Confession Saturday

Confession: I have a cussing problem.

I know, I know-- I can be better than this. I must be better than this. But seriously, when the printer is down, and you need to get printed reports right away, when your Diet Coke spills all over your keyboard, when you stub your toe, fall down the stairs, when you can't find the piece of paper you just had in your hand a little bit ago...

An "Oh, darn my luck!" or "Golly this stinks!" Just doesn't cut it.

I need to bring out the big guns.

One is issued under my breath, and amazingly, I feel in control of the situation. It's like a deep exhale that expels all negativity, all frustration.

My parents nervously looked at this growing habit of mine in sixth grade. It has only improved with time. It started with my inability to play the F scale on the French Horn. Now, it is pretty much a staple response to every frustration. Don't worry, I don't drop the F-bomb, or any other word of its caliber. I'm a high-class swearer: only using the best. The cuss words of my choice are a limited three-- the evil trio: heck, dang, and shoot. I use "ass" so frequently that I stopped considering it a swear word. I kept pushing the line with that one, so I decided to move the line. A logical solution.

Three situations make me want to correct this habit:

1) I was in the break room reading a book, when this loud man was talking to his friend, using every cuss word in the book. It was foul.

2) I dropped one in a staff meeting. Couldn't believe it.

3) We had a lesson on language at church. It made me feel evil.

So, I need to be better. What do you do when you're frustrated?

Concerning Art

My teens and early twenties are marked by periods of intellectual bullying. But no more, folks, no more. In fact, I have created a theory on the matter, which I will discuss later.

We have an independent movie theatre, which shows German short films in lieu of previews. Lame. Most of these films are animated: robot carrying out mundane responsibilities over a long period of time, only to realize, as the camera pans out, that the family it serves is nothing more than a pile of rotting corpses. Or the young red-head that throws herself off a bridge for reasons unknown. The peer- pressured response to this? What brilliance! Moving! Stirring! What's running through my mind? Trash. Inefficient manipulation of emotion.

And here's what I've discovered. Among the "artsy" community (of which I am definitely not a peer-- not by choice, but by lack of acceptance and admitted lack of ability) there is an elitism. Now, as with all genres, this elitism is broken up into two categories: the talented, and the talentless. The talented are exactly that, the talented. The talentless, of which there are significantly more of, cannot operate within the confines of common sense, because if they did, the world would call them out for exactly what they are...the talentless. So they have to try something so entirely radical, so new, that nobody can judge them by correct and established standards of what is good, and what is not good. This leads to the process of "breaking boundaries" "forgetting thought" and "sticking it to the man." For those of you who aspire to be talentless artists, don't worry, all you need is a few materials and clinical depression.

I see you demand examples of talentless art.

When in London I journeyed to the Tate Modern Museum. I saw some cool pieces. But my average reaction could be summarized by an extended eye roll and a grunt.

Piece 1: A woman (a rejected artist) was confined to her bed by utter depression. She stayed there for a total of three consecutive weeks, never leaving. The bed was on display at the Tate: dirty condoms, tampons, rotting Chinese food dotted the mattress. Peer-pressured response: an amazing depiction of human life. Common sense, and hence correct response: sick chick, broom is needed.

Piece 2: A room, full of crumpled up paper. That's it. You could leave your own "artistic mark" by crumpling up (or not crumpling) a piece of paper yourself and throwing it into the pile...or not. The choices. But please, requests the staff member on hand, do whatever to the paper as you would to your life, should it manifest itself in a material form...in a moment of retaliation, I did nothing. I guess, according to artistic standards, I don't care to live.

The talented push the boundaries of common sense, and make us aware of what is beyond our view, but is in fact entirely possible. Drawing on old principles of "what is good" and adding the new. Thus moving society forward and up. The talentless, on the other hand, operate entirely out of the boundaries of common sense, never touching them. And respond to every inquiry of their art with "it just is." Their supportive minions-- you know, the kind that tie up their self-importance to their ability to "see beyond" the mundane intellect of the masses-- are quick to jump into a passionate rant: with finger jabs, red faces, and spit flying everywhere.

Don't you have the wits to understand, jab, jab, jab, this depicts the feelings and the meaninglessness of an entire generation, red, red, red, the sheer movement of the work spit, spit, spit, attests to the brilliance of the artist passion, passion, passion, and because you can't understand the artist denotes your ignorance! Brief grunt of disgust, lip curl, haughty turn on the heel, and walk away.

And there it is. Intellectual bullying.

To me, it's akin to holding a 10 cent harlequin romance in your hand and trying to convince some poor, wanting-to-be-accepted soul its as influential and as brilliant as Tolstoy.

