I know Gavelwrench doesn’t seem like the most appropriate forum for a detailed description of tax legislation, but bear with me. I may not have creepy blue eyes and a blackboard to explain the Tax Reform Act in detail, but I am armed with a series of college essays I was forced to write about it.

I bring it up only because of the passing this week of former Democratic chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski. Everything I know about him I learned from reading Showdown at Gucci Gulch in Poli 100. The book is an exhaustive account of how the legislation actually got passed, i.e. with lots of bipartisan bickering and compromise.

To my great surprise, the book was actually interesting. Rostenkowski, before being mired in corruption scandals and forced out of the House, shines brightly as the hard-nosed pol who struck deals with GOP lawmakers on several key parts of the legislation. Some parts feel sensationalized, I think to make it more palatable to readers, but I got the sense most of what was written happened. Bipartisan legislation is as fraught with intrigue as you might imagine, not that we see very much of it these days.

I don’t plan on explaining the Tax Reform Act, but the important thing is that it drastically simplified the tax code. This probably doesn’t sound all that impressive to anyone who has done their own taxes, but it’s true. It also got rid of some of the more horrendous tax shelters, though not all, and managed to lower taxes. You don’t have to like Reagan to know that this legislation made a hell of a lot more sense than the Bush tax cuts.

As a piece of collegiate nostalgia, I thought I would go ahead and share one of the really terrible essays I wrote about the book. You’ll have to forgive some of my more firey, partisan ¹ thoughts. Being in college means having opinions on everything, even the tax code. You’ll also have to forgive my poor diction, sloppy prose and night-before-it’s-due writing. Being in college also means writing a lot of crappy papers you wish you had proofread more.

The essay is about my general impressions of the book. It doesn’t mention Rostenkowski as my other essays do, but it gives a better feel for the legislation:

September 18, 2006

There were many factors that led to the tax reform plan enacted in 1986, least of which was the growing inequity among income-earners in relation to the amount they were being taxed (i.e. the rich were less taxed than middle and low-income earners were).  One would imagine that this factor, affecting most Americans, would be the lead catalyst, but the Reagonomics mantra went something like, “opportunity, growth, expansion, and capital formation,” meaning that what was good for business was good for America.  Grossly mistaken—and grossly Republican I might add—this lead to the largest peacetime budget deficit from $60 billion in the Carter administration to $200 billion under Reagan.  While the Bradley-Gephardt bill did nothing to immediately address that (it was “revenue neutral”) the benefits could be seen throughout the economy if passed.

The motivation for the president’s initial plan was to continue to lower the income tax, inadvertently decrease the budget deficit, and all without seeming overtly pro-business.  With the help of Pearlman and McLure (and undoubtedly many others) he created the initiative called Tax Reform for Fairness, Simplicity, and Economic Growth.  I think it also had a lot to do with avoiding embarrassment.  A politician’s aim is to look in control at all times, and with a deficit that big, and no way to increase revenue without increasing taxes, something bipartisan had to come about.  It’s also stressed that President Reagan was always pro-lowering-the-individual-tax-burden-on-everyone, even at the expense of his big-business buddies.

I found three things the most surprising at the start of this book.  The first was that at any mention of the words “tax reform” there was an army of Gucci-clad lobbyists to thwart it.  Not even gaping tax loopholes, providing the largest corporations exemptions from paying income tax altogether, could anger the American public enough to force elected officials into fixing the tax system more expediently.  Secondly, being a loyal Democrat, it’s always disappointing to hear how poorly one’s own party is abusing the system by taking as many kick-backs from PACs as the other guy.  Lastly, I was surprised at Senator Bradley’s patience to have started on this idea in the early 80’s, and to persevere even after suffering continuous defeats in the matter, especially when Walter Mondale wouldn’t even adopt it as a campaign issue in ‘84.  In an age where flag burning amendments, abortion laws, and immigration reform pass through one ear and out the other, or as I call it, the issue-du-jour approach to governing, I could only hope we have more legislators take the Bradley approach.  That is to say, find an issue and stick with it until it is resolved.

I tried it out for the first time when it got warm a few months ago. The woman in the video is right that it’s about solitude. Sitting, saying hello, sitting some more. It’s a good way to make yourself feel like you have a home even if you’re just renting some room in a run down row house with a broken oven (yes, landlord, despite what you may say, it is really broken). So do yourself a favor, get some bug spray, cut up some fresh pineapple, and chill out on your front steps. You’ll like what you see.

