If you’ve had occasion to listen to the radio for any amount of time recently, you’ve probably heard the slew of commercials about the ongoing Census. What you’ll hear, unfortunately, is not an explanation of the original purpose of the census, but instead a rather inane and commonly incorrect interpretation of basic economics.

The one I hear most goes something like this (and I’m paraphrasing):

Imagine you live in a growing city approaching one thousand people. Imagine a transportation system that has 3 buses. If you don’t fill out the census, how will we know if we need more buses? Do you want to be on a really crowded bus? Of course not! Fill out your census so we can know how many people live here so we can buy more buses!

I’m not as droll as the narrator of this piece, but I can attest that this is the thrust of the argument. If you don’t fill out the census, public transportation will become ineffectual because, well, apparently that whole “three overly crowded buses” in a small metropolitan area is not enough to signal to the powers that be that…”hey, we need more buses!”

Ironically, what this commercial hints at is the complete failure of centralized planning (a rather funny unintended consequence). A public transit system needs a form filled out every 10 years letting them know how many people live in the area in order to function? Really?

Would several competing, privately owned mass transit companies need this information? Of course not. Private companies pay attention the the ’signaling’ their costumers telegraph their way. It’s not too difficult to literally SEE buses becoming overcrowded. What inferences would you draw from that observation? Perhaps it’s time to put another bus on the road?

If markets were more fully involved in supplying transit services, when people demand more buses, the market will provide more buses, until supply and demand meet at a parity. But that’s another post altogether. I just can’t tell if this propagation of incorrect economics is willful or just ignorant. Perhaps both?

Edit: Marginal Revolution just picked up on this phenomenon, independent of myself.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

I honestly could not initially decide whether or not to post this, as I could not determine if it was a hoax or parody (a la The Onion). But the more I thought of it, the more plausible it seemed.

Outlaw pot farmers in Calif. fear legalization could actually hurt their business:

“The legalization of marijuana will be the single most devastating economic event in the long boom-and-bust history of Northern California,” said Anna Hamilton, 62, a Humboldt County radio host and musician who said her involvement with marijuana has mostly been limited to smoking it for the past 40 years.

Local residents are so worried that pot farmers came together with officials in Humboldt County for a standing-room-only meeting Tuesday night where civic leaders, activists and growers brainstormed ideas for dealing with the threat. Among the ideas: turning the vast pot gardens of Humboldt County into a destination for marijuana aficionados, with tours and tastings — a sort of Napa Valley of pot.

The irony is deliciously delicious…in so many ways. But, foregoing all that, this is basically an issue of rent seeking. People who deal in black-market goods are protected from the ‘legal’ market. Not only do the goods they are producing/trading have an unnaturally high price point, they are shielded from competition from the free market. If anyone can get into the pot growing business, prices will dramatically fall. Some of the former illegal growers will then be priced completely out of the market.

We see this type of rent seeking behavior every day. Groups from manicurists and hair stylists to HVAC repairmen to interior decorators insist on licensure laws as requirements to enter their professions.

Those doing the rent seeking will nearly almost always claim that these types of licensure laws are needed so that only qualified people get the job. It’s a safety issue. Or a quality issue. Or, well, pick your reason.

In truth, it’s none of those. Rent seeking protects jobs using the force of government by way of restrictive fees and time-costing measures. It protects the few at the cost of hurting everyone else by way of decreased competition, higher prices and fewer employed people. You have a limited amount of money and you want to become a florist? Do you have the right license? Have you paid enough fees and attended enough classes? Sorry, you’re now priced out of the market. Some select florists benefit; the aggregate suffers.

But back to the rent seeking pot farmers of Humboldt County, California. Not only are their actions unbelievably immoral, they’re frightfully hilarious. The whole thing reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Homer Simpson is bullied out of the chiropractic market:

Steve: [walks in] Simpson! You’re not a licensed chiropractor, and you’re stealing patients from me and from Dr. Steffi.

Homer: Boy, talk about irony. The AMA tries to drive you guys out of business, now you’re doing the same to me. Think about the irony.

Steve: [grabs Homer by the collar] You’ve been warned. Stop chiropracting.

Homer: Not unless you think about the irony.

As pot legalization becomes more likely, I would expect to see more of this type of behavior. Just remember, the behavior is equally ridiculous when applied to interior decorators or florists, or the nearly other 30% of the workforce that requires licensure.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

Does cognitive brain function determine your belief in anthropogenic global warming? Or, rather, do your political beliefs determine your cognitive brain function? George Lakoff, professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at UC Berkeley would like you to believe so.

Over a span of several articles on the subject, Professor Lakoff attempts to explain what he calls global warming denial as problem of ‘framing’ the discussion; meaning, well…several things:

In a May, 2009 article on the Huffington Post titled, “Why Environmental Understanding, or “Framing,” Matters: An Evaluation of the EcoAmerica Summary Report,” Professor Lakoff says:

How the environment is understood by the American public is crucial: it vastly affects the future of our earth and every living being on it.

The technical term for understanding within the cognitive sciences is “framing.” We think, mostly unconsciously, in terms of systems of structures called “frames.” Each frame is a neural circuit, physically in our brains. We use our systems of frame-circuitry to understand everything, and we reason using frame-internal logics. Frame systems are organized in terms of values, and how we reason reflects our values, and our values determine our sense of identity. In short, framing is a big-deal.

All of our language is defined in terms of our frame-circuitry. Words activate that circuitry, and the more we hear the words, the stronger their frames get. But if our language does not fit our frame circuitry, it will not be understood, or will be misunderstood.

That is why it matters how we talk about our environment.

It’s worth it to read the entire article to really see what Professor Lakoff is driving at, here. Framing is a ‘big deal’ because it is basically the storage space where ‘input’ is translated into ‘output’. Apart from the first sentence, regarding the environment (I’ll get to that in a bit), I have no particular argument with this line of thinking since, admittedly, my knowledge of cognitive scientific theory is spotty, at best.

I do, however, know a little bit about praxeology, being a rational person (in an economic sense) who voluntarily interacts with other rational people (a society!). Where Professor Lakoff looses me (and veers off into dangerous nonsense) is when he abandons hard science for pseudo-Freudian theory.

In February, 2010, Professor Lakoff wrote the following in: A Good Week for Science (Or, What Eating Worms Reveals About Politics):

All three results follow from a cognitive science study called Moral Politics, which I published in 1996 and was reprinted in 2002. There I observed that conservatives and liberals had opposite moral worldviews structured by metaphor around two profoundly different models of the ideal family, a strict father family for conservatives and a nurturant parent family for liberals. In the ideal strict father family, the world is seen as a dangerous place and the father functions as protector from “others” and the parent who teaches children absolute right from wrong by punishing them physically (painful spanking or worse) when they do wrong. The father is the ultimate authority, children are to obey, and immoral practices are seen as disgusting.

Ideal liberal families are based on nurturance, which breaks down into empathy, responsibility (for both oneself and others) and excellence — doing as well as one can to make oneself better and one’s family and community better. Parents are to practice these things and children are to learn them by example.

Because our first experience with being governed in is our families, we all learn a basic metaphor: A Governing Institution Is A Family, where the governing institution can be a church, a school, a team, or a nation. The Nation-as-Family version gives us the idea of founding fathers, Mother India and Mother Russia, the Fatherland, Homeland Security, etc.

Apply these monolithically to our politics and you get extreme conservative and progressive moral systems, defining what is right and wrong to each side.

There are a couple of ideas put forth here that strike me as wrong-headed. We of ‘conservative’ political ideology (I’m assuming Professor Lakoff is lumping anyone who is not ‘progressive’ into this realm, which, in effect, is a false dichotomy, and rather meaningless as there are plenty of Republicans who don’t have a conservative bone in their body) tend to believe that Liberalism* is a philosophy that cannot help but lead to overly patriarchal forms of government. (Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc… are all movements from the Left). That, essentially, is what we are always railing against.

*The word Liberalism is used here to describe a leftest ideology. I do notice, however, that Professor Lakoff has cleverly ‘framed’ his own language throughout his writings. He consistently refers to Liberals as Progressives (never the left-wing). Conservatives are still conservatives and often the “right-wing”. Historically aware people may find this a bit curious as the term “Progressive” was once proudly used by the most racist, war-mongering, intolerant group of people our country has ever witnessed. 100 years ago, “Progressives” got us into World War I, outlawed dissent, outlawed alcohol, banished African Americans from federal employment, purposely starved to death thousands of Germans after the November 11 armistice was signed, censored newspapers and the mails and generally acted like the worst kind of abusive parent. Not to mention their “enlightened” view on eugenics, an idea supported by a majority of scientists and politicians of the day (sound familiar?). A policy so repugnant, it led directly and irrevocably to the gas chambers in Hitler’s Germany.

I would be wary to hitch my wagon to such a term.

Secondly, this strikes me as an example of polylogism; the “belief that different people or groups of people have different forms of logic.” This is a collectivist idea most famously used by Karl Marx when he referred to proletarian logic vs. bourgeoisie logic.

Ludwig von Mises addresses this form of polylogism in Chapter 2 of his book, Human Action:

Marxian polylogism asserts that the logical structure of the mind is different with the members of various social classes. Racial polylogism differs from Marxian polylogism only in so far as it ascribes to each race a peculiar logical structure of mind and maintains that all members of a definite race, no matter what their class affiliation may be, are endowed with this peculiar logical structure.

There is no need to enter here into a critique of the concepts social class and race as applied by these doctrines. It is not necessary to ask the Marxians when and how a proletarian who succeeds in joining the ranks of the bourgeoisie changes his proletarian mind into a bourgeois mind. It is superfluous to ask the racists to explain what kind of logic is peculiar to people who are not of pure racial stock. There are much more serious objections to be raised.

Allow me to rewrite that last paragraph in more modern terms, with apologies to Lugwig von Mises:

There is no need to enter here into a critique of the concept political belief as applied by these doctrines. It is not necessary to ask the Progressives when and how a leftist who succeeds in joining the ranks of conservatism or libertarianism changes his liberal mind into a conservative/libertarian mind. It is superfluous to ask the Progressives to explain what kind of logic is peculiar to people who are not of pure progressive thought. There are much more serious objections to be raised.

In any case, this is all a pretext. To get back to the original intent of this article, what astonishes Professor Lakoff the most is the simple fact that there are individuals out there who are skeptical (he uses the blanket term ‘deniers’) of anthropogenic global warming.

