when I have to pass half-empty lots I cannot use because they are reserved for staff. I take such things rather personally, and as a sign of the lack of genuine interest people in charge have about doing what is best for those they purportedly serve. It is distressing that it is so hard to find leaders who are not corrupt and incompetent. If leaders were as competent in serving as they were in advocating their own pet agendas and in avoiding due regulation and accountability, I would have much less to rant about. I think that would be a good thing all the way around. For now, I study what is around me, and occasionally report on it.