For reasons that exist but have not been comprehensively stated, this blog is concerned with current events and the prevailing sensibilities and cultural norms in our society that determine how we are supposed to think about those events. We look into that while casting a jaundiced eye toward those prevailing sensibilities and cultural norms, determined as a first priority to flesh out the logical problems with same. And for good reason.

Those prevailing sensibilities and cultural norms are wombat-rabies-bollywonkers crazy.

I mean, really. Really. It’s gotten so bad that if you can’t sort through what I’m talking about, you can pick just about any issue to get a great example. Pick one. Pick…oh, I dunno…gun control. Event: Bad guy shoots good guy. How to think about it based on prevailing sensibilities: If the bad guy didn’t have the gun, he wouldn’t have shot the good guy. Course of action: Get rid of the guns. That’s nuts. Nuts. By the time a sane, mature, logically-thinking person has matured to the level of graduating the fourth grade, he or she should be able to understand this just doesn’t work.

Now, a couple of months ago I was inspired to explore a cultural schism that has been developing over several generations in America and all over the world, that has a lot to do with this. Every day, someone is heatedly arguing over a question that has resulted from this cultural schism…like the gun control example, above…but nobody — nobody — ever talks about the schism itself. Except here, at the blog nobody reads.

Since the schism is never discussed, the two sides of the schism have no names. It falls to the blog that nobody reads, to name the sides.

So in my post back in February, which concerned the budget problems of Porter County, Indiana, I called the two halves “Yin and Yang.” My point was that the fiscal issues that befell this poor county, as they were described in the article that found its way to me — never would have happened, had Porter County been overseeing its budget the way responsible people oversee their budgets. And, as county governments, or other large administrations, never, ever seem to do it. Arbitrarily, I attached “Yin” to the way I think things should be done, and “Yang” to the way things actually were done, to the best of my understanding.

It’s safe to say that in nearly all of the arguments we have nowadays, and boy do we have a lot of heated arguments, the difference of opinion results from one side being a Yin and the other side being a Yang. And it’s safe to say that all of us, over the course of a year or two, have done a mix of Yin things and Yang things, as a result of our being imperfect creatures. But, it’s safe to say that as far as our goals in life are concerned, we are all completely, utterly, overwhelmingly dedicated, down to the very core of our souls…self-programmed to concentrate, with laser-like focus…to do either Yin things, or Yang things.

We get in arguments, fire people or quit our jobs, serve or receive divorce papers, because we have encountered someone who lives on the other side of a “fence.” That’s the problem. The fence is a figurative thing, something very few people ever think about. We’re trying to get oil and water to mix, and that’s why we do so much arguing. Maybe someday, the fence should become a literal concept, and should actually be built. Yin live with Yin, Yang live with Yang. Then we’d all be happy. That’s my theory, anyway.

What makes a Yin? What makes a Yang?

There are many different definitions.

Now at this point, you’re thinking…What? Wait a minute. That can’t be. You can’t go dividing the world up into two different halves, the entire world, without supplying and then adhering to one single definition of what the two halves are. Well, you know, that’s absolutely right. But we have several definitions anyway. That’s kind of the point.

When we program ourselves to do something, that programming leads to other programming, whether that is intentional or not. For example, in the early toddler stage a child may make up his mind that “I’m unhappy when people aren’t paying attention to me.” His sister may make up her mind that “when I’m playing with my toys, I want to get something done and I don’t want to stop until it’s done.” This is programming that lasts a lifetime. The boy will become a performer, and the girl will become studious. He will become an extrovert, she will be an introvert. The parents and teachers may become distressed as his “social skills” develop at a faster pace than hers; it’s supposed to be the other way around.

Later on, she’ll have much better grades.

He may find a wife more easily than she will find a husband.

And her earning potential will be higher than his…unless he goes into real estate.

Point is, these things are all linked. There is a hierarchy to them, involving cause and effect.

