Coyote Blog

Yesterday I read in Reason that apparently the new Pope has in the past shown support for the anti-Harry Potter crowd, which is gearing itself up in anticipation of the new Harry Potter book release tomorrow.  He apparently wrote:

It is good, that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are
subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity
in the soul, before it can grow properly.

Here is my whole take on the anti-Harry crowd:  Get a life.  From a values point of view, what is it about Harry that you wouldn't want your child to emulate?  And as for the magic stuff - OK, get ready for this - its...made up.  Yes, it is a fantasy, it is not real.  There is no danger of your child suddenly running off and casting spells.

And here is my take on the Potter books as a whole:  Awesome.  Forget that I personally have enjoyed reading every one of them.  Consider that my 11-year-old boy has been waiting for weeks, not for a computer game or movie to come out, but for a book.  Likely a loooonnnggg book.  And this weekend, no matter what the weather or what is on TV, he will be glued to a couch from dawn to dusk reading.  Do you remember being so excited about reading anything at 11, other than the new issue of Spiderman?

By the way, its your last chance to place a bet on which major character buys it in this book, though Dumbledore is the runaway favorite (the logic being that in the story archetype that Rowling seems to be following, the young hero must face the final battle without his mentor - so Dumbledore needs to go before the 7th and last book).

Update:  At noon, Boston time my son crossed over page 310.  I am not sure I read that fast.

Update #2:  OK, its about 4:00 Eastern on Saturday and he is done.  You can tell that we struggle to keep this kid in books (this week he has read Harry Potter, the DaVinci Code, and a Clive Cussler book).  I will try to get him to write a review for the blog.  I threatened that I would tie him up naked in the middle of his school's cafeteria if he gave me any spoilers, but I will say that he was very, very depressed at the end.

Its good to be back in the USA, though my wife and I had a great time in Paris.  In the extended post, I have some pictures from our trip.  However, don't expect any tourist sites.  My business-related travelogue includes pictures of a gas station, a few cool new cars, my restaurant bill from hell, and other stuff...

Continue reading ‘Some Final Observations from Paris (with Pictures!)’ »

My best wishes to the people of London today.  London is perhaps my favorite city in the world.  Only a coin flip with my wife put us on the Paris metro rather than the London underground yesterday, so the bombings hit close to home.  This is only the second time in five years my wife and I have gotten away without the kids for more than a day -- the first was a trip to Manhattan from September 9-13, 2001.  Maybe we should notify Homeland Security when we make our travel plans next time.  I know my mom is getting exasperated with worrying about me near major attacks.

• I got tripped up today by my American expectations.  The hotel had this little breakfast buffet in the lobby.  It had some coffee and juice and a few croissants.  It was not nearly as nice as the free breakfast at a Hampton Inn or Holiday Inn Express, but it was still a quick and easy way to eat and get out the door.  OOOPPSS.  My wife and I got hit with a bill for 52 euros, or over $65, because we grabbed some coffee and pastries off the buffet.  Bummer.
• Service is a strange thing here.  I try fairly hard to submerge my ugly-American impatient tendencies.  I know to expect that meals will be paced much slower here, and have come to enjoy that pace, at least on vacation.  Shopping, though, is another story.  I still just want to get the stuff I want, pay for it, and go.  I have made the following observations about French service:  When you have a service person's attention, they will serve you for as long as you need, chatting about the product and about your life, for hours if necessary.  The problem is, that they will do this even if 10 other people are waiting to be served.  The lines here are awful, and you have to wait in them for everything.  Women in the US complain about bathroom lines at sporting events, but the women's rooms here have lines all the time, everywhere.  Even my wife the europhile is getting fed up with 45 minute transaction times
• We chose to blow it out one night, and have a top notch French meal at a top restaurant.  We ended up spending a ridiculous sum, more than half the people in the world make in a year, for one meal.  It would embarrass me to spend so much consistently (heck it embarasses me this once), especially since there are equally fine meals out there for 1/4 or less the price.  Also, we were actually nervous for the first 20 minutes - is that nuts?  But there is nothing in the world that can make an American like me who knows the McDonald's value meal numbers by heart nervous like a great French restaurant.  We eventually got into the spirit of the once in a lifetime experience, enough that we were laughing pretty loud about the little fried goldfish we got for appetizers.
• By the way, condolences for the French and the Olympics.  Paris would make a fine venue.  The only real mar in the city's beauty is that it has a real trash and dog poop problem on the streets (no scoop laws here, at least none that anyone enforces) so an Aolympics might help them clean it all up.  Maybe they need a few years of Mayor Giuliani?  Really, it is a beautiful city - did I mention that?  Perhaps the most beautiful city in Europe even before WWII, and certainly the most beautiful after given that it was spared most of the bombing and fighting other great cities faced (not too mention the horrendous 1950's architecture they were rebuilt with.  I mean, my god, look at Berlin.  It was rebuilt during the most horrid period in modern architecture).
• More later on hotels and restaurants you might visit if you come here,
  plus I will just have to post a scan of our restaurant bill from tonight

