Lift Up Your Hearts!

As an avid fan of mystery stories, I’m sure I would enjoy The Da Vinci Code, especially since I’m attracted to Robert Langdon by name alone.  As a rational human being, however, I’m reluctant to open its pages.  Not knowing any better, I’ve enjoyed such quasi-historical movies as Amadeus and Braveheart, learning only later how fast and loose the productions had played with the facts.  Now it’s too late:  the false images are burned into my consciousness, and it will be difficult, if not impossible, to replace them with the truth.

That’s the worst of historical fiction.  At its best, it provides a wonderful gateway into the fascinating field of history itself, breathing life into the dry and confusing swirl of names, dates, and places that normally overwhelms us in school.  But truth should never be sacrificed on the altar of art; if you want to tell the story your way, make up your own characters—don’t lie about real people and events.  The Teaching Company, one of my favorite educational organizations whose products I highly recommend, produced two complimentary lectures on fact and fiction in The Da Vinci Code; because we were specifically given permission to pass them on to our friends, I’m posting links to them below.  If TTC complains, I’ll take them down.  They’re each about half an hour in length.

Who can say why one book becomes a best-seller and another doesn't?  Who could have predicted the Harry Potter phenomenon?  (Certainly not his creator.)  No doubt there are many reasons for the wild success of Dan Brown's fiction, not the least of which is the intriguing stories.  Ross Douthat, writing in The New York Times considers another factor: Dan Brown’s ideas speak to the heart of American popular religion today.

It isn’t just that he knows how to keep the pages turning. That’s what it takes to sell a million novels. But if you want to sell a 100 million, you need to preach as well as entertain—to present a fiction that can be read as fact, and that promises to unlock the secrets of history, the universe and God along the way.

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.”

In the Brownian worldview, all religions...have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It’s a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized “religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.

The polls that show more Americans abandoning organized religion don’t suggest a dramatic uptick in atheism: They reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who’s too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they’re making or how many times they’ve been married.

These are Dan Brown’s kind of readers. Piggybacking on the fascination with lost gospels and alternative Christianities, he serves up a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah—sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.

But the success of this message...can’t be separated from its dishonesty. The “secret” history of Christendom that unspools in “The Da Vinci Code” is false from start to finish. The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling...nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—jealous, demanding, apocalyptic—may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is.

The Teaching Company lectures

• Fact and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code:  Constantine and the Formation of the Christian Canon
• Fact and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code: Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene

You'd think the apprehension of a brazen sex offender would be an unqualified cause for rejoicing, but the Swiss government is already being excoriated for nabbing Roman Polanski and holding him for possible extradition to the U.S.

Elsewhere in Europe, however, reactions to Polanski's arrest were swift and damning. France's minister of culture, Frederic Mittterrand, says he is "stupefied" and is demanding Polanski's immediate release. The country's highest officials are already talking to Swiss and U.S. officials in hopes of ending the detention, it was reported Sunday.

The Swiss Directors Association is also condemning the act, calling the arrest as "a grotesque farce of justice and an immense cultural scandal." Directors and actors worldwide have begun circulating petitions calling for Polanski's release.

I don't care how many film awards the man has won, nothing excuses the rape of a 13-year-old girl.  I don't mean he can't be forgiven, and I don't mean it's not understandable that a man might be driven onto dark paths following the spectacular and much-publicized murder of his wife and son.  There are mitigating circumstances that his lawyer could justifiably raise at his trial.  But why should he be exempt from justice because he is an artist, and famous?  And why should France, a country I love and respect in many ways, and of which Polanski is a citizen, wish to harbor a child molester?  That seems much more worthy of Europe's condemnation than the molester's incarceration.

I cogitated upon this video all day before finally deciding to post it.  I'm hiding it behind the "more" tag because it's replete with highly offensive words.  So much so that it's almost not offensive:  nothing is said with anger, or malice; it's as if the man is one of those poor unfortunates who can't speak without using "um" or "like" every other word—only those aren't his filler words of choice.

The reason I decided to bear with the profanity is that this comedy routine is perhaps the neatest expression I've yet seen of Purple Ketchup Syndrome.  When Heinz came out with purple ketchup, I knew the mental disconnect between what we eat and where it comes from was complete.

(If you watch the video, do it here rather than clicking through to the YouTube site; the comments there are worse than the video.)

Here's a contrast for you.

Most folks know by now the story I wrote about in It's Not about Race, of the Harvard professor who got into an altercation with the Cambridge police while breaking into his own home, and ended up with an invitation first to a jail cell and second to the White House.  But here's a more encouraging tale from NPR, about an encounter between the New Jersy police and someone who might have expected more recognition and respect than a university professor.

