The Enemy of the People

I was flipping through the Wall Street Journal the other day*, and came across a full page ad from Morgan Stanley proudly introducing their new Managing Directors. I skimmed through the list of names, and came across one Emmanuel Goldstein. This was truly shocking.

As you certainly know, Emmanuel Goldstein was the leader of the Brotherhood, and therefore the number one enemy of the people, in George Orwell's classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. My first thought was, "Who would name their kid after that literary character, such that anyone he met would immediately be suspicious?" Let's face it, although he's sort of an anti-hero in the novel, he's not a person you want to be associated with unless you like visiting places like... Cuba, for instance. But not in a vacation cigar-smoking way, if you catch my drift.

I found it odd that there might be people with that name when a year or two ago I learned of the hacker Eric Gordon Corley, who is rather anti-government in his opinion. He goes by the name Emmanuel Goldstein. He's the kind of guy who the government would keep close tabs on anyway, since he is known to rant against "Big Brother", but the fact that he chose that name as his pen name is only asking for trouble.

So here's this other Emmanuel Goldstein, working for Morgan Stanley, who almost certainly was given that name by his parents. The novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published in 1949. So unless this guy is at least 59 years old (which would be old for a mid-level position like Managing Director), his parents either never read the book, named him that anyway, or named him that because of the book. Although I can't find any info on how well the book sold at the time of its debut, there were also two movie versions: a BBC version televised in 1954, and a Hollywood version in 1956. The chance that his parents hadn't been aware of the enemy of the people must be very slim. Yet that is his name anyway. Or, at least the name he goes by.

I guess it's like naming your kid "Guy Fawkes", only the name has a literary meaning, rather than historical one. Whatever the story behind this Emmanuel Goldstein fellow, I would bet a substantial amount that the U.S. government keeps tabs on him. One need only take advantage of the Freedom of Information Act, to get ahold of his files, for whatever it's worth. But I'm not going to request them...


*I know, two blog posts in a row about stuff appearing in the Wall Street Journal. It's a big part of my day now. Oh, how things change...

Gotta love marketers.

You gotta love marketers. They'll find a way to spin numbers to wow and dazzle you, no matter what. As Mark Twain said (paraphrasing Benjamin Disraeli), "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Let's look at an example on the bottom of the front page of today's Wall Street Journal.

ExxonMobil has a small advertisement hailing "the startup of a major new energy project", which means the find of a new oil reservoir. The ad states that the new find will yield "an additional 600 million barrels of oil—enough to fuel one million cars in the U.S. for nearly 20 years." See, there's no shortage of oil anywhere.

When a company like ExxonMobil takes out an ad to announce such a find, you think that it would be significant, and enough oil to fuel one million U.S. cars for 20 years sounds like a lot of oil. Except that in 2005 there were about 247 million total highway registered vehicles in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. If we examine passenger cars only, 136.5 million, this "major new energy project" doesn't look so major. In fact, it is only enough oil to fuel all the cars in the U.S. for 53 days. If we factor in all the highway vehicles, and give ExxonMobil the benefit of the doubt that the oversized-SUVs and trucks are as fuel efficient as passenger cars, we now see that their new find yields enough oil to fuel all the highway vehicles in the U.S. for 29.5 days. Not even one month (unless you count February, which is not a real month, in my opinion).

Who wants to bet that it will take more than one month to suck all of that oil out of the ocean floor? Good job ExxonMobil, you hired a sufficiently sneaky marketing department. But not sneaky enough for the likes of me! Ha ha ha ha!

Does anyone else see a problem here?

Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Steve Forbes wrote a piece concerning one particular Republican presidential-candidate's proposed tax measures. That candidate is of no consequence to me. What is of consequence is some of the facts that Mr. Forbes mentions:

"When the income tax was introduced in 1913, Congress adopted a one-page filing form and a maximum rate of 7%. The Office of Management and Budget estimates Americans now spend 6.5 billion hours a year filling out tax forms.

