Saturday, November 12, 2011

Tips to Maximize Enjoyment of the Great Smoky Mountains' Synchronous Firefly

This is part of the line of people waiting to get on the buses to Elkmont. This line is worth it, IF you follow my suggestions.

Photinus Carolinus, the "synchronous" firefly, found in the Great Smoky Mountains outside of Gatlinburg, TN, is quite a sight to behold. I recommend everyone see it at least once.

To maximize your enjoyment of this natural, precious, and rare wonder of the world, I have the following list of suggestions...

Do:

  1. See them around June 3rd or 4th, if at all possible. Though other species peak at different times, Photinus Carolinus seems to be at its most populus around these days.
  2. Go on a night when the moon will be waning or new. A waxing moon is too bright and will be directly overhead at exactly the wrong time of night. Given this, 2012 will be a bad year. 2013 should be excellent, though.
  3. Bring your own folding chair. You will be sitting for a long time. Not only in line for the bus to Elkmont, but also in the forest, waiting for the fireflies to start flashing.
  4. Leave your children under 12 at home or in Gatlinburg. They will be an annoyance to you and everyone else around you.
  5. Wear jeans and long sleeves. Aside from it getting a little chilly after dark, the woods have lots of chiggers. Using Deet or other insect repellant is strongly recommended. Take it from someone who learned this the hard way.
  6. Enjoy the other species of firefly that will be flashing on the same night. One with an amber light (perhaps Pyractomena, but maybe Photinus Obscurelis) during twilight, and another (Phausis reticulata) with a pale blue light that flits around in a most charming fashion after dark (I swear to you, you will be charmed), nicknamed "the blue ghost".
  7. Stay on the path. See #5 above. If you're there early enough in the month and the moon is waning, the fireflies will be ALL AROUND YOU once it's dark enough (which isn't going to be until after 10 pm, so, again, see #4).
  8. Pick a spot where you can see a decent-sized area, away from obscuring boulders and/or structures. When the fireflies are in full effect, the light pattern moves across the forest floor in waves. Keep in mind that the males are putting on a show for the females in the leaf litter. That should give you an idea about what spots are likely to be the best.
  9. Sit in quiet repose, contemplating life, mortality... its beauty and brutality.

DO NOT:

  1. Try to take movies or pictures of the fireflies (unless you seriously make your living with a camera, preferably as a nature photographer). Not only is this not going to work, it's going to annoy everyone around you and furthermore make you look like the moron that you are demonstrating yourself to be.
  2. Stray off the path. See #s 5 and 7 in the prior section above.
  3. Bring a bright flashlight. Even the dim flashlights are incredibly annoying and essentially unnecessary if you stay on the path. You will find that, A) There are many morons around you with their own flashlights and astoundingly little awareness of just how annoying they are being. They will provide more than enough illumination; and B) Even without the morons and their flashlights you will find that your eyes will adjust quite well and you'll be able to find your way back to the trolley (or your car if you've gone earlier than the start of the trolley service).
  4. Bring young children. Photinus Carolinus fireflies don't start flashing until it's well and fully dark. In June in TN this means 9:45. That's when the fireflies GET STARTED. YOU WILL WANT TO STAY UNTIL 10:30 or later, at which point there will be a long line for the buses back to your car. A line that will be filled with dumb, inconsiderate, fucking stupid people who brought their now incredibly cranky young children. I guarantee that you will not be BOTH seeing the fireflies AND getting back to your car before 11 pm. Not going to happen. Do your young children regularly stay up this late??? Do you want to sit with them in the hot, humid, Tennessee forest, literally for HOURS AND HOURS with virtually nothing to do but be patient and wait, meanwhile annoying the shit out of everyone around you (if not also you), only to then be forced to completely miss what you came to see because they can't manage to make it until 11 pm without throwing fits?

Sunday, May 25, 2008

The Greatest Threat?

This video wins the prize for "Most [shall we say "greatest"?] Unintentionally Ironic"...

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Untitled

The past: immutable
The present: ephemeral
The future: inscrutable

Friday, May 16, 2008

Run Your Car with Water

From this site...

Can Water Really Power a Car?

The answer is YES, ABSOLUTELY! We have made the technology to build a water-burning hybrid easy and affordable.

Water can be used to fuel a car when used as a supplement to gasoline. In fact, very little water is needed! only one quart of water provides over 1800 gallons of HHO gas which can literally last for months and significantly increase your vehicle's fuel efficiently, improve emissions quality, and save you money.

Thousands of successful water-conversions around the world are proof that this technology works and will soon catch on! Some industry insiders say its just a matter of time before this water-burning technology will be standard in new automobiles. One expert estimates most cars will be using this technology by 2012, but until the auto manufacturers catch up, you can use this technology for yourself today at a very reasonable set-up cost.
Are there really people out there who fall for this scam and shell out the $49? Sadly, I bet there are. The site counter there claims over 2.5 million hits, so if you figure a conversion rate of 0.01% then the site's owner has grossed over $12,000 for just putting up a web page.

Facebook (where I found this bullshit being advertised) should be ashamed of themselves. Oh, and this is a good example of why I chose to not put Google's Adwords on Die Eigenheit. If I were showing Adwords then undoubtedly this page would be filled with links for similar sham products right now.

Monday, January 28, 2008

A Jiu-Jitsu Career Pictorial Retrospective

Me and my dad, November of 1999 at the Gracie Academy in Torrance. Note his two stripes and my none!
I began practicing Gracie Jiu-Jitsu in February of 1997 in a small Dojo in San Francisco. It was far from where I lived and I didn't have a car, so I usually only went on Saturday mornings, when riding my bike wasn't an exercise in terror.

I was learning from one- and two-stripe blue belts. Nice guys, but that plus my mere 50 minutes of a very limited number of technique drills and 10 minutes of sparring a week meant little forward progress (but, damn if I didn't learn how to escape a headlock!). Meanwhile my father was living in Torrance, taking several classes a week from the Gracies themselves. I sure was jealous!

In August of '97 I moved to Phoenix. I found the local Gracie Training Association, which at the time was located in Chandler. Like the San Francisco school, the "Bushido Academy" was headed up by 3 low-ranking blue belts. That, plus a 25-mile drive, one way, made me disinclined to go more than an average of once a week, at first.

It wasn't long before I discovered that Megaton's school was less than a mile from where I was living at the time. Given that he was a black belt I was excited to check his place out. My first impression was negative--the school had no A/C, and the people there were not very friendly. Undaunted, I decided to take a few classes. Over the course of a week I chipped a tooth, injured an elbow, and was choked unconscious. The higher ranked students seemed completely uninterested in helping the white belts to actually improve their technique. In addition, even as an ignorant white belt the warm-ups struck me as counter-productive: escape a position when all your opponent is doing is trying to hold you in that position. Everything I'd learned in my minimal exposure to the Gracies told me that escapes were best effected when your opponent was intent on an attack.

