Emotional Attachment

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Last night, I pointed out to my students as I usually do the paradox of the human condition. Humans are the only species of which I am aware that places the survival of other species over its own, and we are the only species of which I am aware that goes to the lengths to which we go to save the weakest among us. In essence, our choices undermine our very existence, and I’m surprised humans are still alive at all. Perhaps that is also because comparatively to other organisms of which we are aware humans have the highest emotional attachment to other members of our species and the things they do that affect us or others.

What we choose to keep and support runs afoul of our beliefs that the strong survive or that those who survive are those who can adapt. This week, while listening to NPR, I heard on “The World” a reporter who seemed almost ecstatic over the prospect of a resurgence of Nubian music in the Sudan. Months ago, I read about efforts in Europe to change utility construction plans so as to preserve fragments of a Roman Road some 20 feet below the current land surface. This prompted me to think about what we conserve and why and what emotional attachment we put on what we choose to keep.

Our fascination with these things seems based on emotion over reason. Vegetarians oppose the slaughter of animals whose sole purpose is as food on the auspices that they have faces while some of their number think nothing of aborting human fetuses who also have faces. Environmentalists will go to great lengths to prevent development of an area to preserve the kit fox because they are cute until of course the time comes to lay high speed rail through California’s central valley. We spend large sums of money preserving something when it makes far more sense to tear it down and rebuild a modern mockup. It is ok to conserve some things but not others. In short, conservation is good, but conservativism is considered to be contrary to progress. We romanticize conservation of music and art while we disdain conservation of politics and moral culture. We preserve what but not why.

If their argument holds water, then the successful and valuable really is what weathers change well. By that argument anything Roman, Greek, or from the British Empire is absolutely worthless because those societies no longer exist as formerly constituted. If that’s true, then nothing we do has any worth either, because none of us will live forever unless some historian can be coerced into chronicling our contributions, concocted or correctly. Yet, the same people who argue for the preservation of the past do so only partially. They continue to prop up dying species, dying art forms, dying technology, etc., at great public expense while they criticize conservatives for their "blind adherence to an obsolete moral code". They subsidize stuff over substance.

I believe they do this on purpose. They do not like history or Roman culture or plants; they like certain episodes of history, certain facets of Roman culture, and certain plant species, and the rest, which do not happen to corroborate their taste, beliefs, habits, or politics, are considered as dross and refuse and refused the same protections and fiduciary allocations they extend to their pet projects. This is a diabolical duplicity designed to dispirit, deject, and dissuade the impressionable from the good parts of the past in favor of the parts that testify of government power or distract minds from its excesses. You need only look at what they choose to promote and who becomes an acolyte thereof to realize that it’s still about “bread and circuses”. Most of what they conserve takes our minds off of what offenses other people, in particular politicians, propose to enforce among us. They would do well to remember not to gouge something out with the beam in their own eye while drawing attention to the mote in mine.

As my students learned, the continuity of the human race however relies on a conservative process. Every cell in our body recreates itself via semi-conservative replication of organic molecules inside the parent cell, using an existing template as measure for a new product. Semi-conservative replication uses an old template to make something that is proven successful and improve upon it. Consequently, aberrations are slow, rare, and small, so that if they are wrong they are easily recoverable. I believe that is why the Founding Fathers established our Constitutional government, to control the rate of mutation so that the body politic could endure for generations.

Contrarily, the conservationists are often in a hurry. Obama for example strikes me as brash, reckless, and systemic in his "fundamental transformation" which is not how any natural process creates lasting and successful changes. He insisted that if we didn't act then it would be the end of the world as we knew it even as he ended the world as we knew it. In biology, that's referred to as a mutant, which carries both negative connotation and denotation. Scientific attempts to understand and improve are stepwise and deliberate so we can measure the effects and retain only the parts that do the useful work that we desire, actual work, not work we hope will happen as a coincidence.

What we choose to keep and maintain tells people a lot about what we value. Every visitor to my house knows from first glance what I value most. However, why we value those things matters at least as much as what we value. Much of my décor is emotionally-linked to something rather than rational. While conservationists deny that, it betrays their emotion, whereas my open admission that I have emotional attachments may make me the most rational of all.

