Per Variety on April 26, Lionsgate has picked up the worldwide distribution rights to make Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged a movie.

The article mentions that the roles of Dagny Taggert and John Galt could be played by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, respectively. As Lionsgate typically makes indie films, the budget for this film would be something on the order of $20 to 30 million. If you'll recall, Lionsgate brought us American Psycho (2000) starring badass Christian Bale.

Though I would be happy to see Atlas Shrugged, I'm admittedly skeptical on how well the book will translate into a movie.

Here are some specific concerns:

1. How do you cram a thousand-plus page book into a three hour movie and have the movie be good? Is this even possible?
2. Are the ideas in Atlas ones that can be conveyed in a palpable yet complete manner through the silver screen?
3. At what time will the movie be set?
4. Brad Pitt? Really? I'm not sure if he's the best choice. I'd much rather see Tobey Maguire. Just kidding.
5. Well maybe not kidding. Or not totally. Not Tobey. Confused? Okay, seriously, who is John Galt? Who could play that role? What about Hank Rearden?
6. I'm okay with Angelina.

I'm going to go ahead and lob in a vote for Christian Bale.

After spending a good deal of time on sites where people exercise reason and logic, it's important to be reminded that there are some seriously fucked up folks out there. If there is a better, more concise way to describe these fellow inhabitants of earth, I'm all ears. Now go here:

Note: I can't even link to these nutballs out of not wanting it to show up on Technorati and thus improve their pagerank. So if you're curious, just type into your browser: www.spelledsideways.com .

Here's one humdinger pulled from the site:

The idea that there are “moderate” Muslims is a lie; there is none, no not one.

Yikes, I have some good friends who are muslim. I thought they've been giving me some suspicious looks! They must have jihad on the brain!

Want more? Go and find your own spelled ass backwards quote and post it in the comments!

Hat tip to Catallarchist Randall McElroy for upsetting such fine specimens of the human race as Dennis Fait.

The Domino's pizza founder, Tom Monaghan, is spending $400 million to build a Catholic community.

Though he says nonbelievers are welcome, Monaghan clearly wants the community to embody his conservative values. He controls all the commercial real estate in town ... and is asking pharmacies not to carry contraceptives. Monaghan says: "I believe all of history is just one big battle between good and evil. I don't want to be on the sidelines."

Now, for the purpose of this discussion, let's ignore Monaghan's beliefs on the supposed war between good and evil. Am I the only one who doesn't have a problem with this? I think it's awesome. And though I doubt it will be anything close to the utopia Monaghan likely desires, it's a step in the right direction for future such developments: if people want to set up their own sub-society with its own laws and have the resources to do so, why should we stop them? As long as those who enter this society do so of their own volition, what's the BFD?

P.S. Anyone else think they should bring back the Noid?

The good news?

The immigration issue is, apparently, deadlocked. At least until November.

The very bad news:

Americans just don't get it.

Republicans are trying to balance the needs of conservatives who are angry about illegal immigration, religious evangelicals who want to offer humanitarian aid to foreigners at the borders and business groups who want access to a pool of cheap labor.

Democrats are struggling to appease some labor union leaders who oppose any plan that would let foreign workers fill U.S. jobs, and at the same time satisfy calls from Hispanics and other minorities to bring undocumented workers out of the shadows and give them legal status.

It all makes me sick. I'm not sure if it's willful denial of our history, ignorance, straight stupidity or a sense of entitlement. As far as I can tell, the influx of new individuals into the U.S. has been one of the main ingredients to economic strength in America. Land of opportunity, remember? Is this actually happening? Individuals want to come to America and work their asses off and we want to stop them. What?!? Why?!

Entitlement is a very sad thing, indeed. Anyone who wants to come to this country to trade freely and work their asses off is okay in my book. In the words of our fearless leader, bring'em on!

Yes, Michael Crichton has more to contribute to the masses than simply Jurassic Park or Sphere.