From this experience I gained a deep respect for "the Gracie way" of instruction. I returned to the Chandler school and never looked back.

Bruises are part and parcel of practicing Jiu-Jitsu. This photo was taken in September of 1999, but it might as well have been last month, or last year...
Dig the shorts!
"Hematoma" is a word in every Jiu-Jitsu practitioner's vocabulary...
Picture from November, 2001
A slightly more serious injury (the result of a throw while I was visiting the Torrance Academy in November of 1999) to the carpometacarpal joint of my left hand...
This sucker hurt!
I know it doesn't look like much, but that one knocked me out of commission for a couple weeks.

In fact, joint injuries of varying degrees are another inevitability, if you're at all dedicated to the art. Aside from the above thumb injury, I've hurt the joint between the metacarpal and proximal phalange of my left index finger (out for over a month), both elbows (at least 3 weeks for those), the MCL of my left knee (another month off), the left glenohumeral joint (another month off), my floating ribs on both sides (chronic injuries that've kept me from an unknown number of classes), and, worst of all, a dislocation of the phalange of my right big toe that was so serious that it broke the skin and necessitated an overnight hospital stay...
Picture taken in March of 2000
The Chandler school eventually was no more. In 1999 my instructors, Nathan and Brad, teamed up with a Karate school in Paradise Valley...
Photo from November of 1999
Here's a picture of my car in the parking lot of the school, after a tow truck rolled into it. Note the Gracie sticker on the window...

We didn't stay in Paradise Valley very long. Sometime in May or June of 2000 Nathan moved the school to a room in the back of a Gymnastics school--a place that became affectionately known as "The Dungeon". There was no heat or A/C, and the ceiling was exposed fiberglass insulation (which Nathan quickly covered over with plastic). At least we had our very own cage!
Too bad we didn't have any cage matches while we were there!
Here's Nathan getting his purple belt from Relson Gracie in September of 2000...

Me and Relson, also September, 2000...
Note my one striped blue belt! Note also the shoes. I was still nervous about my toes after the injury.
The owners of The Dungeon weren't big fans of us "knuckle-draggers". It wasn't long before we were kicked out of the space. Nathan scrambled and found our current digs at Phoenix Grappling, in central Phoenix. The school's been there ever since.

Over the years it's typical for a school's set of students to change. I'm sure this is even more true of a Jiu-Jitsu school, as the art takes a lot out of you. Even if you remain free of serious injury, there's the matter of being constantly beaten up to contend with. Sticking with it over the long haul takes cultivating a certain level of humility and resolve, I think.

Here's the team in March of 2000, at the PV Karate school. Fun things to note about this picture: Nathan's a four-stripe blue belt; Nabeel Ibrahim, top row, second from right, is a white belt...

Several months later, at The Dungeon...

Here we are being visited by Rolker Gracie. I'm not exactly sure of this photo's vintage, but you can just make out that I'm a two-striped blue belt--and so is Nabeel! Also notice that, except for Heath, who is sitting to my left, all the other students pictured are new...

Another photo of unknown vintage, though I'm pretty sure it's sometime in 2002. Things to note here: Doug Moore, top row, second from left, is a white belt, as is Matt Mallery (top row, second from right); Heath is now a purple belt, while I'm still a 2-striper...

Nathan and Relson...

I consider myself very fortunate to have been able to learn from so many great Jiu-Jitsu fighters. Aside from Relson and Rolker (pictured here with me, Brad, and Nathan)...

...I've also taken classes from Rorion, Royce, Royler, Carlos "Caique" Elias...

...and a number of others that, sadly, don't include the great Helio Gracie.

I took a couple years off when I lived in Virginia, but since I moved back to Phoenix I've once again been a regular at the school (with time off recently for recovery from yet more joint injuries)--which, due I'm sure primarily to its stability from staying at Phoenix Grappling, has grown considerably, and now includes kids classes...
Note Nathan's BLACK BELT, and Matt Mallery's PURPLE!
This renewed focus has enabled me to finally obtain the rank of purple belt, after what is undoubtedly one of the longest careers as a blue belt around.
Photo taken January 28th, 2008
They say the Gracie purple belt is the hardest belt to get, period. If I am any indication, then you won't find me arguing otherwise.

Saturday, January 05, 2008

Anarchist's Progress

Written by Albert Jay Nock, this classic essay originally appeared in the March 1927 issue of the American Mercury and was reprinted, by Nock, a year later in On Doing the Right Thing

When I was seven years old, playing in front of our house on the outskirts of Brooklyn one morning, a policeman stopped and chatted with me for a few moments. He was a kindly man, of a Scandinavian blonde type with pleasant blue eyes, and I took to him at once. He sealed our acquaintance permanently by telling me a story that I thought was immensely funny; I laughed over it at intervals all day. I do not remember what it was, but it had to do with the antics of a drove of geese in our neighbourhood. He impressed me as the most entertaining and delightful person that I had seen in a long time, and I spoke of him to my parents with great pride.

At this time I did not know what policemen were. No doubt I had seen them, but not to notice them. Now, naturally, after meeting this highly prepossessing specimen, I wished to find out all I could about them, so I took the matter up with our old colored cook. I learned from her that my fine new friend represented something that was called the law; that the law was very good and great, and that everyone should obey and respect it. This was reasonable; if it were so, then my admirable friend just fitted his place, and was even more highly to be thought of, if possible. I asked where the law came from, and it was explained to me that men all over the country got together on what was called election day, and chose certain persons to make the law and others to see that it was carried out; and that the sum-total of all this mechanism was called our government. This again was as it should be; the men I knew, such as my father, my uncle George, and Messrs. So-and-so among the neighbours (running them over rapidly in my mind), could do this sort of thing handsomely, and there was probably a good deal in the idea. But what was it all for? Why did we have law and government, anyway? Then I learned that there were persons called criminals; some of them stole, some hurt or killed people or set fire to houses; and it was the duty of men like my friend the policeman to protect us from them. If he saw any he would catch them and lock them up, and they would be punished according to the law.

A year or so later we moved to another house in the same neighbourhood, only a short distance away. On the corner of the block -- rather a long block -- behind our house stood a large one-story wooden building, very dirty and shabby, called the Wigwam. While getting the lie of my new surroundings, I considered this structure and remarked with disfavour the kind of people who seemed to be making themselves at home there. Some one told me it was a "political headquarters," but I did not know what that meant, and therefore did not connect it with my recent researches into law and government. I had little curiosity about the Wigwam. My parents never forbade my going there, but my mother once casually told me that it was a pretty good place to keep away from, and I agreed with her.


