Bits and Pieces

I've been reading lately, a lot. I guess I have a lot of time on my hands, and I wish I could be cranking away at my thesis, but unfortunately, the feedback and next steps of the whole process don't seem to coincide with my calendar as well as I'd like. Anyway, all of this is a preface to my wanting to post several items that I think are incredibly interesting.

The Gay Divorcees:  This was actually an article that I wanted to post on Facebook because I know there are several people who would appreciate it, but I'd like to refrain from using that network as a place to sound off on my views that I know don't sit well with many friends of mine. That's what this blog is for. There are certain things, innocuous ones, that are easy to post because everyone can appreciate them, and then there are others that make my teeth grind. I've learned more and more that I don't want to inflict my worldviews on others where they're not seeking it out, but you have no such luxury. You found your way here and, thus, are subject to my musings. With that, here's an excerpt from this one:

Announcing the results of his long-term “evolution” on the subject last week, President Obama revived the debate over gay marriage. In the widespread discussion, however, there is one question that’s rarely asked: How interested are gay couples in getting married?

Heretofore at least, the answer seems to be “not really.” Since 1997, when Hawaii became the first state in the union to allow reciprocal-beneficiary registration for same-sex couples, 19 states and the District of Columbia have granted some form of legal recognition to the relationships of same-sex couples. These variants include marriage, civil unions, domestic partnerships, and reciprocal-beneficiary relationships; and the most recent U.S. Census data reveal that, in the last 15 years, only 150,000 same-sex couples have elected to take advantage of them — equivalent to around one in five of the self-identified same-sex couples in the United States. This number does not appear to be low because of the fact that only a few states have allowed full “marriage”; indeed, in the first four years when gay marriage was an option in trailblazing Massachusetts, there were an average of only about 3,000 per year, and that number included many who came from out of state.

...Controlling for the ratio of homosexuals to heterosexuals does little to explain the enthusiasm gap. For rates to be similar, we would have to pretend that only 0.5 percent of the population of Sweden, 0.7 percent of the population of Norway, and less than 2 percent of the population of Holland is gay. In fact, the numbers tend closer to an average of 4 percent, which suggests that heterosexual couples are up to eight times more interested in registering their relationships than homosexual couples. It is, of course, possible that the estimated number of homosexuals is wrong, but, if anything, gay-rights groups tend to argue that the projected numbers are too low, and statistics show that the numbers of self-identified gay citizens are going up in every Western country.

...In Norway, male same-sex marriages are 50 percent more likely to end in divorce than heterosexual marriages, and female same-sex marriages are an astonishing 167 percent more likely to be dissolved. In Sweden, the divorce risk for male-male partnerships is 50 percent higher than for heterosexual marriages, and the divorce risk for female partnerships is nearly double that for men. This should not be surprising: In the United States, women request approximately two-thirds of divorces in all forms of relationships — and have done so since the start of the 19th century — so it reasonably follows that relationships in which both partners are women are more likely to include someone who wishes to exit.

Interesting, right? I could have guessed that women are more likely to ask for divorces, but I would have assumed that would have been because men tend toward abuse or violence more, but in cases where it's two women in a marriage, divorce actually increases, so that's not the cause at all. Now that I think about, I do know that women are just as abusive as men, just not in the same ways.

And another woe is California article:

California’s present condition is the direct result of welfare-state governance in its full maturity. Intransigent public-employee unions use the collective-bargaining process to maintain their inflated compensation packages, while poorly administered programs for the elderly and indigent have produced a permanent dependent class with attendant expenses that are difficult or impossible to reduce: When Governor Jerry Brown attempted to impose co-pays on some recipients of medical benefits, the Obama administration blocked him. Governor Brown’s attempts to cut spending on health care by lowering some physicians’ reimbursements and subsidies for low-income Californians were blocked by the federal courts. Governor Brown has demonstrated very little that might be called fiscal responsibility, but such attempts as he has made at spending discipline have been blocked by federal authorities when they have not been blocked by Democrats in the state legislature. Those who suspect that Obamacare may turn out to be more expensive and less effective at controlling costs than its admirers have claimed should take a good long look at California to appreciate the difficulty of rationalizing out-of-control health-care spending in a single state. (And multiply by 50.)

California’s finances will not be meaningfully reformed until its public sector is reduced and disempowered, and its health-care spending is made sensible. There are significant legal roadblocks to achieving either end, which is why California’s debt-service costs are pulling away from those of the rest of the United States and heading in a distinctly Spanish direction.

Governor Brown has, in the conventional Democratic fashion, proposed raising taxes on certain high-income Californians to try to close that $16 billion deficit. California, like the nation at large, already relies disproportionately on the high-income for its tax revenue, a situation that produces inherent instability: When less than a tenth of taxpayers provide the great majority of tax income, receipts are likely to be volatile in the best of circumstances. Add to that the fact that the very wealthy — especially Silicon Valley’s cosmopolitan entrepreneurial class — have options about when, how, and where to get paid. California expects to raise $1.5 billion in taxes from a single firm, Facebook, as employees and investors realize capital gains from the company’s initial public offering of stock. But such expectations are far from assured: The Brazilian-born Eduardo Saverin, Facebook’s cofounder, has renounced his U.S. citizenship and taken up residence in Singapore, probably not for the city-state’s rich cultural milieu but because it does not tax capital gains. Others will not go so far as to cross the Pacific; for many, getting out of California will be sufficient. As California has just demonstrated, raising tax rates is not the same thing as raising tax revenue. Capital is fungible, and people are mobile.

The indispensable Thomas Sowell has an article today on The Censored Race War:

When two white newspaper reporters for the Virginian-Pilot were driving through Norfolk, and were set upon and beaten by a mob of young blacks — beaten so badly that they had to take a week off from work — that might sound like news that should have been reported, at least by their own newspaper. But it wasn’t.

The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News Channel was the first major television program to report this incident. Yet this story is not just a Norfolk story, either in what happened or in how the media and the authorities have tried to sweep it under the rug.

Similar episodes of unprovoked violence by young black gangs against white people chosen at random on beaches, in shopping malls, or in other public places have occurred in Philadelphia, New York, Denver, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, Los Angeles, and other places across the country. Both the authorities and the media tend to try to sweep these episodes under the rug.

In Milwaukee, for example, an attack on whites at a public park a few years ago left many of the victims battered to the ground and bloody. But when the police arrived on the scene, it became clear that the authorities wanted to keep this quiet.

One 22-year-old woman, who had been robbed of her cell phone and debit card, and had blood streaming down her face, said, “About 20 of us stayed to give statements and make sure everyone was accounted for. The police wouldn’t listen to us, they wouldn’t take our names or statements. They told us to leave. It was completely infuriating.”

...A wave of such attacks in Chicago were reported, but not the race of the attackers or victims. Media outlets that do not report the race of people committing crimes nevertheless report racial disparities in imprisonment and write heated editorials blaming the criminal-justice system.

What the authorities and the media seem determined to suppress is that the hoodlum elements in many ghettoes launch coordinated attacks on whites in public places. If there is anything worse than a one-sided race war, it is a two-sided race war, especially when one of the races outnumbers the other several times over.

Trying to keep the lid on is understandable. But a lot of pressure can build up under that lid. If and when that pressure leads to an explosion of white backlash, things could be a lot worse than if the truth had come out earlier, and steps taken by both black and white leaders to deal with the hoodlums and with those who inflame them.

These latter would include not only race hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson but also lesser-known people in the media, in educational institutions, and elsewhere who hype grievances and make all the problems of blacks the fault of whites. Some of these people may think that they are doing blacks a favor. But it is no favor to anyone who lags behind to turn their energies from the task of improving and advancing themselves to the task of lashing out at others.

These others extend beyond whites. Asian-American schoolchildren in New York and Philadelphia have for years been beaten up by their black classmates. But people in the mainstream media who go ballistic if some kid says something unkind on the Internet about a homosexual classmate nevertheless hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil when Asian-American youngsters are victims of violence.

All of it very interesting, and important.

Birch Hollow

This last weekend we went down with some friends to Zion and did Birch Hollow Canyon. The canyon was perfect for this group since several of our people had never been canyoneering before, but the canyon is still interesting enough that anyone can enjoy it. It includes about 10 rappels, ranging from 20-120 feet, and it's a dry canyon, so just one less piece of equipment to worry about, but the best part is that it's actually just outside of Zion so no permit is necessary for this one, so you can go whenever you like.

Some people from our group were worried about my little wifey and her 22 week pregnant belly, but I knew she'd do great. She just loves this stuff too much to let anything like being a little pregnant get in her way. And she actually did just as well or better than any of the other girls with all of the hiking and rappels and what not. I'm just proud of my little lady, and everyone in the group. We met some new people and made some new friends, and everyone did really great with the rappels even though several had never been down anything that big before. The scariest moment of the day actually was on the first rappel, which was also the longest, because the cliff face is made up of a lot of loose rock. Some pretty big chunks ended up falling down and caused some havoc for those below, but thankfully no one really got hurt.

I didn't think I really got enough interesting footage to do a video, but it actually worked out okay, so I whipped this up the last couple nights and now you can see our little adventure:

My Name Is MCA, I've Got a License to Kill

I know I'm a little late to this story, but I still wanted to say something about it.

