/ʁeː/

this is partially why economic fundamentalism gets under my skin

2012-02-03T05:00:00.000-05:00

I think economists are somewhere between biologists and psychologists... ?

"Purity" (before further to the right on this spectrum) seems to imply that the results found by such discipline are less influenced by human bias / error, and are more objective truths. I had an econ professor assert that her discipline should not be in the social sciences field. The vibe I got was that their economic perspectives were objective, rational fact not up for dispute. The problem I found with that is the human element. Economics has taught us a lot. A lot of things can be known. But humans are not rocks falling at 9.8 m / s^2. Sorry.

Let's start with a little humility. Then I think we can make some progress...

P.S. I was just reading the blogs over at Vanguard.com, and came across this:

The second book addresses our tendency to put too much faith in quantitative financial models. Models Behaving Badly is written by Emanuel Derman, the former head of quantitative analysis at Goldman Sachs. Derman’s premise addresses our tendency to put the same amount of faith in financial models as those based on the laws of science. Whereas the latter are good measures of reality, the former are less so. According to Derman, most financial models “fail to reflect the complex reality of the world around them.” It’s intriguing to think about the role financial models have played in the markets over the past five years. They work until they don’t work (remember subprime mortgages?). To be honest, we do employ several models at Vanguard when we think about measuring risk in a portfolio or forecasting future capital market returns. We always do so, however, with a healthy dose of humility about what they can—and cannot do.

thoughts on investing - part 1: basics I've learned

2012-01-30T05:00:00.000-05:00

First, don't construe anything here as actual advice. Ok, let's get started...

I've been on an OCD binge again. Perhaps things are a little out of control for me right now (or when I wrote most of the this during the New Year), so investments are something I can control (or imagine I can). Or at least learn about.

Before we have money to invest, the first step for most of us is to simply get out of debt. Here's a good list of 35 resources for building wealth.

Some Assumptions:

*In a Christian sense, I don't see anything wrong with being productive or generating wealth / prosperity. "Go to the ant, you sluggard." However, once you seek to accumulate wealth with no specific investment purpose, or remove yourself from what you are actually investing in and only see it as a giant gambling game, your soul is in danger. So proceed with caution. When your time frame is short-term and you still demand high-return (read: high-risk), trading seems less like investment and more like greed. Not only bad for your soul... you're likely to end up broke too.

*Understand what exactly you are trading as much as possible.

*You can't predict the future. Do you really think you can predict the market? Don't try it. Remember that paid professionals managing billions are trying to do it to, and in the end they will crush you. Remember that 1) the price of a stock (or the entire stock market) is the collective assessment of the company's future profitability, and 2) when you buy the stock you buy a right to future profits. If it is obvious that the company is already wildly profitable, the price already reflects that. For example, a company might release a very strong quarterly profit, but if it is below the market's expectations, the stock may actual go down. Likewise, prices could rise after a releasing data on an unprofitable quarter if it was not quite as unprofitable as previously supposed. So start with a heavy dose of humility. Learn to accept some form of the efficient market hypothesis (while realizing humans aren't perfectly rational).

*To invest in the stock market, you must believe that stocks and other risky assets will, over the long term, appreciate or provide some sort of income. Broadly, it's a bet that capitalism works. And considering you are reading this with a full belly in a climate-controlled room on a device that probably has more computing power than NASA did in the 1960's, it seems a good bet. If you're not so sure, you might consider buying land, guns, and ammo (and never forget how good of friends we were :) But either way, you should plant a garden.

Basics I've learned:

*Instead of reading this, you should probably go straight to the Oblivious Investor. Simple and smart. Scroll down on right toolbar for the top 4 fundamental posts.

*Then check out the Bogleheads' investment philosophy.

*The Oblivious Investor suggests that the actual doing (buying, selling, rebalancing) of a simple investment strategy is almost no work at all. It's the education that takes work (that, and the patience).

*There are two basic ways to profit from a stock. Appreciation is the increase in value of a particular stock driven by assumptions about continued profitability into the future. Dividends are a form of income regularly paid out to shareholders. However, the share price is diluted as the dividends are paid out, so there is really no fundamental difference between the two (other than tax implications - you don't technically profit from appreciated stock until it's sold... just as you don't "make money" when your house is appraised generously. As we've learned, prices can tumble).

*Save yourself the trouble (and the fees) and use indexed mutual funds, instead of actively managed ones. The Oblivious Investor can explain to you in about 3 minutes why indexing makes sense.

*"Constant ownership change doesn’t alter the productive capacity of the asset." The majority of stocks are traded by huge institutions, banks, and pension funds. And much of their trading uses computer algorithms that rely on executing trades in the milliseconds to exploit tiny movements in the stock's value. Watch this TED talk if you want to be unnerved. Obviously, trading is necessary in order for people to express value and information about the stock, or for them to buy (when they have money) or sell (when they need it). It's far from obvious whether this shift to algorithm-dominated trading is good for society as a whole, or for individual traders. In the short-term, trading is actually a zero-sum game. If one person is truly getting a "steal of a deal", then the other is losing out. Actually, the intermediary (broker) is the only one who will consistently profit in these situations. Warren Buffet frequently says that he wouldn't mind if the stock market closed down for 10 years after a purchase, since it's only the purchase and sales prices that really matter. Ignore all the noise in betwen.

*Commodities (oil, wheat, gold) aren't income-producing, productive assets, and so are largely speculative. You have to outsmart someone else. Even in the long-term, it's zero-sum. One of you wins, the other loses. I don't see much difference between this and gambling - stay away.

*Psychology generally works against you. In theory, investing should be mostly just a combination of mathematics and risk-benefit analysis. It's much more. I've heard that the moderately-educated investors often do worse than the completely ignorant ones, who are more likely to admit they know nothing and don't try to outsmart someone or come up with a way to make quick money. Hubris bites.

*Diversify. You don't know which areas of the economy will do good or bad in a particular year. A good starting point is Vanguard's collection of 4 core funds. Pick through the details and figure out what exactly they are. It's a simple way to be exposed to the full diversity of the investable world. And closely related...

*Assets are correlated if they generally change value in the same direction to the same degree. If you can find two asset classes that could potentially return the same amount (say, 8% a year over time) but do so in different cycles, you've effectively reduced your risk while keeping the same return. It's as close to a free lunch as exists. Negative correlation means it will move in the opposite direction. (This is why the most common diversifier for a stock is a bond). If something is uncorrelated, it will occasionally moves in the same direction, for good or worse. The flip of two different pennies will be uncorrelated, but from time to time their sequences of heads and tails will line up "magically". But it's just math functioning over time. If you want to get technical, you can try comparing the last 10-15 years of returns of two assets (or stocks, or bonds) using the CORREL function on an Excel sheet.

Many people overweight Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in their portfolios because their correlation with stocks has historically been somewhat low, while providing similar returns. In a broad index fund, REITs will already make up some 2-3% of the portfolio, so you are not deciding whether or not to include them, just whether or not to overweight them. Many investors with this train of thought (like the Bogleheads - click for the forum and investing wiki) add a REIT index fund to bring that total up to around 10%. Reading about it was enough to convince me, but I don't think it's critical.

*Rebalance your portfolio once a year. If stocks have done well in recent history, and bonds poorly, you may now have a riskier portfolio than you can accept. Sell off the winners and buy more of the losers to get things back in line.

*Risk = reward, generally. Do what you can to reduce risk (like diversifying), but you can't eliminate it without eliminating the potential for return. Don't contruct a more risky portfolio than you can truly accept. Expect stocks to lose half their value every once in a great while (like happened in 2007-2009). If you have 80% stocks and 20% bonds, you must be comfortable with seeing a 40% dip in value. Realize that the stock market has recovered from these crashes in the past (although in spurts, and not always quickly).
*It's not just about utilitarian money-making. People want different things out of the process of investing. Do it for the reason you want, not someone else's reason.

And for some depressing news...
*If you have a typical investment portfolio and over decades receive a "typical" return, you are only actually making 2% a year. Seriously. That's the cost of taxes, inflation, and expenses ("net-net-net"):

Since 1926, according to Ibbotson Associates, U.S. stocks have earned an annual average of 9.8%. Their long-term, net-net-net return is under 4%.

All other major assets earned even less. If, like most people, you mix in some bonds and cash, your net-net-net is likely to be more like 2%. (source)

Of course, if you don't invest in something, your cash deteriorates by around 3% a year. Basic law of the universe - things decay. So... if you are only growing your money 2% a year, it's still 5 points ahead of -3%.

*And lastly, never forget why you invest. This is my reason...

trial trail hike on the North Country Trail

2012-01-26T05:00:00.000-05:00

The 4,600-mile North Country Trail runs from New York to North Dakota, passing just about 20 miles from where I'm now based in Michigan. It is one of eleven National Scenic Trails administered by the National Parks Service.

It's a long way from finished. Many of the miles are simply country road walks connecting the patchwork of local, state, and national public lands.

But once I heard about it, I found an excuse to buy some nice gear and get outside. Of course I joined the local chapter of the corresponding non-profit association and bought some maps for weekend adventuring. It's always easy to dream about doing this stuff... but it's harder to actually do it. I figure sinking some money into it and talking about it helps me get outside.

Here are some pictures from my first hike, just 5 hours of quick walking on about 12 miles split between road and wood. Cutting through the Middleville State Game area. It sure helps (in terms of speed, and soreness, and generally enjoy-ability) not to be carrying a sleeping bag, tent, food, and such!

Oh - I did see a pheasant. And a piliated woodpecker (the really big kind).

someone afoot

keep to the blue blazes

deer bedding sites (?)

I was not the first on the trail that day.

making peace with the anthropocene (part II: Millenium Park)

2012-01-22T16:40:00.000-05:00

Ok, I suggested earlier that in order to make peace with the anthropocene education and politics, we need to embrace "creative ecological multi-use restoration." (If you are skeptical about using the term anthropocene, check the latest research on humankind possibly delaying an ice age. You don't need TNT to stop the glaciers... just chemistry.)

off-trail exploration yields interesting finds

So how can we maximize, build, and sustain local ecological resource? Well, I don't know. I'm just a 27 year-old know it all. But I came across one potential solution just a short pedal from downtown Grand Rapids: Millennium Park.

Millennium Park is a unique, ambitious project to reclaim 1,500 acres of heavily-used land for public recreation. The park encompasses rolling terrain and extensive wetlands and lakes southwest of Grand Rapids, between Johnson Park and John Ball Park. Its land is rich in natural resources, featuring woods, wildlife, fish and waterfowl. Facilities within the park now include a six-acre beach and splashpad, nearly 20 miles of trails, and other diverse opportunities for recreation. Touching Grand Rapids, Walker, Grandville and Wyoming, Millennium Park is one of our nation’s largest urban parks.

look for the skyscraper (dead center). a river, an interstate highway, and industrial areas border the park.

640 acres is 1 square mile. So if this park were a square it'd be over 1.5 miles on each side. It's sizable!

You can click-through the home website link for more info. The master plan includes ensuring it is all of the following: environmentally sustainable, safe and convenient, integrated into regional trail networks, multi-use. Grand plans, and I hope it succeeds.

90% of the urban folks probably don't even go camping. We don't often need wilderness... just a little wildness. Something other than (or integrated into) the urban jungle. Making peace with the anthropocene means embracing these mixed-use environs.

As I explored the park on bike and on foot (in November), I noticed dozens of oil derricks chugging along. Why not? If they had previous land leases, let them keep drilling (provided they meet certain minimal environmental regulations). After all, without a human economy we don't have human culture. Nor do we have a tax base to provide for public spaces For example, read the sign below:

She ain't dry yet!:

From a bike's point of view:

See you on the trail (although this one is unofficial)...

Another example of ecological restoration - from landfill to wetland - will be playing out in New York City.

And for desert, feast on this beautiful image, taken by my friend Blake. He lives in Chicago. He blogs here. This is looking out across Lake Michigan. He has a similar image without the people, but I like this one better (part of living in the antropocene?).

the (future) state of science in America

2012-01-19T05:00:00.000-05:00

From my mom's middle school science class...

Student answer:

The role humans in the atmospheric CO2.

We have all played a big part. You know how when you have a big part in a play or on a team and you are happy about it. This is not one of thowes times the CO2 levels rising that’s not good it is making blankit over the earth. It is I think about 8 days before Christmas. We need to do something for ourselfes and the earth.

my seminal study on understanding religion

2012-01-16T05:00:00.000-05:00

This is all I got...

³⁶ “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

³⁷ Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’^[a] ³⁸ This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’^[b] ⁴⁰ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matt. 22:36-40)

Well, this too...

Three things will last forever--faith, hope, and love--and the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor. 13:13)

Miss these and, well... we've missed everything.

who said it? #144 a war correspondant on war as myth

2012-01-13T05:00:00.000-05:00

Chris Hedges, in War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

National myths as racist [p. 25]

Most national myths, at their core, are racist. They are fed by ignorance. Those individuals who understand other cultures, speak other languages, and find richness in diversity are shunted aside. Science, history, and psychology are often twisted to serve myth. And many intellectuals are willing to champion and defend absurd theories for nationalist ends.

the State as supreme institution [p. 146-7]

...During the Gulf War, as in the weeks after the September [11] attacks, communities gathered for vigils and worship services. The enterprise of the state became imbued with a religious aura. We, even those in the press, spoke in the collective. And because we in modern society have walked away from institutions that stand outside the state to find moral guidance and spiritual direction, we turn to the state in times of war. The state and the institutions of state become, for many, the center of worship in wartime. To expose the holes in the myth is to court excommunication.

war filling a spiritual void [p. 158]

We believe in the nobility and self-sacrifice demanded by war, especially when we are blinded by the narcotic of war. We discover in the communal struggle, the shared sense of meaning and purpose, a cause. War fills our spiritual void. I do not miss war, but I miss what it brought. I can never say I was happy in the midst of the fighting in El Salvador, or Bosnia, or Kosova, but I had a sense of purpose, of calling. And this is a quality war shares with love, for we are, in love, also able to choose fealty and self-sacrifice over security.

opportunity costs - the $1 trillion wars last decade

2012-01-10T05:00:00.000-05:00

Depending on how you add it all up, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan by the U.S. cost us about $1 million million dollars (one trillion) last decade. Obama quotes this figure in the transcript of After U.S. Troops Leave, What Happens to Iraq? on NPR. Several headlines you'll find by Googling "cost of Iraq war" put the Iraq war as more expensive than WWII or Vietnam.

Try to imagine one million dollar bills. Then multiply that by itself.

When we talk about love, devotion, freedom... we speak of priceless words. And yet, the crude reality of war means body counts, and defense budgets set by elected leaders.

Economists often try to measure something they call opportunity cost, or "the cost of any activity measured in terms of the value of the best alternative that is not chosen (that is foregone)". Your first choice was to go the movies, which you did. As a consequence, you didn't have money for your 2nd hankering, a hamburger. The hamburger was your opportunity cost. I think economists overdo it and generally make themselves miserable and miserly by constantly obsessing over maximizing every dollar and minute of their lives, but the concept is powerful nonetheless.

We got rid of Saddam. Was that worth one million million dollars?

It's not always helpful to imagine an alternative history (it is what it is), but perhaps such an exercise could help us in the future to assess the costs and benefits of war (not that rational minds prevail in such times).

What would you have done with one million million dollars?

I think professional estimates of the cost of solving the great social challenges of our time are generally too conservative (in the non-profit world we underestimate the challenges, overestimate our power), but here they are anyway:

*"The cost to provide clean drinking water to half the 1.1 billion who need it is between $10 and $30 billion a year." (source).... "The World Bank offers a range of cost estimates to reach MDG goals. They estimate the cost of reaching 'basic levels of coverage…in water and sanitation' to be $9 billion at the low end, and $30 billion a year for 'achieving universal coverage' for water and sanitation." (source)

Ok, nevermind. I'm too depressed to keep scouring the internet for numbers. Basic sanitation, universal primary education, providing carbon-free electricity, eliminating malaria, AIDS, polio, tuberculosis... they remain dreams, "too expense" to solve.

who said it? #143 economic theory meets humanity

2012-01-07T05:00:00.000-05:00

The irony was that the reason he'd survived was that he'd tried to lie. The two lies--his and hers--had canceled each other out, and Gabriel had inadvertently told the truth. If he had told Lenka's "truth," as she had doubtlessly expected, he'd have committed securities fraud and wrecked his personal portfolio. He'd have lost his job at Calloway. Lenka had lunged and she'd missed, because he was lunging in another direction. The lesson was fantastically cruel to everyone involved. He'd arrogated to himself a victory, but that victory had (fatally) been built on the assumption of her fidelity.

He'd always known that this was why game theory didn't survive studies of real people. Real people's motivations were too complex and flawed to be fathomed by any mathematics.

p. 252 of A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism: A Novel, by Peter Mountford (a novel set in La Paz, Bolivia)

a (very) generous orthodoxy

2012-01-04T05:00:00.000-05:00

In 2007, I got an e-mail announcing presenters at the IWU celebration of scholarship. I doctored the e-mail a bit (keeping formatting consistent), and forwarded it on to a few friends. I poked fun at a popular book at the time, A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren.

At 8:40 am, wedged in between "The State of Twenty to Thirty Year Olds in the Church and the Church's Response" and "The Doctrine and Grace in the Church Father Origen" was my friend Heath:

"A (Very) Generous Orthodoxy: Making Room for Homosexual Wesleyan Suicide Bombers."

For context, A Generous Orthodoxy (Brian McLaren) was a popular book at the time. The Wesleyan Church is a conservative Evangelical denomination.

A few people actually believed it for awhile. I still laugh when I think about this.

who said it? #142 support the arts

2012-01-01T05:00:00.000-05:00

If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.

Yann Martel, end of Author's Note in Life of Pi, one of the best novels I've ever read

making peace with the anthropocene (part I)

2011-12-28T05:00:00.000-05:00

(Inspired by a November bike ride through Kent County's Millennium Park. Pictures and video coming in Part II.)

The anthropocene could be the next geologic age of the earth, brought on by Homo sapiens. Writing about "The End of Nature" was perhaps a little premature in 1989, but it seems increasingly clear that humans have left a long-lasting mark on the planet in terms of geology, ocean chemistry, forest systems, even the composition of the atmosphere. One could imagine another way... but I'm somewhat fatalistic about it. Perhaps human civilization, like evolution, was in some sense inevitable. Or maybe it was only obvious in hindsight.

The popular caricature of environmentalists are that they are being a little too dramatic. "Seriously - there are still plenty of whales, and global warming is not the end of the world. Just enjoy your hamburger." Warnings of falling skies often fade into history with humanity plodding on its happy course. The cornucopians have a point. Never before have so many humans have it so well, and there still remain (some) vast wildernesses across the world.

And yet, there are obvious problems, ecologically speaking. Animals large and small have been exterminated, often by hunting and habitat loss. We've drained perhaps 1/3 of the world's wetlands (half in the U.S. wetlands are gone). We've burned and cut 1/3 of the world's forests. There is no decently-sized prairie left in the U.S. grain belt. We've trawled and impoverished large portions of the oceans. Yes, there have been human benefits from all these as well, but also human costs as the more savvy (and/or selfish) producers externalize costs to others (something Gernot Wagner calls "planetary socialism"), or as we chase diminishing ecological returns (inasmuch as ecological ruin = human ruin).


Home, home on the range. Bison skulls ~1870.

And so what is left for those of us who cannot accept a human future where we have blinking screens permanently in front of our eyes, where our only air is filtered and recirculated and climate-controlled, and our cultural environment is endless reiterations of sex and violence? We are, for the first time ever, an urban species. What now of our role in nature?

