Power glower?

For the last decade we have been treated to "power poses" -- people doing full body gestures that supposedly boost their confidence -- based on spurious research that was challenged as far back as 2013. You all know that I'm against anything that encourages jackasses to behave with more jackassery, so this is an issue that cheeses me off. 

The idea, which came from a minuscule study (n=42), is this: If you stand in a power pose like a superhero for a period of time, you will gain the confidence that your body is demonstrating. For example, before a big job interview, you might stand like Superman in the elevator on the way up, arms akimbo, as if telling the villain that this evil ends right now. Then, full of confidence, you go in and wow everyone and get the job. 

Note how Marvin's power pose makes him look more manly.

But Scientific American took this theory on in 2013. In "The Dark Side of Power Posing," psych professor Jay Van Bavel wrote, 

If you are already lacking self-confidence, you might reason that the ends justify the means. Acting like a heartless jerk for a few minutes may be a small cost to pay for your dream job or a promotion, right? Although it is tempting to conclude that power posing might be a way to trick our nervous system into feeling powerful, research by Pablo Briñol, Richard Petty and Ben Wagner has shown that that this strategy might actually backfire among the people who need power the most. In a paper published prior to the power pose work described above, they examined the possibility that power posing might make people more confident in their own thoughts–even if those thoughts were negative! As predicted, Dr. Briñol and his colleagues found that power posing increased self-confidence, but only among participants who already had positive self-thoughts. In contrast, power posing had exactly the opposite effect on people who had negative self-thoughts. In fact, it actually decreased their self-confidence as potential professionals. In other words, power posing backfired among half the participants. 

I think it would decrease my self-confidence because I would feel like an idiot.

Here are a couple of other problems I've had with this whole business:

1) Superman can get away with standing in a power pose because he is freaking Superman. Meanwhile, in reality, people really getting into a fight don't stand around waiting to be pummeled. They adopt postures to attack or defend, not stand straight up like a punching bag, which is what they would become in short order.

2) It's mostly used after the fact by assholes to rub their opponents' noses in the dirt, not to show confidence in an event beforehand. Noted America-hater Megan Rapinoe, grown rich playing a child's game like so many other creeps, likes to use a "power pose" after scoring a goal, not before doing so, when it would be foolish. In a lot of other sports, perhaps even in women's soccer back in the seventies, such behavior would have earned her an elbow to the mouth. Part of the reason we have so much showboating in sports now is that the policing of this kind of behavior has been heavily penalized. I miss the days when a showboater could expect a pitch to the head, a poke in the eye, or a stick to the solar plexus. Nobody likes an asshole.   

So those are my thoughts, and I welcome your agreement or disagreement, but don't go making a silly pose before we argue, or I will take your picture and turn it into a meme. 

A flake's tale.

Once upon a time there was a tiny drop of water that wanted to become a snowflake. 

"Oh, what a joy to be a snowflake!" it said. "I will drift gently from the sky and join with my brethren to become a snowstorm. And we will become one with the happiness of winter. Perhaps I will become part of a jolly snowman, or a sturdy snow fort, or even a dashing snowball! I can't wait!"

The winter came; the air grew cold, and the bit of water went up into a cloud and froze into a snowflake, as it had hoped. 

"Looking good!" it said, admiring its sharp, hexagonal pattern and gleaming white appearance. "Now to make for land!"

"Hold on," said the cloud, "don't be in such a rush. There are people down there who are trying to get to work, old folks with no one to shovel for them, kids on the way to school, ambulances and delivery men and all kinds of people who will be in grave trouble from a sudden storm. You should all disperse gently, in teams, over a period of time."

"Nuts to that!" said the snowflake. "C'mon, guys! Let's PAR-TAY!"

So the little snowflake led an enormous charge of snowflakes that swamped the town, causing a picturesque layer of slippery stuff that caused people to fall, breaking various coccyxes, and crash their cars and trucks, and have heart attacks shoveling, and see their gazebos collapse. 