Professor Lakoff is further quoted in this article:

“It relates directly (to global warming) because conservatives tend to feel that the free market should be unregulated and (that) environmental regulations are immoral and wrong,” Lakoff said. “And what they try to do is show that the science is wrong and that the argument is wrong, based on the science. So when it comes back to science, they try to debunk the science,” Lakoff said. On the other hand, he added, liberals’ cognitive process allows them to be “open-minded.” “Liberals say, ‘Look seriously at the science and look at whether people are going to be harmed or not and whether the world is going to be harmed,’” Lakoff said.

…

Lakoff, however, said that “99.999 percent of the science is final” on global warming and, in fact, the term “climate change” should be changed to “climate crisis” to more accurately describe the phenomenon. “Climate crisis says we had something to do with it and we better act fast because that’s the reality,” Lakoff said

There are plenty of excellent reasons to be highly skeptical of Professor Lakoff’s claim that “99.999 percent of the science is final”. (How do you empirically come up with such a statement about science, anyway?). Trying to explain all this away by claiming conservatives and liberals are cognitively different smacks of metaphysical desperation.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

Like I said yesterday, when everybody is responsible for everybody else, the logical outcome is, well, this:

Proposal to ban toys in unhealthy kids’ meals

“One in three kids are overweight or are obese, and we’re finding out more and more that if you’re obese as a child, you’re going to have health problems your entire life,” said Yeager.

In an effort to combat the nation’s epidemic of childhood obesity, Supervisor Yeager is proposing Santa Clara County create an ordinance regulating fast food restaurants’ ability to offer toys or other incentives with kids’ meals.

“Ten out of 12 meals that are associated with the promotional toys are the high-caloric, high-fat, high-sodium meals,” said Yeager.

No empirical scientific data is alluded to. We are to take it at face value that giving toys away with children’s fast food meals is…bad. According to Mr. Yeager, it’s bad because these meals are “high-caloric, high-fat, high-sodium meals.”

Here’s a list of proposed questions for Mr. Yeager:

-What scientific studies have been conducted proving a correlation between fast-food toys and childhood obesity?

-If no scientific studies have been conducted, are we just talking about a feel-good, anecdotal trope, here?

-What experience to you have, personally, with the science of nutrition and obesity?

-What other items that are ‘bad for you’ are you willing to ban?

-Do you feel you have a right in assisting me in determining the choices I make for my children?

-If yes, why?

-Do you lay awake at night, fists clenched, with the knowledge that somewhere, somebody is enjoying themselves beyond your scope of control? (My apologies to H.L. Mencken).

The article ends thusly:

Supervisor Yeager expects such a public health ordinance banning fast-food toy incentives could draw a challenge from the California Restaurant Association, but that it would legally fall under the health and safety codes.

If it is passed, this would be the first such legislation in the nation.

It will be the first, but it most assuredly will not be the last. We are all children, now.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

I wrote earlier this evening about some possible unintended consequences of the newly signed health care legislation. While attending my daughter’s orchestral debut, I thought of a few more.

-An increase in the Nanny State.

I first heard this argument put forth in my Junior year at high school: “Seat belts should be mandatory because we pay for the uninsured drivers who would get hurt without wearing them.” Since then, this argument has taken on more manifestations than I care to acknowledge. We need to regulate trans-fats, salt, cigarettes, cigars, MSG, butter, alcohol, fast cars, ad infinitum…for the same reason.

It’s about to get a whole lot worse. ‘We’ not only pay for the uninsured, now, ‘we’ pay for everybody. Since ‘we’ pay for everybody, ‘we’re’ now responsible for everybody’s health.

This is in no way hyperbolic. It’s happening right now: Brooklyn Dem Felix Ortiz wants to ban use of salt in New York restaurants.

As absurd as this sounds (and we’ve all had our laugh), his reasoning is ominous:

Ortiz says his bill is designed to save lives, just like laws that ban the use of trans fats and require chain restaurants to post nutrition information.

“It’s time for us to take a giant step,” Ortiz said yesterday. “We need to talk about two ingredients of salt: health care costs and deaths.”

He claims billions of dollars and thousands of lives would be saved if salt was taken off the menu altogether.

On second thought, perhaps this consequence won’t be so unintended, after all.

-People are going to get sicker and more obese

There is good reason to believe that the fault of our country’s current “obesity crisis” can be placed directly at the feet of well-intentioned governmental interference based on incorrect science. If we can expect the government to have an ever increasing role in what we can and cannot put into our bodies (see above), it follows that people will be lead to the conclusion that the way to maintain a healthy diet is to decrease fatty foods (red meats, butter, natural fats, etc…) and increase the intake of complex carbohydrates in the form of grains (whole wheat breads, cereals, rice, oats). This is most certainly the exact wrong thing to do.

There is enough on that subject for a whole different post (one that I believe Eric will be undertaking, soon). For the purposes of this post, it will have to suffice to say that the current model (the government backed food pyramid) is based on wildly outdated and faulty science. But, even if you don’t believe that a low-carb, higher fat diet is the road to health, at least you had a choice in the matter. Doctors have slowly been coming around to the notion that low-carb lifestyles have terrific benefits. Can anyone doubt that obesity patients (and patients with Diabetes, blood sugar problems) will soon be robbed of those choices? If the government backed model is X, you can bet that when the government pays doctors who treat obese/diabetic patients that X will be the prescription. The result will be an inescapable negative feed-back loop.

-When everyone is forced to have health care insurance, only criminals won’t have health care insurance.

As snarky as that may sound, this legislation will make criminals out of a whole new class of people. It’s really rather simple. There are no provisions for those who want to opt out. If you’re a woman and you don’t want maternity coverage…tough. If you don’t want mental health coverage…tough. If you don’t want coverage at all, for reasons that, quite frankly, are none of anyone’s business…tough.

Oh, we’re assured (wink, wink) that nobody will actually end up in jail for not buying coverage, but don’t you believe them. The end result is always the same. It’s always force.

-We will see a sharp increase in mental health cases in this country.

Everyone must now be covered for mental health. This can be as innocuous as a couple of trips a year to your therapist or as serious as treatment for Schizophrenia or OCD or ADD. Psychotropic drugs (Prozac, etc…) will also be covered.

When something is universally offered at a price below market value, people are going to naturally take advantage of that something. I imagine we are going to see a rather steep incline in the number of people seen by mental health professionals. This, of course, leads to a whole separate Pandora’s Box of unintended consequences. How much more money will be funneled into mental health, thus creating another negative feed-back loop? More people see more mental health professionals, triggering more federal money pouring into the field of mental heath, triggering more people seeing mental health professionals, etc…

Also, will more people be forced to take psychotropic drugs either based on bad advice or against their will? That, too, may be a subject for a future post.

Unintended consequences are a powerful thing. I wish more people were able to think deeply about them before jumping on bandwagons, however well intentioned they may be.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

It seems appropriate to start my first entry on this blog with a quote from Henry Hazlitt, author of Economics in One Lesson, which is the inspiration for the name of this new adventure.

“The most frequent fallacy by far today, the fallacy that emerges again and again in nearly every conversation that touches on economic affairs, the error of a thousand political speeches, the central sophism of the new economics, is to concentrate on the short-run effects of policies on special groups and to ignore or belittle the long-run effects on the community as a whole.”

By far, the aspects of economics I pay attention to the most are those of Unintended Consequences and opportunity costs. When Hazlitt talks of “the short-run effects of policies on special groups and to ignore or belittle the long-run effects on the community as a whole”, Unintended Consequences and Opportunity Costs come into play

Several such consequences/costs come immediately to mind when thinking of the current Health Care bill recently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama.

-We can probably expect new innovations in medical science to stagnate.

We can never know what amazing technology will never be invented simply because the money or the incentive no longer exists to invent that technology. This points to Bastiat’s Broken Window Theory Fallacy, which simply states that though a broken window may unexpectedly enrich the window maker, it impoverishes the person who must now replace the window. His money could have been spent on something else, entirely.

-We can probably expect a new wave of crackdowns on immigration.

Though I have some problems with Milton Friedman, he had it exactly right when he said, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.” I understand that ‘illegal immigrants’ are not explicitly covered under this new legislation, and there is a good deal of economic proof that immigration is a net boon to the economy, but we must face some inconvenient truths. There is a strong movement in this country to give millions of immigrants ‘amnesty’, meaning they will not only be in the country legally, they will be on the first step to obtaining citizenship.

Do not misunderstand me, I applaud the efforts to make this happen as I agree with open borders/immigration. However, as the majority of elected Republicans are against this, if it is passed, it will be because of the Democrats. I do not mean to be cynical here, but the legalization and naturalization of millions of immigrants as a political movement coming from the Left has to be repaid somehow. Namely, there will be millions more in the Democratic party 10 years hence.

This will cause a huge, irrational backlash against immigration. An ‘unintended consequence”. Instead of attacking the welfare state, Republicans and others from the right will score points by fear-mongering and know-nothingness. We can assuredly expect the passage of a National ID bill sometime in the near future, and that’s not even mentioning the hundreds of millions of more dollars that will go towards “protecting the borders”.

It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

I know I’m late with this, but when one comes across such blatant idiocy, one must point it out for what it is.

There’s not much that can be said here that hasn’t already been said. Evelyn Mastroianni certainly deserves to have her name linked to this in perpetuity. I am often gobsmacked at how utterly evil some adults can be. That’s a good word for Principal Mastroianni…evil. “Bully” and “Coward” don’t quite sum it up nicely enough. If you doubt it, consider the following:

“They made me sign a statement,” the tear-stained fourth-grader said. “She told me to write that I had a gun,” he said. “She said, ‘A gun is a gun’.”

Keep in mind, this child is 9 years old.

I think we can all agree that it is axiomatic that a Lego gun is not, in fact, a real gun. In this case, A is not A. That such a priori knowledge is not evident to a principal (all of whom have Doctorate degrees, if I’m not mistaken), is a perfect example of why we should not mistake education for intelligence or wisdom.

Principal Mastroianni has apologized to the boy, only after the news broke nationally. There is no indication she has lost her job, however. More’s the pity. One can hope that this experience will temper any further idiocy in the future. I’m not hopeful. It is my experience that such evil is not so easily assuaged.

My camera and I have a very interesting relationship. There are times when it feels as if it’s literally an extension of my body. No, that’s not right. There are times when it feels as if it’s literally an extension of my entire being. In those moments, time has no hold on me. I will spend hours composing one shot and feel none of the regular distractions of life. Hunger, thirst and weariness have no meaning. It’s what I imagine Zen feels like.

There are other times, however, when my camera feels no more than a brick in my hand. I have no connection to it. No matter what I do to get that shot, the camera will not cooperate.