The U.S. has been more urban than rural since the time of my great-grandfather. We've had a long time to think about this. Suburbia was the great promise of having the best of both worlds. And as many good things as there are about suburbia (more easily seen after living in a majority world slum), it remains to me sterile and lifeless, a place where dreams usually go to die. Not all suburbs, of course, but many. The ecological environment is a sadly pathetic imitation of nature. It was noted in The End of Suburbia that the developments are named after the things they destroyed. That is, if it's Beaver Pond Estates that means there are no beavers left after the bulldozers showed up. The economic life seems cut-and-pasted from Wall Street. The religion, consumer-driven.

But it's where most Americans live, and given the massive investment in its infrastructure, it's where we'll continue to live for some time. Outside of urban and suburban areas, relatively few live in the agricultural countryside. Fewer still live on independent tracts or in quaint towns near true wilderness. The earth and our species both need wilderness, but for most of us it will remain a distant vacation spot for those thrice-in-a-lifetime family trips.

Buffalo, passenger pigeons, an undisturbed backyard stream for every kid to wander in... they're all gone.

Let's cut our losses and imagine Earth 2.0. Let's make peace with the anthropocene.

I can think of three actions points:

1 - education
2 - politics
3 - creative ecological multi-use restoration (for lack of a better term).

The first step will be education. Getting every man, woman and child to spend 1% of their time "thinking ecologically" as they go about their work, mow their yard, or pick out their food. Just 1%. Start with the margins. Stop mowing super-steep drainage ditches (I saw this all over west Michigan this fall). It's pointless! Letting natural vegetation grow up invites cattails, birds, and butterflies (weeds are a matter of perspective - you can eliminate all your weeds in an instant by changing your mind). It slows water down, improving ground water recharge and reducing river flooding. It breaks up the ecological monotony of grass.

A local suburban development in Grand Rapids has two football field-sized common areas for kids to play in, surrounded by the homeowners' backyards. Smart idea. My friends and I played baseball in the empty lots until homes came in. But these two fields are predictably underutilized. A flurry of activity some days and weekends on about half the field. 99% of the time it's another ecologically homogenized Kentucky bluegrass mowing liability (cost). Why not seed half of both fields in wildflowers or prairie grasses? My father-in-law told me about all the many birds species that nested and fed in the field before they turned it over to grass. The only birds left on the lawn now are Robins. This could have been solved by a few committed homeowners who put on their ecological thinking caps. Instead, cultural inertia won and both human culture and the local ecosystem are impoverished. Let's do better.

Often there are simple, fairly uncomplicated solutions that sometimes even save money.

Second, we'll have to vote people into office that can design smart, market-friendly nickel-and-dime moves that nudge our collective activity in the right direction. People who get us to make plain the true cost of what we do. Individual action will never be enough. We need a new Business as Usual. This will involve smart compromises by environmentalists. Capitalists need to reject planetary socialism and let markets do their magic.

I'm somewhat conflicted about the recent Keystone XL hub-ub. Big pipeline to bring the dirtiest of tar sands petrol from Alberta down to the Gulf refineries. Ecologically detrimental for sure, though not nearly as much as it would be in a West African nation with no environmental regulations. With or without a spill, the carbon would still get into the air. Andy Revkin reports on Dot Earth about the recent decision by Obama to delay (but not cancel) the pipeline decision. Given the demand for oil, it will probably get to market, if not in the Gulf than in China. One energy analyst thinks it's not a fight worth fighting anyway; it's just one of many pipelines.

There are times when you cannot compromise without selling your soul. Sometimes, a line in the (tar) sand must be drawn. Ok. But given the inevitability of this oil getting to market, why not push to make approval contingent on also passing a new national $0.01/gallon gasoline tax to fund renewable energy research, build bike lanes, or pay down the national debt. You'd increase North American production while decreasing overall demand by increasing oil's price nationwide. After all, the climate doesn't care where the oil came from - just that it got burned. Doesn't sound like much, but that would amount to $3.8 million a day, about $1.4 billion a year. And now Obama is thinking of drilling in the arctic.

You shouldn't drive to a protest, make signs out of plastic, and expect people to give up all their oil. But neither should you give up something for nothing. Make smart compromises. If you're savvy, you can come across some really good deals that exploit people's ignorance about oil markets (see "The Energy Independence Myth" and "Drill, Baby, Drill... Really!").

In part II, I'll describe one "creative ecological multi-use restoration" project I ran into in November...

Further reading:
*Bush Meat: When Conservation and Child Nutrition Collide (NPR food blog)
*Leveling the Playing Field (Gernot Wagner on why we should listen to the economists and pay the true cost of any good or service)
*The Green Conundrum: Can Small Actions Add Up to Collective Change? (Nature.org, haven't read it)

who said it? #141 the essence of all work

2011-12-25T05:00:00.000-05:00

Bertrand Russell - the famously agnostic philosopher - said there are two kinds of work in this world: altering the position of matter on earth, and telling other people to alter the position of matter on earth.

From The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A. J. Jacobs (p. 80)

my effective tax rates

2011-12-21T05:00:00.000-05:00

The federal income tax is often debated. You seem to be able to twist the data to make whatever point you want. Yes, in gross dollars and as a percentage of their incomes the rich pay most of the federal income tax, but they also make a disproportionate share of all income. But really, who of us are willing to change our deeply held beliefs when presented with opposing data?

It should also be noted that the poor and middle class still pay federal taxes, just not the federal income taxes. I'm began writing this post specifically to demonstrate that point, but I'll let the data speak and let you decide if my family is a leech or not (turns out I pay some, but still not a lot). These federal taxes all earners pay are Medicare, taking 1.45% of all paychecks, and Social Security, normally taking 6.2% (4.2% in 2011) of paychecks up to $106,800. So it's actually regressive, since income about $106,800 is not taxed. Go figure.

I recently put all my tax returns from 2005-2010 into an Excel sheet. Please don't ask me why (it's 1:28AM as I write this on Dec. 3). This is what I get for being sent to Math Camp in 5th grade. And it would be cool if I actually did advanced math, but my obsession doesn't even extend beyond algebra. Anyway, I generally consider myself savvy and OCD with the tax code, exploiting the things I (legally) can. Then again, I had to file an amended return the other year after I forgot to report some interest, so I'm probably fooling myself.

The tax breaks I've used include educator expenses deduction (IN), health savings account, tuition deduction, foreign tax credit, retirement savings credit (which is a really great deal when you are low-moderate income, if you can force yourself to save), earned income credit, federal phone excise credit, Making Word Pay credit, the recovery credit (stimulus check), and renter's deduction (IN).

Anyway, I thought I'd post here my three effective tax rates (%). The first is my effective federal tax rate (tax owed divided by total income). The second we might call "total income tax" where I add in state and county income taxes (which have far fewer goodies for me). The third number is "all taxes" which adds in the payroll taxes previously mentioned. I suppose I could figure in sales tax as well, but... it's late. [A negative number means I actually got a net gov't payment. This was the gov't stimulus at work.]

For reference, in 2005, 2006, and 2010 I would have be considered low-income. In 2007-2009, I made about a middle-class wage (for Indiana). For 2011, I'll add a $1,000 refundable child credit to my low income (it's semi-luxurious in Bolivia, but less than minimum wage in the U.S).

And if the IRS is watching... well, you already knew all this :)

Fun tax fact of the day for MI and IN residents (among others) is the Use Tax. Yes, you are legally required to pay sales tax on items you order through the internet tax-free. Not joking. Seems fair enough though.

And for fun, more math (I totally understand his frustration):

who said it? #140 fundamental paradoxes of the American democratic experiment

2011-12-17T05:00:00.000-05:00

The fundamental paradox of American democracy in particular is that it gallantly emerged as a fragile democratic experiment over and against an oppressive British empire - and aided by the French and Dutch empires - even while harboring its own imperial visions of westward expansion, with more than 20 percent of its population consisting of enslaved Africans. In short, we are a democracy of rebels who nonetheless re-created in our own new nation many of the oppressions we had rebelled against. The Declaration of Independence, principally written by the thirty-three-year-old revolutionary Thomas Jefferson - who himself embodied this paradox, being both a courageous freedom fighter against British imperialism and a cowardly aristocratic slaveholder of hundreds of Africans in his beloved Virginia - offers telling testament to this complex and contradictory character of the American democratic experiment.

-Cornel West, Democracy Matters, p. 42

does it matter who I vote for in the Presidential election?

2011-12-13T05:00:00.000-05:00

The odds that your vote will actually affect the outcome of a given election are very, very, very slim. This was documented by the economists Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter, who analyzed more than 56,000 Congressional and state-legislative elections since 1898. For all the attention paid in the media to close elections, it turns out that they are exceedingly rare. The median margin of victory in the Congressional elections was 22 percent; in the state-legislature elections, it was 25 percent. Even in the closet elections, it is almost never the case that a single vote is pivotal. Of the more than 40,000 elections for the state legislator the Mulligan and Hunter analyzed, comprising nearly one billion votes, only seven elections were decided by a single vote, with two others tied. Of the more than 16,000 Congressional elections, in which many more people vote, only one election in the past one hundred years - a 1910 race in Buffalo - was decided by a single vote.

But there is a more important point: the closer an election is, the more likely that its outcome will be taken out of the voters' hands - most vividly exemplified, of course, by the 2000 presidential race. It is true that the outcome of that election came down to a handful of voters; their their names were Kennedy, O'Conner, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas...

from Freakonomics, p. 222-3

So out of more than 40,000 state elections, a single (marginal) vote mattered for:
*3.5 state races won by a single vote (let's throw out half of these because one less vote for a losing candidate didn't matter; it was only the marginal vote for the winner, statistically speaking).
*2 state races tied (failure to vote by anyone changes the outcome)

Each state race you have a 0.014% chance of affecting the outcome

Of the 16,000 Congressional elections...
*0.5 Congressional race (ditto note above on a marginal vote for the losing candidate)

Each Congressional race you have a 0.006% chance of affecting the outcome

Let's say you vote for two candidates annually for either state or federal House or Senate, from the age of 18 to 100. That's 163 elections in your life. Odds are about 1.6% that you will have any discernible outcome on any one of these elections in your lifetime.

Of course, the larger the pool of voters, the less likely your vote will have any affect. If your odds of changing a Congressional race are 0.006%, think of a state-wide race for the Governor. Then divide that by 50 (because of the electoral college) and you get (roughly) your affect on what we consider the most important race - for the White House.

So maybe you shouldn't lose any sleep over voting for the President. Most likely the most important ramifications for you will be what your family, friends, and co-workers think of you when you tell them who you voted for.

Maybe this means that political parties matter (a bit). Spend the most time (over time) trying to determine which party consistently represents your interests, then vote for that party in the elections.

And if you spend any time voting at all, it should probably be for local elections with the smallest pool of voters. The upside is that you are most likely to see (and be impacted by) local decisions anyway.

Think locally, vote locally. :)

dec. article wrap-up

2011-12-09T05:00:00.000-05:00

Here comes the sun - by Paul Krugman of the NYT, on the plummeting price of solar energy.

Alabama Immigration Law Back in Spotlight After Mercedes-Benz Exec is Arrested. Apparently even without racial profiling, this is a stupid idea.

The Mystery I'm Thankful For. A Thanksgiving prayer from a mysteriously hopeful atheist.

Insects Find Crack in Biotech Corn's Armor (NPR).

who said it? #139 Job, on what animals teach us

2011-12-06T05:00:00.000-05:00

But ask the animals, and they will teach you,
       or the birds of the air, and they will tell you;

or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,
       or let the fish of the sea inform you.

Which of all these does not know
       that the hand of the LORD has done this?

In his hand is the life of every creature
       and the breath of all mankind.

(Job 12:7-10, NIV 1984)

who discovered America?

2011-12-02T05:00:00.000-05:00

Answer:

*U.S. school children -
"In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue."

*Indigenous peoples of the Americas -
"If anyone 'discovered' it, we did, 10,000 years before Christ. Seventeen centuries before Columbus was born, Erastosthenes basically proved that it was a fool's errand to sail from Europe straight to India. Idiot."

*Scandinavians -
"Leif Ericson got to North America 500 years before Columbus and founded a colony. Scandinavians lived there for probably hundreds of years. Take that."

*My Irish classmate at Maryknoll Language Institute last year -
"You see, there was this Irish monk who was a very accomplished boat maker, and..."

*Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu, author of An African Centered Response to Ruby Payne's Poverty Theory, on p. xiii -
"You must understand that this world may have been new to Europeans but was fairly well-known to Africans and others. Read the work of Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus, to learn about the Olmec civilization. Africans had traveled to America as early as 800 B.C."

*Chicken bone-studying scientists -
The Polynesians made it to South America in the 14th century.

Anyway, there are a lot of theories...

who said it? #138 Ayn Rand's objectivism as the least Christian philosophy

2011-11-28T05:00:00.000-05:00

I read [Ayn] Rand. I think … objectivism is the leastChristian philosophy of our time, but I’m drawn to it.

-Steve Brown, conservative Christian show host, author, andprofessor, at a Worldview Forum at Malone University with Shane Claiborne, March 22, 2011

At a Sojourners blog, they asked if Christians (Republicans and Democrats) would choose Jesus or Rand. It seems you would need to do a lot of distorting to get their two moral philosophies to have any common ground.

all your good ideas are already taken

2011-11-24T05:00:00.001-05:00

As a rule, your "original" idea is already being put into place by someone, somewhere. Let's use business as an example, then see how my e-reader proofreading idea was already being put to work.

This is why great businesses are, by definition, rare. Competitive advantages and scarcity get you profit, but they are hard to get. The obvious ways to make money are already being done. Prime real estate is expensive because it already reflects expectations about its profitability. Stocks that have done well have, by definition, already risen in proportion to expectations. They will only continue to go up if more information reveals that they are even more profitable than previously thought. This is the Efficient Market Hypothesis, that all available information about a company is already incorporated by the price. Stock prices are supposed to reflect the potential for future earnings of a company. The 2008 crisis may shed a little doubt on this hypothesis, but I agree with Tim Harford that it is pretty much true. That's why you're probably better off investing in a low-cost index fund (I like Vanguard) than humans who are more likely to under-perform the market after they take their 1.5% annual fee.

So even though the average person in the U.S. is fabulously wealthy by global standards (something we should remember every day as we pray the Lord's Prayer), you aren't likely to find a way to make obscene amounts of money. But relax - it won't make you happy anyway. We've known that for thousands of years and now we have research to prove it.

So, back to my idea.

I downloaded a bunch of free, out-of-copyright publications from Barnes and Noble to read on my Nook. The annoying part is that many of these books are digitally scanned and the computer jarbles way too much of the words. It's LIEKRedding a sentence like this, with every OT*# word mis-spealledDJ. Why couldn't Barnes and Noble upgrade the software to include some sort of Wikipedia-style proofreading, to constantly improve these scans? I figured I was stuck with frustrating reading or shelling out money for actual books.

Then I read Michael Hart's obit in The Economist. He founded Project Gutenberg, which has made tens of thousands of e-books available for free. And of course, they already have a thriving community of volunteer nerds who proofread thousands of old documents (Distributed Proofreading), making high-quality digital copies free to the world.

So tonight, I signed up as an entry-level proofreader. I've done 10 pages...

"MONEY:

2011-11-21T17:48:00.001-05:00

... a chart of almost all of it, where it is, and what it can do"

I don't even want to think of how long this took...

(non-clickable) Screenshot:

who said it? #137 bird love, general and specific

2011-11-20T05:00:00.000-05:00

When I was in college, and for many years after, I liked the natural world. Didn’t love it, but definitely liked it. It can be very pretty, nature. And since I was looking for things to find wrong with the world, I naturally gravitated to environmentalism, because there were certainly plenty of things wrong with the environment. And the more I looked at what was wrong — an exploding world population, exploding levels of resource consumption, rising global temperatures, the trashing of the oceans, the logging of our last old-growth forests — the angrier I became.

Finally, in the mid-1990s, I made a conscious decision to stop worrying about the environment. There was nothing meaningful that I personally could do to save the planet, and I wanted to get on with devoting myself to the things I loved. I still tried to keep my carbon footprint small, but that was as far as I could go without falling back into rage and despair.

But then a funny thing happened to me. It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool. But little by little, in spite of myself, I developed this passion, and although one-half of a passion is obsession, the other half is love.

And so, yes, I kept a meticulous list of the birds I’d seen, and, yes, I went to inordinate lengths to see new species. But, no less important, whenever I looked at a bird, any bird, even a pigeon or a robin, I could feel my heart overflow with love. And love, as I’ve been trying to say today, is where our troubles begin.

Because now, not merely liking nature but loving a specific and vital part of it, I had no choice but to start worrying about the environment again. The news on that front was no better than when I’d decided to quit worrying about it — was considerably worse, in fact — but now those threatened forests and wetlands and oceans weren’t just pretty scenes for me to enjoy. They were the home of animals I loved.

And here’s where a curious paradox emerged. My anger and pain and despair about the planet were only increased by my concern for wild birds, and yet, as I began to get involved in bird conservation and learned more about the many threats that birds face, it became easier, not harder, to live with my anger and despair and pain.

How does this happen? I think, for one thing, that my love of birds became a portal to an important, less self-centered part of myself that I’d never even known existed. Instead of continuing to drift forward through my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.

Jonathan Franze, Technology provides an alternative to love (NYT op-ed)

I've been keeping track of my birding on my other blog...

pop quiz: gas math (updated w/ answer)

2011-11-16T13:47:00.000-05:00

You have the chance to upgrade one of two family cars. Each upgrade costs the same. A new model for mom's car improves her MPG by three while Dad's new model bumps his MPG up by 9. They each drive the same amount of miles, so who should get the upgrade if they want to save the most on gas?

ANSWER:

You should upgrade mom's car with 3 MPG, not Dad's with 9.

See, mom drives a Toyota Sienna AWD, which gets 16 MPG in the city. Improving 3 MPG (+19%) will cut costs by 16%.

Dad drives a 3rd gen Prius, which gets 51 MPG in the city. Adding 9 MPG (+18%) cuts your bill 15%.

(A 18% gain means you save only 15% just like a 100% gain does not mean you save 100% on fuel costs; you would then have a fuel-less perpetual motion machine, meaning you are then God. When you make 100% gains, you save 50%.)

Numbers can be misleading, you see.

To help clarify problems like these, I often taken them to their numerical extremes and they become clearer. If your lawn mower gets 1 mpg and you bump it +1 to 2 mpg, you just cut your fuel costs in half. If you +1 your 100 mpg scooter, you will barely even notice the difference.

In fact, I just realized another thing (someone please point out more things I'm surely missing): Even if the Prius saved a more %-wise in gas, it still might not be the better choice for the family. That's because Mom spends roughly 3x as much as Dad in the first place (given the same amount of miles driven). That is, lemme see here.... Dad needs a +52 MPG improvement (more than 100%) to surpass the fuel (dollar) savings of Mom's tiny little +3 MPG improvement. I should have written:

A new model for mom's car improves her MPG by three while Dad's new model bumps his MPG up by +50. They each drive the same amount of miles, so who should get the upgrade if they want to save the most on gas?
ANSWER:

You should upgrade mom's car with 3 MPG, not Dad's with +50, which slightly loses in terms of savings.

Wait... can that be true? Someone check my math. I assumed 51 miles driven per week, and calculated MPG changes need to save the same quantity of fuel.

