The Blog with No Name

Even the graffiti is emo:

Happy Memorial Day!

I’ve been spending most of the day cleaning up around my apartment. It wasn’t overly messy, but a lot of stuff just had been stacking up over the months. For example, I still get a lot of paper bills and statements. I don’t pay much attention to these because I keep nearly all of my financial interactions restricted to the sphere of the electronic. I’ve found shifting money out of my bank account is much less painful if it’s just clicking cyberbuttons. I’m comfortable with clicking these buttons, and, not to sound like a braggart, but I excel at clicking these buttons. Today I sorted and filed about three months worth of Important Things on Dead Trees. I’m glad I did, because I found two checks I can cash for close to $100. I also found an unused iTunes Music Store gift card. Not bad for a day’s work. Though my joy is a bit tempered because I found one bill and one membership fee I have to pay, which brings it down to a net loss. Perhaps my life would be better if I just let things be.

I’ve been trying to live pretty cheap these days in effort to pay off the loan I took out for that law school debacle. I’ve been pretty successful so far, and I’m optimistic that I will have it paid off by mid-October. I think I could get it paid off even sooner, like the end of August, but that would mean I’d have to live even more frugally and delay a vacation I’d like to take sometime in the next three months. With my loan paid off, I can start planning for the future rather than just digging myself out of the past. I aim to invest significantly in 2008 with the intention of having investments assume my primary financial focus rather than a house or condo. I have no faith in the housing market right now, I don’t want to be tied down to real estate, and I’m pretty sure I don’t have the maturity and patience to actually take care of a house. Besides, a one bedroom apartment is sufficient to remind me of how single my life is; a half-populated house would weigh far too heavily on my fragile emo ego.

Anyway, I also want to get something like this next year too:

Or:

I love the sound of a supercharger winding up over the deep roar of a 400+ HP V8.

Here’s an interesting take on economic and legal lessons that can be drawn from The Godfather.

A choice quote:

Everyone remembers Don Corleone’s famous saying that he’s going to make “an offer you can’t refuse.” But for some reason, people forget that the Don also said that “a lawyer with his brief case can steal more than a hundred men with guns” (Godfather, pbk. edition, 52). One of the recurring themes of the novel is that people turn to the Mafia for help because of the corrupt and self-serving nature of many political and legal institutions that systematically allowed elites to plunder the politically weak. Puzo recognized, as sociologist Diego Gambetta explained more systematically, that the Sicilian Mafia flourished because it provided better “protection” against crime and violations of property and contract rights than did the official authorities, who generally protected only the politically powerful elite. To a lesser extent, a similar dynamic enabled the America Mafia to emerge in Italian immigrant communities in the early 1900s, as Puzo vividly portrayed in his chapter on the rise of Don Corleone.

Puzo also shows how Prohibition and afterwards the War on Drugs, provided opportunities for organized crime to grow and flourish. It was Prohibition that enabled the Godfather to go from being an “ordinary . . . businessman” to a “great Don in the world of criminal enterprise” (pg. 213). And, of course, the great Mob war that forms the central plot of the book is a conflict over Don Corleone’s unwillingness to help other crime families expand into the illegal drug business.

I saw this thought-provoking quote over at “Catholic and Enjoying It!”:

C.S. Lewis remarks somewhere about a pastor he knew who once saw Hitler in the flesh. Lewis asked him what he looked like.

The pastor replied, “Like all men. Like Christ.”

Shea is right: we do desperately want to believe evil and monstrous men are a different species from us. But they aren’t. They’re like us. They’re like me.

I think I’ve been struggling with this idea for quite sometime. It was never as focused or as vividly stated as in the episode above, but the general idea has been there. The question I’ve been thinking about for months now is, “What are we to do with these monsters?” I know what my gut reaction is, but I’m worried that my gut reaction might be horribly wrong and sinfully bereft of mercy. Is the answer really as simple as I want to think and hope it is? Most of the time I believe it is, but I’m also aware that these people share my humanity. Yet they are people who have been cursed with the will, opportunity, and power to commit atrocious acts against other human beings. How then are we to deal with them? How then am I to respond to them? I wish I had a black and white answer, but through my sin-scaled eyes all I see is gray.