Masquerading as Truth

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Since I first heard of people pretending to be relief workers or Red Cross employees after hurricane Sandy to today when I looked again at the Viceroy butterfly, I am reminded that things are not always what they seem. People sometimes hastily believe a thing because they desire it to be true or because they are afraid it might be. In truth, it's probably why so little changes- we are afraid that we might not be offered something true or because we believe one person because we don't know or don't like someone who says the opposite.

Years ago, I lost a friend for a while because I told her something she didn't want to hear. She asked me what I thought of her new male companion, hoping that I would tell her the same thing she thought, and when I told her my concerns, she stopped talking to me. This lasted for an entire year, at which point I unexpectedly heard from her. She called to tell me that she was pregnant, and that I was right- he was not what he purported himself to be. You see, she found something in him that may have been true, or that she hoped desperately would prove to be so, and so she latched onto that kernel even though the fruit surrounding it was rotten.

Today on Facebook I was added against my will to a group that celebrates bikini models. As soon as I discovered this, I left the group, not because I don't appreciate a pretty woman, but because their beauty may not be anything more than clever photoshop skills or plastic surgery. I know that Sunday night I caught myself looking at an actress on a show because of her beauty in her mid 40s, and then I saw the scars from her plastic surgery and I knew that it wasn't because of her behavior as much as it came from her wealth. Someone once told me that there are no ugly women, only poor ones, but I think he referred only to external beauty. Perhaps he forgot Odysseus and the Syrens or Perseus and Medusa or that some of nature's greatest predators lure in their victims with scents, colors, and motions. There is a great difference sometimes between what is true and what is made to appear to be truth.

The kingdom of God is likened unto a pearl of great price, which when a man found he went and sold all that he had to buy it. While it is something desirable, it is not the only desirable thing, nor is everything that appears to resemble it the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I have seen gobs of images on the internet of Chinese knockoffs that look like the real thing but are clearly fake. In 2000 I bought a leather jacket where the buttons said "quality since 2002". I had no idea that boutique was supplied by time lords.

I have been saying since I started teaching at the collegiate level that most people are not looking for truth. Most of them secretly hope that the truth will happen to corroborate what they already believe. In my experience, most people who leave Faith or change congregations do so because the teachings do not match their beliefs. Rather than align their will with God's, submitting to His will, and obeying His laws, they attempt to boss Him around the universe and then act all offended when He does not obey their commandments. In any event, it is certainly no mark of maturity to say, "Give me what I want or I will be a miscreant".  Sometimes there are elements of truth, but what they have found appeals only to a certain logic, a certain subset of facts, or a particular point of view. I love this video that illustrates how that can be a fallacy:

It's only when we get the whole picture that we realize what's truly going on, but some people don't wait for the whole picture before marching around with a portion thereof, which may not be the whole truth even if it is true. God isn't finished talking to us when He tells us something true. Science doesn't have all the answers when we discover something that is sufficient to reject the null hypothesis. We have some truth. It might only be true on earth, or in a vacuum, or for woodchucks or if the temperature is 2000K. It might not be true at all in the grand scheme of things.  We call that a false positive.

In our day, there are false pearls, that sound like truth but are really sand or stones or some other pyrite-like distraction from truth. Opinions of men masquerade as truth, and while they may have the appearance of godliness, if they deny the power thereof they will not satisfy or stand the test of time and circumstance. Just because a purse says Prada made it doesn't make that true. I have a beard, but it doesn't make me a Nazarene, a wise man, a miscreant, or a wizard. It gives me a hairy face, but only compared to some. Truth can be relative, but things that are really true are really true always and in all ways. I don't think we have as much truth as we think, but that's probably because we think we have enough. People only usually find things they seek, and if you already think you have it, you stop looking.  We receive not because we ask not, and in our vanity, we think we are learned and wise when in reality we are otherwise. It's part of why I hate being a professor- sometimes I feel like I profess things I don't really know. My mentor in Graduate School told me that "an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing at all". At least I'm wise enough to realize how little I really know.

Trading Your Life

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Rarely do I look forward to the release of a film. However, a few years ago when "In Time" came out, I wanted to see it, not because I knew it would be great, but because I was curious how they would handle it. You see, for a long time, I have looked at purchases in terms of how much time I had to trade for it. Is it worth the time? If you had to trade, would you trade that amount of your life? The movie begs some fascinating think pieces that made it worth seeing. I will address a few here.