Thus it is with Yin and Yang. But there is always a root cause…one that is responsible for all ensuing effects. So if you’re looking for that as a defining distinction, I would say it is this: Yin think, Yang feel. Of course, everybody thinks and feels. But when & if the Yin perceive two cognitions, one resulting from thought and one resulting from feeling, they place more priority on the cognition that comes from thinking. Put the Yang in the same situation, and they will place more priority on the cognition that comes from feeling.

And that is exactly what happened, insofar as I can infer, with Porter County’s budget problem. A budgeting process was set up that was designed, whether consciously or unconsciously, to spare peoples’ feelings. This was done by, as is the case with most large bureaucracies, making sure that at the end of the process the money was all gone. (My original post explains how this works.)

“Yin” wouldn’t do that because they can’t do that. To place thinking over feeling, means to concentrate on getting a job done, regardless of your own feelings. Pride and prejudice are displaced in favor of following some kind of project plan, timeline, and management of milestones. Just like the girl toddler playing with her blocks, who won’t stop until the thing is built, and will chafe at any interruptions that get in the way — parents imposing mandatory nap-time, or her attention-whoring brother.

And this has impact on our political debates. No, Yin are not Republicans and Yang are not Democrats. If my “wall” were to be built, we’d have donkeys and elephants on both sides, just in somewhat different numbers. But banning guns makes a person feel good. Oh good, we can’t have any more gun crimes because we got rid of all the guns. The sentiment doesn’t survive the process of critical thinking very long at all, but it feels good. The Yin, on the other hand, evaluate the process of banning guns as the young girl might evaluate a move in chess, as soon as she got old enough to start playing the game. What is going to happen next? And so, when she’s old enough to start voting, even if she is pressured by her peers or other sentimental attachments to support gun control, she’s going to find it nearly impossible to do so. By the time she’s in her thirties and the go-along-to-get-along impulse has been relegated to the dustbin of her history, like Puff the Magic Dragon, she will be vigorously opposing gun control, or at least spectacularly failing to support it. She will have been looking for a viable plan in the exercise of gun control, something logically compatible with the stated goal of improved public safety, and if she pays attention to the events around her she will have become frustrated in this quest.

Her extrovert brother might be engaging in regular political debates with her, because he will likely be in favor of gun control. He’s going by feelings. And why shouldn’t he? He likes the resulting attention. When he wants to ban guns, he seems to care.

Everybody likes to look good. So we have the above-mentioned “prevailing sensibilities and cultural norms.” What’s so interesting about the times in which we live, is that the prevailing sensibilities and cultural norms are at odds with the way people vote. The Yin are voting in stronger numbers than the Yang right now. But the Yang, craving attention and getting attention as they do, decide our prevailing sensibilities and cultural norms. We’re supposed to oppose the War on Terror, but after our leaders give speeches against it, they support it — or else get voted out. We’re supposed to want abortion to be legal from sea to shining sea, but the way elections are going, the electorate seems to want it decided as a sovereign-state issue. We’re supposed to want that gun control, but we’re torn down the middle on it, with noisy people supporting it and real voters opposing it.

Now that we have spent 22 paragraphs getting our definitions straight, let us evaluate the 37 paragraphs written up in the Sacramento News and Review (April 6, 2006) cover story: The conversion of Judge McGrath, subheaded “The conservative right-wing jurist says that he made a mistake and that had he known then what he knows now, he could not have sentenced Michael Morales to death.” Michael Morales, about whom I had written when he “virtually” beat the rap, you might say, was sentenced to die. He had bludgeoned a young girl in the face with a hammer twenty times, then stabbed her in the chest. She’s dead. A quarter century later, we’re figuring out what to do with him…and the result seems to be a complete dismantling of government’s ability to protect the innocent from the creeps who will always be around, who can’t be reformed.

Wow, before you even get to the “reform” of California’s execution process, that’s already pretty big news, huh? The judge who sentenced Morales to death in the first place, has re-thought everything and joined the other side! Morales must be innocent! How could such a thing happen?

