Heartache

(to protect the interests of some friends of mine, this will be a read-only posting)

I've had to let a friend go today, and the situation leading up to it has been one of great sadness for me. It's a terrible thing to have to do, but sometimes there simply is no alternative. Someone I know and respect is delusional. Not in the general, easily diagnosable "my wife has been replaced by a demon" kind of delusion, but another more insidious kind, wherein the person involved avoids reality by inventing delusions and hopping from one to the next like so many lily-pads. These people are not just pathological liars who invent random untruths aimlessly, nor are they social predators who manipulate the truth for their own gain. It's worse than that: these people simply do not access reality directly, but only through their own personal and continuous mythologizing. This is twice in my life now that I've been involved with someone who suffers from this kind of condition. One I am divorced from (luckily). Although I never anticipating meeting another one (one per lifetime is already excessive), the other has been a wonderful and interesting friend for several years.

Sadly, though, people with this sickness, being unable to accommodate reality for themselves (for whatever reasons I can't begin to guess), cause massive pain and disruption to other people's lives. You see, our lizard brains are wired to share information as much as possible -- it's one of our greatest survival mechanisms. It's no accident that professional liars learn to internalized their inventions, because once they've done so, they can use our human minds against us. Everyone knows how this works, so we do our best to recognize motivated deception. Other times, when it's just the case of someone who's a little warped (and who isn't, at least a little?), you can always say "ok, well Bill said X, but knowing Bill, it probably went down more like Y".

But when the person is neither conceiving advantageous schemes nor acting from the sort of consistent personal biases that we like to call "personality", but is simply selecting the next bearable delusion, there is no way to protect oneself. Stay in proximity long enough, and your own lizard-brain will internalize the person's new version of reality, regardless of what you know or do, even if you already recognize the delusion as false. As Homo Sapiens, we simply cannot help it.

There is no DSM-IV for these people, no intervention, no cognitive therapy, no regime of drugs. Being estranged from reality at the hardware level, with no differentiation between recognizing the truth and selecting it, there is literally nothing that can be done to help them. These people are like falling knives -- there's just nothing you can do but step backwards and help to clean up the mess that gets made on the way down.

This is twice now that I've lost someone to this, first a spouse, and now a friend. And it sucks.

Temporary Work Visas -- A Modest Proposal

There's a lot of bluster in the media regarding immigration "reform", whether one operates from Ron Paul's "lets make only US-born children of citizens automatic citizens" approach (absolute anathema to the La Raza racists), or from La Raza's "borders are inherently racist" belief (I think we all know where I stand on that one). One thing that keeps getting offered as a compromize position is the ability to have temporary workers come into the country. Temporary workers are a mixed bag, economically -- US Companies can exploit income inequities between the US & Mexico in their perennial drive to minimize costs: this results in cheaper goods for US consumers and a total dearth of low-end jobs that pay enough to let anyone climb out of poverty. Let's just say for purposes of argument that temporary workers are a good idea, even if only as an optimization or compromize position. The next big question becomes: how to ensure that temporary workers are really temporary? Why won't they just stay in-country? If Visa-allocation works anything like most programs do today, then a temporary work-visa is dead on arrival: there's nothing to keep workers from staying.

However, (drum roll, please)

The temporary work Visa (workable version):

• Temporary work Visas are issued by US'ian embassies in the countries of origin of the candidate workers, with full attention paid to criminal history, &c. .
• Temporary Work Visas each carry a unique, trackable ID number, distinct from Social Security Numbers or other IDs.
• Candidate workers, upon receipt of their Visa, may back and forth to the US freely just as any legally resident alien may do.
• Once the Visa is expired, there is a fixed period of time during which the worker must register at the US'ian embassy in his/her own country, in person. This deallocates the Visa ID#, allowing it to be re-issued to another worker. (like checking in a library book)
• At any point of time, only a fixed number of Temporary Visa IDs are allowed to exist; if a worker fails to re-appear at the US'ian embassy, the temporary Visa is not re-established.
• If the worker fails to de-register at the US'ian embassy, an ICE arrest warrant is automatically issued for the offender.
• If an offending temporary worker if forcibly removed to his/her country of origin, the temporary Visa ID is once again made available for use by other workers.
• To incent desired behavior on the part of temporary workers, workers who have already completed used temporary Visas without incident receive added priority for re-issue of another temporary Visa.
• US'ian embassies will routinely publish lists of temporary workers holding up Visas that could be issued to their fellow citizens in the foreign country.
• Visas are re-issued should the temporary worker die while in the US, &c.
  

If we were to follow this program, then we gain three benefits:

1. If temporary workers attempt to use the program for illicit entry into the US on a permanent basis, the system automatically corrects for their presence, affecting the offending workers' countries of origin without penalizing others.
2. It would allow the actual population of foreign workers to be directly managed, rather than attempting to manage a "rate of infow"-type metric with "Visas per year" as we have now.
3. By killing off a mechanism for illicit "sneak in the back door" immigration, it would allow the US to welcome more immigrants in through the "front door" with full support, dignity, &c.
   

Republican '08 Explained

Passing the Baton

There comes a point in every man's life when you simply have to pass the baton on to the next generation and retire. Apparently, two days ago Alexander Solzhenitsyn did just that, accepting a well deserved humanitarian achievement award from Russia's latest tyrant. Some might feel mad that he didn't say anything in protest against Putin, but he really did deserve the award, and at 88 years old, I think he deserves the rest.

Geeks Only

Professor Peter Bird, a plate techtonics specialist, has an alternate map of Tolkien's Middle Earth that he's posited in the "Dessert" section of his web-page. Click for the larger version.

Things that Suck: Reliant Energy

I've never lived anywhere before where I thought about getting a "No Solicitors" sign before, but here in Irving there's some knucklehead trying to sell you something every week or so, and if you're a work-from-home type, it's kinda vexing. Not a lot vexing, just the "please don't waste my time" vexing.

So some idiot wearing a white Reliant Energy polo shirt and two different kinds of officious looking ID cards comes up to my door, introduces himself, shakes hands and says....

(drumroll, please)

I'm here in the area because the energy market has been deregulated; do you know what that means?

Needless to say, I wasn't interested in the rest of his spiel. Never take an offer from a company (Reliant Energy, in this case) that believes its customers are stupid.

RFC on Teen Employment

From The Mess That Greenspan Made (see linkbar), the following graph:



Now, I have just as much loathing of Gen-Y as does the average Gen-X loathing Gen-X'er, but even I don't have a good explanation. Is it really possible that teenagers are really this spoiled nowadays, or with so many illegal immigrants working low-end jobs is there some new "those jobs are for poor people" meme out there, or ... ?

Please speculate, or, even better, opine.