born live love die

I quoted a lyric earlier and I think I will add a category with that as the title.

And here I am in my clean, white shirt,
With a little money in my pocket and a nice warm home.

I made some pasta tonight because I think the kids need to carb up.  They have been doing tennis and swimming during the day and swimming at night.  We ate well and I turned on the telly to catch a little news before we head out for the swim lessons.  The news channels went into commercial break so I surfed a little.  I knew that History Channel was running Band of Brothers and I wanted to see where they were.

It is the episode where Easy Company discovers a concentration camp.  I turned it on just at the point where they find the camp and open it up.  The inmates come toward them.  One of them is carrying a dying man.

It hit me.  I started to cry.  “Never again” I said, as if I could somehow keep that kind of evil from happening.  I started to sob.  I felt hopeless when I thought about the evil that had swept across Europe in the Thirties.  I kept saying “Never again”, but I also knew that there wasn’t a lot that I could do about it.  I felt hopeless in a way that I haven’t felt for a long time.

Clean white shirt is about having a lot of needs met and looking around to see what there is that I can do in the world.  Darfur?  Out of reach.

You drive three miles from all this prosperity
Down across the river and you see a ghetto there
And we got children walking around with guns
And they got knives and drugs and pain to spare
And here I am in my clean white shirt
With a little money in my pocket and a nice warm home
And we got teenagers walkin’ around in a culture of darkness
Livin’ together alone.
And I can’t explain it and I can’t understand
But I’ll come down and get my hands dirty and together we’ll make a stand.

Make a stand is how I feel right now.  Yackers yacking on the telly, trying to make people mad.  I’ve had enough of that crap.

I may have a clean white shirt, but I’m going to get it dirty.

The jilted wife of the governor who wanted to tango doesn’t seem to want to shut up.  She was rolling out of her driveway and stopped to talk on camera.  I can’t find a link on line about it, but she got in a few digs on her wayward husband.

Yo, lady, if your kids are your concern, stay away from the cameras.  Do not snipe at your husband on camera while your kids are in the car.  The kids are having a hard time as it is, and trying to demand their allegiance, which is what you are doing, is adding to their burden.

Stay away from the cameras.  The camera is not your friend.  Make no more public statements.  Your kids are having a hard time.  Make them available to their father.

You have a lot of anger, but anger isn’t noteworthy.

You referenced some Bible verses in your initial statement, how about the Lord’s Prayer?  Forgive those who trespass against you.  Yeah, it’s hard, but it’s worth it.

Try James 1:19-20

Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath:
For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.

Pixar’s latest animated movie, Up, is pretty good.  Most Pixar movies focus on relationships that do not have a nuclear family dynamic.  The Incredibles was an exception.

The protagonist is a man who is waiting to die.  He has lived his life and now there is nothing left.  He is old, he feels broken.  His life with his late wife is told quickly and it brought a tear to my eye.  Okay, many tears.  To escape the loss of his house and his freedom, he floats it away with a lot of balloons.  Adventure ensues.

I saw the movie in 3D, and this is great 3D.  Because it is animated, it is possible to render depth of field.  I popped my glasses down to look at the screen several times and things that were in long focus were still clear.  Things in the foreground, like a character’s hair, were slightly blurry, but the leaped off the screen when I put the glasses back on.  With other 3D technologies, the reflection off the front of viewers glasses in back of me would be reflected off the inside of my glasses and be quite annoying.  This was due to lens coatings, I think.  This would show up when there was a lot of light on the screen as white blinking lights just at the edge of my peripheral vision.  I didn’t like it.  I didn’t see any of that in this screening.

Apart from the technology, the storytelling was quite good.  Pixar movies usually have a message or two that can be extracted, along with small character things that stick.  In A Bug’s Life, the characters Tuck and Roll are easy to remember, even though they had no dialog.  The parable of the rock stuck with Bookzilla.  She went around saying “Voila, it’s a tree!”, even though she was around three.  In Finding Nemo, the turtles who said little more than “Dude!” bring a smile, but Nemo’s discovery of “Keep swimming!” is a message to remember at all ages.  In Up, the dogs cracked me up, but the message of what makes an adventure is the lasting one.

This movie should be seen in the theater in 3D.

With the passing of the self-named “King of Pop”, I was going to write something snarky, perhaps echo what Stanley Crouch said about Tupac.  To be the king of the ephemeral, self-named or not, seems pretty shallow, but I won’t go there.

