[UPDATE] The Potpie Bandit

After a successful sting operation, the potpie bandit has been captured!! After months of effort, Dr. Chris Brown captured the thievery through a top-secret technology (a camera). That is why he is a Criminal Justice Professor, and not me. The culprit confessed to petty thievery of miscellaneous desk items and an insatiable appetite for pot pies. He was then relieved of his janitorial duties.

Hard wiring

If we as humans are innately advanced animals, then the story about male response to seeing scantily clad women is not a surprise. This is likely a corollary to recent stories about women having sexually related dreams about our new president. The issue of concern is not that we are hard wired to have sexual fantasies, but that society is trying to rid us of them. It is not socially acceptable to acknowledge them, and there must be something wrong with those who do. In the name of societal progress, we are exercising social Darwinism against those people who exhibit genetic traits that could save our species. I also believe this to be true of those of us who are able to store fat and nutrients in our bodies in case of an emergency. Society is promoting those genetically weaker subgroups who are thin and sickly over the more genetically robust subgroups. The real question is whether we as a society want to accept the implications of being advanced animals?

This is not why I am fat

The british tabloids always have the best stories. The Daily Telegraph posted a link to the site This is Why You're Fat, and I couldn't help but look. Needless to say, those foods are not the reason that I am fat. This is the reason that I am fat...

The Golden Halo Pesident

While looking at how the new president pulled a Gerald Ford by hitting his head on Marine one, I found this great picture of President Obama. Someone is going to get a big bonus for snapping this one.

La famille proche

On our return trip from F-town last December, I saw the most beautiful truck I had ever seen. We were getting gas at the Flying J in Kingman, Az.

But it was not just any normal LandRover truck, it was a diesel and had been customized...

And it was pulling a trailer.

Being who I am, I had to talk to the owners. Their story is here. I am certain that I would not have a happy family if we were on the road more than a couple of weeks, let alone a couple of years.

Death

I rarely think about death in more than an obscure sense, that it exists and people experience it. Although I have a mortality complex (which probably deserves its own post), I simply don't think about it much.

I saw a dead person today.

It was sort of your standard, fatal car crash. There was a traffic jam on VanBuren as I was headed towards the westbound 60. Then I saw the lights of the firetrucks and a seriously damaged truck in the median. As I got to the scene, the traffic once again stopped. Not of my choosing, I was as close as the traffic could get, around 15 feet away. I watched the firefighters cut away the roof of the vehicle and the EMTs prepare to cover the body with a white sheet. I was stopped for an eternity, maybe 60 seconds. It was long enough for me to reevaluate the value of life, and all of my close calls.

Obviously, people deal with death everyday (nurses, doctors, police, firefighters, and soliders). For my sheltered life, today made an impact on my perspective. Someone won't be coming home tonight.

Divorce

A mentor of mine once said "if gays want to suffer as much as the heteros, we should welcome them into marriage!" Apparently, even gays want out.

What would have been a good strategy for their cause, would have been to move to a state where gay marriage is not legal, and then divorce there. Then a divorce ruling in that state would have created a legal problem for the state. If the judge ruled on the couple's divorce, it would have to imply that they have legally married status. If the court failed to rule, it would violate federal marriage reciprocity laws. Unfortunately, their marriage didn't last a move to another state.

Marriage

I love my wife and I am happily married, BUT, I think that the government should stop regulating marriage. Civil unions appear to carry with them the same bundle of legal rights as marriages, but many in the gay community argue that it still falls short of a marriage. A couple of years ago, a gay rights activist visited my graduate school and talked with us about it. He argued that marriage conveys a social and religious acceptance that civil unions do not. In short, he said that a state-sanctioned gay marriage would confer a sense of religious acceptance to the couple. WHAT? At that point, I decided to be against government sanctioned marriages. When getting a document from a courthouse and going through an unregulated ceremony conveys religious acceptance, we have exchanged religion for law and sanctioned the state as a religious institution. My solution is to only allow the state to grant civil unions, and only allow religious organizations to grant marriages. Thus, the state gets to give its bundle of legal contracts without discrimination, and religions get to sanction what they believe is a correct marriage before God. I used to laugh at the Italians and Mexicans who had a two-stage process for marriage. They go to the court to get the civil marriage done, and then they go to the church to get the religious marriage done. Now I think that they have it right.

The speed of the internet and the global economic crisis

I have a theory about the economic crisis. While there are a lot of targets for blame, I think that the internet is the most responsible. Sure there was Madoff, the sub-prime lending behavior, a housing bubble, etc., but why should we blame the internet? Well, it isn't really the internet that was the problem, it was the speed at which we gather, process, and act on information.
As the housing market began to to inflate, all of the realtors and appraisers (two of my least favorite professions) were able to justify exaggerated prices based on the most recent sales data. Unfortunately, the most recent sales data were slightly mild inflations of value from the most recent sales data. Which happened to be slightly inflated based on the most recent sales data. The trend was not to look too far into the past, say a month ago, because that was not the most recent data. It was old for the internet age... we could call it 'internet old' [That is, like, so last week!].
The same goes with lending behavior... banks have access to vast amounts of information about each of us through our credit scores. If our most recent activity looked promising, they may be more willing to risk giving us a loan. They've been getting better at not defaulting, right? The FICO score might be low, but the government obviously wants us to get people into housing because they loosened the rules on lending, right? The economy is doing well, we are helping people, and we can't miss taking a profit if other banks would lend to these people.
Here is where the internet killed us. People started to observe that there was a housing bubble and people started to default on their loans. It became news faster than we could imagine. Now for months, the news media have pounded it into us that we are either headed speedily towards a depression or possibly the end of human civilization. (They have every incentive to tell us the horrible news because if they don't do it first, they won't be the ones breaking the story and their ad revenue will drop. So what if they are wrong?) There was a virtual run on a number of banks that may have weathered the economic storm had everyone not heard about their possible problems and reacted to them. These possible problems became very large problems as people began to overreact.
This overreaction became instant Drudgereport updates which fueled panic. People began a run on the bank. Not a run on the bank in the 1920's style, but an immediate, online tidal wave of transactions and physical lines. In the 1920's banks and citizens maybe had a day to react, but online transfers make it so much easier to move money now. 24 hour banking is great, right? Then there were Drugereport updates about which bank was next. People began to speculate and interpret any information that was available to them. Unfortunately, there is a lot of information available with a simple click. Some of it good, some not so good.
People who control their own investment accounts began to panic buy and sell. The buys and sells spawned days of market fluctuation of the Dow of nearly 900 points. Up to date information at a rapid pace created uncertainty. This spawned news of uncertainty which lead to more uncertainty, and more panic. The market lost any sense of reason that it once had.
Now everyone is worried about a depression and high unemployment they we will all create from our worry and fear about a depression. While it is probably overly simplistic, it is my take.
Access to immediate information and control of personal portfolios has created a huge problem, everything moves too fast. And I blame it all on the internet.

P.S. and the realtors and appraisers