Two months later I heard someone say that election day was shortly coming on, and I sparked up at once; this, then, was the day when the lawmakers were to be chosen. There had been great doings at the Wigwam lately; in the evenings, too, I had seen noisy processions of drunken loafers passing our house, carrying transparencies and tin torches that sent up clouds of kerosene-smoke. When I had asked what these meant, I was answered in one word, "politics," uttered in a disparaging tone, but this signified nothing to me. The fact is that my attention had been attracted by a steam-calliope that went along with one of the first of these processions, and I took it to mean that there was a circus going on; and when I found that there was no circus, I was disappointed and did not care what else might be taking place.

On hearing of election day, however, the light broke in on me. I was really witnessing the august performances that I had heard of from our cook. All these processions of yelling hoodlums who sweat and stank in the parboiling humidity of the Indian-summer evenings -- all the squalid goings-on in the Wigwam -- all these, it seemed, were part and parcel of an election. I noticed that the men whom I knew in the neighbourhood were not prominent in this election; my uncle George voted, I remember, and when he dropped in at our house that evening, I overheard him say that going to the polls was a filthy business. I could not make it out. Nothing could be clearer than that the leading spirits in the whole affair were most dreadful swine; and I wondered by what kind of magic they could bring forth anything so majestic, good and venerable as the law. But I kept my questionings to myself for some reason, though, as a rule, 1 was quite a hand for pestering older people about matters that seemed anomalous. Finally, I gave it up as hopeless, and thought no more about the subject for three years.

An incident of that election night, however, stuck in my memory. Some devoted brother, very far gone in whisky, fell by the wayside in a vacant lot just back of our house, on his way to the Wigwam to await the returns. He lay there all night, mostly in a comatose state. At intervals of something like half an hour he roused himself up in the darkness, apparently aware that he was not doing his duty by the occasion, and tried to sing the chorus of "Marching Through Georgia," but he could never get quite through three measures of the first bar before relapsing into somnolence. It was very funny; he always began so bravely and earnestly, and always petered out so lamentably. I often think of him. His general sense of political duty, I must say, still seems to me as intelligent and as competent as that of any man I have met in the many, many years that have gone by since then, and his mode of expressing it still seems about as effective as any I could suggest.


When I was just past my tenth birthday we left Brooklyn and went to live in a pleasant town of ten thousand population. An orphaned cousin made her home with us, a pretty girl, who soon began to cut a fair swath among the young men of the town. One of these was an extraordinary person, difficult to describe. My father, a great tease, at once detected his resemblance to a chimpanzee, and bored my cousin abominably by always speaking of him as Chim. The young man was not a popular idol by any means, yet no one thought badly of him. He was accepted everywhere as a source of legitimate diversion, and in the graduated, popular scale of local speech was invariably designated as a fool -- a born fool, for which there was no help. When I heard he was a lawyer, I was so astonished that I actually went into the chicken court one day to hear him plead some trifling case, out of sheer curiosity to see him in action; and I must say I got my money's worth. Presently the word went around that he was going to run for Congress, and stood a good chance of being elected; and what amazed me above all was that no one seemed to see anything out of the way about it.

My tottering faith in law and government got a hard jolt from this. Here was a man, a very good fellow indeed -- he had nothing in common with the crew who herded around the Wigwam -- who was regarded by the unanimous judgment of the community, without doubt, peradventure, or exception, as having barely sense enough to come in when it rained; and this was the man whom his party was sending to Washington as contentedly as if he were some Draco or Solon. At this point my sense of humour forged to the front and took permanent charge of the situation, which was fortunate for me, since otherwise my education would have been aborted, and I would perhaps, like so many who have missed this great blessing, have gone in with the reformers and uplifters; and such a close shave as this, in the words of Rabelais, is a terrible thing to think upon. How many reformers there have been in my day; how nobly and absurdly busy they were, and how dismally unhumorous! I can dimly remember Pingree and Altgeld in the Middle West, and Godkin, Strong, and Seth Low in New York. During the nineties, the goodly fellowship of the prophets buzzed about the whole country like flies around a tar-barrel -- and, Lord! where be they now?


It will easily be seen, I think, that the only unusual thing about all this was that my mind was perfectly unprepossessed and blank throughout. My experiences were surely not uncommon, and my reasonings and inferences were no more than any child, who was more than halfwitted, could have made without trouble. But my mind had never been perverted or sophisticated; it was left to itself. I never went to school, so I was never indoctrinated with pseudo-patriotic fustian of any kind, and the plain, natural truth of such matters as I have been describing, therefore, found its way to my mind without encountering any artificial obstacle.

This freedom continued, happily, until my mind had matured and toughened. When I went to college I had the great good luck to hit on probably the only one in the country (there certainly is none now) where all such subjects were so remote and unconsidered that one would not know they existed. I had Greek, Latin, and mathematics, and nothing else, but I had these until the cows came home; then I had them all over again (or so it seemed) to make sure nothing was left out; then I was given a bachelor's degree in the liberal arts, and turned adrift. The idea was that if one wished to go in for some special branch of learning, one should do it afterward, on the foundation laid at college. The college's business was to lay the foundation, and the authorities saw to it that we were kept plentifully busy with the job. Therefore, all such subjects as political history, political science, and political economy were closed to me throughout my youth and early manhood; and when the time came that I wished to look into them, I did it on my own, without the interference of instructors, as any person who has gone through a course of training similar to mine at college is quite competent to do.

That time, however, came much later, and meanwhile I thought little about law and government, as I had other fish to fry; I was living more or less out of the world, occupied with literary studies. Occasionally some incident happened that set my mind perhaps a little farther along in the old sequences, but not often. Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a boy who had been sentenced to prison, a poor, scared little brat, who had intended something no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be a crime. The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this. The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an official and not as a man. On this principle of action, it seemed to me that one could commit almost any kind of crime without getting into trouble with one's conscience. Clearly, a great crime had been committed against this boy; yet nobody who had had a hand in it -- the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, the complaining witness, the policemen and jailers -- felt any responsibility about it, because they were not acting as men, but as officials. Clearly, too, the public did not regard them as criminals, but rather as upright and conscientious men.

The idea came to me then, vaguely but unmistakably, that if the primary intention of government was not to abolish crime but merely to monopolize crime, no better device could be found for doing it than the inculcation of precisely this frame of mind in the officials and in the public; for the effect of this was to exempt both from any allegiance to those sanctions of humanity or decency which anyone of either class, acting as an individual, would have felt himself bound to respect -- nay, would have wished to respect. This idea was vague at the moment, as I say, and I did not work it out for some years, but I think I never quite lost track of it from that time.