In the comments at TBogg, I saw that a music video had been rendered in Lego stop action animation, available on YouTube.  I found these:

Bohemian Rhapsody – this seems to be a frame-by-frame reconstruction of the Queen video

My Generation – I don’t recognize the audio track (The Who released everything on tape at least twice, so it gets confusing)

There are a lot of animations that do not copy the original videos, like this one of Elinor Rigby (I don’t think there was an original video)

One of my favorite songs is one recorded by Martina McBride, “Love’s The Only House” and I thought of a bit of the lyric when I was reading this article.

And here I am in my clean, white shirt,
With a little money in my pocket and a nice warm home

The article is the Failed States Index at Foreign Policy.

Yemen may not yet be front-page news, but it’s being watched intently these days in capitals worldwide. A perfect storm of state failure is now brewing there: disappearing oil and water reserves; a mob of migrants, some allegedly with al Qaeda ties, flooding in from Somalia, the failed state next door; and a weak government increasingly unable to keep things running. Many worry Yemen is the next Afghanistan: a global problem wrapped in a failed state.

It’s not just Yemen. The financial crisis was a near-death experience for insurgency-plagued Pakistan, which remains on imf life support. Cameroon has been rocked by economic contagion, which sparked riots, violence, and instability. Other countries dependent on the import and export of commodities—from Nigeria to Equatorial Guinea to Bangladesh—had a similarly rough go of it last year, suffering what economist Homi Kharas calls a “whiplash effect” as prices spiked sharply and then plummeted. All indications are that 2009 will bring little to no reprieve.

Instead, the global recession is sparking fears that multiple states could slip all at once into the ranks of the failing.

The world my children will live in is one ripe for the wars we thought were too big to happen.  Multiple failed states, fractionalization, independent players intent on expansion; it’s a recipe for another world war.  The countries listed in this report form a band that starts in Equatorial Africa and goes east, across Asia.  The transition to economies that are not dependent on Middle East oil which will happen around the middle of this century will be rough.  These countries all have high birth rates and failed political systems.  They can’t feed the people they have now.

I’m sitting in my clean shirt and there isn’t much I can do about it.  But maybe my kids can.

John Dickerson at Slate.com:

I’m not offering Sanford’s humanity as an excuse. I’m just marveling at how few people stopped for a moment to even nod to it. My thoughtful colleague William Saletan and Andrew Sullivan were exceptions. Maybe there are others. Maybe people expressed these views in private conversations. But in the e-mails and Twitter entries and blog posts I read in the aftermath, Sanford’s human ruin was greeted with what felt like antiseptic glee. The pain he’s caused, the hypocrisies he’s engaged in, seemed like license to deny him any humanity at all.

And what, exactly is Sanford’s humanity?  He cheated on his wife and got caught, then went on the lam to Argentina?  What part of that is the human part?  Cheating or ducking out?

Sanford acted with extreme selfishness, and that is the action we label ‘human’?  If a person is uncharacteristically generous, do we remark on the behavior as an example of ‘humanity’?

Is behavior at the margins of the spectrum that which we call ‘humanity’ as a way of excusing it?  Are we supposed to say, “There but for the grace of God go I?”

I can’t.  I might say that if I saw someone on whom has fallen an unforseen and unavoidable calamity, but I don’t say that for people who engage in pointless and self-centered actions and are found out.

When the governor’s wife said that she didn’t know where he husband was on Father’s day, I knew that she knew where he was and that he was with another woman.  I think that a lot of people knew that.  But none of the news organizations raised the possibility.  No one said, “Where’s his girlfriend?”.  I’m pretty sure they were thinking it.

She said:

I believe wholeheartedly in the sanctity, dignity and importance of the institution of marriage. I believe that has been consistently reflected in my actions. When I found out about my husband’s infidelity I worked immediately to first seek reconciliation through forgiveness, and then to work diligently to repair our marriage. We reached a point where I felt it was important to look my sons in the eyes and maintain my dignity, self-respect, and my basic sense of right and wrong. I therefore asked my husband to leave two weeks ago.

I can relate to that.  Infidelity is like a drug.  The governor got hooked and can’t give it up.  It is a completely self-centered act, and it probably feels very good for the one doing it.

Most models for human behavior have a linear basis.  Some use two axis or posit four foci in a plane.  The model I have developed is that of a matrix vectors, each of which contains a physiological component.  The evaluation of the matrix will result in a single action being taken, but all of the components are there for any one of a number of actions.