I was going to write a Fourth of July post, but it kept looking like my past Memorial Day effort, so, since I am in France and ready to go consume more food, I will take a shortcut this holiday:

Every Memorial Day, I am assaulted with various quotes from people
thanking the military for fighting and dying for our right to vote.  I
would bet that a depressing number of people in this country, when
asked what their most important freedom was, or what made America
great, would answer "the right to vote."

Now, don't get me wrong, the right to vote in a representative
democracy is great and has proven a moderately effective (but not
perfect) check on creeping statism.  A democracy, however, in and of
itself can still be tyrannical.  After all, Hitler was voted into power
in Germany, and without checks, majorities in a democracy would be free
to vote away anything it wanted from the minority - their property,
their liberty, even their life.   Even in the US, majorities vote to curtail the rights of minorities all the time, even when those minorities are not impinging on anyone else.  In the US today, 51% of the population have voted to take money and property of the other 49%.

In my mind, there are at least three founding principles of the
United States that are far more important than the right to vote:

• The Rule of Law.  For about 99% of human
  history, political power has been exercised at the unchecked capricious
  whim of a few individuals.  The great innovation of western countries
  like the US, and before it England and the Netherlands, has been to
  subjugate the power of individuals to the rule of law.  Criminal
  justice, adjudication of disputes, contracts, etc. all operate based on
  a set of laws known to all in advance.

Today the rule of law actually faces a number of threats in this
country.  One of the most important aspects of the rule of law is that
legality (and illegality) can be objectively determined in a repeatable
manner from written and well-understood rules.  Unfortunately, the
massive regulatory and tax code structure in this country have created
a set of rules that are subject to change and interpretation constantly at
the whim of the regulatory body.  Every day, hundreds of people and
companies find themselves facing penalties due to an arbitrary
interpretation of obscure regulations (examples I have seen personally here).

• Sanctity and Protection of Individual Rights.
  Laws, though, can be changed.  In a democracy, with a strong rule of
  law, we could still legally pass a law that said, say, that no one is
  allowed to criticize or hurt the feelings of a white person.  What
  prevents such laws from getting passed (except at major universities)
  is a protection of freedom of speech, or, more broadly, a recognition
  that individuals have certain rights that no law or vote may take
  away.  These rights are typically outlined in a Constitution, but are
  not worth the paper they are written on unless a society has the desire
  and will, not to mention the political processes in place, to protect
  these rights and make the Constitution real.   

Today,
even in the US, we do a pretty mixed job of protecting individual
rights, strongly protecting some (like free speech) while letting
others, such as property rights or freedom of association, slide. 

• Government is our servant.
  The central, really very new concept on which this country was founded
  is that an individual's rights do not flow from government, but are
  inherent to man.  That government in fact only makes sense to the
  extent that it is our servant in the defense of our rights, rather than
  as the vessel from which these rights grudgingly flow.

Statists
of all stripes have tried to challenge this assumption over the last
100 years.   While their exact details have varied, every statist has
tried to create some larger entity to which the individual should be
subjugated:  the Proletariat, the common good, God, the master race.
They all hold in common that the government's job is to sacrifice one
group to another.  A common approach among modern statists is to create
a myriad of new non-rights to dilute and replace our fundamental rights
as individuals.  These new non-rights, such as the "right" to health
care, a job, education, or even recreation, for god sakes, are
meaningless in a free society, as they can't exist unless one
person is harnessed involuntarily to provide them to another person.
These non-rights are the exact opposite of freedom, and in fact require
enslavement and sacrifice of one group to another.

Don't believe that this is what statists are working for? The other day I saw this quote from the increasingly insane Lou Dobbs (Did you ever suspect that Lou got pulled into a room a while back by some strange power broker as did Howard Beale in Network?):

Our population explosion not only detracts from our quality of life but
threatens our liberties and freedom as well. As Cornell's Pimentel puts
it, "Back when we had, say, 100 million people in the U.S., when I
voted, I was one of 100 million people. Today, I am one of 285 million
people, so my vote and impact decreases with the increase in the
population." Pimentel adds, "So our freedoms also go down the drain."