WORDS from Everynone on Vimeo.

Everyone Forever Now – “Stoop Sitting” from Everynone on Vimeo.

Check out their other stuff: http://everynone.com/

The best part of this week had to be the surf lesson we took yesterday before coming back. This was a first for me, as well as Lee (who had recuperated enough by then) and his brother, Art. We were all nervous about it. Fortunately, we had a surf instructor straight out of the movie Point Break. Leif, our teacher, let us do pretty much whatever we wanted. He said finding the wave and finding our balance couldn’t be taught… only felt. Wipeout after merciless wipeout, I still appreciated his gentle guidance and zen positivity. He said if we had a few more days on the island, we’d probably be able to master standing up. I want to believe him. I can see how surfing gets in some people’s blood. Afterward I felt a high akin to the one I felt after running a dinky 5K last year. An exhausting, yet completely rewarding experience.

Lee’s mom dutifully snapped away on her snazzy SLR during our lesson. With more than 150 photos, I figured it would be best just to pare them down slightly, slap a hypnotic, thumping electronic beat underneath, and let it go at that. I also made another album of the rest of the trip; I’ll add surfing highlights (post cropping) to that later. As much as I don’t like it when other people rub my face in their gratuitous vacation photos, here I am doing the same. Enjoy.

More photos:

If there’s one overarching lesson I’ve learned working in international broadcasting the last two years it’s this: simultaneously being a journalist and being a federal employee is nearly impossible. It’s farcical to pretend otherwise. A lot of times I’ll hear colleagues lauding the fact that we are free from financial pressure and pandering to advertisers, ignoring the fact that we are not free from the pressures of our political overseers and their foreign policy priorities, as well as the retarding force of federal bureaucracy.

Here we have one of the biggest disclosures of classified information in U.S. history, and we’re told that we can only cover it by copycatting other reports and the wires. That’s malarkey! It’s been so hard to explain coherently with friends and family the difficulty of my job in this environment, so I thought today finally I would let you all see for yourselves what I’ve been up against. The following are excerpts from a series of e-mails appearing in my inbox this week on the Wikileaks disclosure.

The documents were leaked Sunday. On Monday morning this appeared in our inbox:

It has come to the attention of the IT Directorate and the Office of Security, that some agency employees would like to download material related to the story that appeared on the front page of the Washington Post regarding leaked classified material about the US efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  There are a number of documents currently available on the Internet that are classified as secret or higher.  While this material has been leaked, it has not been officially de-classified and, for our purposes, is still considered classified material.  Our agency network, storage systems, and email are not classified systems and cannot have classified material stored on them.  Please do not download, browse, or email any of these files from agency computers.

Of course, this didn’t sit well with many of us, many of us who have tried to ignore the fact that we are regarded by many journalists and news organizations in Washington as low-level government cogs. One angry colleague replied:

I still find this profoundly disturbing.  The documents have been de facto declassified by the leak, even if they have not been de jure declassified by the government. Notice its says BROWSE or download.  So I interpret that to mean that we cannot even LOOK at them on a public website from an agency computer. That means I cannot check original source material… I know from long experience that perusing source material whenever possible is the only way to get context and nuance. Writing from news accounts is no substitute.  Other news organizations do not have papal infallibility.

More grumbling, more replies. This one from a superior:

A number of you have expressed frustration with the note regarding [the] potential downloading of the classified Pentagon documents.  I’ve made my frustration known to _____, as have some of our colleagues. _____ sent this in response to one colleagues’ e-mail, and I want to share it with you.  It doesn’t end the debate, but you all deserve to know what’s being discussed:
————–
Unfortunately, this Catch-22 is something we can’t overcome.  As a federal agency and federal employees, we are bound by federal law which prohibits downloading or viewing classified documents on a non-secure computer system as well as being in possession of classified documents without the proper security clearance.  Until these documents are declassified, we can’t put them on our work computers. We can and will still report on what others say are in the documents, the reaction to the content in the documents as well as putting it into context for our audience.

More grumbling, more replies. By the end of the week, a full five days after the Wikileaks documents have been available for public download, we received this update:

The board is actively looking at how to fix the situation in order to allow direct access to the documents. Stay tuned.

