Economics 101: The Supercommittee

So I've been taking Economics 101 online from the local community college, and I have to say, I've been learning a ton. Everyone in the country should be required to take Economics. And unfortunately, there should be the most basic Economics 101 course that covers the fundamentals of macroeconomics, the Great Depression, and the current Great Recession in order to scare people into being conscious of how the world gets so effed up. And then, there should be a basic finance class that teaches people the fundamentals of earning, saving, how much things really cost, and basic equations to give people ways to think about money. I just read about compounding interest - the equation is simple, but, not being a math genius, I wouldn't have figured it out on my own. Now that I've studied it, I get it. Especially as I consider my 401k statement. Is there a negative compounding effect??

Anyway, for the class, we are asked to write short reports on topics or news articles. This particular topic, the Super-Committee, was something I knew pretty much nothing about. A quick scan through the internet pulled up a number of good sources, but I found that to get a really good rundown of the basics of the committee, the Canadian article was by far the best and least inflammatory. By inflammatory, I mean, the authors of the other articles obscure facts such as the Super-committee can decide on a proposal, but that proposal has a good chance of never becoming law, and furthermore, whatever law Congress grinds out of the proceedings could get twisted, whittled down, and essentially castrated before the laws go into effect. Kind of like the current Healthcare Law.

In my report, the applications portion at the end just refers to concepts we've covered in our weekly readings that apply to the article or topic. Enjoy!

1. Sources

NYTimes, pg. A22, October 19, 2011. "Deficit Panel May Need Push, Lawmakers Say" By Robert Pear

Reuters, October 21, 2011. "US Deficit Reduction Talks" by Richard Cowan http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/21/us-usa-debt-supercommittee-idUSTRE79K6C220111021

LA Times, October 19, 2011. "'Super committee' on deficit reduction is getting an earful." By Lisa Mascaro. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/19/nation/la-na-super-committee-20111020

Financial Post (Canada)- Reuters. October 21, 2011. "What happens if US 'super committee' fails?" by Donna Smith http://business.financialpost.com/2011/10/21/what-happens-if-u-s-super-committee-fails/

wikipedia.org - Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.

National Commission of Fiscal Responsibility and Reform report. http://www.fiscalcommission.gov/sites/fiscalcommission.gov/files/documents/TheMomentofTruth12_1_2010.pdf

2. Summary

The "Super-Committee" (formally known as the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction) was legislated into being by the Budget Control Act, passed in August 2011. The committee's objective is to propose a plan to reduce deficits by at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years (greater if possible), and their report is due in one month, on November 23. Their recommendations will face a vote in Congress on December 23. If the committee cannot agree on how to reduce the deficit, or if their proposals are not made into law (either rejected by Congress or vetoed by the President), then the President is authorized to impose across-the-board cuts of $1.2 trillion in most military and civilian programs in January 2013.

However, cuts made either by legislation adopting the super-committee's recommendations or made by the President could be voted up or down by subsequent sessions of Congress before 2013, as Donna Smith points out in her Financial Post-Reuters article.

The problem the committee is trying to solve is a difficult one politically, and they reportedly spent most of September in a standoff. The main ideas to reduce the deficit include increasing taxes, which the Republicans are loathe to consider, and cutting spending on programs, like Medicare, which the Democrats won't do unless Republicans accept tax increases.

At least one Republican on the committee, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, is pushing for tax law reform. He defends his position by saying that economists generally agree that "fundamental corporate tax reform is going to produce more economic growth and therefore, as a consequence, more revenues."

Both parties want to simplify corporate taxation, reduce rates, eliminate loopholes. But the problem there is that the profits of a large number of businesses "are not subject to corporate income tax, but distribute profits to the owners, who report the income on their individual tax returns."

According to a Reuters report, financial markets are looking for a deficit reduction greater than 1.2 trillion. Credit rating agencies are a part of the financial markets, and they would look for a greater deficit reduction in order to maintain confidence that US debt is not a high risk investment.