Well, as is usually the case with the Sacramento News & Review, you have to read the whole article…the headline is designed to present a different picture than the content. I’ve often suspected that News & Review doesn’t actually want anyone to read the content of their articles. It’s a free magazine, which means that to spend the time necessary reading paragraph after paragraph until you get to the very end, is…well, I did it, anyone can do it, but it might be thought of as a bit odd. Heh. If you read this far, I hope that doesn’t come as a shock. Anyway, the headlines are always, on the cover story anyway, what you would call “sensationalist.” But very seldom does the meat of the article actually support what’s being implied by the headline.

Nor does it here.

Paragraphs 1 and 2 give a rough profile of Charles McGrath, and how he is involved in Morales’ case (he was the sentencing judge). In paragraph 3 we get to the inspiring nugget of the story: “In an unprecedented reversal, the judge now says it would be unconscionable to execute the man he sent to death row for murdering Winchell.” Paragraph 4 discusses more of the judge’s crisis of faith in our judicial system, paragraphs 5 through 10 discuss some of the background of the case and McGrath’s historical right-wing conservative pro-death-penalty leanings.

In paragraphs 11 through 19, we get to what the Yin are going to be wanting to know, thus proving that this is a Yang story. It is a story built to agitate, not to give reasons for the agitation. Here it is, at last, why does Charles McGrath think the death penalty should not have been imposed on Michael Morales?

Although the plea-agreement deal between [Bruce] Samuelson [fellow inmate and career criminal with whom Morales had discussed the case, key witness for the prosection] and the prosecutor was disclosed to the Morales jury, McGrath said that Samuelson�s testimony describing the confession was the only evidence to support the lying-in-wait special circumstance, which made Morales eligible for the death penalty, and the rape conviction. Because the torture special circumstance was invalidated by a federal appeals court, the lying-in-wait finding was the only remaining aspect of the crime that kept Morales on track to the San Quentin death chamber. In addition, Samuelson gave other statements used in the sentencing phase that discredited Morales� own testimony that he felt deep remorse for the crime, a critical factor in the judge�s decision to impose the death penalty. Samuelson claimed that Morales made derogatory statements about the victim–including muttering “You fucking bitch” as he walked away from the body–callously boasted about the attack and solicited him to murder two prosecution trial witnesses.

So in a Yang article, there you have it. That’s the case against executing a guy who killed a young woman with a claw hammer. You aren’t really supposed to pursue the logic, that’s not the point…the point is, Judge McGrath doesn’t like the way it went down, and he’s the sentencing judge. You’re supposed to just adopt McGrath’s opinion as your own. Nevermind that McGrath’s objections are procedural objections, having little-to-nothing to do with actual guilt.

Nevermind that, if you’re upset by the death sentence because you’re a stickler for procedure…you’re asking a fairly obvious question that is answered nowhere. Why did the federal appeals court invalidate the special circumstance of torture? Did he not do it? Since the article makes no attempt to address this in any way, it falls short of being a useful chronicling of what happened, for those who like to make up their own minds…what the article is, is instruction. How to think, and what to think.

In fact, other things are left unstated, but implied. Ideally, you’re supposed to conclude from McGrath’s consternation that Morales was innocent, after all. California tried to execute an innocent man! They still might do it! Oh, the horror of it all!

Here is how the Yin would write an article probing the outrage of Morales’ sentencing to the death penalty:

Judge Charles McGrath doesn’t think Michael Morales killed her.

Got it? That would be a great logical argument for sparing Morales from death. Because, logically, it is a matter of fact that California doesn’t execute people for the crime of yelling “You fucking bitch.” Whether or not this was said, therefore, becomes irrelevant. If there is some procedure in place that says otherwise…that procedure is suspect, and it would be helpful to examine how such a procedure came to exist.

Only problem is, you can’t say “McGrath thinks Morales is innocent.” It wouldn’t have any relationship with the truth.

Being alienated from the Yang more than most people are, I’m handicapped from figuring them out. I don’t understand the selectivity of these sentimentalist feelings that shake, rattle and roll people into a frothy activist rage. Why does it have to be some feelings and not others? Michael Morales murdered a beautiful young girl by smashing her head to a bloody pulp; one would expect that to inspire certain feelings, especially in people who are self-programmed to act on feelings.

