Winter's End

Copycat

A couple of weeks ago, there was an article on, Slate, a commentary site, "How the Evangelical Culture of Forgiveness Hurts Victims of Sexual Abuse." While the title might lead one to believe that it is an examination of, well, how the Evangelical culture of forgiveness hurts victims of sexual abuse, it's really just the story of megachurch pastor Andy Savage and his congregation's reaction to his confession to "a regretful sexual incident" with one Jules Woodson, when Mr. Savage was 22 and Ms. Woodson was 17. Although it does touch on the idea that Evangelical culture overall tends to be forgiving of those with troubled pasts (at least fellow Evangelicals, anyway), it's dominated by discussion of Savage and Woodson.

A few days ago, there was an article on NPR, a news site, "Amid #MeToo, Evangelicals Grapple With Misconduct In Their Own Churches." While the title might lead one to believe that is an examination of, well, how Evangelicals are grappling with [sexual] misconduct in their churches against the backdrop of the #MeToo moment, it's really just the story of megachurch pastor Andy Savage and his congregation's reaction to his confession to "a regretful sexual incident" with one Jules Woodson, when Mr. Savage was 22 and Ms. Woodson was 17. Although it does touch on the idea that Evangelical culture overall tends to be forgiving of those with troubled pasts (at least fellow Evangelicals, anyway), it's dominated by discussion of Savage and Woodson.

Hmm.

The fact that two left-leaning sites have both discovered this story doesn't strike me as particularly odd. After all, their readership bases are likely fairly similar (although, given Slate's ability, as a commentary site, to be more openly lefty means that the overlap is likely incomplete), it seems reasonable to presume that each site's readers would be interested in something like this.

What strikes me as strange is that both sites seemed to decide that the Savage-Woodson incident is broadly applicable enough that one presume to write the headlines that the stories lead with. Granted, both of them seem fairly click-baity, and that's likely not just my impression of them. Slate I can understand. It's a commentary site, and commentary isn't necessarily intended to be an accurate reflection of reality. Just like here, where a lot of the things that I write are my interpretation of events, openly filtered through my own worldview, rather than a straight retelling of events for the purpose of informing someone who wasn't present to see it for themselves. But NPR is a new site, and the article by Tom Gjelten doesn't come across as an opinion piece. And so, even though the articles are dealing with the game overall topic, I would have expected the NPR piece to more about Evangelical churches writ large, rather than the story of this one incident by a single pastor.

Because surely, there are more incidents to include than this one. And if their aren't, then firstly, while the story is both tragic and generally relatable to the broader #MeToo moment, it's hardly a case that seems worthy of nationwide attention, because it seems to be one Evangelical church dealing with an issue in a way that, according to both articles, Evangelical churches often deal with these sorts of issues, by welcoming the contrition of the admitted sinner, and welcoming that person back into fellowship. (In this sense, the Slate article is perhaps too narrowly focused, in its desire to make this into a women's issue - the culture of forgiveness would seem to hurt anyone whom someone high up in the ranks had harmed, whether the issue was sexual abuse or not.) In a way, both articles seem like an exercise in journalistic virtue signalling, on the part of Slate and NPR, a way of putting stories out their that show that "they get it." But I'm not sure that the people who decide what goes on the sites and what goes back do get it. But maybe that's part of a broader issue - one that arises whenever oneone tries to "get" things like this, that can mean different things to different people.

Anything Once

[Ben Shapiro] has never tried marijuana or any other drug. When I asked if he wasn’t a little curious, he mounted a quintessentially conservative miniargument against curiosity. “I’m not someone who feels the need to try every experience,” he said.
Seth Stevenson “The Many Faces of Ben Shapiro”

Mr. Stevenson's story is, in more ways than one, a hit piece on a Conservative voice that it seems Mr. Stevenson would prefer to be a Liberal one. And the idea that not needing to try every experience seems indicative of that. Many of my friends and acquaintances are to my left, some by quite a distance. But so far, none of them have told me of a need to experiment with drugs recreationally, simply to maintain their "curious Liberal" bona-fides. Just like none of them are curious enough about shooting to sign up for a gun range simply for the sake of doing so.

As for me, I don't feel the need to try every experience, either. Again, not because I have something against curiosity. But because the length of a day is fixed at 24 hours, and I have plenty of other things that I would like to do in that time; enough other things, in fact, that fitting them all in becomes a challenge at times. (Note the times that I fall behind on this blog.)