What??
In a society with a rule of law protecting individual rights, how does
having a diluted vote reduce your freedom?  The only way it does, and therefore what must be in the author's head, is if
one looks at government as a statist tug of war, with various parties
jockeying for a majority so they can plunder the minority.  But in this
case, freedom and rule of law are already dead, so what does a
dilution of vote matter?  He is arguing that dilution of political
power reduces freedom -- this country was rightly founded on just the
opposite notion, that freedom requires a dilution of political power.

At the end of the day, our freedoms in this country will only last
so long as we as a nation continue to hold to the principle that our
rights as individuals are our own, and the government's job is to
protect them, not to ration them.  Without this common belief, all the
other institutions we have discussed, from voting to the rule of law to
the Constitution, can be subverted in time.

So to America's soldiers, thank you.  Thank you for protecting this
fragile and historically unique notion that men and women own
themselves and their lives.

After a couple of days here, some impressions:

• The airline flights that dump you off in Europe at 7am which seemed so convivial when I was consulting are less so when I am a tourist.  We had the experience of arriving at our hotel about 8am, which of course did not yet have a room anywhere near ready.  We had a nice day walking around, but we sure were exhausted by the time we got to our room and had a nap.  Note:  American Airlines 767's have very very uncomfortable business class seats - really a disgrace nowadays.
• The Louvre is magnificent, but is ridiculously big.  It is impossible to digest.  You really have to find a branch of art, like the Flemish painters, and stay in that area.  The Musee d'Orsay, which focuses on 19th century French art, is much more digestible.  Also, it has a cool location in a train station, which was a very important part of 19th century life.
• The French smoking thing has been joked about so much it is almost a caricature, but it is still a shock the first time in a restaurant.  We observed many American smokers reveling in their smoking freedom.  I wonder if there is a business opportunity to sponsor smoking trips to Paris, much like those Asia sex trips to Thailand.
• Wow, the food is expensive!  $50-80 entrees in some places, and for that you can get two slices of tenderloin.  It was good though, and we have yet to have a bad, or even so-so, meal.
• I would feel safer in a golf cart than some of the cars here.  You can really see the trade-offs with fuel economy we make in the US by having crash test standards.  Over here with no crash tests and $6.00 gas, you get lots of tiny cars.  Mini-coopers look average to large-sized here.
• The Champs d'elysees was amazing on Sunday afternoon - a sea of people going up the hill.  It looked like those pictures of the start of the NY marathon, but it went as far as the eye can see.  Amazingly, with all this foot traffic past the door, half the businesses were closed that day (welcome to Europe, I guess)
• There are more shoe stores here than fast food restaurants in Phoenix.  And my wife has stopped in every one of them

OK, this may be a bit bizarre, but believe me, when you live in a climate that routinely remains between 100-114 degrees for five months, comfortable underwear is a must.  I have tried nearly every type and brand, from briefs to boxers, and have recently discovered some new ones that are great.  They are made by Under Armour, which is an entirely familiar clothing line to everyone here in Phoenix because they handle heat and sweat so well.  My kids live in the Heatgear, though I opt for the Loosegear since I no longer have the body for form fitting clothing. 

The underwear is made of that silky under-armour fabric, but is very comfortable and seems to wick sweat away from your body.  The downside is that they are nearly $20 a pair, but they don't shrink and so far have held up well. 

PS- I know my friend Scott in San Francisco tried a pair as well - he may be able to give us a review in the comments of whether he liked them or not.

Final Note: To those of you who suggest "none", you haven't lived in a really hot climate.  "Freefalling" may be OK on a breezy day on the California coast, but in a Phoenix summer or in my birthplace of Houston, you are going to regret it.

Really Random Tangent: Someone sitting with me in my office this morning commented that "the only reason we think it is hot when it is 98 out is because of our clothes.  If we were naked, 98.6 would be the perfect temperature because that is our body heat."  This is actually a misconception and ignores several principals of thermodynamics.

The key fact is that the body generally is a net producer of heat.  To be comfortable and maintain body heat, the body must shed this heat, which humans do in two ways.  First, we transfer heat to the surrounding air from our skin - to do this well, the surrounding temperature needs to be less than our body heat.  The more differential, the more heat transfer.  Air motion (via wind) provides convective heat transfer, which accelerates this process.  Second, we sweat.  When sweat evaporates, it pulls heat from the surrounding air and adjacent body.  Sweating cools us therefore based on evaporation rates, which is one reason why drier climates are more comfortable -- sweat evaporates faster. 

