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The federal government has been attempting to correct the massive financial issues facing the United States via a massive jolt of spending for the better part of a year now. When taking a macro view of this solution it can seem to make sense from a distance. By taking over the role of the engine of economy the government hopes to keep the wheels spinning until the normal engine (business) recovers and resumes the role it holds.

However, because the government by its very nature does not need to take into account profitability there are factors that come into play which reduce the effectiveness of the intended jolt. From my perspective, which is one of a person that deals with government agencies on a daily basis, the results would be comical if not so serious. A very good example of this happening on a micro level can be found in the following article by Andrew Malcolm of the LA Times. In the article Mr. Malcolm describes a $5 billion (that’s $5,000,000,000.00) dollars that are devoted to creating 90,000 jobs dedicated to weatherize homes. It sounds like such a great idea. We will employ people and save energy costs in the future. Indeed from a macro point of view it sounds like a wonderful investment of that huge sum of money. In fact, the initial estimate from the current administration called for over 80,000 of the jobs would be created in the first year of the program. Those new workers would in turn weather proof over half a million homes in the first year. Sounds so simple right?

The micro reality however is that the GAO (general accountability office) has found that only 9,000 homes has taken part of the program despite the fact that $522 million ($522,000,000.00) dollars from the program have already been spent. Why the hold up? Simple, the government forgot to plan for…the government. From the article:

The Energy Department is run by Steven Chu, like President Obama a Nobel Prize winner. You’ll never guess what the federal government blames for the lack of significant progress.

RED tape.

Not duct tape. Not weather stripping. But that infamous RED tape. In the form of, well, forms.

It seems that the Pelosi-Reid stimulus plan that was so quickly cobbled together and was supposed to immediately pump so much money into the sagging economy last year included an 80-year-old legal provision requiring all federally funded projects to pay a prevailing wage to workers.

But what’s a prevailing wage for weatherization, you ask?

Who knows?

So the Energy Department asked the Labor Department, which set out to calculate what a prevailing weatherization wage is in every single one of the more than 3,000 counties across these United States.

There were some other things to figure out. It seems the law also requires some kind of National Trust for Historic Preservation review for most homes before any contracts could be estimated to be negotiated to be signed to be let to be begun. And states like Michigan have two people assigned to such tasks.

So, good luck speeding up that work.

Ask any contractor that has to deal with local, state or federal government about getting anything done quickly with their involvement. Projects that would take our company six months to complete five years ago now take upwards of 14 months to finish. It is only getting worse. Every aspect of the construction process has more steps now that result in more delays. Any project that has federal funds tied to it now requires that bidding contractors contact disadvantaged businesses in their state to make them aware of the bid. This involves faxing out a form letter not once but twice to every business that appears on a web site search engine provided by the State. More paper, more steps, more time.

Whether or not there is an efficient government run program that spends the public funds wisely is open to debate. That much of our tax dollars are currently wasted is not. The solution, and what it might be is the real question. Let’s all hope the person with the solution arrives soon.

Peggy Noonan writes about the Massachusetts Senate election in which a Republican won in what many viewed as a referendum on the Healthcare Reform that is currently being debated in congress. Both sides of the aisle are pointing to why this happened and I’ve yet to see someone that sums it up as well as Peggy does:

Speaking broadly: In the 2006 and 2008 elections, and at some point during the past decade, the ancestral war between Democrats and the Republicans began to take on a new look. If you were a normal human sitting at home having a beer and watching national politics peripherally, as normal people do until they focus on an election, chances are pretty good you came to see the two major parties not as the Dems versus the Reps, or the blue versus the red, but as the Nuts versus the Creeps. The Nuts were for high spending and taxing and the expansion of government no matter what. The Creeps were hypocrites who talked one thing and did another, who went along on the spending spree while lecturing on fiscal solvency.

In 2008, the voters went for Mr. Obama thinking he was not a Nut but a cool and sober moderate of the center-left sort. In 2009 and 2010, they looked at his general governing attitudes as reflected in his preoccupations—health care, cap and trade—and their hidden, potential and obvious costs, and thought, “Uh-oh, he’s a Nut!”

Which meant they were left with the Creeps.

But the Republican candidates in Virginia and New Jersey, and now Scott Brown in Massachusetts, did something amazing. They played the part of the Creep very badly! They put themselves forward as serious about spending, as independent, not narrowly partisan. Mr. Brown rarely mentioned he was a Republican, and didn’t even mention the party in his victory speech. Importantly, their concerns were on the same page as the voters’. They focused on the relationship between spending and taxing, worried about debt and deficits, were moderate in their approach to social issues. They didn’t have wedge issues, they had issues.