3. Application

Government budgets deficits and surpluses: Government deficits lead to reduced national saving, and reduced national saving means less investment, less investment leads to a reduced rate of long-run economic growth for the country. Clearly, the deficit has to be taken care of or the future of the country will be very dark. The debt to GDP ratio in 2010 was 62% (National Commission of Fiscal Responsibility and Reform report).

"Crowding out" - Deficits also mean that the government is borrowing more which eventually equals increased interest rates and less money for private firms to borrow for investments. Another reason the interest rates might rise is because of a downgrade by the rating agencies on US debt. Interestingly, according to the Financial Post-Reuters report, interest rates fell after S&P downgraded the US debt (bonds) earlier this year.

Bonds and Financial Markets: The US government borrows money to pay for its spending through issuing bonds. Financial markets in general are looking for a greater deficit reduction than $1.2 trillion in order to keep interest rates on those bonds low, but more importantly they rely on a stable and growing economy in order to function and function well.

Macroeconomics: Senator Rob Portman of Ohio is relying on macroeconomists' analysis of tax reform that says less taxes on corporations would produce more economic growth, more revenues in the end. This is directly related the idea that investment now grows the economy in the long run.

Public notes to myself

I have these thoughts...and they won't go away!

No, actually, they do go away, but before they do, I often wish I had a place to jot them down in public record fashion...oh, look! I've got a blog!

Maybe someday I'll get Twitter and post my thoughts over there. But for now, I'll add triviality to the internet by saying that, ....of course Pippa Middleton is stylish! She's the sister of a princess AND she's loaded. Duh. That's in response to this headline "Kate Middleton's sister may not be a princess, but she is stylish." Gah!

OK. I'll follow that up with my latest economics 101 write-up.

Wow....

Reading this post was so amazing, I had to post it. Who are these people and how did they manage to get such relationships?

I seem to remember that once up on a time, my own dreams of coupledom were also so delicious. I am totally perplexed, however, at what it takes to have such a relationship. I feel as if I'll never know.

People with brains and conscience

This has to be one of the most common sense things I've seen in a long time. Goes a long towards righting my sense of fairness in the world.

As Professor Robert Shiller says, "how many cars do you need if you can only drive one at any given time?" I would argue, if you can have one car as a backup while you drive your other very old, but still running Volvo, you're being fiscally responsible. But it's a luxury.

Americans need to stop feeling entitled to anything.

Great quotes

People have been saying some awesome things recently. Just a quick sample:

From a Washington Post article about Supreme Court Justices and technology:

This is Chief Justice John Roberts speaking to Justice Scalia as he tries to understand text-messaging in the context of a public employee privacy case before the court .

"I thought, you know, you push a button; it goes right to the other thing," Roberts said. Responded Justice Antonin Scalia: "You mean it doesn't go right to the other thing?"


From Scott Adams in the Wall Street Journal:

"The primary purpose of management is to kill any hope that staying in your current job will work out for you. ...The last thing this world needs is a bunch of dopey-happy workers who can't stop humning and grinning. The economy needs hamster-brained sociopaths in management to drive down the opportunity cost of entrepreneurship. Luckily, we're blessed with an ample supply."

I'll be looking for more to add here.

Burgers 1

I am an omnivore at heart, but a vegetarian in practice. Except...every once in a while I get a burger craving. This happened the very first time I tried being vegetarian working in New Haven years ago. I think I went about four months before I was drooling for a burger.

So tonight, despite the fact that I had a marvelous egg-lemon spinach soup waiting for me at home, I desired a burger. My workday had been proletarian to the extreme; like a dog, I dogged, grinding my millstone, dragging my albatross, holding onto the metaphorical fishing line like the old man in the sea with determination, for miles...I deserved a burger.