Like a lot of other guys who grew up in the 80s and 90s, the Beastie Boys provided the soundtrack to much of my formative years. My earliest recollection of any Beastie Boy song is Fight For Your Right as it played during a scene in the Bobcat Goldthwait movie Hot to Trot, and the horse's party, Don, gets out of control and all of the animals are tearing the apartment apart. I remember my brother had the CD single of So Whatcha Want and listening to that pretty intensely in the early 90s. I've still got both of the CDs for Licensed to Ill and Ill Communication. Intergalactic was a huge hit the summer after my senior year in high school. They were never my favorite band, but I really do love a lot of their music. Great music videos. Catchy rhymes and good beats. I was saddened to hear of Adam "MCA" Yauch's passing last week.

One of my favorites:

Euro Crisis: Do I Have to Care?

On my long run last week I ended up listening to a This American Life episode about the European financial crisis, titled The Continental Breakdown. They started off the episode asking the question regarding the crisis, "do I have to care about this?" And what follows is a really great breakdown and analysis of all the things that have been going wrong in Europe lately, and what binds everything together.

The crisis is basically this: For many years, people in Europe have been clamoring for a United State of Europe type venture that would bring together all the countries of Europe. Victor Hugo pleaded for this many years ago, and apparently this is something that many people in Europe have been wanting for a long time. There are a number of things that keep Europeans separate from each other, but there was a major development in the last 10 years that made it so that they did become united in a very significant way - the Euro.

And herein lies the problem with the Euro. Although all of the countries now share that common currency, the economies of Europe push and pull on the value of the Euro while their financial markets remain in flux as well. It's really interesting.

But...as for the main question of this post, do I have to care? The answer, obviously, is yes, because it whatever instability is experienced across the Atlantic is also going to be felt here. That's one of the things that I find most interesting about all of these developments. Because Greece is floundering, major financial players move their money away from the country, and without that liquidity, the Greeks can't maintain their system, and if they can't, then that puts into question other countries in Europe, including Spain, Portugal, and even Italy.

Now there's a question if the Euro is sustainable, and will other major players follow suit with other countries and default on their debts, or will they reign in spending. Some writers here contend that the European governments that have slashed spending have not seen any improvement in their financial lots, but there are major questions about whether that is true or not, mainly if they have actually cut their spending.

In any case, I bring all of this up because France just elected a socialist as their newest President, and it seems that he will only increase government spending. So whatever unrest France has seen in the last few years, will probably be dwarfed by what will come in the next few.

Anyway, others, smarter than myself, have written on this subject. At Powerline in this post, they had this to say:

In France and Greece, voters have rejected “austerity”–the idea that European governments should live within their means. In Italy, too, anti-austerity candidates are currently leading in the polls. French Socialist François Hollande vows to continue running huge deficits so that he can hire more public sector workers; in a burst of stupidity, he announced that “My real enemy is the world of Finance.” I suppose there could be a surer way to impoverish your country than to declare war on the flow of capital, but I can’t think of one offhand.

What does it all mean? Two things, in my opinion. First, Southern European voters are determined to go over the waterfall in a canoe as long as there are politicians who will promise to keep paddling. One might think it obvious that no country can live beyond its means forever by borrowing money which it can’t possibly pay back. But voters in countries like Greece and France apparently think: it has worked so far, why not keep it up?

Realistically, it will work until creditors–Germany, mostly–decide to pull the plug. Then there will be default, some form of bankruptcy, some degree of chaos. That evidently is what many European voters want. In one sense, you can’t blame them: why not live on someone else’s money as long as you can?

But something more profound is going on, too. As I have written here more than once, the fundamental question raised by the current economic crisis is whether Europe is a country. If Europe is a country, it is not so unreasonable for profligate Southern Europeans to expect their more responsible fellow-citizens in Germany, and to a lesser extent Great Britain, to bail them out. But the fact is that Europe is not a country, despite the imaginings of its political class. Germans and Englishmen will not forever support Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, and now perhaps Frenchmen. At some point–and I think that point is drawing very near–they will go their own way, and the European Union, most probably, will collapse.

And the editors at NRO had this to say in their piece about the French election:

François Hollande has become the newly elected president of France more by luck than by any quality he might possess. Almost anonymous, he has no ministerial experience. His platform nonetheless raised expectations mightily that he would be able to find employment and entitlements where Nicolas Sarkozy had failed to do so. Voters could conclude that there are jobs for all and everyone richer than them will pay more taxes. He likes to promise that France is not doomed to austerity, because he still believes that socialism is the magic formula for growth, and can simply be ordered up.

...

Poor and insincere as Sarkozy’s campaign was, in reality the Euro-crisis left him without a chance. No present head of government can hope to win an election in a Europe irrevocably tied to the single currency and the political structure erected in Brussels to enforce it. In the gathering climate of economic and political disaster, Sarkozy is the eleventh in a succession of office-holders in one nation after another to go down in electoral defeat.

Germany sets the terms for Europe, and François Hollande now has to discover whether Chancellor Angela Merkel, the architect of austerity, is willing to permit a forlorn attempt at socialist-induced growth. She had let it be known that she wanted the like-minded Sarkozy to win. But then she herself has already lost regional elections, and until and unless something changes with Brussels and the euro, she too is likely to join the lengthening list of rejected European office-holders.

And then in this piece found in the UK's The Spectator, the author writes about the one country who did actually manage to slash spending and what resulted of that:

When Europe’s finance ministers meet for a group photo, it’s easy to spot the rebel — Anders Borg has a ponytail and earring. What actually marks him out, though, is how he responded to the crash. While most countries in Europe borrowed massively, Borg did not. Since becoming Sweden’s finance minister, his mission has been to pare back government. His ‘stimulus’ was a permanent tax cut. To critics, this was fiscal lunacy — the so-called ‘punk tax cutting’ agenda. Borg, on the other hand, thought lunacy meant repeating the economics of the 1970s and expecting a different result.

Three years on, it’s pretty clear who was right. ‘Look at Spain, Portugal or the UK, whose governments were arguing for large temporary stimulus,’ he says. ‘Well, we can see that very little of the stimulus went to the economy. But they are stuck with the debt.’ Tax-cutting Sweden, by contrast, had the fastest growth in Europe last year, when it also celebrated the abolition of its deficit. The recovery started just in time for the 2010 Swedish election, in which the Conservatives were re-elected for the first time in history.

All this has taken Borg from curiosity to celebrity. The Financial Times recently declared him the most effective finance minister in Europe. When we meet in his Stockholm office on a Friday afternoon (he and his aide seem to be the only two left in the building) he says he is just carrying on 20 years of reform. ‘Sweden was a textbook case of European economic sclerosis. Very high taxes and huge regulatory burden.’ An economic crisis in the early 1990s forced Sweden on the road to balanced budgets, and Borg was determined the 2007 crash would not stop him cutting the size of government.

‘Everybody was told “stimulus, stimulus, stimulus”,’ he says — referring to the EU, IMF and the alphabet soup of agencies urging a global, debt-fuelled spending splurge. Borg, an economist, couldn’t work out how this would help. ‘It was surprising that Europe, given what we experienced in the 1970s and 80s with structural unemployment, believed that short-term Keynesianism could solve the problem.’ Non-economists, he says, ‘might have a tendency to fall for those kinds of messages’.
He continued to cut taxes and cut welfare-spending to pay for it; he even cut property taxes for the rich to lure entrepreneurs back to Sweden. The last bit was the most unpopular, but for Borg, economic recovery starts with entrepreneurs. If cutting taxes for the rich encouraged risk-taking, then it had to be done. ‘In most cases, the company would not have been created without the owner,’ he says. ‘There would be no Ikea without [Ingvar] Kamprad. We would not have Tetra-Pak without [Ruben] Rausing. They are probably the foremost entrepreneurs we have had in the last few decades, and both moved out of Sweden.’

But they were not rich, I say, when they were starting out. ‘No, but they were becoming rich. If you have a high wealth tax and an inheritance tax, people emigrate because it becomes too costly to own a company. Ownership is a production factor. Entrepreneurs are a production factor. Yes, these people are rich and you can obviously argue that we want to encourage social cohesion. But it is also problematic if you drive out entrepreneurs from your country, because they are the source of job creation.’

It's a lot of reading, but it's worthwhile. 

Love Me Some Mason Jennings

Mike and I had a date night last Saturday to go see Mason Jennings play at The State Room. I had never even noticed the place before even though I had been to Decades right across the street from it several times. Heck, I had never even heard of the place, but it was great.

The venue was different than what I'm used to. Church pews lined the back half of the event room, and metal chairs lined the front. His concerts are already pretty chill, but having everyone seated and just watching made it feel even more relaxed.

The thing I'm always impressed with is how all these people can show up and pay to watch one person perform for an entire evening. Sometimes I feel like I have a hard time just keeping one person engaged, let alone a big room full of complete strangers, but that's what Mason did on Saturday night. He played an all-acoustic set with just his guitar, harmonic, and occasional song on the keyboard.

I just love the guy. I love his song writing. They're thoughtful and artistic. Somehow they strike me as being more sophisticated than someone repeating "we found love in a hopeless place" over and over. Some of my favorite lines is from Sorry Signs On Cash Machines when he sings:

Oh, my heart is a thoroughbred
I can't sleep in my bed
Everything is burning up inside me
I need something I can feel
Cigarettes and a driving wheel and
Oh, my god, when you cross your legs beside me
I know true love don't love like anybody else
I know your heart don't beat like anybody else

I was afraid he would play a lot of stuff from his newer albums, but he played a great mix of old and new, and I just loved one song that he debuted that night.