SUV

old MPG: 51 miles / 16 mpg = 3.188 gal

new MPG: 51 miles / 19mpg = 2.684 gal

Savings …(51m/16mpg) - (51m/19mpg) = 0.504 gal (per week)

PRIUS (51m/51mpg) –(51 m / X mpg) = 0.504 gal (per week)

1 – (51/x) =0.504

-51/x = -.496

51 = .496x

X = 51/.496 = 102.8 mpg ~103 new mpg - 51 old mpg = +52 improvement

Ok, I think this makes sense... mom saves 16% but she uses (thus saves) 3.2x as much as dad to start with (51 mpg / 16 mpg). 16% savings x 3.2 multiplier = ~50... So it is equivalent to about a doubling in Dad's MPG, which is a 50% reduction in his costs. This is how 16% = 50%.

Man, I wish I knew math...

I feel this is why my investments are doomed (I know in my head they are not, but these numbers tug at my heart-feeling). Ok, yes there is the power of compound interest over time. But say your stock is worth $40 today. It has a great year and goes up 100%. Woo-hoo! They're now valued at $80. But the following year is a bear market and you lose 50% (the entire S&P 500 dropped about 50% from late 2007 to early 2009 - ouch). After a great year of +100% and a bad year of -50%, you are back to square one. In fact, due to inflation, you are out about 5%. Crap.

Percentages are evil things.

So, policymakers: let's work primarily on forcing manufacturers of trucks and SUVS (which Americans apparently desire to drive) to make them more efficient. Electric car breakthroughs would be a big deal too, but incremental improvements in already efficient little cars are not a big deal.

When you have extravagant wastage/consumption, the first cuts are easiest. That is, getting U.S. per capita carbon emissions down 25% (to 15 tons a year from 20) would be a big step, but do-able if politicians put smart, market-friendly incentives in place (good luck with that). But moving down another 5 tones (which by then is a 33% drop) to 10 tons per capita (where Europe is at) would be nearly impossible. See - if you go from 20 to 10, that's a 50% drop. Unless you go from 20 to 15, and then 15 to 10. Then it's 25% and then 33%. So confusing...

So on the personal side, it doesn't matter much if your car has four cylinders or six. It matters mostly that your family's high-mileage commuter vehicle is a car of some sort. Or that you switch from a low-efficiency truck to a high-efficiency one. Going from a normal old 40-mpg (highway) Civic to a 50-mpg (expensive) Prius doesn't mean much.

Ok, someone hide the coffee from me. Seriously... I'm about to explode...

who said it? #136 Papal greenery

2011-11-07T05:00:00.000-05:00

Respect for creation is of immense consequence, not least because ‘creation is the beginning and the foundation of all God’s works’, and its preservation has now become essential for the pacific coexistence of mankind.

Pope Benedict XVI in his January 1, 2010 message for the World Day of Peace

oct. article wrap-up

2011-10-26T05:00:00.000-04:00

I am the Zero Percent. Refreshing group of single "I believe..." statements by Forbes writer, touching on Occupy Wall Street, the recession, regulation, etc.

When does life begin? 13:7 Blog at NPR.

When does consciousness arise in human babies? Scientific American (linked in the 13:7 blog above)

Why I dumped my iPhone - And I'm Not Going Back

The Land Boom (Why 158 Acres of Corn Costs $1.5 Million) on NPR's Planet Money. This podcast is 20 min, or you can catch the 5 min version.

Fountains of Life Found at the Bottom of the Dead Sea.

where I look for news

2011-10-24T05:00:00.000-04:00

I would like to scale back the flood of information. For one, I need to spend more time with my daughter, for both necessity and pleasure. I dropped off Facebook (so if you can't find my profile, I didn't "unfriend" you. If you were genuinely hurt, please seek help immediately). But I might forever be an information junkie, a learning hog. This is often cast in a positive light, so it might sound like bragging, but I don't think so. My wife, for example, is an amazing person. If I could be as patient, kind-hearted, and others-focused as her, I'd be much better off. Much more like God. But when I told her the other day that Steve Jobs died. "Wait, who's Steve Jobs again?" Even pre-baby, she let Facebook messages piled up unanswered. She would rather be spending time with a dear friend, playing piano, making coffee.

I'm not convinced we need to stay glued to the TV or to smart phones to create a better world. 99% of us know 99% of what we need. Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God. We just don't do it.

Anyway, I do still follow news. After a lot of searching and my own opinion-development, this is what I generally follow.

Religion
*I've been listening fairly regularly for years to Mars Hill sermons. Previously dominated by Rob Bell, and now more directed by Shane Hipps. Good, thought-provoking work that guided some of my spiritual development in college.

*Other than that, I think one should be plugged into local church community, working out one's salvation on the ground. Endless theological bickering over the internet is fruitless, and often dangerous. Shane Claiborne and N. T. Wright caution us on this.

Ecology/Environmental Issues
*Andy Revkin's Dot Earth blog (HT to Blake Chastain years ago), hosted at the New York Times. An experienced and truth-digging journalist that seems to understand the science of environmental degredation, but throws in a strong pragmatic element that doesn't engage in wishful thinking or alarmism that non-profits generally circulate. The NYT Green blog will bring the general stories to your attention without quite as much analysis.

*Gernot Wagner with the Environmental Defense Fund has a new blog with an intriguing premise, though it seems mostly to be book-promotion so I'm not sure if it will stick around. Brevity is one of his best allies.

*Fading in my thinking are the popular (and often inciting) ClimateProgress blog, the 350.org movement (as much as I've appreciated Bill McKibben's writings, I'm with Revkin in believing it's useless to pick a [CO2] target that we've already greatly surpassed), and Grist.org. I also try not to let any articles go unread on the NPR Environment page, or the Science page.

Politics / Culture / Other
*Hard to go wrong with NPR. I usually download podcasts to listen while I'm doing something else. Their Planet Money production is a blast.

*The Economist. This gets probably as close as any to what I generally think. It's heady at times, but it too seems to be "pragmatic with a heart." It's right-leaning for a European magazine. / To round out my top fav magazines, throw in National Geographic and Harpers, and I'm all set. Harpers has a quirky weekly summary of the news (subscribe here).

*Ted talks. Great talks about a variety of issues, often sprinkled with some contrarians to spice it all up.

*After reading The Undercover Economist, I found Tim Harford's blog.

*Tweetage Wasteland when I'm feeling pessimistic about technology.

Humor
*XKCD

That's about all. I suppose I should be reading something about parenting.

who said it? #135 religious upbringing in the liberal protestant tradition

2011-10-20T05:00:00.000-04:00

I grew up in a small farming town in upstate New York where my life, and the life of my family, centered on the Presbyterian Church. I prayed and sang hymns every Sunday, went to Bible school, listened to my father preach the weekly sermon and attended seminary at Harvard Divinity School to be a preacher myself. America was a place where things could be better if we worked to make them better, and where our faith saved us from despair, self-righteousness and the dangerous belief that we knew the will of God or could carry it out. We were taught that those who claimed to speak for God, the self-appointed prophets who promised the Kingdom of God on earth, were dangerous. We had no ability to understand God's will. We did the best we could. We trusted and had faith in the mystery, the unknown before us. We made decisions - even decisions that on the outside looked unobjectionably moral - well aware of the numerous motives, some good and some bad, that went into every human act. In the end, we all stood in need of forgiveness. We were all tainted by sin. None were pure. The Bible was not the literal word of God. It was not a self-help manual that could predict the future. It did not tell us how to vote or allow us to divide the world into us and them, the righteous and the damned, the infidels and the blessed. It was a book written by a series of ancient writers, certainly fallible and at times at odds with each others, who asked the right questions and struggled with the mystery and transcendence of human existence. We took the Bible seriously and therefore could not take it literally.

-Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Rise of the Religious Right (2006)

thinking like an economist / scientist

2011-10-16T20:54:00.000-04:00

After finishing up Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist, my brain has been tweaked a little. I wrote recently about the merits of a science-based worldview. Now, I don't mean that you have to throw your artistic side out the window, or be really stingy, or reduce the entirety of your relationships to a cost-benefit analysis. The more ideological scientists and economists do this. The distinction I'm trying to make is that we can use the systematic study of cause-and-effect, relative risks, and opportunity costs to live a better life. We can better live-out our values and priorities when we know more precisely what we're dealing with.

I'm trying to use economics to expand my definition of costs. Economists see an onslaught of never-ending costs and benefits and choices, so perhaps that is why they tend to be stingy. But they do have a very powerful point. This XKCD comic illustrates the point very simply. (With the caution that you can't weigh everything you do against your "going rate" as a worker, for you are not paid 24 hours a day). Writing this blog, for example, costs me nearly nothing in cash, but it does cost time. Time I could have spent holding my two month-old daughter. That's a steep price, based on how much I value time with her. (Whereas it would not be a steep price if the alternative is holding someone else's slobbering, crying child). My wife is literally asking me right now if I'd like to hold her and put her to sleep. Back in a minute...

...as I was saying. I was at Meijer the other day shopping for toilet paper, possibly the most confusing consumer purchase. Is that a single roll with double ply, or double rolls with single ply? Is it the same ply but extra fluffy? Fluffy but not strong? How many sheets on a roll? How many rolls in a package? Years ago at Aldi, I think I stood for 10 minutes straight, paralyzed, trying to choose between only two TP choices (less choice is actually one reason I dig Aldi; I've put The Paradox of Choice on my reading list). My OCD froze me in my steps. Then suddenly, facing a similar fate with a dozen choices before me, I realized that I was paying a mental price. I grabbed the largest package of Meijer-brand butt tissue, threw it in the bottom of the cart, and worked on the rest of my shopping list. Done.

Plenty of other examples. Little things I begin to recognize throughout the day that are time wasters, things I do inefficiently and can change without becoming obsessive about "saving time." Also, seeing how much of my 24 hrs / day time-currency I spend on the internet, ingesting mountains of free information. It's expensive in a way. And seeing how verbose my blog posts are. I need to take a lesson from Gernot Wagner's writing style. Convey the same point, cut out your rambling.

But it's not all abstract or trivial either. I'm currently faced with a very important decision about when to go back to Bolivia. My daughter is awfully tiny. There is a health risk involved in bringing her in to extreme altitudes, but we don't have a lot of information to properly assess the risk. It sounds callous to talk about our loved ones and our God-given calling in terms of risk-benefit, but it is ultimately inescapable. We all have thresholds. If there was a one-in-a-million chance of her having permanent bodily damage of some sort, would we take it? If we wouldn't, then we probably shouldn't even drive to the grocery store with a car seat. But what about 1 in 100,000? 1 in 500? Do we listen to my presumably rational assessment, or my wife's presumably intuitive analysis? If we never returned to Bolivia, would we be paying the cost of disrespecting an invisible deity called Jesus? What if we pray and feel good about it? I tend to lean more heavily toward the "mysterious" end of Christian life and faith. As much as I believe that God is indeed love itself, I'm not very quick to presume that God will protect my family any more often than he would protect a rural Bolivian, or a Sudanese soldier, or a Polish politician. They pray too, and even the Scriptures themselves have unanswered prayers.

Anyway, that's getting into theology. Let me back up.

Let's take one last look at a very common daily decision: the marginal cost of a trip in the car. We usually only think of gas prices when we consider the marginal cost of driving. But depreciation is likely just as expensive. Instead of paying depreciation per trip, you paid when you bought the car with cash, or in your monthly car payments, but it is still highly-related to mileage. It's not hidden, but it's hard to find.

One rough estimate is that mobility costs around $0.23-$0.32 per mile and I came up with $0.23-$0.29 in '09 when I wondered if it was worth taking the train out west (after which a friend commented, "adam, you are cool, but kind of creepy"). The government pegs it at $0.51, but that includes fixed costs that I pay regardless what I do tomorrow. Being that we're probably slightly underestimating the costs, let's call it $1 for every 3 miles. I used this math to figure out if it was worth taking the Greyhound to Marion, IN from Grand Rapids, MI. Price is nearly identical and my daughter would be in grade school by the time I made all the transfers with Greyhound. I'll drive, thank you.

Recently, I was thinking about accepting a half-day substitute teacher job that would pay about $35 after taxes. But it's 15 miles away. I could bike, which cuts my transportation costs to near zero, but the weather isn't always cooperative and that's two hours of biking. Quick mental math: 30 miles = $10. I would only be $25 at the end of the day. Less than minimum wage. Ok, if I was short on rent for the month, I'd take any job I could get to put food on my family. But if it's just for something to do that pays a little bit as well, not worth the hassle. I think I usually overvalue making money by my own labor, any amount at all, as long as I'm doing something. Which is good when it's needed, but it's not always worth it.

It seems the price of car-based transportation is higher than we (or at least I) assess. But then again, it's so vitally important to our participation in work, recreation, and religion in our communities that we are willing to pay a high price to maintain mobility.

So.

One economic theory (popularized in this book ?) is that we make all of these cost-benefit analyses with amazing speed. What seems like a very irrational world is actually pretty tidy. We're smarter than they give us credit for. So Adam, Just. Chill. Out.

And if that were the case, you probably should have spent the last 10 minutes doing something other than reading this post. Sorry.

state of our union 2011

2011-10-14T15:35:00.000-04:00

I am writing in my daughter's baby book. "Current events when I was born..." under National News is depressing.

What I wrote:
*Unemployment at 9.1%
*End of war in Iraq (since 2003) & started intervention in Libya & 100,000+ troops in Afghanistan
*July 8: the last space shuttle mission launched.

What else can I put? Oh, our particle accelerator shut down and now Europe has the best one. And we're 14 trillion dollars in debt. And cable news is filled with shouting people confirming viewers' already-existing biases. China is eating our lunch. We're one of just a couple rich nations that not only lack smart greenhouse gas regulations, but our leaders routinely deny the existence of the underlying science. Of our foreign aid, 29% is weaponry. The rest of the weapons we sell, often billions of dollars of merchandise to oil-rich monarchies with well-documented human rights abuses.

Sigh. At least we eat a lot of ice cream. Where's the vanilla bean?

For World News I put:
*Indigenous Bolivians in the Amazon were protesting a road built through their land
*You were just a couple months before the 7 billionth human born!
*A new country was born ~1 month before you (South Sudan).
*The "Arab Spring" protests caused unrest and democratic reforms in the Middle East and North Africa.

Local News:
*Grand Rapids held 3rd annual ArtPrize, drawing artists and visitors from all over the country.

who said it? #134 being home, and not at home

2011-10-12T05:00:00.000-04:00

We could do worse.

I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. Today I favor the latter view. The word 'sojourner' occurs often in the English Old Testament. It invokes a nomadic people's sense of vagrancy, a praying people's knowledge of estrangement, a thinking people's intuition of sharp loss: 'For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.' [1 Chron. 29:15]

We don't know where we belong, but in times of sorrow it doesn't seem to be here, here with these silly pansies and witless mountains, here with sponges and hard-eyed birds. In times of sorrow the innocence of the other creatures - from whom and with whom we evolved - seems a mockery. Their ways are not our ways. We seem set among them as among lifelike props for a tragedy - or a broad lampoon - on a thrust rock stage.

It doesn't seem to be here that we belong, here where space is curved, the earth is round, we're all going to die, and it seems as wise to stay in bed as budge. It is strange here, not quite warm enough, or too warm, too leafy, or inedible, or windy, or dead. It is not, frankly, the sort of home for people one would have thought of - although I lack the fancy to imagine another.

-Annie Dillard, Sojourner, in her collection Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (1982)

my fellow Hoosier, crane-hunter

2011-10-09T05:00:00.000-04:00

UPDATE 10/15: Apparently this continues to be a problem.

We're gearing up for this weekend's Crane Fest in Calhoun Co., MI. It's a Sandhill Crane and Art Festival hosted by Michigan Audubon.We went in 2009 and were not disappointed. The Cranes are pretty sweet (video and audio here) and can be spotted across a large swath of the midwest, great plains, and the south. They are even hunted in some states, which is fine by me if the hunts are based on sound ecological science.

Sandhills are one of only two crane species in North America, the others being the super-rare Whoopers, which are protected and not hunted. I saw this on the Whooping Crane Wiki page:

Although the individuals responsible for the deaths of four of the cranes have not yet been apprehended, on March 30, 2011, Wade Bennett, 18, of Cayuga, Indiana and an unnamed juvenile pled guilty to killing First Mom [the first captive raised and released whooper to successfully raise, along with her mate, a chick to adulthood in the wild in the East]. After killing the crane, the juvenile had posed holding up its body. Bennett and the juvenile were sentenced to a $1 fine, probation, and court fees of about $500, a penalty which was denounced by various conservation organizations as being too light. The prosecuting attorney has estimated that the cost of raising and introducing to the wild one whooping crane could be as much as $100,000.

Stewart owns H*nnity on democratic protests

2011-10-06T21:53:00.002-04:00

About one minute long, starting at 3:21 in the clip below, in regards to the Occupy Wall Street movement ongoing in NYC and elsewhere.

I will try my best to avoid even mentioning the names of these people (hence "H*nnity"), they that draw so much rage from the Huffington Post, inspiring angry liberals to forward sound bites, making an embarrassment of thinking Republicans. A steady diet of Colbert and Stewart is still enough to drive one mad, even with a heavy glaze of comedy. The fact that a former half-term governor-turned-celebrity takes up such prime real estate in the media is a mockery of our democracy, regardless of the merits of her particular political perspectives. They get paid for exposure, good or bad. It all draws attention to them, and they laugh all the way to the bank. So I'll simply turn the other way and listen to someone who is interested in adult conversation.

Of course, humans with 24 hours of news to fill will make mountains out of molehills. But I would only like to draw attention to the more egregious examples of hypocrisy.

My suspicion is that more people are interested in power than in truth.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Parks and Demonstration

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

are we missing the Civil Rights Movement 2.0?

2011-10-04T05:01:00.000-04:00

UPDATE 10/7: Strange coincidence that Occupy Grand Rapids is coming to town tomorrow. Should I do that or go to CraneFest?

I recently popped in a 25 min video on the Civil Rights Era in a recent sub-teaching position. Interestingly enough, I was trying to read Cornell West's 2004 piece, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, but I couldn't take my eyes off the show. The courage of the marchers, the brutality of the repression, the rage of an oppressed people... it seems like another world. But it was the United States, just 40-50 years ago. Crazy. My parents were just elementary school kids in northern Iowa, helping out with the farm chores. Chicago and L.A. were burning.

I asked the kids what they learned from the video, what questions they had. They were shocked at how much hate and violence was generated over absurd differences like skin color. You see, even in suburbia, racial and cultural diversity is the new normal. Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America - we're all here, we're all American, we all have a chance (at least on the playground). My voice nearly cracked as I admitted that one of the images in the video was identical to the one I knew from my dear Marion, IN (graphic photo), the last confirmed lynching of blacks in the North.

I have often looked at those videos of marches and sit-ins with a naive sort of privileged jealousy. What a clear-cut line of right and wrong! How could any clear-minded and halfway-decent person, to say nothing of any follower of Christ, not be 100% behind that fight for justice? I would have marched, certainly I would have! A comfortable distance from those events, anyone who publicly doubts the legitimacy of the '60's Civil Rights Movement is about as respected as a Holocaust denier.

And yet, millions of "good" and decent people, Christian folk, were apathetic, if not outright hostile, to the movement. I don't think a livened social imagination, or anything like a heart of God, could give them a blanket excuse and pardon, but we often forget how hard it is to get into the mind of another time and culture and person. For example, our modern sensibilities are shocked at the violence and sexism of the Scriptures. But properly understood, I suspect that they were more like a significant leap of progress and grace. They propelled us in the right direction of God's Kingdom, even if we hadn't arrived.