What's that, you ask? How about a speech he gave on Fear, Complexity and Environmental Management in the 21st Century?

The bottom line:

At any moment there are 1,500 electrical storms on the planet. A tornado touches down every six hours. We have ninety hurricanes a year, or one every four days. Again, right on schedule. Violent, disruptive, chaotic activity is a constant feature of our globe.

Is this the end of the world? No: this is the world.

It’s time we knew it.

Damn skippy, Mikey.

As the saying goes, "Actions speak louder than words." Or how about, "Sticks [Guns] and stones [nukes] may break my bones [country] but words will never hurt me."?

Matt McIntosh over at Catallarchy points out via Matt Yglesias that there's a difference between Rhetoric and Reality:

One of the largest sources of error in reasoning about other people’s behaviour is paying more attention to what they say than to what they do . . . As mi amigo

Razib

likes to repeat often: there is what people say they believe, and there is what they really believe, and there is how they act – and these things are nowhere near perfectly correlated, to say the least.

Said simply, Iran is all talk with regard to bombing Israel. So why are we taking them seriously? Did we all forget to stop worrying and love the bomb?

Per Reuters via Leo:

Dave Givens drives 370 miles to work and back every day and considers his seven-hour commute the best answer to balancing his work with his personal life.

Yeah. Three-hundred and seventy miles! Can you say, "Damn!"?

In Atlanta, my daily commute of twelve miles each way takes a mere 25 minutes per direction. This is a great commute. Keep in mind that I work with people who have 50 mile commutes each way.

A lot of people look at this sprawl and say, "It's ridiculous! We should have better mass transit!" or some other such solution. I say it's just fine. People put different values on their time, and for many, a long commute is worth the big yard and the good public schools. For me (for now), I like living in the city of Atlanta. It's where the action is and where the areas have character and history. But that's just me. Thankfully, we can all live where we want if we are willing to pay the price.

In case you were unaware, today, April 20, 2006 (420), is National Pot Smoking Day. Since I like noting "special" days that derive their importance from their numerical sequence in the M-D format(Remeber my Pi Haiku for Pi Day? No one has figured that thing out yet!), I would be amiss not to celebrate a day that honors America's favorite illegal drug: marijuana.

No, I know what you're thinking. This Neal guy is some kind of pothead! Well, you're wrong: I don't puff the magic dragon. I only partake in legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco (The latter only very occasionally via a pipe or a cigar). Not that there's anything wrong with toking on the ganja! I just hope you don't get caught.

Which brings me to my parting thoughts on cannabis on this special day: when is America going to legalize marijuana? Your body is your property. You can do what you want with it. Our government understands this with respect to abortion, food, nicotine and alcohol. What's the hold up with weed? If Rick Steves is into it, can it really be that bad?

Meaningful statements are those that are either true by definition or are verifiable. A statement true by definition is a tautology ("tauto" meaning "identical" and "logos" meaning "word, idea"). An example of a tautological statement is, "A triangle has three sides." The other types of meaningful statements are verifiable. Verifiable statements are synthetic: they can be proven or disproven. Proveable or disproveable statements are testable.

This philosophical idea is known as the principle of verifiability.

Think of anything you believe to be true. An airplane can fly - true by definition. Improved aerodynamics reduce drag - a synthetic statement that can be proven or disproven. G*d exists - not true by definition and not proveable or disproveable. Therefore, the statement is not meaningful.

Making decisions based on meaningful statements is useful.

This is a synthetic statement: not true by definition. Thus, you should be asking: why is it useful? Usefulness to a human being means improved functionability. Making decisions based on meaning improves our ability to function in the world. The utility of meaningful statements is proved in millions of ways. You must eat to survive. Food must be produced or procured. Creation requires work.

Armed with an understanding of meaningful statements, I ask you: what commonly held theories are meaningful? Meaningless? If testable propositions about an idea cannot be made, can the idea have meaning? If a statement is meaningless, does it have value? You no doubt already apply the principle of verifiability to almost everything you do. But is there anything you don't use it for? Why?