I work on a frustration plantation.

I’m going to the Outer Banks for about a week starting today; it hardly seems like an appropriate time to complain about my job. In fact, I have tried diligently to avoid using this space to vent, aware of how good a 24-year-old has it in a landscape of 10% unemployment.

But at the same time, I’m hoping this disclosure gives you a tiny glimpse of the dysfunction that has plagued America’s international broadcasting efforts for several decades now. Why should you care? Because we have a budget along the lines of $760 million dollars from the federal government. That’s your money! It’s also about $340 million more than the BBC World budget, which completely pwns the U.S. when it comes to reaching the “hearts and minds” of its overseas audiences. (You can read more about this in a recent New York Times op-ed.)

How can we expect Afghans to rely on our reporting on the Wikileaks story when we can’t even see the documents ourselves?

White House

Lest you think it’s all bad, there are still some perks. On a brighter and totally unrelated note, I got to go to the White House this week for a second time. Of course, waiting outside for an hour in the blazing sun just to capture Obama walking to a helicopter for all of 30 seconds gives me serious journalistic pause as well, but seeing the president in the flesh is still very cool. (Wearing a skirt next to Marine One upon take off and landing, however, is not.)

That’s all from me for this week probably. Going to rest, tan, recharge and pray I still have a job when I come back.

But we did take a bike tour while there that included a pit stop at the main bullring (pictured to your right). Our wonderful guide John, all too aware of the controversial nature of the subject before us, decided to take a different angle. He said, “You all have heard the reasons against bullfighting, so rather than rehash those, I’m going to give you a defense.” I thought it was a novel approach, one that was sure to challenge the PETA-brained Americans in the crowd. I made sure to write down his arguments when I got back to the hotel (somehow knowing they’d come in handy for a blog post two years later).

Like I said, I hate bullfighting (and bull riding for that matter). Perhaps I read too much Ferdinand growing up. But I think it’s always good to hear the other side. So here are three points in defense of bullfighting, as told by John:

1. John said one pro to bullfighting is the bulls live lavishly, moreso than some humans even! They spend their time in big, grassy fields, not all bunched up like cattle farms. He said they all eat organic food too, just like Gwyneth Paltrow.



2. Another defense of bullfighting is that they only use old bulls, after they’re done mating with all the hot young topless heifers. I think this might be the weakest point because it wasn’t immediately clear what he meant by old. Putting an ageing animal in a ring to get impaled is not quite the same as euthanizing your childhood cat when it develops some debilitating disease.
3. His last point was they suffer for only about 15 minutes. A relatively short time, according to John. But for anyone who’s ever been stabbed, 15 minutes probably feels like a lifetime.

John didn’t include a fourth item, but Lee wanted me to add: matadors have kids to feed.

So what do you think? Is there some justification? Cultural tradition? I don’t expect this ban will really catch on in the rest of the Spain. But I take comfort in the fact that a few more happy bulls can now spend their time sitting under the trees and smelling flowers.

Julia’s sister Jessica reporting here, from the last melting days of July. I’m not sure what my speciality will be, but I love movies so let’s start with that.

As a supreme procrastinator, I wanted my first post to be about director Jean Cocteau and for it to fall on his birthday, which passed on July 5. La Belle et La Bete was one of those films for us growing up. One that you couldn’t quite put into words, but you knew you were a different person after watching it. The grainy videotape checked out from the library adding to the dreamlike visuals and pacing, not needing the subtitles and getting gloriously lost in all the dark hallways of the Beast’s castle where the statues watched you out of the corner of their eyes. It seemed almost an odd continuation of the games we’d play in the backyard, and the air castles we’d build between the trees, warning each other of the dark creatures that lurked in the woods.

Both of us are at a crossroads now, and it’s funny how you don’t go home again exactly, but you do return to the wellspring of your imagination. We both love movies and art and neither of us are working in that field. That has to change. To tell or read or make up a story is to lay claim to a power no one can take from you. Cocteau understood that, even going so far as to ask his audience to grant him a little childlike acceptance in the opening to his masterpiece.

I don’t like the cynical, hardened shell of most film critiques today. Either they’re pining for a golden age that like most golden ages never actually existed, or feeling nostalgic for a movie that was terrible and hasn’t been too degraded by an admittedly unnecessary remake. So in writing about films I’m going to stick with what I like: films more people should know about, or current actors and films who make it all worthwhile.