So the obvious question before me, that has haunted me since at least my college years:

What is the Civil Rights Movement of my day?

I'm beginning to come to terms with the Iraq war. It's hard to convey the atmosphere of the country for about two years following September 2001 (Though Ken Schenck does a good job). In March of 2003, I had some mild, juvenile reservations during discussions in my 12th grade history class, but my default was (in language hijacked and distorted by Empire) to "support the troops" and thus accept the inevitability of the invasion. Over time, the sinfulness (there is no better word to describe it) of the entire endeavor was made painfully obvious. The evidence gathered with each new revelation, laid like bricks patiently mortared into a looming, dark structure: Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the absence of weapons of mass destruction, the massive destruction of property, culture, and infrastructure; the opportunity cost of billions of dollars; our legacy of cluster bomb munitions (de-facto landmines) on innocent civilians; hundreds of thousands dead, wounded, and mentally shattered. I don't doubt that history will one day look at the Iraq war with a similar overwhelming consensus as Vietnam, or perhaps (inversely) the Civil Rights Movement.

And yet, I did essentially nothing. I blogged a few privileged words into the great internet void.

The sh*t went down in March 2003, during some of the most exciting times of my life. I was wrapping up a pretty successful time in high school. And like so many of my generation, I was self-absorbed. As the war rolled on and the bodies piled up, I jumped on Facebook. I blogged. I ran around on mission trips doing good deeds. Sure, I eventually took a job working managing a charity, then moved to Bolivia to try to serve among vulnerable people, but I gave my quiet consensus by my lack of resistance, my faithful payment of taxes. I did not resist.

Anyway, that's my own problem.

But I want to hear from you: what are we missing right in front of our faces?

I jotted down a few candidates here, and I'll try to refrain from picking and choosing:

*the fact that an ungodly number of people in the world don't get very basic daily nutrition and calories, clean water, or sanitation

*ecological socialism, that is: privatized benefits and socialized expenditures. We have failed to make some of us to pay (internalize) the full, actual, real, and measurable costs of our activities, whether that is putting carbon in the atmosphere, excess nitrogen in the rivers, increasing cancer and asthma rates for those living around smokestacks. Years from now, will we see how obviously immoral it is to make other people's children sick so that we can maintain our lifestyle?

*the growth of federal government expenditure and increased indebtedness (Speaking of spending here. On the income-side of things, all the data I've seen suggests the actual tax burden is pretty historic/normal, if not flat-lined. For the very richest, it has actually decreased significantly [just Google "effective tax rate wealthiest"], bringing me to...)

*the income and wealth disparity in the United States, which is pretty normal only by the standard of African dictatorships. See this, to start. Some young upstarts have invaded Wall Street as a protest of mostly this, but not altogether exactly this.

*capital punishment, what some call state-sanctioned murder. Jesus was actually asked directly about this issue. "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." (John 8:7)

*the denial of some fairly basic human rights to sexual minorities, although it seems they are winning the war, if not losing battles here and there.

*the continued use of torture, violence, and human rights abuses by the U.S. government in the so-called "war on terror." Many have pointed to Obama's increasing use of drone strikes, for one.

Any more I'm missing?

my seminal study on understanding politics

2011-09-30T05:00:00.001-04:00

These two sentences (source) go a long way to explaining why urban populations vote liberal, and rural folks vote conservative:

Many so-called Everyday Americans who live in the oft-maligned red states essentially are people who live in more open spaces and, therefore, see little need or benefit for government management of their lives. But those who have opted to live in densely populated blue areas need third-party authorities to maintain order and figure they’ll trade a little freedom for the convenience and cultural riches of city life.

So. Give each other a break, okay? You are both rational in your own way.

Additionally, the fact that the United States has a larger government in 2011 is not at all surprising or even probably that alarming (even for conservatives). At the signing of the Declaration of Independence 235 years ago, we had a total population that was less than the current population of Kansas (or urban Chicago). Also, we are much more urban now (82%) than we were then (couldn't find the value, but it was ~40% in 1900, less than halfway back to 1776). The world urbanization rate is just over 50%, so we're likely to have a larger government than the average country, which is more rural. So, I submit that a large portion (the portion of which depends on your political ideology) of this giant government takeover of our lives can simply be attributed to population growth and urbanization.

In practical terms, this means that we don't just have our own farms to take care of. We're integrated into the global economy and culture much more intricately, and our actions have much greater consequences on the lives of others. For example, if you fell off your horse coach on your way into town in 1800, you might break your arm, but there isn't any obvious need for a government to tell you how to ride your horse. Governments have to regulate travel via motor coach today because individual error or free choice have much greater consequences. You could clip the rear end of the van in front of you (which flips and kills all four occupants) then end up veering off the road, severing an electrical line and causing a blackout for millions people. This is not likely, of course, but it does happen; increasingly complexity only increases the severity of the possible chain reaction (think of the Butterfly Effect). For this obvious reason we have expensive and sophisticated public highways, car safety standards, and speed limits.

Human societies have always had some form of government. Whether it was tribal chiefs leading a few dozen relatives or massive, modern societies, government is a necessary evil. In fact, Western societies point to the evolution of democracy (a form of government) as one of the crowning accomplishments of humankind (whether it belongs exclusively to the West, I have no clue).

And so I will insert at the end here my less objective and neutral, more personal opinion directed at the recent wave of libertarian fervor: I understand if you want to privatize Social Security, reduce the military, reform Medicare and Medicaid, and repeal the annoying nanny-state regulations. But if you want a government small enough to drown in a bathtub, I humbly suggest the back-to-the-land method. Which, coincidentally, is probably not that different than the lives the founding fathers lived, when living standards were more on par with modern-day Africa. Find a piece of real estate somewhere on the planet where you can live out your government-free days self-sufficiently. But if you want in on the benefits and opportunities and challenges of 21st century globalization, of massive urbanization, of a world with seven billion humans and many billions more of livestock animals, and of incomprehensibly complicated wealth-generating trade, you gotta pay to play.

who said it? #133 politics is high school

2011-09-28T05:00:00.000-04:00

Politics is high school with guns and more money.

- Frank Zappa (quoted in June 2010 issue of Harper's)

sep. article wrap-up

2011-09-26T05:00:00.007-04:00

Her.meneutics: Three Stories About Reproductive Technology at ChristianityToday.com If you haven't noticed already, bioethical issues are going to become more and more important and inescapable.

Hops Harvest at Know Hops. Yep - Michigan hops for Michigan beer. The vast majority is grown out West.

Canadian Oil Pipeline Plan Meets Resistance. 30 min of debate on Talk of the Nation (5 min short story here). After listening, it confirmed my suspicion that NPR may lean ever so slightly to the left, but is nothing like the liberal media boogeyman some paint it to be.

Roman Opalka, painter of infinity, died on August 6th, aged 79. A obit in The Economist I found especially haunting.

Mail a brick to junk mailers. Yes, that's right.

Has the Industrialized World Reached Peak Travel? Fascinating.

Ask an Evolutionary Creationist on Rachel Held Evens blog. An outsiders questions about EC, answered.

Chill your beer without using any electricity. No joke, this is old, pre-industrial technology. Going to try this one.

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, by ecologist Jared Diamond. The mistake? Ditching hunting and gathering for agriculture. Very interesting perspective.

One of my fav comics I found a couple months ago, XKCD:

Nerds unite:

maybe I do believe in fate (evolution, economics, and the destiny of planet Earth)

2011-09-22T05:00:00.000-04:00

I've stumbled upon another doozy. A personal ah-ha (if you have just 3.5 min, just watch the embedded video instead of reading).

Two years ago I finally came to terms with an evolving creation and the Christian God. Ken Miller's work, Finding Darwin's God, was instrumentally important. He has some good quotables - "I think evolution is both an entirely independent process and a working out of the will of the Creator" - but of course they didn't settle anything completely. In fact, they often invite new questions. The journey presses on.

I posted a quote from the video below just four months ago, but I don't think it sunk in how (potentially) profound it was. Or that is just might have something to do with the economic and cultural destiny of humankind (more in a second).

The study of evolutionary convergence suggests that evolution is not random as we often think of it (random = purposeless). First, it's not random in the obvious sense that natural selection is favoring specific traits from randomly generated mutations. The genetic variation may be random. The selection is not; it is choosing the best fit individuals and populations to continue on. There is at least one point to the story: ever better adapted organisms.

But the second reason is not so elementary. Believers in a literal six-day creation (and intelligent design?) state that this variation and selection are not progressing toward a certain, God-given path. It is meaningless and therefore can only lead toward materialism. (Strangely, that puts them in agreement with the New Atheists!) But if convergent evolution is pervasively true throughout the biosphere, then perhaps evolution is not completely open-ended. "Effectively it is arguing that from different starting positions, some sort of structure emerges which is remarkably similar." ...

So for theists, God did actually roll the dice, but perhaps they were loaded to some degree.

Turns out this conversation has been happening for some time, I just wasn't aware of it.
*BioLogos Foundation asks, Did evolution have to result in human beings?
*ScienceDaily.com reports Evolution is determanistic, not random, biologists conclude from multiple-species study

All these thoughts came back to my mind as I was finishing up a great little book called The Undercover Economist. Listening to economists wax eloquent about the wonder of markets and the general evil of anyone who gets in their way (mostly true, not completely so), I was again impressed by the amazing ability of markets to self-organize. Prices fluctuate, margins change, buildings are expanded, orders are curtailed. All seeking to maximize their profit, usually causing great gains from the free exchange of goods and services of buyer and seller. The creative-destructive force of markets is uncannily similar to the optimizing effects of natural selection in ecology. Both businesses and species must innovate like hell to react to their changing circumstances. Failure to do so is death. But more on that in a (possibly) future post.

But it got me to wondering if, given the inevitability of humans, or at least something humanoid, how inevitable was the Industrial Revolution? To be more more accurate, you'd have to go back to the basis of the IR: agriculture. This is nothing but speculation, and the simple fact that history is what it is makes it hard to imagine any alternative, but it seems to me that, early on, the alternatives to the fundamental advances in human history were quite limited or perhaps non-existent. So...

Agriculture began about 10,000 years ago, but the significant point is that it originated in multiple locations, independently, within centuries of each other. That seems to be strong evidence for inevitability.

This new stability lead early agricultural communities to concentrate in cities, where specialization accelerated. This urbanization slowly progressed until it hit a tipping point in the 20th century. The world is now more urban than rural. This is huge.

I could talk about metallurgy, advancements in husbandry, scientific insights, politics... but I don't really know much about those. But you get where I'm going. There are basic and fundamental laws in nature. Physics, ecology, biochemistry. Given the intelligence of early humans, was the discovery (and application) of these laws inevitable? Sure, we might imagine that they had discovered them by a different path, or that key insights could have come earlier or later in history, but barring any major killer pandemic or catastrophic asteroid, was there any real alternative?

And that, perhaps, is a question for the philosophers.

truth is stranger (& more beautiful) than fiction

2011-09-19T22:07:00.001-04:00

Reading a physicist's explanation of the universe is, in some ways, more captivating than the most imaginative creation myth. Truth is not only stranger than fiction; sometimes it's even more beautiful.

Just finished Stephen Hawking's "A Briefer History of Time."

if you don't know what "CTRL+F" is, pay attention.

2011-09-18T05:00:00.000-04:00

If you spend more than a few minutes a day on a computer, and you don't know what the CTRL+F shortcut is, you must read this from SlashDot:

Hugh Pickens writes "Google search anthropologist Dan Russell says that 90 percent of people in his studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page. 'I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for,' says Russell, who has studied thousands of people on how they search for stuff. 'At the end I'll say to them, "Let me show one little trick here," and very often people will say, "I can't believe I've been wasting my life!"' Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing, says Alexis Madrigal. 'I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all,' writes Madrigal. 'We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.'"

Hipster Christianity - The Frugal Collegians

2011-09-16T17:46:00.000-04:00

A huge number of Christian hipsters are college students or newly graduated wayfarers. Birthed in vast quantity on the campuses of Christian colleges, these sorts of Christian hipsters embody that newbie, activist spirit of "just now discovering that I can be Christian and care about the poor." Because they are jobless or saddled with school loans, their hipster evolution has yet to reach advanced stages of Fred Segal materialism. Instead, it's mostly conceptual. With one foot in their old Baptist youth group and the other on the unsteady terrain of viewing missions through the lens of post-colonialism, these kids are horizon-broadened, foundation-shaken and mind-blown on a daily basis, as they encounter such things as genocide, non-western plumbing, or Camus for the first time in their lives. All the while they are learning to live lives of unconventionality--dabbling in post-legalism rebellion and vice (cheap alcohol and tobacco mostly) while figuring out how to sustain a more authentic and substantial Christianity than the feeble religion of their upbringing.

From HipsterChristianity.com

who said it? #132 mckibben on the current cult (pre-crash)

2011-09-14T05:00:00.001-04:00

If economists can shed their inclination to serve as priests of the current cult, they will play a crucial role in helping us understand what options we have, what scales of enterprise may work to serve all our needs, which kinds of efficiency help and which harm. For them – for all of us - this is a far more interesting intellectual adventure than merely trying to keep the present system accelerating a little longer.

-Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, 2007 (p. 232)

lessons from 9/11, ten years later

2011-09-10T09:51:00.000-04:00

(for a much better review of the last ten years, see Ken Schenck's post from today. seriously, don't read mine, read his)

While holding my newborn at 3:45 a.m., thoughts raced through my head. I tried to frame a reflection specifically for U.S. Christians.

*Evil is out there. As if there was any doubt. But it's hard to get an accurate assessment. The media overplays so many small things (like planes flying into buildings - extremely rare) and underplays more common and equally twisted ones (physical and sexual abuse, for one; racism and hatred).

*Evil is in here. Rest assured, it is no further than the inner recesses of our hearts. War must be waged against hatred, using all weapons on hand. 9/11 was remarkably fertile ground for tribalism, racism, and xenophobia. Christians must absolutely reject these. Our God created the heavens and the earth. He is our Father. Every last human is our brother or sister. We are all children of God.

*Love, sacrifice, generosity and all the mush really are possible. Tales abound of heroic police and firefighters running into those tall, flaming buildings. Hundreds perished. Humans are capable of all this, especially in times of trials. I would say this is part of God's imprint in our hearts and minds. But if we don't listen to our better side...

*But payback is a b*&#$. Yes, everyone agrees that civilian deaths in Iraq easily topped 100,000, and that the U.S. left thousands and thousands of unexploded land mines (cluster bombs) around to kill and maim the vulnerable for decades to come. But the pain was also for those paying-back. We've already lost at least 6,000 service members in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mentions trillions of dollars. Although we know Iraq was not involved in 9/11 at all, it is also clear that politicians conflated the two issues subtlety and purposefully. If you have ever been acutely and personally wronged, you know how the feelings of rage can turn your minds toward twisted and violent thoughts (and sometimes actions). Multiply that times 330 million.

After 9/11, instead of humble soul-searching, careful investigations, heck - even simply taking all that money and bombing poor people with bread - we chose violent revenge. We all paid the price. And with respect to those who jumped into the ethically gray mess to serve certain ideals as best as they could, it's very hard to argue that the entire endeavour was worth the collective price.

So let's keep telling the story, remembering the businessmen and policewomen who went up in flames, the Kurdish kids who were caught in the crossfire. If anything, it's a cautionary tale.

my seminal summary of endless environmental advice

2011-08-29T05:00:00.019-04:00

'Blind guides! who are straining out the gnat, and the camel are swallowing.

-Jesus, talking to environmentalists (Matt. 23:24, Young's Literal Transl.)

If you read nothing else I ever write (which ain't a bad idea), specifically about ecological and environmental issues, read this. Not that I'm necessarily right, but this is the best I got. This will save me a lot of ink. And possibly save you a lot of reading. I've read and pondered for far too many hours on things which don't matter much. As in athletic training, 90% of the gain comes in 10% of the effort. We need an entire world of reasonably fit people, not a small minority of Olympiads.

I will try to be brief. After all, a book has already been written, to say nothing of hundreds of others that caught the green wave in the mid '00's. The book is The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from The Union of Concerned Scientists (1999), and I'll borrow a bit from them. It's 304 pages of charts and qualifiers and scientific studies. The average (non-scientific, non-obsessive) person could make do with a well-written pamphlet summary; here is a good summary/review of the main points (and here). It's much more effective of an approach than the more recent No Impact Man (2010; I haven't read it), who apparently insists on living without electricity in Manhattan. That kind of obsessive bean-counting doesn't often lead to a happy and fruitful life, which I think we all want.

So I offer these here as goalposts for the do-gooders, dreamers, the well-intentioned, and those who want to turn off cruise-control and live intentionally. To those who love their children, and their neighbors, and the meteor shower and chickadee and marmot. In order to redirect our energy away from Styrofoam® cups and towards things that matter.

Obviously, we can't all move to small houses this year, sell our car next month, give up meat this week, or live without children (our wonderful, unbelievable children). Some of these we won't or can't attain and are part of our own definition of "the good life" (for example: living near family or our job). So I judge thee not. But these are ten goalposts, starting with what I consider the most effective, the best "return" for your investment. If you are short on time, just read the bold:

#1 Live simply (reduce & reuse). Reduce your expenditures, and give the rest away. Breathe deep. Be content. Feed the poor, give clean water to the thirsty, provide family planning services for Indian women and education for African girls. All of our best moral and religious teachers would agree. And it lays the foundation for #2-10, like...

#2 Broaden the consideration of values in your decisions. Often these will coincide with the most eco-friendly choice, so do what most harmonizes with your other values: Social justice, local economies, ecological and cultural diversity, relieving poverty, personal health and wellness, animal welfare, caring for orphans, taking time to love your neighbor. All of these things are important as well, and they will help strengthen and sustain your commitments when you hit two or three birds with one stone.

#3 Promote systemic change. This means politics. Even when you reduce your electricity consumption by 50%, if you live in the Midwest it's still coming overwhelmingly from coal. And you can't ride the bus if there is no bus service. We need smart incentives and policies to shift our collective structures in the right direction, something individual choice cannot do. (UPDATE 9/8, these recent articles confirm my suspicion) Vote, and write letters, which are probably more important anyway. Your single vote is almost infinitesimal, but politicians consider each letter as representing thousands of voices from their constituency. Schedule time to write once a month.

#4 Inspire, educate, and evangelize. Practice a positive "prophetic energizing" (hat tip to Walter Brueggemann for the term) along with targeted and careful denouncements of eco-sins. Show others that being pro-environment has everything to do with what matters: jobs, health, family, fun, fulfillment, and community. Write, blog, sing, teach, and share. Show a kid how to identify birds. Harvest wildflowers in the ditch and give them to people. Share garden veggies with the hungry. Respect and defend the work of scientists. Multiply your impact.

#5 Consider having less children, no children, and/or adopting one of the 100 million+ orphans in the world. This is really unpopular to talk about in polite company, and more radical thought experiments can lead to really dangerous, draconian interventions like China's one-child policy. When we depreciate children and view them as mere burdens, this is a sure sign of the death of a culture. But with seven billion folks around, and probably two billion more on the way, it is an obvious elephant in the room. To say otherwise, IMHO, is to deny basic mathematics. It is important to note that the most effective way to reduce population is to empower and educate women, especially in the majority world. Across every culture and religion, mothers desire a manageable family size. Recommended reading is Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families by father-of-one Bill McKibben, who was recently arrested for following #3.