This has a great deal to do with my personality. I’m much more comfortable in solitary situations than being surrounded by people. When I attempt to immerse myself in those kinds of situations, I find myself completely off center. The concept of taking pictures of perfect strangers (candid or not) is absolutly foreign to me. I envy those who are able/willing to pull that off.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been able to get some pretty good pictures in those situations, but even so, I don’t feel that same special connection to my camera as I would photographing an abandoned barn or a solitary trail in the woods, etc… When doing so, I’m able to take in all of my surroundings. I’m able to hear what is going on around me, breath in the air, feel the soil beneath my feet. I’m able to relax. It is then that my camera and I meld.

I don’t know what’s to be done. I often find myself in chaotic, loud situations, surrounded by chaotic, loud people. The introvert in me can always act the extroverted part, but it becomes much more complicated when one has a camera in one’s hands. The dichotomy becomes ever more strident. The camera either serves to connect you more with people OR to cut yourself off from them. Want to hold a psychological experiment? Put a camera in an introvert’s hands in a room full of people and see what happens. I’m telling you, it could go either way.

Anyway, back to the original point of this post. I don’t like feeling disconnected from my camera. It almost feels like a betrayal. (I know, I know…a bit hyperbolic). This almost leads me to believe that perhaps it’s a good idea to just occasionally leave the camera behind.

I know the camera won’t mind, but I have doubts about myself…

H.L. Mencken once said, “A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.”

I’m certainly over thirty years old, but I’m no poet. Though, occasionally I’ll jot something down.

I wrote this one several years ago and it’s still my favorite:

Stepping out on the threshold
The jostling of bodies
The whiff of cigarette smoke
The constant negotiations of con artists and whores
Beverly loves the night life

Wandering aimlessly, hardly caring about the destination
Catching a reflection in the Victrola store window
Cheap, sensible shoes
Pleated skirt
Eggshell blouse, a touch of rouge

She pretends to be thrown up against dark buildings
Hair mussed up, blouse ruffled
She speaks coyly to the man next to her
Brushes his hand off her shoulder
Walks away clicking her heels

Flapper girls dancing the Lindy
Gold coins a jinglin’
Pushing and pulling

In her bedroom she lies supine, almost satisfied
She quietly invites him to leave
Sighing, she falls into slumber, a vacant look crosses her face
Beverly loves the night life

Meh, it’s not Wadsworth, but it will do.

One of the most oft’ imitated poems is William Carlos Williams’, “This is Just to Say”:

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Go to Google and type in “This is Just to Say Parody”, and you’ll see what I mean about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.

I guess I’ll add to the corpus:

This is Just to Say (for William Carlos Williams)

I tried to listen
to the poem
you wrote
just for me

and really,
your intonation
was beautifully
melodic

Forgive me
it’s the ADD
look!
there’s a squirrel!

Eat your heart out, Charles Bukowski!

I often have counter-intuitive feelings when in large crowds. Rather than feeling boxed-in, it’s almost as if the space between me and the mass of humanity scrunched up against me is hyper-amplified. Though we all jostle for space, seeking out a vacuum to fit our bodily forms, brushing up against each other, sometimes brusquely, sometimes apologetically, those around me may as well be standing miles away; so disconnected I feel from them.

Some might call this a form of agoraphobia, but I’d disagree. I have absolutely no problem with public places, whether they be wide open or not. Neither do I feel claustrophobic or have any anxiety in crowds. It’s difficult to explain. I just feel, well…disjointed, somehow.

While up in Chicago this weekend attending the Camper Van Beethoven/Cracker concert, this feeling came over me very suddenly. For some reason, while standing in the crowd, I just could not figure out what to do with my hands. Do I put them in my pocket? Cross my arms in front of me? Raise them up in the air? Put them behind my back in the position of a modified Parade Rest?

It did not help that the extremely cute girl next to me was dancing lithely, without affectations. She even hip-checked me a few times with a sly, knowing smile. And there I stood, unable to figure out what to do with my hands. The space around me multiplied exponentially until, in a crowd of hundreds, I was alone. At one point, I became so flustered with the odd situation that I actually (God help me) put my hands up in the air and made the “devil horns” sign with my hands while yelling, “Woooooooooooooooooooooo!”.

When the concert was over, the cute girl next to me slid up, put her arm around my waist and half yelled in my ear, “Thanks for hanging out with me! I had a great time! I gotta go home, now!”

And then she was gone.

And I was left there. With my stupid hands. Which I happily put into my pockets, while walking towards the coat check room…smiling all the way.

As I have a specific film project in mind to kick off this summer, I’ve been contemplating differing ways to use the video camera to stage a scene. This has proven to be an interesting mental exercise as for three weeks (or so), I’ll be a one-man show. Meaning, I’ll be the actor, director, cinematographer, sound-guy and producer of this little project. Hell, I don’t even know if it will work; but there’s something both liberating and a bit scary about undertaking each of the roles listed above.

Alone.

I mean, I have to figure out all this stuff by myself.

Which brings me to a dilemma. Yesterday, while watching the show Man Vs. Wild with the girls, I realized exactly what I did not like about the show (not the genre of show, which I love, but that specific program).

The whole thing is staged.

Unlike some other shows of the same sort, Bear Grylls is never in any real danger. He has a full camera crew stalking him at all times. This is illustrated by the oh, so cleaver ways the editing team makes sure you realize this from show to show (the camera man’s shadow, Bear talking off screen, etc…). This is done (post-edit) so you have a hint that even though there’s all this drama, there’s no real danger. So yeah, when he’s scaling that canyon wall, there’s a guy with a camera right next to him shooting the footage. Which leads me to ask, no matter how dangerous Bear makes his plight out to be, (with dramatic music effects and that heightened, slightly stressed out voice of his) I’m always thinking to myself…”Dude! There’s a guy(s) right next to you filming the whole thing, doing the same things you are..with a camera rig in their hands! How freaking hard can that be?”.

I don’t know if this is fair or not. But, really, it all just points back to my dislike of “staged scenes”. Even in photography, I try to avoid this. I’d rather catch something in its natural state rather than position something to make it look appealing. I’ve seen plenty of breath-taking photographs that, in the end, I’ve devalued simply because they were “staged”. I don’t know what this says about me. I don’t know if this is a simple preference or something much deeper. But, it does present a problem.

There are a couple of scenes I want to film during this upcoming journey of mine that, unfortunately, will require some amount of staging. These will be poignant, slightly emotional vignettes. The only way I can capture these scenes if to set up the camera and “stage the scene”. Something that is meant to be an impromptu moment will actually be planned out. Those heart-felt words or actions will have been thought over for months ahead of time.

That seems like cheating to me. But, pursuing other solo documentaries, I see that this technique is done all the time.

I wonder how they come to terms with it.

From the book, Diana F+, More True Tales & Short Stories:

The Diana loves the little things. It loves breakfast, your dog, your boyfriend or girlfriend, that crazy hat in the window, the unbelievable morning traffic, those gummed up salt shakers, a blazing afternoon sun, your nose when it’s all close-up an blurry, the shoes that you didn’t buy, and your hamburger-champion uncle. It’s lightweight body feels good next to yours, and it doesn’t bog you down with a lot of weight…

I got one of these beauties about a month ago, but haven’t tried it out, yet. I can’t wait.

In the meantime, there’s always the Diana Gallary.

I’ve had this blog since 2003 and have never really thought of it as any more than an outlet for what I may be thinking/feeling at the moment. As I am wont to do, I have engaged in a few abortive attempts at something larger throughout the years (blogging the bible, one photo a day, 1001 Journals project, etc…). I don’t regret that. I often shoot for something and end up wide instead of deep, meaning I gain just enough experience from something to sate me…then I move on. I’ve been this way for as long as I remember and I don’t regret it. My ability to shift focus rapidly has served me well over the years, though it’s been a source of great frustration and amusement for those close to me.

The above, of course, is a symptom of ADD; something I’ve lived with all my life. When I was younger, the condition completely ruled me. A child psychologist once recommended that I be put on Ritalin (something my mother disregarded, thank God) and when in class, a screen be put around me so I would not be distracted by the other children. I repeated the 2nd grade. It seems I had “great potential” but just couldn’t sit still long enough to get through the lessons. I was always the odd one out…the one the other kids beat for sport. That all changed by the time I was 14 or so. I learned to fight back. I learned to use wit and intuition to be likable. Later, I learned to relax and just kind of be myself…a confidence born from bloodied knuckles and a knack for comedy. In those years I made some of the best friends of my life. Friends I still talk with on a weekly basis.

But, nothing has ever cured me of paying attention to things that bore me. And, brother (sister), school bored me. I graduated high school with the lowest GPA possible. I’m still proud of that fact. It was the same with college. I really did try my hardest. I did. But, in the end, it bored me. I realized later that I simply cannot abide being told what I should and should not learn. If something does not interest me, it’s not worth my time. That’s just simply the essence of me.

This is how my mind works. I once saw the line, “Hell is other people”, while reading a newspaper one day. Sure, most anyone educated in the Liberal Arts should understand this reference right off. I, however, did not, but it spoke to the introvert in me. So, being intrigued, I searched the net. I then went out and bought three books by Jean-Paul Sarte and read them all. A week later something else caught my attention. And, so it goes. Like I said, my vision is miles wide.

But, sometimes it’s deep as well. In spite of all this hopping about from one subject to another, I have had some constants in my life. The over-arching constant is a passion for learning. The specific things I focus on more than others are: art, photography, literature, science, languages and traveling. One can see that by looking back on this blog over the past several years. I imagine I’ll be following these pursuits for the rest of my life.

Which kind of brings me back to the beginning of this post. As I said, I never really thought of this blog as anything more than a “snapshot in time”. “Hey! This is what I’m thinking right now!”. But, I’m starting to realize that it can be so much more. It can be used as a tool to help strengthen my focus on those things above that I love so.

There are several projects bouncing around in my head at the moment and I don’t want them to bounce away…they really are great ideas. So, I think I’ll start using this space to document what I’m working on. Perhaps this will keep me on track to completion. Perhaps it will allow others to provide encouragement.

Perhaps.

When dusk starts to encroach, the eyelids get heavy and the labors of the day are behind….when I inevitably ask myself, “What did you do today”.

I don’t ever want the answer to be, “Not much”.

. . . Read more!

Subject: Home!

For those of you not on Facebook…I’m home! And none to soon as a winter storm came in last night while I was sleeping.

I’ll write more later. For now, I have to figure out how to go get some food. :)

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Subject: Leaving Kabul

Greetings, all!
Well, tonight is my last night in Kabul. I’m catching a flight out of here tomorrow. The next challenge is to get from here to Qatar, which could take a couple of days. Once I’m in Qatar, I’ll be looking at changing my flight so I can get to the states a little earlier than I expected. Christmas, anyone?