Cops: You're Bob Dylan? Never Heard Of You

The link takes you to a transcription, but there you'll also have the opportunity to listen to the 2 1/2 minute show, which I recommend, if only for the way the journalist skillfully wove in bits of Bob Dylan's songs. 

Finally, in the end, the three of them all went back to Dylan's hotel where the staff IDed this man, who is arguably one of the most well-known songwriters of all time. The officers thanked Dylan for cooperating and later they said he seemed as kind as could be.

What chance this kindness and cooperation will get Dylan and the officers a beer at the White House?

I wasn't going to waste blog space on the Harvard prof flap, but since I took the time to comment on Facebook, I'll add it here.

• It's not about race, other than the understandable prickliness of one who has experienced racism. This kind of thing happens to while people, too, with exhibits A & B in my own family (no arrests but undeniably wrong behavior on the part of the police). But that doesn't make the news, and garners no presidential commentary.
• If a policeman had entered my house, uninvited and without a warrant, and asked for my ID I would have been on the phone to 911—or maybe a lawyer—if  not fleeing like a felon myself out of sheer terror. Didn't we fight a war about that sort of thing?  Back in the early homeschooling days, we were advised never to let an official without a warrant into the house, but instead hand them our attorney's telephone number.  That still seems like reasonable advice.  I tend to sympathize with policemen, who put their lives on the line daily for us—not to mention that a friend of ours is one of New York City's Finest—but that doesn't mean I trust everyone sporting a badge.
• Maybe it is about race.  Would the charges have been dropped like that if the person had been white, or poor? Would there be such an uproar? Unfortunately, I have enough experience with the system to doubt it.
• Lesson learned (or should be): Mouthing off is stupid. Sometimes it gets you suspended from hockey games, sometimes it gets you arrested, always it diminishes you as a person.

In another context, someone asked if the folks at the Front Porch Republic were Presbyterian.  I spent a little time trying to determine the answer, without success.  From the writings, I'm pretty sure some are Catholic, and others, if not Presbyterian, would at least own the label "Reformed."  Darryl Hart, who has thus far contributed two essays, would not least but most own that label, and "Presbyterian" as well, being an elder in the Orthodox Presybyterian church.  This unfortunately evokes an automatic negative reaction from me, both personal and theological, but as I've mentioned several times before, God seems to have taken on as a special project this year the task of teaching me that those with whom I do not get along are sometimes right, and always have important things to teach me.

In this case, I'm pointing you to Hart's latest post, John Calvin and the Land of Chocolate, because of the prominent display of the Swiss flag (correct shape and all), and his kind remarks concerning my country-in-law.

As I sat at the [International Congress for Calvin Studies] in Geneva and heard presentations on the social and political consequences of Calvin—contributing to the mix with my own paper on American Presbyterian boasting about Calvinism and political liberty—I couldn’t help but wonder if historians and the devout were looking for Calvin’s legacy in all the wrong places. After all, I was sitting in Geneva, a city that is part of Switzerland, and which takes a back seat to Bern and Zurich in the nation’s political and religious history. And yet, scholars kept tracing Calvinism’s influence to everywhere but Switzerland and its admirable history. [Abraham ] Kuyper himself credited Calvinism with Dutch independence, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the founding of America. If you like political events with international consequences, then the colonial powers of the Netherlands and Great Britain, as well as the super-power of super-powers—the United States of America—are historical horses to which you might want to hitch your globally ambitious wagons.

But if you are fond of the original United States and the Articles of Confederation, then Switzerland may just be your cup of hot chocolate. Here is a nation that managed to do what the United States all to quickly abandoned. It is still a confederation, has an executive branch made up of a committee of seven, managed to remain neutral in two world wars, and nurtures patriotism by requiring all men to serve in the military (as well as the reserves until the age of 42). Granted, its economy is not flashy—consisting of banks, watches, pocket knives and chocolate. But it is a nation with truly independent instincts and the collective wits to preserve Swiss autonomy.

Of course, Switzerland is not a utopia, and its policy of neutrality during World War II has a fair share of detractors. The point here, however, is not to paint Switzerland as the answer to the world’s problems. It is instead to wonder aloud if Calvinists and those who study Calvinism should look for the fingerprints of John Calvin’s influence not across the English Channel or across the Atlantic Ocean or anywhere for that matter outside Switzerland. I know my own Protestant convictions would feel more comfortable in Switzerland’s political shoes than with the global footprint for which the United States is now responsible. Perhaps, if American Calvinists can find their confederated selves during this year of Calvin festivities, they might show their American neighbors that places like Switzerland are more worthy of our political admiration than supposedly successful nations like the United States. If John Calvin gets credit for a renewed interest in national restraint and real political independence, so much the better.

You can always count on Mallard Fillmore, the only one of my favorite comics to remember.

