Baseless Feelings of Security

When it comes to form over substance, nobody does it better than the government. In response to yesterday's terrorist attack, passengers are being limited in the number of carry-ons they can have and when they can leave their seats.

Why? Did Umar Mutallab, yesterday's terrorist, use a carry-on or leave his seat? According to news reports, he had "a sophisticated explosive device strapped to his body." Also, "the suspect had a blanket on his lap." The lap, some of you might remember from childhood riddles, is something you lose when you stand up.

In short, the new "safety" rules, had they been in place yesterday, would not have altered Mutallab's activities in the least. So why do we have them? Because it's a lot easier to make people feel safe when "something" is being done, even if it's completely the wrong thing. (For instance, the administration's response to the recession is to kill small business hiring through health care "reform.")

How about some REAL safety measures, such as making sure people who shouldn't be flying into the country aren't, in fact, flying into the country? Mutallab was on a terrorist list, but he still managed to enter the country with a one-way ticket yesterday. But we have nothing to fear because airport screeners were made federal employees in 2001, remember? Unless, perhaps, that was another case of the government embracing form over substance.

There's a Reason Football Commentators Are Considered Stupid

Remember 2001? (If not, don't feel bad; most people don't anymore.) Specifically, I'd like to talk about Brigham Young University's 2001 football season.

That was the year the Cougars began the season with 12 straight victories, peaking in the rankings at Number Eight. BYU had one game remaining on the schedule, at Hawaii. Before the game was played, the BCS announced that the results didn't matter; an undefeated BYU would not be invited to a BCS bowl game. When BYU lost the game, football pundits took it as a mark of their wisdom in doubting BYU, instead of a mark of the ability of the BCS to affect game outcomes by demoralizing one of the teams.

Now let's come back to 2009. Remember 2009? (If not, you're probably a stoner.) Earlier this week, BYU destroyed Oregon State in the Las Vegas Bowl. Football pundits have an explanation for that one, too: Oregon State was demoralized by losing to Oregon and missing out on the Rose Bowl. And that's why BYU isn't as good as the football game showed them to be.

The thing about football pundits: they are always trying to explain away the results of the actual football games. Time was, football teams play football games to decide who's better. Now they play the games for revenue, and the job of deciding who's better is left to the pundits.

The pundits, in turn, decide which team is better with a few easily remembered criteria:

1. Did I go to school there?
2. Did I go to school at a school in the same conference?

Some might wonder if two criteria are too few, but when you remember the caliber of brain we're dealing with here, you begin to wonder if two might be too many.

So to recap: disappointment is an acceptable reason for a football loss if you're from a Bowl Cartel Series conference, but if you're from the Mountain West, it's just a pathetic excuse.

Yankee Imperialist

I'm not trying to be a chauvinist or anything, but I'd prefer we keep the comments to English, K? With the way that some blog comments are malicious links, I can't really allow a blog comment full of a Chinese-charactered hyperlink to go undeleted.

Just so we understand each other: I'm sure your language is really great, but keep it to yourself.

Happy holidays!

Church at Home

Today I went to the best sacrament meeting I can remember in my entire life. There was no false doctrine, and all the speakers kept it short and sweet. The entire meeting took less than half an hour, and that included three testimonies. Every Sunday should be this great. Even with the amount of shoveling I've had to do this weekend to get church at home, it's been worth it.

Christmas Miracle

Due to our "treacherous, frightful" snowstorm (the people around here are serious winter wimps), church has ALREADY been canceled tomorrow. If we want, we can get approval from the bishop to have the sacrament in our homes. In short, God has given me my Christmas present.

The Year in Economics

I am NOT recommending this blog for general reading (unless you feel a need to atone for some fairly heinous sins, and like to make your atonement by reading long, dense blog posts that read like the index of an especially boring encyclopedia), but his summation of the economic failures of the past year is worthwhile.

Richard Bushman Is Speaking My Language

From his Believing History, about church members acknowledging the failings of their institutional church:

More than a little of that spirit has infected the Latter-day Saints. We sometimes hear discontented young people say they believe the gospel while having trouble with the Church. The prevalence of this idea led Eugene England to give a sermon on why the Church is as true as the gospel. To a degree, the young people may not be entirely wrong. Perhaps we have let our enthusiasm with organization carry us too far. (p. 166)

I feel I can disagree with Eugene England, though, because his book was published by Bookcraft, which we all know means it's only 40-percent believable.

Honestly, though, I should probably read that book, but it's $13.99 on eBay. Who wants to hook me up? Remember, boy, my eternal soul is at stake.

(I'll write a glowing friend review to anyone who can identify to what the previous sentence alludes.)