I went to a local Essex bar. Ordered the basic burger, cooked medium, with lettuce (romaine), tomato (beefsteak), and onion (red). I added ketchup (Heinz), and mayonnaise (some non-name brand - it's fat, ok). I bought the burger and brought it home - it was packaged in those plastic containers that are not really recyclable, but fairly handy. They must be cheap. Anyway, upon arrival at home about ten minutes after leaving the establishment, I pulled the plastic box out, and started in on the fries. They were slight soggy, but fine. The included three ketchup packages was not enough, so I supplemented with my four year old ketchup perfectly preserved at ideal conditions in my refrigerator. Fries and ketchup. It is hard to mess this up.

Onto the burger. It was thick, but smaller than the bun by about 5/8ths of an inch. That's a little over half an inch. That's kind of a lot in terms of proportion for those of us raised to believe that the burger ought to hang outside of the bun. Oh well. The vegetables were good. There was a lot of onion, and I thought I'd only eat half of it, but I ended up needing all of it. It was very tasty with all the pieces put togther. For the most part, the meat itself was decent, but I would say it was middling quality. It was slightly dry, and although cooked just medium, the juices from the pinkish meat inside weren't exactly flowing. And most unfortunately, there were pieces of gristle in the meat. Two pieces of something quite hard that I had to spit out.

The bun was toasted, good, but as previously noted, too big for the exercise at hand. And it did not have sesame seeds on it, for the record.

So, overall, I'd have to rate the Black Seal burger 2.5 stars out of 5.
A Burger King Whopper would probably be a 2 out of five.
McDonald's burgers, rubber on plastic, would be 0.5 out of 5. That's kind of generous, isn't it?

I'm looking forward to more burger escapades in the future.

musings on following your bliss

A few nights ago, I had a conversation with one of the guys here. He’s 32, tall lanky guy with an outdoorsy look. He also looks like a carpenter, which he kind of is, although had gone to school to be an architect. He asked me what I was thinking about doing for finding work, and I started going into my thinking and struggles, thinking about leaving architecture behind like I’ve left music behind. His response was condoning and encouraging going off in a completely different direction and following one's bliss. Standard young, liberal reaction.

I asked him about his story, what kind of major change he had gone through, and he relayed how he had a minor meltdown at the end of architecture school, decided he didn’t want to work in architecture after school. He moved out to Vermont to be with his girlfriend, work as a carpenter, be outside, healthy, and just alive again. Architecture school can do that to you, kill you in bits and pieces.

We talked about Parents. He had some real tension with his father because his dad wanted him to go forward with schooling and being an engineer. He decided to go to architecture school, but after that, he went skiing and mountain climbing. His father, surely worried but also made uncomfortable by his son’s independence and questioning, demanded the son come back to reality. The son, of course, refused, and there was a rift which was eventually healed between father and son. The son’s take on it is that if these people want you to be someone they want, then what are they to you? Are they people who want to see you grow and be happy, discover and move forward? Or are they people who want to control you and see you do what they want you to do? This is one of the central questions in my life.

Additional questions I have are do your parents have the right to demand that you be someone they want you to be? Do you have a responsibility to them, and where does that responsibility start or stop? At what point in your life does what your parents want from you stop being your responsibility? At what point does that relationship between you and your parents become one where the love is purified and the playing field levels out - in other words, neither party has responsibility towards the other, and the relationship is based on wanting to help each other, not being required to help?

Going back to following your bliss - If you step out and become something else, do something different and follow your own drum, my perception of what would happen is that you’d find yourself alone. What this guy reminded me is that while you’d be alone maybe for a little while, you’d be finding other people who were interested in what you were doing. To me, this makes the bedrock relationships that I have even more important. My emotional home.

Day 2-ish in workshop in VT

Even in pretend-land, time moves fast. But definitely in non-straightforward fashion. Yesterday was, again, chock full of activity and motion. In the morning, I was up pretty early, and read a bit, and then drove from the dorms to our working area in Brattleboro with another woman, a grad student in urban planning. She’s 25, recently out of school, working as good industrious people do, trying to find her next job. She seems earnest enough, straightforward enough. Yet, I have a sense of her as being a type. Not so much a person unto herself yet - but that's kind of how it is at the young adult stage. It is starting to get clearer what this truly means, though, self-identity. I think it means that you’ve committed yourself in total down a path of requirement.