So, I spent the past two days saying my good-byes and getting everything in order here. I’ve made a ton of new friends here…and I’m very sad to be leaving them. I am, however, excited to be coming home to my old friends (and some new ones).

Thank you everyone for making my deployment that much easier by staying in touch and giving me well-wishes when they were needed.

I can’t wait to see and talk to you all when I get back.

Merry Christmas!!

And, to that little red-headed girl…write me back! :P

Subject: Everything is fine

Just so everyone knows, I’m fine. There was an explosion this morning about 1/2 a kilometer away from where I’m stationed. The news is sketchy right now and we’re still waiting for info. I’m fine, though I’d rather not have these sorts of events happen so close to me leving country. Well, I’d rather not have these sorts of events happen at all, but you get my drift…

Subject: Quick Update

I know I said I’d probably be writing less now that I’m so close to leaving country, but I have found myself with a bit of free time and some ideas on my mind.

First, I’m not sure if you are all aware, but all of these letters have been put on my blog: www.shrubbloggers.com. Eric took the initiative to do this, as I could not get the blogging interface to work from here. So, you’re always free to go back and read about this whole journey from the beginning.

Speaking of blogging, I think I’ll be paying much more attention to it once I get home. There are about a dozen projects I have in the back of my head that I’d like to see come to fruition…and blogging about them seems like a good idea.

I’ve been pre-approved for a mortgage, so house-hunting will be in my immediate schedule the first few months home. Ideally, I’d like to get a place that’s in the same general location but is out of the control of a neighborhood association. I’ll cut my grass when I damn well want to, thank you very much. My ideal house will have a full basement in which to build an ad-hoc, DIY digital/music studio. Nothing fancy, just a nice quiet corner where I can start working on all the things I want to work on.

Eric and I have been talking a great deal lately of starting to play music again. I have no idea where this will lead, though I have my ideas. As eclectic and varied as our musical tastes are, this should be a lot of fun. In that vein, I’ll be buying a tuba within the next couple of months. Most of you know that I played the tuba for a few years in high school, but I’ve always suspected that that instrument can do much more than any lay person may guess. I don’t know what to tell you what to expect…I can only advise that everyone “stay tuned”. Whatever happens, it’s gonna be a lot of fun.

I have several ideas for documentary photo/audio work, but my thoughts have also been branching out to film. More to follow on this, as well. I’ve been talking to Eric about this on and off over the past few months…perhaps he can post something on his side of the blog explaining his thoughts.

It’s nice to finally get out of the “dreaming” phase and to actually start work on something you’ve thought about for years. Oh, I’ll keep my day job, but I look forward to adding lines of definitions to myself via these projects.

So, anyway…8 days to go until I fly out of Kabul!

Subject: Winding Down

So, if I go by my calender, I have 12 days left until I leave Kabul. Depending on how long it takes to get a flight out of Afghanistan, I may or may not be home in time for Christmas. Only time will tell.

This will probably be my last long email to everyone before I leave as I expect I’ll be farily busy preparing for my replacement and getting all packed up. I just wanted to write down some thoughts I’ve been having.

• The Day Care project we undertook here was successful beyond what I could have imagined. So far, we’ve received well over 50 boxes of supplies ranging from pens and pencils to winter hats and gloves to clothes to cool toys. To date, we’ve delivered about half of those supplies. We are planning on another run down next week. We have also received about $1,500. This was completely unexpected to me. At best I thought we would be able to get MAYBE $100 for various supplies. Though I won’t be here to see what that money is used for, I suspect we can now seriously start thinking about rebuilding the classroom that was mortared several years ago. At the very least, we can get their building repainted and work on some basic repairs.
  
  I know I’ve said it before, but thank you to everyone who took time out of their lives to help out. I’ve always believed in a a sort of “cosmic” underlying benevolence (those that really know me, know how silly that sounds coming from me, but there’s no real good way of putting that thought into words in such a medium) and you have all validated that belief. Since I’m leaving soon, I’ll be passing everything over to my friend, Scott Poole. He will be here until March. I will also be asking my replacement if he would like to take up the cause when I leave. Again, thank you. I hope that I’ll be able to see each of you in person soon to pass on my gratitude.
• There are a couple of projects I want to work on when I get back home. Some of you know that I’ve spent the past four months purchasing equipment needed to do photography/film/audio documentary work. I’ve had a fascination with my family (both sides) for some time, now. I’ve always warned my mom that someday I was going to write a book about my family. I think she has always been amused and slightly horrified at that prospect. I don’t believe I have the talent needed to write any sort of book, but I do seem to have a knack and a passion for documentation (through photographs, video and audio). Over the next couple of years, I’d like to travel around the states and get an oral history of my family…but that’s only half of what I want to do. While out and about, I think it would be fun to be the modern day John Steinbeck and just experience America. I couldn’t verbalize what I have in mind, but it’s all in the back of my head…swirling.
• (Those of you who are uncomfortable with personal stuff may stop reading now, but you are all friends and family…so I don’t think you’ll have a problem with this). It’s time for me to find my partner in crime, so to speak. I recently watched a video from the Rev. Tom Honey (a Vicar in the Church of England). In it, he was discussing the “nature of God”. He had some rather surprising things to say and I would encourage anyone to watch the clip, as it was rather moving to me (an avowed Agnostic/sometimes Atheist).
  
  In it, he said (and I’m paraphrasing here), in order to know the nature of God, we must cultivate our own inwardness, through quiet meditation and gently setting aside our passing thoughts. This, of course, speaks to the introvert inside of me. I’ve spent years “cultivating my own inwardness”. What he said next was profound to me…though not overly profound as an overall thought. Once we have cultivated our own inwardness, once we have recognized the God inside of ourselves, we must move out into the world and establish intimate connections with others. We must allow our inwardness to touch the inwardness of others. We must allow the God inside ourselves to touch the God inside others.
  
  Of course, I don’t do this thought justice. Rev. Honey explains it much better than I. And, I know to many of you, this probably sounds like metaphysical claptrap. Perhaps. But, I find it an utterly beautiful thought. There is an Indian (the sub Continent) custom where two newlyweds will look at each other for hours (days) to attempt to recognize the God within them, therefore recognizing the God within themselves. I believe this transcends what we know about our own trifecta in the field of psychology (the sex drive, romantic love and long-term attachment).
  
  So, where was I before I went off on what seems like a “self help” lecture? :P Oh, yes…a partner in crime. One wonders….one wonders…
• There’s a good chance that I may be coming back here for a few weeks next year to conduct more training. But, I think this will be my last deployment for a long while. Though I had a wonderful time over here, I just hate to be away from my daughters for such a long period of time. But, we are going to have a good time getting to know each other again when I get back.

So, that’s it for now. With any luck, I’ll be back in the states in two weeks time. It’s going to be great getting back into a regular routine…warm showers, a variety of food, supermarkets, etc…

Have a wonderful day! As always, I love getting emails from all of you.

Talk to you soon!

Subject: Thanksgiving at Camp Eggers

All,

MSNBC was here yesterday covering Thanksgiving at Camp Eggers. Here are two clips. Alas! I didn’t make the cut, but I was nearby. :)

Subject: Happy Thanksgiving!

This is just a quick note to all my friends and family. First, I wanted to tell you all how proud I am to have such a great support network…namely, you guys! We made our first delivery to the childcare center yesterday morning. It was utter chaos and I’ll have to write down my thoughts about it later. But, there are about 75 more kids in Kabul who have warm clothes, toys and school supplies to last them through the winter because of you.

I’ve led a blessed life. When I reflect back upon my childhood and think about what we had to do without in order to get by, I then think of all the places I’ve seen in this world…China, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Eastern Europe, etc.. and I’m completely and utterly grateful for living where I live and having what I have. There is no place I’ve ever experienced in America (and I’ve seen a lot of it) that can touch the abject destitution that pervades Afghanistan. It’s literally soul-crushing.

I’m not here to tell you what you should be thankful for. We’ve all figured that out throughout our lives. Me? I’m thankful for you guys. You’re the best. You always will be.

Here are some pictures taken over the past couple of days. I don’t have time to caption them all, but most are from the child-care center. The others are from our Thanksgiving celebration here on Camp Eggers. . . . Read more!

Subject: The Most Beautiful…

This update really has nothing to do with Afghanistan, but I just came across something I felt I had to share.

As most of you know, I’m an aspiring amateur photographer. I make my rounds through the photography blogs, read books, experiment with new ideas, etc… I probably have 10 cameras of varying sizes, formats, quality, etc… back home.

Every once and a while, I come across a picture that actually elicits an emotional response from me. I’ve had this response only a couple of times looking at my own pictures, and I get it occasionally by other people’s pictures as well.

When I saw the following, I literally involuntarily sucked in my breath. A chill went down my back. The only way I can explain the feeling is for you to imagine sitting in a room and hearing the perfect musical chord being played. Imagine that feeling that starts at the base of your head (where the most primitive part of your brain is located) and then radiating down your spine…tingling the entire time. Shallow breaths, surrendering yourself to the feeling…it’s Divine.

http://nicnichols.com/FourCornersDark/?p=3224

I know this picture won’t elicit the same response from everybody, if anybody…but, I thought I’d share a glimpse into what I find moving.

Make sure you click on the link and check out his other photos.

Take care!

Subject: The Meme, The Seashell, The Blathering…

There’s a meme* going around on Facebook right now requesting that you pick up your iPod, put it on shuffle and write down the first 15 songs that pop up, regardless of what they are or how embarrassing they may be. I never have my iPod with me unless I’m sitting at work, so I never got around to it. I had a bit of free time today so I thought I’d go for it. Keep in mind that my iPod now holds 3258 songs, with more added per week.

Here are my first 15 songs that popped up on “Shuffle Mode”:

1. Recuerdos De Le Alhambra – Fransisco Tarrega
2. The Killing Moon – Echo and the Bunnymen (From the Donnie Darko Soundtrack)
3. Summertime – Gershwin
4. U-Mass – The Pixies
5. Symphony #3 in D Major, Op. 29 “Polish IV.” – Tchaikovsky
6. Entry of the Gladiators – Julius Fucik
7. Gold Dust Woman – Fleetwood Mac
8. The Aquarium – Saint-Saens
9. 5/4 F.T.D. – Critters Buggin
10. Look at That Old Grizzly Bear – Mark Mothersbaugh (From The Royal Tenenbaums Soundtrack)
11. Joe Stalin’s Cadillac – Camper Van Beethoven
12. Whole Lotta Trouble – Cracker
13. Will the Circle Be Unbroken – The Neville Brothers
14. Sax and Violins – The Talking Heads
15. Halloween Parade – Lou Reed

Not too bad. Number 16, by the way, was Brian Eno’s 2-1 from his Music for Airports album.