Theory: the most brilliant, time-tested artists in society combine common sense, or for the sake of a better analogy, the head, with emotion. I buy into the philosophy that emotion is the engine, and the head is the conductor. An engine needs an operator to move themselves, and any passengers, in a desired direction. A visionary always has direction. Raw emotion, the only ingredient in the work of the talentless, only moves people that don't care where they end up, or those that are intellectually bullied to buy into the art.

On a lighter note, post on my puzzle putting-together abilities is coming soon.

SO how I feel...

I found this on my brother's blog. EXACTLY how I feel. If only I was as eloquent as Elder Christophersen...

"The societies in which many of us live have for more than a generation failed to foster moral discipline. They have taught that truth is relative and that everyone decides for himself or herself what is right. Concepts such as sin and wrong have been condemned as “value judgments.” As the Lord describes it, “Every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god” (D&C 1:16).

As a consequence, self-discipline has eroded and societies are left to try to maintain order and civility by compulsion. The lack of internal control by individuals breeds external control by governments. One columnist observed that “gentlemanly behavior [for example, once] protected women from coarse behavior. Today, we expect sexual harassment laws to restrain coarse behavior. . . .

“Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become.”

In most of the world, we have been experiencing an extended and devastating economic recession. It was brought on by multiple causes, but one of the major causes was widespread dishonest and unethical conduct, particularly in the U.S. housing and financial markets. Reactions have focused on enacting more and stronger regulation. Perhaps that may dissuade some from unprincipled conduct, but others will simply get more creative in their circumvention. There could never be enough rules so finely crafted as to anticipate and cover every situation, and even if there were, enforcement would be impossibly expensive and burdensome. This approach leads to diminished freedom for everyone. In the memorable phrase of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, “We would not accept the yoke of Christ; so now we must tremble at the yoke of Caesar.”

----------------
This man so completely put together the thoughts I have been having for the last three weeks.
I love genius people. There is just something I love about people that come in, sit down, and in a very calm manner, tell you how it is. No PC, no beating around the bush-- love it.

When I was young, I stumbled across a quote by Abraham Lincoln, that has long since been among my favorites:

"Government should never do for people what they can and should do for themselves."

Apparently self-discipline isn't this generation's forte.

I'm Just a Bill-- the Unsung Version

There's a really important aspect of government that many people do not understand. I didn't fully understand until AFTER my Masters program.

Many think that law-making occurs by their elected representatives in fancy capitol buildings. That's true. But just the bone structure-- if you're lucky. The blood and guts of a law are interpreted and applied by bureaucrats. It's amazing to me that bills are passed with words that run on and on to, well, nowhere. I'm fairly convinced that a bill spends almost the entirety of its existence explaining and acutely defining the unimportant, and the other 10% of its existence is attached to the purpose for which it was born-- only to barely define it. The legalise dances around the issue like a lunatic while desperately trying to avoid being where it needs to be-- at the center of it all. For the majority of bills, it takes years for a group of fairly intelligent people sitting in meetings trying to both 1) interpret and 2) implement a section, a phrase, or even a word in a bill. And this section, word, phrase could significantly alter the entire purpose of that bill.

So what's a bureaucrat to do? Why, my friends, they create administrative rules. Administrative rules administer laws. They supplement black letter law, and combined, the two create a policy. Administrative rules fill in the holes of a bill-- are you fully aware of how many holes are in a bill?
What do lawmakers mean by "most"? 50%? 100%? All citizens? only the elderly?

What's "in decent time" mean? This century? Tomorrow? Next week? By the end of the year?

Depending on the answer to these little questions, a lot of money and power is at stake.

We're supposed to send out notices when we do this. If you're really lucky, your government will call a public forum. That's if they feel like it. If they do, you don't even want to know how many people show up-- most of them are cancelled from lack of public attendance. Thus, not only do you vote on pieces going up for legislation, but how a passed bill is interpreted (again, IF they call a public forum). Did you even know that?

So that's my problem with people wanting to pass legislation-- big legislation-- very quickly. People are constantly throwing around, what I call, trigger words-- "sustainability" "diversity" "rights" and so forth. You say those words, and people automatically start wetting their pants in pure excitement.

Are we ever questioning what they mean by that word? That word has to be defined, implemented and quantitatively measured. To my knowledge, government uses up to six definitions of sustainability. All of them are very vague. Some interpret them to mean sustainability as "we like to recycle pop cans" to "we believe that people should only have one child, live in high rises with one bedroom, and we need to send around a new plague to decrease the world-wide human population to 600,000 people" (no joke on the later interpretation). So, these highly-charged, very emotionally-driven, bills with vague definitions get passed.