What is that? What’s a path of requirement? In the past, you’ve been forced to do this and that, you’ve been swayed heavily by the winds of society and culture, and finally, now, you’ve reached a point where you must stand up on your own. You must work. You don’t necessarily want to do all the things required of you, but you will, and you actively do now. At that point, standing up on your own means nothing so much as making that decision, and deciding on your terms what you will do to stand, unbowed. And then, you do. And keep doing because you've made a commitment, and you must.

This is critical for people seeking a path, the Seekers. Parents can weigh like millstones around a young sapling’s neck, making it difficult to seek light and air. To continue the metaphor, if the field of saplings is close, other saplings crowd your branches, making if hard for you to grow straight and true. We are not trees, however, but moving, metamorphosizing people. That ought to be a word, metamorphose, -ing or –phosizing.

Anyway, snippets of thoughts from Vermont.

creative genius?

This girl is unbelievably good.

Wasps

Life is profoundly unfair. Perhaps where humans are most different from the other animals is how we (some of us anyway) feel a distinct irony in the fact that collectively, we want everything to be fair and rosy, but in fact, life requires that we perform differently.

I tend to leave my lawn, the borders, and trimmings fairly untended, happy to leave it to the wild things. Every now and then, however, I'm struck by an impulse, a first cousin to the desires of frontier women to dress up their humble stick and mud abodes with lace curtains. My impulse drags me to garden, to try and make order out of the imperturbable chaos that is Nature. Silly me. But so it is, and so I venture to pull out weeds that I have no sense of, as a bulldozer to a primeval forest. Suddenly, thwack! - into the poison oak and a nest of ground wasps!

Must kill (innocent) wasps, and tear out threatening poison oak (a relatively pretty looking plant that suddenly takes on a wicked witch like cast)!

I pick up the pesticide and gird myself to dig out the poison oak. This mundane suburban vignette illuminates a human irony. For what has the wasp done but try and build a home? What has the poison oak done but what all plants do at all times - live and grow? Suddenly, strangely, the actions of all who have come before make some sense - killing, maiming, tearing down, destruction....all in the name of some ideal or other, but at the end, it is a fear and a desire to control. And yet, we all wish fervently for peace, harmony, and an end to struggling and strife. That’s what we all profess to want. We can’t have it. We are not in Eden, but cast outside of it, and while our hearts were formed in Paradise and we retain so many paradisical yearnings, Paradise is not where we live. We live on earth, grimy, wasp-ridden, poison oak-bearing, lovely earth.

What do we do with such knowledge? It can be enough to make people crazy – I think it does, quietly, and often, not so quietly. I see it when I look into people’s eyes sometimes, at the checkout counters, in the streets. People go about their proscribed lives, knowing from the bottom of their soles/souls, that the borders of their lives are identical to those of soap bubbles.

What would you teach your children, knowing that this world they go into is as much soap bubbles as it is milk, honey, asphalt, steel, gold, and terror?

IDEA: digital privacy

I read this and want to puke.

Please, somebody make this privacy service! Make it so that I can buy it.

So, the world is moving inexorably towards digital, computerized everything. (The world from from the Matrix is coming!) Well, I want a way to effectively create a blank, dummy profile in the digital world so that no marketer, no person, no corporation, no one can figure out who I am and what my preferences for anything are. LEAVE ME ALONE! My private preferences for what brand of anything I want remain a mystery to all except me.

So how would this work?
The goal is that every time I go online to do anything, including shopping at Amazon, browsing websites, my internet identity gets a random mask, but different every single time. It happens before I get onto even a supposedly secure site, like with banks and financial institution websites. Whoever is generating that mask for me doesn't know who I am because there's a double blind - two layers of masking throughout the interaction. I'm sure people are doing this already somewhere, but give me a service, or make it a law. I don't really care which because I think it's wrong to give marketers any sort of edge on me. I'm not convinced the current economic system actually works anyway.