But it's also worth pointing out that curiosity, and seeking out experiences simply to satisfy that curiosity, are not the same thing. I've always been curious about the experience of skydiving, and I'll watch people float around on parachutes all day if given a chance. The only way, however, you're getting me to jump out of an aircraft in flight is if it's literally disintegrating out from underneath me. And let's not forget, learning to skydive without risking being (perhaps seriously) injured is not a quick thing. And, as I said before, I'm backlogged on things as it is. And I'm sure that it would be only the work of a moment for any given person you might meet to express curiosity about something that they have no intention of ever experiencing. In fact, as much as I know that it's a bad idea to speculate about other people's inner lives, I suspect that even Seth Stevenson has curiosities that he had no plans to ever satiate with direct experience. To be curious may take some mental effort, but other than that, it takes no energy, resources or planning and very little time. The same cannot be said for any number of human experiences.

I'm also, ahem, curious about Mr. Stevenson's particular choice of experiences. Now, I live in Washington State, where marijuana has been mostly decriminalized, but it's still illegal in most states, and it's still a Schedule 1 controlled substance as far as the Federal government is concerned. Ben Shapiro has a pretty good thing going, for all that one might decide that he's using his powers for Evil. Why would he jeopardize that by risking jail time for drugs, just to satisfy curiosity? After all, it would need little more than a zealous prosecutor to put him away for a time. And even if he came out a hero to anti-government types, one wonders if their adoration would make up for the money lost while on the inside. The risk-reward curve on that seems would advise against it, in my estimation.

So I see nothing conservative, let alone quintessentially so, about declining to try every experience that one knows about. And in this, Mr. Stevenson's argument seems to take on a tinge of Ben Shapiro is different (a.k.a., not Liberal) and that's bad. There is a stereotype of Conservatives as being uninterested in anything they don't already understand, and that may be true in many cases. But the simple disinterest in trying drugs isn't enough to be a marker for it.

Conflicts of Compromise

What both parties are also missing is this: Any individual American is also capable of holding views that seemingly conflict, and it is our individual right to do so.

It is the politicians' job to recognize this and work out the conflicts and contradictions through compromise and accommodation. This is what the political culture of a democratic republic requires. It is also what most voters expect, whether they realize it or not.
Ron Elving. Both Parties Claim Public Support In Shutdown Struggle. Who's Out Of Touch?

I would submit that the politician's job has little to do with compromise and accommodation. The job is advance the interests of their constituents, in a way that said constituents understand is making their lives better, increasing their income, giving them better services or what-have-you. If compromise and accommodation are the most effective path to that, fine. But I suspect that, given similar outcomes in that department, a politician who achieves the outcome without offering the opposition anything in return is going to be seen as more successful than one who gives their voters what they want, but at the price of having to give something else up.

In this respect, one can view retail politics as being a lot like retail - if people have the choice to buy something for $3, or for $5, it's a fairly safe bet which one they'll go for, even if they understand that the extra $2 will go to other people in their community. And even though not everyone will go for the lower price, or the lack of compromise; in the same way that not enough people were willing to pay higher prices to save local small businesses from large nationwide enterprises, not enough people are willing to pay the costs of compromise that candidates can win elections by citing a willingness to accommodate others as a platform plank.

The fact that so much American political discourse has been marked by explicit or implicit stands on self-evident correctness on whatever side a given person may support and/or charges of being willfully perversity on the other side doesn't help matters. Compromise in the face of someone wanting something that seems obviously wrong tends leave people feeling that they've been extorted, and while they may come to expect that sort of behavior from their political opponents, it's unlikely that they're happy when concessions are eventually made.

The perception of poverty, whether justified or not, makes people sensitive to not receiving everything that they feel that they need or that they want. Compromises, which are effectively built on giving something to get something, therefore become less attractive, in favor of outright victory, which (correctly or not) people understand that they are giving nothing to get something. Whether or not a republic requires compromise becomes secondary. And given the fact that Americans have developed a habit of seeing winning elections as an entitlement to having their interests publicly funded at the expense of the losers, compromise is likely the last thing on most people's minds.

Forward...

Yesterday was, I am told, a day for rallies and marches all across the nation. I didn't go downtown yesterday (that being like most days), and so I saw absolutely no sign of the activism that the news media told me was taking place.