You get one year free, and if you want more time, you have to do something valuable enough that those who have time will give you theirs. Near the beginning of the movie, they show the price of coffee rising to 5 minutes for a cup. Do the math. I calculated that to cost me $1.67, which is pretty expensive unless the coffee is starbucks, but it's just some crappy cup of coffee. Riding the bus costs his mother 2 hours, which would amount to me paying $40 to ride the bus (which is about how much I pay in gas for an entire week). The investigator that chases the protagonist is offered ten minutes with a prostitute for an hour. That makes her a pretty cheap hooker at my wage, being $120 for an hour. Of course, it's worse for poor people. The more you have, the less of an impact, but I have looked at things for a long time and wondered if I was willing to trade five days of my life to obtain something.

Most characters in the film buy things that cannot satisfy and that are of no worth. The protagonist gives his friend ten years, and his friend promptly goes out and overdoses on alcohol with nine years left on his arm, nine years of wasted life. Recreation and entertainment rather than sustenance become the driving force for the poor. They know they will die soon, and so they choose to eat, drink and be merry. The rich never do anything because they can live forever unless they die accidentally. Thus, people who are alive never actually live, and the people doing the dying never live for anything valuable. They are willing to pay huge amounts of money for things. The protagonist pays several years worth of money for a car, something people buy to display, and several weeks of money for a meal (that must be some meal), and he wins money gambling. You see, that's the only risk for the rich. We mirror that in our world, paying far more than is wise for entertainment. I read today about the $300/month cell phone bill. I will admit I pay $55 for a single phone, but I get unlimited minutes, and it's not a smart phone, something for which my students regularly mock me. I only need a phone to make calls and receive messages, and I justify that bill because I don't have a house phone.

Ironically, this is exactly how our lives really are. We trade our life for a currency that we then trade for things we value. I can't get people to trade me directly what I offer for what I seek, so we use money (or time) as a medium of storage for our labor and our life until we find something we value enough to trade. However, imagine the power that would give you if you knew you were immortal unless you were foolish. What would you do? You know when you are going to die. You run out of time.

Everyone dies. Not everyone truly lives. Make sure when you die that you have not wasted your time, wasted your life, in things of no worth and things that do not satisfy. That was the worst part of the movie- everything was a big waste, and I understand why one of the characters chooses to time out. Machines go through the motions.

Fad Investments

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Somewhere, there are crates sitting around full of Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo dolls, and other items people loaded up on thinking they would be great investment opportunities. I remember when the newspaper was loaded up with ads offering Tickle Me Elmo for $500, reminiscent of Jingle All the Way where Arnold Schwarzenegger fights mall crowds for a fad toy for his son. I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere out there someone is trying to corner the market on Hostess products thinking they can sell them on the internet and turn a profit. I know, because I mention it often, that they do this with gold.

In the end, an investment is only worth money if you can convince someone to pay you for it. I don't tend to buy a lot of stuff other people can easily liquidate, partially to discourage theft but partially because I value different things. I was reminded the other night while reminiscing that, after "investing" $10,000 into precious gemstones as a "business venture" my ex-wife came in to tell me she made her first sale, but that she had to give them a deal to make the sale, meaning that it cost us an additional $1.50 to make her first sale. She told me you have to spend money to make money. I asked what the $10,000 was for. This difference of values continues to plague me, as I cannot liquidate things I own because nobody would buy them or at least not put the same value into them that I attach to them. Most of my scrimshaw has a symbolic point. Not many folks buy scruples, but then not many folks seem to have them either.

My guiding light has been an item's utility. If I cannot get rid of them for the money, are they valuable some other way? I don't know what I'd do with hundreds of plush children's toys or with 50 cubic feet of gold ore. I suppose I could take a nap in the toys or use the gold as a door stop or a paperweight, but to me both of those are worth about as much as a dead ipod or a blown tire. In other words, I have no use for them, so I don't buy them.

Perhaps it comes back to my attitude on salesmen and purchases. I was offered a lucrative job out of graduate school selling drugs for a pharmaceutical company. However, I realized that I would not enjoy that because I cannot sell something I would not buy and because I cannot sell people something they don't need. That's why eBAY works for me, because the bidder has already decided he has need. You cannot pay me enough to do that job, because I can't motivate myself to buy it. I can sell chemistry because I believe in the principles, but I can't sell chemicals because, as my students can tell you, I don't really trust in them.

