WasatchMan

From the page: "In the old days, low-fat individuals could flatter themselves that they deserved credit for being that way. But it's now clear that obesity owes a lot to biology and environment. Some people are genetically prone to excess weight, and some are not.

Lots of heavy folks work very hard to lose weight, without success, or else lose it only to gain it back. Their bodies, hard-wired for famine survival, don't want to be skinny. Some people are thin because they eat sparsely and exercise fanatically, but most are just lucky. So New Jersey voters are probably not going to take Corzine's figure as a symptom of virtue.

In the future, given the changing shape of the electorate, a little extra flesh could be a political asset, if not a necessity. But regardless of who wins, I'm willing to bet this will be the last time a politician is rash enough to mock an opponent's weight. When Corzine raised that issue, he bit off more than he could chew."

From the page: "One of problems economists should study is what happens when the overall truth content of a servitized economy declines. Whereas the “truth” of a ton of steel is the steel itself, what is the truth of a bundled subprime mortgage? What is the truth content of a credit default swap? Perhaps we don’t know, and this circumstance has directly led to the current economic crisis. The financial meltdown is from a certain point of view, a pure crisis of information. What we don’t know (or better yet what we do know but ain’t so) is hurting us. The market has either temporarily lost its ability to properly value assets; or more disturbingly we are simply unwilling, like the ATP vis a vis Andre Agassi, to value the assets because to recognize the truth would be catastrophic for business in our servitized world. Perhaps the real psychological purpose of the various government stimulus packages is simply to suggest that we don’t need to know the truth. It’s government’s way of saying that when we don’t like market signals then bureaucracies can set it aside; that with enough printed money we can avoid looking at ourselves in the economic mirror and forestall bankruptcies indefinitely. The music can be kept playing forever if only we wish for it hard enough.

The problem is that we can never be wholly free of the truth.

The words “and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” are often used in a moral sense. But they can be used in the entirely secular meaning of the need to be free of bad information. Bad information destroys. We need to be free of bad information. Perhaps the underlying reason for the large and seemingly growing crisis in the Western World is that its truth reserves — the percentage of its information store that actually corresponds to reality — have fallen below a critical level and its institutions are attempting to cover the deficit by frantically printing more lies. Maybe the reason why finance, politics, news, real estate and environmental services are in dire such straits is that they among the service industries have the biggest portfolio of defective information. And it’s killing them. While there may be a tendency in the service economy to increase the amount of spin for short term gain in the long run survival depends on its minimization. We have to know where we are, if we are to avoid getting lost.

The way to the truth is to take the shortest path back to reality. Carmen Collins, the mother of the dead BBC employee, intuitively believed that her daughter might have fared better if she had chosen a simpler career. What drives that sense is the same reason behind the apparent wholesomeness of grassroots political movements and untutored pundits like Joe the Plumber in contrast to the artificiality of the MSM. The outsiders have not yet been firewalled from reality in the way that the mandarins of the BBC and the politicians in Washington have been. The Tea Party world is still that of genuinely funny things — not the sour mordancy of Letterman; it is still one of basic fears and simple joys, of aching feet and a welcome ice-cream soda at the end of the day. Some people spend their whole lives trying to get away from it; to forget the memory of people sitting around a sunny porch eating peanuts, to try with various expensive unguents to wash the smell of new-mown grass and two stroke gasoline fumes from their hair. That is what “success” all too often means in certain circles. That and a line of white powder across a table. In the end they may arrive at a palace of chrome and glass, all cold air and ice at some dizzying height above the world. But they must always remember, or forget at their peril, that it is all upborne by truth and human love."

From the page: “The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books - a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.”

Albert Einstein "

From the page: 'No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief.'

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing --
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."'

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep."

Truth.