*A “meme”, for the benefit of those among you who may be a bit Facebook challenged is, according to Wikipedia: “a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.”

I have a little under six weeks left here in country. Things are beginning to wind down for me. I’ll start shipping my stuff back home in about two weeks. My replacement will be here in four. I have quite a bit of work to accomplish between then and now, but I’m so set in a routine now that the work hardly phases me. We have a running joke here. Every morning when everyone gets to the office, we say, “Hey! Do you know what day it is?”. “No! What day is it!?”. “It’s Groundhog Day!”.

And so it is. Wake up at the same time. Eat the same food, Do the same work, Go to bed at the same time. I catch myself looking at the date from time to time and thinking, “Is it already the 17th? Wow!”. The days just kind of bleed into each other after a while.

I’ve discovered some new things about myself while here and have reconfirmed others. It’s almost impossible for me to “go along to get along”. It always has been. I tend to call stupid actions, well…stupid. You’d think that after 12 years in the Army, a little tact would have sunk into my head.

I’ve found that I miss the military. I miss the camaraderie, the brotherhood, the irreverent joking, the horse-play, the seriousness of it all.

I’ve found that though I have a tendency to jump into situations I find exciting, I need to make time to be sentimental. In one of the first care packages I received, my daughters included a number of sea-shells they gathered from their recent trip to California. There is one shell fragment, in particular, that is a bit thicker and smoother than the others. It’s about the size of a silver dollar, though not shaped like one. I don’t remember when I did it, but sometime ago I slipped it into my pocket and have been carrying it around ever since. When I change pants, I transfer all the contents of my pockets into the new pair before I send the old pair off to be washed.

Along with the pen I bought before coming out here, that shell has been a consistent and constant companion. I take it out every now and then, place it between my thumb and fore-finger and just hold it, running my thumb over it as you would do with a poker-chip or an old coin. This simple shell…a conglomeration of Conchiolin, Calcite and Calcium…picked up on a beach somewhere in California and then transferred via mail all the way to me in Afghanistan serves as a life-line, a direct link between myself and my daughters.

Sentimental? Sure. But, that’s how it is. When Jordan and Zoe held that shell in their hands, billions of their atoms by way of skin cells, skin moisture, etc… transferred themselves onto its surface. It just as Crosby Stills Nash and Young said, “We are stardust. We are golden”.

Indeed. Ultimately, we are all stardust. Ultimately, we are all the same. 100 billion years from now, the atoms that have now formed to make me will still be part of this great Cosmos. And you, my friends, will all be there with me. That has always given me great comfort.

By the way, The Imperial March from Star Wars just started playing on my iPod. Carl Jung would call that Synchronicity. I simply call it Kick-ass Awesome.

So, another long email down. :) I hope everyone is well and happy.

Buddha taught that “The cessation of suffering is attainable”. The Pixies keep pointing out, “Here comes your man”. Bach gave us “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” and Disco Stu, “Don’t advertise”.

Love you guys!

Subject: Going Native, Part II

The closer I get to coming home, the more I blend in… . . . Read more!

Subject: A Quick Note

Greetings, all!

So, it appears that I’ve been a bit lax about my updates and keeping up with friends and family as I just got chided by both my mother and my sister for not keeping them up to date. Sorry, mom.

This will be a short update. It’s a little crazy here right now. We had an explosion about 10 miles off to our north-east at Camp Phoenix. A number of U.S. military were hurt and several U.S. contractors were killed. We have the national inaguration here next week and there are indications that there could be violence before-hand.

The good news it, I have 45 days left here.

Sorry to cut this short. I just wanted to get this out so everyone knows all is good here.

Talk to you soon!

Subject: Going Native . . . Read more!

My sister Michelle sent me this email on Friday:

I had a dream last night where I was running errands in Ashland and all of a sudden you appeared with sweet concert tickets for that night (I don’t recall the group, though). You said I had to hurry and find someone to watch the kids if I wanted the tickets for Dan and myself. I felt like I was on a game show hesitating: “uh, let’s see, who do I know that can watch the kids”…as the clock ticked. Finally, we agreed that since you’re family, you could stay long enough to watch the kids yourself before handing out more sweet concert tickets to other people. I woke up and thought that would be the perfect side job for you; handing out random concert tickets to people who needed good music. You even had this magical room that people could step into and hear the music you were sending them to so they could get a taste of how good it was. The room had amazing acoustics.

I know, bizarre dream, but I was sad that it wasn’t true : (

micehell

Working as an intern for the Cato Institute in 1997 was one of the most formative experiences of my life. During that time, I participated with the other interns in a series of lunchtime discussions with Tom Palmer, a Cato senior fellow, director of Cato University, and also now at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, where he’s vice president for international programs. I’ve written elsewhere about my high esteem for Tom, and his considerable impact on my own intellectual development, and I could say more — but for now, I’ll get to the point.

The very first reading assignment that Tom gave to the interns was Frédéric Bastiat’s essay “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” It’s pretty powerful stuff, even today, and even for those of us for whom the ideas contained in that essay are old hat. That may be partly because of Bastiat’s clear, lucid, illustrative way of making abstract economic concepts understandable and unmistakable, but also because the economic fallacies that Bastiat debunked are still widely believed today, so his points remain relevant to modern political and social problems. When journalists — and even a Nobel laureate economist — begin to credit wanton destruction as a form of economic stimulus, it becomes obvious that Bastiat is more relevant than ever. Henry Hazlitt updated Bastiat’s essays for a new generation in his book for which this blog is named. Tom Palmer is helping to bring them to the YouTube generation. . . . Read more!

David Boaz reminds us just how amazing markets are when they’re allowed to work:

In 1982, Motorola produced the first portable mobile phone. It weighed about 2 pounds and cost $3995. Within a very few years they were much smaller, much cheaper, and selling like hotcakes.

Today there are some 4.6 billion mobile phones in the world, and counting, or about 67 per every 100 people in the world. The newer ones allow you to carry in your hand more computing power than the computers that put Apollo 11 on the moon. You can cruise the internet, find your location with GPS, read books, send texts, pay bills, process credit cards, watch video, record video, stream video to the web, take and send photos — oh, and make phone calls from just about anywhere. Unimaginable just a few years ago.

And to celebrate this incredible achievement, Slate and the New America Foundation are holding a forum titled “Can You Hear Me Now? Why Your Cell Phone is So Terrible.”

This is an old story. Markets, property rights, and the rule of law provide a framework in which technology and prosperity soar, and some people can only complain.

Read the whole thing.

This reminds me of the inspiring book by Stephen Moore and Julian Simon, It’s Getting Better All the Time: Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years. The state smacks down the economy every day with its gigantic dead hand, and yet efficiency still finds a way through in many ways, continually improving our lives. Eliminating as much of that dead-weight regulatory loss as possible will absolutely make the world a better place.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

I just noticed on Facebook that Bryan Caplan listed as his status message that he’s “watching *Frailty* yet again.” That reminds me that two and a half years ago, I created a list of my “Top 5 Religious Films” for The Cinematheque’s Top 5 Project. I didn’t submit my list before the deadline, so it wasn’t included with the others. But I think it’s probably worthwhile to resurrect it now for the blog’s more or less permanent record. The other Cinematheque lists were filled with almost certainly more worthy films, like La Passion de Jeanne d’arc and Andreï Rublev, but I have my own cinematic hobbies and obsessions. This list reflects that.

Copied from an email message I sent, dated Sept. 9, 2007, here goes:

—————————

I always have trouble with lists like this. I tend to want to create lists of favorites, rather than judgments of “best,” which could change with varying criteria anyway. So, although I might agree that films like The Rapture, The Apostle, The Life of Brian, or even Dogma are some of the “best” religious films, there’s stuff that I don’t necessarily think is better that I’m more likely to include on my own list.

So…

1. The Book of Life (Hal Hartley, 1998)
2. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
3. Frailty (Bill Paxton, 2001)
4. The Believer (Henry Bean, 2001)
5. Bash: Latter-Day Plays (Neil LaBute, 2001)

This illustrates one problem with using favorites. Four films from 2001? That can’t be right. And the last one is really just filmed stage readings, anyway.

But this list contains some powerful stuff, all the same. The Book of Life, for me, is like a distillation of everything that makes Hartley movies so great. Searching, philosophical dialogue mixed with deadpan absurdist humor and occasional explorations of the artifice of making the films themselves. That wouldn’t be enough, though, if he didn’t pull it off so well. It also had perfect lead casting. Martin Donovan had become the iconic conflicted hero in Hartley’s movies by this point, and Thomas Jay Ryan had nailed down a perfect performance as a Hartley antihero in Henry Fool. So, sharing the bill as Jesus and Lucifer? Kind of like the Hal Hartley version of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino sharing a scene together for the first time, in Heat…

Spirited Away is rife with Shinto references, so the elements that seem like pure fantasy to American audiences probably make it more of a religiously-themed movie for the Japanese. It’s not only the best anime film ever made, it’s one of the best films ever made in any category.

The Believer shows how religion can stay embedded within us even when we try to reject it — and that an obsession with fighting a belief system stems from an impulse that’s not too far removed from faith and acceptance.

The list also represents my inordinate fascination with Mormon movies, even if the connection is tangential (like the brief appearance of gun-toting Mormon thugs in The Book of Life, or the fact that the star of The Believer grew up in a Mormon family). I’ve become hopelessly addicted to “Big Love” on HBO, and I might well be inclined to put States of Grace (Richard Dutcher, 2005) on the list, I’ve spent so much time following Dutcher’s career for the last several years. But there’s no getting around the fact that Dutcher’s movies released to date aren’t quite ready for prime-time (despite the fact that each is better than the last, and they’re all light years better than just about anything else in the fledgling “Mormon cinema” trend). Dutcher’s films are also likely to be seen by outsiders as vehicles for proselyting, at least a little — even though he’s left the church.

Bash: Latter-Day Plays was written, staged, and then filmed while LaBute was still a Mormon. A convert during his days as a theater major at BYU, Bash takes an unflinching look at some disturbing cultural traits LaBute saw in some of his fellow students. Belief can lead to an in-group/out-group dichotomy that can make it easier for some people to fail to recognize the humanity in outsiders.

And last (but not last), Frailty hit home for me because of my own religious background. A lot of Mormons were upset about Jon Krakauer’s book Under the Banner of Heaven, because he suggested that certain violent episodes in the history of the church — both the mainstream group and splinter groups — stemmed from an integral part of the religion. When I saw Frailty, I immediately thought of the Lafferty brothers, polygamists who left the mainstream church and had a “revelation” that God wanted them to kill a disapproving sister-in-law, her baby daughter, and a couple other people. Frailty came a few years before Krakauer’s book, but I made a similar connection when seeing it.