So I see twinkies on eBAY already. Ironically, there is a Hostess bakery just across the railroad tracks from the campus. Too bad they don't sell directly to the public. Meanwhile, I refer you to this quote from Brigham Young that is hanging on my fridge at home: "The time will come that gold will hold no comparison in value to a bushel of wheat." I believe that. Time to buy more wheat...

No Mistakes, Only Learning Opportunities

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I have been telling my students for years now that there are no mistakes, only learning opportunities. Failure shows us where to reconcentrate our efforts to increase our success and round out our skill set. For me at least, life consists of a series of opportunities to improve ourselves constantly in different aspects of character, habits, and values. Some of them remember me telling them to improve when they can and hold their ground when they get there. I believe it’s just as important for me to teach them these lessons as it is the chemistry curriculum the institution requires me to present. They are tools that will help them be successful. I do this so much that I’ve been asked why I don’t teach philosophy. I don’t have a degree in that, and in college, you teach what your degree says (thank God mine is Biochemistry). Some people never learned it in college.

While in graduate school, some gang members graffitied my house. The local sheriff’s office had made a big hullabaloo about their graffiti removal program, so I called, only to be confronted by a gruff man who seemed disinclined to acquiesce to my request. I filed a complaint with Internal Affairs. The investigating officer told me that he had enough to relieve this officer of his post and remove his pension. I told the IA officer to tell the man that he had a job still because I told them to let him keep it. He works for us, and if he’s going to be the face of the department, he needs to keep in mind that we are his customers.

Last night at the gym, the woman at the desk annoyed me greatly. She asked me to use the further racquetball court because it makes too much noise and she was trying to study for an exam. Her attitude made me feel like she felt she was more important than I, and I told her boss that you never inconvenience a customer to do something that is not related to work while you are at work. I asked him to remind her of this, with the proviso that if I ever hear or see her do it again, I will ask her to be punished.

My attitude on the subject surprised me. You can talk all you like, but when you are confronted with opportunities to see what you really believe, you find out the truth. For years, I have been saying that the first time can be a mistake, an accident, an oversight, but the second time is usually a choice. I have allowed them the chance to prove if it’s a moment of weakness because they were sad, tired, bored, having a bad day, or what have you. If I see it again, I will know it’s a pattern of behavior.

Perhaps I extend this courtesy because I have been recipient thereof. Even my current boss, for all the problems I have with her, came to me a few months back with a concern and asked me to correct it. I know that if I do it again, I will be reprimanded in writing, but if it goes away, it’s as if it never happened.

You will make mistakes. You will have moments of weakness. I have already written about allowing the atonement and hanging people for a moment, when that is not truth. Why does one moment ablate a lifetime of service while one grand act redeems a life of wickedness? You do not fall off the path suddenly. You wander off and are lost. As we learn to see things as opportunities we start seeing things for what they can be rather than just for what others around us want to make them become. You may not control what happens to you, but you can decide what you do about it from here.

Selfish Sacrifices

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With Obama’s reelection a week ago, talk has resumed of shared sacrifice, our fair share, and a whole litany of ideas that sound wonderful while they ignore the nature of man. Men are inherently selfish. You cannot change that by changing their behavior, and their behavior betrays their true sentiments.

Most utopians talk about how wonderful it would be if everything were equal. That’s an oversimplification. If murder and stealing pens from work are equal, none of them would like to be executed for purloining a pen from the office. If being a couch potato and a sewage pipe cleaner are equal, nobody will clean the sewer pipes if they can sit at home. They begin their argument by bastardizing a philosophical principle of the revolution- that men are equal. Their behaviors are not.

Recent news stories reveal that people don’t really want things to be equal as much as they want things to be better for them. From the Obama phones to extension of unemployment checks to free Wal-Mart gift cards for just showing up to a job fair, everyone seems to be looking at advancing himself regardless of how that impacts his neighbors. Perhaps that’s because we don’t really know our neighbors; perhaps it’s because they want to sound kind when they are really something else. Everyone has skeletons in his closet; maybe if we extol our own virtues and point out the motes in another they won’t notice our flaws.