Did the snowflake get to earth? Yes, but it got stuck on a roof, where it could not be made part of anything cool. It just had to hang around on the shingles until it melted. 

"Aw, this blows," the snowflake said bitterly. "Any chance of leaking into the house?"

"Bob said they're doing it on the north side, but not over here," said another flake. 

"Crap. Well, here comes the sun. I'm gonna skedaddle."

"What will you do?"

"I'm going to melt off that gutter and become an icicle. Maybe I can fall off and hit something."

So the flake did that, and froze into a mean, hard icicle. But the icicle did not fall off all at once. Instead, the sun melted it bit by bit, and the snowflake (now water again) plunged into a drift of snow and froze into ice once more. It got piled on by many of its brethren, and this was the best they could do. It was no fun at all, and the drop of water regretted being such a jackass when it was still up in the cloud. 

Moral: Keep being a selfish jerk and you'll turn into a complete ice hole. 

The BS part is no longer for Boy Scouts.

Well, if you put money on Fred being right, you won!

Unfortunately.

Back on April 21, you may recall, I posted:

I fully expect that the Boy Scouts of America, who have stomped on the key word in that name -- Boy -- by allowing people other than boys to join, will become just "BSA" in the next decade or so.

And yesterday, in the Chicago Tribune:

For 108 years, the Boy Scouts of America's flagship program has been known simply as the Boy Scouts. With girls soon entering the ranks, the group says that iconic name will change. The organization on Wednesday announced a new name for its Boy Scouts program: Scouts BSA. The change will take effect in February.

So it happened a lot faster than I expected. These people cannot wait to ruin everything for boys as fast and as brutally as possible. I wrote to them, I really did, to tell them of my dissatisfaction, and they referred me to their happy rah-rah Web page, which says,

By welcoming both girls and boys into the program, even more youth will have access to the character development and values-based leadership that Scouting promises. 

That's the opposite effect it will have; by catering to a wider audience the focus will be lost, if it isn't already.

Were they having trouble getting boys to join? Is this a Hail Mary (or a "Hey, Mary! Sign up here!")? I guess they never heard Kingsley Amis's dictum that "More will mean worse." Well, guess what, BSA? Boys will stop joining entirely unless they are forced to, and it will become essentially the Cookieless Girl Scouts. Why should boys join a co-ed activities group doing dumb co-ed things? They already belong to one and it's called "school." They've just once again proven to boys that they are second-class citizens, deserving of nothing of their own.

But completely driving boys away will take a little time. Meanwhile, they will keep hold of the initialism BSA, exactly as I predicted. Why? Let's check with our old friend Iowahawk:

What will the "BSA" ruin next? Well, this oath has to go:

On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.

"Honor" is of course an outdated and dangerous male idea. "Honor" brought us World War I, right? So that's out. "Duty" is an entrapping idea, antithetical to freedom, as is "obey," and knowing that, this "Law" thing is out as well. "God" -- the less said the better. "My country" -- please! What is this, the 20th century? "Physically strong" -- more maleness -- strength is just one sign of physical fitness, you know. "Mentally awake" -- who even knows what that means, amiright? "Morally straight" -- you have GOT to be KIDDING me, people.

So, we have:

On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.

Edited down, we get:

I will do my best to help other people at all times.

That's an oath for toddlers, unworthy of an older child. Just ditch the whole thing. 

You know what we need? We need a scouting organization with actual guts. The girls can have their own wing, but the boys need to have a place where they can be boys. (It seems like every other group of people in the world is supposed to be able to hang out with their own kind, but never males, except in stupid Zac Efron-movie yo-brah ways.) I want a return to wildlife-loving, forged in battle scouts, someplace where boys can learn honor and dignity, and actually have to perform difficult tasks to get merit badges, not namby-pamby stuff.

We've said for more than a century that boys need things to make them into men, and what we're seeing around now--shootings, drug overdose, family abandonment--is not the horrific effects of too much manliness, but rather of boys in men's bodies. Taking manly things away from boys isn't turning them into sweet little girls; it's turning them into wild animals. 