A common theme over at the Front Porch Republic is a respect for place: for home and community, for not only eating locally but being locally, staying in (or returning to) one's hometown rather than venturing off to "better" places.  The article Root Hog or Die is where I chose to ask a question that has been bothering me about this approach to life, much as I like some of the ideas.

I’ve moved enough times in my life to know I hate it. (The only time I didn’t was when moving from an apartment to our first house, just a few blocks away.) I grieve that my present grandchildren live an 18-hour drive away, and some future grandchildren are likely to grow up where I can’t visit them without a passport. Our extended family makes a point of getting together at least twice a year—but that’s not the same as being able to drop by my nephew’s house for an impromptu cello concert, or to comfort my grandson when he is sick.

That said, I want to ask a question that has bothered me ever since I first encountered the stay-home ideas here at the FPR. Having done extensive genealogical research, I know that the best thing my maternal great-grandparents did for me was to get out of their West Virginia town. Among those who remained, the incidence of “father unknown” on the birth records is depressingly high.

Moreover, I noticed that each of my hated moving experiences provoked growth in my life and that of others. In my own (highly-rated) high school the brightest, most interesting students were almost always those who had come from elsewhere, not because of any deficiencies in the local population, but because the non-locals had a wider range of experience from which to draw. I like to think our different perspectives brought enrichment to our fellow-students as well.

I wish we could have it both ways. Home, as my friends and family will assure you, sometimes with exasperation, is my favorite place to be—wherever home happens to be at the moment. I wish my entire family were no more than an hour’s drive away instead of spread across the country and the globe. But living, at least for a while, in Japan, and Costa Rica, and Switzerland, and Italy, and yes, Pennsylvania, Florida, Washington, Massachusetts, and many other states, in small towns and suburbs, in cities and on farms, has brought such richness to our family that I wouldn’t have it otherwise.

How does the philosophy I see here at the FPR allow for such enrichment, such growth, such joys?

If there's a good response I'll include it here in the comments.

What is my home? Eastern upstate New York, where I grew up?  Eastern Pennsylvania, where I also grew up?  Western New York, where our children were born?  Florida, our home for most of the last quarter-century?  My two parents and four grandparents were born in New York, Washington, West Virginia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Florida—representing the middle and three of the four corners of this continental United States.  How far back do I go to find my "family" home? Do I go back to England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Germany, France, or the Netherlands?

These ruminations were sparked in part by what I learned recently about the Swiss system of citizenship, which perhaps reflects, at least in principle, the rootedness extolled at the FPR.  Swiss people are not citizens of Switzerland, per se, but of their family’s home town, which may be neither the place they were born nor a place they have ever lived.  Children and wives take on the citizenship of the father/husband, which probably would make me a citizen of Quidnessett, Rhode Island, if not of somewhere in England. Mindboggling.

Ancestral lands or no, "home" to me would ideally have all family members (children parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, siblings, in-laws) living close enough together for casual visits, mutual support, and tremendous Memorial Day picnics, while at the same time providing for all the enrichment of life that comes from extended immersion in other cultures, both the cultures of foreign lands and the alien cultures in our own country.  (If you doubt we have alien cultures in our own country, you've never experienced the contrast between New England and the South, let alone Middle America and California.)  So it's impossible:  but what kinds of attitudes and actions could bring us closer to the ideal?

Who the Hell Writes Wikipedia, Anyway? is a refutation of the idea that "[t]he bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks who do little else but contribute to the site."  That disparaging notion came about by looking at Wikipedia editing activity to see who made the most contributions to the project.  Therein is the problem: What is "most"?

[Aaron] Swartz analyzed percentage-of-text instead of number of edits, and what he found was slightly different: The bulk of the original content on Wikipedia is contributed by tens of thousands of outsiders, each of whom may not make many other contributions to the site. The bulk of the changes to the original text, then, are made by a core group of heavy editors who make thousands of tiny edits (the 1400 freaks).

When you put it all together, the story becomes clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site—the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

I find that reassuring; Wikipedia is useful and much better for finding the random information I look for than any other encyclopedia I've found. It's much like the news media:  great for getting information if you don't trust it overmuch.  In all the times I've actually known something from the inside about a news story, whether newspaper, magazine, or television report, it has been obvious that the story, as reported, was wrong.  Sometimes egregiously so, sometimes in minor detail, but never reliably correct.  So too with Wikipedia, as anyone who knows Old Saybrook, Connecticut, will attest upon reading the entry on Katharine Hepburn, which contains the following sentence:

On September 21, 1938, Hepburn was staying in her Old Saybrook, Connecticut beach home when the 1938 New England Hurricane struck and destroyed her house. Hepburn narrowly escaped death before the home was washed away over the cliffs.

Behold the cliffs....

