Some things really are relative

Smart people who deal in absolutes a lot can tend to forget that many things are relative, even though they might seem like they are not. One million dollars may seem like a large amount of money, but it is only large relatively speaking. It was worth more yesterday and will be worth less tomorrow, to you and me it's a lot but to some men it's change. To the dead it's worth nothing, even if those dead men's faces are imprinted on the bills.

Mistaking relatives for absolutes is a mistake which Stephen Krason makes in the following paragraph in this article:

We see shamelessness in corporate America. Besides the surrender to the homosexualists, we witness CEOs getting large bonuses even when their companies don’t perform well and their employees’ pay stagnates. We see the national Chamber of Commerce pushing amnesty for illegal immigrants because, in the final analysis, they want more workers who will be willing to take minimum wage jobs. In other words, so companies don’t have to pay a just wage.

The CEOs getting the large bonuses even when their companies don’t perform well is something that really makes me shake my head. If it was the CEO who didn't perform well, then all right. But evidence is never brought forward for this. Instead the reflex is to look at the company not meeting bottom line expectations for a period of time and say "That's it; no bonus for anybody!"

It is forgotten or summarily dismissed that companies have many external factors to deal with. Markets, competitors and lawsuits just to name three. And it's possible though for a company which posted a loss of $10 million to have been saved from a loss of $100 million by the quick acting of C-level personnel. I've seen this first hand. Many haven't because this scenario doesn't play well on TV. Who ever heard of a "near-disaster movie"?

It is in a company's best interest to keep these types of people on their staff, and acknowledge their contribution to averting further disaster atop the bad performance. One might argue that the CEO should just accept the fact that he's not going to get a bonus this year because it would look bad. Yeah; looks are so important. The same people who think bonuses for key players are shameless are the ones yammering about the bottom line being God and "unsustainable" business plans which are too short term. So which is it?

As for the workers not getting bonuses, who says they don't? Yes, the loud people who didn't get anything. When I was a worker I used to get a discretionary bonus, sometimes in cash, at the end of the year with the understanding to keep my freaking mouth shut. That's the way it's done right, and that's how I'd do it.

Competence and Accountability

Four Enchiladas, Señor, extra sauce

Crystal, honey... baby, where you been?



...and white socks, too.

Also check out the vid for Call Mr. Lee.

Thus Sprach Zarathustra

This is creative destruction at its absolute best. Check out the comments to the video, they're very funny, especially when some obviously unamused folks start warning about all the toxic substances in old TV sets and receive sarcastic and dismissive remarks from the producer of the video.

The Templeton Foundation's Latest Article on Religious Scandals

Here's the latest reporting on Catholic scandal issues, a chatty, meandering missive by Rod Dreher of the Templeton Foundation. Excerpt:

The Church indeed survived, but only as a fragment of itself. Justified or not, the Protestant Reformation was an act of spiritual, and often physical, violence that brutally cleaved the body of Western Christendom. The causes of the Reformation are complex, but nobody can dispute that corruption among the Roman Catholic clergy, especially in the papal court, was the prime cause of the catastrophe.

This paragraph displays what I call "pop-ecclesiology". It's how secular journalists who know little about religion describe the events in church history. For example, when he writes "The Church indeed survived, but only as a fragment of itself" what does he mean by "The Church"? At first it seems like he means the Roman Catholic church, but later he clarifies by saying it was "Western Christendom" which was brutally cleaved. The implication is that the Catholic Church is just one of the broken pieces of the smashed cookie jar, albeit the largest piece. We Catholics would see it more like living branches chopped off of a living tree with strong roots and a trunk ailing from disease and weakness. I think that the orthodox Orthodox viewpoint is probably closer to that, but Rod appears to have taken off his religious hat at the moment he wrote that.

My Reformed Protestant relatives and friends would strongly disagree with the statement that "corruption among the Roman Catholic clergy...was the prime cause...." of the Protestant Reformation. To them, the rediscovery of what to them are the truths of sola scriptura and sola fide is the cause for what Luther and Calvin accomplished, and they see all the popes from shortly after the third century as corrupt heretics. They might agree that this corruption was an historical occasion of which the reformers took advantage, but to them the prime cause was one of doctrine. So the notion that nobody disputes this stated prime cause is leaving out the beliefs of many of the pieces which were broken yet have still survived the centuries. Obviously, Rod is closer to the Catholic point of view here, but one has to wonder whether the gaffe of writing "nobody can dispute" follows from a held belief that "corruption among the Roman Catholic clergy" is a prime cause of many or most of the ills in the world throughout history.

Later on in the article we get some references to the attempt being made to revitalize the Catholic church scandal in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. That paragraph is gossipy and vague, and strains to make something from an off-the-record quote from an anonymous priest-friend from New York City. Bill Donohue's reaction is much more informative and I urge everyone to read it. He doesn't hesitate to criticize the Diocese along with the media for inattention to the due process rights of the accused. So in addition to containing more facts and less insinuation, Donohue's piece seems to be more in line with the demands of the Gospel than the demands of gossip, so you can decide which line of thinking and reporting is more profitable.