To illustrate, in the last week, we have seen some retribution from people who perceive themselves as victims of the entitlement mentality. At Hostess, workers protest an 8% paycut that has led to a prolonged strike. The CEO announced that if they do not back off, Hostess, which has filed for bankruptcy for the second time in seven years, will lay off 18,000 people. In essence, if the protestors continue to insist what they demand and keep 8% of pay, 18,000 people will take a 100% paycut. Last week, an adjunct where I work told me during the course of a conversation that “you’re paying for health care for other people. You can pay for mine too” even though I never go to a doctor. She went on to talk about how she’s paid into it and that it’s “her money” even though we can’t afford to pay for it. Like many Social Security recipients, she demands her cut, what she paid in, regardless of our ability to pay. That’s very selfish. Over the past several years, state civil servants have refused to cut their budgets to help the state, county and city fix theirs. The policemen finally bent, and the teachers bent for a year, but the teachers are back demanding an increase in pay, and the firemen never made any concessions of which I am aware. Ironically, they do not realize that we can survive without them; they cannot survive without us because if there are no neighborhoods to patrol, children to teach, or fires to put out, what need have we for their services? Then there is Jesse Jackson Jr, who has been in treatment for bipolar disorder and who has been expelled from Congress who refuses to retire without disability. Of course he makes it all about him without worrying about what’s best for the people for whom he ostensibly works.

Then there’s me. Back in 2008, when the State of Nevada first went into a budget crisis officially, I wrote Governor Gibbons a letter. I impressed upon him the fact that we cannot spend money we do not have to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like. I know full well that the state is full of employees who draw paychecks but do not do much work if any at all, and if we remove them there is plenty of money to refurbish schools, buy computers, pay bills, give raises to people who do the most work per capita (like myself). Last week, despite being defeated 67-33 on the measure for more money, the school district changed tactics asking for a business tax when the property tax request failed. The school district “found” money last year. Why didn’t they use that to fix schools? I digress.

In my letter to Governor Gibbons, I asked him to lay people off, knowing that I might lose my job because I was relatively new. I explained that it was better for us to go do something they actually need than to pay people to staff offices on the chance that someone might need them. Particularly offensive is when, as a student told me last night, the DMV employees told him he just needed to get a different smog check to pass. That’s not very helpful, and neither he nor I know what the technicians are actually paid to do. They are paid to harass us. Very few of them are qualified to let alone interested in directing our activities in ways that will benefit our lives.

That’s not the rhetoric. We are the only species on the planet that puts the well being of other species over its own. We disenable raw materials to protect obscure beetles, rodents, and weeds, until and unless of course the time comes to fast track high speed rail across California. When it comes to their pet projects, all the rules fly out the window; when it comes to the interests of Liberals, the ends always justify the means, particularly if they benefit. Liberals believe in shared sacrifice until they are asked to sacrifice, and then they pepper Congress for redress.

What these events show me is that people are selfish. They are more interested in themselves when the time comes to put up or shut up than they are in the good of the many. I have taken a 15% paycut since arriving here, and I tell people that 15% beats 100%, but some people are willing to risk losing everything in order to not lose anything at all. That’s absurd and illogical. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush, and I told the Department Chair once that I only count on the money in my account already. After all, another student discovered yesterday that was a good move when, after giving a month’s notice to be nice, they told her yesterday not to bother coming back at all. People are willing to do almost anything as long as it doesn’t cost them anything personally. They are free with other people’s resources but absolutely stingy with their own.

We cannot arrive at utopia unless people really mean to do what is necessary to live that way. We cannot have utopia if people do it grudgingly. Taking from one man and giving to another does nothing to advance society, because neither has benefitted from the virtue of the other. He who has was not allowed to decide to give and he who lacks was not allowed to decide if he wanted to receive. Entropy then, rather than virtue, has increased, and perhaps resentment arises in both parties. The nature of man is not geared to serve, sacrifice, or share. We cannot change that by legislating behavior. Obama would do well to remember that all real change begins from within. First clean your own house, and then you can see more clearly to clean up the house of another.