It has been nearly five years since I honored here two family members who gave the "last full measure of devotion" in France during World War I:  Harry Gilbert Faulk and Hezekiah Scovil Porter, both of the 101st Machine Gun Battalion.  Today, for Harry I post a picture of the tree planted in his memory in Cypress Cemetery, Old Saybrook, Connecticut.  It has been a few years since World War I.

For Hez, these pages from Yale in the World War (George Henry Nettleton, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1925).

   

Here's another Memorial Day thought from Patrick Deneen, who reminds us that while politicians may send soldiers into battle for ideas and ideals, the soldiers themselves fight for something much more personal.

No soldier dies for a theory.  He dies on behalf of the people with whom he enters battle, seeking to save those whom he loves, to whom he feels a strong sense of duty, and for whom he is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.  Today, on this day of remembrance, we should recall not only the lives and deaths of the soldiers whom we rightly honor, but the right and proper grounds for their sacrifice, and keep in mind those reasons as we seek to defend, in our own less demanding ways, a nation of particular places, particular people, and particular memories.

I know why I write, but why do you read?

Because writing is an essential part of the way I think, and blogging is the best venue I've yet found, I'm not likely to stop posting here anytime soon.  However, as part of an ongoing analysis of the most productive use of my time, I'd appreciate your feedback very much.  Feel free to answer here, by name or anonymously, or if you prefer you can e-mail me.  Below are some questions that are burning in my mind, but don't let them limit you.

1. Which subjects and approaches make you eager to read the post?  Which do you read with only minor interest or skip altogether?   Book reviews?  News, commentary, and ideas I've found elsewhere and repost here?  My own commentary on various issues?  Stories about our everyday life, including travels?  Education, children and family issues, conservationist living, health topics, food, genealogy, computing problems/solutions, amusing comics and other fun stories? Short posts with links, or longer posts with quoted excerpts?
2. How often do you like to see new posts?  Does one/day overwhelm you?  Does one/week disappoint you?  How often do you visit?  Do you come by every day, hoping for something new?  Or do you check in via feedreader once a week and think, "Oh, no, there are too many"?  (If you say the latter I won't take it as an insult; I love the quality of most of the Front Porch Republic posts, but I can't handle the quantity.)
3. What, if anything, do you find of value here?  This is not quite the same question as #1.

Many thanks for your responses.  I don't know yet how I'll use them, but I'm sure they'll help in my deliberations.  Choosing good over bad may sometimes be difficult, but at least it's usually clear.  Deciding among several good things can be rather murky territory.

James Burke's first Connections series drove home the idea that change in one area can have unexpected impact in far different fields.  The Butterfly Effect reminds us that the tiniest difference may lead to great changes.  The invention of the automobile was one event that led to vast societal changes no one could have predicted.  Television was another.  Then the Internet.  Within the Internet, there was Google, which may be the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in our time, who knows?  And now there is Wolfram|Alpha.

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. With a world-class team and participation from top outside experts in countless fields, our goal is to create something that will stand as a major milestone of 21st century intellectual achievement.

Take time to check out the Stephen Wolfram's introduction.  The demonstration explains faster and better than I can the power of this not-just-another-search-engine.  It's still in its infancy, and I was easily able to come up with searches it did not understand.  But what it can do already is amazing.

The 4-Hour Workweek:  Escape 9 - 5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, by Timothy Ferriss (Crown Publishers, New York, 2007)

Examine what is said, not him who speaks.
‎— Arabian Proverb

I discovered this proverb recently, and it goes well with my own, "The wise man recognizes truth in the words of his enemies," which I use to remind myself that there may be much to learn from people with whom I disagree, even on critical issues.

Janet found Tim Ferriss online.  I found some of his ideas familiar—I think I read something about him, or watched someone's posted YouTube video from him...or something.  (This is the problem with information glut.  I used to be able to tell you, not only the book where I found certain information, but often the section of the page.  No more.  Did I read it in a book?  On a blog?  See it on YouTube?  Hear it on the radio?  I have no idea.)

It would be easy to be turned off by Tim Ferriss.  He comes across as brash, self-centered, bombastic, and as subtle as an infomercial, and I'm certain his moral compass points several degrees shy of north.^*  But to ignore him on that basis would be a mistake.  In amongst the infomercial fodder there is some truth, and some really good ideas.

Ferris may be the polar opposite of the denizens of the Front Porch Republic, and thus a good balancing viewpoint for me.  The FPR values localism, meaningful work, community, neighborhoods, and staying put. Ferriss not only thinks outside the box, he has no box.  His "work" is impersonal, mostly outsourced, and of value to him only for funding his dreams. The world is his home.  No tourist he:  he can put three months' intense work into learning a new language, plunk himself down in the middle of a foreign city, find a cheap apartment, and totally immerse himself in the local culture for three weeks, three months, or three years, all the while maintaining his business seamlessly.  If I find his attitude towards work and his lack of roots disturbing, I find his love of other places, languages, and cultures admirable.