To my mind, there’s no question that Krakauer’s thesis was at least partly correct. Close to the beginning of The Book of Mormon, we have the story of Nephi and Laban. Nephi’s father, having had a vision that Jerusalem would be destroyed, took his family to live in the wilderness. Not long after they left, he sent his sons back to talk to a local rich guy named Laban, to retrieve from him the “brass plates” — which supposedly contained the books of Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and some other stuff that didn’t survive to become part of the eventual Old Testament (Zenos, Zenock, and Neum, for those keeping score). The Lord had told them they needed the writings of the prophets for their journey.

Laban wasn’t having it. They asked for the plates; he said no. They tried to buy the plates; he took their payment and kicked them out, plateless. Nephi’s brothers were ready to give up. Then Nephi, “led by the spirit,” came across a drunk man lying on the ground who turned out to be Laban.

The spirit tells Nephi to kill Laban. Nephi demurs, having never killed anybody before. The spirit insists: “Slay him, for the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands; Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.”

So Nephi lops off Laban’s head, dresses up in his clothes, fools Laban’s servant, and makes off with the brass plates.

This is the tension at work in Frailty. Your dad tells you the Lord has revealed to him that he should start killing people to fulfill a higher purpose. Is he crazy? Is it an actual revelation? The movie doesn’t let us off easy. We can say with confidence that we believe people like the Lafferty brothers to be crazy, but all indications are that they were sincere in their belief that God wanted them to kill a couple of relatives.

In modern Mormonism, there’s an interesting dynamic between the church’s structure of top-down, hierarchical leadership and the religion’s focus on the ability to receive personal revelation. The structure of the church may keep potential crazies in check more than would be the case with breakoffs like the Laffertys, but still…

When I was in seminary during high school, in the year we spent focusing on The Book of Mormon, the first verse of scripture we were asked to commit to memory was 1 Nephi 3:7:

“And it came to pass that I, Nephi, said unto my father: I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them.”

This is one of the best-known Book of Mormon scriptures in the church, although I believe Mormons think of it out of context most of the time — considering it simply a powerful statement about faith and obedience. But the context is bleak — it’s the prelude to Nephi’s murder of Laban. Killing a man is the way that the Lord prepared for him.

The idea is there, in a fundamental portion of Mormon theology, that God can decide he wants you to kill somebody to accomplish a greater mission — and in a more personal sense than most of the God-approved killing in the Old Testament.

Although religion may discourage some forms of rigorous thought, I don’t think it creates insanity where there was none before (although I grant there may be exceptions). Religion may, however, give that insanity an extra sense of confidence and purpose.

And, Frailty asks, what if that insanity isn’t really insanity at all? Chilling stuff.

There are also a few movies I’d want to include just for the sake of seeing them represented by anyone at all — Malcolm X; Saved!; Cremaster 2; Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones; South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut; Orgazmo; Salome’s Last Dance; Heaven Can Wait; Defending Your Life; The Ten; even The Devil and Max Devlin and Oh God, You Devil (Bill Cosby, Elliot Gould, and then George Burns in dual roles! I haven’t seen it since of these last two since I was about eight years old, though).

Tom Palmer’s book reviews are more than enough to explain why Cass Sunstein is an extraordinarily sloppy thinker, but bad ideas never die — and Sunstein’s bad ideas are plentiful. One of his pet theories, developed with Richard Thaler, is “libertarian paternalism,” which posits that central authorities can frame the choices available to people in society in such a way that “better” choices will more often be made — all without running afoul of libertarian objections to authoritarian compulsion.

David Friedman has made compelling arguments that “nudges,” attempts to establish innocuous choice architecture, would likely soon become more like shoves.

Yesterday, I discovered that economists extraordinaire Mario Rizzo and Glen Whitman (check out this nice encomium to Rizzo by Peter Boettke) had thoroughly dismantled the idea that would-be paternalists have the ability to make better utility-maximizing decisions than the aggregate population they hope to influence, let alone cement this ability in a set of public policies that would implement the benefits of their omniscience in practice. Titled “The Knowledge Problem of New Paternalism,” one additional reason it caught my eye is because they published it in the law journal of my own alma mater.

(Last time I went poking around the archives of BYU’s scholarly journals, incidentally, I stumbled across this gem from 1976, which provides the interesting bit of trivia that Milton Friedman and Dallin H. Oaks had been friendly colleagues during their mutual time in Chicago.)

At any rate, Rizzo and Whitman give “libertarian paternalism” the full Hayekian analysis, concluding:

In principle, we can embrace the idea of making people better off according to their own true preferences. That goal cannot be made operational in practice without access to information that policymakers do not, will not, and often cannot possess. Yet policymakers have to make policy on the basis of something, and so they will appeal to their own preferences, the preferences of self-appointed experts, or the (alleged) preferences of the public at large. They cannot implement people’s “true” preferences, but they can implement what they believe are the “right” ones, and the new paternalist paradigm will provide the intellectual cover to do so.

It’s an excellent piece, worthy of a full, careful read.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

Two and a half years ago (can it really have been that long?) I wrote over at Show-Me Daily about Barry Schwartz’s “paradox of choice” theory. An excerpt:

Sometimes eliminating choices is a business strategy that makes sense. Some restaurants are getting rid of menus, some supermarkets are paring down the number of items on their shelves, and the Internet is filled with advice on how to make decisions effectively — suggesting that there’s a wide range of people out there that needs help coping with the bewildering array of choices life has to offer them.

So, yes, I grant all of this. And yet … it’s easy to forget that the long tail has become the basis for the most valuable new business plans of the Internet age. The idea here is that people have such widely varied tastes that the many items people buy very little of, with low market share, add up to a mass of options that rivals the popular items that nearly everybody buys.

Schwartz coined a couple of terms for different types of deision-makers: "maximizers" and "satisficers."

Maximizers are the people who try to find the best of whatever they’re choosing — the best new car, the best brand of toothpaste, the best hamburger, etc. These people may enjoy their optimal choices more than other people enjoy their subpar choices, but there’s a large opportunity cost in pursuing knowledge of the "best" choice.

Satisficers, on the other hand, choose things that are "good enough." They don’t second-guess whether there’s a better brand of peanut butter if the brand they’ve already purchased results in satisfactory sandwiches.

Schwartz essentially argues that satisficers are happier than maximizers because they don’t expend an inefficient amount of time and energy looking for goods that are only marginally better than things they would be satisfied with. And his argument might make sense if people fit exclusively into one or the other of his categories.

But the fact is that everybody is both a maximizer and a satisficer, just for different sets of choices. As Virginia Postrel argued in Reason:

Since different people care intensely about different things, only a society where choice is abundant everywhere can truly accommodate the variety of human beings. Abundant choice doesn’t force us to look for the absolute best of everything. It allows us to find the extremes in those things we really care about, whether that means great coffee, jeans cut wide across the hips, or a spouse who shares your zeal for mountaineering, Zen meditation, and science fiction.

A world in which there’s an ever-expanding array of choices means I get to maximize my music preferences by listening to Zorn and Zappa while others can satisfice theirs with Lavigne and Timberlake. It also means that some people can maximize their preference for vehicles with luxury BMWs or SUVs, while I can satisfice with my trusty Hyundai Elantra. And it means that while David Stokes can satisfice his baby bottle needs with whatever’s on sale, somebody else who’s looking for certain characteristics in a bottle that David might not care about, or have even considered, can find what they’re looking for as well.

So, I was particularly happy to stumble across this piece from The Onion today. It’s a reminder that most people tend to be maximizers about some aspect of their lives. That line will be drawn in radically different places for different people, but the rest of us frequently benefit from the externalities of their trailblazing obsessions.

I’ve lost a substantial amount of weight a couple of times in the past. The first time happened after heading back for my second year of college following two years as a missionary in Florida. It involved a lot of walking to and from my off-campus apartment and a purposeful rejection of any and all junk food. I lived pretty much entirely off of beans and rice, oranges, and granola, got lots of practical exercise, and lost about 70 pounds in five months. Later, I moved closer to campus, got a bike, began relying on spaghetti as a staple, and the pounds started to pile back on.

The second time, an experimental stab at Atkins, is partly chronicled in three blog entries from 2004, a series continued in both concept and number by this very post. I didn’t have the tools to measure my progress accurately at the time, but I think I lost about 60 pounds in four months, then took a break while visiting home on vacation, used the short-term break as an excuse to take a longer break and cram in some of my favorite foods as long as I was temporarily off the wagon, and didn’t start back up again.

The third time is currently ongoing. I’d been contemplating another diet for a while until last fall, when I stayed with my pals James and Rachel during a work-related trip to D.C. I discovered that James had been adhering to the paleo diet, which is low-carb and similar in some ways to Atkins. I’d read about it before, and it always made evolutionary sense to me. But truth is often counterintuitive, so I checked out the research. I’d read pretty much every criticism of low-carb diets I could find before I started Atkins back in the day, although I was ultimately swayed in favor of at least trying out the approach by Jim Henley’s blog.

James sent me links to a lecture and book by Gary Taubes, who I’d read back in 2004 but had kept collating research in the interim. His 2008 book is an amazing survey of how nutritional data has been systematically massaged for decades in ways that are entirely incompatible with the scientific method. From Overcoming Bias:

For several decades, it has been the conventional wisdom that dietary fat (and especially saturated fat) contributes to obesity, heart disease, and cancer. Judging from Taubes’ exhaustive research — indeed, I’d be surprised if any other book examined bias within a particular scientific field in such detail — the conventional wisdom was based on unreliable and slender evidence that, once established and institutionalized in government funding, set a pattern of confirmation bias by which further research was judged (or ignored).

It’s a great read, and I find it convincing. Of course, the theory also fits perfectly with my own anecdotal experience — so that helps. When I started Atkins for the second time in February 2009, I realized that I’d forgotten how great it felt the first time. No more low-blood-sugar crashes or moments of panicky hunger. Increased energy, deeper sleep. My occasional acid reflux vanished. And as the weight dropped, everything became easier — less mass that needs to be serviced by oxygenated blood flow, less effort required to move the mass that remains.

I think the primary reason I ultimately failed to stick to the diet in 2004 was that I never fully committed. I viewed it as more or less a neat metabolic trick to lose weight without much physical effort, and I always planned to go back to eating all my favorite foods once I’d lost weight — but keep it off with exercise rather than with what I still regarded as a fad diet. Now that I’m convinced by the science, though, it’s no longer even really a diet to me. This is not a temporary change of behavior; there’s no going back. It’s just a healthier way to eat, and that won’t change if I manage to once again reach my long-lost skinny days. The term “lifestyle change” gets thrown around a lot in nutritional literature, and in my case it’s true — that’s what it takes. No breaks for vacation, no falling off the wagon to succumb to a momentary indulgence. It’s a complete shift in outlook.