While it’s true her empire is at times contradictory (having a line of weight loss pills while seeming to discourage them in her books), I believe she has a genuine interest in helping the morbidly obese and those who are exercise challenged (the category in which I used to fall). Of course, her idea of helping is often scaring these families into submission. But facing one’s mortality has never been a popular prerogative in our culture. At least once per episode she yells “THE FOOD YOU’RE EATING IS POISON!” Some may find this shrill, but I think it’s refreshingly effective hyperbole. I guess you can tell what kind of parent I’ll be.

Anyway, one episode in particular I wanted to mention was with a Yavapai-Apache family in Arizona. The episode highlights the rampant problem of diabetes and obesity among Native Americans. More interestingly, it also addresses the checkered and controversial heritage of fry bread, which I knew little about.

Now if you’ve ever been to the flavorful cafeteria in the National Museum of the American Indian in D.C., fry bread will not be unfamiliar to you. It’s exactly as it sounds. Fried, puffy golden dough. Preferably served savory with some buffalo chili on top. It’s delicious. It’s also 700 calories. I had always associated this with being a “traditional” Native American food. But over the course of the episode, the idea of this being a remnant of tradition is challenged by Michaels. In one pivotal scene, she throws an entire box of fry bread away at a community picnic to the dismay of many onlookers.

This leads to some fry bread throwing at Michaels and confrontation with a tribal elder who tells her it is NOT cool to waste food in their culture. She later apologizes for any disrespect, but argues that what she threw away would not be classified as food. In fact, she thinks it is–as you might have already guessed–POISON! But the incident sparks debate in the community about the bread’s significance.

Earlier, she asks the woman featured on the show, Cora-lei, if her ancestors had things like enriched bleach flour. Cora-lei admits that fry bread really wasn’t introduced into their culture until the 19th century when the U.S. government began rounding up Indians, confiscating their land and relocating them out west to terrain that couldn’t easily be farmed. To keep them from starving, the government began giving them rations of things like blocks of cheese and blocks of lard, further alienating them from their more healthful hunting and gathering traditions.

Jillian says,  ”Not only is this 100 percent not of your tradition, it is seemingly a representation of everything horrible that’s happened to your people.” Cora-lei responds, “That’s true.”

There are many good articles on the decades-old fry bread fracas. One quote I found especially telling was by two Indian scholars noting the irony of selling fry bread mix in the Native American museum in D.C.:

[A] fitting conclusion: excess commodity flour, lard, sugar, [once] offered to starving reservation people as partial payment for the millions of acres of treaty-stolen land, [and] transformed by Native ingenuity to disguise mold and rancidity, here becomes a portable artifact of Indian authenticity for tourist consumption.

This is not to say that everyone, American Indians in particular, should feel bad for enjoying it and eating it. I don’t. Nor should it be banned from the museum’s cafeteria. It just provides a good example of how unhealthy foods can be rationalized and perpetuated through tradition and almost folkloric devotion. Comfort foods. We eat them because they evoke strong memories of family, home, and our past.

But Micheals is right to discourage the worship and romanticizing of family favorites, regardless of your cultures and traditions. When faced with diabetes, high cholesterol, sleep apnea and a whole host of other diet-related issues, you can hardly afford to be picky.

Back to basics. Maybe not hunting and gathering per se, but counting at least. Calories in, calories out.

Pictures courtesy Flawedartist and Navin75 under Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 2.0 License.

This summer I’ve been immersed in biostatistics due to the nifty little summer program for undergraduates here at THE University of Wisconsin.  I have been helping out with questions the undergraduates have about the statistical program we use here, and attending some of their lectures about clinical trials.  Right after returning from one of these lectures, Julia mentioned this blog post to me, which criticizes the FDA for failing to approve a new drug named Flibanserin to treat “hypoactive sexual desire” in women.  For those of you who, like me, are not good with prefixes, “hypo-” means below normal.  People who believe that the rejection of this drug was due to some sort of sexism that readily pushes Viagra but fails to acknowledge the possibility of a real disorder in women are ignoring the basic way the FDA and statistics work.