#6 Choose a smaller living space in a more densely populated area near where you work. We often think of cities as eco-nightmares, but urbanites have significantly lower environmental impacts (per capita) than rural folks with similar standards of living (one visual example). This lays the ground for #7 and #9 below.

#7 Think about energy usage when you change the temperature of anything. iPod chargers, a TV, and the fish tank light won't make much of a difference. Heating and cooling air, heating water, and the 'fridge are the main users. Use ceiling fans, wash with cold water, line dry, use the microwave, buy the most efficient appliances, insulate everything, and dress appropriate for the weather even inside your home. Start with the easiest efforts and the ones that save you money. After you reduce demand, next priority is to buy, install (solar thermal and PV), and ask for renewable energy on your grid (as well as nuclear, whose threats are disproportionately overblown in relation to their benefits).

#8 Reduce (or eliminate) animal products from your diet. This may be #6 or #7 in impact. In terms of land and energy use, animal agriculture's impact is hard to overstate. I ultimately believe good animal ag is necessary on grounds of culture, the ecological balance of plants and animals and soil, and using impossible-to-cultivate land. But don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good. If you're like me and won't go Bill-Clinton-vegan, there are many creative alternatives: try weekday veg (it is what it sounds like), the Daniel Fast (for several months, my wife and I found this discipline enriching on several levels), selective omnivory, meat-only-once-a-day, or a 1 lb / wk meat budget (U.S. avg. is half-pound/day; global avg. is quater-pound/day). Recommended reading is Eating Animals (though this deals more with animal ethics, and I don't agree with good portions), which just jolted me back from my backsliding ways. #Update at 10:30 am: I agree with author/farmer Wendell Berry, Hoosier farmer Dave Haxton, and my butcher brother-in-law Josh here that animal ag is good and necessary. I leave up "eliminate" animal products knowing that animal-eating will never cease to exist unless we as a species go extinct. But meatless you could think of yourself as balancing out a meat over-eater, if that's how you like to do math.

#9 Travel less and travel light. The biggest gain comes in arranging to have less than one motor vehicle per adult by sharing, biking, walking, or taking public transit. Live near where you work (#6), as you probably travel there the most. Drive the smallest vehicle necessary for your needs (be they safety, capacity, or weather-related). Save long-distance travel for the things that really matter. Learn to love the land you inhabit. We often overlook or downplay beautiful treasures in our own backyards.

#10 Think smartly about #1-9, take concrete actions, and then enjoy life. Save worry for more important things.

Kind of funny that I didn't put recycling on the list.

THE END

Non-required reading:

Epiphany: Perhaps - no, hopefully - the evolution of my environmental thinking is tracking my experience with religion (toward what I hope is maturity). An initial fervor and desire for holiness. A feeling of guilt from having transgressed in so many ways, large and small. A re-commitment to do well. A slight falling back. Guilt, forgiveness, and renewed resolve. Repeat. Then: a slow and progressive realization that some things, while still important, aren't crucially so. Maybe they are still a barrier to holiness, but they are probably inescapable in this life. Understanding that my commitment can be boiled down to a key principle that perhaps I can hold even more strongly as the petty preoccupations on the margins are allowed to blur a bit. And finally, some sort of rest. And confidence. Even amidst the gray world I inhabit.

Below are some things I have at one time worried about, but when examined closely don't almost make a significant difference or are too complicated to accurately assess, speaking strictly of environmental considerations. Many have other significant considerations. For example, when I think about food, I also think of my family's health, taste preferences, budget, and impact on culture.

*A lot of the local vs. imported debate, besides perhaps some fresh food. Bucking the accepted wisdom: "If you live in New York City, French wines beat out Californians by a wide margin in terms of [transport-related] carbon footprint." (Nat Geo, via Treehugger.com)

*Reusable glass vs. recyclable plastic packaging. Glass is heavy to transport and resources are used in washing

*Aluminum can mass-produced beer vs. glass bottled craft (good) beer. Aluminum travels much lighter, preserves the product better (with no breakage) and much energy is saved in recycling it. But... very few of the good beers are in cans. New Belgium Brewery did an Life cycle assessment (LCA) on their Fat Tire brew and found that a significant portion of its impact came just from in-store refrigeration (3X the co2 output as the avg. transport from brewery to store, ~800 mi). So buying at room-temp instead of those open-air coolers at the store is ~3x more important than buying local.

*Genetically-modified organisms (GMO) vs. non-GMO food. GMOs can reduce need for water, pesticides, and herbicides. Improved yields from GMO mean more food grown on the same acreage, requiring less virgin prairie or forest to be cleared for new cultivation or pasture (habitat loss).

*Certified organic vs. traditional food. See The Omnivore's Dilemma. Still could be trucked-in, refrigerated, from thousands of miles away. Organic means no GMO and possibly lower yields (more pressure for habitat loss).

*Cloth vs. disposable diapers. Even the hardcore greens at Grist.org say to give it a rest. And that's a relief. After a good amount of reading and strategizing, my plans for cotton were finally scrapped after reading this.

*Grass-fed meat vs. CAFO. Not quite clear. Depends on what environmental metrics one uses (GHG, acreage per pound, food quality, antibiotic resistance, etc). I generally come down on the side of a careful grass-fed operation. But if we all want 1/2 lb of meat a day, we would probably have to use CAFOs in the mid-term, but then we'd probably be in trouble long-term. If you care at all about animal rights, it pretty much puts conventional broiler, egg, and hog operations off the table.

A few other things from The Consumer's Guide to chillax about:

*Paper vs. plastic bags at the store (bring your own bags if possible)
*Disposable cups, plates, napkins and utensils
*Aerosol spray cans and Styrofoam cups
*Cotton vs. synthetic fabric in your clothes.

august article wrap-up

2011-08-26T05:00:00.037-04:00

UPDATE 8:30 am for something timely: Protests over a really long pipeline that promises to bring Canadian tar sands to the Gulf coast.

Greenery in Canada - we have a winner: British Columbia’s carbon tax woos sceptics. Heartening news. It dawned on me while reading this was that what often makes markets efficient are constraints and limits. Lower revenue. Higher expenses. The challenge of physics. Or scarce supply of inputs. When there is a negative externality to combat (like pollution), effective regulation can harness this innovation but creating artificial limits not proscribed by the market. This is how the U.S. took on acid rain pollution - cap and trade. Each of the three previous U.S. presidents have used cap and trade in this way. Kinda sad that we refuse to acknowledge it.

Mythbusting 101: Organic Farming > Conventional Agriculture. On the Scientific American blog. "The point of this piece isn’t to vilify organic farming; it’s merely to point out that it’s not as black and white as it looks."

Several points of coverage on a Calvin College (in Grand Rapids, MI) professor who publicly denied the existence of a literal Adam and Eve. From the Grand Rapids Press, NPR, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Poop and paddle. (NPR Science Friday video of the week) A self-contained floating toilet that biodegrades the waste on-raft. Really.

This was just beautiful. I fancy that it's how men prefer to dance.

who said it? #131 founding fathers: "U.S. is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion"

2011-08-24T05:00:00.006-04:00

I found this interesting tidbit from our beloved founding fathers. Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen...[Muslims]

Sponsored by George Washington and signed by John Adams.

There is context, obviously. And for every document one may find about "a wall of separation between church and state" you can pull out another proclaiming how great our Western, deistic God is towards our new republic. But I thought it was worth pondering against the many references to deity in the formation of the U.S.

I, for one, am quite glad that gov't officials don't pick what prayers are said at public schools, don't choose which countries Jesus would preemptively invade (well, at least shouldn't), Etc, etc...

more L. pics (re-post)

2011-08-23T13:29:00.000-04:00

Over at BoLiving.

the merits of a science-based worldview

2011-08-21T08:40:00.002-04:00

I guess alchemy never dies.

Human beings generally think they are right; that's called pride. And we group ourselves in little like-thinking communities; that's called group-think. And we also belong to certain socio-political communities that reinforce cultural and religious norms and myths; that's called ethnocentricity.

Science is an interesting and, I believe, worthy goal. It is a grasp at objective, observable truth. It is being willing to let a dataset change your mindset when everything you have been told and taught has said otherwise for a very long time. We live in a society and on a planet both highly impacted by the effects of science, but our mythical roots run deep. We still believe that if we mix the right batch of chemicals next time, we'll have gold out of our ears. We want to believe it so badly. And we do.

Some facts are plainly obvious to "modern" people. We cast a strange eye towards anyone (a very small minority) who still thinks the earth is actually flat, or that the Sun revolves around the Earth. And yet a large portion of people send me scary and improbable forwards: how our children will soon be praying to Allah in public schools; how Al-Qaida planted poison in Pepsi products; a research paper hushed by the scientific establishment that disproves evolutionary theory once and for all. We prefer to believe the sensational and improbable, so much so that we won't spend 60 seconds briefly researching basic facts about such wild claims. We hold deep-seated religious and political values that we simply choose not to change in the face of the obvious evidence before us. The revolution of truth would simply be too hard to handle. (a high-profile GOP Presidential candidate recently told a questioning child that evolutionary theory "has some gaps on it" and figures that kids are smart enough to decide whether it is true or not. You can hear the child's mother prodding, "Ask him why he doesn't believe in science." !).

For whatever reason, I personally tend toward the scientific side. The good spin I might put on this statement would be that I'm grounded in reality. The bad spin is that I'm just arrogant and, like every last seven billion of us, I think I've got it right and everyone else is just various shades of wrong. My athiest and agnostic friends would say I'm right, but I just don't have the guts to go all the way and ditch the God that I can't see or hear or touch. I understand that. And my faith, at some point, comes up to the abyss and takes a giant leap into the void. I believe. So I appreciate faith, believing in the unseen, planting a seed in cold soil with snow threatening, foolishly believing that spring is near. But I also worry about the widespread, selective, and convenient rejections of science-based findings. A blogger at NPR's 13.7 blog recently expressed this frustration, suggesting that science-deniers hand over their cell phones, since the same science that unearthed Darwinian theory and revealed the greenhouse effects in the atmosphere led to portable-phone technology. The argument, in the end, is sound. Science gave us modern medicine, air travel, cheap and convenient food... everything, in short, that the average family enjoys from being born after the industrial revolution, not before it. These have profound implications for our religious and political values, of course. The transform them, for sure. But that story is already centuries old, if not older. "Believing" that the Earth traveled around the Sun, and not the reverse, was tantamount to denying one's religion. In retrospect, we can see that they got a little carried away with something that really is not a big deal.

So, the merits of a science-based worldview? Well, it seems absolutely essential in the 21st century, so of course, it deserves merit. We consider someone who thinks they can distill gold from boiled corn and paprika "out of touch with reality." And even though it can indeed cross the line at some point from harmless to dangerous, we need to have grace with people who are making the transition, especially when they do not have life-or-death responsibilities. (One might have grave reservations, however, about appointing a head of critical biomedical research who rejects the role of natural selection on biological communities). But does that mean the scientific method has the last word on every single question in the universe? Myself, and millions others, suggest not.

who said it? #130 understanding depends on your job

2011-08-15T05:00:00.009-04:00

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

-Upton Sinclair-

One example from last year's election cycle:

"‎With one exception, none of the Republicans running for the Senate — including the 20 or so with a serious chance of winning — accept the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming." from In Climate Denial, Again

Methinks Newt Gringrich would not like to be reminded about the commercial he did with Nancy Pelosi for Al Gore's non-profit. Whoops.

Best. Day. Ever. (redirect)

2011-08-13T12:38:00.000-04:00

World: Meet Lydia.

Modern medicine and religious values

2011-08-11T10:37:00.012-04:00

I was glad to hear, in a tribal sense, our OB doctor speaking Christianeze at our first appointment. "because of the fall and evil in the world... " and "God designed our bodies so that..." It only makes sense to integrate one's religious beliefs and values into the rest of one's life. An isolated religiosity that only informs the so-called "spiritual" life doesn't seem to make sense. Then again, you can drift into dangerous territory. Refusing medical care for your kids and opting for a prayer-only approach. Refusing blood transfusions (our nurse asked us about that today). Being so "pro-life" that in trying to save a fetus, both mother and child die. I would also suggest that not understanding, appreciating, and "believing" in natural selection's ancient role on the human organism might hinder a doctor's medical care in some way. I cannot think of an example, but I suspect this might come into play in a highly conservative, religious culture such as West Michigan. That said, I feel very confident in our doctor and am thanking the God of heaven that we have access to world class medical care. Heard on NPR yesterday that 70% of Pakistani women give birth at home and that 12,000 mothers there die in childbirth every year.

The Green Thing (an internet forward)

2011-08-11T05:00:00.009-04:00

Oh, internet forwards. Cheesy, ignorant, and consistently facetious. But this one is mildly funny... and contains a truth as well.

The Green Thing

In the line at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bringher own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.

The woman apologized to him and explained, "We didn't have the green thingback in my day."

The clerk responded, " That's our problem today. Your generation did notcare enough to save our environment."

He was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to thestore. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized andrefilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really wererecycled.

But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store andoffice building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.

But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-awaykind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. Kids gothand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-newclothing. But that old lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back inour day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. Andthe TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not ascreen the size of the state of Montana.

In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electricmachines to do everything for us.

When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used a wadded up oldnewspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.

Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn.We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so wedidn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate onelectricity.

But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or aplastic bottle every time we had a drink of water.

We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replacedthe razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor justbecause the blade got dull.

But we didn't have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes toschool or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service.

We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to powera dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive asignal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find thenearest pizza joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks werejust because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson inconservation from a smartass young person.

who said it? #129 not our nature to be removed from nature

2011-08-07T05:00:00.004-04:00

From the National Catholic Reporter (17 April 2010):

Only a generation ago, kids spent long days fully engaged in outdoor play and discovery. Curiosity was our guide, wonder our reward. Our minds and bodies were engaged, our senses alive. We interacted with the world around us -- learning about it, and ourselves, in the process -- and were endlessly challenged and delighted by doing so.

I’m not simply romanticizing an idyllic childhood. I grew up in a place -- perhaps you did, too -- remarkable only for being unremarkable; it lay equidistant between city and wilderness, without being either. But even that place was more than adequately endowed with the landscape of childhood: dirt and stone, grass and trees, butterflies and birds, flowers and bees. And while we certainly cherished our own diversions and distractions, it was not within our nature to be removed from nature. A glorious day would begin with the bang of a door shutting behind us and would luxuriously unfurl to the languid evening, until the streetlights came on and we, at last, would return home.

That all has changed. We have reached the point where the children of today spend significantly less time at play outdoors than the previous generation. And when they do go outdoors it is less frequently, and for markedly shorter periods of time. University of Maryland researchers have found that outdoor and nature-based activities -- from walking to camping -- now comprise less than one-half hour per week of a child’s time. And even though many parents recognize the benefits of outdoor time for their children -- and themselves -- we are nonetheless in the midst of a generation-long shift away from nature-based recreation as a whole.

I was lucky enough to grow up next to a woodlot, a ravine, a garden, a cemetery, fruit trees, a creek, and several bird houses. Neither a concrete jungle nor an untouched wilderness. I hope to give my kids a similar opportunity.

if Athada were a nation state?

2011-08-03T05:00:00.003-04:00

Another one of those weird things you find when you Google your own name or username...

The Land of Athada is a massive, socially progressive nation, ruled by Olek Skilgannon with an even hand, and remarkable for its complete lack of prisons. Its hard-nosed, intelligent population of 1.295 billion are fiercely patriotic and enjoy great social equality; they tend to view other, more capitalist countries as somewhat immoral and corrupt.

who said it? #128 a real Christian witness

2011-07-30T05:00:00.001-04:00

A second thing that happens when we fail to distinguish the civil religion of America from the kingdom of God is that we end up wasting precious time and resources defending and tweaking the civil religion - as though doing so had some kingdom value. We strive to keep prayer in the schools, fight for the right to have public prayer before football games, lobby to preserve the phrases "under God" in our Pledge of Allegiance and "in God we trust" on our coins, battle to hold the traditional civil meaning of marriage, and things of the sort - as though winning these fights somehow brings America closer to the kingdom of God. This, we think, is part of what is means to "take America back for God" ...

What if the energy and resources used to preserve and tweak the civil religion was rather spent feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, befriending the drug addict, and visiting the prisoner? What if our focus was on sacrificing our resources to help inner-city schools and safety houses for battered women? What if our concern was to bridge the ungodly racial gap in our country by developing friendships and collaborating in endeavors with people whose ethnicity is different than our own? What if instead of trying to defend our religious rights, Christians concerned themselves with siding with other whose rights are routinely trampled? What if instead of trying to legally make life more difficult for gays, we worried only about how we could affirm their unsurpassable worth in service to them?

-Greg Boyd, The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church p.114, 115

"I hate pennies" rant

2011-07-29T14:00:00.000-04:00

UPDATE 21-Dec:
*NPR Planet Money reports that the government officially killed the dollar coin program. "The Treasury department estimates it will take about 10 years for the economy to absorb the 1.4 billion $1 coins now in storage."

UPDATE 29-July:

*Legislation has finally been introduced in Congress to kill the $1 coin program. Though it hasn't been getting a lot of attention. I wonder why....

*After frequent flyer mile "hackers" had so thoroughly exploited a free gov't distribution system for dollar coins (not illegally, just not in the best interest of the taxpayers), the Mint is shutting it down. I must say: good for them. I was just about to buy $500 in dollar coins for the freq. flyer miles, but I was determined to actually spend them and not deposit them in a bank. I promise.

...

This anti-penny rant is great, and fact-filled. I generally agree with everything he says...

In Bolivia, the smallest coin in circulation is worth 1.4 US cents and the smallest bill is worth US$1.40, despite having a GDP per capita more than 25 times lower than the U.S. (meaning there are a lot of small-value transactions and cash is used almost exclusively). Many Bolivians don't even bother picking up or giving change for a measly 10 centavos. In the supermarkets, totals are rounded to the nearest coin.

In the U.S. I would often get $2 bills from the banks and spend them just to throw people off. Some people think they're fake. My other currency fetish was getting briefly involved with WheresGeorge.com, a currency tracking project. I hand-wrote on several hundred bills, and they still pop up every once in a while when someone finds them and re-enters the serial numbers into the systems, several years later and thousands of miles away. But I won't go into that.

NPR's Planet Money recently broadcasted a great story (25 min) on the many unwanted $1 coins in Federal Reserve banks (or check the short 6 min version). The obvious but politically untenable solution is to simply discontinue the $1 bill, which would save taxpayers about $5.5 billion (about $17 per citizen) and put all those coins into circulation.

I think this summer I'll walk into a U.S. bank and buy a couple hundred dollar coins...

july article wrap-up

2011-07-26T05:00:00.007-04:00

Abortion debate rages in Northwest Indiana - a look at the effects of the Indiana legislature cutting off Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood

Immigration in Indiana and the "Christian Right": Neither "Christian" nor "Right" - by my missions prof

Define American - a conversation started by one undocumented Filipino immigrant.

Jon Stewart 1, Politifact 0: Fox News Viewers are the Most Uninformed on the DeSmog blog

Climate Change: Public Skeptical, Scientists Sure on NPR

Transitional Forms as Evidence for Evolution: Tiktaalik and cdesign proponentsists (From The Archives) - religion prof at Butler U.