In addition to shedding the body heat we produce, we also have to shed any heat we pick up by radiative transfer.  Radiative heating is the heat we feel on our skin when we are in direct sunlight, and is why one can be cooler in light than dark clothing (dark colors absorb more radiative heat). 

All this means that if we are naked, in the shade, in a dry climate like Phoenix on a breezy day, we are likely to be comfortable at a temperature closer to 98.6.  In the direct sun in a calm, humid climate, even naked, we are going to want a temperature much much less than 98 to be comfortable.

Of late, I have been getting a lot of calls at work from stock boiler-rooms with high-energy come-on guys trying to sell me some hot equity.  The tactics used by these calls is very consistent, but to describe it I need to share some background.

Fifteen years or so ago, I from time-to-time would get calls from what I assume were legitimate brokers trying to get my business.  They would call me and say something like "I am not going to sell you anything today.  I am going to give you the name of 5 equities, and in 6 months I am going to call you back".  If played straight, this is not a bad sales tactic - prove your ability to pick stocks and out-perform the market in advance of asking for business.  Of course, this could be gamed:  I could create 20 lists of 5 stocks each and call a thousand people, giving each person one of the 20 lists.  Then I could wait 6 months and call back those people whose 5 stocks outperformed the market.

Today, there is a less patient variation on this call.  I get about three calls a week from guys saying "do you remember me when I called you last January 23, and fedexed you our stock selections - since then they are up xx%".  The only problem is that they never called or fedexed anything, but I guess they are hoping that I assume I forgot and then take their word for their stock picks.  The scam here becomes more obvious when you get your 10th call from these guys.  It became even more obvious given I have three numbers for my business and over a 20 minute time period I got three calls on three lines from three different people with the same spiel starting "this is X, you remember my call from a few months ago?"

LOL, I can just picture Tony Soprano in the back room monitoring the whole operation. 

The Onion has a dead-on spoof of how major media selects "experts" for their articles.  The spoof is worth reading in total, but to give you a taste:

Dr. Gary Canton, a professor of applied nuclear physics and
energy-development technologies at MIT and a leading expert in American
nuclear-power applications, was rejected by MSNBC producers for being
"too boring for TV" Monday....

"[Canton] went on like that for six... long... minutes," ...
"Fact after mind-numbing fact. Then he started spewing all these
statistics about megawatts and the nation's current energy consumption
and I don't know what, because my mind just shut off. I tried to lead
him in the right direction. I told him to address the fears that the average citizen might have about nuclear power, but he still utterly failed to mention meltdowns, radiation, or mushroom clouds."...

MSNBC chose Skip Hammond, former Arizona State football player, MBA holder, and author of Imprison The Sun: America's Coming Nuclear-Power Holocaust. Hammond is best known for his "atomic domino" theory of chained power-plant explosions and his signature lavender silk tie.

"Absolute Armageddon," Hammond said when asked about the dangers
increased reliance on nuclear power might pose. "Atoms are not only too
tiny to be seen, they're too powerful to be predicted. Three Mile
Island? Remember it? I do. Don't they?"

"Clouds of radiation, glowing rivers, a hole reaching to the earth's
core"”that's what we're facing, " Hammond continued. "Death of one in
four Americans! Count off, everyone: one, two, three, you. Millions of people gone. And no one's even mentioned terrorism yet. You have to wonder why not."

According to [MSNBC], Hammond was "perfect."

Dead-on.  Tell me you haven't seen this exact type of thing in stories on nuclear power, biotechnology, genetically modified crops, global warming, breast implants, Vioxx, etc etc.

Happy Cinco de Mayo, because it is always good to celebrate independence from the French.  As you might imagine, this is a fairly big celebration down here in Arizona.

A bit of history, from the source above (I have added emphasis to a couple of lines I really liked)

The French had landed in Mexico (along with
Spanish and English troops) five months earlier on the pretext of collecting
Mexican debts from the newly elected government of democratic President (and
Indian) Benito Juarez.  The English and Spanish quickly made deals and
left.  The French, however, had different ideas.

Under Emperor Napoleon III, who detested the
United States, the French came to stay.  They brought a Hapsburg prince
with them to rule the new Mexican empire.  His name was Maximilian; his
wife, Carolota.  Napoleon's French Army had not been defeated in 50 years,
and it invaded Mexico with the finest modern equipment and with a newly
reconstituted Foreign Legion.  The French were not afraid of anyone,
especially since the United States was embroiled in its own Civil War.