Thanks, "BSA." Let me know when you decide to have a cookie drive.

Great things and small.

I was thinking about this whole Hollywood scandal with that Weinstein guy. Not that I know any inside information. There are newborn antelope in Africa who are better connected than I am. But I remembered the first time I'd heard of Harvey Weinstein was in connection to one of his Miramax films that he was defending despite its vile subject matter and the childish means it told its story. He was acting like a poor innocent lover of art who couldn't dream of why people should be offended, all the while doing everything to gin up as much fury as he could.

What a jerk, I thought, and if I could see that from a million miles off, couldn't everybody?

I know that plenty of well-known gropers, creeps, and men who otherwise can't behave themselves get a pass in life because they are rich, because they can buy favors, because they can buy loyalty, because they can buy people's silence. Often they can just terrify people with the slightest hint of what horrible things they and their army of lawyers can do to them, to their reputations and careers. And sometimes they get away with things because they're on the "right side," they think the "right way" and support the "right causes." In other words, they may be well known as disgusting pigs, but they're allowed to get away with little things because they're right on the big things.

Yes, I realize I'm calling the subjugation, humiliation, and even rape of women a "little thing," but I didn't make this situation or define its terms.

And maybe it's exactly backward. Really, where did we get the idea that some schmuck who cheats at penny poker is a good ally when things are really serious?

I don't have to get biblical on you to make the case, but I will, specifically Luke 16:10: "If you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones. But if you are dishonest in little things, you won't be honest with greater responsibilities." Would you trust a guy who cheats at gin rummy even for funsies to do your taxes? to manage your money? Probably not, because in real life we know a cheater is a cheater. It's just a game is a meaningless excuse, because to a lot of big-time cheaters everything is a game. Their funsies is your ruined existence.

We love stories about the petty crook or awful sinner who comes through in the big stuff. Off the top of my head I give you wastrel Sydney Carton from Dickens, thief and murder-solver Bernard Rhodenbarr from Lawrence Block, Dustin Hoffman's petty schnook from 1992's Hero, and every bad-boy antihero scalawag out there. But the reason these characters are interesting is that they're unexpected.

In the last fifty years we've turned it all on its head. In the 1970s you were surprised when a movie cop was not corrupt. Now our pop culture heroes are all antiheroes; there's a strong wellspring of goodness lurking in every low-down punk, while every angel of charity is an evil creep. But that's not how it works in real life.

I know people who have really turned their lives back to front, inside out, to be good and upstanding, and I've also known people who never had to because they've always been kind and brave and decent. I love and respect them both. But I have also known human sphincters who never wanted to become good, never cared; always thought that genuine goodness was stupid at best, weakness at worst. People like them will always prefer the darkness, because the light burns them.

So what does this have to do with Harvey Weinstein? After all, the people who wanted large things from him (campaign support for national and international causes) got what they wanted, didn't they? He didn't stab them in the back, right?

Look at it this way: People who are rotten in small things -- especially when they are not really small -- will be rotten clean through. You know that some of Weinstein's friends are familiar with this principle; they would be among those objecting to the foreign policy position on friendly dictators that says "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." And yet it didn't matter when Harvey was their son of a bitch.

Those who were using Weinstein for his money while he was using all kinds of women for his base desires were offering him cover as sure as if they were giving the police phony alibis on his behalf. The Harvey Weinsteins of the world are contagious, and you're better off staying away from them entirely.

Even if it means you wind up with all the fame, wealth, and prominence of a newborn antelope.

How to be a pitiful jackass.

"Fred," people never say to me, "I would like to be a first-rate douchebag, the kind of person that is open to scorn from just about everybody. What should I do?"

Well, imaginary person, there are many things you can do. You can father children and ignore them. You can steal things from people who have nothing and use it for your own pleasure. You can push over little old ladies and laugh as they sprawl in the street.