Well, folks, you have to transition from the realm of idealism into the realm of reality somehow.

And let me tell you-- it's not easy, and it certainly isn't pretty.

So congratulations! You passed a vague bill, and a bunch of bureaucrats are desperately trying to figure out what the h%$^ you mean by it. That's IF they're honest. So they turn idealism into the defined. And that's when a bill frequently turns into the thing everybody hates-- because it ruined what they thought sustainability was, or what they thought diversity was. That's if you pay attention to bill implementation.

Life of a Bill Part II: The Depressing World of Implementation.

And the School House Rock board calls an emergency meeting.

Liberalification Project III: I am now the proud recipient of the moveon.org newsletter.

A whole lot of skewing

Why you don't want government to get involved-- it skews (and screws) everything:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33354321/ns/business-the_new_york_times/page/2/

Yes, yes, MSN. Though they try to end the article on a more positive note, you cannot deny that even these liberals are somewhat back-tracking.

I remember all of my liberal friends and professors saying that if the government doesn't invest, then the economy will end up in the toilet.

I wish I could ask them to prove it.

I think their plan the entire time was:

a) If it (the bailout) failed: we just didn't invest enough. Oh, the long-standing explanation as to why the New Deal ended up largely a failure, and well, not that great of a deal. WWII got us out of the Great Depression. Not the New Deal.
b) If it worked: we rock and had the right answer all along.

The market knows best. Not government. The market.

Mammoths v polar bears (without Al Gore)

You missed me.

I missed myself.

I've been gone for a while. Alex has the computer (the one with the internet) all day, every day. The only time he doesn't have it is after we get home, and truly, after nine hours of work, the last thing I want to do is blog.

It's so overwhelming, isn't it? The pressure to blog, facebook. No, pressure is the wrong word. I enjoy doing it. But after being gone so long, it piles up, and the task becomes more daunting. Especially as more and more of my friends are becoming bloggers. So many blogs, so little internet time.

What's tonight's occasion? AJ is sick. He got it from me.

So, to reduce my pile of things I want to blog about, I give you the following, fascinating (it's all a matter of optimism and perspective, people) list of things to blog about:

1) Liberalification Project II: An Inconvenient Truth. I would first of all like to rename this into "An Inconvenient Self-Promotion Movie." No, I really did try to watch this with an open mind, but I have to start with the criticism. My immaturity, you see. But seriously. Have you see the movie? No? Let me break it down for you:

Al Gore on his laptop, looks up, and has a studious expression on his face as he gazes out the window.

And then the violins.

And then a sad story (the stories were legitimately sad, which made them all the more inappropriate in this film)

"I remember when my son got hit by a car. It changed my world. We didn't know if he was going to make it."

What's running through your mind as an audience member? "How horrible!" "Is he OK?"

And then Good Ol' Al inserts the bridge "And watching my son fight for his life, made it clear to me what I need to do. Promote Global Warming"

What in the world? Seriously? You related a very serious, close, personal event in your life to global warming? Even if you did believe in global warming-- come on! Oh, and don't you worry, Al did this a number of times, watching his sister die of lung cancer, and his father's death too. All tied back to global warming. Tacky, that's all I could think, tacky.

OK, let's be more diplomatic. I enjoyed the graphs, and the analysis. He made me think, and that's why I watched the video in the first place. One thing I am not entirely convinced of is the strength of the argument that global warming is caused by men. Al said that out of all of the people who wrote on global warming, none of them disagreed that mankind started it. Two things:

1) they may not have necessarily agreed. Maybe their opinion was mute.
2) "Out of all of the people that wrote on global warming" What about climatologists that didn't?

Other than that, he had sound arguments. I have to re-evaluate what exactly I think.

And one more thing:

Everything is all about the polar bears. If a were a living wholly mammoths today, I would sue. Discrimination. Saving the polar bears? blah. Nobody did anything to save us. So me, and my homeboys the saber tooth tiger, and the all of the other mammoths (did you know there were several breeds? I didn't until an interesting Discovery channel), and a select handful of aggressive cave men would march on capital hill. We were around during the last climate change era, you know, before SUV's hit the highways. And where's all the concern about us? I'll tell you where that concern is: too busy cuddling up to polar bears.

2) Apparently the Nobel prize is all about intent. My intention? To make the best cornbread ever for Friday's church festival. Think I can get an Nobel for that? Oh, I think so. They're handing those things out like candy. And my cornbread deserves candy. Trust me.

3) Love Suppernanny.