Our Founders drafted the Constitution with fewer than 5,000 words; with later amendments it is about 8,000 words. The federal tax code is more than 9 million words. So the document that created the government is less than 0.1% as long as the tax code that funds it. Such is the state of Washington today."

Absolutely amazing. What I want to know is this: what does the federal government provide to me today that it did not provide U.S. citizens before 1913? In other words, what am I paying federal income tax for?

A military? We don't need a military. At least not as much of a military as we have. I bet we could cut 90% of our military without any undue effect at all. We only keep some minimal amount of troops and all of our nuclear arsenal. This sends the message to the rest of the world that our only recourse in any military conflict is nuclear warfare. Nobody would mess with us.

Unconvinced? Why doesn't anyone mess with North Korea or Iran? I don't think it has been verified that either of those countries has nuclear weapons, yet nobody messes with them. Even the paranoid President of our country hasn't tried to go to war with them, which says a lot. Heck, North Korea has intentionally "missed" every deadline for scaling back it's nuclear weapons and uranium enrichment programs, and nobody does anything to punish them (if there's anything left that can be done).

What's my point? My point is that we have far too much law in this country, for no real reason. Taxes to fund wars that we don't need to fight and we can't 'win', in the historical sense of the word. I won't even get started on the erosion of freedom in this country.

That's Dr. Josh, thank you.

It's been a long time since I've posted anything. I haven't lost the desire to blog, so much as put it off for so long that it isn't the second nature it used to be. I'm going to change that for the new year. (Happy new year, by the way.)

Rough chronological timeline of major events in the past two months:

Dec 1st - My uncle Brian, the youngest of my dad's three brothers, passed away due to complications of cystic fibrosis. It was very, very hard for everyone. My father and his brothers were with him at the hospital at the time, and had been there all day. Personally, it was extremely difficult for me to focus and prepare my presentation for my thesis defense the following Friday.

Dec 2nd - My brother's birthday. I spoke to him on the phone, and he certainly wasn't in the mood to celebrate. I think he sat at home and drank a few beers.

Dec 7th - Pearl Harbor Day. My thesis defense. I went on the 'offense' and Pearl-Harbored my committee (as per Russ's suggestion). It worked. I passed.

Dec 14th - I deposited my thesis, fulfilling all the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Columbia provided me with some letters stating that fact, as my degree isn't actually conferred until Feb 23rd, making me a 2008 graduate, despite the fact that I finished in 2007.

Dec 15th - A memorial service was held for my uncle Brian. My aunt Karen (his wife), my dad, and his three brothers, were all understanding of what I was going through, and believed that Brian would not have wanted me to be unduly stressed at the time of my defense, so the service was postponed until this day. It was emotional, to say the least.

Dec 16th - My dad's birthday. Yilin and I made him breakfast. Again, there wasn't much celebrating going on in our family.

Christmas week - Last year I went to Montreal for Christmas, and this year it was Yilin's turn to spend Christmas in Connecticut. I got to see my family and sit around a lot. It was good.

I'm currently looking for a job. I'll keep everyone updated with how that goes.

On Saturday, Yilin used her $100 store credit from Apple*: she got me an iPod shuffle. It's my first iPod, but not my first mp3 player. I've discovered that I don't like iTunes, because there is no organization outside of playlists. Furthermore, any audio books I had previously downloaded from LibriVox aren't recognized as eBooks by iTunes. So I had to have iTunes convert them to 64 kbit AAC, and then rename the files *.m4a to *.m4b so that iTunes recognizes that they are audiobook files. It took me about an hour to figure out the problem and fix it, even though I used the 'mv' command in Terminal to instantly change all the file names. But the Shuffle is cool.

*Yen-I and I bought Yilin the iPhone for her birthday present the first weekend they were on sale. Shortly after that a new iPhone was announced; all the people who waited in line for hours and hours were pissed, so Apple gave them all a $100 in-store credit.

Not much more to say right now. I am hoping to re-blog regularly. Oh yeah, happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Perhaps you should re-listen to his most famous speech, which I believe to be the greatest public speech ever given.