The previously mentioned blog post takes the view that the side effects were not severe enough to reject the drug, especially compared to the side effects of Viagra.  I think this would be a valid point, and I even think that the FDA doesn’t have any business telling us what kind of side effects we can and can’t accept.  But in this case, the drug showed some side effects, and it may not actually work. That bolded point is where FDA haters usually get it wrong.  When we see that something has been approved by the FDA, we naturally assume that it’s effective.  Therefore the FDA has a responsibility to weed out as many ineffective drugs as possible.

I’ve actually looked at the FDA briefing on the Flibanserin trial, which is here.  The study aimed to show two things:  an increase in sexual desire and an increase in the number of “sexually satisfying events,” or SSEs.  The FDA and the drug company agreed in previous meetings that these two things had to be shown in order to show efficacy.  The trial showed a significant increase in SSEs, but no significant increase in desire (page 30 of the linked document).  So as far as the FDA is concerned, that’s it.  The drug has not been shown to be effective, therefore even in the absence of side effects it can’t be approved.

The drug company behind Flibanserin tried as hard as they could to convince the FDA that their drug worked.  The company petitioned to switch the way desire was measured.  Some other measurement besides the daily logs was suggested, but this is a big no-no from a statistical standpoint.  Probably the most important rule about clinical trials is that you can’t change what you’re testing after the test is over.  This is exactly what the company wanted to do, and if the FDA allowed this kind of thing, we would have many more ineffective and dangerous drugs on the market.

As kind of side note, another trial was done which sought only to show that Flibanserin increases SSEs failed to show an effect.  Although this isn’t actually that relevant, since the drug didn’t pass the efficacy standards agreed upon in the first place.

Of course, I want to say that the blog linked above seems like a fine blog, but the fact of the matter is this clinical trials business is hard.  I think it’s a shame that the FDA gets so much hate, when a lot of it really seems unwarranted.  I’ve heard some stories of heroic statisticians in the FDA standing up to influential statisticians hired by drug companies.  And I don’t even think the statisticians working for the drug companies are doing anything wrong.  They truly believe the drug works, but not all effective drugs can be shown to be effective.  All the parties involved just want to help the most people.

About two and a half to three years ago my good friend Alex returned from his second and final tour of duty in Afghanistan. Safe and sound to my great relief. He brought with him many amazing gifts, including a couple for yours truly. The first was a neon green paperweight with a scorpion suspended in resin with “I ♥ Afghanistan” written on the bottom. ¹

The second gift was a few yards of gorgeous, silky gray fabric. Alex explained at the time that the fabric was beside the point. He had actually bought the material because of the wrapping paper it came in, pictured on your right. The marketplace where he bought it was using giftwrap adorned with revered Afghan tribal leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, a.k.a. the Lion of Panjshir. “Do you know who that is?” Alex asked me.

I had to admit that the significance of Massoud escaped me, my knowledge of Afghan history being very paltry. Here’s the abbreviated version of what Alex told me (my recollection may be a bit sloppy, so read his Wikipedia entry and correct me if I’m wrong):

Massoud was a well-respected ethnic Tajik living in the Panjshir Valley who helped drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the 1980s. He went on to become the defense minister before the Taliban overthrew the Afghan government in the mid-1990s. He then assumed the leadership of what is commonly referred to as the Northern Alliance (a coalition of Afghan ethnic groups that fought the Taliban instead of each other). Massoud was considered a moderate, so naturally this meant he had his fair share of enemies.

By 2001, Massoud continued to warn of the Taliban and its links to al-Qaida, receiving very little support or attention from the United States as I understand it, though this is probably a very controversial topic I’m entering into. Anyway, by September he was dead. A group of suspected al-Qaida agents pretending to be foreign journalists exploded a bomb from inside the television camera they were using to “interview” him. Date of death: September 9, 2001, two days before the world shook. Coincidence? Probably (definitely) not.

Alex says it is a widely believed that had Massoud lived to see the events that followed and been around for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, he would have been a powerful ally for the U.S. Of course, hindsight is 20/20. We can’t really control world events. But I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that Massoud’s counterinsurgency expertise would have been pretty invaluable.

And all these years later, he’s still very much a part of the Afghan consciousness, plastered on billboards and wrapping paper. Wikipedia tells me he even has his own holiday. So for two years I left the fabric in its wrapping. Happy was I to let Massoud’s smiling face peer from my coffee table. Eventually I’d figure out what do with it.

In fact, what I decided to do was create a fabric-covered corkboard to handle some of the paper accumulating around my room (with the help of Alex and his wife Emily, naturally). Massoud would be preserved on the back.