Forming a New Family, Emotionally and Legally, at The Baby Project on NPR, highlighting the pregnancy journey of a Los Angeles lesbian couple (due a couple weeks before us)

Officials: W.Va. Mine Operator Kept Two Sets of Safety Records. Is this the "just trust us" regulation? Yes, these people should go to jail.

law of unintended consequences & libertarianism

2011-07-22T05:00:00.002-04:00

There is a great 3-yr old piece at the NYT Freakonomics blog that highlights the unintended consequences of government policy. The phrase "unintended consequences" is used most often by Libertarians to express their disdain for government intervention. One example from the piece is that by restricting usage rights for land owners that have property with habit suitable for certain endangered species, land owners then have the incentive to actually eliminate the habitat before the species is noted and verified on their property. Net result: less habitat for these endangered species.

To risk beating a dead horse...

The law of unintended consequences means we should craft public policy very carefully, have sufficient oversight for each corresponding program/regulation, and be willing to quickly admit our mistakes and be ready for revision when things don't go as planned. This does not mean that regulation is inherently doomed.

in praise of "thinking Republicans"

2011-07-18T05:00:00.002-04:00

I wrote this down in February, after reading some despairing - then encouraging - news releases and blog posts and Facebook reactions.

And since I'm praising "thinking Republicans" ... I guess that's an implicit shot against unthinking Republicans. Since I watch so much Colbert Report (only my slow internet keeps me from obsession), that's mostly what I'm exposed to. Obviously, there are scores of unthinking Democrats, and Libertarians, and Greens. Most of my family and friends post about the stupider Dems, so I guess I rarely feel the need to repeat. But as always, this cuts both ways ;)

. . .

People like K. Schenck and - proudly, I say - most of my family are what I call "thinking Republicans" or perhaps "the good-natured GOP."

The kind who put common sense before ideology.

The kind who keep a healthy distance from the obsession with control and power and domination.

Who let their faith inform their politics, but won't let their politics manipulate their religion... won't let secular and cultural trends reinterpret the basic, rock-solid teachings of their faith tradition (charity to the poor, hospitality to the alien, judging not lest we be judged, etc).

Who disagree with other people - even strongly - and still can sit down with them afterwards for a drink.

Who neither worship or vilify the rich. And have enough sense about the world we live in to see that someone grossing $250,000/year is still phenomenally wealthy.

Who realize that we need to care for the poor, even when the poor themselves are often "complicit" in their own desparate situation.

Who don't treat the Constitution of the U.S.A. like divinely-inspired Scripture, but rather just a smart document of its time.

Who realize that we don't need to keep burning fossil fuels forever when there are so many healthy alternatives, and that smart policy with proper incentives can guide us to that future.

Who don't swallow paranoid, hateful Tea Party dogma unthinkingly.

If only there were enough of them to vote some other "thinking Republicans" into office...

who said it? #127 God hates them, so do I

2011-07-14T05:00:00.006-04:00

You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Anne Lamott’s priest friend Tom, in her book Bird by Bird

who said it? #126 Christian nation? if there are Christian aardvarks

2011-07-06T05:00:00.001-04:00

Not everything about the kingdom of the world is bad. Insofar as versions of the kingdom of the world use their power of the sword to preserve and promote law, order, and justice, they are good. But the kingdom of the world, by definition, can never be the kingdom of God. It doesn't matter that we judge it good because it stands for the principles we deem important - "liberty and justice for all," for example. No version of the kingdom of the world, however comparatively good it may be, can protect its self-interests while loving its enemies, turning the other cheek, going the extra mile, or blessing those who persecute it. Yet loving our enemies and blessing those who persecute us is precisely what kingdom-of-God citizens are called to do. It's what it means to be a Christian. By definition, therefore, you can no more have a Christian worldly government than you can have a Christian petunia or aardvark. A nation may have noble ideals and be committed to just principles, but its not for this reason Christian.

-Greg Boyd, The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church, p. 54

do I love my country? - a 4th of July reflection (re-post from 4 july 2010)

2011-07-03T05:00:00.000-04:00

(the answer is yes, I do. Coming home 14 July 11!)

"Love it or leave it."

This might be a response you'd from a true patriot. The connotation attached is, "you need to accept the majority, if not every, decision your leaders make in order to be considered a citizen, to legitimately bask in the privileges you enjoy." (Unspoken are the few exceptions made for the years when the other team is in power. Then you can make some heavy criticism.)

God Bless the Best

While I can and do claim that I have the best spouse in the whole world (as each husband, ideally, should be able to say), I think it fairly simplistic - and obviously impossible, from an objective standpoint - for each human to claim her country as the best in the world. Now, if we could accurately and objectively rank countries (and by what scale? economic power? the integrity of ecological systems? respect for elders? leisure time?) it could be true that I was born in the best one. About a 1:20 chance actually.

I suppose we are culturally conditioned to prefer the traits and priorities we are taught from society, and thus we could each think our culture the best at fulfilling these ideals. Ethnocentrism is one of the oldest human narratives. So we can't all be the best in the objective sense, but we're the best at being who we want to be. Those who have priorities different from the culture, or are on the leading edge of cultural change, are therefore isolated.

In a Facebook back-and-forth, I had a friend tell me that "America has never been a threat to peace." When I try to mention the possibility that America had sinned in the past, the friend somehow manages to evade them ("Native Americans had a history of 'backing the wrong horse'," "You can't say that or else we'd have to consider this and that President for war crimes," etc). Now, I know that my friend is much more well-read than I. My friend knows history, and has lived more of it than I have. But in this way our conversations always end in stalemates, both of us perplexed that the other person could be so blind. And so aside from the objective, something deep, personal, and spiritual is drawing my friend to see this nation as distinct and blessed above all others, even to the point of denying or explaining away many of it's faults. Which leads most people next to God.

It's true judeo-christian values (again, not necessarily God's values, but the values as understood by the Christian religion during a specific place and time of human culture) permeated our country at the time of our founding. But we never were, are not now, nor ever will be a "Christian" nation. I'm sorry. Several of our founders were deists, not Biblical Christians (see, "How Christian Were the Founders?"). Several owned slaves, were racist, sexist, etc. On some levels, we are more in line with Kingdom values now than we were then. On others, obviously, we have regressed. I've blogged to death the fact that when religion is wedded to the state, it's the state that wins out and the religion that is perverted. Religion becomes a tool for the aims of the state, which, historically, perhaps intrinsically, have been domination (economic, cultural, military, etc). I for one don't want a government official deciding which prayer (to whom? asking for what? praying in whose name?) to say at my child's school.

A Dance With the Devil
I guess I consider my relation with this political entity more of a dance with the devil, a dance in which I think many have been seduced. (Keep in mind this is not that radical; I have several friends who don't even show up to the dance.) I view the original intentions of the founders, the founding documents, etc, with respect. It's was, and still is, a great idea: "All men are created equal." But as in my relationship with the Bible in which I cannot go back into the Biblical times, I do not live in New England with a small number of European colonists. Like biological life, like religion, ideas evolve. Like it or not, it's another inescapable reality. And so our leaders eventually had the sense to say, "All humans are created equal, not just property-owning white men." And with struggle, they have expanded the definition: to women, others races, and various minorities. The battle still continues. I simply believe that, although we cannot obviously extend citizenship to everyone, all people are created equal. People of all religions and races, Africans, Muslims, people without economic power. With such a respect for the individual and her personal ambitions, I just can't accept the war-time murder of so many thousands of civilians as "collateral damage." To me, it stands as a great offense to our ideals.

My friend has told me that, just as we extend grace to imperfect humans, we should extend grace to our imperfect institutions. True. And as I do so, I wish to point us back to the best ideals - everyone created equal, not just our citizens. At times, perhaps I'm too critical. But I think it is evoked as a response to the many that swallow everything so uncritically (IMHO).

I’ll probably end up voting in the coming 2010 elections. Not to have "One Nation, Under God" as the Bush/Cheney 2004 billboard read in West Michigan. As much as we like to complain about government (especially when our “team” is losing), those in power do make real decisions with real impacts. I dance with the devil to bend the power of the government is a positive direction. Like each voter, I weigh my values (aren't we all "values voters" after all?), what I think is right, true, and just, and I try to come to a decision. I will admit I think the most straightforward reading of the New Testament supports a more Mennonite/separatist/alternative view of political engagement, but I don’t think participation in a technological pluralistic democracy was anywhere on the map at the time. There is some contextualizing to do. So if I get out of bounds and start endorsing Manifest Destiny, please friends, correct me.

What I Love, and it's Responsibility

True love requires more than just good feelings, more than just receiving pleasure. Reciprocal love comes with responsibility, and sacrifice. Having just completed 4 years of marriage, I understand that more and more each year.

But I can't bring myself to say the pledge of allegiance anymore, especially not in a church (I'm quiet and trying to stay seated during all the Christian flag-waving). It's not because I hate my country, or don't want to work for it's prospering. I don't mind the flag, I'm just not always in agreement with others as to what it represents. Watching the World Cup has revived my patriotism a bit, watching people from all over the world cheering on their countrymen. In this way, I find it natural to root for the U.S., even for Germany, land of my ancestors. There are things that I'm pledged to, things to which I have allegiance. But at the same time, there are things that I reject.

I reject the notion that I can count my personal satisfaction by my income, nor our collective happiness by our GDP. I don't want to cultivate consumerism.

I reject the endless and life-destroying military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about, whether that's for natural resources, political power, or out of anger and revenge. We have failed to heed our President's warning, not to mention the much sterner warnings of our religious leaders.

I reject the liquidation of our natural resources in a short-sighted rush for comfort. Like those who don't want to leave trillions in financial debt to our grandchildren, I don't want to leave ecological debts, which are much more real and tangible than modern currencies.

Like Barbara Kingsolver...

"I wish our national anthem were not the one about the bombs bursting in air, but the one about purple mountain majesties and amber waves of grain. It's easier to sing and closer to the heart of what we really have to sing about. A land as broad and green as ours demands of us thanksgiving and a certain breadth of spirit... We've inherited the grace of the Grand Canyon, the mystery of the Everglades, and the fertility of an Iowa plain. We can crown this good with brotherhood. What a vast inheritance for our children that would be, if we were to become a nation humble before our rich birthright, whose graciousness makes us beloved." ("Saying Grace" in Small Wonder: Essays, p. 29-30.)

But more than what I reject, I would like to reflect on what I love, and what I can hope for.

I love that we are a nation of immigrants, a single culture formed from many. I love the diversity of food, languages, and worldviews. I have the responsibility to beat my sword into a plowshare, and use violence only as a very last resort and even then with great trepidation. I would prefer to understand and engage with other cultures and not annihilate them out of fear, insecurity, or misunderstanding.

I love the people. I love my friends and family. I love the community in which I happened to be born. I have a particular responsibility not just to this vast and numerous nation, but to the very distinct and limited community in which I reside.

I love the innovation, the striving to improve, invent, and investigate. I have the responsibility to use this technology for the benefit of my people, not to be driven and controlled by it.

I love the land, literally the country itself. The diversity, the richness, that ancient wisdom that it seems to contain, the vast emptiness that still remains. The wilderness that puts our desperate self-importance in perspective. I have the responsibility to understand and respect creation and have the wisdom to live within it's limits.

And so, the US is not the Great Satan, nor is it "the last, best hope for planet earth" (as Obama and a slim majority of Americans believe). Other voters under 30 agree with me, by a 51%/37% margin. America is a powerful nation, some say an empire, with the unique mixture of good and bad that each of it's citizen's possesses. It has had quite a time in the sun. Like others, it will eventually set. But until then, I will live and move and have my being here (well, if and when I move back from S. America). I will try my best to keep it faithful to it's deepest ideals, and push it further to take on the best ideals it has omitted.

In other words, I will love it.

private markets, public assets, and GMO corn

2011-06-29T05:00:00.005-04:00

This article - Farmers Skirt Rules on BT Corn, Report Says (NYT) - highlights my developing political/economic perspective: that a completely self-interested free market would be a disaster, just as bad as any state-run economy (which in Bolivia often frustrates me to no end). It has to do with a public resource that cannot be privatized - the effectiveness of BT toxins on the European corn borer.

The crops in question, called BT corn, have bacterial genes spliced into their DNA that cause the plants to make toxins that kill certain insects when they feed on the crop... [resistance] would not only render the crops ineffective but would hurt organic farmers who use sprays of bacterial BT toxins as natural pesticides.

To stave off such resistance, E.P.A. requires farmers in the Corn Belt to plant 20 percent of their fields with non-BT corn to serve as a refuge for insects. The idea is that if an insect becomes impervious to the BT toxin, it is likely to mate with a nonresistant insect from the refuge, and the offspring would not be resistant...

The article has pointed out farmers are becoming less compliant with the restriction, and the threat of BT-resistance looms.

The solution? There has to be some type of government intervention in the market. Libertarians hate this word, but it is nothing new - human societies have always had methods of social control. Doing otherwise would lead to a quick developing of resistance in the pest organisms, because they evolve, and they move from field to field, not respecting private property rights. Maximizing our own individual profits leads to mutually-assured destruction.

Does government intervention always lead to socially-optimal outcomes? Of course not. Politians make stupid regulations. They put special interests over obvious, more general interests. Feedback is not welcomed. Ideology triumphs over science.

But where intervention is inherently necessary, the right incentives can and should be put into place. Where feedback is welcomed, the science is consulted, and politicians make the right decision. Will it always happen? History tells us plainly that it does not.

But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater because it's not perfectly clean.

...

(Andy Revkin has more on the DotEarth blog, pointing out that non-GMO farmers reap the residual benefits of having GMO neighbors by keeping a lower overall pest population. The conventional seeds, in turn, provide a refuge of non-resistant pests for interbreeding, thus delaying the day of reckoning.)

june article wrap-up

2011-06-26T05:00:00.000-04:00

here's what I've been reading this month:

The Anthropocene: A Man-made world - Science is recognizing humans as a geological force to be reckoned with (The Economist)

Jon Stewart, God, Science, Mutant Fish, and a Plea for Reason by Adam Frank on the 13.7 NPR blog, and see the accompanying links near the beginning. I was going to blog it, but I couldn't think of anything to add.

who said it? #125 should we tolerate the intolerant? a paradox

2011-06-23T05:00:00.005-04:00

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against teh onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival or the slave trade, as criminal.

-Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, quoted in chapter 1 of Chris Hedges' American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America

So what in the world do we do about this? --> Christian foster couple lose 'homosexuality views' case (BBC)

how to think in metric

2011-06-21T05:00:00.007-04:00

It's something of a constant challenge down here, even for a math nerd like me (I like math... though I'm not necessary great at it. And I've forgotten most everything from calculus.) I need to get this up in my office...

war - what is it good for?

2011-06-19T05:00:00.016-04:00

Over a year ago, a Facebook friend posted a note defending the notion of war. More specifically, defending war as carried out by the U.S., for which it "has always been a last choice." I was not so certain, and responded with this:

I am not a pacifist, personally. I'm too violent and vengeful and I right wrongs with my own two hands. But there is a long, detailed, and documented history of people in power lying to those they are ruling during war time (which seems especially troubling in a democracy). Also interesting is that in war time individual freedoms appear to be restricted the most (muffling the press, spying on protesters, conscription, economic rationing, etc). The more abstract and large the enemy (war against an entire nation vs. stopping 1 murderer), the more "justice" turns into mob violence. The sad fact remains that the U.S., a democracy, has supported many dictators and despots to achieve... somebody's interests (I know not who - there are many creative claims), but certainly not for world peace or liberty. The other side of the coin in saving many Jews from the Germans is that we had to very plainly use terrorism in bombing many civilian populations (Vonnegut famously documents the bombing of Dresden, Germany; Howard Zinn likely annihilated French citizens from 25,000 ft, and of course, Nagasaki and Hiroshima). How can we claim any sort of humanitarian mission if we so readily accept "collateral damage" of the people we intend to save? Let's not talk about liberating Iraqi's - let's be courageous and say that we were there to save our tail from supposed WMDs and we simply have to accept that Iraqi children have to die in order to attempt to reduce the threat to our own. (Oddly, we are asked to forget our self-interest taught in the marketplace and switch to others-interest to defend liberty and spread democracy).

I feel sad for any friends and family in the military who have died or suffered to serve someone else's perverted purpose, because they are very often well-meaning, compassionate, and trying to do right in the world (just as there are some in gov't with similar nobility but helpless against the greater forces). I wish them the best, but it's hard to hope.

To sum, the closer I am to the situation, the more I believe I could rightly divine what is a "just" act of violence (Christ have mercy). In this sense, I agree with you that all violence is not equal. But the concentration and scope of political and economic power in the world puts my judgment at risk. Better to err on the side of not killing my neighbor. I would like to think (!) this is humbly admitting that I don't have enough information to be confident enough to kill some man and his family. Thus I suppose I'll probably be against almost any war.

Perhaps I should, as you've suggested, extend grace to my leaders or the "system" [as differentiated from the idea of democracy, the idea of all (Iraqi, Bolivian, U.S.) men (& women, black and white, land-owning or no) created equal]. But just as extending grace to a murderer doesn't mean you don't put her in jail, it doesn't extend to me taking orders to kill for reasons I can't (or won't be permitted to) understand.

After he responded this comment, I finished with this:

I think modern industrial war probably fits mob violence by analogy. In Bolivia, for example, mob violence is still pretty common. Folks get lynched, beaten, tortured without a fair trial and often on false information (the bloody pictures are on today's front pages). The greater the mob, the worse and less-just the reprisal. The greater the "world war" the quicker we are able to rationalize mass murder of civilians in order to... save civilians. To torture in order to prevent torture, bomb to promote peace, etc. I think your insight on the Quakers is right on (at least the more orthodox type, not the kind that have oatmeal factories) - they don't act on the "world scene" nor do they wish to or, really, need to. That is something those of us who carry out conversations and debates on Facebook call "unrealistic".

free Josh Garrels album

2011-06-18T19:50:00.000-04:00

... and after listening, I'm sure you'll want to tip (there's an option for there).

Head over to NoiseTrade for Love & War & the Sea In Between.

just wondering...

2011-06-17T05:00:00.000-04:00

What would a U.S. American reaction be?

If a elite Mexican military team covertly landed a chopper on a skyscraper in San Diego, dropped into an apartment and assassinated a wanted Columbian drug warload, grabbed the body & any available computers, leaving some women and children injured, then flew back to Mexico.

Just wondering... what would you feel like?

Christian Science Test - FAIL

2011-06-14T05:00:00.001-04:00

This was just too funny not to pass along... (for better view, right click + "view image" + zoom)

blog re:design. feedback?

2011-06-11T11:38:00.000-04:00

I spent about 3 hours of my Saturday morning fiddling around, trying to get the mountain picture right and all. Does it look ok in other browsers?

Post-baby I think I'll look back on this free time and laugh. Or cry.

who said it? .124. cancerous ideology

2011-06-11T05:00:00.015-04:00

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

-Edward Abbey

who said it? .123. give us this day our daily off-shore tax haven

2011-06-07T05:00:00.006-04:00

Mr Buffett, who runs the investment group Berkshire Hathaway and is widely regarded as the world’s most successful investor, said that he was a Democrat because Republicans are more likely to think: “I’m making $80 million a year – God must have intended me to have a lower tax rate.”

In "Buffett blasts system that lets him pay less tax than secretary" (2007)

must read: "Science Deniers: Hand Over Your Cell Phones!"

2011-06-05T05:00:00.001-04:00

This NPR post (from the 13.7 blog) sums up neatly what I've been thinking for awhile.

And this Onion article was simply too hilarious not to pass along...

a gay-marriage solution: end marriage?

2011-06-03T05:00:00.001-04:00

So questions this TIME article.

The beautiful part to me is that the two authors behind such a proposal - taking marriage away from the gov't - voted different ways on the CA Prop 8 vote in 2008.