4) I passed the water temple in Zelda.

5) I've been reading about the history of England. And another book on what it was like to be a Dark Age peasant. What I learned: you don't want to be a Dark Age peasant. It's dark. And infected.

6) And I am still on Atlas Shrugged. It's going to be a year long book.

Liberalification

So, in order to further expand my mind and broaden my views, I go through a weekly process of "liberalification."

Once a week, I liberalify myself by reading and watching heavily biased books and videos. And it makes me think. I try to have an open mind and absorb what the work wants to convey. The majority of the news I watch is liberal, but I am becoming so conservative that I decided I needed a little more liberal in my life. Hence liberalification. My new hobby.

But my liberalification project this week horrified me. In fact, it was so far left, it wasn't left. Tell me what you think:

I signed up for the Diversity Conference the State of Oregon was putting on for all employees. The conference was broken up into three sections-- one large gathering (there were about 500 people there), and two small break-out sessions. During the large assembly, I heard the following stories:

The first speaker talked about how similar she was to the friends that she grew up with: they watched the same TV shows, read the same books, did the same activities, etc. Except she was black. When she became more educated, she realized that her white friends were holding her back because they did not treat her like she was black, they treated her like she was one of them. Thus, by accepting her as one of them, they made her forget her heritage and not appreciate her black skin. They also (the white culture) taught her that celebrating Thanksgiving and Columbus Day were OK, even though those holidays are racist.

She then went on to say that she worked for an NGO in Arizona, and loved its diversity because it had no white people.

The second speaker, truth be told, was pretty good. She taught us about paradigm shifts. But she did say some crazy things... like she was at another diversity conference, and the speaker divided everybody up-- black women over there, white males over here, Asian women over there, etc-- and then had each group talk about how similar they are to each other, and how different they are from the rest of the groups. She had a white male friend that came in late and asked her (the second speaker) what was going on. She told him that they were separating into groups, to which the white male responded "I didn't know I was in a group." And she was shocked that this poor white man did not know he belonged to such an apparent click.

There's a name for an acitivity like that. What is it? No really, it's on the tip of my tongue...

Segra...

Segre...

Oh that's right, segregation! But wait, isn't that what we're fighting with these conferences, not promoting?

Oh, and she also taught us that one way we know we are not racist, and truly culturally diverse, is if we feel guilty about our individual demographics.

...

And then I went to the last break-out session. The speaker there told us about how they need to help the minorities of his County. The minorities are down, because the system (created by the wealthy) keeps them down, so we need to create a system that doesn't. So, I asked a really, what I thought to be, innocent question. And this is exactly how I phrased it:

"I know this is a very sensitive issue, so I want to be very careful. In your opinion, how much of these statistics is explained by there not being enough opportunities for minorities in the system, versus them simply not taking advantage of the opportunities that are available?"

And I was heckled.

The guy looked at me like I was from Mars. Granted, after his recovery he was very polite. He didn't really answer my question, but did go on to explain how the county received a federal loan to build a 50-mile bike-path, and he fought tooth and nail to not put any of the bike path (there were only 10 miles of it in dispute) in the white neighborhood because "they already had too much already."

...

I simply don't know how to respond to all of this. I got in the car and was so disheartened. We are a lot further from being a non-racist society than I thought. Is there racism? Sadly, yes. And truly, I was subjected to nearly 4 hours of it. I guess my idea of racism and their idea of racism are very different. And usually, in situations such as these, I try to justify the other side, try to find their point of view. But I can't. It's so entirely wrong, counter-intuitive, and void of logic. To emphasize race as a mechanism to decrease racism? To so resolutely separate people based on race as a means to promote cultural exchange? To categorize, group, and pigeon-hole everybody according to their race and sex is so utterly wrong. I don't care what the gender, race, religion, or whatever, of the other individual may be, they're different from everybody else. I could be more similar to a Latino man than to another white woman. That's entirely possible.

My idea of diversity is to listen to everybody. I am not going to focus on their age, gender, disability, sexual orientation, religion, race, or whatever, as a means of passing judgment or preference. Everybody has valued positions, because everybody has lived life, gone through trials, and has learned something. That's diversity.

Oh, and I would like to dispel two myths, two assumptions, if you will that this conference was founded on:

1) Diversity comes in more ways than just differences in race-- there is also diversity of religion/value systems, gender, age, sexual orientation, nationality, language, culture, and so on.

2) There is such a thing as poor white people that need help. I know, it sounds crazy. But if you live a long time, you might be able to spot one.

If you have great ideas for future liberalification projects, please leave them in the comments section below.

Gracias