The million dollar question now is whether or not these new office holders will do what they say and follow through on their promises. Based on past behavior by Republicans, I’m betting on more Creepy behavior.

Newton’s First Law of Motion states that a body at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force acts on it, and a body in motion at a constant velocity will remain in motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an outside force. For the better part of the past five years I’ve felt like that body at rest. I’ve had goals that have sat on the shelf waiting for ‘the time’ to attend to them. Instead of working on bettering myself and attaining those goals I devoted the better part of five years to a task with no true payback and no finish line. That ended for me just as I approached my 40th birthday. Deep inside my psyche I knew it was now time to get serious about my goals and begin working on achieving them.

I’m glad that I’ve thrown the monkey off my back and I’ve worked hard to restore my connections with my family and friends that I’ve neglected. Sadly, I fear that some of those connections have now changed in ways that I can’t change back. I can only look forward at this point and hope that as time goes by what seems impossible will slowly but surely become possible. The inertia that held me trapped was quite large and honestly could only be escaped by me because it was created by me. Once I began to realize that the things I truly wanted, the things I considered most important to me were being neglected by my actions they became a bigger pull to me than the escape that my ‘addiction’ was. I slowly prepared my exit strategy and executed it nearly flawlessly, quitting a few months sooner than I anticipated.

Looking back, I’m not sure how I managed to fit it into my life. The sheer volume of time required to be a part of a ‘relatively’ bleeding edge group like I was cut into nearly every other aspect of my life. I managed to move the majority of the time I devoted to it into late night hours which only cut into my sleep in an attempt to spare my other obligations. Now that I’ve quit and get roughly six or seven hours of sleep a night instead of the two or three I was getting I find myself much more engaged in work and at home. I don’t miss the game itself – not one bit. Making this change was a huge win for me and I’m glad I made it.

Since quitting I’ve recommitted myself to several short and long term goals. First, I’m determined to improve my overall health. Having a desk job that I spend a minimum of 50 hours a week at sitting on my backside coupled with then spending another 18-20 a week sitting while playing contributed to me being horribly out of shape and overweight. Since quitting in early October I’ve made significant strides in correcting this problem. If my progress continues at the current pace I will be at my goal by May of next year. The normal sleep pattern coupled with my healthier habits has helped a great deal with improving my overall mood.

The extra time and energy is also allowing me to complete old goals as well as realize some new ones, but more on that later. Despite the doom and gloom surrounding our economy and the overall future of our world I’m looking forward to next year and those beyond it. I feel like I’m moving again and I don’t plan on letting myself rest or get pulled off course again.

Pecha-Kucha is a unique method of presenting ideas to a group. The presenter is limited to 20 images (slides) with 20 seconds devoted to each. Devised in Japan, the name comes from the Japanese term for the sound of “chit chat”, Pecha-Kucha nights have begun to spring up all over the world.

Philadelphia has been the host to several of these nights. What makes them interesting beyond the severe time limit is the subject matter. Initially designed for architects to limit their speeches, (who knew architects are a chatty bunch) there is no limit to the subject matter.

Take a look at a few of the presentations that are available online. I found the one titled ‘Kev Rock’ to be one of the more interesting Pecha-Kucha’s (be aware he uses foul language).

White mountainous clouds, separated by vast gulfs of pale blue sunlit sky raced across the sky, their flat grey bases offering no purchase to the outstretched fingers of the trees desperately grasping to escape the coming fall. Their branches sparsely populated by the remainder of yellow, gold and red stained leaves.

He drives the road. More so the road drives him. He steers along the path home, not thinking of the next turn and where it is taking him – he doesn’t need to. The kaleidoscope of leaves makes waves behind him. Turning left he sees a farmer in a red tractor plowing the fields for a planting of winter wheat. The wet brown earth a wound that offers itself up to create new life. Up ahead the flashes of a school bus lights indicates caution is required. He taps the steering wheel in time with the beat of the music on the radio while waiting for the bus to discharge its contents.

Lights out, children with papers in hand and backpacks over one shoulder push open the doors to their homes as he continues on his way. The same drive as any other day. The same goal as any other day. To remove the aggravations of his day and to be ready for home when he pulls into the driveway.