Man, I just love live music. It took me a long time to come around, but I really do love me some Mason Jennings too.

This and That

A lot of times I end up saving articles in my inbox, or my blog reader, or in other places, for the purposes of posting them on here later, or sending them to someone, or what have you. I probably only end up posting/sending/whatever-ing the stuff I save like a quarter of the time, and then eventually I delete it wherever it's stored because it's so long after the fact. Today, I'm just going to link/excerpt everything that came in the last few days that is currently in my online digital storage. So here goes...

How to buy a new car:



Here are the basics if you don't want to watch the video:

So let me lay out how to buy a car. It’s very easy. Decide exactly what car you want to buy, make, color if it matters to you, options and so forth. Then do not go to a dealership. Let your fingers do the walking. Telephone all of the dealers who sell the vehicle you’re interested in who are, say, within a 50 mile radius, a 25 mile radius, 75, however far you’re willing to go.

To each of them make the same statement: “Hi, my name is so and so. I plan to buy such and such a car today at 5pm. I’m going to buy it from the dealer who gives me the best price. What is your best price?” 

The economists over at Cafe Hayek had this to say about central planning:

My eye recently caught on t.v., in passing, an old film clip of someone trying to fly like a bird.  This would-be aviator had wing-like things strapped to his arms.  Of course, no amount of flapping would get this human being to take flight like the birds he sought to imitate.  One important reason, of course, is that we humans – as smart and clever as we are – can observe only a tiny fraction of the details of what enables birds to fly.  We can observe a handful of large details (“bird flaps limbs that extend kinda, sorta from bird’s shoulder”; “bird’s flapping limbs are made of lightweight things that we call ‘feathers’,” and so on).  But the amount of detail that we don’t – can’t – observe with the naked eye (even with a naked eye as careful as that of Leonardo) is overwhelming.  The bird’s musculature; cardiovascular system; weight and position and minuscule maneuverings of its tail – these and countless other relevant details aren’t observed.

The human being observes a bird in flight and then analogizes his – the human’s – limbs and muscle movements to what he supposes, from his observations, are those of the bird.  But the human is too easily misled into thinking that he can easily-enough mimic the bird’s body and movements and, thereby, achieve flight.

Obviously, no human can do so.  Such attempts as there have been by man to strap on wings, flap, and fly invariably failed – sometimes catastrophically for the pretend Icaruses.

….

Attempts to centrally plan economies are very much like attempts to fly by dressing like and flapping like a bird: utterly futile because the most that can be observed of any successful economy are a handful of large details (“assembly lines,” “retail outlets”…..).  The vast majority (99.99999999999…9 percent) of the details that must work reasonably well aren’t observed by the would-be central planner.  What Hayek called “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place” – knowledge of details spread today across the globe and across billions of different human minds – is not incidental to the successful operation of a modern economy.  Utilizing that knowledge – vast, deep, changing, incredibly fine-grained detailed knowledge – is the very key to a successful market economy.

Central planning is as futile as trying to strap on wings and fly like a bird – and potentially as calamitous.

Of course, few people today advocate full-scale central planning of economies.  But smaller-scale interventions suffer the same problems as do attempts at central planning: inevitably inadequate knowledge of how to intervene.  Asserting, for example, that the key to economic recovery is to “increase aggregate demand” is a fiction borne from observing a true, but only large and inadequate, fact about successful economies: most producers, at any given time, are able to sell most of what they plan to sell.  But to leap from this observation to the conclusion that “therefore, government can stimulate economic recovery by increasing aggregate demand” is akin to a human being costumed-up as a bird and leaping off of a mountaintop, flapping away, hoping, hoping, hoping to fly.

And then I thought this post was pretty interesting. It's called the Curley Effect, which is when a politician increases his political power by driving away opponents through some kind of radical or distortionary policies. One example is Detroit. Guess the other example...right...California....sigh...

In their paper, Glaeser and Shleifer write:

We call this strategy--increasing the relative size of one's political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies--the Curley effect. But it is hardly unique to Curley. Other American mayors, but also politicians around the world, pursued policies that encouraged emigration of their political enemies, raising poverty but gaining political advantage. In his 24 years as mayor, Detroit's Coleman Young drove white residents and businesses out of the city. "Under Young, Detroit has become not merely an American city that happens to have a black majority, but a black metropolis, the first major Third World city in the United States. The trappings are all there--showcase projects, black-fisted symbols, an external enemy, and the cult of personality" (Chafets 1990, p. 177). Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe abused the white farmers after his country's independence, openly encouraging their emigration even at a huge cost to the economy.

I think something similar is happening in California. California has become a heavily Democratic state. The majority Democrats in the legislature and the Democratic governor are pursuing highly wasteful projects: a "high-speed" rail that probably won't be high-speed but will surely be high-cost, and higher marginal income tax rates (already among the highest in the United States) on the highest-income people, to name two. They don't seem to be restrained by the worry that many of the most-productive people will leave and are leaving the state. You can attribute this simply to ideology, and I'm sure that's an element. But I also think one of the Democrats' goals is to reduce the population of potential anti-Democrat voters so that their majority is assured.

Will that hurt many of the people who vote for them? Sure. But we need to distinguish between the fortunes of those who vote Democrat and the fortunes of the Democratic politicians. The California state government pays legislators pretty well in pay and perks when you consider the opportunity costs of many of them. And the state government is larded with high-paying sinecures for those few who ever lose an election or get redistricted out.

Distance

Someone I know used to make a connection between the growing size of a couple's bed (full-queen-king-California King) was a parallel to how couple's seem to be growing emotionally distant from one another as well.

I was reading the other day about how the average size of an American's home has steadily increased over the past century. In 1950 the average size of a new single family home was just under 1000 sq ft, and now it is just over 2400 sq ft.

While I was running earlier this week I was thinking about distance, broadly, probably because I think a lot about how much I'd just like to be done running whatever length it is that I happen to be running that day. I just think it's kind of interesting how our homes are bigger than they have ever been, but we're also more densely packed than we've ever been in terms of houses per squared units.

It's just interesting to think how certain distances have been greater shortened (distance between houses), while others have grown (distances within households, physically, and even in one's own bed between partners).

Anyway, all of this leads me to still another article that talks about how Facebook is potentially making us more lonely. We are more connected digitally, and have more access through social media like Facebook and Twitter and blogs and such, but in many ways we are more distant than ever, and it's causing many people to feel very isolated. Kind of similar to how someone can feel completely isolated when at a party that is wall-to-wall with people.

The article leads with this story:

Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space. 

The article is incredibly interesting and very well written, written by a novelist actually:

Facebook arrived in the middle of a dramatic increase in the quantity and intensity of human loneliness, a rise that initially made the site’s promise of greater connection seem deeply attractive. Americans are more solitary than ever before. In 1950, less than 10 percent of American households contained only one person. By 2010, nearly 27 percent of households had just one person. Solitary living does not guarantee a life of unhappiness, of course. In his recent book about the trend toward living alone, Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, writes: “Reams of published research show that it’s the quality, not the quantity of social interaction, that best predicts loneliness.” True. But before we begin the fantasies of happily eccentric singledom, of divorcées dropping by their knitting circles after work for glasses of Drew Barrymore pinot grigio, or recent college graduates with perfectly articulated, Steampunk-themed, 300-square-foot apartments organizing croquet matches with their book clubs, we should recognize that it is not just isolation that is rising sharply. It’s loneliness, too. And loneliness makes us miserable.

We know intuitively that loneliness and being alone are not the same thing. Solitude can be lovely. Crowded parties can be agony. We also know, thanks to a growing body of research on the topic, that loneliness is not a matter of external conditions; it is a psychological state. A 2005 analysis of data from a longitudinal study of Dutch twins showed that the tendency toward loneliness has roughly the same genetic component as other psychological problems such as neuroticism or anxiety. 

But I thought this excerpt mentions an especially interesting point:

But it is clear that social interaction matters. Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing, but both are on the rise. We meet fewer people. We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy. The decrease in confidants—that is, in quality social connections—has been dramatic over the past 25 years. In one survey, the mean size of networks of personal confidants decreased from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to, and 20 percent had only one confidant.

In the face of this social disintegration, we have essentially hired an army of replacement confidants, an entire class of professional carers. As Ronald Dworkin pointed out in a 2010 paper for the Hoover Institution, in the late ’40s, the United States was home to 2,500 clinical psychologists, 30,000 social workers, and fewer than 500 marriage and family therapists. As of 2010, the country had 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 400,000 nonclinical social workers, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 105,000 mental-health counselors, 220,000 substance-abuse counselors, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. The majority of patients in therapy do not warrant a psychiatric diagnosis. This raft of psychic servants is helping us through what used to be called regular problems. We have outsourced the work of everyday caring.

We need professional carers more and more, because the threat of societal breakdown, once principally a matter of nostalgic lament, has morphed into an issue of public health. Being lonely is extremely bad for your health. If you’re lonely, you’re more likely to be put in a geriatric home at an earlier age than a similar person who isn’t lonely. You’re less likely to exercise. You’re more likely to be obese. You’re less likely to survive a serious operation and more likely to have hormonal imbalances. You are at greater risk of inflammation. Your memory may be worse. You are more likely to be depressed, to sleep badly, and to suffer dementia and general cognitive decline. Loneliness may not have killed Yvette Vickers, but it has been linked to a greater probability of having the kind of heart condition that did kill her.