And now a departure from the socio-economic-political themed posts of late.

Figuring out what you want to do with your life is difficult. Extremely painful. Oh, and time-consuming. Is it even possible?

I've been out of school now for almost three years. In that time, I worked for a little over a year doing audit at one of the "Big Four" (Now there's an axis of evil) before I came to terms with my hatred of auditwork. I left. Since that time, I've spent a little over a year and a half at my current place of work doing a mixture of financial and cost accounting, project analysis, accounting research and financial valuation/modeling. I spoke last week about when Mediocrity is Policy (MiP). As alluded to in MiP, I've realized for awhile now that corporate life is bullshit, and now I'm ready need to move on.

But moving on is so damn costly. If you don't know what job to do, how do you figure it out? You start with what you enjoy. Well, I enjoy art, music, science, economics, reading, theorizing, problem-solving, writing and math. That didn't help. I don't enjoy accounting or finance or being a corporate lacky. I do enjoy creating tangible products that have value to me and others. I need to bear the fruits of my labor. What does that all translate into?

Entrepreneurship. Yeah, I think that's right. But that's just a fancy way of saying self-employment. Self-employment means determing your own job. So in a way, I'm only slightly closer to an answer. Enterpreneurship doing what?.

I'm at a wall. Figuring out what you want to do with your life is difficult because it is costly. However, I must pay the price now because if I don't, I'll never be able to repay the debt of future regret.

Any entrepreneurs out there have some advice for this impressionable twenty-something? I know I won't be the only one listening.

A lot is going on right now.

For one, commodity prices are sky-rocketing. For a comprehensive analysis of this, check out themessthatgreenspanmade.blogspot.com. Specifically, however, check out Iacono's post on Oil, Greenspan, China. He's talking about inflation: inflation is an increase in the money supply that results in increases in the price of assets. While on the topic of money and inflation, go ahead and read Gold and Economic Freedom, which will help you understand why our current economic situation is so precarious. And this only scratches the surface.

Meanwhile, America is forgetting the benefits of free trade and pushing for more protectionist regulations such as fighting against "illegal" immigration.

Finally, we have a nuclear situation in Iran. If Iraq is any indication of what our fearless leader will do, get ready.

Thus, I wonder, are we on the verge of economic collapse and nuclear war? Is the end of the world as we know it, indeed, nigh? Or are these just more examples of our government's neverending SNAFU?

Kevin Underwood, a blogger, has confessed to killing a ten year old Oklahoma girl. This is sad, tragic, appalling, awful . . . I've read a few things on Underwood's blog, futureworldruler.blogspot.com. Yeah, odd choice for a blogspot name. Even weirder, how about him quoting Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure as the blog title? I won't be able to use that quote again.

Here's a quote lifted from Underwood's profile:

If you were a cannibal, what would you wear to dinner?

The skin of last night's main course.
[Note: this is a random question posed by Blogger that Kevin must have answered while updating his profile]

I'd like to point and say, "See! This is evidence that he was prone to cannibalism," but it's not all that compelling. It's clearly a joke - a bad, dry-sense-of-humor joke, but a joke.

You'll find his writings often creepy, always lonely, and littered with sadness and fear. You won't read his blog and conclude that, "Yes, this guy was obviously a violent psychopath." It's just not that clear cut. The worst his posts get is here, where he mentions dangerous fantasies.

So I ask: in a world with a few billion people, what can you do to stop the surfacing of human beings with these homicidal traits? Can you do anything? What can we learn from the blog of a murderer?

Click the image above for the full version!

In bizarre news from my alma mater, University of Georgia sophomore Jeremiah Ransom was pinned down by an ATF officer in plain clothes near Snelling Hall. For those of you who didn't go to UGA, "Snelling" is a dining hall on Georgia's South Campus near Myers Hall.