And I wonder if that isn't a flaw in the way we think of activism today. It occurs to me that the way things are really done in the United States is not through activism, but through lobbying. Well-paid operatives present themselves to lawmakers and lay out for them their understanding of the world, as their employers would like to see it. Whether they present carefully-selected information points as facts to claim that what they are after is the best thing for the public at large, whether they offer corrupt quid-pro-quos or whether they simply offer assistance in whatever priorities the lawmaker has, the end result is that laws are passed (or defeated) in ways that largely compost with the interests of major, well-funded, interest groups.

For other things, things that the public finds important, marching in the streets is considered a victory.

It's easy to chalk a lot of this up to the "wealth and power" of the interest groups that hire the lobbyists. But the fact of the matter is for most of these groups (and, to be sure, individuals as well), it was the public that made them wealthy. And it is the collective societal willingness to take the lead from them that makes them powerful. These are not things that were forcibly wrested from society at the point of a gun or by force of law. These are things that society has willingly given, and even when the general understanding is that they are being used against the public good, there seems to be little appetite for reclaiming them.

Instead, people gather in small areas, and march.

This is not to cast aspersions on the marchers. They are doing what they understand that they need to in order to show their numbers and their desire to be heard. But they are never going to be as well listened to as a lobbyist, unless the cause is so obviously in the public's eye that only one outcome will save an elected official from unemployment come the next election cycle.

Participatory government is mostly taken to mean voting. But it has to be more than that. It has to mean a certain amount of interest in, and understanding of, the way things actually work. But that takes work, and it seems that there are only a few people who are ready and willing to put in that work, even if they are able.

It's odd to think that making one's way to a protest site and participating in public demonstration is the easy way out. But maybe that's what it is. And perhaps that explains why it seems so ineffective in the end.

A Rip In the Big Tent

I was listening to This American Life, and they were talking about the Democratic Party, post the election of Donald Trump. The basic topic was the big split in the party that had opened up recently. What kind of surprised me was that no-one ever simply came out and said that the Democrats were still caught in re-litigating the Sanders-Clinton primary, with neither side either conceding that some or another circumstance had shown the strength of the other side, nor being willing to actively reach out to the other with an olive branch.

While the Republicans were effectively, if grudgingly, lauded for their decision to all come together around their opposition to President Obama after his election in 2008, it was also recognized that the Democrats couldn't manage to simply be the party of Opposing President Trump. Their voters expected more of them, and you sort of come to the realization that these Democratic voters themselves don't seem to understand that the question of the 2016 Democratic primary, namely, should the party move the Far Left or the Center Left, had never adequately been settled.

And at some point, it's going to have to be settled. Democratic voters are going to have to settle it without attempting to extort one another, and Democratic politicians and leadership are going to have to settle it without taking one or another of the voter blocks for granted. It's going to be a heavy lift.

Think of the Adults

One of the things that I learned fairly quickly when dealing with the adults who meandered in and out of the lives of the children that I worked with is that the value of children, and their entitlement to things like love, protection or even our modern understanding of what childhood should be, are not self-evident concepts, regardless of how ubiquitous they may have been in own lives.

There are a myriad of reasons for this. Sometimes, the only answer that I could come up with was effectively "Whatever happened to crazy?" Mental illness, it turns out, can do a fairly bang-up job of making people into absolutely nightmarish caregivers. Drug addiction also rates up there. Although, I suppose that you could make the point that past a certain degree, they're effectively one in the same.

There are also those people for whom things like love and value just look a lot different than they do to the rest of us. It can be difficult to empathize with such people, but managing to inhabit their shoes for a while can offer some interesting insights into a world that, despite being outwardly the same as the one that everyone else lives in, looks and operates very differently. And when the logic of it can be worked out, it's possible to understand how something that seems so broken, can be an expression of love and caring.

But then there are those people for whom children just aren't valuable or worthwhile in the way that society commonly says that they are. These are the people who are the most difficult to understand, and, accordingly, the most difficult to explain. Dealing with a foster parent who's upset that their foster child isn't a key to extra cash every month, or a birth parent for whom their child's highest use is as leverage over their partner is frustrating and draining for the simple fact that they can seem willfully perverse - deliberately mistreating their children for no other reason than it's the wrong thing to do. Of course, there is a logic behind their actions, and a basis for it that goes far, far, back. Likely to when they were children themselves.

