Physical Intervention
My pastor today gave a sermon on trusting God, and he relayed some personal stories of times when he “should have” gotten really hurt and didn’t. (The most interesting was when he was 10 or 11, he somehow set a golf ball on fire, and then dumped a 5-gallon tank of gasoline on it.)
For me, there was definitely such an event: It was in grad school and I was coming back at like 2 in the morning from my friend’s apartment. (I was staying at my grandmother’s in Long Island, and so even though I didn’t leave all that late, what with the train etc. I didn’t actually get back to her house until such a late hour.)
It was summer and I was wearing sandals. My uncle also stayed at the house, and he had come home from work (he worked nights) and didn’t realize I was still out, so he locked the screen door. Thus, I couldn’t get in, even though I had a key.
Well, I didn’t want to wake people up at 2 in the morning, so I had the bright idea to use my uncle’s ladder (he had a roofing company in addition to his night job) to climb up to the 2nd-story deck that was off my room. Well, the grass was dewy, and I’m going up this ladder that is aluminum and just has the cylindrical steps (i.e. not wide platforms). I get to the top, but I had placed the ladder against the floor of the deck. So I have to reach up to pull myself up and over the handrail.
I grabbed one of the little pieces of wood that ran from the floor of the deck up to the handrail. And as I put more and more of my weight into it, all of a sudden the whole piece just pops right out of the deck, so I’m just holding it, still standing at the top of the ladder in my wet sandals on a cylindrical step at 2 in the morning. (I am not sober, if that helps the story along.)
I think it was more my panic than an actual jolt from the unexpected give of the wood, but next thing I know my feet have fallen through the holes in the ladder. So I fall about three feet and my butt lands on the steps of the ladder. The top of the ladder loses its connection with the deck, and the ladder comes down, with me still sitting on like the 3rd rung from the top.
As I fall, I reached out to grab the floor of the deck, but didn’t grab it. Instead I scraped the insides of my forearms as I slid down.
Now I don’t know how this is possible, but I landed and was totally fine. You would think I easily could have broken my legs or ankles or something, because (to repeat) I fell from the second story while sitting IN a ladder.
In retrospect, what must have happened is that the ladder and I went straight down, and so I didn’t get my feet or legs caught under it as it hit the ground. So I just ended up, dazed, sitting on top of the ladder.
What’s really funny is that not only didn’t I hurt myself, but after the fall my back felt much better. During grad school my back got perpetually sore, but it was cured for a day or two after the fall.
Now I know, an atheist could easily explain what happened; no need to posit angels supporting me. And yep, you could find all kinds of crazy cases where people die who “shouldn’t have” from crazy accidents a la Final Destination 2. (I didn’t see the first one so maybe the premise is the same.)
Nonetheless, given that I believe in the Christian God, I totally think He saved me from my stupidity that night, just as surely as I have prevented my own son from seriously hurting himself on several occasions.
Man Jailed for Neglecting Child Support…But the Child Wasn’t His
My wife alerted me to this story:
A Philadelphia man was forced to pay more than $12,000 in child support for another man’s daughter and spent two years in jail for falling behind on payments.
And of course:
He served four six-month jail terms for not keeping up with support payments between 2001 and 2005, then lost his job. Petitions he filed for DNA testing were opposed by the court’s domestic relations officials and denied by the judge.
In May 2007, the paternity order against Walter Sharpe was overturned after the girl’s mother and grandmother failed to show up to a court hearing. But the judge ruled in October that Walter Sharpe was not entitled to compensation.
Walter Sharpe and his attorney, Tabetha Tanner, claim his identity was stolen in 2002, when he met with agency officials and provided identification showing he was not the father. Instead, his personal information was entered into the agency’s computer records, he said.
Officials in the court’s domestic relations office would not respond to the newspaper’s questions. They said in court papers that they determined Walter Sharpe was the father “after reasonable investigation.”
The lesson is, even for things that you might think are OK for the government to enforce–“C’mon, I got no sympathy for deadbeat dads!”–you need to realize that once you give a monopoly institution the power to do the “right” thing, it might just, well, behave like the government.
One Last Late-Night YouTube from the 1980s
This is the fight between Optimus Prime and Megatron from the Transformers movie. Is it just me, or did Prime barely touch Megatron? I get why Prime is on the verge of death, but what happened to Megatron? He took a big fall was all I saw…
"…and I’ll form the head [of the ad campaign]!"
Ah, the Internet is so great for marketing. How much do you think the following YouTube allowed this artist to bump up the price on this Voltron?