Something for Nothing

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On the way home from my parents after dinner, I was stuck behind a driver who was the kind I dislike the most. They seemed as if they didn’t know where they were going, as if they had never been in the neighborhood before, and as if they didn’t know how to drive the speed limit or follow traffic signs. I made very little progress. Stuck behind them, I noticed they had not one but two 2012 Obama bumper stickers. When they finally pulled into the casino near the freeway, it suddenly struck me that they might be part of the something for nothing crowd.

I have never been a fan of gambling. My ex-wife lost at least 33% of all the money she earned while we were married frittering it away in the casinos trying to get rich. It invites people to bring a small amount and leverage their luck to win a chance at money other people lost. If you win, it costs you very little, but the effect of winning even a little draws many powerfully to the tables time and time again until they lose more than just their money. It teaches people that wealth can be gained without effort, but what it doesn’t tell them is that in order for you to get something for nothing, someone else must pay for it.

Where there is no effort there also seems to be little value. As a teenager, my parents required me to pay for my first pairs of contac lenses. At what seemed to me exorbitant prices, I obtained two pairs, on which I doted; in fact, I have never cared for any possession as much as I cared for those. Thomas Paine reminded us that what we obtain too easily we esteem too lightly, and some people who obtain free stuff without paying for it do not realize that it costs someone something. These same people will say “there is no such thing as a free lunch” and “if it sounds too good to be true, it is” until they are offered it, and then too often they gobble it up. It strikes me as paradoxical every time it happens that they think they can get something for nothing. It costs me a great deal, as this video from Judge Judy illustrates:

The other problem is that what they offer us in return for limited time, life, and resources constitutes things of no worth. They promise us that everyone who signs up will get an iPhone, a Prius, and a chicken in every pot. Obama literally promised jobs, cars, and new kitchens in the 2008 campaign, none of which happened for the people to whom he made those promises. While they rail against corporations, they promise us the very things that corporations provide. What they don’t like isn’t corporations as much as it’s that we buy from corporations they happen to dislike. So, we take our cows down like Jack to market to trade for something that will sustain us, and they hand us three magic beans- hope, change, and peace- telling us it leads to some pie in the sky world where we fart rainbows and barf skittles. Just because it’s something doesn’t mean it’s valuable.

Subscribing to the utopian elitists invites us to trade something for nothing at all. They promise us something for nothing, but in reality they give us nothing for every something we hand them. Remember that people only give up things they do not value as much for something they value more. That’s the reason why I have coffee and tobacco in my food storage, not because I use them but because I know that people who are addicted to them will trade me anything for which I ask in order to get their fix. The something for nothing crowd is addicted to stuff just like some have said.

I attended a work Halloween activity with my father where they handed out trick or treat brickabrack to children. The stuff they handed out was worthless, but the kids came by and took handfuls. It was free to them, so whether they wanted it or not, needed it or not, made no difference. They were there, and we had stuff, and so they wanted it. They follow the buccaneer theory of economics- they do not care how much swag they have- they care that we have swag in our hold to which they feel they have a right because they exist. As I have written before, elitists, whatever their socioeconomic state, will always think you have too much freedom and too much money until you have none at all of either. Their pride will bring us all down.

"A government powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have." --Thomas Jefferson

Whose Square Are You?

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Years ago a close friend of mine asked me to consider what kind of tool in God’s toolbox I might actually be. He compared himself to a compass, something that shows the way, a role he has played in my life frequently off and on over the last seven years. While I am not exactly sure that this is my final answer, one of the tools that often crosses my mind is a carpenter’s square. Those who know me may chuckle a bit at this for their own reasons, which I leave to them. One of them once called me the squarest person he had ever met.

Carpenters use a square for two reasons that I understand. First, it is used as a reliable straight edge. In addition to having a linear ability to make things straight, it also helps you square up the corners. Secondly, the square also has a ruler, so that you know approximately how far you are from your goal or what kind of distance is required to make the cut. The square helps make sure that things line up where they need to be to make things flush and flat and fair, because otherwise it not only looks unsightly but may not come together, making all the other work in vain.

Recently, I worked on a project with my father that required us to use a special kind of square that he fashioned. By that time, we had planed, sanded, cut, joined, routed, and done all other kinds of work to the wood. When it came time to put the frame of the pocket doors together, it was extremely important that they all line up and do so at the same time, or else all our other work might be wasted. Small bows in the wood and errors in cutting were overcome by the proper application of pressure. The frame looks amazing, but it’s not perfect. It was made by a fighter pilot and a chemistry professor, not by professional carpenters.