And yet, despite its deleterious effect on health, loneliness is one of the first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving. With money, you flee the cramped city to a house in the suburbs or, if you can afford it, a McMansion in the exurbs, inevitably spending more time in your car. Loneliness is at the American core, a by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence: The Pilgrims who left Europe willingly abandoned the bonds and strictures of a society that could not accept their right to be different. They did not seek out loneliness, but they accepted it as the price of their autonomy. The cowboys who set off to explore a seemingly endless frontier likewise traded away personal ties in favor of pride and self-respect. The ultimate American icon is the astronaut: Who is more heroic, or more alone? The price of self-determination and self-reliance has often been loneliness. But Americans have always been willing to pay that price. 

The emphasis in that is my own.

One thing that I worry about with a child on the horizon is how I can encourage my kid(s) to engage socially, to make sure that they are functional adults, able to function normally and to be emotionally and socially intelligent. I think a lot of is simply trial and error. It's constant opportunities for interaction with others, but in a way where the child feels confident enough to venture and explore on his or her own.

I don't know. It's a lot to think about.

The Verdict Is In....

This was appointment was probably the coolest part about the whole pregnancy so far. When Amy missed her period and she took the test and we found out she was pregnant, that was pretty cool, but still not real. The stick has a + or - and that's it. Then you see the doctor and he confirms it. You hear the heartbeat, but it's still foreign sounding.

For us, pregnancy has had that much of an effect. Amy has luckily avoided most of the normal and not so awesome signs of pregnancy - morning sickness, and the like.

But today felt very different. We went to the ultrasound room, the doctor rubbed the jelly on her belly, and just about everything we saw on the screen was immediately obvious. You could see the body, the hands and feet, legs, heartbeat, even brain formation. You could see the chambers of the heart, and the one thing my neurophysiology imparted unto me from last year was some knowledge of brain anatomy, so I was able to recognize ventricles and the cerebellum and other various parts from CT scans that I studied last year.

The doctor measured the head, the femur, and other parts, and everything is looking great. The baby is measuring to within two days of Amy's due date, so everything is right on track. Once he got down into the genital area the doctor was taking a noticeably long time determining parts down there. It was pretty apparent to Amy and I that the genitalia was an inny and not an outty, from not only the pictures, but how the doctor was looking for sure signs of what sex of child we were looking at.

It's a girl. We couldn't be happier. The first thing I thought was that we could have our own Lisa Johnson leading our family of children like in Amy's family, or have our own Katie that would be Amy's little clone, like she is to Lisa. It's awesome. It's fun just to know what our kid is going to be, and that everything is going so well.

It's also great because this means that the arranged marriage between ours and Dave and Caitlin's family is a "go" and it won't have to be delayed at all.

Romney Rising

This piece here by Jim Geraghty over at NRO details how the Romney camp has been so quick to respond to the distractions that the President's campaign has been trying to drum up. This is in reference to the charge about how the Romney's transported their dog on top of the car back in 1983, and then also all the uproar over how Ann Romney supposedly never worked a day in her life.

Romney has been very, very impressive the last several weeks. And I'm really pleased with how the GOP has been lining up behind him recently as well. This week he picked up Rick Perry's endorsement, and Santorum has been said to be following suit soon as well. In spite of however much vitriol was spewed from these other candidates, they realize that there is a lot at stake with this Presidential election and they have been getting on board with what needs to happen if there will be any hope of unseating the incumbent.

That Geraghty piece is interesting because it goes into some of the tactics employed by the McCain campaign back in 2008 and how they utterly refused to engage in any of the back and forth with the Obama campaign.

2008 was just a bad year. There was a very unpopular president, with an economy on the decline, and an up-and-comer, and even if the perfect candidate had been nominated, I don't think it would have amounted to much against the tide that had been formed at that time. This year, however, the tide seems to be ebbing and I think this a great opportunity to get someone who can be really good as the next President.

I know that I have been really hesitant about Romney, but I think he has just been shining lately. His wife is a star, and he seems so much more polished and capable now. 2008 sharpened him, but so has the primary season. I'm excited about him and think he has a real chance at winning this thing.

Anyway, here's another post about Romney, following his sweep this past Tuesday.  This excerpt comes from his speech:

We launched this campaign not far from here on a beautiful June day. It has been long and extraordinarily rewarding.

Americans have always been eternal optimists. But over the last three and a half years, we have seen hopes and dreams diminished by false promises and weak leadership. Everywhere I go, Americans are tired of being tired, and many of those who are fortunate enough to have a job are working harder for less.

For every single mom who feels heartbroken when she has to explain to her kids that she needs to take a second job … for every grandparent who can’t afford the gas to visit his or her grandchildren … for the mom and dad who never thought they’d be on food stamps … for the small business owner desperately cutting back just to keep the doors open one more month – to all of the thousands of good and decent Americans I’ve met who want nothing more than a better chance, a fighting chance, to all of you, I have a simple message: Hold on a little longer. A better America begins tonight.
…
Four years ago Barack Obama dazzled us in front of Greek columns with sweeping promises of hope and change. But after we came down to earth, after the celebration and parades, what do we have to show for three and a half years of President Obama?

Is it easier to make ends meet? Is it easier to sell your home or buy a new one? Have you saved what you needed for retirement? Are you making more in your job? Do you have a better chance to get a better job? Do you pay less at the pump?

If the answer were “yes” to those questions, then President Obama would be running for re-election based on his achievements–and rightly so. But because he has failed, he will run a campaign of diversions, distractions, and distortions. That kind of campaign may have worked at another place and in a different time. But not here and not now. It’s still about the economy…and we’re not stupid.

And then an excerpt from the post I linked to:

As I watch Mitt Romney, this thought also occurs to me: Romney is sometimes criticized as “inauthentic,” but this is radically incorrect. As a politician, he has had to tack with the winds from time to time, like anyone else. But as a person, Romney is hugely authentic. His persona is no mystery: he is a Dad. We have all known men like Mitt Romney. We may think they are square and out of date; we may roll our eyes if they are occasionally goofy. But when times are tough, in moments of crisis, everyone knows where to turn: we look to leaders of character, competence and decency, like Mitt Romney. I am increasingly confident that in November, Americans will see Mitt Romney as just what we need after four years of Barack Obama’s incompetence.

Growing Up

On the radio this afternoon I was listening to some talk radio, and one host, the older one, was giving the younger one a hard time about turning 30. He also said, "you turn 30, turn around once, and then all of a sudden you're double that age." And I'm sure most people reading this would probably agree.

On my birthday a week ago, my friend texted wishing me a happy day, and said something like, shouldn't we still be 18? I can't believe that I first met her when I was actually 18. Can't believe that's 14 years ago.

It's actually happening. The getting older thing. You know how I can tell? The subject of my conversations lately. Today I was talking to my bestie, and we got through the usual stuff about work and school stuff, family things, but then we started talking about kids, and I was telling him about the Go Crib that a friend of ours was telling us about last night, and then all of a sudden I'm realizing, holy mackerel, I'm in such a different position than I was in just 2 years ago.

When you're single, all you talk about is dating - who you're interested in, why things are so awesome, or the opposite of all that, why things stink, why is so and so making it so difficult. You talk about friends, or what you're doing for the summer.

You get married, you get a little older, and then you're talking kids, parenting, career and really important things.

The funny thing is, I wouldn't trade 32 for 30 or 25, or 18 or almost any other age. (Although I might trade it for 14 because what's better than playing roller hockey and soccer all day everyday like I did at that age, right?) Honestly, though, I don't think there could be a more exciting time. Amy and I are going to have a baby, and I'm about to start a program wherein the current students who are complete strangers to me light up when talking about it. That's great sign, right?

It really is that way, though. All the things that you worry about seem to take so long while going through them, but then you turn around, and all of a sudden more things change than you ever thought possible. It's crazy how that happens.

Same Old Formula

There are several shows that I watch regularly. I watch the NBC Thursday lineup which includes Community, 30 Rock, The Office, Up All Night, and Parks and Recreation. A few of these shows have been switching out for a time while another steps in its place. 30 Rock was on hiatus to start the TV season, then Community, then Parks and Rec, and when they returned they pretty much all delivered. I also watch Modern Family, Psych, and White Collar. There used to be some others in the rotation, and then I'll lose interest. Lately we've also been watching the dramas Awake, along with Alcatraz before it finished up.

There's something about a couple of these shows that I'm just getting bored of lately. One thing in particular. It's the constant make-you-so-uncomfortable-that-you-can-barely-stand-to-sit-still-while-beginning-to-physically-and-mentally-curl-up kind of humor that is really old to me. The Office did this wonderfully for awhile with Michael Scott, and now they do it with Andy, mostly, but they'll rotate it among some of the other characters. It especially bothers me when it happens to Jim because he was the one guy on there who was obviously the cool, most normal person that you could relate to, but now that everyone is free game, it's just kind of old. Where it's really bothering me is that now Modern Family is resorting to it, and it just feels like such a cop-out to me.

(Another thing is the addressing the camera as if its another person, but only part of the time. I'm not actually tired of it yet, but it's been recycled a lot.)