And that's often the worst part about it. The understanding that the dysfunction that the parents display is likely to be passed along to the children, who will one day pass it along to their children. And the cycle will continue. It's a weight that can be difficult to shake, when one deals with it day after day after day, and in my case, I found that it threatened to become a part of me. It seemed to infect a lot of people. One thing that I always noticed when I went to conferences and the like was that if you put a bunch of people in a room and left them to their own devices, it became a matter of when the topic of making people have a license to become parents would come up, rather than if.

And that lack of compassion for the adults in the world is a common legacy of the things that the world often does to children. It's hard to see the heartbreaking things that people do as a result of anything other than sheer meanness, and eventually, the desire to make the world a better place manifests itself as an impulse to control those who don't behave as we would like them to. And in that, it occurred to me, many of use became these funhouse reflections of the very people we were so amped up about; distorted, but still recognizable.Once I understood that, I think that I understood the adults I dealt with better. Because I could then see the same impulses in them that I saw in myself and everyone else around me, simply distorted and made maladaptive.

It was a valuable realization, but in the end, it was not a comforting one, because it didn't chart a path forward to the world that I wanted. But learning to accept the world as it was, rather than as we wanted it to be, was one of the most valuable lessons that we could teach to the children in our care. It was only fitting that we learned it ourselves.

Changes

"For God’s Sake, New York Times," the headline reads, "#MeToo Is Not Going to End Flirting And Fun Sex." It's a point that has been made before in response to the idea that the current focus on sexual harassment and assault (especially given its penchant for after-the-fact realizations of bad behavior) is going to somehow drive every man in the country to completely sublimate any sexuality in the workplace.

But let's say, for a moment, that men nationwide start following the advice of New York employment attorney James Vagnini:

Vagnini says dealing with workplace gender relations need not be complicated:
"My general rule is: If you wouldn't say it to a man, don't say it to a woman. Your best bet is to leave it alone and just say, 'Good morning'."

So what?

Implicit in the debate over whether or not the workplace flirting and sexual flings between coworkers are going to come to a crashing halt is that there's something necessary about them. And although I met one of my girlfriends through a mutual employer (although we weren't in the same workplace), I think that human relationships will survive if the workplace becomes off-limits for looking for a partner.

The mores of sex and partnering change regularly. Trends and fads come and go, and technology introduces us to ways of meeting people that didn't exist a decade previously. This process has survived every social upheaval (major and minor) that humanity has seen fit to throw at it. And it will continue to do so in perpetuity. And so if tomorrow, men become cautious about making a move to the point of paranoia, mores around coupling will adapt to the new reality. Sure, some people will miss out on what may have been a really great relationship for them, but, as the saying goes, there are other fish in the sea.

And it can be said that there may even be utility in exploring what the world might look like in the absence of workplace flirting and fun sex. If we understand that the current atmosphere of sexual misconduct is, at least in part, a reflection of the way we currently understand and go about the search for sexual partners and/or sexual reputation, perhaps there are solutions to be found in looking at the matter differently.

Made In Elsewhere

Offshoring of labor, for all that it aggrieves the people who lose their livelihoods, has enabled business to remain in labor-intensive enterprises while, at the same time, putting downward pressure on costs. And, perhaps more importantly, it has allowed the public to purchase the trappings of affluence at a lower cost than they would otherwise. This isn't to say that it's necessarily a good thing, or that everyone should support the practice, but it is somewhat worthwhile to understand why it happens as often as it does.

This movement of jobs to places where the same work can be done for lower wages is a product of our own desire to buy things cheaply and/or see corporate profitability (and thus, stock prices) continuously rise. In effect, we've been importing poverty in the name of increasing our overall standard of living and corporate balance sheets. This, like the paradox of thrift, is simply another manifestation of the fact that our current economy is set up in such a way that what's best for any given individual can be bad for the group. While many people might not like what is happening, there isn't a broadly-shared idea of what should be happening, and the status quo (as unappealing as it may be) tends to be everyone's second choice.

Part of the problem is the parochial way in which lawmakers tend to see the world. While we might prefer the Congress act for the long-term good of the nation as a whole, the individual states and districts that Senators and Representatives are answerable to are primarily concerned with themselves, and the "National interest over Local interests" constituency isn't yet large enough to be able to elect/defeat candidates for national office on its own. (It is also very divided, as people tend to be more interested in targeting programs that benefit someone else, while seeing those things that benefit them as beneficial for everyone.)