Ferriss has looked at the "traditional" view of working long, hard, and faithfully at a job while saving money so one can finally enjoy life at retirement, and shouted a resounding "No!"  It's hard to blame him, given that advancement and security are no longer the rewards of faithful service, the work-week has stretched from 40 hours to 60 or 80, and savings can be wiped out in an instant.  His suggestion is not to retire at all, but to organize one's life to fund frequent "mini-retirements" throughout life.  One of the differences between those he calls the New Rich and those stuck in the old way of thinking is that the latter want to be able to buy all the they want to have, while the New Rich want to be able to do all the things they want to do and be all the things they want to be.

Ideas fly from Tim Ferriss like popcorn from a popper with the lid off.  (Is that analogy still viable in these days of microwave popcorn?)  Even if you don't want to outsource your everyday life to India, I think you'll enjoy these excerpts.

Some people remain convinced that just a bit more money will make things right.  Their goals are arbitrary moving targets:  $300,000 in the bank, $1,000,000 in the  portfolio, $100,000 a year instead of $50,000, etc.  Julie's goal made intrinsic sense:  come back with the same number of children she had left with.

She reclined in her seat and glanced across the aisle past her sleeping husband, Marc, counting as she had done thousands of times—one, two, three.  So far so good.  In 12 hours, they would all be back in Paris, safe and sound.  That was assuming the plane from New Caledonia held together, of course.

New Caledonia?

Nestled in the tropics of the Coral Sea, New Caledonia was a French territory and where Julie and Marc had just sold the sailboat that took them 15,000 miles around the world....All said and done, their 15-month exploration of the globe, from the gondola-rich waterways of Venice to the tribal shores of Polynesia, had cost between $18, 000 and $19,000.  Less than rent and baguettes in Paris....

The trip had been a dream for almost two decades, relegated to the back of the line behind an ever-growing list of responsibilities.  Each passing moment brought a new list of reasons for putting it off.  One day, Julie realized that if she didn't do it now, she would never do it....

One year of preparation and one 30-day trial run with her husband later, they set sail on the trip of a lifetime.  Julie realized almost as soon as the anchor lifted that, far from being a reason not to travel and seek adventure, children are perhaps the best reason of all to do both.

Pre-trip, her three little boys  had fought like banshees at the drop of a hat.  In the process of learning to coexist in a floating bedroom, they learned patience, as much for themselves as for the sanity of their parents.  Pre-trip, books were about as appealing as eating sand.  Given the alternative of staring at a wall on the open sea, all three learned to love books.  Pulling them out of school for one academic year and exposing them to new environments had proven to be the best investment in their education to date.

Now sitting in the plane, Julie looked out at the clouds as the wing cut past them, already thinking of their next plans:  to find a place in the mountains and ski all year long, using income from a sail-rigging workshop to fund the slopes and more travel.

Dreamlining.  That's what Ferriss calls his version of setting and achieving goals. 

For all their [complaining] about what's holding them back, most people have a lot of trouble coming up with the defined dreams they're being held from.

He includes a number of questions designed to help you clarify your desires and determine the cost of actually accomplishing them.  The whole procedure is a lot of work, but a quick take-away is that if you stare down both your desires and your fears, it may cost a lot less than you think to fulfill your dreams. I'm convinced that he's onto something here, especially on a smaller scale.  How often do we defer trips or purchases or projects that would make our lives (or someone else's) more delightful, because we've never clearly defined the issue and determined the cost?  We'll curse a recalcitrant piece of equipment for months, then curse ourselves when we finally get around to fixing it and discover the solution was a $5 part and 20 minutes of work.  Often my unexamined mental image of how much something will cost (in money, time, or effort) is vastly inaccurate.  For years I put off scanning my father's journals because I couldn't imagine finding time for such a mammoth job—and suffered much fear that fire or flood would destroy the only copy of this family treasure.  When I finally sat down and did the calculations, I discovered that by setting aside a manageable half hour a day for the project I could complete it in just eight months.  And I did.

Speaking of fear, Ferriss names it as a major culprit holding us back, and urges us not to allow our fears to remain amorphous.  Define them clearly (as Yoda said, "Named must your fear be before banish it you can"), consider worst-case scenarios and how you might recover from them, deterimine the possibilities of positive outcomes, and do a risk/benefit analysis, not forgetting to include the costs of not taking action.

Usually, what we most fear doing is what we most need to do.  That phone call, that conversation, whatever the action might be—it is fear of the unknown that prevents us from doing what we need to do.  Define the worst case, accept it, and do it.....What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.