A New Hobby

As some of you know, I keep track of things, specifically places I've been.

• I've been to 33 states (AZ, AR, CA, CO, DE, FL, GA, IL, IN, IA, KS, KY, MD, MI, MN, MO, NE, NV, NM, NY, NC, OH, OK, PA, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, WV, WI, WY)
• I've been to 22 state capitols (AZ, CA, CO, DE, IL, IN, IA, KS, KY, MD, MO, NE, NV, NM, OH, OK, PA, UT, VA, WV, WI, WY)
• I've been to 1,115 counties (I won't list them here, but I have two links in my sidebar for websites that DO list them all)

So it only makes sense that I would add something else. I recently decided to start visiting each state's highest natural point. To start, today we went to the highest point in the District of Columbia, which doesn't even count on my list, since it's not a state.

Since we're dealing with the "highest natural point" here, in some low-lying states it's possible that land has been graded as a building pad which is higher than the "high point." Such is the case in Washington, where just next to the high point in Fort Reno Park is the higher land of historic Fort Reno. But hey, at least it's not as bad as Delaware, where the "high point" is actually a step DOWN from the sidewalk.

I declared that everyone needed to have a celebratory jumping pose for the pictures. Articulate Joe complied with the request, but you can tell from the look on his face that his heart wasn't in it. Jerome the Metronome didn't quite get the idea of raising his hands above his head.

However, we've summitted our first high point, and only have fifty more to go.

I Wish That Were My Name

In reading this news story I learned that the vice president of Nigeria is named Goodluck Jonathan. Why can't I get a name as cool as that?

Oh, and also Africa's most populous nation is two weeks away from a constitutional crisis. Good thing for us they're a major oil producer.

Leslie Asked for Something Funny

This newspaper gig is not fun anymore. Which means it's more like a real job than any other writing gig I've ever had.

Who Are These People?

When I had children, I knew they were going to grow up. If I brought my daughter home from the hospital with the idea that she would forever stay tiny, I realized soon enough that wasn't the case. And when she traded out her cute newborn cry for a shrieking wail, I realized she would do things that would make me want her to grow up much faster.

What I didn't realize, though, was that my children would turn out to be tiny strangers. I guess I figured they would be small versions of me, or of my wife, or a mixture of everything good from both of us. Given the gene mixture, and the influence of growing up in our home, how could they turn out to be anything different?

Lately, though, my children have been exhibiting strange symptoms of being their own people. Especially my seven-year-old daughter, who has let it be known that her parents' level of holiday cheer is decidedly lacking.

It was before Halloween that she said wistfully, "In Kansas I knew a Christmas music radio station to listen to, but I don't know one here." My wife and I, for reasons of sanity preservation, have a rule against Christmas music until after Thanksgiving. This meant we spent the entire month of November turning down my daughter's radio requests.

Thanksgiving evening, on the way home from our relatives' house, we no longer had an excuse and I had to find a Christmas music station. The first song we heard was Frank Sinatra's "We Wish You the Merriest," which has as honest-to-goodness lyrics, "We wish you the merriest, the merriest, the merriest, yes the merriest, we wish you the merriest, the merriest, the merriest Yule cheer." Sinatra's intent is not made clear in these lyrics, but in many contemporary news sources he gave the reporters to believe that he wished the listener the merriest.

This song was followed by "Jingle Bell Rock," which was written by a man who firmly believes that all things are made more festive by attaching the words "jingle bell" to their names, and he spares no effort in making this belief known to all and sundry.

Two songs into the holiday season and I wanted to puncture my own ear drums. My daughter, meanwhile, was riding contentedly in her seat, smiling out the window.

The next afternoon she began a relentless agitation to decorate our Christmas tree. I told her that, in the old days, people didn't decorate their trees until Christmas Eve. She just looked at me as if to say, "And that's why no one liked living in the old days." By bedtime, the tree had been assembled (another thing they didn't have to do in the old days) and decorated.

I said to my wife, "It turns out she's the type of person who's going to grow up and listen to Christmas music six months every year."

My wife said, "And wear holiday sweaters with ironed-on reindeer and elves."

This realization has caused me to repent of all the negative things I ever thought about the inadequate rearings of such ladies I've seen in grocery stores. I'm here to tell you, it's not their parents' faults.

This be-your-own-person stuff can only go so far. I knew eventually I was going to have to put my foot down. When raising children it is important to draw a line and say, "This far and no farther." I didn't know when she would drive me to my limit, I only knew it would happen one day.