Why is it that the beneficiary status of this potentially-activist feeling seems to never, ever be conferred upon the innocent victims in these brutal homicides?

You’ve heard the expression “there’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything,” haven’t you? Well, the older I get, the more I start to think that perhaps that’s a relative thing, after all. That there is no absolute right answer.

That sounds awfully new-age and hippy, I know. Perhaps it is. But take, for an example, traffic. Nobody ever says “I wish I could get the hang of this driving thing, everybody else is so good at it and I can’t figure it out.” Nobody says that. Nobody says they’re average, either, and very few people admit they ever made a mistake unless said mistake is in the distant past. We’re all a bunch of James Bonds out there. But when is the last time someone could have benefited from some advice from you — or a swift kick in the ass? Probably the last time you were on the road, right? Everyone else is a dumbass, you’re the only one who has it all together.

My favorite pet peeve is the asshole who wants to go ninety miles an hour in a sixty-five mile speed zone, is always behind me. And the slow-ass old fart who wants to play amateur traffic cop, making sure everyone drives at a safe speed, seems to always be in front of me. I never get to see Mister Rocket-Butt zip along on his merry way, to come almost to a screeching halt behind the lethargic old goat in the Cadillac. That would be entertaining. No, I seem to always be sandwiched between them.

Only with the wisdom and maturity acquired through hundreds of thousands of miles of driving and many years — since I’m better than Bo & Luke Duke and Mario Andretti combined, aren’t we all — that I’ve come to be fully conscious of the fact that the old fart thinks I’m just as big of an asshole, as does the caffeine-buzzed stress puppy eating my back bumper. The former thinks I’m going too fast and the latter thinks I’m too slow. They’re both right. And I’m right about them. It’s relative. The only absolute is the posted speed limit, and since everyone’s ignoring that, does it even matter?

And after pissing away all of my twenties and most of my thirties, I’ve come to appreciate that this is a metaphor for life. If you were to make a dozen clones of that sleepy old goat doing 45 miles and put them on the freeway, the result would be — pretty good. Until someone came along who wanted to drive faster than 45, you’d have the safest stretch of highway for miles around. And if we were to Xerox several copies of Rocketman back there, the result would be pretty good too. It’s the inequality of speeds that causes the problem. That’s when simply driving down a half-mile of pavement starts to demand all kinds of strategic maneuvering that it shouldn’t.

Life is like that, in that it gets complicated not because of what we have decided to do, but from the difference between the way we want to do our thing, and how the other guy wants to do his stuff. The guy who’s never held a job, gets drunk all day, doesn’t pay child support, thinks he’s doing everything just right. He’s got problems, of course; but he figures his problems are caused by the cop that busted him for loitering, the district attorney who learned about the child support delinquency and decided to go after him, and the judge who sentenced him. You know, in his own world, he’s right. Where he comes from, people don’t take responsibility. They push it off somewhere else. So the problem comes not from his refusal to accept responsibility — they come from the expectation of others that he should do so. He has is own expectations: His ex-wife should marry some hard-working lunchbox carrying guy, who will cheerfully take on the responsibility of raising another man’s kids. This would free him up to be left alone to smoke grass and drink hooch all day, since, after all, that’s what he’s used to. That’s the way it’s supposed to work: Responsibility for those who accept it, and not for those who don’t. Purely optional.

Who cares where we would all be, if we all coped with life the way he does? How does that matter? Who ever said we should all do everything the same way, anyway?

Maybe that’s the answer.

Over time, I’ve formed the theory that, just as it’s the speed differential that makes traffic unsafe, perhaps the lifestyle differential — differential in our expectations of how people accept their responsibilities — is the source of all complaining. And for the time being, when I say “all” I do mean that. As theories like this are refined, absolute statements like that tend to whither away and get pruned off fairly early, so this is a fairly nascent theory. But so far, the absolute statement has yet to be pruned. I’ve made a point of checking all complaining against my new theory, as I become aware of the complaining. My complaining, other people’s complaining…liberals complaining about President Bush.