Jean-Marc Hachey landed in West Africa as a volunteer, with high hopes of lending a helping hand....He arrived in Ghana in the early 1980s, in the middle of a coup d'etat, at the peak of hyperinflation, and just in time for the worst drought in a decade....  He had also missed the memo.  The national menu had changed, and they were out of luxuries like bread and clean water.  He would be surviving for four months on a slushlike concoction of corn meal and spinach....

Jean-Mark had passed the point of no return, but it didn't matter.  After two weeks of adjusting to the breakfast, lunch, and dinner...he had no desire to escape.  The most basic of foods and good friends proved to be the only real necessities, and what would seem like a disaster from the outside was the most life-affirming epiphany he'd ever experienced:  The worst really wasn't that bad.  To enjoy life, you don't need fancy nonsense, but you do need to control your time and realize that most things just aren't as serious as you make them out to be.  Now 48, Jean-Marc lives in a nice home in Ontario, but could live without it.  He has cash, but could fall into poverty tomorrow and it wouldn't matter.  Some of his fondest memories still include nothing but friends and gruel.

The 80/20 Principle:  80% of the results come from 20% of the effort and time.  Applying this analysis to his business was life-changing, and it applies to much more than business.

Out of more than 120 wholesale customers, a mere 5 were bringing in 95% of the revenue.  I was spending 98% of my time chasing the remainder, as the aforementioned 5 ordered regularly without any follow-up calls, persuasion, or cajoling....All, and I mean 100%, of my problems and complaints came from this unproductive majority, with the exception of two large customers who were simply world-class experts of the "here is the fire I started, now you put it out" approach to business.  I put all of these unproductive customers on passive mode:  If they ordered, great--let them fax in the order.  If not, I would do absolutely no chasing:  no phone calls, no e-mail, nothing.

That left the two larger customers to deal with, who were professional ball breakers but contributed about 10% to the bottom line at the time.  You'll always have a few of these, and it is a quandary that causes all sorts of problems, not the least of which is self-hatred and depression.  Up to that point, I had taken their browbeating, insults, time-consuming arguments, and tirades as a cost of doing business.  I realized...that these two people were the source of nearly al my unhappiness and anger throughout the day, and it usually spilled over into my personal time....I finally concluded the obvious:  The effect on my self-esteem and state of mind just wasn't worth the financial gain....The customers are always right, aren't they?  Part of doing business, right?  ["No," rather more rudely put, followed by an explanation of how he "fired" these customers, one of which he lost and the other of which changed his behavior and remained.]

I then identified the common characteristics of my top-five customers and secured three or so similarly profiled buyers in the following week.  Remember, more customers is not automatically more income.  More customers is not the goal and often translates into 90% more housekeeping and a paltry 1-3% increase in income....I duplicated my strengths, in this case my top producers, and focused on increasing the size and frequency of their orders.  The end result?  I went from chasing and appeasing 120 customers to simply receiving large orders from 8, with absolutely no pleading phone calls or e-mail haranguing.  My monthly income [doubled] in four weeks and my weekly hours immediately dropped form over 80 to approximately 15.  Mot important, I was happy with myself and felt both optimistic and liberated for the first time in over two years."

Parkinson's Law:  Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

[A] task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.  It is the magic of the imminent deadline.  If I give you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials.  If I give you a week to complete the same task, it's six days of making a mountain out of a molehill.  If I give you two months...it becomes a mental monster.  The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.

The best solution is to use both [laws] together:  Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most...and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.

No multitasking allowed.

You should have, at most, two primary goals or tasks per day.  Do them separately from start to finish without distraction.  Divided attention will result in more frequent interruptions, lapses in concentration, poorer net results, and less gratification.

Okay, so I really fail at that one.  It may work for some jobs, and I acknowledge I multitask too much, but I defy any parent to do a good job following the letter of this law.

Battling information glut.  What information consumes is rather obvious:  it consumes the attention of its recipients.  (Herbert Simon)

[Develop] an uncanny ability to be selectively ignorant....It is imperative that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable.  Most are all three.  The first step is to develop and maintain a low-information diet.  Just as modern man consumes both too many calories and calories of no nutritional value, information workers eat data both in excess and from the wrong sources.

[E]-mail...is the greatest single interruption in the modern world.  Check e-mail twice per day, once...just prior to lunch, and again at 4:00 p.m.  Never check e-mail first thing in the morning.  Instead, complete your most important task before 11:00 a.m.

This obviously won't work for Lime Daley.  Ferriss makes it work for his business (indeed, he checks e-mail only once a week) by outsourcing the work, and that is not the Lime Daley way.  But I know I don't need to check e-mail nearly as often as I do (nor blogs, for that matter), and I have already benefitted from the small steps I've taken to tame the beast.  Not going online first thing in the morning is liberating!

To live is to learn.