Presently I got acquainted in a casual way with some officeholders, becoming quite friendly with one in particular, who held a high elective office. One day he happened to ask me how I would reply to a letter that bothered him; it was a query about the fitness of a certain man for an appointive job. His recommendation would have weight; he liked the man, and really wanted to recommend him -- moreover, he was under great political pressure to recommend him -- but he did not think the man was qualified. Well, then, I suggested offhand, why not put it just that way? -- it seemed all fair and straightforward. "Ah yes," he said, "but if I wrote such a letter as that, you see, I wouldn't be reelected." This took me aback a bit, and I demurred somewhat. "That's all very well," he kept insisting, "but I wouldn't be reelected." Thinking to give the discussion a semi-humorous turn, I told him that the public, after all, had rights in the matter; he was their hired servant, and if he were not reelected it would mean merely that the public did not want him to work for them any more, which was quite within their competence. Moreover, if they threw him out on any such issue as this, he ought to take it as a compliment; indeed, if he were reelected, would it not tend to show in some measure that he and the people did not fully understand each other? He did not like my tone of levity, and dismissed the subject with the remark that I knew nothing of practical politics, which was no doubt true.


Perhaps a year after this I had my first view of a legislative body in action. I visited the capital of a certain country, and listened attentively to the legislative proceedings. What I wished to observe, first of all, was the kind of business that was mostly under discussion; and next, I wished to get as good a general idea as I could of the kind of men who were entrusted with this business. I had a friend on the spot, formerly a newspaper reporter who had been in the press gallery for years; he guided me over the government buildings, taking me everywhere and showing me everything I asked to see.

As we walked through some corridors in the basement of the Capitol, I remarked the resonance of the stonework. "Yes," he said, thoughtfully, "these walls, in their time, have echoed to the uncertain footsteps of many a drunken statesman." His words were made good in a few moments when we heard a spirited commotion ahead, which we found to proceed from a good-sized room, perhaps a committee room, opening off the corridor. The door being open, we stopped, and looked in on a strange sight.

In the centre of the room, a florid, square-built, portly man was dancing an extraordinary kind of break-down, or kazak dance. He leaped straight up to an incredible height, spun around like a teetotum, stamped his feet, then suddenly squatted and hopped through several measures in a squatting position, his hands on his knees, and then leaped up in the air and spun around again. He blew like a turkeycock, and occasionally uttered hoarse cries; his protruding and fiery eyes were suffused with blood, and the veins stood out on his neck and forehead like the strings of a bass-viol. He was drunk.

About a dozen others, also very drunk, stood around him in crouching postures, some clapping their hands and some slapping their knees, keeping time to the dance. One of them caught sight of us in the doorway, came up, and began to talk to me in a maundering fashion about his constituents. He was a loathsome human being; I have seldom seen one so repulsive. I could make nothing of what he said; he was almost inarticulate; and in pronouncing certain syllables he would slaver and spit, so that I was more occupied with keeping out of his range than with listening to him. He kept trying to buttonhole me, and I kept moving backward; he had backed me thirty feet down the corridor when my friend came along and disengaged me; and as we resumed our way, my friend observed for my consolation that "you pretty well need a mackintosh when X talks to you, even when he is sober."

This man, I learned, was interested in the looting of certain valuable public lands; nobody had heard of his ever being interested in any other legislative measures. The florid man who was dancing was interested in nothing but a high tariff on certain manufactures; he shortly became a Cabinet officer. Throughout my stay I was struck by seeing how much of the real business of legislation was in this category -- how much, that is, had to do with putting unearned money in the pockets of beneficiaries -- and what fitful and perfunctory attention the legislators gave to any other kind of business. I was even more impressed by the prevalent air of cynicism; by the frankness with which everyone seemed to acquiesce in the view of Voltaire, that government is merely a device for taking money out of one person's pocket and putting it into another's.


These experiences, commonplace as they were, prepared me to pause over and question certain sayings of famous men, when subsequently I ran across them, which otherwise I would perhaps have passed by without thinking about them. When I came upon the saying of Lincoln, that the way of the politician is "a long step removed from common honesty," it set a problem for me. I wondered just why this should be generally true, if it were true. When I read the remark of Mr. Jefferson, that "whenever a man has cast a longing eye on office, a rottenness begins in his conduct," I remembered the judge who had sentenced the boy, and my officeholding acquaintance who was so worried about reelection. I tried to reexamine their position, as far as possible putting myself in their place, and made a great effort to understand it favorably. My first view of a parliamentary body came back to me vividly when I read the despondent observation of John Bright, that he had sometimes known the British Parliament to do a good thing, but never just because it was a good thing. In the meantime I had observed many legislatures, and their principal occupations and preoccupations seemed to me precisely like those of the first one I ever saw; and while their personnel was not by any means composed throughout of noisy and disgusting scoundrels (neither, I hasten to say, was the first one), it was so unimaginably inept that it would really have to be seen to be believed. I cannot think of a more powerful stimulus to one's intellectual curiosity, for instance, than to sit in the galleries of the last Congress, contemplate its general run of membership, and then recall these sayings of Lincoln, Mr. Jefferson, and John Bright.[Note 1]

It struck me as strange that these phenomena seemed never to stir any intellectual curiosity in anybody. As far as I know, there is no record of its ever having occurred to Lincoln that the fact he had remarked was striking enough to need accounting for; nor yet to Mr. Jefferson, whose intellectual curiosity was almost boundless; nor yet to John Bright. As for the people around me, their attitudes seemed strangest of all. They all disparaged politics. Their common saying, "Oh, that's politics," always pointed to something that in any other sphere of action they would call shabby and disreputable. But they never asked themselves why it was that in this one sphere of action alone they took shabby and disreputable conduct as a matter of course. It was all the more strange because these same people still somehow assumed that politics existed for the promotion of the highest social purposes. They assumed that the State's primary purpose was to promote through appropriate institutions the general welfare of its members. This assumption, whatever it amounted to, furnished the rationale of their patriotism, and they held to it with a tenacity that on slight provocation became vindictive and fanatical. Yet all of them were aware, and if pressed, could not help acknowledging, that more than 90 per cent of the State's energy was employed directly against the general welfare. Thus one might say that they seemed to have one set of credenda for week-days and another for Sundays, and never to ask themselves what actual reasons they had for holding either.

I did not know how to take this, nor do I now. Let me draw a rough parallel. Suppose vast numbers of people to be contemplating a machine that they had been told was a plough, and very valuable -- indeed, that they could not get on without it -- some even saying that its design came down in some way from on high. They have great feelings of pride and jealousy about this machine, and will give up their lives for it if they are told it is in danger. Yet they all see that it will not plough well, no matter what hands are put to manage it, and in fact does hardly any ploughing at all; sometimes only with enormous difficulty and continual tinkering and adjustment can it be got to scratch a sort of furrow, very poor and short, hardly practicable, and ludicrously disproportionate to the cost and pains of cutting it. On the other hand, the machine harrows perfectly, almost automatically. It looks like a harrow, has the history of a harrow, and even when the most enlightened effort is expended on it to make it act like a plough, it persists, except for an occasional six or eight per cent of efficiency, in acting like a harrow.