Not using Internet services is less and less an option. Not using the internet means falling behind technologically, and unless I win the lottery, I won't be able to compete in the world without using technology. Does this piss me off? Yes.

grumble grumble grumble

Book Review (of sorts): The Checklist Manifesto

The Checklist Manifesto: How to get things right
By Atul Gawande

This book is a fast and easy read as Gawande writes well and engagingly. The subject of checklists and the efficacy of them is intriguing because I am highly interested in efficiencies, value, and high performance. This is the Great Trifecta, to be able to do something with minimal effort and cost, but with high reward or return. Gawande makes the case that checklists, being fundamentally low cost, are highly efficacious. The returns in various fields that he reports on all seem substantial.

The drawbacks? People don’t like to do things that seem regimented and that require discipline, which is how checklists have to be used. As Gawande writes,

“Discipline is hard – harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can’t even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.”

Checklists are not just checklists. They require human adherence to them in a way that requires discipline and acceptance that we are fallible even in our most mundane, simple tasks. Gawande doesn’t really get into this so much, but beyond our dislike for disciplined, regimented action, we also don’t want to accept that many of our expectations exceed our abilities to do what needs to be done to reach those expectations. In other words, we want things to work out perfectly - or at least, very well - but to get to those expectations, we have to realize how fallible we are, how limited we actually are. Despite all the choices the modern age presents us, despite the surfeit of sophistication in the world around us, despite the technology we have, we humans are highly fallible, and our worse mistake is believe we are anything but.

I suppose age brings a certain realization that this is so, but I think as a society, we don’t like to think that all of our technology, all of our social progress, and all of our apparent intelligence does NOT bring us easier lives, but in fact, presents us with a greater need for discipline in order to match the outcomes of our actions with our expectations. Using checklists, in a way, underscores for us how fallible we are.

I gleaned a few interesting points from Gawande’s research. From the aviation industry, he discovers that checklist creation is a process. There are some important elements:

1. They have to be short enough, usually one page, only, ideally 5-9 items.
2. They should have pause points where people take the time to assess some condition.
3. They are either DO-CONFIRM or READ-DO.
4. They should focus on “killer” items only, the steps in a process that are the most critical.
5. Simple and exact wording.
6. Easy to read, using lowercase and uppercase, using sans serif type, like Helvetica.
7. It has to get tested until it works consistently.

The last point underscores the way checklists are created at a fundamental level. They are created because of mistakes. Either people have died, or things have gone very, very badly in order that checklists needed to be made in the first place. This gives us a place to start if we wish to make our own checklists – where are the mistakes recurring? What keeps happening badly that requires we take a step back and see the flaw in the process?

It would be nice to have a checklist for life, but that one would either be longer than than day, or be fairly short. I think it might look something like this:

1. Think.
2. Do.
3. Repeat.

head wrap

I had hit my head recently, and the talk turned to wrapping head wounds with toilet paper.

These guys are at the Afghan peace conference. Talk about head wraps.


Omar Sobhani/Reuters

Many different groups or dynasties have ruled the Afghani area. They have fun sounding names:
Greco-Bactrians, Kushans, Indo-Sassanids, Kabul Shahis, Saffarids, Samanids, Ghaznavids, Ghurids, Kartids, Timurids, Mughals, and finally the Hotaki and Durrani (off wiki-awesome-pedia).

These are the current tribes:

Pashtun
Tajik (Farsiwan, and Qezelbash)
Hazara
Uzbek
Aimak
Turkmen
Baloch

I think the two guys with the gold headwraps are Qezelbash of the Ghaznavids. (I'm making this up, I have no idea, I just like the names.)

