Introducing...

...another scribbler with too much time on his hands.

However, before beginning this, it seems like a good place to say just why this exists.

A few years back, there was a period where Time and U.S. News & World Report, as well as the NYT, were all publishing articles on the above-captioned subject. I became fascinated and took some notes, just so I wouldn't get lost in the thick of it. This coincided with some philosophical avenues I was exploring as well. Suffice it to say, when one starts feeding into another, there is a tendency to get overwhelmed by information, especially when you have no one to share these really weird thought with. The funny thing was, though, I did have a correspondent, a young lawyer who was on a dull document review case and asked me if I had anything to relieve the boredom when she took a break. That started me off sending the first two e-mails.

That sort of died out when she told me it was a little too... (well, you'll see) It lay dormant until I got a job at another firm and struck up a similar conversations with another lawyer. His interest piqued mine as well and I went back to the material. I will speculate that it was the "fallow field" (in case you are unaware of the term, it comes from some aspect of farming, where the acreage is left unplanted and untilled for a few seasons, just to let the nutrients re-accumulate) which let the next crop germinate unbeknowst to me, until I started harvesting the next couple sections.

I hit something of an impasse then because what I wanted to end it with was not really ending where the research led me. There was something else out there that kept me digging.

I do not actually want to call the end of this a "EUREKA!" moment. It was more like an "oh...yeah...right..." kind of thang. As I write this, it still exists only in notes, but the purpose here is to finally finish it, just for the hell of it.

If you read what follows and like it, great. If you read it and don't, I would be fascinated to have any input on where my logic/proofs/suppositions/premises, whatever, fails. I can't pretend to argue like a master, but, having put this together as rigorously as possible and taken pains to pick at every last nit of error and confusion, I can't see where I've gone wrong.

So I leave it to you.

Now.