And for those waxing nostalgic, here ya go–and be sure to note how fast and loose they play with the different astronomical units. It goes from Voltron being a defender of the universe to some group protecting the galaxy down to “all the good planets in the solar system” or something. I was waiting for them to say the Voltron crew came from one enlightened housing project.
Can You Tell Marxists from Misesians?
Here is an interesting quiz on which I did barely better than randomly guessing. In my defense, I think I tried to be too clever, i.e. if something seemed “obviously” written by a Marxist, I guessed it was the Austrian. Oh well.
My Favorite Goldbug Conspiracy Theory
(Note that the title is mostly for fun; I don’t think these guys are crazy or anything.) I have been on the gold bandwagon for a while now. Some of us (perhaps after a period of being oblivious) were alert to the dangers and thus recommended to people, “You want to own gold. Once everyone else catches on to how screwed up things are, they will rush to gold as a safe haven.”
Well, that apparently hasn’t happened. Judging from official prices, people all over the world run to US Treasury debt, not yellow metal, when they start panicking. What’s really odd is that on certain days when major surprises hit, gold would get crushed, when one might have supposed it would at least hold its own.
Now there are lots of official explanations for this. For one thing, gold is a commodity, and every other commodity has tanked in price over the last three months. For another (though perhaps related), even if investors would like–other things equal–to increase their exposure to gold during these times, they might not have that luxury if they are (say) running a hedge fund and have to pay cash to a bunch of withdrawing clients. A hedge fund might actually have to sell some of its gold futures to raise the money to pay them off.
Anyway, the goldbug theory that I like on all this, is that you have to distinguish the paper from the physical market. What is happening is that the government (or other nefarious groups) are purposely selling gold futures contracts like mad, to suppress the official gold price (reported in the news). On the other hand, if you try to go into a coin shop or buy gold through the mail, there is a shortage; they will be out, or you will be told to wait 3 months for your coins to show up.
My own personal twist on this is that the obvious arbitrage isn’t really attractive once you factor in all of Paulson et al.’s recent hijinx. You might say, “Well if gold really ‘should’ be $1200 but it’s only $750, why don’t you and a bunch of Ron Paul kooks buy a bunch of futures?”
Well, one answer is that the government might step in and void the contracts. Suppose a bunch of counterparties to Goldman Sachs demand physical delivery, and then (because of the stipulated shortage) Goldman realizes it can’t deliver. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if the government voided the contracts–or more realistically, allowed Goldman to just pay the ‘market’ value of them, even though the whole point is that this value is bogus–in order to relieve the “systemic threat to financial integrity” or some such BS.
Here are two articles (1 and 2) on these matters, from the goldbug point of view. I think I got them from Tom Woods and MercedesRules.
Roissy’s Non Sequitur
“Roissy in DC” gives us his answer to the meaning of life: hedonism. Roissy starts out by assuming there is no afterlife or supreme being, and then concludes (HT2MR):
My answer to the philosophical question I posed above is hedonism. It is the only rational conclusion one can draw faced with the premises I presented. When there is no second life or higher power to appease; when our lives are machines — complex misunderstood machines cunningly designed to conceal the gears and pulleys behind a facade of self-delusional sublimation, but machines nonetheless — grinding and belching the choking gritty smoke of status-whoring displays in service to our microscopic puppetmasters… well, there can be only one reasonable response to it all. It makes no sense to behave any other way unless you never questioned the lies.
Are you prepared to embrace the meaning of your ultimately inconsequential existence? If it feels good…
And yet, he also recommends:
Spend time with little children and old people. One is innocent, the other is reacquainted with innocence. Their company is a world away from the drone and ruckus of all the furious humanity in between. At the extremes you will find perspective.
Now I’m not saying atheists can’t invoke terms like “innocence,” but they need to at least offer some sketch of their definition, given their worldview. (Roissy doesn’t do this.) And what if another hedonist (I have known some) say, quite understandably, “Are you nuts?! We both agree we’ve got a limited time here–we could get hit by a bus tomorrow–and you want me to play airplane with toddlers, and drive elderly people to their rest home? Huh?! I’m hitting the strip club.”
Note, I am NOT saying, “If you don’t believe in God, you logically have to become a heroin addict.” What I AM saying is that Roissy’s post smuggles in a bunch of value judgments without explaining where they come from, given his initial “thought experiment.” In particular, I don’t see how he would respond to the hypothetical (though based on people I have known) hedonist above. Old people might give you information you didn’t previously have, but unless you derive pleasure from playing with kids directly, what’s the point? To learn about “innocence”? Isn’t that term itself just one of the “lies” from which Roissy says we must disabuse ourselves?
Welfare Is Bad for Automobile Companies, Too
So I argue in today’s Buffalo News. BTW there is a surprise in this article for long-time Free Advice readers…
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