Rod touches vaguely on scandals in the OCA, but probably not enough to satisfy our friend, Diane, I'm guessing. Or any of us, really. (This might be because he follows this thread quickly with another blast at the Catholic church featuring another semi-quote from a Franciscan vocations director and an obligatory mention of his "own departure from Roman Catholicism.") He mentions Metropolitan Jonah's criticism of former church leaders as having "raped the church", rhetoric that Obama may wish to consider for the 2012 presidential campaign. He pimps the new OCATruth.com site, a site in which a letter of his was recently published. The letter is a must-read, if for no other reason than the fact that he mentions a transvestite and the immortal words of Charlie Sheen in the same breath. This is done to dismiss alleged accusations that +Jonah ("Yo, Plus, whazzup?") had commissioned the aforementioned Catholic-bashing propaganda piece on Orthodoxy. Oooooooh, smell the intrigue. [Correction: The piece being discussed is a piece by Julia Duin which can be read here. Rod states that he was interviewed for the story which ran several days after his OpEd.]

So now we've seen several blasts within a month at the Catholic Church from a guy who claims that his writing is strictly monitored by his employer. Is this lashing out the product of a rigorous Orthodox lent on the disposition of someone used to gourmet food and wine? Or is Rod bashing the Catholic Church to attain respect from his fellow secular journalists? I'm just wondering.

The epitome of 'epic'

Why is this so funny? Why do I keep watching it? And where is Yoda when you need him? or Samuel L Jackson for that matter?

Tell him the dog is turning red

Love this song. Actually was checking out Beauty Trip, another one of my favorites, but this video is beautiful. Check out how the guitars interweave.

Mondale tells Obama to get off the "Idiot Boards"

Constructive criticism from grouchy old guys is not always worth noting, but sometimes it is.



Loved how he laughed like a Scooby Doo villain when Clinton is mentioned. Might as well have said "Yeah, the old 'feel your pain' trick!" At any rate, I'm glad Uncle Walt points this out about the teleprompter so people can't just claim we're picking on the man when we make fun of it.

I forget if the Muppet in the brown suit is Statler or Waldorf, but doesn't Mondale look like him? I know, no mustache; I think it's the eyes.

A former LOST fan pans final episode as a "stunning act of creative cowardice"

Here's some really insightful and detailed commentary on what was wrong with the LOST finale. It's admittedly much better than my snarky take, which has been called immature, providing several contrasts with other films and stories and it doesn't run on for too long. The fact that the author, Doctor Zero (aka John Hayward), had been a fan in the early days is another benefit and his knowledge of key parts which represent serious internal inconsistencies show that his accusations of lies on the part of the show's creators are not merely lashings out. Example:

It’s not merely a question of riddles left unanswered. The show lied to its viewers, repeatedly. Remember Juliet saying “it worked” after the atomic bomb went off, followed by the last season’s opening shot of a submerged island in what appeared to be an alternate timeline? That wasn’t some sort of clever misdirection. It was an outright lie. The reason everyone immediately rewinds The Sixth Sense after seeing it for the first time is that it plays fair. It shows the audience certain things, with complete honesty, and the audience misinterprets what it’s seeing. It’s the difference between pulling a quarter out of someone’s ear with sleight of hand, versus knocking them unconscious and stuffing a coin in their earlobe. The kind of cheating indulged by the Lost writers will cost them their feet, if they ever run afoul of the madwoman from Misery.

The contrast with The Sixth Sense is perfect. It's the difference between skillful film-making and hoping people forgive you for your lack of skill. Here's the Doc's conclusion:

Too much of their collective story was left to our imaginations, and we aren’t the ones getting paid millions by ABC Television to write this stuff.

My thoughts exactly.

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That is one big assed answer machine!

I was just reading this and I thought "oooohh... bad idea."

Don't blame me, I voted for Bartlet

Good piece on vouchers in DC and Barack Obama's latest opportunity to really be different.

The most honest, decent, and thoughtful Democratic president of modern times, Jed Bartlet, was surprised to find himself supporting vouchers on an episode of NBC’s “The West Wing.” Bartlet’s staff summoned the mayor of Washington, D.C., to the White House to plot strategy for his veto of a Republican-backed bill to provide vouchers for a few students in D.C. schools–and was stunned to discover that the mayor and the D.C. school board president both supported the program, as indeed Mayor Anthony Williams and School Board President Peggy Cooper Cafritz did in real life. Why? the president asked the mayor. “After six years of us promising to make schools better next year,” the mayor replied, “we’re ready to give vouchers a try….We spend over $13,000 per student — that’s more than anywhere else in the country — and we don’t have a lot to show for it.” (As Andrew Coulson wrote recently in the Washington Post, the real cost is actually much higher than that.)

The piece contains the West Wing clip and ends with the question of whether or not the real congress and President will care about the people enough to keep the voucher program intact. My guess is that the Democrats in congress and Barack Obama will once again play the "let 'em eat cake" card. Vouchers just ain't politically correct.