But let me say, for the record, I've never had a big affinity for this kind of humor. There are plenty of these kinds of guys out there, and everyone has run into them at some point in time. They're the ones that think it's the funniest thing in the world to make everyone else so uncomfortable that they can barely stomach it. They'll purposefully ask awkward questions. They think it's funny when other people recoil. I've never really thought much of that kind of humor. I mean, I can appreciate it when it's well done, and it's one of those things where it takes real guts to ask something so dumb/inappropriate that you just kind of stand there slack-jawed, hardly believing what you're witnessing. But it's definitely one of those things that gets butchered or overplayed when used by the wrong person.

I realize that in some ways, I'm totally snotty when it comes to my TV show humor. I want clever, and I think that what I laugh at tends to be smarter and more sophisticated than a lot of what's out there. And while I openly say that I think my humor is more sophisticated, I still laugh at a lot of things that are silly and goofy, but I just want it to be done in a skillful way. Let me give you an example.

First of all, this is totally dumb, but this video that got passed around a little bit last week by some friends of mine on some of the social media things was the funniest thing in the world to me. I was in tears
.

It obviously kills some of the humor to have to explain a joke, but let me do it anyway: The genius behind this is not just how ridiculously bad the cover is. It's all about the presentation. You have one of the most climactic moments in the movie, a time when the dinosaurs are finally unveiled to the researchers who spent their whole lives in their study of these extinct animals, and the scene is backed up by a musical score that now everyone in the whole world knows as another awesome John Williams piece to another great movie in Jurassic Park, to have it cut in with some idiot's terrible rendition that is barely recognizable, but only because you know both the movie and the music so well. Genius, right? That's what gets me going.

But Modern Family is taking a big hit right now. And The Office keeps on repeating this same mistake. It's the kind of thing where the characters act so idiotically that I wonder aloud, who in the world would ever do that? It works on something like Seinfeld because the characters never stop being absurd, but I just have a hard time buying it when it seems inconsistent with what I thought was developed with the character.

And I guess that's why I love Community. I totally recognize that it's not for everyone. A lot of people won't connect to it, and may even have the same kind of complaints about that show that I have of these other ones, but I think it's the most creative show because it doesn't have any boundaries. The show takes shots at other shows without pulling any punches (Glee, for instance), and do things like a documentary style pillow fight civil war. Not every episode is a hit, but it delivers far more often than it misses.

I think that's what made people appreciate Arrested Development. It's not conventional, and it makes you feel like you're getting something more than the same old song and dance that you see in so many other shows. Is that too much to ask for?

The Count Goes On

Man, running lately has been awesome. I think the biggest difference between training this year and last year is that I'm not at all burned out on running. By the end of my training last summer, I had a couple of bad runs, and I was just done. I didn't care. My last run was just awful. I had these weird numb moments and I could not force myself to run the last mile or two.

Tomorrow I run 18, and then I am planning on two more hard weeks with 20+ miles and then that's it. I only have two tough weeks of training after this one and then I'm ready for Utah Valley.

What's been great too is that my pacing has been good. I feel stronger than I ever have. I have been doing strength training in conjunction with my running, working out my core, my back, my legs. I finish my long runs, my more up-tempo runs, and I'm never sore. I'm fatigued, sure, but I always finish strong.

Yesterday I ran 9 miles after having had Tucano's for a birthday lunch, and although I felt heavy and sluggish, I ran a good portion of it on an incline, and I still came out with an 8:03 a mile pace. It just feels awesome to be feeling so strong.

And I'm way slow to get on board with any of the new running technology, but I just recently got a new Ipod Nano for my birthday, and I was finally able to use the Nike+ accessory Amy won in her work raffle from Christmas. I just loved it. I listened to my podcasts, the electronic lady told me my mileage, my pacing so that I didn't even have to bother looking up that stuff myself. I just love it. It makes just going out and running even easier since I don't really have to pre-plan my route or calculate minutes per mile, etc. Awesome.

Political Experiments

Here's another article talking about the differences between California and Texas. I'm not going to post much from that article, except for this one point:

My point was simple: California is often a trendsetter in the realm of left-wing policymaking, while Texas legislators keep their government small. The results speak for themselves. But for those who didn’t find the article convincing, here’s another way of looking at the issue.

During my six years of service in the California state assembly, I was on the budget committee and the revenue and taxation committee. I’m a numbers guy. Numbers say everything about a government and its values. Follow the money and you can figure out whether elected officials view themselves as the center of the universe, or whether they think the government exists to protect liberty.

The way states run themselves is a good way of seeing how the liberalism v. capitalism experiment is working out. California is the most extreme end of that liberalism in how the government is run, and the results are quite telling.

I think it's interesting to note how other states are faring in these political experiments. Texas is the most fitting example of conservative politics. Others that were once more liberal that are now swinging back toward more conservative principles provide very promising examples of the benefits of a conservative bent in ideology. I was just reading this morning about Louisiana and its education reforms, but I've also read a lot recently on Wisconsin, New Mexico, New Jersey, and all of these examples speak volumes to how effective conservative politics helps stimulate economies and general well-being.

Feeling Grateful

We had stake conference this last weekend and the Saturday evening session was dedicated almost exclusively to gratitude. It was great.

 It also happens to be something that I've been feeling a lot of lately.

On Friday I found out that I had been officially admitted to the MBA program, and although I had been kind of expecting it following the last time I took the GMAT, it was still a comfort to know that this is now a path that is set in stone. It's one thing to plan on applying, hoping for the best, sometimes even assuming it'll work out, but it's another once you've gone through the process, you've gotten letters and emails and everything is set in motion for that path to actually be trod upon.

Today I got notice that I'll also be getting some financial aid from the university, and though that's the case with many, maybe even most, admitted applicants, it just adds to the big pit of gratitude and debt that I owe to God and this university that I'll never be able to pay back.

Yesterday was my birthday, the 32nd such celebration. I got calls and texts, and normally I don't care much for them, but even the Facebook posts were nice. It's just nice to be remembered, and it is nice to hang out with people I appreciate, and will get to see again because Amy's birthday is also just a week away from today.

Anyway, I just can't believe the multitude of blessings in my life. I can't believe that I have been given so many opportunities to succeed. Not everyone has as many as I have been given, and I can't say enough about how much I appreciate all of it, to have such a supportive wife, and to have a baby on the way to boot. I am in great physical health, all of my family is doing great, and I have many people that I care about and who I feel like care about me.

What else could I ever want? It's amazing.

The Romneys

A couple days ago, a political aide to the White House Staff commented that Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life. That, of course, sparked a good amount of outrage, and Hilary Rosen has been on damage control since she made that statement. Here is her apology:

Let’s put the faux “war against stay at home moms” to rest once and for all. As a mom I know that raising children is the hardest job there is. As a pundit, I know my words on CNN last night were poorly chosen. In response to Mitt Romney on the campaign trail referring to his wife as a better person to answer questions about women than he is, I was discussing his lack of a record on the plight of women’s financial struggles. Here is my more fulsome view of the issues. As a partner in a firm full of women who work outside of the home as well as stay at home mothers, all with plenty of children, gender equality is not a talking point for me. It is an issue I live every day. I apologize to Ann Romney and anyone else who was offended. Let’s declare peace in this phony war and go back to focus on the substance.

Very heartfelt, no? Feels like one of those, I'm-sorry-you-decided-to-get-so-upset kind of apologies.

One writer took the time to enumerate the genius behind her decision to be a stay at home mom in this piece here. And here's an excerpt:

According to one estimate from a hostile party, Mr. Romney earned about $6,400 an hour at Bain Capital. The Romneys’ personal net worth is somewhere between $190 million and $250 million, but that understates things a bit: The Romneys set up a trust for their grandchildren worth an additional $100 million or so.

Assuming a 2,000-hour work year, Mrs. Romney as a higher-end CFO would have earned about $132.94 an hour, or about 2 percent of her husband’s hourly wage. A 40-year career at $265,882 would have given Mrs. Romney lifetime earnings equal to about 3.5 percent of the family’s net worth.

The Romneys, who are notably charitable people, have given away far more money than Mrs. Romney probably would have earned in a career that would be considered by most of us wildly successful and highly paid.

Conclusion: Ann Romney is economically a hell of a lot smarter than Hilary Rosen.

The marginal value of the wages earned in a typical C-level career would have been almost nothing to the Romneys. But there is that other scarce resource: parental time.

It is difficult to put a dollar value on parental time, but it is clear that to the Romneys one hour of Mrs. Romney’s time at home with the family was worth far more than one hour in C-level wages; further, a 2,000-hour annual block of time invested in earning C-level wages would have fundamentally changed the character of the Romney household for the worse, while providing negligible economic benefit. Instead, she provided the family with a critical good that Mr. Romney, for all his riches, could not acquire without her cooperation. If we think of the household as a household, Ann Romney’s decision to stay at home makes perfect economic sense: Her decision to be a full-time mother enormously improved the quality of life for Mr. Romney, for the couple’s five sons, and — let’s not overlook this critical factor — for Mrs. Romney herself.

Mrs. Romney’s personal investment model — marry a man who turns out to be wildly successful in business and politics, escape the tedium of what is sometimes described romantically as “a career,” have five children and the pleasure of raising them — is not open to everybody, of course: The supply of future centimillionaires is limited, and they are not easy to identify. But making intelligent decisions about forming a household and about the division of labor within that household is an option open to many of us, though unhappily not to all of us, given the state of the family.