They say that the only difference between a professional and an amateur is that one of them is paid.

In our carpentry, my father and I came prepared to tolerate a certain degree of fudge factor. You reach a point after which the cost to align things perfectly outstrips the return that you can expect looking at it. After all, most people won’t notice that, and if they do, that says more about them than it says about my work building it. This tolerance means that nothing I build is perfectly square.

That’s really the bottom line. Nothing built by man is perfectly square. Men are flawed, and it is not theoretically possible for anything to create something more perfect than the creator. I find the fascination with artificial intelligence and evolution fascinating because it ignores the law that entropy always increases. Even Asimov acknowledges that in his novels. My efforts already put useful work into the wood that made it more organized than before, but without a continued and consistent investment, the wood of which it is made will fade, dull, crack, and eventually decompose. It will not evolve into an elephant.

We try to be square, and we try to line up, but ultimately, the Master Carpenter is the only one who can fashion a contraption to make us more perfect than we are today. I am honored and humbled to be useful to Him as that particular instrument, and I thank Him for His tolerance of my imperfections as I am not the best tool in His toolbox. In those times, I think of this quote from Neal Maxwell: “God gives the picks and shovels to the ‘chosen’ because they are willing to go to work and get callouses on their hands. They may not be the best or the most capable, but they are the most available.” I am here. I am trying to make His paths straight. I hope that my sacrifice will be acceptable to Him.

Who's square are you? Whose paths are you trying to make straight? No matter how well-meaning and compassionate they may seem, most people are intolerant and selfish until and unless they begin with first principles and value individuals and their rights over the so-called "masses". They want to be regarded as individuals; they must show the same decorum to you. I know that it can be hard to be a Don Quixote, but the successful quixotic quest is one in which you learn to enjoy the ride while you charge. It's easier to enjoy when you begin with everything in line.

As You Really Are

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Heading into the election tomorrow, I see a plethora of passionate and biased analysis. People are choosing to see or at least mention only the virtues in themselves or their candidate while mentioning only the evil in the people with whom they disagree or whom they dislike. The fact of the matter is that the picture is much more complicated than that. Back in February 2011, I posted the following to Facebook: "Other people manufacture labels to describe us quickly without having to get to know us. Each man is far too complicated in his facets to be so accurately distilled. " We are far more complicated than even I can discuss in this post, but I will make a few points.

People often talk about what we "deserve" without realizing what that means. Even some of my friends talk about the good things I deserve, so much so that I began to believe them. This made me feel bitter, like a victim, and to talk angrily of the boons experienced by others I viewed as less worthy than myself. Then a dear friend pointed out that in truth, I'm already getting better than I deserve. You need not suppose me guilty of any great transgression, but I am a human. I am often self-centered, lazy, anxious to avoid difficulty, and a whole host of minute albeit common human traits. I don't always give money to the people at the off ramp (it would eventually come to feel like a toll to go home every day since they are there almost every night at the exit to my house). I don't always help out when I can. I don't always share what I can afford. I am not always eager to give of myself. The nice thing about it is that I'm honest about that whereas other people are not. The bad thing is that in the system of justice we have imagined up to ourselves, I deserve to be punished because I am not the paragon of virtue some people believe me to be.

Secondly, people who know me have heard me say before how much I believe what CS Lewis wrote about human nature. I do not believe that if you strip away all that is good in man that you are left with a bad man. I believe that you would be left with nothing at all. Even Tolkienn agreed with Lewis on that philosophical point, or at least he allowed Aragorn to say so, talking about the great things in men when he rallied the men of Gondor to buy Frodo time to destroy the ring. Sure, there are evils in men, and those evils live after us. Sometimes they loom large even though they are not true. The honest man realizes that men have strengths and weaknesses and weighs them appropriately. The dishonest man points out the mote in his neighbor's eye to distract men from the beam in his own.

The wisest man realizes that any weakness makes him weak and turns to a higher power for help. Your Achilles Heel may not be physical. Perhaps it's psychological, financial, intellectual, spiritual, chemical, nutritional, etc., but EVERY ONE OF US HAS ONE that just like with Achilles can and will bring us down in the fight for right. We are not paragons. We are humans. Making mistakes is part of what the universe allows us that it does for no other life form of which we are cognizant. An ecclesiastical leader in my youth once said that smart men learn from their experiences and wise men learn from the experiences of others. I submit that wise men lean on Christ and allow Him to make weak things become strong in them through the Atonement.