Surely such a spectacle would make an intelligent being raise some enquiry about the nature and original intention of that machine. Was it really a plough? Was it ever meant to plough with? Was it not designed and constructed for harrowing? Yet none of the anomalies that I had been observing ever raised any enquiry about the nature and original intention of the State. They were merely acquiesced in. At most, they were put down feebly to the imperfections of human nature which render mismanagement and perversion of every good institution to some extent inevitable; and this is absurd, for these anomalies do not appear in the conduct of any other human institution. It is no matter of opinion, but of open and notorious fact, that they do not. There are anomalies in the church and in the family that are significantly analogous; they will bear investigation, and are getting it; but the analogies are by no means complete, and are mostly due to the historical connection of these two institutions with the State.

Everyone knows that the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime that I spoke of a moment ago, and that it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien. There is, for example, no human right, natural or Constitutional, that we have not seen nullified by the United States Government. Of all the crimes that are committed for gain or revenge, there is not one that we have not seen it commit -- murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, fraud, criminal collusion and connivance. On the other hand, we have all remarked the enormous relative difficulty of getting the State to effect any measure for the general welfare. Compare the difficulty of securing conviction in cases of notorious malfeasance, and in cases of petty private crime. Compare the smooth and easy going of the Teapot Dome transactions with the obstructionist behaviour of the State toward a national child-labour law. Suppose one should try to get the State to put the same safeguards (no stronger) around service-income that with no pressure at all it puts around capital-income: what chance would one have? It must not be understood that I bring these matters forward to complain of them. I am not concerned with complaints or reforms, but only with the exhibition of anomalies that seem to me to need accounting for.

In the course of some desultory reading I noticed that the historian Parkman, at the outset of his volume on the conspiracy of Pontiac, dwells with some puzzlement, apparently, upon the fact that the Indians had not formed a State. Mr. Jefferson, also, who knew the Indians well, remarked the same fact -- that they lived in a rather highly organized society, but had never formed a State. Bicknell, the historian of Rhode Island, has some interesting passages that bear upon the same point, hinting that the collisions between the Indians and the whites may have been largely due to a misunderstanding about the nature of land-tenure; that the Indians, knowing nothing of the British system of land-tenure, understood their land-sales and land-grants as merely an admission of the whites to the same communal use of land that they themselves enjoyed. I noticed, too, that Marx devotes a good deal of space in Das Kapital to proving that economic exploitation cannot take place in any society until the exploited class has been expropriated from the land. These observations attracted my attention as possibly throwing a strong side light upon the nature of the State and the primary purpose of government, and I made note of them accordingly.

At this time I was a good deal in Europe. I was in England and Germany during the Tangier incident, studying the circumstances and conditions that led up to the late war. My facilities for this were exceptional, and I used them diligently. Here I saw the State behaving just as I had seen it behave at home. Moreover, remembering the political theories of the eighteenth century, and the expectations put upon them, I was struck with the fact that the republican, constitutional-monarchical and autocratic States behaved exactly alike. This has never been sufficiently remarked. There was no practical distinction to be drawn among England, France, Germany, and Russia; in all these countries the State acted with unvarying consistency and unfailing regularity against the interests of the immense, the overwhelming majority of its people. So flagrant and flagitious, indeed, was the action of the State in all these countries, that its administrative officials, especially its diplomats, would immediately, in any other sphere of action, be put down as a professional-criminal class; just as would the corresponding officials in my own country, as I had already remarked. It is a noteworthy fact, indeed, concerning all that has happened since then, that if in any given circumstances one went on the assumption that they were a professional-criminal class, one could predict with accuracy what they would do and what would happen; while on any other assumption one could predict almost nothing. The accuracy of my own predictions during the war and throughout the Peace Conference was due to nothing but their being based on this assumption.

The Liberal party was in power in England in 1911, and my attention became attracted to its tenets. I had already seen something of Liberalism in America as a kind of glorified mugwumpery. The Cleveland Administration had long before proved what everybody already knew, that there was no essential difference between the Republican and Democratic parties; an election meant merely that one was in office and wished to stay in, and the other was out and wished to get in. I saw precisely the same relation prevailing between the two major parties in England, and I was to see later the same relation sustained by the Labour Administration of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald. All these political permutations resulted only in what John Adams admirably called "a change of impostors." But I was chiefly interested in the basic theory of Liberalism. This seemed to be that the State is no worse than a degenerate or perverted institution, beneficent in its original intention, and susceptible of restoration by the simple expedient of "putting good men in office."

I had already seen this experiment tried on several scales of magnitude, and observed that it came to nothing commensurate with the expectations put upon it or the enormous difficulty of arranging it. Later I was to see it tried on an unprecedented scale, for almost all the Governments engaged in the war were Liberal, notably the English and our own. Its disastrous results in the case of the Wilson Administration are too well known to need comment; though I do not wish to escape the responsibility of saying that of all forms of political impostorship, Liberalism always seemed to me the most vicious, because the most pretentious and specious. The general upshot of my observations, however, was to show me that whether in the hands of Liberal or Conservative, Republican or Democrat, and whether under nominal constitutionalism, republicanism or autocracy, the mechanism of the State would work freely and naturally in but one direction, namely, against the general welfare of the people.


So I set about finding out what I could about the origin of the State, to see whether its mechanism was ever really meant to work in any other direction; and here I came upon a very odd fact. All the current popular assumptions about the origin of the State rest upon sheer guesswork; none of them upon actual investigation. The treatises and textbooks that came into my hands were also based, finally, upon guesswork. Some authorities guessed that the State was originally formed by this-or-that mode of social agreement; others, by a kind of muddling empiricism; others, by the will of God; and so on. Apparently none of these, however, had taken the plain course of going back upon the record as far as possible to ascertain how it actually had been formed, and for what purpose. It seemed that enough information must be available; the formation of the State in America, for example, was a matter of relatively recent history, and one must be able to find out a great deal about it. Consequently I began to look around to see whether anyone had ever anywhere made any such investigation, and if so, what it amounted to.

I then discovered that the matter had, indeed, been investigated by scientific methods, and that all the scholars of the Continent knew about it, not as something new or startling, but as a sheer commonplace. The State did not originate in any form of social agreement, or with any disinterested view of promoting order and justice. Far otherwise. The State originated in conquest and confiscation, as a device for maintaining the stratification of society permanently into two classes -- an owning and exploiting class, relatively small, and a propertyless dependent class. Such measures of order and justice as it established were incidental and ancillary to this purpose; it was not interested in any that did not serve this purpose; and it resisted the establishment of any that were contrary to it. No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose than to enable the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another.[Note 2]

This at once cleared up all the anomalies which I had found so troublesome. One could see immediately, for instance, why the hunting tribes and primitive peasants never formed a State. Primitive peasants never made enough of an economic accumulation to be worth stealing; they lived from hand to mouth. The hunting tribes of North America never formed a State, because the hunter was not exploitable. There was no way to make another man hunt for you; he would go off in the woods and forget to come back; and if he were expropriated from certain hunting-grounds, he would merely move on beyond them, the territory being so large and the population so sparse. Similarly, since the State's own primary intention was essentially criminal, one could see why it cares only to monopolize crime, and not to suppress it; this explained the anomalous behaviour of officials, and showed why it is that in their public capacity, whatever their private character, they appear necessarily as a professional-criminal class; and it further accounted for the fact that the State never moves disinterestedly for the general welfare, except grudgingly and under great pressure.