So far, it all seems to fit. Where someone complains about something, it can be traced to two classes of people coming into social contact, who should have been kept isolated. Yin, and yang. Some of us believe in personal responsibility, and others don’t. Thinking, versus feeling. Opinions based on personal observations and logical cogitation, and opinions formed to please others.

Just like speed-demon and lead-butt. If all the world was full of mommas-boys who drank moonshine and smoked grass and screwed around all day, everything would be fine. We’d have no justice system to speak of, illiteracy would be rampant, the streets would be full of filty bastards with dirty diapers half-hanging off their butts — but no dead bodies. Maybe we got something here. Just treat people like matter and antimatter, making sure that never the ‘twain shall meet. Build some big-ass wall separating everybody.

The government of Porter County, Indiana, needs to be on the dirty-diaper, feelings-matter-more side of this wall (although to be fair about it nearly all county and state governments would likely be better off joining them there.) That isn’t just my assertion. They’ve admitted it. Freely. Well, kind of freely, in that circumstances have forced them to admit it.

Porter County is not “Yin,” they are “Yang.” As a Yin male who believes in personal responsibility, thinking over feeling, pulling in lots of cash, spending only what is needed to address the needs but spending it wisely — I have stuck my pecker in so many female Yangs, I know a Yang when I see it. Why do I think Porter County is Yang?

They’re in financial trouble — but Yins get in financial trouble all the time, so let’s look further. Are they in financial trouble because of revenue issues? Businesses leaving? Employment down? Or perhaps something on the expenditure side? Catastrophic road damage? Maybe asset/liability management issues? Long-term investment in unstable commodities? Failure to lock in favorable interest rate on a loan? No…they’re in the financial trouble you only get into, when you manage finances the way the Yang manage finances.

…guided by its computers, the county expected to collect taxes on this startling new abundance, and other taxpayers were asked to pay a little less. Budgets were built around the phantom figures. [emphasis mine]

“And that’s when the poop hit the fan,” the treasurer said.

Eighteen taxing districts from the city of Valparaiso, the county and the Valparaiso schools now find themselves in the position of having to return to the county an advance of $3,090,287.33 that was never collected.

That’s $1,700,192.51 from the Valparaiso Community Schools, which had counted on the money for their $38 million 2006 budget.

It’s also $1,045,527.33 back from the city of Valparaiso (2006 budget: $21.3 million), which had been mounting an aggressive city beautification effort, complete with street resurfacing and sidewalk repairs.

“You can imagine the panic it caused here,” said City Administrator Bill Hanna. “You won’t find us buying laptops.”

Still, no matter what anybody says, “We’re not even thinking about laying people off,” he said.

But that cracked sidewalk? Might have to wait until next year.

Budgets were built around the phantom figures.

Let me repeat that. Budgets were built around the phantom figures.

Hey…this is the way things work at nearly all county governments, I’m sure. In fact, I doubt like hell you can find a county government that doesn’t operate this way. But it strikes me as a little bit odd. There were phantom figures to begin with. Rosy figures. Happy figures. But phantom figures…which means, they ultimately had to dissipate into a cloud of smoke. The wealth was never there.

The strange part is, because of the phantom figures, the cracks in the sidewalk won’t get fixed. And yet, had it not been for the phantom figures, with all the “real” stuff being kept as it was, the sidewalk probably would have been fixed. I mean, that’s what we’re being told, anyway.

Now how does that happen?

It happens with the way governments tend to treat the word “budget,” and I can’t use the typical conservative-libertarian line, “would you run your own household this way?” The answer to that question, about fifty percent of the time, is…yes. Half the households are Yang households. Maybe a little bit more. That’s one of the defining differences between the Yin, who do things in order to meet previously defined objectives…and the Yang, who do things in order to minimize dissention.