Additionally, large American businesses typically seem to work in what could be described as profit preservation mode, eschewing risky creative ventures in favor of creating circumstances that seek to guarantee a certain level of profitability (including importing poverty). And while a number of people talk a big game about how "small businesses will save the world," policy tends to favor large businesses, which use the clout provided by their size to hold off smaller competitors. (Think about how things might be different if the individual brands that made up General Motors and Chrysler were still independent companies [I'm not an old man, and I remember when there were four big Detroit automakers.], and if banks weren't routinely allowed to buy up their failing competitors.)

This leaves us with a situation in which a number of factors routinely conspire to move work away from the United States, with its relatively high expectations for the standard of living that work, even relatively low-skilled work, should provide, and to nations for which wages that we would consider too low to be workable are a step up the food chain. And as high-speed communications and global supply chains make the world seem ever-smaller, the number of jobs that it will make sense to move elsewhere will increase. (If Africa, as a continent, ever manages to settle things down enough that it's "safe" to move large-scale employment projects there, we're likely to see another round of large-scale offshoring, as companies move to take advantage of the large labor force of poor people that will be made available.)

To a degree, we shouldn't care that other parts of the world are willing to perform low-skilled labor more cheaply than what would be a living wage in the United States. Last I looked we were supposed to have an educational system that was the envy of every other nation on the planet - do we really have a good reason to be squabbling with China over manufacturing jobs that don't even require a high-school education? (Of course, in this respect, it would be helpful to actually consider a high-school education to be, well, education. And for the most part we don't.)


Fighting to save industries that can be sited more cheaply somewhere else is a loser's game, that only works to the degree that a national economy can more or less achieve autarky. We're better off creating new industries, and letting companies arise, live and die in a way that creates technological and labor churn that creates new engines for growth and recurring labor shortages that make it worthwhile for the labor market to stay up on the latest tech. When some poor country somewhere decides that they want to spend their time making t-shirts or ball-bearings, we should be rushing to offload that sort of busy work to them, so that we put the best-educated labor force in the world to work on things that actually require the education that we spent so much on. Of course, this may mean altering our education system. While there seems to be an emphasis on well-rounded citizenship as a goal of education, it seems to me that a certain basic skills set is also a useful component. To be sure, the goal should not be to allow companies to offload their basic training costs onto the public (although that may have to be part of it), but rather to understand what basic skills will be needed in the overall economy by the time students graduate. This is, of course, a taller order than I'm making it out to be - if predicting the future were easy, we'd live in a much different world. But if we're effectively going to mandate that everyone spend a dozen years in school, we may as well do what we can to make that investment pay off for us.

This alone won't solve the problem. It is, after all, a very deep problem. And if we can't manage to create and maintain a constant demand for local labor to supply the good and services we need, we'll simply wind up in the same position down the road. But our current responses to living in a worldwide labor market are dysfunctional. So sticking with them won't do us any good, either.

Hidden Stories

I tend to be suspicious of claims that the "Mainstream Media" colludes to broadly spike stories that are of particular interest to groups that see themselves as marginalized, in part because of that very marginalized status. A couple of days ago, I came across a breathless denunciation of the media for not widely disseminating the story of a Black lesbian who had been murdered. While it was a fairly heartbreaking case, in its details, that's all it was - yet another in a sad litany of violent crimes that happen all day, every day, across the United States. While it was the sort of thing that one might expect would headline the local news, it was difficult to see what a national audience would have found interesting about it.

And this is something that I commonly see in stories that people hold up as being covered up by the national media establishment. While they may be of intense interest to people in certain communities, they're often not much different than a thousand other stories that no-one outside of the local area in which they occurred ever hear about. There's nothing particularly unreasonable about the idea that news outlets will carry the stories that people find important, even if it's sometimes unrealistic. But in an attention economy, attention is valuable because it's limited. You could read about murders all day long and still be hard pressed to keep up with all of them. And there are other things that happen in the world that people are interested in.

The desire of the marginalized to have their stories, and their concerns, presented to the public at large is sensible. And who better to do that than media organizations that have built up large audiences over the years? But there is a degree to which this becomes an abdication of responsibility. The best way to ensure that a story is heard is to tell people yourselves, and that means competing with the other ways in which they can spend their time. Which is often a difficult and thankless task. But it's a necessary one, if for no other reason than it leads to an understanding of what people's concerns and priorities are.

Plots

So the latest pastime of the chattering classes is speculation about just how unfit for office President Trump is. But while it might be a satisfying hobby, it's not a very useful one at this point.