Again, one could perceive at once the basic misapprehension which forever nullifies the labors of Liberalism and Reform. It was once quite seriously suggested to me by some neighbours that I should go to Congress. I asked them why they wished me to do that, and they replied with some complimentary phrases about the satisfaction of having some one of a somewhat different type "amongst those damned rascals down there." "Yes, but," I said, "don't you see that it would be only a matter of a month or so -- a very short time, anyway -- before I should be a damned rascal, too?" No, they did not see this; they were rather taken aback; would I explain? "Suppose," I said, "that you put in a Sunday-school superintendent or a Y.M.C.A. secretary to run an assignation-house on Broadway. He might trim off some of the coarser fringes of the job, such as the badger game and the panel game, and put things in what Mayor Gaynor used to call a state of 'outward order and decency,' but he must run an assignation-house, or he would promptly hear from the owners." This was a new view to them, and they went away thoughtful.

Finally, one could perceive the reason for the matter that most puzzled me when I first observed a legislature in action, namely, the almost exclusive concern of legislative bodies with such measures as tend to take money out of one set of pockets and put it into another -- the preoccupation with converting labour-made property into law-made property, and redistributing its ownership. The moment one becomes aware that just this, over and above a purely legal distribution of the ownership of natural resources, is what the State came into being for, and what it yet exists for, one immediately sees that the legislative bodies are acting altogether in character, and otherwise one cannot possibly give oneself an intelligent account of their behaviour.[Note 3]

Speaking for a moment in the technical terms of economics, there are two general means whereby human beings can satisfy their needs and desires. One is by work -- i.e., by applying labour and capital to natural resources for the production of wealth, or to facilitating the exchange of labour-products. This is called the economic means. The other is by robbery -- i.e., the appropriation of the labour-products of others without compensation. This is called the political means. The State, considered functionally, may be described as the organization of the political means, enabling a comparatively small class of beneficiaries to satisfy their needs and desires through various delegations of the taxing power, which have no vestige of support in natural right, such as private land-ownership, tariffs, franchises, and the like.

It is a primary instinct of human nature to satisfy one's needs and desires with the least possible exertion; everyone tends by instinctive preference to use the political means rather than the economic means, if he can do so. The great desideratum in a tariff, for instance, is its license to rob the domestic consumer of the difference between the price of an article in a competitive and a non-competitive market. Every manufacturer would like this privilege of robbery if he could get it, and he takes steps to get it if he can, thus illustrating the powerful instinctive tendency to climb out of the exploited class, which lives by the economic means (exploited, because the cost of this privilege must finally come out of production, there being nowhere else for it to come from), and into the class which lives, wholly or partially, by the political means.

This instinct -- and this alone -- is what gives the State its almost impregnable strength. The moment one discerns this, one understands the almost universal disposition to glorify and magnify the State, and to insist upon the pretence that it is something which it is not -- something, in fact, the direct opposite of what it is. One understands the complacent acceptance of one set of standards for the State's conduct, and another for private organizations; of one set for officials, and another for private persons. One understands at once the attitude of the press, the Church and educational institutions, their careful inculcations of a specious patriotism, their nervous and vindictive proscriptions of opinion, doubt or even of question. One sees why purely fictitious theories of the State and its activities are strongly, often fiercely and violently, insisted on; why the simple fundamentals of the very simply [sic] science of economics are shirked or veiled; and why, finally, those who really know what kind of thing they are promulgating, are loth to say so.

The outbreak of the war in 1914 found me entertaining the convictions that I have here outlined. In the succeeding decade nothing has taken place to attenuate them, but quite the contrary. Having set out only to tell the story of how I came by them, and not to expound them or indulge in any polemic for them, I may now bring this narrative to an end, with a word about their practical outcome.

It has sometimes been remarked as strange that I never joined in any agitation, or took the part of a propagandist for any movement against the State, especially at a time when I had an unexampled opportunity to do so. To do anything of the sort successfully, one must have more faith in such processes than I have, and one must also have a certain dogmatic turn of temperament, which I do not possess. To be quite candid, I was never much for evangelization; I am not sure enough that my opinions are right, and even if they were, a second-hand opinion is a poor possession. Reason and experience, I repeat, are all that determine our true beliefs. So I never greatly cared that people should think my way, or tried much to get them to do so. I should be glad if they thought -- if their general turn, that is, were a little more for disinterested thinking, and a little less for impetuous action motivated by mere unconsidered prepossession; and what little I could ever do to promote disinterested thinking has, I believe, been done.

According to my observations (for which I claim nothing but that they are all I have to go by) inaction is better than wrong action or premature right action, and effective right action can only follow right thinking. "If a great change is to take place," said Edmund Burke, in his last words on the French Revolution, "the minds of men will be fitted to it." Otherwise the thing does not turn out well; and the processes by which men's minds are fitted seem to me untraceable and imponderable, the only certainty about them being that the share of any one person, or any one movement, in determining them is extremely small. Various social superstitions, such as magic, the divine right of kings, the Calvinist teleology, and so on, have stood out against many a vigorous frontal attack, and thrived on it; and when they finally disappeared, it was not under attack. People simply stopped thinking in those terms; no one knew just when or why, and no one even was much aware that they had stopped. So I think it very possible that while we are saying, "Lo, here!" and "Lo, there!" with our eye on this or that revolution, usurpation, seizure of power, or what not, the superstitions that surround the State are quietly disappearing in the same way.[Note 4]

My opinion of my own government and those who administer it can probably be inferred from what I have written. Mr. Jefferson said that if a centralization of power were ever effected at Washington, the United States would have the most corrupt government on earth. Comparisons are difficult, but I believe it has one that is thoroughly corrupt, flagitious, tyrannical, oppressive. Yet if it were in my power to pull down its whole structure overnight and set up another of my own devising -- to abolish the State out of hand, and replace it by an organization of the economic means -- I would not do it, for the minds of Americans are far from fitted to any such great change as this, and the effect would be only to lay open the way for the worse enormities of usurpation -- possibly, who knows? with myself as the usurper! After the French Revolution, Napoleon!