That day came sooner than expected. I came home last week to hear from my wife-cum-homeschool teacher that my daughter had been assigned a report on any president she wanted, and she had chosen Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

My feelings about FDR are not complex and can be best summarized by Albert Jay Nock, who called Roosevelt's 1945 death "the biggest public improvement that America has experienced since the passage of the Bill of Rights." Nevertheless, my daughter had been to the library to get many books for her report, and most of my Roosevelt books, such as FDR's Folly and FDR vs. The Constitution are beyond her reading level.

When she finishes her report, my daughter wants to visit FDR's memorial in Washington. I told my wife she could take the kids, but I wouldn't go along. Maybe I will give her bad directions, or at least suggest stopping off at the hospital for a DNA test to make sure this seven-year-old changeling is really ours.

(c)2009, Broadside.

The Boss Didn't Want Me to Work Overtime Because My Production Function Exhibits Quasi-Concavity

Paul Samuelson died this week. Robert Lucas has said of Samuelson's influential textbook,

"I loved the Foundations. Like so many others in my cohort, I internalized its view that if I couldn’t formulate a problem in economic theory mathematically, I didn’t know what I was doing. I came to the position that mathematical analysis is not one of many ways of doing economic theory: It is the only way. Economic theory is mathematical analysis. Everything else is just pictures and talk.”

Now, before I offer my own take, I'd like to point out these facts:

• Number of Nobel Prizes won by Samuelson and Lucas: two.
• Number of Nobel Prizes won by A Random Stranger: zero (so far).

Still, though, I disagree. Economics has gone to the point now where the ability to formulate a problem in economic theory mathematically often covers the fact that the economist doesn't know what he's doing.

If economics is a collection of principles of human action, then no principle should be so obscure as to not make intuitive sense. After all, how often do we make an economic decision, the motivation for which was too complex for us to understand? If a problem can't be explained WITHOUT mathematics, at least in a rudimentary form, it probably isn't true economics.

But, like I said, those guys have two Nobels, and so far I have none.

You've Got a Problem? We've Got a Czar for That

For months we had news stories about how those bastard banks were going to use taxpayer money (the money we were told they absolutely needed, but they didn't) to pay their executives large salaries and bonuses, so in response we got a federal pay czar. Then the banks didn't like the idea of a government official reviewing their contracts for "decency," so they decided to pay the taxpayer money back.

Okay, at this point in the story, I'm ambivalent. I hated the bailout, and I hate the pay czar (not personally, but he is speaking at my school this week, so maybe I can get to know him and since I'm a misanthrope THEN I can hate him personally), but if the two things are going to work against each other, if the threat of a pay czar is going to get the bailouts paid back, and then there will be no one's pay that needs czarring, what's not to love? It's like the Iran-Iraq War, or the Oakland Raiders playing the New York Yankees and everyone breaking his leg.

However, this news story makes me wonder if the "geniuses" we have running the federal government aren't a little closer to the "Forrest Gump" end of the IQ scale than we think. To get Citi to pay back its bailout, we let them not pay their taxes. But I thought they were already getting a sweet deal by not being subject to the pay czar. So what happened? Did we just pay Citi billions of dollars in exchange for them running their company the way they want? That sure is a nice deal for Citi, but how nice is it for us?

The only thing I learned from writing this blog post is that there is only a one-letter difference between the words "running" and "ruining." And, the misanthrope in me feels compelled to point out, "running" isn't "ruining" until "I" get involved.

Italian TV is Freaky

A blog I read linked to this other blog where I watched this clip of Italian TV. The point of the post was to show us what foreigners think Americans sound like, but the thing I take away from it is this: Italian variety shows are weird.

And yes, now that my finals are over, you can look forward to a month of posts like this one. Don't bother pinching yourself; I'll tell you right now you aren't dreaming! It's really true!

Advice

Should I keep my newspaper writing position, even though

• they only pay me in campus credit
• my editor hacks my stories in inexplicable ways (such as changing the spelling of words that weren't misspelled, thus turning them into new words that don't fit in the sentence)
• my editor is an insufferable bore who doesn't respond to e-mails for weeks at a time and then tells me that forwarding the previous e-mail to him is "unprofessional"

Who am I kidding? I'll probably keep doing it. Shakespeare gotta get paid, son.

This Place Makes Washington Heights Look Like Hanover Park

I know this post is just going to make Jill laugh herself silly, but we're surrounded by crime. Firstly, a student from my school was arrested in Pakistan for being a terrorist. Since we have a lot of Muslim students, I'm hoping this leads to some good finals-week drama. Secondly, our local newspaper tracks so many fugitives that they have a "fugitive of the week" column, and this week's fugitive (or Fugee, as they like to be called) "has been known" (in newspaper parlance) to frequent our neighborhood.