The other compelling aspect is that "Christian" governments used to hold records of baptisms and such. We now see these as the exclusive domain of the church. Shoot, I even got baptized twice! Do we really wants governments telling us when and how we should be baptized? It's worth noting that Christianity has not collapsed since governments took their hands off the rite of baptism, and we now consider this normative.

The more important question for Christians, I've always thought, is what the Church thinks about marriage. Not some government that is here today, gone in a century or two. And not especially one so explicitly non-religious and pluralistic as ours. Which is, by the way, a good arrangement. If you want religious fascism, try Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia. Try Europe centuries ago when kings wielded religious and political power inseparably and people slaughtered each other over doctrine (or at least they were told as much). If you want to fight for your religious power, move to Nigeria in the border lands between Muslims and Christians.

Anyway, I'm tired of fighting. Let's lay down our swords.

who said it? .122. why the Japanese will recover quickly

2011-05-30T05:00:00.011-04:00

Such social order and discipline are so enforced in ordinary times that I
think it's very easy for Japanese to kind of continue in the manner that
they're accustomed to, even under an emergency.

The communitarian spirit at the foundation of Japanese culture seems to
function even more efficiently under the stress of disaster, he said.
The natural American inclination is to operate independently.

So you do everything you can to protect your own interests with the
understanding that, in a rather free-market way, everybody else is going to
do the same. And that order will come out of this sort of invisible hand.

And Japanese don't function that way. Order is seen as coming from the
group and from the community as a sort of evening out of various individual
needs.

Got this in an e-mail forward... tracked part of it down on this blog.

Perhaps another reason why the extreme-Western-individualism-is-the-only-path-to-prosperity model is not what it's cracked up to be.

my father's first-hand experience with climate and change

2011-05-28T05:00:00.000-04:00

I sent my father an article by 350.org leader Bill McKibben. It's a sarcastic take on the latest tornado disaster in MO, in that we shouldn't even think about coming close to blaming global warming for this. Andy Revkin, an environment writer at the NYT who I see as a rather cool-headed voice, doesn't quite agree with the tone. Either way, I sent it to my father to see what he thought. He's conservative culturally and politically and has been in agriculture for more years than I've been alive. I tend to think I'm pretty well informed because of my obsessive web-browsing, but he's got a lifetime of observed, on the ground experience and I wanted to tap into that wisdom. He gave me this reply:

Adam,

I think I remember over my 59 years that almost every year there is a drought somewhere in the US and there has been some flooding as well. Now this year might be a little worst and I do believe there is some connection to all the human activity on earth and the global warming. I know for a fact that the corn varieties for a certain maturity have crept north over the last few decades.

The weather has been bad this year. Over 300 killed in a tornado break out in Alabama a couple of weeks ago. Two nights ago in Joplin, Missouri 122 people were killed in one night with 700 injured, last night another 8 or 9 killed. Today most of Illinois and Indiana are under Tornado Watches and we just had a Tornado Warning in Benton county which is just east of here about ½ hour ago. Tornado on the ground west of Hoopeston.

We change a lot of small things in the world all the time without really thinking about it. Emerald ash borer has now killed thousands of trees north of here. What impact will that have? That little bug came from China on wooden pallets sent to Chicago some time back.

The flooding of the Mississippi has been really bad this year as the core of Engineers have had to blow up some levees which flooded over a million acres of farm land which was already planted. This was done to save some cities from being flooded. Maybe we shouldn’t live so close to the River?

We to must learn to adapt to our climate change. I think we need to learn to all be a little more environment friendly. The government will have to mandate some of this because there are so many people that don’t care. People usually get on the band wagon once it starts to affect their pocket books.

Oh well.

DAD

the best summary I've seen on why young-earth creationism is dead...

2011-05-26T05:00:00.001-04:00

... or at least intellectually dead. So claims this Butler University prof in "Creationism's Cartoon Physics." YEC remains alive in many Evangelical circles, but my own experience is such that most people don't bother to really examine the evidence. I think most Christians would eventually reject it, and without losing their faith too. Or at least I hope so. Anyway, the blog post is brief, and honest. Definitely worth a short read.

who said it? .121. is evolution a random process?

2011-05-22T23:00:00.001-04:00

The point being made in this clip is that the scientific definition of randomness does not imply that something is is open-ended and purposeless. The evolutionary process is an efficient search algorithm optimizing for specific functions. In fact, the evolutionary process follows well defined roads and paths constrained by the nature of chemistry and physics. Not everything is possible, there are a limited number of possible solutions, stable points in biological space. There is no reason to conclude that evolution demonstrates that we are accidents of nature.

From the Jesus Creed blog, describing this video in this post.

college graduation

2011-05-10T05:00:00.000-04:00

Four years ago this April I graduated from university. Just as much time since college as during college. Haven't really accomplished anything, not that I necessarily expected to, but I think I've learned a lot at least. I was cleaning out an old e-mail address and found this note from an older friend who congratulated me on my accomplishment. He was in seminary and is now a pastor. Some readers will know instantly who it is :)

...

Adam,
Congratulations on graduation.
This is a big achievement.
And people will tell you that they are proud
But this is not more important than your baptism.
Find the tactics that work for you
and in your own little way, change the world.
And unlike the the other 85% of your class
try not to make a capitalist asshole of yourself.
I'm proud of you.
God bless.

measuring up the great chinese famine

2011-05-06T05:00:00.000-04:00

Sometimes it's incredibly hard to put big things (or small, or numerous, etc) into perspective. Galaxies, light speed, genocide, attributes of God.

I was reading Development as Freedom when I came across a mention of the Great Chinese Famine of 1958-61 (the "Great Leap Forward"). I read that some 30 million Chinese died - easily the world's greatest famine... a tragedy that rivals WWII, which left 40-70 million dead - with most dead being civilian women and children, I'm almost certain, not strong men 18-24 years old. These are easily in the top 10 human tragedies, and largely our own fault. The Chinese famine is largely blamed on the failure of compulsory collective farming. Imagine - it was supposed to be communism's greatest triumph!

People often question God for natural disasters... I am most inclined to question how humanity can far more demonic than tectonic plates or flowing lava.

So here are a few observations I made to help my mind make scale of this incredible tragedy:

*Imagine everyone in the most populous U.S. state - California - starving to death. Every man, woman, and child slowly perishing from malnutrition and disease.

*Imagine that this happened when my parents were in grade school.

*In the last year of the famine, the President of another country on planet earth announced plans to mobilize massive amounts of resources to put humans on the moon, an inhospitable rock about 400,000 km away.

*If the fatalities were averaged out over three years, that was one person starving to death every 3 seconds.

And, of course, when numbers fail, words and experience and poetry are about all we have left:

In Xinyang, people starved at the doors of the grain warehouses. As they died, they shouted, "Communist Party, Chairman Mao, save us". If the granaries of Henan and Hebei had been opened, no one need have died. As people were dying in large numbers around them, officials did not think to save them. Their only concern was how to fulfill the delivery of grain.

...

In the second half of 1959, I took a long-distance bus from Xinyang to Luoshan and Gushi. Out of the window, I saw one corpse after another in the ditches. On the bus, no one dared to mention the dead. In one county, Guangshan, one-third of the people had died. Although there were dead people everywhere, the local leaders enjoyed good meals and fine liquor. ... I had seen people who had told the truth being destroyed. Did I dare to write it?

...

I went to one village and saw 100 corpses, then another village and another 100 corpses. No one paid attention to them. People said that dogs were eating the bodies. Not true, I said. The dogs had long ago been eaten by the people.

Life in the 20th century was in many ways much better than before, but there were some really crazy times. The first decade of the 21st has nothing on it.

...

More perspective, on something much different: marathons. Haile Gebrselese holds the official men's record at 2 hrs, 3 min, and 59 seconds (although someone on a downhill course w/ a tailwind just ran 2:03:02). Gebrselese's pace was 4:44 / mile. That's exactly the speed of the fasted mile I've ever run, on a rubber track, when I was probably in the best running shape of my life around 17-18 years old. He wasn't any faster than me... he just did it 26.2 times longer than I did :)

Time to hit the track again!

rambling e-mail on oil, economics, and politics

2011-05-02T05:00:00.001-04:00

Because I invested so much time in this e-mail, I figured I might as well put it on the blog for comments/reflections. I'm not going to spell check or make links. The first (lightly edited) section is a link + commentary by my engineering-and-science-wise father-in-law, soliciting my thoughts (which follow). He should have known better...

Hi Adam,-

Below (way at the bottom of the page) is a link to an article at NPR - hydrogen fuel cell cars - I thought you might be interested - maybe you have already seen it.

It is interesting that there is an industry that has the vision to promote and invest in this technology - and it takes just one government official to determine that it is a "non-starter" and so does not merit the government support that other technology receives - as if there is harm in having more than one option.

Of course our vice president states that battery powered cars require no energy - just install the batteries - and there you go; no associated environmental impact either. I think that the politicians (leaders really) of a few decades ago had the wisdom to know that they needed the advice of the scientific and technological communities. I not so sure about the politicians of today.

Hopefully the exposure that this gets on NPR will at least increase awareness. Regardless the cost and efficiency of producing battery and hybrid cars - that should not be the end of the story - just one step to cleaner running cars and elimination of dependence on foreign oil.

Do you have a perspective on this?

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/19/135518929/automakers-try-to-sell-government-on-fuel-cell-cars

Me:

This touches a fundamental economic/political question, on which libertarianism will stand or fall: should the government ever pick winners or losers? The mainstream answer is Yes. And after I got over my libertarian brainwashing by the IWU econ department, I agree. There is plenty of room within that answer, obviously, for discussion. There are negative externalities of some activities that require a 3rd party w/ enforcement power to intervene (the most obvious is pollution). There are national-interest concerns (our oil-dependence on anti-democratic regimes that abuse their own people) that are negatively affected by our individual freedom to choose our own path thus the argument to restrict oil use in the U.S. to a certain degree to decrease our involvement in military affairs abroad or avoid social chaos (and martial law) in the event of a oil crisis. There are natural monopolies where competitors cannot simply come and go in the market every year (you can't have a competing waste water company tearing up the street just to put it their sewage line, same w/ public roads, electric utilities). The natural monopoly issue deals w/ infrastructure, and it might not be possible to have natural gas and fuel cell and gasoline and electric charging stations for cars (unless you had a super energy station w/ everything... even Polar Pops!). But we should at least try all of the above, especially in early stages. My understanding w/ hydrogen fuel cells (from my chem prof who worked w/ the Dept of Energy for years) is that they have not been as promising as electric battery technology, but I may be wrong on this. Eventually, some gov't bureaucrat has to look at the data and decide what to fund. This doesn't exclude private investors from going in a different direction, however, which apparently Honda has done to some degree.

Will the gov't always pick rightly? Of course not. There are special interests, people w/ extra political clout, more money (thus more "votes"). To me, this does not eliminate the need for gov't (libertarian), it just shows that it must be more transparent, more science- and fact-based, have more cost-benefit analyses, be more engaging with public interests. Abuse and misuse of power (not to mention hypocrisy) in the church doesn't mean that I don't need the church.

I didn't hear it in the article linked, but that our vice-president could be so ignorant in the ways of basic science is perhaps a sad reflection of the state of science-ed in the U.S. Ideally, they would at least excel in listening to the right experts for the right situations, then go about coming to an agreement (that's their specialty - the art of compromise). Obama picked Dr. Chu right out of the gate, and my impression from the science community was that they were trilled. He does have a Nobel Prize in physics. Whether his expertise is reflective of a administration-wide stance I have no clue. My bible prof's understanding (registered Republican) was that several of his picks were a departure from officials in the Bush administration who seemed to come out with findings / policy suggestions that were more ideological than fact-based (i.e. well-documented and obvious tampering w/ gov't climate change research/statements). But then again perhaps now Chu is ideologically in favor of renewables. (Here's his 13min interview on Fox News that I"m downloading now to watch).

In sum, I think we need a leader to say this: "yes, we need to get off of fossil fuels for a million reasons (environmental, economic, security, etc), and the drill-baby-drill folks are pulling a sleight-of-hand b/c oil is an international commodity and the U.S. no longer controls the supply or demand side of the equation (it's not your father's 1950's anymore). Int'l supply has largely flattened and the developing world's demand is straight up. Period. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not doing math. There is not a nougaty center of oil at the center of the earth. We are going to explore all the options and employ them in an economic, democratic, and urgent way." (bonus: they could do all this without ever mentioning climate change).

The most intriguing idea I've heard is setting a floor price for oil (maintained by a tax that is triggered when it falls below that price). An extra tax with already $4/gal gas is impossible (I remember Hilary and McCain floating a gas tax holiday in early '08. Suicide for our tax-funded infrastructure). But every time oil prices crash again (after gouging us first), all the alternative plans get defunded (private sector) and everyone goes back to Hummers. If the private sector had the stability of knowing they only had to beat $3 or $3.50/gal gas, they could invest w/ confidence. If international prices fall to the equivalent $2.50/gal, the $1 tax could be used, say 50% for fed alt energy research and 50% for federal debt reduction (to get GOP votes). But that would require voters and politicians who had memories super to goldfish.

Oh lord... I think way too much about things I have no control over...

=adam=

Then he links to an article that shows U.S. consumers' incessant demand for large vehicles, even at high gas prices, and explains that we do, in fact, need that space and power to live the American lifestyle. Then I respond...

My libertarian prof suggested that the CAFE standards are the wrong tool for the job. I.e. they're aren't as effective as they could be at reduce oil usage (the proported goal). Due to the averaging, you could sell 10,000 40 mpg compact cars and 100,000 20 mpg vans and get a 30 mpg average, although the actual fleet (# of vehicles would be much closer to 20).

He suggested (for this goal) eliminating CAFE and simply adding a tax on gasoline, then letting producers and consumers choose which vehicles to purchase. Sounds fine too. But as it is it seems CAFE is pushing production in the right direction without seriously limiting individual choice (there are still plenty of big vehicles on the market and they seem to be more efficient than decades past).

I read that the Nissan Leafs were all being produced in Japan for now. It does seem strange that tax payers are giving $7,500 credit for foreign-produced merchandise. If they built a plant here (which they may be planning to - don't know) then maybe it's another story using American parts/labor and maybe engineering. Tesla will be coming out w/ their all-electric Model S sedan too, which will qualify for the credit. But I question the wisdom in giving such a large tax credit for a $57,000+ vehicle. Esp. if it doesn't have the chance of going mainstream (which the Leaf and Volt will be priced to do sooner). At ~$25,000 after the tax credit, the Leaf is already positioned for 2-3 car middle/upper-middle class families with one dedicated commuting vehicle, once the lifetime gas savings are factored in.

Our biggest challenge is, perhaps, that we are a large, still sparsely populated country with sprawling infrastructure. We don't get the huge gains in public transit that Europe can (which is why we use literally 2x the energy per capita for a lifestyle that isn't demonstrably 2x "better"). Thus, if I want to take my kids to Yellowstone (some day...) I'll probably have to fly or drag a minivan towing a camper for thousands of miles... all to teach them the beauty of God's creation and why we should be steward of it :) or maybe we'll just hit the U.P...

Oh jeez... will I ever shut up? Then there is the israeli Shai Agassi's Better Place business plan to provide an electric car infrastructure (TED talk here). Home & work charging (even 240/480 V) will not be enough to make a dent in oil demand and eliminate the range anxiety of electric. He has designed an under-the-car battery-exchange that takes less time than a gas fill-up. He wants to separate ownership of car w/ ownership of the battery, which you would rent (just like you don't own the oil infrastructure - you just buy the energy when you need it). The business then assumes all risk for maintenance and recharging, and you pay a subscription fee only.

who said it? .120. Christian values, pluralistic reality

2011-04-29T05:00:00.005-04:00

But make no mistake, the US government operates on the basis of a social contract between everyone living here, which includes many non-Christians. No law or policy that is specifically Christian--and not generally beneficial--will stand the test of time. This is why the entire Christian lobby against gay marriage will eventually fail and probably is, in my suspicion, a waste of energy, an exercise in futility.

-Ken Schenck blog post, "Bible, Christians, and Government" May 2010

domestic oil production under Obama at highlest level in 7 years

2011-04-27T07:06:00.003-04:00

(click for larger view)

Just in case anyone was thinking of blaming our Commander-in-Chief for high gas prices.

Then again... if you feel the need to blame any one person for the high price of one of the most internationally produced & demanded commodities... then you have other issues. Like your ability to do math, maybe.

I'll be posting a long e-mail rant May 2...

repost from Boliving: phone company "tricks" and the ethical foundation of markets (and/or capitalism)

2011-04-26T07:25:00.000-04:00

I wasn't sure what blog to post this reflection on, so I posted it on my BoLiving blog and re-linked here.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

2011-04-24T21:31:00.000-04:00

Tax season has come and gone again. And for the second year in a row, I didn't pay any federal income tax. My income, more than sufficient in a country like Bolivia, is barely enough to survive on in Marion, IN, so the various deductions and exemptions bring my liability to zero. In fact, I'll be getting a check because of the Making Work Pay law from the stimulus. No complaining here.

Recently, A Tea Party friend (God Bless him) began his annual posting of federal income tax statistics, presumably to show how much the rich are suffering and how the poor are getting off scot-free. Instead of starting a useless Facebook commenting frenzy, I thought I'd write something more comprehensive, cool-headed, and fact-based here.

And the statistics are pretty eye-opening. No sources listed, but I've seen these many times before and they're more or less accurate. 47% of households pay no income tax at all (2009). The top 1% ($380,000) pay 38% of all income tax. The top 10% ($114,000) pay 69%.

As it has been observed, there are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics. So I'll offer my take... and offer more statistics, of course. Even if they are all technically "facts," they need to be put in context. Without which they are merely ungainly tools used to club ideological opponents.

My first observation is that of course there will be income tax payment inequality, because of the huge amount of income equality. Slate.com has an incredible and comprehensive analysis on the "Great Divergence" that shows the increasing inequality since WWII. The top 1% make 24% of the wealth. "From 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percent of total increase in American's income went to the top 1%." The rich are taxed more, it is obviously true, but it's not as much as it seems when only looking at the tax-side of the equation.

My next comment is that all workers who are above the table pay federal taxes (just not federal income taxes). The semantic distinction matters little, since either way it comes from one's income. 6.2% of wages go to Social Security (although the employee-portion was lowered for 2011 to 4.2% in order to ~~make the deficit larger~~ get Democrats to agree to tax cuts for the wealthy). Unlike the income tax, this federal tax is actually regressive because income above $106,800 is not subject to the 6.2%. Thus, someone making $1 million pays an effective Social Security tax of 0.6%. There is also 1.45% taken out for Medicare. Employers have to match these amounts, so this is essentially counted as a cost of hiring employees. That brings the combined tax rate to 15.3% (13.3% for 2011 only). Again, the fact here is a somewhat regressive taxation for federal programs.

The guilt-prone poor and middle-class (me) can also stop feeling sorry for taking all the deductions and credits we get for paying rent, saving for retirement, or having a children when we realize that the rich use all the same (legal) tricks. "How to Pay No Taxes" in BussinessWeek (no - not "The Hippie Socialist Times" - BusinessWeek) shows that tax conditions for the rich have probably never been better. The effective tax rate for the richest 400 Americans dropped from 30 to 17% from 1995 to 2007 (see image, but warning - these facts are displayed on a liberal website - thus immediately suspect). For the top 1% it also dropped - from 29% to 23% in 2008. Yes, the top 400 actually have a lower effective tax rate than the next 1.4 million people. Yes, Warren Buffett pays less taxes (%) than his secretary!