And you can do this:

It may not be clear immediately what you are looking at, but I shall explain.

This is a church, and these are pews. And yes, there is a man in jeans, when most every other man is wearing a suit and tie. Does this mean he is the one I am thinking of, like the wedding guest in Matthew 22:

But when the king came in to look at the company, he saw a man there who had no wedding-garment on; "My friend," he said, "how didst thou come to be here without a wedding-garment?" And he made no reply. Whereupon the king said to his servants, "Bind him hand and foot, and cast him out into the darkness, where there shall be weeping, and gnashing of teeth."

Nah, as much as I regret the slovenliness we have descended to in our society, the ignoramus in the bad pants was just abetting the real jackwipe next to him. That guy, in the black, whose collar was up and whose necktie was askew and open halfway down his chest, that guy was responsible for this:

Yes, he was watching a football game on his mobile device during the wedding.

This is the kind of thing that someone does in maybe a Billy Bob Thornton or Seth Rogen movie and everyone finds it funny, because no one could be that crass, that stupid. Well, guess what?

Seeing this guy do this tell you several things immediately:

🙈 He has no respect for the bride or the groom.

🙈 He has no reverence for or even awareness of the solemnity of any religious ceremony or place of worship.

🙈 He has no manners.

🙈 He has no idea how to pay attention to something that doesn't have an obvious interest to him.

🙈 He's someone who can't listen to or sympathize with others, because his self-interest is all he sees.

This was not some big huge full-Mass wedding; it was a short service, a little more than half an hour. When it was over he pushed outside as fast as possible to have a cigarette. Screw the confetti to shower the happy couple; he wasn't going to participate. They were lucky he was there at all.

I missed the reception. I'm sure he was a barrel of fun there.

You may say, "Well, Saint Fred, unless you're perfect yourself you shouldn't be judging anyone."

I reply: We all make judgments. It's a survival skill. It's the basis of law and civil society. Don't twist Matthew 7:1 on me---"Judge not lest ye be judged." The next verse is "For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." And you know something? If I were to fall lower than the assholiest day of my life and watch a football game in a church during the wedding of a loved one, I should and ought to be shamed for it.

Kids, if you want to grow up to be a dickweed like this guy, you'll have to work very hard to prevent yourself from having any respect for anyone but your own precious self. Make sure everyone knows how little you think of them by ignoring them even on the most important day of their lives. You wouldn't want to give others a hint that they matter.

Could be special charges for me!

Saw the news yesterday that 5,300 Wells Fargo employees---or about two percent of the entire company's workforce---were fired for opening millions of phony accounts for their customers. These were used to make the employees look productive. CNN reports that "Employees went so far as to create phony PIN numbers and fake email addresses to enroll customers in online banking services, the CFPB said."

I don't know if it's CNN or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that does not know that the N in PIN stands for Number, but it appears not to have been the CFPB, so it must have been geniuses at CNN. Never mind about that now.

Anyway, just how bad was this scandal?

The way it worked was that employees moved funds from customers' existing accounts into newly-created ones without their knowledge or consent, regulators say. The CFPB described this practice as "widespread." Customers were being charged for insufficient funds or overdraft fees -- because there wasn't enough money in their original accounts.

Additionally, Wells Fargo employees also submitted applications for 565,443 credit card accounts without their customers' knowledge or consent. Roughly 14,000 of those accounts incurred over $400,000 in fees, including annual fees, interest charges and overdraft-protection fees.

That bad.

It's scary enough these days to do anything with money. If you use your credit card in a restaurant, the spiky-hair ink queen who thinks 20 percent isn't enough for her sterling service will steal your number and help herself to an extra tip. You use a card in the gas station and find out later some SOB* stuck a skimmer in there to steal your swipe. You sit down and write checks like me (call me Gramps!) and some schmuck steals them out of the mailbox. Now you can't even trust the bank to not screw you just so some low-level punk can get a bonus without having to work for it.