Great and salutary social transformations, such as in the end do not cost more than they come to, are not effected by political shifts, by movements, by programs and platforms, least of all by violent revolutions, but by sound and disinterested thinking. The believers in action are numerous, their gospel is widely preached, they have many followers. Perhaps among those who will see what I have here written, there are two or three who will agree with me that the believers in action do not need us -- indeed, that if we joined them, we should be rather a dead weight for them to carry. We need not deny that their work is educative, or pinch pennies when we count up its cost in the inevitable reactions against it. We need only remark that our place and function in it are not apparent, and then proceed on our own way, first with the more obscure and extremely difficult work of clearing and illuminating our own minds, and second, with what occasional help we may offer to others whose faith, like our own, is set more on the regenerative power of thought than on the uncertain achievements of premature action.

Footnotes
1. As indicating the impression made on a more sophisticated mind, I may mention an amusing incident that happened to me in London two years ago. Having an engagement with a member of the House of Commons, I filled out a card and gave it to an attendant. By mistake I had written my name where the member's should be, and his where mine should be. The attendant handed the card back, saying, "l'm afraid this will 'ardly do, sir. I see you've been making yourself a member. It doesn't go quite as easy as that, sir -- though from some of what you see around 'ere, I wouldn't say as 'ow you mightn't think so." (Back)

2. There is a considerable literature on this subject, largely untranslated. As a beginning, the reader may be conveniently referred to Mr. Charles A. Beard's Rise of American Civilization and his work on the Constitution of the United States. After these he should study closely -- for it is hard reading -- a small volume called The State by Professor Franz Oppenheimer, of the University of Frankfort. It has been well translated and is easily available. (Back)

3. When the Republican convention which nominated Mr. Harding was almost over, one of the party leaders met a man who was managing a kind of dark-horse, or one-horse, candidate, and said to him, "You can pack up that candidate of yours, and take him home now. I can't tell you who the next President will be; it will be one of three men, and I don't just yet know which. But I can tell you who the next Secretary of the Interior will be, and that is the important question, because there are still a few little things lying around loose that the boys want." I had this from a United States Senator, a Republican, who told it to me merely as a good story. (Back)

4. The most valuable result of the Russian Revolution is in its liberation of the idea of the State as an engine of economic exploitation. In Denmark, according to a recent article in The English Review, there is a considerable movement for a complete separation of politics from economics, which, if effected, would of course mean the disappearance of the State. (Back)

Sunday, December 16, 2007

My Strange Diet

During my halcyon college days I weighed an average of around 160 pounds; since I was also 6 feet tall, that made me—in the immortal words of one of my sister’s friends—“buff skinny.” Shortly after I graduated and was cast adrift in the real world, a book in my father's library by Dr. Roy Walford, called Maximum Lifespan, caught my eye. The book detailed Dr. Walford’s quest to find any genuine, scientifically based method(s) for not simply increasing our average life spans, but, more radically, extending the human lifespan beyond our current, roughly 120 year, limit. His researches led him to conclude that the only viable possibility at present would be a calorically restricted diet.

Walford's argument was seductive. Soon I was counting calories, building meal plans, and feeling very hungry. All the time. The tragic irony with the diet was that it required me to think about food constantly. I just couldn't eat it. When I wasn’t worried about balancing my daily intake of macro and micronutrients I was involved in some aspect of food preparation. Over time I began to wonder about the value of an extra 50 years of life—all of it spent thinking in excruciating detail about food. I quit after 10 weeks, deciding it wasn’t worth it.

A welcome side-effect, though, was a general tolerance for not eating much. I remained very slim for several years, until, in my late 20s, I began dating a woman who loved to cook. Three years later I hit my peak weight - just over 190 lbs. After that relationship ended I drifted back down to just under 180.

Sometime around my 35th birthday I noticed a subtle change in my appetite, as well as the way my body seemed to deal with what I ate. If I satisfied my hunger at every meal the pounds would just pile on. Furthermore, this weight wouldn’t come off easily, even with lots of extended bouts of agonizing rowing sessions! I began somewhat obsessively weighing myself every morning. If I weighed “too much” I’d try to eat light that day. Strangely, this seemed a losing battle. I found that this “going hungry” business was happening far too often, and was punctuated by bouts of wild cravings for sweets—cravings that I’d succumb to, usually with either a pint (or two) of Ben & Jerry’s, or an entire package of Pecan Pralines from Trader Joe’s. Not surprisingly, my average weight continued to creep up, despite my efforts to the contrary.

Then, just over a year ago, I was reminded that one aspect of Walford’s research included a study of rats forced to fast on alternate days. On the non-fasting days the rats could eat as much as they liked. Interestingly, these rats saw health benefits that, while not as pronounced as those seen with the more strict version of calorie restriction, were nonetheless significant. My father (who, by the way, is president of Kronos Laboratory), showed me the results of some human studies of alternate day caloric restriction and its beneficial effects on inflammatory response and insulin resistance. Given the apparent role of belly fat in the promotion of various diseases, he didn’t have to tell me twice. I decided immediately to embrace a (modified) caloric restriction diet once again.

Here's how it works:

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I eat some combination of nutritionally rich foods with a total calorie value equal to only 20% of a "normal" day. For men, that's roughly 380 calories. For women, 340ish.

Since I'm lazy and cheap when it comes to food, my typical lo-cal days' meals consist of a couple off-brand slim-fast clones (be careful to avoid the ones with partially hydrogenated oils, though). My father likes to shake things up by substituting a V8 and a hard-boiled egg for one of the Slim Fasts. My friend Lisette prefers eating copious amounts of spinach and mushrooms.

On the remaining days I eat... as much as I want of whatever I want. Strangely, though, I rarely find myself craving pralines or ice cream any more.

It's that simple.

November 20th was my ADCR year anniversary. Today I weighed in at 167. Now, if it were only possible to once again look like I was a college kid...

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Partial Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum

I learned something interesting about myself recently. Because of some pretty severe migraine headaches I was having I decided to get an MRI scan of my brain. Imagine my surprise when I found out I have a small corpus callosum!

Here's an image of it:

Click to enlarge
And here's a "normal" one, for comparison:

Click to Enlarge
Naturally, I was curious about the implications. What has this meant to me, if anything, in terms of, e.g., my personality, my perceptions of the world, and my intellectual development? Sadly, there's not a lot of info out there to help me answer such questions.

Wikipedia's relevant entry concerns only the corpus callosum's complete agenesis, which is associated with some pretty severe developmental deficits - none of which, thankfully, apply in my case. It does, however, mention Autism. This caught my eye because I recently had an ex-girlfriend accuse me (gently) of having Asperger's Syndrome, which is an autism spectrum condition. Perhaps she's right. I'll admit to a certain level of shyness, dislike of parties, and inability to pick up on subtle non-verbal cues, but I'm not in a position to reliably self-diagnose whether I could be considered more than, say, 2 standard deviations from the mean in that regard.

Meanwhile, PubMed is a little more helpful on the subject, though not much. Again, I get the sense, from reading those abstracts and articles, that I should be a lot worse off than I am. Even the National Organization for Disorders of the Corpus Callosum is unhelpful. This all leads me to wonder: just how unusual is my condition? How strange is it for someone with it to go 38 years showing no real signs of it? MRIs of the brain are expensive ($2K a pop, without health insurance), so not many people get them. Maybe there are hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of outwardly normal - if a bit shy - people out there who have no posterior corpus callosi.