Wendy Shalit is an author that focuses on women’s issues. Young women in particular. Her books examine the attitudes and roles of society and mass media in young women’s lives with particular focus on their outlook on sex, marriage and relationships. I came across her work while reading another weblog ( Erosblog – NOTE NOT SAFE FOR WORK OR KIDS). The person from Erosblog commented on a particular passage of this review of one of her works by F. Roger Devlin, Ph.D. The passage is as follows:

When a young girl becomes erotically aware of boys, she is endowed by nature with a set of blinders that exclude the majority of them — including many who can make good husbands — from her sight. What gets a male within her narrow range of vision is called “sexual attractiveness.” What is it?

It is not possible to find out by asking women themselves. They will insist until they are blue in the face that they want only a sensitive, respectful fellow who treats them right. “Intelligence, kindness, personality [and] a certain sense of humor” make up Wendy Shalit’s list of supposedly sought-after male qualities. (RM, p. 116) In a passage on the decline of male courtesy she delivers the following ludicrous assertion deadpan: “When … a man does dare to open a door for a woman, he is snapped up right away.” (RM, p. 156)

When women claim to be seeking kindness, respect, a sense of humor, etc., they mean at most that they would like to find these qualities in the men who are already within their erotic field of view. When a man asks what women are looking for, he is trying to find out how he can get into that field of view. Women do not normally say, either because they do not know themselves or because it embarrasses them to speak about it. The advice they do give harms a lot of lonely men who mistakenly concentrate their mating effort on showing kindness and courtesy to ungrateful brats rather than working to gain the things females actually respond to.

Fortunately, we do not have to depend upon female testimony. It is with women as with politicians: if you wish to understand them you must ignore what they say and watch what they do. Plentiful evidence gathered over a vast range of history and culture leaves no room for doubt: women are attracted to men who possess some combination of physical appearance, social status, and resources.

In the environment in which we evolved, the careful choice of a mate was critical to a female’s success in passing on her genes. If her man was not strong enough to be a successful hunter, or not of sufficiently high rank within the tribe to commandeer food from others, her children might be in trouble. The women who were reproductively successful were those with a sexual preference for effective providers. A kind of erotic “tunnel vision” was selected for, which causes women to focus their mating effort on the men at the top of the pack — the “alpha males” with good physical endowments, social rank, and economic resources (or an ability to acquire them). Today the female preference for tall men, to give just one example, no longer makes much sense, but they, and we, are stuck with it.

What women instinctively want is for 99 percent of the men they run into to leave them alone, buzz off, drop dead — while the one to whom they feel attracted makes all their dreams come true. One of the keys to deciphering female speech is that the term “men” signifies for them only the very restricted number of men they find sexually attractive. All the dirty articles in Cosmo about “giving him the sex he craves” and “driving him wild in bed” concern this man of her dreams, who by some amazing coincidence usually turns out to be the man of some other girl’s dreams as well.

During their nubile years, many women are at least as concerned with turning male desire off (i.e., telling the 99 percent to drop dead) as with turning it on (getting Mr. Alpha to commit): they get more offers of attention than they have time to process.

Like many men I have always been puzzled by the ‘I just want a sweet guy who listens.’ vs. the reality of the what women want. This certainly explains it. When you are considered unacceptable as a partner you don’t fit in the catagory of men. You are simply not included and none of the things that society is shouting about men/women relationships apply to you. No matter how well you fill the ‘sweet guy who listens’ role if you failed to miss the initial survey of people that fit into the context of the womans ‘wants’ you might as well just go pound sand.

What of the Beta Males? All of those men that fall outside the field of view, struggling to find a mate?

F. Roger Devlin writes:

Since the sexual revolution began, plenty of “beta males” have been tearing their hair out trying to discover what on Earth they have to do to make themselves acceptable to the Cosmo girl next door. They hear it said that women do not want to be rushed into sex and are looking for a man to commit. So when a woman does not respond favorably to his first advances, Mr. Beta reasons that he has to demonstrate his commitment. He will “prove his worthiness” to the angelic creature by being patient, kind, attentive, and respectful — exactly what women claim to want from men. He then gets slapped with a harassment accusation. If the woman is a co-worker he will probably lose his job. (Many — perhaps most — employers will fire a man without a hearing upon a woman’s complaint.) The loss of income, of course, does nothing to improve his success with other women.

This pattern may be repeated for many years until, well into his thirties, he unexpectedly finds himself starting to receive come-hither looks from desperate, frustrated, menopausal shrews cast off by more attractive men (or who have divorced such men). Sadly, many men are so lonely that they try to accommodate such women. Then they find themselves on the receiving end of all the resentment against “men” that has been building up in the women’s minds all these years. (Female anger tends to be less focused on the particular person who has caused it.)