Serious thoughts

Dean Kamen says that educated people have a responsibility to not only live prosperously, freely, enjoying the luxuries of modern, first-world existence, but because there are relatively so few educated people, we equally have a responsibility to do good in the world. If not us, then who? Because if not us, how can we expect the other half of the population that live on under $1 a day to do it for themselves? More importantly, what is your life for if you haven't done good in the world?

High standards, ambitious benchmarks.

His emotional compass is in full display when he talks about building working arms for soldiers coming home from our overseas conflicts without arms, without two arms, or without arms and without legs. A TED talk. "It's not about technology, it's about people and stories."

Reflection on multi-conversing

I think I've just figured out something. Many people, but mostly men with their slightly different way of relating to people than women, have issues keeping several lines of conversation going at once. On a large scale, this is obviously true. Not even I, le grande writer of this blog, can hold a conversation with more than three people, although I do enjoy the challenge. It's mostly a vision thing. I like making eye contact with people I'm talking with, and once you get more than three, you have to turn your head, and you can completely lose sight of the third person, therefore miss all the visual cues you might want.
I have found that most of the men I work with - ok, all - have a hard enough time keeping one conversation going, much less interaction with more than one. And I believe, based on my own experience, men also have issues when they can't see the person's face.

sweet potato buttermilk cornbread

I made some a few days ago, and at first, right out of the oven, I didn't think it tasted very good. It was slightly bitter, which I attribute to the sweet potato, and slightly too wet for cornbread, which I attribute to using agave nectar as opposed to granulated sugar. However, day 4 in the life of the sweet potato cornbread seems to bring it to the peak of its existence, much like a wine that needs to settle into of its flavor. Odd.

Anyway, here's what I did.
1 cup flour
1 cup Bob's Red Mill 8 Grain Cereal - good enough substitute for corn meal
3 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup agave nectar
1 beaten egg
1 cup buttermilk
1-1/2 cup peeled and grated sweet potato.

Pre-heat oven to 425. Mix dry ingredients together. Cut in butter until mix is crumbly. Add wet stuff - everything else. Grease a baking dish that's at least 9x9x2 (I used a round cake pan.) Pour mix in, bake for 20-30 min. Voila!

Notes:

1 - I really enjoy cutting butter into flour. It's knowing that these small bits of butter you're embedding with flour will make tasty, greasy, buttery pockets in the final product. It really feels like you're doing something. Not unlike, say, cleaning out the basement.

2- I think the bitterness at the beginning of the life of my cornbread was perhaps because the sweet potato wasn't cooked enough. Not sure, but I would experiment in the future with grating it finer, or even pre-cooking it and just adding mashed sweet potato to the mix.

3- I sprinkled cinnamon and nutmeg on top after it was almost done baking, but definitely adding those into the mix, or at some point in the process is recommended.

4 - I feel that there is a chocolate version of this somewhere in the ether...chocolate chips, perhaps, or cocoa powder. Mmmmmmm.

Sounds!

SO, I think it's interesting how getting older has meant that my ears are more sensitive to musical nuance than ever before. I think it's an emotion thing - emotional maturity, emotional experiences, having had the chance to develop myself on an emotio-spiritual level...or something.

Anyway, sounds. Lovely sounds...

Just heard April Verch. Wow. She's cute, sings, dances, plays violin, writes songs, leads her band, teaches...and she played at the Olympics in Canada. Her legs are like John Jorgensen's fingers. A little unworldly.

John Jorgensen's "One Stolen Night" from the album of that same name has stolen my heart. I listen to it at 7am on the train, and I feel like the luckiest person in the world to be able to listen to it and see morning sun angle over the marshes of the shoreline...

April Verch's kick-ass guitar man, Clay Ross, hailing from South Carolina, has a group called Matuto. It means something in Brazilian, but I don't know what, but they have put out an album that is a mix between Brazilian music and bluegrass. And from what I'm hearing right now, it's got some funky reggae-zydeco-honkytonk-backroom blues-hint'o'grunge thing going on. Yeah! That's what I'm talking about, man! He played these awesome Brazilian shakers - they look like two small balls attached to each other by a short length of string...pickchers, need pickchers...