The French Army left the port of Vera Cruz to
attack Mexico City to the west, as the French assumed that the Mexicans would
give up should their capital fall to the enemy -- as European countries
traditionally did. [ed.-- and as the French inexplicably did as recently as 1940] 

Under the command of Texas-born General
Zaragosa, (and the cavalry under the command of Colonel Porfirio Diaz, later to
be Mexico's president and dictator), the Mexicans awaited.  Brightly
dressed French Dragoons led the enemy columns.  The Mexican Army was less
stylish.

General Zaragosa ordered Colonel Diaz to take
his cavalry, the best in the world, out to the French flanks.  In response,
the French did a most stupid thing; they sent their cavalry off to chase Diaz
and his men, who proceeded to butcher them.  The remaining French
infantrymen charged the Mexican defenders through sloppy mud from a thunderstorm
and through hundreds of head of stampeding cattle stirred up by Indians armed
only with machetes.

When the battle was over, many French were
killed or wounded and their cavalry was being chased by Diaz' superb horsemen
miles away.  The Mexicans had won a great victory that kept Napoleon III
from supplying the confederate rebels for another year, allowing the United
States to build the greatest army the world had ever seen.  This grand army
smashed the Confederates at Gettysburg just 14 months after the battle of Puebla,
essentially ending the Civil War.

Union forces were then rushed to the
Texas/Mexican border under General Phil Sheridan, who made sure that the
Mexicans got all the weapons and ammunition they needed to expel the
French.  American soldiers were discharged with their uniforms and rifles
if they promised to join the Mexican Army to fight the French.  The
American Legion of Honor marched in the Victory Parade in Mexico, City.

Sticking with the Cinco de Mayo theme, immigration has been a big issue of late down here in the Southwest.  Last election cycle Arizona passed a law limiting benefits to illegal immigrants.  This last few months have seen the "minuteman project", ostensibly to have private citizens help "defend the borders" and which got surprising support from America's most famous immigrant Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I have a number of friends who passionately support these efforts.  I am forced to say that not only do I disagree with them, I am actually embarrassed by the Minuteman project.  Michelle Malkin makes the argument that these are good people and not crazed racist KKK crazies.  OK, I am willing to accept this (for most of them) but this just makes it worse, wasting the patriotism and labor and time of people to such a wrong-headed end. (Matt Welch is less willing to believe they are just happy misguided soles).

At the end of the day, the vast, vast majority of people crossing the border are looking for a job.  That's it.  They are not terrorists or foreign spies or criminals -- they are ordinary people looking for a job, often to support their family.  This is why I find it an incredible waste that we have Arizona's private citizens, many of whom probably lament the slacker mentality of recent American generations of kids, standing around along the border making sure that people who are looking for a job in this country don't find one.

Of course, these Minuteman folks won't say that is what they are doing.  They are saying that they are:

• Defending the borders.   A Government's job is NOT (repeat NOT) "defending its border".  A government's job is to defend its citizens.
  In 1939, if a country was next door to Nazi Germany, defending its
  citizens probably meant defending the borders.  Today, though, next to
  Canada and the Mexico with whom we have been at peace for 150 years and
  with whom we share a common market, its harder to argue that defending
  our citizens requires having a Maginot Line at the border.

I am sure that our southern border is vulnerable to terrorists crossing, but I am equally sure that the minutemen did not find a single one.  Here is the real problem:  Because we force Mexican immigration to cross illegally across the open borders, terrorists trying to use the same approach are masked by thousands of others crossing the border.  By making free passage of Mexicans across the border illegal, we shift them out of monitored border crossings and onto the frontier, where they mask true criminals and terrorists.  Think of it this way - would you rather try to find a single terrorist who is alone in an empty stadium or one of 60,000 people at a football game?

• Enforcing the rule of law.  Maybe, but why not start with sitting beside the highway and writing down license plates of speeders too?  At the end of the day, enforcing current immigration law is as hopeless as was prohibition, the war on drugs, and enforcing the 55 mile-an-hour speed limit.

• Protecting American jobs.  I would not be at all surprised to find a high degree of overlap between the Minuteman supporters and the anti-NAFTA crowd.  The fear that "immigrants might be willing to do your job for less than you are willing to do your job for" has always been a strong part of anti-immigration movements.  The fact of the matter, though, is that this takes a very static view of the world.  The economy is not a zero sum game with competition for a fixed number of jobs.  New sources of labor can spur economic growth that creates new jobs.  The best example of this was in the last three decades, where a totally new, sometimes unskilled, work force of 40 million people showed up at industry's door suddenly looking for work:  women.  I told the story here (towards the bottom of the post), but the bottom line is that these new workers made the economy stronger, and now, with a generation or two behind them in the work force, women are really the backbone of entrepreneurship today in this country.  Besides, if we don't allow companies to legally hire immigrant workers, businesses in this global economy will just pick up and move to Mexico.