There is reason to think such accommodation of women is already becoming less common: ordinary men are understandably growing disgusted with cleaning up other people’s messes. They are starting to reason as follows:

We cannot keep resentful, Cosmo-addled, STD-infected harridans out of our schools, workplaces, or government, but at least we can keep them out of our beds. Let them have the glamorous careers the feminist sisterhood fought so hard to obtain for them. They do not need our paychecks to keep them supplied for a lifetime with pulp romance fiction and magazine articles on “Reversing the Aging Process” or “Seven Kinds of Orgasm and How to Have Them All at Once.” Everyone makes choices in life and must accept the consequences; they long ago made theirs.

This male sexual counterrevolution — “revenge of the nerds,” you might call it — is likely to end up being more important and effective than Shalit’s exclusively feminine strategy of keeping the knickers up until after the wedding. What good will that do when there is not going to be a wedding?

I’d encourage everyone to read the full review and to perhaps grab a few of Wendy Shalit’s books as well to see the other side.

She clicked the seat belt into place and pushed down the door lock, the heat from the interior of the car making tiny beads of sweat begin to pop on the small of her back. Pushing the key into the ignition she turned over the engine in her dirty little Ford Escort, its engine a peppy little puppy eagerly waiting to go wherever his master bade him. Looking over her shoulder she ensured that the parking lot was empty. This also made sure that she could not look at him as she left. Quickly selecting drive she sped from the lot, leaving behind the boy she loved for the summer. Today was August 25th and it was time to move on. Thankful to get the green light at the exit of the parking lot she moved into traffic, towards home and away from him. Her summer memories followed her.

That first week after graduation; at the beach, the first taste of independence, no curfew, no limits. Roaming the boardwalk with a crowd of classmates, the exhilarating feeling of freedom from the daily rules that hold all teens in check flowing over the collective. The buzz of alcohol, burning on the way down, making risky decisions so much easier to make, so much fun to make. It was there she met him, she knew him from before but the uncertainty of the new environment made the pairing a possibility that otherwise would not have happened.

The uncut weeds on the perimeter of the ball fields whipped past her door as she went home to the only house she knew. Already in the process of packing up what little belongings would fit into a dorm room she had plenty to do. Pulling into her driveway she carefully stepped around the backboard her younger brother practiced at daily. First one home, she unlocked the door and headed upstairs to continue packing. She had her clothes packed, she was moving on.

She first saw him on the beach, a skinny boy that she knew from school but deep down inside she never have expected to pay attention to her. Maybe it was the rum or vodka, but he laughed at her jokes and seemed to genuinely be interested in her and what she had to say. The first time he touched her arm, a casual caress, released a flood of raw hormonal energy that felt like it would flow right out of her fingertips, toes, the top of her head. The next two days where a collective blur, a melding of two into one. Sure, she had done all of this before with others but this, this was hanging onto the edge of a raft amidst whitewater compared to a paddle boat on a flat lake.

She taped the packed box shut and labeled the side of it ‘books & stuffed animals’, pushed it off to the side along with the other boxes and got up off her hands and knees. Looked around the room that was slowly becoming the spare bedroom and not her bedroom she headed downstairs to start dinner. Reaching into the cabinet she pulled out the stockpot to begin boiling water for spaghetti for dinner, her family would be home soon and the quiet atmosphere would transform into a raucous environment where she would slowly fade into the background. She was an inconsequential part of her parents lives, they being so focused on her brother and his dreams and goals. She smiled to herself because she was moving on.

Holding his hand, damp with sweat they walked in the summer moonlight through the park. Soft music played from parked cars filled with young and old, committed and adulterous, each enjoying the anonymity of the night. She could see the outline of his face, he looked off into the distance intent on where they were headed. Looking for that secret place that they believed together was theirs and theirs alone. They spent their time like thieves, no caution for what was coming, the separation that they knew was coming. Instead they recorded these moments with their memories to hold for future times.

She turned off the light on her nightstand and rolled over to go to sleep, confident that tomorrow would be the final day of her summer and the true beginning of her life. The crickets thrummed outside her window as she slipped into the world of dreams. She was moving on.

He grabbed her shoulders and forcefully turned her to face him. In too deep to walk away, in love, that was what he said. Panicked the feelings she had worked so hard to suppress welled up inside her. No! Slamming them down she pushed his arms away and quickly walked to the edge of the sidewalk. We have plans, we have plans! No matter how he would plead she would beat him down and stick to her plan. She turned from him, the skinny boy with tears streaming down his face. Ready to abandon his plans for her, for a summer of life and love. She would not be part of it. The car door slamming was the punctuation mark on their relationship. A bright light that flared and was quickly snuffed out for bigger and better things.

She awoke and she moved on.