Take a look at how a budget is used by the Yin, who strive to meet defined objectives. You have some things that have to get done, you prioritize them and figure out the dates they have to get done…and you compare it to the money coming in. A “budget” for a particular period, like a month, or a two-week paycheck period, is simply a capturing of all these income-and-outgo events taking place within that period. By capturing that slice of time, the budget simply demonstrates that there will be adequate funding for everything during that slice of time. That’s all. What’s left over, is left over. The objectives having been met, you sit on the surplus in case something bad happens. That’s the way a Yin handles a budget.

A Yang budget is prepared differently; the Yang has a different concept of the budgeting period. For the Yang, the period is everything. You start with the revenue, and then you find things to spend it on until it is gone. If the number doesn’t equal zero, you aren’t finished yet. Because if you leave a surplus, someone’s going to feel bad. Someone’s going to have something they think is pretty important, that is being left undone. And they’ll be ticked when they find out you could pay for it, but you’re keeping the money locked up until something “important” happens, because they feel that their thing is already pretty important.

So you make everybody feel good, by getting rid of the money. Then, at least, you can tell everyone that, shoot, I’d love to fund it, but I can’t because the money’s all spent. Maybe next year. Same result, but now everybody feels better.

Except in Porter County, they don’t feel better. And the meat-and-potatoes stuff that’s supposed to get fixed, is going unfixed — when nothing bad happened on the expense side, or on the income side.

Nothing happened except disappointment.

What kind of disappointment? Well, now it gets interesting…

In October 2004, give or take, a real estate agent�or maybe a title company employee�checking on the value of the Valparaiso property on a county computer system apparently tapped the wrong key. Officials figure it was an accident.

The unidentified user stumbled onto a restricted screen, and then changed the value of the $120,000 house in the 1100 block of Chicago Street to $400 million.

Trying to reconstruct the event, officials imagine the user looking up and realizing something was amiss, then hitting “escape” to leave the screen. But the new value stayed in the computer, and the property tax bill for the house leaped from $1,500 to the upper seven figures.

“They never reported it to the county that they got a funny screen,” Porter County Treasurer Jim Murphy said of the mystery typist.

Don’t you just love that last quote? Imagine what the liberals would say if President Bush dished out that kind of an excuse about the Valerie Plame scandal. Yeah, see, uh, our computer system that stores confidential information is based on…well, on this kind of honor system. We let people get into it, and we don’t know who they are, and when they change stuff there are no value constraints that sound alarms when they tack on a few extra zeroes on something. But back to the honor system. We have this help desk that takes phone calls from users, where the users report they went to this screen that looked kind of funny. That’s how we ensure the integrity of the database…and this safeguards our national security. Now, this mystery guy didn’t do this, and we don’t know who he is…so there ya go.

Oh my God. Helen Thomas would have an aneurysm.

This is really an interesting story. If you go through it carefully, you should be able to identify about…I think five big huge things that are glaringly out of place, and maybe five more cases of someone not taking responsibility for what happened. But the thing that really impresses me — and I’m sure this just goes to show my naivete about how county governments work — is that a county government apparently ran years and years just going from one fiscal year to the next, taking their rosy prospects for revenue, and making up Yang budgets. Just take number X, and divvy it up. Spend it until it is gone. Make sure it’s gone.

And then they got CAUGHT.

Like I said, I’m not going to sit here and say “household budgets don’t work that way.” Many do. That’s why the divorce rate is so high. That’s why our society can’t save money, unless the money is in a 401k.

But my household budget doesn’t work like that. And I think the purpose of taxes is to raise revenue…the purpose of that revenue, being, to fund expenses — not to be entirely consumed by those expenses.

If everybody thinks the way I do, a lot of our problems go away…and if nobody thinks the way I do, a lot of our problems go away, too. We have problems because people disagree about how to see things. Too much diversity.

But at this point, I’m sure all Porter County is worried about, is the short-term budget crisis. I just hope they find enough time and energy left over to put some security controls on their assessment database. That honor system thing is gonna have to go.