I’ve found that it’s pretty easy to give something up once I’ve psychologically committed to the decision. Giving up starchy/sugary food for my diet entailed a shift in the way I view food. I see a heaping bowl of mashed potatoes or a plate of cookies, for instance, and no longer regard them as edible. They hold so little power of temptation anymore that they may as well be made out of plastic. Similarly, ruling out the possibility of dating more than a decade ago also turned out to be surprisingly easy. I mean, self-acceptance is one thing, but I labor under no illusions that women are dying to have bald fat dudes crushing on them — in either sense of the term. Not that you can really help developing a crush on somebody, but you can resign yourself to the fact that it’s hopeless and leave it at that; the idea is off the table.

I’m reminded of when the sitcom “King of Queens” came up as the subject of a trivia question not too long ago. A friend pointed out that she thought the show’s basic premise was not believable. Ain’t that the truth. It’s simply a fact of life that I’ve long been resigned to. Way back before the turn of the 21st century, my mind raced through a bajillion losing scenarios like a 1980s Department of Defense supercomputer before concluding that “the only winning move is not to play.” And, after such a point of psychological commitment, other doors open; other opportunity sets arise (although, granted, not necessarily better ones). A “Seinfeld” plot framed this in a cruder but much funnier way — although I’m not sure I’ve been more productive than I otherwise might have been, a la George Costanza, because my OCD tendencies can make even largely unproductive activities seem to carry a veneer of accomplishment when I fall into a rhythm of doing them exhaustively.

Path dependence is an ongoing marginal process. It’s easy to maintain the status quo for another day, week, month, etc., while telling yourself that substantial change is just around the corner. But making that change takes effort, an investment in a new set of sunk costs that require time in order to develop into a new, more rewarding future path. The small immediate payoffs that come from minimal effort can be an attractive alternative to a larger distant payoff that comes only after the difficult initial steps of change. Even though an expanded time preference is one of the hallmarks of success throughout life, it took me this long to consistently forgo the marshmallow of immediate gustatory gratification.

But, again, once actual psychological commitment takes hold, the new path becomes easy to sustain in much the same way as the old one: inertia works in either case. I never intended my absence from the world of relationships to last so long, but I kept telling myself that I’d change next month, next year . . . and that sort of extended procrastination adds up. At times, now that I’ve ventured this far down a new path away from the darkness of self-imposed exile, I catch a glipse of a light at the end of the tunnel — but it’s still distant. So, I remind myself that it’s still hopeless. But maybe it won’t be in another year or so: There’ll be no more marshmallows for me.

There’s no fixed end game that I hope to reach via substantial weight loss, but already, even with 150ish pounds left to go, I can do far more things more easily and readily than I could last year. Losing weight means becoming a dramatically more functional human being, in any number of ways. Whatever comes after that is uncertain, but — ceteris paribus (I know, I know, ceteris is never paribus) — the range of possibilities will expand in positive ways.

Even though I more or less know what I’m doing this time around, this blog entry still lives up to the “incompetent” designation I began back in 2004, because I haven’t been keeping a systematic record of my progress. When I finally got around to writing all of this down, I realized that the only written record I have of my 2009 weight loss milestones comes from Facebook status updates. I’ve compiled the data I posted there for the past several months into the following table that’s interesting (to me) but still incompetent in its inconsistency of measurement: . . . Read more!

I love my nephews and nieces to pieces, but can’t get over how surreal it is trying to formulate a rational explanation that will convince another person that it’s unacceptably gross to pick your nose and eat it.

I think I feel some sort of analogue to Bastiat’s frustration with the political process:

What a lot of trouble to prove in political economy that two and two make four; and if you succeed in doing so, people cry, “It is so clear that it is boring.” Then they vote as if you had never proved anything at all.

But, you know, replace “two,” “two,” and “four” with “boogers,” “mouth,” and “disgusting,” and “political economy” with “basic norms of polite society.” Oh yeah, and “vote” with “pick their nose and eat it anyway.”

Or something.

Partial Google Talk transcript from Thursday, Nov. 12:

12:04 PM
me: a bunch of book club people formed a bar trivia team last night… we were the “Mathletes for Liberty”
12:05 PM
J: LOL…sounds like my kind of crowd…though I suck at math
me: no math questions… even so, we only came in third
me: out of like 12 teams, though
12:06 PM
J: Sounds like a lot of fun, actually
12:07 PM
me: it was indeed pretty fun
me: and, somehow, two talking heads songs made it to the jukebox with no help from me
J: LOL, nice!
me: several book club people had no idea who talking heads are… clearly, this calumny cannot stand
12:08 PM
J: WTF!!??
12:09 PM
me: “Blind” from “Naked” came on at a restaurant in asheville nc while we were there, and when i got excited, josh looked puzzled and said, “you know this strange music?”
12:10 PM
me: kids these days…
J: “Get off my lawn!!”
me: yeah
me: get a haircut
J: exactly

We hadn’t had our shiny new blog for long before we, once again, became apathetic about posting new material in it. I know I tend to write less if Justin isn’t writing anything, and I suspect it’s the same for him if I quit posting. It’s easy to fall into a consistent lack of productivity that feeds on itself.

For the last couple months that Justin has been in Afghanistan, he’s been sending out group email messages to a variety of friends and family, updating everybody about his travels and travails. I suggested a few times that he should post some of them to the blog, because they’re interesting enough to be part of this permanent record, but he never posted anything. When I suggested this again a few days ago, he revealed that he’s had trouble logging in to our blog interface from Kabul, and proposed that I add some of the stuff he’s sent out instead.

So was born the already lengthy and ongoing series “Dispatches From Afghanistan,” which currently has 27 entries. I backdated each of the entries to match the date and time at which he sent out the emails, the first falling on Sept. 4. After I’d finished posting them all, I updated our archive page as well, so even the entries that get pushed off the front page can still be located and read.

As I’ve added all of Justin’s dispatches during the past few days, I’ve found that the addition of his content to the site has once again stoked my own initiative to add to my own side of the blog. So, stay tuned for more — until the next time we go into update hibernation.

I haven’t really said anything about gay marriage around these parts. I’m close to many people who hold strong positions on multiple sides of the argument, and nobody’s ever asked me to outline my own stance. Maybe they all just presume that I agree with them, or maybe they’re apprehensive that I won’t. More likely, they don’t care — and I can’t say I blame them. Nobody asks about my view, and I don’t offer, pretty much a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation.

I have no personal investment in the issue, which may also be one of the reasons I haven’t bothered to touch on it before. I do have friends with a personal stake, however, as I suspect most people do, so the issue will always affect me tangentially. That’s all beside the point, though — for instance, I don’t take recreational drugs, and regardless of that I’ve been a long-time advocate for drug legalization. Standing up for individual rights should be a matter of principle, and it may well be more important for people to fight for rights they don’t ever plan to use themselves than to protect only their own interests, if for no other reason than to help ensure they don’t succumb to a corrupting bias in otherwise principled ideology. So, for the record, I’m firmly in favor of legalizing all consensual behavior among adults. Whether other individuals throughout society consider any particular behavior to be “moral” is a separate question, a battle that should be waged in the marketplace of ideas in civil society, rather than in legislative chambers.

My own position on gay marriage has actually been on the web for a little more than four years, in the comment section of Tom Palmer’s blog (there are a couple of references to previous comments that don’t fully make sense outside the context of the full thread):

In our perfect little libertarian utopia (as if anyone could agree on what that might be), we certainly might agree on the complete separation of marriage and state as one of the features of this society. And this is indeed the view I once held; I wasn’t interested in arguments for gay marriage because I didn’t think government should be involved in defining or approving marriages at all. And in a perfect world, this would still be my view.

But as we live in a decidedly non-libertarian world, it’s important to take stock of the set of rights and responsibilities that a civil marriage confers on its participants — and to realize that some of these rights and responsibilities *can’t* be contracted for in any form outside of marriage.

Since marriage is the one form of contract that allows for specific sets of rights and responsibilities between two people, it’s fundamentally unjust to withhold that form of contract from a categorical set of willing participants.

If, Aaron G., you think engaging in a homosexual relationship is sinful, that’s your right. And, SPB, if you want to work toward smashing traditional forms of sexual morality, that’s your right too. But the libertarian in both of you should recognize that if someone else wants to take another path in her pursuit of happiness, you should grant her that right as well.

After all, the only thing under consideration is the right to undertake a specific form of interpersonal contract. This shouldn’t be a controversial notion at all.

Why do I even bother arguing with somebody who has such a tenuous grasp on reality?

Earlier today, Jesse Walker posted a link to the FilmFlam email list to an article about how scientists have found that people often tend to blink as a group at particular places when watching movies or TV shows. The seemingly inconsequential act of blinking causes a viewer to miss a split second of the plot, which “means moviegoers who sit through a 150-minute film have their eyes shut for up to 15 minutes.” So people subconsciously save some of their blinks for moments that they instinctually think they can afford to miss briefly.

Later in the day, I responded on the list that this bugged me as a kid:

For a while when I was a kid, my OCD latched on to worrying about blinking during movies & TV shows. Had I really watched a movie, or just sizable portions of a movie? Knowing that I wouldn’t be able to stop blinking entirely, I recall trying to just periodically close one eye and then the other so that I’d never entirely miss even a fraction of a second — but it didn’t take too long for me to decide I was being ridiculous, and so I stopped worrying about it, cold turkey, and began once again blinking with abandon…

Then, just a few minutes ago, tonight’s TiVo’d episode of The Colbert Report was drawing to a close when Stephen Colbert closed the show with this gag:

If those of you watching at home want more show, try watching this episode again without blinking. You get at least 3 percent more programming, and the added bonus of seeing all those bright white spots.

Now, if only one of my Malcolm Gladwell books were to fall mysteriously off a shelf, or something, the day would be complete.

I inadvertently left my phone at work on Tuesday night, and tonight I left my 10-inch netbook. So, I pulled out my slowly-falling-apart laptop once I got home, which I hadn’t used in weeks, and at 15.5 inches it now seems comically oversized — kind of like Edith Ann’s rocking chair.

It can be inconvenient at times using such a small display as a matter of course, but now that I’ve gotten used to it, the lightness, portability, and easy handling of the smaller-sized model easily win out for most of the situations in which I want to use a computer at home. I can’t do much in the way of cutting-edge gaming or video editing on a netbook — but I’ve never been much of a gamer, and at any rate, I have a fancy new Power Mac at work for CPU-intensive tasks that are actually productive. In the meantime, most of the time, I’m sold on the sheer usefulness of tiny, tiny computers.