Wells Fargo has changed a lot since its early days a provider of financial and delivery services to the west. Its position in our Western lore has always made the organization seem brave and good. It has inspired endless novels, a 1937 movie, a 1951 movie, a 1956 TV show, and of course this:

But in the end, it's just another company.

Wells Fargo is not my bank, so at least this is one bullet I've dodged. But I've gotten warnings in the past from plenty of places I do business with, like Home Depot, who find their data compromised. I'm thinking about going back to those old Western days, puttin' mah money in a metal box, buryin' it somewhere in the back forty, and watchin' over it with mah shootin' iron. Try'n hack that, ya goldurn sidewindin' bushwhackers!

----

* Or, as CNN would call him, some SOB bitch.

Jerks.

The third human being with whom I spoke on Thanksgiving morning promised to sic the police on me.

I don't want to dwell on it. It was a lovely morning, and no one else in the house was up, so I took Tralfaz for a walk in a neighborhood with which I wasn't familiar. (We both enjoy trying new paths on our walks sometimes.) Turned out we wandered into a small, crummy, run-down apartment complex with a "no trespassing" rule. Suddenly I heard someone pretending to growl like a dog; then we were getting yelled at by some bald guy with a ponytail---always an appealing look---who threatened to call the cops if he saw us there again.

I wished him a happy Thanksgiving. Although clearly, with his attitude, that was not going to be possible.

Maybe he's the maintenance guy and he is always having to clean up dog poop. Hey, I can relate, mister. No need to be a complete jackass right out of the gate, though.

I know that as you get older you begin to appreciate the pillars of civil society in a way you don't when you're younger, you come to see that civil society is more fragile than you thought, and you tend to see rudeness as a threat. People that care about civil society do, anyway, unlike Ponytail Joe.

Jackassery is all over, and creeps in everywhere. Like the bus I saw a couple of months ago that was in the right lane that pulled out into the center of the street while I was passing him. He'd had the flashers on, showing he was picking up passengers, and it was perfectly legal to pass. But suddenly he wanted to go, and he wanted to get around some construction at the curb. He didn't look to see if someone was going by on the left, or if he did, he didn't care. I had to make an instant choice to slam on the brakes, swing into oncoming traffic, or let the bus he didn't own smash the car I do own. What choice did I have?

When you're not the lead dog, the view never changes,

Jerks are running the media, of course, and we're to blame for letting them do it. When I was a kid, daytime TV was pretty anodyne, even the soaps; now it's a swirling cesspool of broken lives and miserable people who make bad choices. I see that the ABC Family channel is changing its name to Freeform in 2016, the better to reflect the fact that it has not for a long time been a place you could rely on for something that won't shock Grandma or confuse Little Jackie or embarrass Teen Queen (who canNOT believe that she has to WATCH all this SEX STUFF with her PARENTS in the room). The name ABC Family conveyed---falsely, for a long while---that it contained what we used to call family entertainment.

Freeform promises nothing, hints at almost exactly the opposite of that. The executives at the network literally danced with joy when they announced the name change, freed from the shackles of having to pretend they cared about families.

Thanks, Disney!

So the whole world feels like it's going to worse than the dogs---it's going to the jackasses.

Or is it?

As I mentioned at the top, Ponytail Joe was the third person I spoke with on Thanksgiving morning. Persons 1 and 2 were two lovely young ladies out walking their tiny dogs when I came across them with my humongous dog. We chatted happily for a bit while their little dogs sniffed and jumped around my big fellow, and everyone complimented one another's pup, and it was a delightful way to start the day. It's sad that my pessimistic mind is more geared to focus on one asswipe than two polite and cheerful young people, but you always notice the tooth that hurts, not the 31 that don't.

Which is why it's easy to think that everything is going to hell, all the time.

But this weekend I'm going to try to focus on the 31 that don't hurt. On the two that are nice rather than the one that is naughty. I'm going to try to be grateful, and hope for the best.

And drive carefully around buses. Those drivers are nuts.