Ms. Rosen’s remarks were criticized as being snide; the real problem is that they were stupid.

In another article that I already posted on Facebook, Kevin Williamson makes note of the challenges that Romney faces in the general election regarding his religion. You can find the full article here. From the article:

Mormons and Catholics are alike in that they matter. Everybody knows who the pope is, and when there’s a papal vacancy the drama of the election leads practically every newspaper in the world, and all of Europe holds its breath. Very few Americans could pick Bryant Wright out of a police lineup or tell you that he is the president of the Southern Baptist Convention. What the Catholic Magisterium teaches influences public policy — and life — around the world. Mormons, likewise, have a kind of cultural electricity about them: There is no Broadway musical assembled to lampoon the beliefs of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, but The Book of Mormon keeps selling out. There are few if any websites dedicated to “unmasking” the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., but there are dozens dedicated to Mormons. The Catholic Church matters in part because it is global, and in some quarters it is still held in suspicion for that reason. The Mormons represent precisely the opposite condition: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the only major worldwide religion bearing a “Made in the U.S.A.” label. Forget apple pie: With its buttoned-down aesthetic, entrepreneurial structure, bland goodwill, and polished professionalism, it is as American as IBM.

Also, it drives people crazy.

“A Mormon One-World-Theocracy Brought to You by Mitt Romney?” Apparently, Romney has a 59-point plan for that, too, if you believe the more hysterical anti-Mormons, the doyenne of whom, quoted above, is Tricia Erickson, a Mormon apostate and professional opponent of all things Latter-day Saintly. She is the author of, among other works, Can Mitt Romney Serve Two Masters? The Mormon Church Versus the Office of the Presidency of the United States of America. (She also is fond, as you can see, of rhetorical questions.) She believes that the fact of belief in the Mormon faith is in and of itself disqualifying for an aspiring president.

She is hardly alone in that belief. One in five Americans declare that they would not vote for a Mormon presidential candidate — even if that candidate were a member of their own party. There is no other religious group that comes close to inspiring that kind of widespread hostility in U.S. voters. Seven percent of Americans say they would not vote for a Catholic, 9 percent would oppose a Jew. Five percent would oppose a black candidate, 6 percent a female candidate. Twenty-two percent would oppose a Mormon. The only groups with higher negatives are homosexuals and atheists, and their numbers are improving. Anti-Mormon hostility has been more or less constant since Gallup added the question to its survey in 1967, an innovation occasioned by the presidential campaign of a moderate Mormon ex-governor and millionaire business executive by the name of Romney. George Romney’s candidacy was hobbled by his infelicitous use of the word “brainwashing” to describe his experience on a Department of Defense–organized tour of Vietnam (“A light rinse would have been sufficient,” quipped Eugene McCarthy) and by the New Hampshire machinations of Nelson Rockefeller, who saw to it that Romney’s 1968 campaign was over before it began. For his ineptitude, Romney pere was rewarded with the secretary’s chair at Richard Nixon’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, a career-ending appointment that prevented the country from answering in 1972 or 1976 the question that went unanswered in 1968: How big a problem is religion for a Mormon presidential candidate?

There's much more to that article that's worth reading. Interesting stuff.

I took a PEW quiz about political knowledge, and this quiz just asked which party - Democratic or Republican - has this person as a member, or supports which issue, etc. It got me thinking a lot about freedoms, and who supports liberty, and that got me thinking about the expansion of the federal government and how in many ways that is actually restricting our freedoms in many ways. One example is how the deficit is becoming so unsustainable that at some point, it's going to require a drastic reduction and cutbacks in major services that will really dampen the lives of many Americans. Another article I read was talking about how Democrats are intending to create a government dependent society so that people become entrenched in power. Then I was reading about North Korea and how the Kim family has been able to maintain control over their people for so long through creating dependency and its manipulation of its people. It's a story that continues to repeat itself over and over: some support the cause of liberty, but others seek to suppress it. (You can probably guess where my loyalties lie in this one.)

Sometimes it happens in very egregious forms like when a government mutes the press and forces particular way of thinking, as was the case with the various forms of communist governments. And other times it's as simple as coaxing someone to eat a piece of fruit.

Come Thou

I hate that I'm totally unoriginal and I totally love the same hymn that everyone else does. I remember the first time I heard this hymn. I was in the MTC and it was shown in the video of a large group meeting, back when they still had those. I totally broke down and it just melted my heart. Loved those words, "prone to wander...here's my heart, oh, take and seal it."

This last week I've been watching General Conference talks while I eat breakfast and it really has been pretty great covering those again. Sort of. Some, or all, may be more like the first time because for some reason I was pretty sleepy during a number of talks. Thank goodness for DVR, right? Anyway, one of those also happened to be President Monson's Sunday morning address, which was wonderful, obviously, but then it was followed up by the MoTab's latest performance of the hymn.

I don't know what it was about it, but it just got to me again. I got very emotional, laying on the couch tucked under a blanket while Amy was still using the bathroom. With my feet stretched out over the length of the couch, what little my body covers anyway, and my head leaning on the arm of the couch, I quietly sniffled through the duration of the song, and even into my shower.

There's a lot of legend about the song. It was written by Robert Robinson, and the story goes that he was a rowdy teen, given to drinking and causing trouble, but was then convicted by the gospel and that he needed to change. Some stories have it that he and his friends were attacking a gypsy fortune teller, who told him that he'd live to see his children and grandchildren to be born, only to realize that he did not want them to see him as the person he currently was. Other stories have it that he never was able to give up his drinking, and that he died never having fully overcome his vices.

The thing that strikes me most about this song is that it must have come from a very deep and very personal place, one that everyone has felt to some degree at one time or another. Regardless of how it came about, Robinson penned some amazing words that just about any can relate to. Everyone has experienced that loneliness and longing for some greater power to rescue them, and every member has felt that guilt born of weakness that causes both the author and hearer to exclaim "prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love."

Just so beautiful. The part that really got to me in that performance was when the men begin the verse singing "Here I raise my Ebeneezer." The clarity of that choir and their voices, the words, it's all very good.

Anyway, here is another version of it. I just happen to like the full orchestra and not just the organ accompaniment.

Opening Day!

Well, the only one that actually matters...Angels open up against the Royals tonight. Pujols debut. Morales returns. Fireworks.

Man, I wish I could be there.

I can't believe how much I love baseball. I was a heavy baseball card collector. For three complete summers I played it every day in the green belt over by my house with my then best friend, Ryan McCoy. It really is just so summer to me. And home. It's part of the perks of home and I miss it. I'm so excited for this season. They look awesome. Play ball. Go Angels.

Romney Rising

It now looks pretty inevitable, right? He swept Maryland, DC, and Wisconsin on Tuesday. Wisconsin is huge because it's such a swing state. He's getting key endorsements all over the place now. I really like what the Republican party is doing, lining up behind him, making it known that it's time to start putting together a strong message against the incumbent. I'm very curious to see what will happen with the VP nomination. Polls suggest that most people want two of the rising GOP stars to get the nod - Marco Rubio or Chris Christie, but I think both have publicly declared that they are not interested in the position. No one saw the Palin VP bid, but that's what happened in the last go-around, I think this one could be similar.

I know you'll be so disappointed to hear this, but I had such a great post put together yesterday about gas, how gas prices fluctuate, how prices range from regions, how the President is largely responsible for high gas prices, etc, and when I published it, all but the very beginning part disappeared. I lost all interest after that. Kind of disheartening. You'll just have to trust me when I say that the President can have a huge effect on gas prices, the US has more oil in reserves than the rest of the world, and the presidential election is our chance to voice displeasure with the current state.

Back to Romney though. I thought his speech following his Tuesday victories was really impressive. He's no longer worried about his GOP opponents, but now crafting his message for the general election. I love that. I was very reserved in my opinion of Romney before, but he's really become much more polished with his campaigning and I think all credit for that should go to the primary season and how that has forced him to improve. He's come very far since 2008, and very far even since the fall. He's looking good and I like his prospects come November. 

Changing Direction

It does, it takes faith to change directions. The first significant direction changes seem to happen in college as people are deciding on their majors. That one is kind of interesting because for a lot of college grads, several years following graduation, it really doesn't matter what it was that they ended up deciding on while they were in college to where they are now. They would have gotten to that place had they majored in English, marketing, communications, family life whatever and it wouldn't have really mattered, but if you would have asked them back when they were making those decisions, it seemed to mean the whole world.

Sometimes I wonder a little bit what it was like for my parents to decide that they should move to the United States before I was born. Did everyone in a third world country think that way back then? What would that be like to feel that your best chance at happiness consists of moving away from your home and family to a new country where they speak a language that you don't even know? That's what my parents did.

My dad made a couple of reconnaissance trips to the US before deciding to move to lovely Orange Country. It's kind of amazing what he did, saving up $10,000 in Brazil to come out to visit one brother in San Francisco, then another brother down in Laguna Hills. He saved that money back in the 70s when there was a worse global recession than we've seen this century and in a third world country that was far from the economic upturn it would experience in these recent years. It's amazing to me that he did it. And he just came over to the US, moved his family, learned English, and created a successful business all at the same time. Crazy, right? Making that kind of decision to move would require enormous faith and he made it work. It came with some costs, but in the end, neither of my parents have ever looked back and never plan on going back to Brazil, so content they are with their lives in this country, even if they have had some rough patches.