Apparently, the kid was coming from a pirates/ninjas function at Wesley United Methodist. He was still wearing his ninja bandana and running to the dining hall when these federal agents freaked out, imagined they saw a gun and told everybody to "get down."

Stop. Hello! Ninjas don't use guns, dumbass: they use throwing stars or swords. Not only that, but if Jeremiah had really been a ninja, he would have "flipped out" and killed your sorry ass while "porking" his girlfriend (You need to go to that link to understand what I'm saying here).

THE POINT: Yes, this guy was kinda stupid to be running around looking like he was going to hold-up Snelling for lunch money. But give me a break, did he really need to be face-planted into the concrete? I don't think so. This was straight not autoDogmatic. People have rights, ya know.

And finally, yes, Wesley has spent entirely too much time on realultimatepower.net to throw a function with a pirate/ninja theme. No matter how hard I try, I can only begin to imagine how ridiculously lame this party must have been.

BOTTOM LINE: Had Jeremiah been dressed up like Chuck Norris, he would have had no problems: the ATF agents would have simply exploded from looking at him.

I've been out of school and in the "working world" now for almost three years. In that time, I've worked for one gigantic private company and one relatively small public company (my current place of work). The most important thing I've learned: there's a point in any organization when mediocrity becomes policy.

What do I mean? Let me illustrate first through examples. At 5:00 p.m. on any given day of the week, 90% of my colleagues will have gone home. Co-workers push back on work because they are "too busy" or want to "decomplicate" their jobs. These same people are frequently seen shooting the shit, surfing the 'net, taking long breaks and/or arriving late and leaving early. When they actually have to do work to meet some deadline, they complain about it. And when someone inevitably gets fired, they start freaking out. Why? Because they know they're overpaid and underworked. The rest of the time (most of the time), work-life means doing just enough to "stay under the radar": mediocrity is policy (MiP).

Call it the "lowest common denonminator" or doing "just enough to get by": MiP is all of these things. It's bullshit, but not all that surprising. I spoke about the principal-agent problem yesterday in my post about France. Well, MiP and the principal-agent problem go hand in hand - particularly in large organizations.

In any large organization, there are many layers of management. Few of these managers have significant stakes in the ownership of the company. Their employees (often other managers) have even less stake. To control for this obvious manifestation of the principal-agent problem, incentive programs are developed to bonus people when they do "good work." This is easy to do for salesmen and extremely difficult to do for upper management and overhead-type departments (HR, accounting, legal, etc.). The more distanced the work is from any consistently measureable, tangible, and correlating output, the more difficult it is to incentivize the employee. Overcoming the principal-agent problem is hard. Thus, instead of dealing with it, most organizations simply set up blanket bonus programs that are based on the overall company's return. These programs are poor ways to incentivize upper management and downright ridiculous ways to incentivize accountants, HR, legal, admin, etc. - as if a policy I write on the implications of FAS 156 on our accounting for secured assets has anything to do with the company's overall return.

But does anyone bring this little problem to the attention of management? Of course not. We like being bonused for work we didn't do. No way we're going to tell our managers to make us work harder. We may be lazy, but we're not stupid.

So it goes: mediocrity as policy prospers. We benefit at the cost of our principal, who is too distanced from the problem to try and fix it.

Not too surprisingly, France has scrapped the CPE law that likely would have aided those who rioted against it. I cited the situation as an example of a welfare state back in March.

I dislike politicians out of principle; however, I feel a little sorry (only a very little) for Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin. After all, they were trying to fix a broken system. What did they get in return? A punch to the face and a clear message: subsidies can be given, but they can't be taken back.

This is nothing new, of course. People fight to protect what they're given: even if it comes at someone else's cost. After all, stealing is okay if it's done by the government. Could you imagine what would have happened if Robin Hood suddenly decided to stop stealing from the rich? He would have been tarred and feathered.

So why is it that government's only get bigger and rarely get smaller?