• Reducing cost of government services.  As a libertarian, I am very sympathetic to the argument that you don't want immigrants coming in and being able to immediately live off our safety net at taxpayers expense.  In my mind, though, this has historically been a problem of poorly crafted law rather than immigration per se.  It certainly would be possible to craft an intelligent immigration policy that allowed access to social services in steps.  By the way, shifting illegals into legal guest worker programs would likely increase tax revenues by bringing these folks into the system.

• Preventing Hispanics from becoming the dominant ethnic group in the Southwest.  Yes, I am positive this is a concern of many of these folks, just as the Italians in Boston at one time were worried about being overrun by the Irish.  It barely dignifies a response, except to say that if you are really concerned with the number of permanent Hispanic residents, then a guest worker program might actually reduce the number.  The reason is that many Mexicans still love their country but want work.  If they were allowed to freely move back and forth, they would do so.  But, since the border is the riskiest point for them, once they get in the US, they are reluctant to ever leave again.

We have got to have an intelligent immigration policy that

• Allows for free movement of guest workers across the border, with few limits on total numbers allowed. 
• A clear and fair system for guest workers to move up over time towards full citizenship
• A clear and fair system of tiered access to social services as immigrants progress from worker to citizen (e.g. emergency services access to all, but welfare/social security require full citizenship).
• Includes a taxation system on guest worker labor that causes these workers to help pay for the services they use.

Kudos to Professor Bainbridge for breaking with the conservative ranks to support an intelligent guest worker program.  More here from Steven Taylor.

Postscript:  I want to propose a thought experiment.  Most everyone considered the Berlin Wall a travesty.  Now, keeping all the facts about East and West the same, make one change:  suppose the wall was built instead by the West to stem the flood of immigrants from the oppressive east.  Would the wall suddenly become OK?  Even if the reality on the ground for an East Berliner (ie they can't escape) remained unchanged?

Border walls in Nogales, AZ and Berlin, Germany:

Oh, and from this site, here is the Montana-Canada border "wall" and a "checkpoint"

 
But its not about race.

There is a price one pays for slipping into the Harvard Business School through some mysterious hole in the Harvard admissions process:  From time to time, one must be ready to be humbled by their peers.  Of course, with nearly 900 people in a graduating class, one expects someone in that group to distinguish themselves at some point.  However, this large groups is somehow indistinct - at HBS one spends most of their time with 90 people in their "section", spending the vast majority of waking hours, both in class and in the pub, with this group.  After a couple of years with the same 90 people, one gets the overwhelming impression of normality -- these people are just as full of shit as anyone else I have gotten to know.

So it is both expected and with some surprise that I have begun to see these 90 people start making headlines.  My section-mates have distinguished themselves as executives and industry leaders and entrepreneurs  and lifestyle writers and business writers and fashion moguls and artists even as the notorious.  Humiliating levels of fame and success seem to be the rule among these ostensibly ordinary people.

This week, however, another member of our 90-person section (1989-B, on the off chance you are a fellow alum and were wondering) has gone to the next level.  This week Time magazine named Jim Balsillie, CEO of RIM (the Blackberry people) to their list of the 100 most influential people.  Wow.  Congratulations Jim.  The bad news is we are all totaled humbled about our own success trajectories in comparison.  The good news is that Jim will obviously "draw fire" away from the rest of us when Harvard comes looking for money.  Its a funny combination of old and new to think about the CEO of Lili Pulitzer and the CEO of Blackberry sitting next to each other all through our first year.

Postscript:  By the way, for those of you who may be tempted to put me on suicide watch, I am pretty much joking, though not about my section mates - they are all as awesome as portrayed here -- but about any dissatisfaction with my career.  Several times in my life I have been presented with opportunities to pursue high-profile wealth.  In most cases, I have turned these down, with zero regrets.  In fact, since one of the first of these rejected opportunities involved following Jeff Skilling from McKinsey to Enron, I really, really have no regrets.   Each day I am out visiting my operations at some National Park or other, I will think about the rest of you filling out your TPS reports.