So for me, I guess it's not anything close to the same magnitude to decide that applying to business school was a better option than finishing out my Phd program. It adds another year, will add some debt, but after talking with some people in that program and that have also graduated from it, it sounds like a really great opportunity, not only for what the program itself is like, but for what types of jobs are available post-graduation. So we'll see what happens with that.

And I guess even a few years earlier, it was a pretty big move for me to leave my job, go back to school, and leave the comfort of California to come back out to Utah, a place that was familiar to me at one time, but wholly new in other important ways. It took some time to start up my new life out here, but obviously that was one of the best decisions that I have ever made.

I wonder what keeps certain people in their holding patterns. I know one person who is in a job that she has already outgrown and offers no future career prospects, living in a place where she feels like she hasn't met anybody new, but still can't seem to steer herself into a new direction in any capacity. Everyone outside of her has been encouraging her to move, to do something different, and Amy even forwarded her a job position that seemed to be a great fit, only to have her turn all of it down for the status quo, which in her more honest moments, she'll admit that she's far from content.

Sometimes major upheaval is necessary. It's interesting to think about the times when I've grown the most have always coincided with when I've had the most significant changes. Sometimes it means a makeover. Buy new clothes. Get a new job. Move somewhere. Get a new haircut. Go back to school.

The great thing is that the gospel invites and encourages change all the time. The invitation is always there to reorient ourselves and point ourselves back to the Lord, and sometimes that means just giving ourselves a new perspective so that we can see him better.

Running Season

Running season is upon me. Mileage is starting to get heavier. I ran 12 last week, and today was 14. I haven't decided if I'm going to go for three 20+ mile runs, or just two. They say that it's always better to under-train than over-train, but something about getting that third 20 miler makes me feel more comfortable with my training. Not sure yet. Although last time I did get three 20 milers and then I was still not ready for the race at all, and the race I felt the least prepared for, St. George, I had my best time. Who knows. I think I'm leaning less. It's just harder to get myself to do these long runs with a wifey.

I do still love running though. Much more once I finish the long run, and after I have talked myself into actually getting out there. But I just love how it feels to go that far, to look from my house over to the mouth of the Provo Canyon, which is where I always run to on these long ones, and think that I covered that entire distance on my own power in just a couple hours. I just like running that long and knowing that my heart and body must be at least pretty healthy to be able to sustain physical activity for that long. It makes me feel good.

I do think I like having my running calendar pushed up earlier in the year instead of doing my hardest training in the dog days of summer. If I think it's hard to get myself to do those long runs when it's 70 degrees out, it's a million times worse when I'm either having to get up at 6 or 7am to avoid the heat, or just taking it at 80-90 degrees. Those are really, really hard.

Anyway, that's what I have to look forward to for the next 10 weeks, and then it's Utah Valley on June 9th.

Here goes....

More To Trayvon Shooting

I saw this report from the Orlando Sentinel yesterday. Here are some excerpts:

On Feb. 26, when Zimmerman first spotted Trayvon, he called police and reported a suspicious person, describing Trayvon as black, acting strangely and perhaps on drugs.

Zimmerman got out of his SUV to follow Trayvon on foot. When a dispatch employee asked Zimmerman if he was following the 17-year-old, Zimmerman said yes. The dispatcher told Zimmerman he did not need to do that.

There is about a one-minute gap during which police say they're not sure what happened.

Zimmerman told them he lost sight of Trayvon and was walking back to his SUV when Trayvon approached him from the left rear, and they exchanged words.

Trayvon asked Zimmerman if he had a problem. Zimmerman said no and reached for his cell phone, he told police. Trayvon then said, "Well, you do now" or something similar and punched Zimmerman in the nose, according to the account he gave police.

Zimmerman fell to the ground and Trayvon got on top of him and began slamming his head into the sidewalk, he told police.

Zimmerman began yelling for help.

Several witnesses heard those cries, and there has been a dispute about whether they came from Zimmerman or Trayvon.

Lawyers for Trayvon's family say it was Trayvon, but police say their evidence indicates it was Zimmerman.

One witness, who has since talked to local television news reporters, told police he saw Zimmerman on the ground with Trayvon on top, pounding him — and was unequivocal that it was Zimmerman who was crying for help.

Zimmerman then shot Trayvon once in the chest at very close range, according to authorities.

When police arrived less than two minutes later, Zimmerman was bleeding from the nose, had a swollen lip and had bloody lacerations to the back of his head.

Paramedics gave him first aid but he said he did not need to go to the hospital. He got medical care the next day.

Should the police have closed the investigation as quickly as they did? Probably not, but if this is the account that they received from Zimmerman, and the evidence seems to support his account of the events, then I can kind of understand why they decided to leave it at that.

I think the real problem is all of the racial politics that are coming into play and how people are trying to turn this into more of a political commentary on the state of the nation.

Here is an interesting piece about how some in the media are manipulating this tragedy into some political action points. From the article:

But is the Martin shooting emblematic of a larger problem? Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the mainstream media here and abroad certainly are portraying it as such. That larger problem, of course, is lethal white racism and a criminal-justice system allegedly indifferent to the killing of blacks. At a rally Thursday night in Sanford, Sharpton said that “Trayvon represents a reckless disregard for our lives that we’ve seen for too long,” and warned that “they,” presumably whites, would try to trick black protesters into violence by “send[ing] in provocateurs.” “Blacks are under attack,” said Jesse Jackson on Friday from Chicago. “Targeting, arresting, convicting blacks, and ultimately killing us is big business.” MSNBC analyst Karen Finney claimed that “racist rhetoric” used by Rush Limbaugh and several Republican presidential candidates was responsible for Martin’s death.

So determined has the New York Times been to fit the shooting into its favored racial story line that it has been referring to the Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic,” contrary to its usual practice of referring to Hispanics without any additional racial characterization. The fact that Zimmerman’s father is white does not explain this departure from the Times’s racial protocols; the Times’s one-drop rule still applies to Barack Obama, who is, according to the Times and every other media outlet, America’s “first black president.” (The Grey Lady referred to Zimmerman for the first time on Friday simply as “Hispanic.”)

Times columnist Charles Blow dealt with the complicating factor of Zimmerman’s ethnicity with a simple duality: “Trayvon is black. Zimmerman is not,” he wrote last Saturday, presumably conferring on Zimmerman putative white status. The Rainbow Coalition has apparently broken down.

Here is an article that talks about the Standing Your Ground statute, and the need for some alteration in that provision of the law. I think what's especially interesting is how he also gets into how this shouldn't be cause for overreaction and needlessly placing gun control laws that are too restrictive. Another excerpt:

Contrary to what many liberal pundits have written, Florida should not reimpose a “duty to retreat” — the policy that prevailed before Stand Your Ground — on innocent people who face violent attackers. But it is true that the Stand Your Ground statute protects people who don’t merely stand their ground — it protects anyone who can reasonably claim he faced a serious threat, so long as he was “not engaged in unlawful activity” when the threat occurred

Therefore, to arrest Zimmerman, the police would need evidence that he was doing something illegal when Martin attacked him, or that he didn’t reasonably believe he faced a serious threat. Since we don’t know whether Zimmerman threw the first punch when he caught up to Martin, and we don’t know what Martin was doing when Zimmerman fired, this isn’t possible.

The solution is to make Zimmerman’s activity unlawful. It should be a crime to chase down a fellow citizen who runs away, except in certain situations (e.g. when a store owner pursues a shoplifter, as opposed to a man’s running after a teenager with no provocation whatsoever). One might imagine this was already a crime — such as assault — but Florida police officials have said it is not.

Law enforcement often fails — that’s why people need the tools to defend themselves, and the laws to protect them when they do so. But the proactive aspects of policing, including confronting individuals who seem to be “up to no good,” should be left to the professionals. If Trayvon Martin had been approached by an officer who identified himself as such, rather than a strange man who jumped out of an SUV and chased him, he would almost certainly be alive today.

And lastly, this article is in the case that you want to use this incident as a reason to believe in stricter gun control laws, Jeff Jacoby has evidence to the contrary in this article here. And I'll end with this lengthy excerpt:

To those with an emotional bias against guns, it goes without saying that more guns in private hands invariably mean more crime and violence. If the number of people carrying firearms on campus rises, then of course that campus is less safe. What could be more obvious?

But it isn’t obvious at all.

While the University of Colorado spent much of the past decade resisting the state’s concealed-carry law, Colorado State University complied with it. If the gun controllers are right, Colorado State should have seen a surge in crime, while its gun-banning sister institution should have been an Eden of security and lawfulness. That’s not what happened. As Clayton E. Cramer and David Burnett write in a new monograph for the Cato Institute, “crime at the University of Colorado has risen 35 percent since 2004, while crime at Colorado State University has dropped 60 percent in the same time frame.’’

Something similar happened after the US Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision striking down a gun ban in Washington, DC. The city’s mayor predicted in dismay that “more handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence,’’ yet crime in the nation’s capital plunged. Murder nose-dived to its lowest rate in half a century, falling from 186 in 2008 to 144 in 2009 to 132 in 2010 to 108 in 2011.