I call them ‘narcissism vectors’ in a ‘narcissism matrix’.  Each vector measures the essential question, “Do I do for you, or for me?” in some area.  Each vector has some physiological component, a learning component and a perceptual component.

Some of these components are parametric.  For example, when a person is in the throes of infidelity, their ability at self-perception is severely distorted.  There could be a physiological component to this, e.g., dopamine is being generated at very high rates and it overwhelms the ability to make rational decisions.

The governor’s wife is also working in this model and her ability to make rational decisions will be impacted.  She may be able to couch her position in strong rhetoric, but that doesn’t speak to the pain she must be feeling.

On CNN last night, Drew Pinsky said something like, “the marriage may have been in trouble and the affair was a result of that.”  Yo, Drew, you deal with drug addicts all the time.  Just because someone wants to feed the narcissistic beast, that doesn’t make the marriage in trouble.  It was only in trouble for one of them.  One of the pair felt trapped by responsibilities and wanted out.  And instead of being truthful, that person engaged in deception to feed that narcissism.

In so far as drug addicts have any control over their actions, the over riding thought is, “I’m doing this for me.”  A drug addict doesn’t try dangerous drugs because they will be able to help their neighbor.  They do it for themselves.  Addiction is an exercise in narcissism.

I can understand the sentiment of the governor’s wife, but I don’t think she did her kids any favors.  She just dumped the weight of her failed marriage onto her kids shoulders.  The governor rejected her, and she is passing the rejection on to her kids by being this public about it.

She had limited options in that the guy was out of the country and then back in the country and in the media.  The best thing she could have done was a simple statement that she and her husband were having difficulty in their marriage, that the media may want to explore the political implications of the governor’s actions, that they leave her and her children alone to deal with this painful issue.  She didn’t need to tell anyone about the separation or go into the detail that she did.

It is hard to keep quiet at times like these when you feel like you have been violated in the most intimate way, that your love and trust have been kicked to the curb.  But keeping the kids out of it is the best move.

What I haven’t heard from President Obama is something along the lines of “Americans support the universally identified right of freedom of self-determination.  Americans support free and fair elections as a way for peoples around the world to express that self-determination.”  I think he has made statements that are more specific than that and I don’t think he laid the correct foundation for them.

Nate Silver says just about all that I have wanted to say about health insurance but have had the time (or skill or detailed knowledge) to write.  Silver writes about the fallacious arguments being hoisted by the conservatives and knocks them down, one by one.  And here’s the nuts of the article:

This is particularly so because health insurance benefits, unlike other types of income, aren’t taxed, and so Fredrick is less cognizant of them if show up on his paycheck at all. Not only, then, is the free market maxim of perfect information violated, but it’s violated in such a way that creates artificial profits for the insurance industry: the government is effectively subsidizing every dollar that Frederick’s company is willing to spend on his insurance benefit.  The profits the insurance industry is making, of course — profits artificially boosted by an enormous backdoor tax subsidy — don’t seem to be buying the customer much of anything in terms of improved service or cost savings.

Read the whole thing.

My trivial analysis is that there are three parties for the product in question.  The product is health care.  Consumers need it, healthcard providers supply it, and just what the hell do insurance companies do?

Silver calls out George Will:

What Will’s position reflects instead is ideology: who cares that the federal government could build a better mousetrap? They’re the government and that’s bad. His argument is really no more sophisticated than that.

My trivial analysis is the flip side of Will’s, but the government will be more transparent than an insurance company.

There are times when I am overcome with love for my children.  I just want to hold them and feel the warmth of their flesh against mine.

There are other times when they do things that make me revert to drill sergeant mode.  I wanted to see “Up”, the new Pixar movie.  I had timed it out so that we had time to get to the theater.  I gave them several warnings that it was time to get their shoes on.  I look into the living room and they are on the floor, looking at something JMan made.  Sergeant Rock made his aappearance.

Bookzilla gets her shoes on and starts to go for the white board marker.  “Don’t touch it.  Go to the car.”  I put too much steel into those words.  JMan gets to the car and we start out.  Silence.  Is Dad really that angry?  I need to lighten the mood.  I ask Bookzilla about her classes for next year.  She says that she is taking Spanish.  I say, “Let me see if I can count to ten in Spanish”.  I get to 5 and get lost.  JMan takes over and counts to 20.  Bookzilla chimes in.  They are soon chatty again and horsing around with each other while we wait in line for tickets at the theater.

There are times that I dearly love them.  There are other times when I want to roar.  But there are more times when I take a step back and see how blessed I really am.