UPDATE:  Welcome to fellow sectionmate Karen Page, author of numerous Amazon 5-star rated books on food, wine and becoming a chef, who links to me today (oops, Karen is slipping - a few of the books only have 4-1/2 stars).  Not only is Karen part of that vast section B conspiracy to make me feel inadequate, she also has a much cooler blog than mine.

I resisted blogging about it when a woman claimed to have found a human finger in her Wendy's chili.

I was tempted to blog when it was discovered that the woman had a suspicious history of torts against other restaurants and public companies.

I still held out when authorities began searching the woman's home, supposedly to find evidence that she put the finger in herself, perhaps from her dead grandmother's hand.

However, I just can resist this new addition to the story:

A woman who lost part of her finger to a leopard in Nevada thinks it
somehow ended up in a bowl of chili in a California Wendy's.

Her
lawyer says Sandy Allman wants to participate in any DNA test on the
finger. The lawyer says Allman last saw her digit packed in ice in a
Las Vegas emergency room. Doctors had told her it couldn't be
reattached.

The hospital says it can't account for the three-quarter-inch fingertip.

Las
Vegas resident Anna Ayala claimed she found an inch and a-half
fingertip in her chili about a month after the leopard attack.

Update: Unfortunately, authories are now leaning away from the leopard story.  Have they checked Roy Horn?

In a surprise move, the US House of Representatives, the arm of the government Constitutionally tasked with initiating any new taxation authority, today passed a resolution "apologizing for the way [the Congress] has historically mishandled Americans' hard-earned income".  In part, the resolution reads:

For years, we in Congress have held closely to the notion that we know better than the average American how to spend his or her money.  Facilitated by economists like John Maynard Keynes, we the Congress have increased the government's share of the economy to over 30%, and have invented taxes on about anything, in part by portraying every tax cut a subsidy for the rich, rather than a return of hard-earned income to the productive. 

We have taken the money you might have spent on private schools to fund a public school system that lags most of the Western world.  We have taken the money you might have used to pay your cable bill to pay for a alternative to Nickelodeon and the Discovery Channel, but for effete snobs.  We have taken the money you might have used to buy a new car or a vacation to gift billionaire sports team owners with new stadiums and to subsidize millionaire farmers who have never actually done any farming....[note the resolution continues with examples for another 16 pages]...

We are sorry.

Finally.

Twenty years ago, I was a fairly hard core death penalty proponent.  I never could muster up much respect for the life of someone who had themselves shown so little respect for life in committing the heinous crimes that incur the death penalty.

Over the years, I have not gained any additional respect for a killer's right to life, but I have had growing doubts about our ability to mete out this penalty fairly.  To some extent this is based on the accusations that certain groups are more likely to get the death penalty than other groups.  For example, its fairly clear that men committing heinous crimes are more likely to get the death penalty than women.  I am also mostly willing to accept the notion that blacks are more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime as whites -- I hesitate to fully embrace this conclusion only because the people making this case are the same people who play the race card on everything, from OJ's guilt to fan reaction to Sammy Sosa's corked bat, so it has an element of the boy crying wolf.

However, discrimination is not the main reason I no longer support the death penalty for anything but the most extreme cases (there is still a need for an ultimate penalty in certain cases - without it, people who have already earned life in prison might see nothing to lose in killing a policeman or prison guard).  I have come to believe that the death penalty impairs a person's right to appeal. 

Now, certainly people sentenced to the death penalty get many layers of appeal.  However, while these appeals may cover many years, at some point the convicted person is put to death, and any further appeals or introduction of new evidence is no longer possible.  A multi-decade vindication process is not without precedent, for a number of reasons:

• Racial mores may have to change:  How many black men were put to death unfairly in the south up through the 1960's?  Yes, they got to have all their appeals, but their appeals all occurred in the same place and time-frame as their conviction.  Only a generation later, long after many were dead, could a legal system run by a society with a different outlook on blacks look at some of these cases in a new light.
• Public hysteria may have to calm down:  Though none that I know were sentenced to the death penalty, look at how many teachers and day care workers were convicted in the child molestation panics of the 1980's, only to be release decades later after the hysteria had passed, and in some cases after the original ego-driven prosecutors had retired.  The Gerald Amirault case is a great example.
• Technology may have to change:  A number of people who had exhausted nearly all their appeals prior to being put to death have been vindicated, sometimes many years after the fact, by new DNA testing technologies.

We all know that courts make mistakes, some of which take decades to fix.  What if we never had a chance to change the flawed Plessy vs. Ferguson decision?  Criminal cases are no different - mistakes and abuses happen.  In most cases, these can be fixed, even decades after the fact.  The wrongly accused, like Mr, Amirault, loses a piece of his life, but still has some left.  Once put to death, though, the wrongs can't be fixed.