Ignoring the weaknesses has led to the downfall of every powerful group, civilization, and man ever born. You see, your enemies seek out your weaknesses to exploit them, and if you pretend you don't have them, you are the fool twice- fool that you are dishonest with yourself, hence undermining all your other virtues, and secondly that you are foolish enough to think that you cannot be defeated. The "greatest city in the world" was humbled last week by a Category I hurricane. Imagine if it had been a Category V. Bad situations can wear down good people, and none of us are really that good. We benefit from Christ's mercy which allows us to be blessed in spite of what we actually and honestly deserve.

I'm a pretty good man, but I am just a man. You will make mistakes. Don't let your mistakes make or mark you.

Compassionate Selfishness

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Democrats like to paint themselves as the party of sacrifice and cooperation while they libel their opponents as greedy. In the wake of hurricane Sandy's landfall in New York City, they have shown these claims to be at least partially projection of their own selves, even if the aspersions are true. In 1995, I worked on a hurricane relief crew, and it was a very illuminating and transformative experience. In some ways, I think it laid the foundation of my political philosophy.

Then as now, people in the affected areas have a particular type of aid they prefer and a particular type of aid they need. The immediate priorities are food and shelter, as usual, and yet unlike Hurricane Katrina I do not see a lot of food or habitable shelter efforts being accomplished there. Perhaps it's because of the unique nature of New York City, but I am glad I don't live there. The aftermath of Sandy shows us just how dangerous it is to national security to overly urbanize America. A massive attack or disaster cripples a huge fraction of our population.

A great majority of New Yorkers are, I believe, not only registered democrats but also democrats deeply steeped in the party platform. What I see in their behavior makes Democrats appear to be the Party of Selfishness. Mayor Blomberg insists that the marathon must go on, powering the tent with a generator that could power 400 standard sized homes. Union workers drive out volunteers from AL, calling them scabs there to take their jobs. Isn’t it about getting people back up on life support? The Union workers view this as wages lost rather than seeing the importance of protecting the customers so they can continue to pay in the future. Many care recipients are complaining about Red Cross cookies and milk while people dive in dumpsters, because they need blankets and such. Elsewhere, gangs pilfer abandoned homes. Isn’t it about shared sacrifice? You get swag because you stayed?

Sandy's aftermath is a microcosm for the failure of Democrat promises. Blomberg had 11 years to shore up the shoreline against a disaster and did nothing. Obama shows up for a photo session and then leaves, and now people are clamoring for him (of all people) not to forget them as they starve and freeze. It shows just how bad it can be in close quarters as looters rampage and gangs pillage and feces accumulates in the hallways as unions bicker over who can repair what. Then the environmentalists come in and warn against developing the shoreline, as if developing the shoreline renders the city more likely to flood. Mass transit, one panacea of the left, is useless. What mass transit is accessible has no power or fuel to run, so people can’t get anywhere in a city where mobility depends on that unless you walk or are rich enough to afford $6/gallon gas.

Like New Orleans, New York is a city managed by leftists. Like New Orleans, New York is a city that is languishing in ruins despite its wealth and pomp. People are going to die, Americans, in New York City of all places, because the policies of an egalitarian utopia interferes with the most efficient and effective means to rebuild and recover. Obama doesn't come to help; he comes because if he doesn't they might say of him what they said of Bush after Katrina. I feel bad for New Yorkers who have such piss-poor leaders. They are going to freeze to death, starve to death, and be beaten to death because of selfishness on the part of Democrat party members, voters, and potentates.

While Freedom means that it's possible the you might fail or die or suffer, these disasters have shown that Socialism cannot prevent those eventualities. While Freedom creates some winners, Socialism renders everyone a loser. As you go to the polls next week, keep in mind the words of Samuel Adams, which are oddly as prescient today as they were in his time as they continue to find dead bodies in one of our most prosperous cities.

Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then ask 'what should be the reward of such sacrifices?' Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains rest lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen! --Samuel Adams

Vote for freedom. Let us now apply liberty.