To be sure, correlation doesn’t prove causation. But the experience of Colorado State and DC should come as no surprise. By now there’s so much evidence that higher rates of gun ownership lead to lower rates of crime that it isn’t hard to fathom why fewer and fewer Americans want to ban handguns. According to Gallup, just 26 percent of the public now thinks the private possession of handguns should be illegal — that’s down from 60 percent half a century ago. Roughly 1 of every 4 Americans reports keeping a gun to protect themselves or their homes. Having a gun makes many people — for good reason — feel safer.

How often firearms are used defensively is a much-debated question in American criminology. Respected studies over the years have come up with estimates that range widely, from nearly 110,000 defensive gun uses annually to as many as 2.5 million. Whatever the precise number is, it clearly isn’t trivial. An enormous amount of death, bloodshed, and suffering is prevented in this country by ordinary citizens with firearms.

That doesn’t mean terrible things can’t happen when a gun is used for protection. Trayvon Martin, an Orlando teen, was shot dead last month by a Florida man who claims he was acting in self-defense. Yet the teen carried nothing more deadly than a bag of candy, and police told the gunman — a neighborhood watch patrol member — not to follow him.

Such tragic tales inevitably draw the spotlight. Far more common, but far less likely to be played up, are cases where guns are used to scare off, resist, or thwart a genuinely dangerous criminal. For their Cato paper, Cramer and Burnett assembled nearly 5,000 news stories reported by the media between 2003 and 2011. Their catalogue includes instances of armed customers preventing a store from being robbed, of victims fighting off would-be rapists, of senior citizens defending against a home invader, of attempted carjackings foiled because the driver had a gun — even of self-defense against deadly animals.

Of course, most defensive gun uses never make the news at all. As Cramer and Burnett observe, “Man Scares Away Burglar, No Shots Fired,’’ is not a very compelling headline.

But with or without headlines, millions of Americans grasp instinctively that guns make us safer. For when honest citizens carry weapons, criminals are less likely to attack — and those who do are more likely to fail.

Sledding Vid

I finally finished putting together some footage I got while sledding in Lake Arrowhead with Dave. = Probably my favorite part of this video is that there are more clips Dave and I sledding together than me with Amy. In fairness to me, she was busy throwing up behind a tree during most of the time we were there. Thems road in Arrowhead were a little too curvy for my pregnant wifey.

So Good

I love B.o.B. This one will get overplayed for sure, but for now, I just love it. Something about his songs also lack the trashiness of other hip-hop artists. It's nice. I've loved his stuff from day one. Good stuff.

We're going to see Hunger Games tonight and go to the Colors Festival tomorrow, and maybe the Real Salt Lake game afterwards. So our weekend is pretty packed. Hope yours is a good one too.

This and That

Ready for some Friday round-up? I've been kind of saving up some stuff to blog about when I had more time, and now that time is finally here. Here are a few things...

Interesting article about how the main religious leader in Saudi Arabia called for the destruction of all Christian churches, and advocated this to a terrorist group, no less. This isn't just a fringe guy saying it, it's as if Billy Graham/Pat Robertson/Al Sharpton/Archbishop in the US/President Monson had called for this. It is not insignificant. Excerpt:

Why is it that when Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah Al al-Sheikh, the grand mufti of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, declares that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches in the Arabian Peninsula,” the major media do not see this as even worth reporting? And no one, to the best of my knowledge, has noted that he said this to the members of a terrorist group.

This should be emphasized: Al al-Sheikh is not the Arabian equivalent of some backwoods Florida pastor. He is the highest religious authority in Saudi Arabia, where there is no separation of mosque and state, and the state religion is the ultra-orthodox/fundamentalist reading of Islam known as Wahhabism. He also is a member of the country’s leading religious family.

In other words, his pronouncements represent the official position of Saudi Arabia — a country that, we have been told time and again, changed course after 9/11 and is now our ally and solidly in the anti-terrorism camp.

Teachers are almost impossible to fire, here. If you didn't know, that's actually a bad thing.

In a fight between Texas and California, Texas wins. Long excerpt, that's actually most of the article:

California may be dreaming, but Texas is working.

California’s elected officials are particularly adept at dreaming up ways to spend other people’s money. While the state struggles with interminable deficits caused by years of reckless spending, the argument in Sacramento isn’t over how to reduce government; rather, it’s over how much to raise taxes and on whom. Governor Brown is pushing for a tax increase of $6.9 billion per year, to appear on this November’s ballot. California’s powerful government-employee unions and Molly Munger, a wealthy civil-rights attorney (wealthy by dint of being the daughter of Warren Buffett’s business partner) are offering two competing tax-hike plans. The silver lining may be that having three tax hikes on the ballot will turn voters off all of them.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in Texas are grappling with a fiscal question of an entirely different sort: whether or not to spend some of the $6 billion set aside in the state’s rainy-day fund.

California’s government-employee unions routinely spend tens of millions of dollars at election time to maintain their hold on power. In Texas, the government unions are weak and don’t have collective bargaining, leaving trial attorneys as the main source of funding for Lone Star Democrats.

California’s habit of raising taxes to fund a burgeoning regulatory state isn’t without impact on its economy. Californians fork over about 10.6 percent of their income to state and local governments, above the U.S. average of 9.8 percent. Texans pay 7.9 percent. This affects the bottom line of both consumers and businesses.

With that money, Californians pay for more government. The number of non-education bureaucrats in California is close to the national average, at 252 per 10,000 people. Texas gets by with a bureaucracy 22 percent smaller: 196 per 10,000.

While California has more bureaucrats, Texas has 17 percent more teachers, with 295 education employees per 10,000 people, compared to California’s 252.

The two states’ educational outcomes reflect this disparity. If we compare national test scores in math, science, and reading for the fourth and eighth grades among four basic ethnic and racial categories — all students, whites, Hispanics, and African-Americans — Texas beats California in every category, and by a substantial margin. In fact, Texas schools perform consistently above the national average across categories of age, race, and subject matter, while California schools perform well below the national average.

While California seeks more ways to tax success, it excels at subsidizing poverty. The percentage of households receiving public assistance in California was 3.7 percent in 2009, double Texas’s rate of 1.8 percent. Almost one-third of all Americans on welfare reside in California.

And I was going to post about oil here, but I think that will get a post of its own. There you go.

Best Picture

It just so happens that The Artist is playing in our awesome cheap theater that's right over by our house. Amy and I went and saw it last weekend, and I guess I shouldn't be so surprised, because it did win Best Picture this year, but I really enjoyed it. I knew very little about it going into it, just that it really had won most of the significant awards at the Oscars this year. What really impressed me about the movie was just how much the film was able to communicate without the benefit of dialogue. Every so often you would see the intertitles (nope, didn't know that word, had to look it up, but it's what you call the parts where the words flash on the screen in silent films), but for the most part, you could follow everything without needing to know exactly what was being said. That's probably true of any movie, but you don't really how true that is until you watch this kind of movie. Anyway, I did some reading up afterward on some of the details of the movie and it's really amazing how careful the director was with every part of the movie. He was so deliberate with everything, and what's more, this must have been such a huge risk for everyone involved. When was the last time a silent film got any kind of real press or attention, let alone success? The actors were amazing, of course. It did get a little slow for me in the middle toward the end, but otherwise, just a very impressive production. On a similar note, Amy and I watched Midnight in Paris some time ago too. We really enjoyed that one as well. Movies are fun.

Starndardized Tests

I have taken four of them: SAT, ACT, GRE, and GMAT. So I guess that only leaves the MCAT, DAT, and LSAT (of the remaining major graduate school tests). My SAT and ACT scores were all right. Nothing to boast about. ACT was good enough to get me into BYU without any real concern, but the real story about that test was that it happened to follow the night of when I broke up with my very first girlfriend. (I totally copped out and told her that I think we should go on a break, but then pretty much ignored her after that. What a gent. I swear, I've grown up a lot since then, Amy!)

I knew before I even got into BYU that I would be doing more grad school. Little did I know that it would pretty much all be at BYU. I began studying for the GRE my last semester as an undergrad, took tons of practice tests, and voila! Nailed the GRE.

So when I started considering applying to the MBA program, knowing that I would be taking the GMAT, for some reason I didn't have the same single-minded preparation for that test as I had for the GRE. With the GRE, I felt like I had a very proven and reliable method for doing well - many practice tests, lots of drills, and I even made flashcards of like 800 frequently used GRE vocabulary words. But for some reason, my performance there left me feeling like I would do just fine on the GMAT without that same level of dedication. Overconfident in my test-taking skills, I guess.

And then the day of reckoning came and the GMAT occurred, and I swung and missed. I mostly attended a discounted course that I got through BYU, did some drills, and knew before I even walked into the test that it was going to be a long-shot to hit the score I needed to be a competitive B-school applicant. As I left that day, I was confirmed in my suspicions. I scored a perfectly average GMAT score - 540. Ouch.

Well, I got cracking, used the old methods and stayed much more focused for the second go-around. The last two weeks were especially taxing in that department. I took 7 full practice tests in 8 days, and used what was going to be a failed boy's weekend/anniversary weekend for more studying.

And then today was the test.

Today I am pleased.

The old method still works. I should be a competitive b-school applicant. Now let's see if they'll have me.

In Case You Missed It

I'm pretty sure that everyone who reads this blog has already seen this video, so I guess this is just for you lurkers out there...