The reason I think about all this today is because of the Terri Schiavo case.  I am at a loss as the the right thing to do is here, and am amazed that so many people on both sides are so certain they are right -- the facts in this case are just so messy.  I am willing to accept that the court in Florida has done their job in plowing through all this mess and making the best decision they could under the law, and I am not about to advocate setting some really bad constitutional precedents just to second-guess them.

However, I am left with the same worry that I think many Americans are in cases like this.  Courts do make mistakes, what if they are wrong here?  After next week, there will be no more chances to appeal.

I am not sure what causes this, but my otherwise healthy children always seem to get violently ill on vacation.  On various "vacations" past we have had several trips to the emergency room, on 3-day stay in intensive, and any number of barfing incidents.  Sure enough, my poor daughter is now vilently ill.

James Taranto in "Best of the Web" reports on a Tampa Tribune article about a rally to revive the ERA.  The funny part was this:

Dozens of veterans of the women's equal rights movement, state lawmakers and relative newcomers to the cause gathered at the [Florida] state Capital [in Tallahassee] to renew the call for ratification of the 24-word statement.  In unison,  many repeated the text from  memory: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

OK, this may not seem funny yet.  To understand it, you have to picture the building in front of which they chose to hold their rally.  Picture hundreds of women rallying for women's rights, then picture that occurring in front of this building.  LOL.

By the way, I am not a Constitutional scholar, but can anyone tell me what women can't do now that they could do if the ERA were passed?

As mentioned below, I visited Tallahassee last week.  The Florida State Capital building there always makes me laugh:

Am I crazy, or does the tall tower flanked by two hemispherical domes look like the Florida government is sending its citizens a message?  To paraphrase Dave Berry, I am not Photoshopping this - Google it yourself.  The architect has got to be laughing himself silly.

More here.

UPDATE:  It gets better and better.  Apparently women's groups chose the steps of this building as their venue for trying to reignite interest in the ERA.

It strikes me that no matter what happens with Syrian troops, one victor will certainly be Lebanese women, who have certainly made a positive impact on the American male's aesthetic radar screen of late.

Update:  Ditto Kuwait.

I am not a Scrooge on most holidays - heck, we even decorate our house for July 4, not to mention Halloween and Christmas.  However, I feel about the same guilt in not celebrating Valentines Day as I do not having kitchen floors as minty-fresh as the ones in the Pine-Sol commercial.

When I was single, I used to love Valentines Day.  Often it was a great excuse to get my girlfriend all romantic and full of wine, and, well, you know.   One year when I was in business school and was sans g/f, I secretly left  a red rose on the desk of every female in my section.

Since I have been married, though, Valentines has been one of those sort of grim opportunities to screw-up, like anniversaries.  For the married person, Valentines is all down-side.  Yes, I know a few couples who have developed some Valentines rituals with which they seem to have a lot of fun (power to them), but my wife and I never have particularly bonded with the day.  This year, my wife and I swore off the flowers (its much more money to apply the money to roses some day she is not expecting them) and had a nice lunch al fresco on a beautiful Phoenix day.  So I guess it wasn't so bad after all.

Ann Coulter doll giving speech to the troops, ala Patton

Ann Coulter doll saves Cody (or is that Jenifer Garner doll in disguise?)

Stay tuned next week when computer-savvy terrorists kidnap Aki from Final Fantasy

Scrappleface has yet another take.

Via Dave Berry, it is lucky that these guys didn't get a Darwin Award, so why am I so jealous?  Other great moments in thinking with your y-chromosome here and here.

I have this weird problem when I jog.  When most people jog, people nod at them or wave or say hi or maybe just ignore them.  When I jog, people more often than not say things like "you can make it" or "not much further", like I am about to die or something.  I am not exactly Governor Arnold but I am not John Candy either.  I wish I knew what it was about my body language when I jog that makes everyone think I am about to have a coronary - maybe I will have to get my wife to video me sometime.  Or maybe not - the kids would probably run it over and over and laugh at me.

Please, someone tell me this is a hoax or an urban legend or something.  But it does appear to be a legit Reuters story (via Reason):

The U.S. military rejected a 1994 proposal to develop an "aphrodisiac" to spur homosexual activity among enemy troops but is hard at work on other less-than-lethal weapons, defense officials said on Sunday.

The idea of fostering homosexuality among the enemy figured in a declassified six-year, $7.5 million request from a laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for funding of non-lethal chemical weapon research.

I am speechless.