I've contacted some folks at Cal Tech who are doing research on this. Hopefully they'll have a few answers, but it seems likely that nobody really knows much of anything at this point.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Pentecosts Know How to Party!


Thanks, Jim!

Saturday, August 04, 2007

The AZ Millionaire Makers

I first heard about Travis Hoover and Mark Saenz via the Nouveau Riche University recruiting meeting I attended back in May. Their absurd, unmistakable vehicle was parked out front. Some days later, on a whim, I figured I'd check out the web page the Humvee was promoting.

If you've read my other posts about NRU and somehow find yourself still on the fence regarding whether or not to "invest" any money in an NRU "education", a cursory inspection of Mark and Travis's page should remove all doubts. One glance at it and my scam detection meter's needle is pegged!

Some of the red flags it raises include

  • Absurd, "too-good-to-be-true" claims
  • The use of phrases like "secret", "wealthy", "rat race", "proven system", etc.
  • The "we were skeptical too" storyline
  • "Proof" consisting of a screenshot of a spreadsheet (!)
  • Invoking the name of Robert Kiyosaki
  • Overuse of bold text and exclamation points
  • Emphasis on lavish materialism
  • Failure to reveal what their "leveraged business" actually is
I'm sure I'd come up with some more if I kept thinking about it.

What the page doesn't tell you was made clear to me on the day I went to the NRU recruiting meeting: Mark and Travis's "leveraged business" is Nouveau Riche University. They want to sell you on NRU so that you'll want to then sell others on NRU, too. It only makes sense.

Given how obviously gung-ho these two are on NRU and its product, I have to conclude that they must both be powerhouse real estate investors, to boot. Don't you think? Why would they sell the product if they didn't believe in it? Soooo... I looked into it.

Travis Hoover

In October 1998 Travis lived in a house in Chandler, which he purchased for $122,305, taking out a $116,180 loan against it. He sold it in October 2003 for $175,900 and, presumably, used the proceeds to buy another house in December of 2003, for $210,173. His first loan was for $168,000, followed several months later by another loan for $43,000.

In April of 2005 Travis took out another $92,000 loan against his house, though it doesn't appear that he used any of it as a down payment on what appears to be his first and only investment property. Purchased in July for $235,000, Travis took out a $188,000 first and a $47,000 second against it. It seems he's now trying to offload this property on someone else. A search of the ARMLS shows an expired listing (MLS # 2408725) with an asking price of $269,900, and a currently active listing (MLS # 2658372) with an asking price of $240,000. This investment appears to be a big loser! I guess Travis only heard of NRU after he bought this place?

Mark Saenz

Mark at least appears to have been an entreprenuer (not counting his current stint as a millionaire maker, I mean). He also apparently has owned more than one investment property. For example, he bought a house with 100% financing in September 2004 for $710,000 and then sold it in February 2005 for $865,000. Sure, this was during the peak of the housing bubble frenzy, so anyone with a pulse was making money in real estate, but $155,000 (less transaction costs) in less than 6 months is nothing to sneeze at.

It seems that Mark has been putting the growing equity in his home (purchased in February/March of 2004 for $152,590) to some use over the past few years. Initially, he had two loans against it - one for $125,272, and the other for $31,318. Then, in August of 2004 he took out another two loans, one for $177,600, the other for $22,200, paying off the original two loans shortly thereafter, leaving roughly $23K in spending cash. Roughly a year later Mark took out another two loans against this house. This time they were for $280,000 and $82,290. Paying off the previous two left him with over $160K to play with!

Who knows what he did with all that money though? He didn't use much of it to buy this place or this place. Both those houses were 100% financed. He sold one of them in March of 2006, though I can't imagine he made much money on it, since the sale price was $242,000. Given the rental market I doubt seriously he's making any money with the other one, either, at this point.

Then there's this oddity. I confess that its details are beyond my expertise. As near as I can figure it, Mark loaned someone $26,880 and secured it with a note against the house, then the loan was paid off by May, 2007.

Now, I can almost hear the screams of "What about asset protection and corporate entities? Maybe Travis and Mark have cut huge swaths of property, but they're all hidden away in LLCs!"

Well... maybe. However, I've looked them up in the AZ Corporation Commission records. All I was able to find were 3 LLCs: 3 Amigos of Arizona, I Can Learn Anything, and The Saenz Organization. None of those entities own any real estate in Maricopa County.

So, that's it. I don't know about you, but it sure seems to me that $16K is an appallingly high price to pay just to learn how to buy a few houses of questionable profitability via your own apparently excellent credit. The implication of all this, by now, should be abundantly clear (and not at all surprising, when you think about it). The real point of NRU isn't the (bogus) real estate investment education. It's the selling of the (bogus) real estate education - or, more correctly, it's the selling of the selling of the (bogus) real estate education. MLM all over again.

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Still No Evidence

Invariably, in any discussion regarding the legitimacy of Nouveau Riche University, the NRU apologists eventually make claims along the lines of Wallace, a one-time commenter on this blog, or Matthew, some dude with zero friends over at Tribe.net. The refrain quickly becomes very familiar... they were once just as skeptical as the rest of us, but in the last X months they've bought Y properties and increased their net worth by some $ZZ,000... bla bla... The Secret... bla bla...

Of course when pressed for any actual property addresses the apologists either claim they're all hidden away in corporate entities ("bla bla... asset protection, bla bla") or they don't respond at all.

Not content to leave well enough alone, I've been actively researching public records in the hopes of finding anything of relevance to my particular Independent Student Advisor (ISA) and her purported status as a real estate investor. So far, in addition to finding her aforementioned corporate entities and documents in Maricopa County, all I've uncovered is her blog, as well as an NRU recruiting site called Fast Track Club (a site distinct from the one I mentioned in my prior post on NRU), which led me to a property marketing site called Nextep Real Estate Solutions - which currently has zero listings. Not even historical properties. Nothing.

A close look at the fine print of The Fast Track Club reveals the name of my ISA's business partner, who not surprisingly is listed as an agent in one of her corporate entities. Now we're getting somewhere! Unlike my ISA, this guy seems to actually own a few investment properties. But wait! Among all the warranty deeds, etc., we find a Civil Judgment (the fact it's in his favor is beside the point), and not one, but two trustee's sale notices!

I thought NRU was supposed to teach people how to be successful real estate investors!

Is there anybody out there?

UPDATE MAY 2, 2008: All of my ISA's NRU web sites have been defunct for a while, now, but it appears that Jess is still involved in a real estate scheme - Something called "INFOclosure", that appears to be a combination foreclosure listing service slash investment education thing. Well, I hope she likes her new line of work!