Though you can upgrade your brain domestically, raveling and relocating provides unique conditions that make progress much faster.  The different surroundings act as a counterpoint and mirror for your own prejudices, making weaknesses that much easier to fix.  I rarely travel somewhere without deciding first how I'll obsess on a specific skill...I tend to focus on language acquisition and one kinesthetic skill.  [Sports are especially good because you don't need superior language skills, but he recommends dancing, hiking, chess, or almost anything that encourages interaction with the community in which you've chosen to live.]

Language learning deserves special mention.  It is, bar none, the best thing you can do to hone clear thinking.  Quite aside from the fact that it is impossible to understand a culture without understanding its language, acquiring a new language makes you aware of your own language:  your own thoughts.  The benefits of becoming fluent in a foreign tongue are as underestimated as the difficulty is overestimated.  Thousands of theoretical linguists will disagree but I know from research and personal experimentation with more than a dozen languages that (1) adults can learn languages much faster than children when constant 9-5 work is removed and that (2) it is possible to become conversationally fluent in any language in six months or less.  At four hours per day, six months can be whittled down to less than three months....I learned six languages after failing Spanish in high school, and you can do the same with the right tools.

Do I recommend The 4-Hour Workweek?  Yes.  Now that I've read it from the library, will I buy it?  Probably not.  There's a lot in there of little interest to me, business practices and tricks that leave me feeling a little queasy.  (Although I'll admit I learned a thing or two about Google ads and pay-per-click.)  But even though it contributes to the information overload Ferriss decries, I say it's worth a quick reading, borrowing if you can, buying if you can't.  (It's only $13 on Amazon.)  There are definitely ideas worth wrestling with.  You can also check out the website.

Dipping once again into the blogging backlog.

It's old (from October 2008), and long, but this Financial Crisis for Beginners from InvestorsInsight is definitely worthwhile if you want a better understanding of what happened to the credit markets and why.  Here are a few excerpts to give you a taste.

Historically local banks took deposits from savings account customers and lent money to homebuyers. They paid 1% for the savings accounts and collected 6% on the mortgages, and the spread (5 percentage points in this case) was more than enough to compensate for any homebuyers who couldn't pay their mortgages. (The numbers are illustrative only.)...Then, as any explanation of the subprime crisis says, banks started reselling and securitizing mortgages. But what does it mean to resell (let alone securitize) a mortgage?

To [banks], a mortgage is a product. This product gives them a monthly stream of payments...from their perspective, they are "buying" the stream of payments by paying you the loan amount....If Bank A resells your mortgage to Bank B, Bank B buys your payment stream from Bank A in exchange for a lump sum of money....[I]n practice, Bank B (or C, or D, …) is often an investment bank. And Bank B often securitizes your mortgage. This means they take your mortgage and combine it with many (thousands of) similar mortgages....Now you have a pool of [mortgages, which] as a whole has a price—the amount someone would pay to get all of those payment streams of that riskiness. In a securitization, the investment bank divides the pool up into many small slices [also referred to as tranches]....Each slice can be bought and sold separately, and each slice entitles the buyer to [a fraction] of the payments streaming into that pool.  The price of these slices is based on current assumptions about the riskiness of those payments....The problem is that at the time those mortgages were securitized, the buyers assumed that housing prices could only go up, and therefore the payments were not very risky [hence prices were high].

Let's say you are an investment bank and you paid $1 million for a slice of a securities offering (a pool). You put that on your books as an asset...valued at $1 million. However, a year later, that slice is only worth $200,000 (you know this because other people selling similar slices of similar pools are only getting 20 cents on the dollar). You generally have to mark your holding to market (account for its current market value), which means now that asset is valued at $200,000 on your balance sheet. This is an $800,000 writedown, and it counts as a loss on your income (profit and loss) statement.

The next problem is that, over the last two decades, most of our banks have become giant proprietary trading rooms, meaning that they buy and sell securities for profit. Let's say you start a bank with $10 million of your own money. That's your "capital." You go out and borrow $90 million from other people, typically by selling bonds, which are promises to pay back the money at some interest rate. Then you take the $100 million and buy some stuff (like slices of mortgage pools), which pays you a higher interest rate than you are paying on your bonds. Suddenly you are making money hand over fist. But then let's say that housing prices start falling, securitized subprime mortgages start plummeting in value, and your $100 million in assets are now only worth $80 million. Since the value of your debt ($90 million) hasn't changed, you are technically insolvent at this point, because your losses exceed your capital; put another way, the money coming in from your slices of mortgage pools isn't enough to pay your bondholders.