I posit that it's because of the classic conundrum between principal and agent. In an ideal world, a government would function like any other business: as an agent for its shareholders, the government's constituents. The problem is that we have no choice but to pay taxes to the government: the de facto monopolizer of your property and mine. As a monopoly, the agent has little to no incentive to mind the principal. As a result, governments simply serve the squeaky wheels. You think voting matters? Voting is a joke.

Why? Let's put this idea into numbers: a group of one million people lobbies the government for a $100 million dollar subsidy. Congress complies. It's paid for by 100 million people at the cost of $1.00 per taxpayer. It's hardly worth it for any of the 100 million taxpayers to fight for their measily buck. Meanwhile the subsidy-receivers have 100x that incentive ($100/receiver) to protect their government-given "right." A system like this only runs one way: bigger and fatter.

When the system of principal and agent are set up as such, there's no turning back the wheels of bureaucrazy. France hasn't a chance in hell. Do we?

I never thought installing Google's AdSense would result in links I might actually want to click on, much less post on. But somehow, my Losing my Religion posts (Parts I and II) resulted in the ad to my left about Teen Jesus.

As the ad says, "What's up with that?"

Well, it's a link to a painting by Tom Trujillo. As Tom says:

How come you never here [hear] about Jesus the teenager? It's a question I asked myself before starting this painting. You read about him as a child impressing the priests at the temple with his biblical knowledge, and we all know about him as an adult before being crucified. But you will find nothing written about him between the ages of 13- 24. Of course if you've ever raised a teenager you might know why.

And so it came to pass, that Tom painted a masterpiece: Jesus, the Teenage Years.

In Trujillo's depiction, Jesus is an anglo skin-head with an "APOSTLES" tattoo across his ripped torso. Based on the Lord's stance, I sense he's about to say like, "My dad is God, yo! Holla!" right before flashing his sign. Meanwhile, he's hanging out with his ho, Zhora from Blade Runner, and just having a good time. He has some sort of halo: I'm not sure if it's holiness or the reflection from his shaved head.

Tom wisely notes in the official symbolism, "Jesus lived all that we (weak humans), experience - anger, doubt, temptation, hunger and more." Good points, Tom, I'll come back to this.

While you're on teenagejesus.com, make sure you read some of the comments. Here is my favorite:

As I look upon this poster I want to cry and throw up. This portrays Jesus as a sexual being. And the chick with her tit showing....... now what's up with that.

Yeah, what is up with that? I'll tell you what's up with that: it's the first Mardi Gras and Jesus is throwin' down!

Seriously (cue the Full House music), I think the intent behind this painting was straight autoDogmatic: it catalyzes thought about issues we too often shelve. People don't think about Jesus as a human being - someone who makes mistakes or gets depressed. Though I think Tom's depiction of Teen Jesus is kinda silly, it begs the question: who was Jesus, really? In what ways was he human? Can you imagine sitting by a campfire with the Christ, and hearing him suddenly rip a huge fart? That's humanity, not blasphemy. I bet Jesus could break Holy Wind with the best (worst?) of us.

So I ask: if you were to paint Teen Jesus, how would you do it?

Recently, I was trying to find a regulation-sized kickball. The wife and I searched at Wal-Mart, Target, and finally, The Sports Authority. Failing to find a kickball with a 10 inch diameter, per WAKA rules, I ended up buying a Rawlings 302F 34 inch Big Stick.

How did I end up buying a bat, you ask? Home security. You probably think I'm crazy, but it's the best I can do until I convince my wife that owning a gun isn't unsafe or crazy. For now, I'm going to just carry my bat around and keep it by my bed at night. And it is fun to swing it around with a hearty "hi-ya" or "take that filthy home intruder" even if my wife makes fun of me for it.

As for the kickball search, we ended up with a Spider-man 8.5 inch ball. Our kickball team's mascot, Zoe the Rottweiler, destroyed it within three minutes of our Sunday practice. Doh!