President Trump can be seen as a reaction to some or all of the eight years that preceded his election, just as President Obama can be seen as a reaction to some or all of the eight years before him. And the people who drove that reaction are going to be very unhappy with things if a way is found to remove President Trump from office. In her Slate column, Dahlia Lithwick points out that the cooperation of Republican members of Congress would be needed, and that it likely isn't forthcoming. And while true, I think that this does sort of look past some people who really do matter in all of this, and that's the Republican electorate.

Regardless of how bad one thinks that President Trump's tenure will be (or already has been) for the nation as a whole, the fact of the matter remains that he was elevated to that office by people who felt that he was their best option. They seem him as someone who is on their side, and are likely to regard a serious move against him as a move against themselves and their interests (even if they don't conflate those interests with those of the nation as a whole). They would have no reason to support a move to oust President Trump from office, and every reason to effectively double down on crisis mode - and it was putting these people into a crisis that lead to President Trump's election in the first place. Any expectation that they're not going to see it as a coup is misguided.

And it's in that sense that the arguing that President Trump is unfit, whether it comes from Left, Right or Center is counterproductive, because it reinforces the paranoid worldview that many Trump voters espoused - that they live in a world governed by élites, who are not only unaccountable to them, but are hatefully plotting against their rights and interests in order to unfairly increase their own power and wealth. One of the ideas that Candidate Trump put forward that resonated with them is the idea that their woes are not the result of changes in the world around them, but were specifically engineered to disempower and impoverish them. And I would be unsurprised to learn that they already regard talk of impeachment or invoking the 25th Amendment as yet more élite engineering of events.

And this is where the partisanship of Congressional Republicans comes into play. Given that, for better or for worse, they've hitched their wagons to Donald Trump's star, they have nothing to gain by siding with their political adversaries to oust him. And so all of the talk of President Trump's possible unfitness for office is just that - talk. And it's talk that feeds a serious rift in the nation, rather than bridging it.

Choicies

Many families in the [Down syndrome] community are concerned about recent reports from Iceland that the genetic disorder has come close to being eradicated there through prenatal testing and pregnancy termination, says Heather Sachs. She's the policy and advocacy director for the National Down Syndrome Congress, and the mother of a 12-year-old girl with Down syndrome.

"It hurts, especially when you have family members with Down syndrome who are very much integral parts of their families," Sachs says.
Down Syndrome Families Divided Over Abortion Ban

One of the things that I've noticed about broader American culture is the habit, although maybe "tendency" is a better word, to see rejection when other people make different choices. If people in Iceland have determined that Down Syndrome is something that they'd rather not deal with, I'm not sure how being hurt by that makes any sense. I understand that for people in the United States who have children with Down Syndrome, it feels as if Icelanders are saying that those children aren't valuable, but what they're really saying is that they have a different set of priorities, and that they would rather devote their resources to something else.

I think that part of it comes down to the outsourcing of choices, in a way that leads people to see whatever path they've chosen as not simply the correct one for them, but the Right Thing To Do overall. And I suspect that this makes challenges to that feel more personal than perhaps they would, otherwise.

The Lost

"Whatever happened to 'Bumvertising'?" I wonder. For those of you who have no idea of what I'm talking about, a Seattle businessman hit on the idea of giving panhandlers a sign advertising his business to hold, along with their own. For this, he handed over a free lunch, and between one and five dollars. The story (and the resulting teapot tempest that masqueraded as a controversy) first broke in 2005 on the national news cycle (ABC, the Daily Show, and others picked it up and ran with it), and there hasn't been much about it since then.

So much of our news a flash in the pan these days that there are all sorts of stories like this wandering the back woods of the Internet. Like the story out of Canada that nearly every pedophile that the Toronto police nabbed between 2001 and 2005 was "a hardcore Trekkie." Now you see it, now you don't. Where do they go? Every so often, you come across an interesting story, and then can go back a few months later and get the newest update. But many of them fade in perpetual obscurity as the latest Lindsay Lohan meltdown or wannabe terrorist plot grabs the headlines by the neck.

I can see this trackless graveyard, littered with the tombstones of old stories that seemed to fade away before coming to a satisfactory conclusion. Occasionally I wander through there, drawn by something that caught my interest years ago, before being filed away in Limbo. One of these days, maybe I'll stumble across another mourner, and I'll ask them who, if anyone, cares for all of the lonely graves.