Toward the end of Letterman on Wednesday night, a band named St. Vincent started playing: . . . Read more!

Steve Ball, guitar protégé of Brian Eno’s old pal Robert Fripp, has developed his own music for airports: . . . Read more!

The A.V. Club tackles my favorite movie, Trust, as part of its “New Cult Canon” film review series. Here’s a nice excerpt:

It should be said up front that Trust, aside from any deeper emotional or thematic underpinnings, is flat-out funny much of the time. And it’s often absurd and melancholy simultaneously, like when news of Maria’s situation literally kills her father, or when her hilarious stereotype of a jock boyfriend breaks up with her without pausing in his training regimen. There’s something sad and funny, too, about Maria’s older sister Peg (a young, superb Edie Falco), a hard-living divorcée who also lives at home, and whose mother considers her damaged enough to make a better partner for Matthew than Maria, the less-spoiled daughter. Hartley also has fun noodling with archetypes: One subplot has Maria searching for a businessman who will come off the Long Island commuter train wearing a trenchcoat and smoking a pipe; it turns out that description fits all businessmen.

Though such deadpan absurdities are a longstanding element of Hartley’s work, they’re also the albatross that hangs over his lesser films, because it can be hard to see the sincerity and depth behind them. Yet that’s never the case with Trust, which speaks to Shelly and Donovan’s wonderful chemistry and the touching way Hartley ties their tenuous romance with their desperate need for rehabilitation and change.

Later:

Respect + admiration + trust = love. Only Hartley would attempt to devise some sort of metric to quantify a feeling as intangible as love; one critic, I can’t recall who, suggested that Hartley’s scripts were so hermetic and rigidly plotted that it’s as if they were written on graph paper. But while his films definitely give the impression of being fully worked out well before the cameras roll, that doesn’t necessarily condemn the end results to being stale and overly calculated.

Indeed. I’ve heard similar complaints about filmmakers like the Coen Brothers and Stanley Kubrick over the years. I mean, I like the loose improvisational styles of, say, Godard or Altman as much as anybody — but this “cold, calculated” charge has never seemed to me like a drawback for any movie I’ve ever seen.

Trey Gunn, one of my favorite musicians, explains the trouble he’s having learning a new piece of repertoire for an upcoming series of performances:

This “three-piece suit and a poison pen” of a tune has some of the most challenging rhythms I have ever attempted. The musical worlds that I move comfortably in, all have four, or occasionally three, subdivisions to the beat. The bars could be composed of any numbers of beats – 5, 8, 9, 13, etc… – but each of those beats are broken up in to four small pulses. This is extremely common in even the most complicated of rock and world music rhythms. All of the King Crimson material (except for the short bass break in Lark’s Tongue II – which is five to the pulse) is based on four, or the odd three, pulses to the beat. All of my solo material is based on four small pulses. All of the music that I listen to from Iran, Egypt, Eastern Europe and Africa is based on either four or three to the beat.

However this track, “Austin Powers” leaves this concept behind and the small subdivisions of the beat are mutated beyond this “norm”. One beat is divided in four, the next one in six, the next in 7, then one in five, then the next into 7. Sometimes these subdivisions even include rests on the first note — leaving you hanging off a cliff for a short split in time.

After a couple of illustrative audio samples: . . . Read more!

Why do I do it? Some high school English teacher with an axe to grind has started filling Show-Me Daily with rancor and intimations of institutional bias — as though he thinks nobody could possibly reach the conclusions we publish unless somebody paid us to doctor the research. But I know what we do is accurate, to a fault, and it’s obvious he’s a crank that nobody will take seriously. Still, I keep responding — even though his comments all follow posts I didn’t write. Check it out:

How to Compete With Charters

Education, Not Regulation

Answers to Charter School Criticism

Professional Licensing: A First-Person Perspective

Another Reduction in Government Lobbying

Choice as a Motivator

The guy devotes his comments to ad hominem attacks to such an absurd degree that he reminds me of this Onion article.

In other work-related news, I have a piece in the latest issue of Atlas Highlights. Yay.

Update: I’ll keep adding adding links to blog entries that this guy has commented on. He’s pretty entertaining.

A few days ago, an old friend of mine from Portland posted to Facebook that he “Never wants to see an lol again” — so I’ve developed a new acronym that is destined to take the world of texters and script kiddies by storm: AAGHEMM. It stands for: “An Audible Guffaw Has Escaped My Maw.”

Pass it on PLS, PPL.

One of my bestest pals in the world, Travers, is in a new band — Electric Desert. Go check ‘em out on MySpace and Facebook, where you can also hear some of their music. Here’s a nice shot of Travers in action.

Also, below the jump, I’ve embedded a couple of audience-cam YouTube videos from their show last night in Chicago. . . . Read more!

As Memorial Day draws to a close, it occurs to me that it would be a good time to repost something here that I wrote nearly a year ago for Show-Me Daily, the blog I maintain as part of my day job with the Show-Me Institute. The entry stems from a trip that Justin and I took to Kansas City, during which we visited several historical sites marking and commemorating Missouri’s Mormon War:

Every Memorial Day that I can recall while I grew up in Portland, Ore., we went to visit my mom’s parents’ resting place. After moving away, first for college and later for work, I got out of the habit of visiting family members’ graves on Memorial Day. There just weren’t any within driving distance.

Now that I’m living in Missouri, it’s a little easier — my great-great-great-great grandpa is buried about an hour and a half northeast of Kansas City, lying at the bottom of an abandoned well with several other people after they were all murdered. Although I visited the site in March, and had considered going there again over the Memorial Day weekend, a nasty bug has laid me out for the past few days … and the rain would have been a dealbreaker anyway — my car didn’t handle so well on the muddy back roads last time.

I did, however, spend some time on Monday thinking about the value of civil society. Because we live in a country largely founded on principles of freedom, tolerance, and the rule of law, people with wildly different cultures, backgrounds, and belief systems can live comfortably together in the same communities. And although from time to time tragic incidents may occur — like the one that killed one of my progenitors, and drove several others out of Missouri — they are by far the exception rather than the rule. There are places in the world where this sort of organized persecution and violent purging happens all the time.

Ultimately, this is one of the most important historical innovations of the United States — despite our differences, for the most part we all manage to live and work together in peace.

Most of my periodic trips to Kansas City are work-related, and timing generally doesn’t permit me to stay for much sightseeing. I almost went back this weekend, to see They Might Be Giants and visit a few of the places I didn’t see last time, but found that I had plenty to keep me occupied here at home. I’ll head back again soon, though.

Stronger! Faster! More explosions!

This blog upgrade has been in the works for a long, long time. Back when we first decided to start a blog, I tried installing Movable Type on our server only to find, four or five hours later, that I couldn’t get it to look the way I wanted. I had this dueling blogger design in my head, and Movable Type just didn’t seem equipped to make it a reality. But hey, I thought, I’m a wily web guy — I’ll just create a blog manually through an elaborate series of server-side include files!

It worked well enough, except for the drudgery of manual archiving — periodically copying and pasting all of our main-page entries into their permanent resting places. I kept it up for a while, but as procrastination took hold and I let an increasing number of weeks drift by between each cumulative batch of archiving, the chore became easier to ignore until it reached absurdly out-of-date proportions. I’ve blogged about this before, after my last stab at archiving. Before this site upgrade went live today, the archives were more than three years behind schedule. And having a poorly maintained blog made both of us apathetic about posting here at all.

I’ve used Wordpress to build some other sites, so I figured it wouldn’t be too difficult to adapt our existing site’s look to the spiffy Wordpress content management system. A year or so ago, I spent a few hours doing just that — until I hit a road block. You see, I was able to create a main page for the blog that looked basically like our old page, dueling author content and all, but getting the archives to behave the same way stumped me. I spent several more hours tweaking PHP code with no success, and several hours after that searching through Wordpress forums, codices, and plugin documentation, searching for some way to make it work. No dice.

You see, Wordpress has no native function for displaying posts within a specified date range, and no way to split a single database query between two authors with two separate feeds. I was able to create the main page by initiating two separate database queries, one for each author, but when I tried to use the same code for archive pages, Wordpress would just pull the most recent entries for each author — not our archived entries.

A more sensible man might have decided that this was far too much trouble for something of little importance anyway, and just scrap the old site design for something new and, well, possible to implement. Instead, defeated, I retreated into petulance for the better part of a year. Whenever Justin made suggestions about changing the blog’s design rather than pursue the hobgoblin of my foolish consistency, I’d whine about how it’s not that difficult to update the relevant include files and FTP them to our server, and that he should just do that instead of pestering me. But our ill-kempt blog had become more of an embarrassment than an asset, and he really just wanted to start from scratch. I can’t say I blamed him.

So, when Justin posted a message to Facebook last week indicating that he was thinking about starting a new blog of his own, I sprang into action. A new survey of Wordpress possibilities revealed that, in February, someone might have solved the archive problem, finally making it possible to create dueling author feeds for old blog entries. A test of his method worked like gangbusters. A few days of heavy lifting later, here we are.

So, we now have a functional site with all of your favorite five-year-old blog technology — RSS feeds, comments, searching, and bona fide automatic archiving. Well, almost automatic archiving. I ended up putting it all together in a pretty ghetto way (I don’t include metaphorical “elbow grease” and “rubber bands” in the blog’s new footer for nothing), but it works. And I’m really digging it.

I’ll add category functionality before too long, and sooner or later I may start eliminating the HTML-tables-as-design-tools strategy that’s still more or less in place, even after the upgrade. I’m a fan of pure CSS design, but that’s another problem to tackle on another day. In the meantime, welcome to Shrubbloggers 2.0!

The cat ran away Thursday morning, apparently slipping out the door while Justin left for work. I was surprised by the sense of loss I felt when I realized she was gone — I’ve never had a pet before, and never set out to bond with this one. I’ve never fully understood people’s grief when their pets die. After all, it’s just an animal. Get another one. What’s the big deal?

But I spent a couple of cumulative hours searching around our apartment complex for this cat, and even sat out on the front step for a half hour Thursday night at about midnight, hoping she’d saunter home. No dice. But earlier tonight, after Justin spent some more time poking around our residential environs, she suddenly came home. Seemed a little dazed at first, but OK. Later, as she was purring on my lap, I actually let loose with two or three tears. Really. I literally can’t remember the last time that happened — at some point in high school, around 20 years ago, maybe? There’s no question, though — I’m hooked. Welcome home, kitty.

I’ve been looking for this video intermittently for about a decade. From eBay to collector sites to DVD anthologies — nothing. Today, I discovered that somebody finally posted it to YouTube in August. . . .