There. Marakas. He showed me how to play them, but it reminds me of hackey-sack - I can kick it once or twice, but to actually do something cool with it might take some effort...I think I do however have the hang of the pear shaped shaker...I need to buy one of those.


What really gets me about these people is that they are real, honest-to-god, making-a-living-as-musician musicians. And they are really amazing. And they aren't making the kind of money your average hedge fund manager is making. What, by the way, is the hedge fund manager contributing to joy and happiness in the world? Oh, well, I suppose they pay the taxes that help support unemployed people...OK. That's worthwhile.

April does this Ontario step dance thing that is pretty much tap dancing. But, my god, it's so cool...and she will sometimes play violin while tap-dancing...

OK. Enough rhapsodizing.

Working, for now, and Good Ideas

So I started working again today after about 7 months off. I like not working better, but it was fun to do something different. Gotta keep thinking about other things to do because this job I can do already. It will bore me quickly.

I also liked this Inc. article about how good ideas don't always make it to the top. Yet, be optimistic, anyway, as a function of being human.

Humility vs. Pretention

Was thinking it was important to consider some of the things I hated about my previous job. One of them was a certain quality of pretentiousness I found myself constantly experiencing during work. Reflecting on that period is leading me to question what it is about pretention that drives people nuts, and yet, why people are drawn to positions that are almost certainly bound to lead to brushing up against a load of pretension.

I'm reviewing this article that explores humility. A few thoughts:

0. Humility in Western society seems to often be tied directly, in a knot, with Christian values. I'm not Christian, and I find it virtually impossible to view the religion without feeling a certain amount of displeasure and disgust at Christianity's sins and foibles. That discomfort with the religion makes viewing humility through that lens an avenue I will not endeavor to take.

1. For a moment, think of what pretentiousness evokes: unjustified or excessive claims of value, exaggerated importance, arrogance, pompousness, disdain, vaingloriousness, self-centeredness, to name just a few. I think the fact that there are so many words that are fundamentally about the same thing, just shades of difference, hints at how big an issue this is for us humans. The opposite word, humility, has quite fewer synonyms, two notable examples being modesty and unpretentiousness.

2. Pretentiousness is a kind of inauthenticity, an untruthfulness in essence. Pretention is a close relative of pretending, hearkening back to praetendere, meaning to stretch, extend. In our modern day world, we find people who stretch truths, extend inauthentic versions of experience to attempt to gain power, money, and quantifiable gain.

3. In our competitive society, rebellious teenagers, younger people starting in the world are told "That's just how it is." Should you try to change this status quo, you run up against brick, concrete, and crap walls. It can make a person trying to operate out of humility, or at the very least, out of a sense of authenticity that isn't about achievement, feel very lost and lonely.

4. And yet, people recognize or at least pay lip service to the idea that life's true meaning, the real worth of this experience we are all currently sharing of living, breathing, eating, crapping, sleeping, seeing beauty, seeing tragedy...the whole shebang is worth it for most people through things that deny pretentiousness. That is, true connections with others, love, service, helping others. These things, some say, are what lead to a good life, a life that when your time is up, you will be able to look back on and have no regret. And not have to lie about it to yourself.

5. Not easy questions, by far. I think of John Paulson, the hedge fund manager who, as portrayed in the book The Greatest Trade Ever. By some of society's standards, he has achieved pinnacles of success, becoming a billionaire, winning an unimaginable sum by taking advantage of systemic flaws in the social fabric. I think he's someone who was made with a drive to earn money. And so that's what he does. It's a fairly simple thing, but the milieu in which he operates is one that I cannot believe isn't oozing with pretentiousness. Can you have a moral compass amidst all that money and power?

More thoughts later.

Music, Gongs, and Cows

Gongs are the shit. http://gongsongs.com/products.html

I love listening to gongs. Apparently, so do cows. (look for Massimo Piazza on the gongsongs page)