[S]ince the Lehman bankruptcy on September 15, the crisis has moved into a new phase. In this phase, financial institutions are facing liquidity runs, or bank runs, whether or not they are solvent. How can this happen?...[B]anks tend to borrow short and lend long. [A typical mortgage is for 30 years, and the bank can't require the homeowner to pay it off early, while savings deposits tend to be short-term, perhaps a withdraw-on-demand savings account or a two-year certificate of deposit.]  In the classic case, the bank takes money from depositors and loans it out as mortgages....If every depositor tries to withdraw his money at the same time, the bank can't call in its mortgages, and there won't be enough cash for everyone. Now why would this happen, since it is unlikely that everyone will need his cash at the same time? It happens if each depositor starts worrying that his...money might not be safe...then everyone tries to withdraw his money at the same time.

In ordinary times, bank runs don't happen. First, the FDIC insures all deposit accounts up to $100,000 [now $250,000] per account holder, precisely to prevent this kind of panic. However, in a real bank many of the liabilities are not deposit accounts and hence are not insured. Second, banks can ordinarily borrow money "against" their assets; that is, a bank with $100 in good mortgages can borrow almost $100 from another bank...by pledging those mortgages as collateral. [Securities] can also be used to raise short-term money.

These are no ordinary times, however. The fundamental problem is that all players in the financial system have realized that a bank that is solvent...can still be subject to a bank run. Once that happens, Bank A doesn't want to lend money to Bank B for two reasons: first, Bank A wants to hold onto its cash in case it becomes the target of a bank run; and second, Bank A is afraid that Bank B could be the target of a bank run, and hence is afraid that if it lends to Bank B it won't get its money back. Like all such panics, of course, this becomes self-fulfilling.  [When perfectly solvent banks try to replace or renew their short-term loans—remember, they lend long and borrow short—they can't because no one is willing to lend them money.]....The key characteristic of such a crisis is that banks can be hit by bank runs—and go bankrupt—even if their assets are worth more than their liabilities.

There's a lot more, including an explanation of such TLAs as CDS and CDO, but if I put too much here it won't count as "excerpts."  Besides, my head's still spinning.

In the back corners of my "to blog about" list, I finally found In Defense of "The Rich," by Larry Elder.  I'd originally bookmarked it because of the facts about charitable giving (see below); I'd remembered, from another source, George W. Bush's impressive record in this matter, but couldn't find it when I needed it in a debate with my brother.  This article gave the hard numbers for my hazy memory, but at that point it was but l’esprit de l’escalier, so I filed it under "sometime"...you know.

But sometime is now here, and I find that the article has several good points, and complements my previous post, Think You're Rich?  Or Poor?

A recent poll commissioned by Investor's Business Daily asked, in effect, "What share [of the tax burden] do you think the rich pay?"  Their findings? Most people are completely clueless about the amount the rich actually do pay.

The top 5 percent (those making more than $153,542) pay 60 percent of all federal income taxes. The rich (aka the top 1 percent of income earners, those making more than $388,806 a year)...pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes. The top 1 percent's taxes comprise 17 percent of the federal government's revenue from all sources, including corporate taxes, excise taxes, social insurance and retirement receipts.

[Of those polled,] 36 percent thought the rich contribute 10 percent or less of all federal income taxes. Another 15 percent thought the rich pay between 10 and 20 percent, while another 10 percent thought the rich's share is between 20 and 30 percent. In other words, most people thought the rich pay less—far less—than they actually do. Only 12 percent of those polled thought the rich pay more than 40 percent.

A U.S. News & World Report blogger went to the Democratic National Convention in Denver and conducted an informal poll of 24 DNC delegates. He asked them, "What should 'the rich' pay in income taxes?" Half the respondents said "25 percent"; 25 percent said "20 percent"; 12 percent said "30 percent"; and another 12 percent said "35 percent." The average DNC delegate wanted the rich to pay 25.6 percent, which is lower than what the rich pay now.

Thirty percent of American voters pay nothing—zero, zip, nada—in federal income taxes.

And here's the above-mentioned charitable giving data.

• In 2007, President George W. Bush and his wife had an adjusted gross income of $923,807...and donated $165,660 to charity—or 18 percent of their income.
• Vice President and Mrs. Cheney, in 2007, had a taxable income of $3.04 million...and donated $166,547 to charity—or 5.5 percent of their income.
• Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, earned between $200,000 and $300,000 a year between 2000 and 2004, and they donated less than 1 percent to charity. When their income soared to $4.2 million in 2007, their charitable contributions went up to 5 percent.
• Joe and Jill Biden...made $319,853 and gave $995 to charity in 2007, or 0.3 percent of their income. And that was during the year Biden was running for president. Over the past 10 years, the Bidens earned $2,450,042 and gave $3,690 to charity—or 0.1 percent of their income.

Liberal families earn about 6 percent more than conservative families, yet conservative households donate about 30 percent more to charity than do liberal households. And conservatives give more than just to their own churches and other houses of worship. Conservatives, especially religious conservatives, give far more money and donate more of their time to nonreligious charitable causes than do liberals—especially secular liberals.