Because the material was so thin, spray adhesive was useless. So we cut and staple gunned the the fabric around the edges. This might have been a hideous solution were it not for the fact that the staples blended so well with the gray material. It took all of 20 minutes with cutting, ironing and stapling.

Et voilà: a corkboard with a little history.

I know having a corkboard with an Afghan freedom fighter on it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But it sort of reminds me of Alex’s time in Afghanistan. And how I used to G-chat for long hours with him and his buddies about ridiculous topics that seem very silly to me now considering the shit they had to go through. Like trying to avoid getting shot at by the exact same people that Massoud was trying to defeat.

No, I don’t have plans to visit Afghanistan anytime soon, nor am I trying to romanticize this unwinnable war. But you know, I can still appreciate Alex’s (and Massoud’s) contributions there… thanks to my corkboard.

It was an absurd statement to be sure. It also served as his explanation for why he would not be putting his new album on iTunes. A lot of netizens snickered that not only was Prince out of touch, but a sinister capitalist who puts his business interests before his fans. (Which, big deal. It’s his music, not Steve Jobs’.)

Although all these assertions may be valid, I think it’s worth noting that he also discusses very candidly with his interviewer the matter of his faith as a Jehovah’s Witness. A lot of bloggers found this just as wacky, especially the part where he talks about door-to-door proselytizing (a requirement of the faith) while in disguise. But as a former Witness myself ¹, I thought maybe his dismissal of the Internet could be better understood and examined looking through the lens of his faith.

The organization as a whole has historically been slow to embrace the modern world and its technologies. My grandparents on my dad’s side refused to own a TV for much of my dad’s youth because at the time, many in the faith believed the tube was tantamount to the eye of Satan (and that was before reality TV!). Even in their later years, my grandfather never purchased cable for my grandmother, forcing her to wiggle the bunny ears antenna on her tiny television set to try and catch some of her favorite soaps, which my grandfather would later scold her for watching. Computers were out of the question.

Now I’m not saying Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t use the Internet or aren’t tech savvy. With 7 million practicing members, you can be sure many of them are just average online surfers like the rest of us. It’s just that institutionally, Jehovah’s Witnesses’ attitude toward modernity and the outside world has not changed much. And so with every new technology, trend or fad, there would always be some sort of disclaimer posed as a rhetorical question. Usually something like, “Ferbies: Harmless fun… or fowl of darkness?”

In fact, you can see this for yourself by browsing the titles of some of their articles:

The Internet: How to Avoid the Dangers
Can Internet Dating Really Be Dangerous?
Chat Rooms: What Should I Know About Them?
Electronic Games: Is There a Dark Side?
(And just for funsies: Homosexuality: How Can I Avoid It? Yikes.)

A large tenet of the faith is shunning the “system of things.” In practice this means not becoming attached to one’s material objects and avoiding engaging with people of other faiths (or no faith). For a long time JW’s openly discouraged their practitioners from letting their children attend college. Why? Because a life dedicated to being a missionary was preferable. College also has a way of opening your mind to new ideas, which could lead you to question some of the more troubling aspects of the faith.

For a time, at least while I was still practicing, it seemed they treated the Internet with the same ambivalence as college.Yeah, you can use it. But they’ll want to tell you how to use it. And how not to use it. And how using it the wrong way could jeopardize your special relationship with God.

By trivializing modern luxuries, the faith forces its members to do the same. Think about it, the Internet is kind of pointless when God is going to come back and wipe away most of mankind, right? I’d say that’s one of the more appealing parts of the faith–the fact that you don’t have to be connected or rich or with-the-times to feel like you’re still really special and part of God’s plan, or at least their version of it.

It’s interesting to see how someone of such wealth and celebrity can embrace these facets and incorporate them into his/her life. I always wondered why Prince and the Jackson family (i.e. the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ answer to Scientology’s Tom Cruise and John Travolta) would want to be JWs.  Turns out, everlasting life promised to a select group of people can be a very attractive offer.

So maybe Prince does just want you to buy his CD so he can make more money. Or maybe he is a rich eccentric with a God habit. But I think there also may be some truth in what I argued: that his new religion has made him care less about the modern world and what you or I think.

After all, Prince is not your lover. He’s not your friend. He is something that you’ll never comprehend.