The most potent argument from my friend is that nearly half of household don't pay any federal income tax. In order for people to feel they have a stake in the government, perhaps more people should probably pay this tax. The 2010 tax brackets are 10, 15, 25, 33, and 35%. I would guess that most household's marginal tax rate falls in the 10 or 15% range. You could imagine a situation where the tax base could be expanded (eliminating/simplifying certain deductions, exemptions, and credits) and adding a new lowest tax rate of 3-5%. To get Democratic votes for the proposal of this more right-winged idea, go back to a still-historically-low highest marginal tax rate of around 40%, only applicable to millionaires (the 35% bracket starts at $379,150 for married couples filing jointly in 2010). Yes, it's a tax increase for nearly everyone, but you could sell it as a deficit/federal debt repayment scheme. But then again, the American public nor their elected representatives seem to understand that a balanced budget includes both income and expenses, and you can't reasonably expect to pay for $14.3 trillion in national debt only with cuts. Maybe that's why the U.S. is behind 24 other countries in math, including China. Yikes.

Not that anyone with any real power is listening to this... just my small attempt at reason.

who said it? .119. the beginning of the end. perhaps.

2011-04-21T05:00:00.001-04:00

“People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.”

U.S. Transportation Secretary (!) Ray LaHood, 11 March 2010. CNSNews.com

increase domestic production, improve fuel efficiency, invest in clean energy alternatives, and reduce oil imports by one third, BABY, increase domestic production, improve fuel efficiency, invest in clean energy alternatives, and reduce oil imports by one third!

2011-04-17T20:51:00.000-04:00

(previously posted on Facebook...)

Simplicity is beautiful... but not always.

The best example I've seen yet that shows how rational, common-sense, sophisticated solutions to our complex world problems don't get far in the political realm. But perhaps that says more about the electorate than anything...

possibly the funniest Colbert video ever - no joke

2011-04-12T12:52:00.000-04:00

The Colbert Report

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the Lord's Libertarian Prayer

2011-04-06T07:16:00.001-04:00

I just stumbled upon "The Lord Keynes Prayer" by my old econ prof. So in the spirit of fun & creativity, thought I'd do the reverse and imagine what a libertarian must be praying... I imagine there could be other versions floating around the internet (UPDATE: I found one), but I wanted to write mine first so I wouldn't steal their lines. And before you post a comment urging me to re-take ECON101, just remember that this is something like satire, an obvious exaggeration & poking-fun of another's viewpoint.

Our Friedman, who art with Mises,
Hallowed be thy government-free utopia.
Your ever-expanding economy come,
our rational, self-maximizing will be done,
in reality as it is in your grand theories.
Give us this day our daily tax cuts,
and forgive us our acts of charity,
as we forgive those who mindlessly try to act out of compassion.
And lead us not into the slightest government intervention,
but deliver us from regulation.
For yours is the Invisible Hand, the Gross Domestic Product, and the Self-Interest,
Forever and ever,
Amen

This could obviously be much improved upon, as it simply came to my mind at 6 am as I was waking.

What lines could I change? What other Lord's Prayers should we make up?

a budget compromise solution for the U.S.

2011-03-26T05:00:00.000-04:00

Naive, uninformed, and arm-chair, but here it goes.

Tea Partiers want absolute cuts to shrink gov't down to size immediately. As gov't spending does make up a substantial part of the economy (some businesses and non-profits actually count on it), immediate, drastic cuts could threaten recovery and leave vital services lacking. Not to mention critical, public investments that are non-controversial outside of Tea Party-land: health, environment, NASA, roads, science, energy etc.

Many liberals want to keep expanding - a public option for healthcare, more social security, more international military adventures, etc. With some $14.2 trillion in national debt and no end in sight, expansion isn't exactly an option either.

So what about a spending freeze? Sure, Obama proposed a 3-yr freeze last year, but it was almost meaningless. It exempted entitlements and military (among others), which make up about 88% of the budget. But I mean a real freeze. Frozen until the gov't runs a budget surplus, and continued until the deficit is paid down. No budging. Inflation will slowly reduce the purchasing power for each department; these are de facto budget cuts, 1-3% a year. The point is that there will be cuts, but they will be made gradually - easier for businesses, individuals, families, and gov't departments to adjust to. Once we are finally debt-free (ha!), then we can have a real conversation about what gov't programs need funding increases.

To have a reasonable shot at paying off $14.2 trilliion (~$47,000 per citizen), we can't cut revenue either. No tax cuts. The fact that congress didn't take the easiest low-hanging fruit of the budget solution, raising billions of dollars by letting the marginal tax rate rise 3.6% (to former levels, which were still historically low) on the top 2% of tax payers, is a sign that they don't want to face the hard math, looking at both income & expenditures. It would be a huge step towards a solution, the "shared sacrifice" that people are talking about, but unfortunately it's done and gone now.

This can be tweaked too, depending on whose vote is needed. If you need to convince some more aggressive cutters, you could maintain the freeze minus cuts to a few programs that have bi-partisan critics, like farm subsidies. The military, IMHO, has a small return on investment for the huge amounts that we spend. By some calculations (including the lingering expenses for past wars, for example), it accounts for 48% of our budget now. I seriously imagine you could cut half the military budget (phased in over 5 years) and still protect our 50 states from clear and present danger (although not all the bogeymen, of course). For added flexibility, you could cap just the total federal budget, then let different interests/departments fight it out for funding. Or fix the budget of only general areas (energy, defense, health) and allow resources to be distributed where needed.

Ok, so perhaps not the best of solutions. And it may need some tweaking to become politically possible. But everything I've heard so far doesn't seem to have much of a chance either (i.e. down the gov't in a bathtub, or keep spending until our entire gov't defaults).

Thoughts?

"U.S. Launches Missle Strikes on Libya"

2011-03-23T10:48:00.000-04:00

UPDATE: 3/23... No se preocupen, Tea Partiers, Democrats always find the status quo when it comes to the military. This picture sums it up quite well.

UPDATE: 3/22/11 A quick look at the difference between candidate Obama (quoted here) & President Obama...

"The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.
As Commander-in-Chief, the President does have a duty to protect and defend the United States. In instances of self-defense, the President would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent."

Whoops.

...

NPR reports.

My gut reaction is, "Good! Take out the bad guy, and let the Libyan people pick their leader."

Let's hope so, but these days I doubt it.

Lest we forget Vietnam, Somalia, Nicaragua, Iraq, and Afghanistan to name a few places of U.S. intervention gone wrong. The human reaction is always to "do something." No matter how messy, morally gray, or the mountain of conflicts of interest, hypocrisy, and government secretes. No matter if we're fighting against weapons that were manufactured in the U.S. No matter if most of our citizens & even military service members couldn't even place the country on a map, much less know the language, climate, religion, culture, or history.

In 2003, as a high schooler who absorbed the political & religious climate around me, I was all for a "surgical" removal of a bad guy in a strange, ancient dessert.

In 2011, I'm just shaking my head. And praying that I'm wrong. Praying for peace. Praying for the strength to love my enemies.

...

UPDATES

*For a tragic/comedic takes on the military-industrial-sell-to-future-enemies complex, check out Colbert's The Word, "Economic Boom."

*The latest take (not optimistic, but hopeful) from development economist William Easterly. I've read a couple of his books & enjoyed them.

*An excerpt from a BBC article...

What's the difference between Libya and Yemen or Bahrain?
All three states have been using violence to crush pro-democracy protests.
But only against Libya are the US and its Western allies planning a military response.
Yemen and Bahrain's crackdowns have so far been met only with words, not action.
On one level the answer is obvious.
Bahrain and Yemen are US allies - especially Bahrain with its large US naval base. Libya is not.
The US response to Bahrain is further complicated by neighbouring Saudi Arabia, Washington's number one Arab ally.

who said it? .118. beyond Bed, Bath, & Beyond

2011-03-16T20:05:00.001-04:00

“[Younger evangelicals] also understand that human flourishing means a healthy natural environment. And it simply isn’t good for ourselves or for our neighbors live in a world that is completely paved over and in which every piece of green land is replaced with a Bed, Bath, and Beyond. That’s not how God designed human beings to live.”

Dr. Russell Moore, Dean of School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
on NPR's "An Evangelical Crusade to Go Green with God" (June 2010)

my blog is getting sloppy...

another crack in the libertarian profit-at-all-cost economic model...

2011-02-26T05:00:00.002-05:00

NPR's Planet Money blog points to this important YouTube video explaining what really motivates employees.

Again, the days of casino capitalism, of rational self-maximizing human automatons, of GDP-as-ultimate-reality are coming to a close. Let's look to the future instead of dwelling in the 90's...

volterra's principle (pests and predators)

2011-02-22T05:00:00.000-05:00

I read about this idea in a Barbara Kingsolver novel - Prodigal Summer - and thought it was fascinating. There is probably more depth to it, but here's the basics:

Volterra's principle states that "An intervention in a prey-predator system that removes prey and predators in proportion to their population increases prey populations."

The character in the novel that broaches the issue is an organic farmer. As a background, we can assume that the pest species of concern to the farmer also has natural predators can keep the population in check, even if they are an invasive species. She notes that by spraying an indiscriminate pesticide, both the prey (the pest species) and predator are mostly eliminated. However, because predators always consume a large number of prey individuals, their numbers have been disproportionately reduced, and the prey population (the pest you're trying to eliminate) undergoes a population explosion.

Oops.

I think this is what organic farmers mean when they say they work with the natural systems, not against them with overly simplistic solutions (bombs away! kill all living things with our chemical cocktail!).

Now if it were so obviously futile to spray pesticides, farmers wouldn't continue to do it. So there is more to the story. But I'm betting farmers wouldn't have to spray as much if our system didn't encourage such extreme simplicity in the form of the corn/soy monoculture that dominates the Midwest. Sounds like a great breading ground for super-bugs (pesticide-resistant). Someday we'll realize we can never "win" the battle "versus" nature. We'll have to play the game of evolution the best we can, wiggle in some roots, and make our home here.

who said it? .117. the most urgent question

2011-02-18T05:00:00.000-05:00

Probably the most urgent question now faced by people who would adhere to the Bible is this: What sort of economy would be responsible to the holiness of life? What, for Christians, would be the economy, the practices and the restraints, of "right livelihood"? I do not believe that organized Christianity now has any idea. I think its idea of a Christian economy is no more or less than the industrial economy - which is an economy firmly founded upon the seven deadly sins and the breaking of all ten of the Ten Commandments.

-Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays, p. 99
found quoted in Jesus for President, by Shane Claiborne & Chris Haw, p. 191

get filthy rich... just be content

2011-02-14T05:00:00.002-05:00

Great story over at NPR (text & audio): "Why economists hate presents, and how 7th graders solved the problem" (4:36). The kids were randomly given different types of candy, and they ranked how much they liked it on a scale. The total happiness was measured by adding these ranks. Crude, but better than nothing. Then they were allowed to trade candies. Economics tells us that they would only trade if they thought it could improve their situation (better candy). Post-trade, the rankings for their own candies went up. The were happier.

The obvious take-away is that, all things equal, trading with others allows us to improve our lives.

The not so obvious take is perhaps this:
Each person's evaluation of the candy was subjective unto themselves. Most of them didn't "decide" to like a certain candy, they just do. Largely because of their taste buds and cleaver marketing I'd wager.

We don't always understand what makes us content, or especially why it does so. "I can't get no satisfaction" could be our national motto. Because despite unprecedented wealth, mobility, and market choices, we aren't unprecedentedly happy. Sure - we're obviously better off than societies with high infant mortality, no access to electricity, and and ruled by a dictatorial government. But what about communities that have reached a certain minimum of physical security... what's next? iPads, Hummers, and reality TV just don't seem to cut it.

Let me offer this unexciting suggestion: seek contentment.

If you are determined to enjoy the one candy bar you have, rather than think of the 7 new brands you don't, you've got it. You are demonstrably just as well off, or better, than you would have been chasing more candy.

So while markets can be (and have been) a great tool for improving the human condition, they have their limits. Exposing us to even more choices may even decrease our satisfaction by making us aware of all the things we can't have, all the places we can't travel to, all the things we can't be.

I think my grandparents called this perspective common sense. Today, you'd be labeled an apostate of the hyperindividualistic GDP-growth-at-all-costs cult.

You've been warned.

why wikileaks matters (by the nation)

2011-02-10T05:00:00.001-05:00

Reading a sample subscription of The Nation on my Nook. Here's the latest...

And as with earlier WikiLeaks bombshells—the massive Iraq and Afghanistan "war logs"—many critics in the media soon labeled the Cablegate revelations minor, old hat. Some of WikiLeaks' media partners, after a dozen days of heavy-duty reporting, severely reduced coverage of the cables...

For balance, then, it's important to review a small sample of what we have learned thanks to WikiLeaks since April and the release of the "Collateral Murder" US helicopter video, which showed the killing of two Reuters journalists, among others. It's necessary to do this because most in the US media, after brief coverage, provided little follow-up. Consider the scope of even this very limited list of revelations...

§ The Saudis, our allies, are among the leading funders of international terrorism. [my note: the U.S. gov't announced in October 2010 that they were selling them $60 billion in arms]
§ The scale of corruption in Afghanistan tops even the worst estimates. President Hamid Karzai regularly releases major drug dealers who have political connections. His half-brother is a major drug operator.
§ The Pentagon basically lied to the public in downplaying sectarian violence in Iraq. Our military handed over many detainees they knew would be tortured to the Iraqis. US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of torture and abuse by Iraqi police and military.
§ After the release of the Iraq logs, new tallies put the number of documented civilian casualties there at more than 100,000. The Afghanistan logs similarly showed many more civilians killed there than previously known, along with once-secret US assassination missions against insurgents.
§ The British government assured Washington that our interests would be protected in its "independent" public inquiry into the Iraq War.
§ The Pakistani government has allowed its intelligence unit to hold strategy sessions with the Taliban. Despite longstanding denials, the United States has indeed been conducting special ops inside Pakistan and taking part in joint operations with the Pakistanis.
§ The Yemenis have lied to their own people, taking credit for air attacks on militants in that country—but it was the United States that did the job. The Yemeni president gave us an "open door" to combat terrorism. Washington has secretly shipped arms to the Saudis for use in Yemen.
§ The Saudis, contrary to their public statements, want us to get even tougher vs. Iran. So do some other countries in the region—or so they say in private.
§ Our State Department asked our diplomats at the United Nations to spy on others, including the secretary general, even aiming to retrieve credit card numbers.
§ At last we got to read in full the historic 1990 memo from US Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the first Gulf War.
§ The Obama administration worked with Republicans to protect Bush officials who faced a criminal investigation in Spain for alleged torture.
§ Pope Benedict XVI impeded an investigation into alleged child sex abuse within the Catholic Church in Ireland.
§ Bribery and corruption mark the Boeing versus Airbus battle for plane sales. "United States diplomats were acting like marketing agents, offering deals to heads of state and airline executives whose decisions could be influenced by price, performance and, as with all finicky customers with plenty to spend, perks," the New York Times reported early this month.
§ Israel destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007.
§ US diplomats have been searching for countries that will take Guantánamo detainees, often bargaining with them; the receiving country might get a one-on-one meeting with Obama or some other perk.
§ Among several startling revelations about control of nuclear supplies: highly enriched uranium has been waiting in Pakistan for more than three years for removal by an American team.
§ The U.S. embassy in Paris advised Washington to start a military-style trade war against any European Union country which opposed genetically modified (GM) crops.
§ The British have trained a Bangladeshi paramilitary force that human rights organizations consider a "government death squad." ...

And there's another crucial aspect. "The reaction that the WikiLeaks episode most deserves has been the least evident," observes former British diplomat Carne Ross, who now runs the advisory group Independent Diplomat. "The picture of the world revealed in the cables demands a sober and informed reflection on the realities of policy-making.... The reactions to WikiLeaks share one abiding characteristic, so obvious that it can easily be overlooked, namely, an unwillingness to address with any sophistication or seriousness the complex and ever-changing world that the United States—and all of us—must now deal with. The prevailing and lazy assumption is implied but all too clear: that the foreign policy elite, and government, should be left to get on with the job, with whatever secrecy that they demand."

T. Rowe Price responds (re: Lockheed Martin + cluster bombs)

2011-02-04T05:00:00.002-05:00

Well, I thought I had done all my homework right, but I guess I get a B- after all. But anyway, mostly good news - the Capital Appreciation fund no longer owns Lockheed Martin stock, and Lockheed Martin doesn't exactly make cluster bombs (see below). I would be much happier investing in no weapons at all, but I didn't want TRP to dismiss me out of hand as one of those fanatical people that believe that the United States actually has a military-industrial complex that is out of control.

I appreciate and respect your commitment to choosing investments that are focused on the prosperity of others and improving their well being. I will be happy to discuss your concerns with the Capital Appreciation Fund and the investment in Lockheed Martin (LMT), and I want you to know that you are not the only investor who has contacted us to share their disapproval with our holding of this security. We agree that submunitions are unacceptable and have spoken with LMT about this issue directly. They informed us that submunitions are not products that they bring to market. Instead, they make a delivery system that has been adapted by certain end users to accommodate submunition-based weapons. Unfortunately, LMT does not have control over the end result of how these delivery systems have been adapted and used by their clients. We are monitoring this issue closely and taking these factors into consideration in our analysis of the risks associated with owning LMT in our funds.

That said, as of December 31, 2010, the Capital Appreciation Fund did not invest any assets in LMT. You can verify this at http://www.troweprice.com/caf. Click on the "Composition" tab followed by the "View the Complete Portfolio of Investments" link located in the upper, left-hand corner of the page. Lastly, select the appropriate Adobe Reader icon. It is important to consider that T. Rowe Price makes decisions with the best interests of our investors and stockholders in mind, and we believe this philosophy leads to our mutual success. With that said, we cannot guarantee that our funds, including the Capital Appreciation Fund, will not purchase LMT in the future or that our other funds will not continue to hold LMT as part of their portfolios.

Mr. Thada, I hope this information is helpful, and I was glad to learn that you have been impressed with our company. If you have any questions, please reply to this message or call a representative at 1-800-225-5132. Representatives are available Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. ET and Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET. We appreciate your business and hope that you will continue to invest with us.

Republican Jesus' Ten Commandments

2011-02-02T05:00:00.002-05:00

The Republican Jesus' Ten Commandments (original link here)

And Lo, did Republican Jesus come down among the masses and holding his tablet PC, did he give unto his disciples the NEW (and improved) Ten Commandments. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Socialism, out of the house of Communism.”

1. You shall have no other gods before me, especially that terrorist monkey god, Mohammed.[i]

2. You shall not make for yourself any carved image; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them except for the Holy Benjamins. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting poverty of the fathers on the children of those (those) who hate me, but showering material riches unto thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments. Also, you shall have guns. All you want.

3. You shall not take the name of your God, Ronald Reagan, in vain, for the Lord will hold him guiltless of treason and malfeasance.

4. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. If you are a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, six days you shall labor and do all your work, that should just about do it for the year[ii], but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor the stranger who is within your country illegally unless they are off the books then they shall work all seven days without respite. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, including dinosaur bones and rested the seventh day.

5. Honor your father and your mother by ensuring that they keep their Social Security even as you shall taketh it away from all others.

6. You shall not murder unless they are Muslim. Or gay. Or abortion doctors. Or government workers. Or black. Or whatever group is currently out of favor with mine chosen White (not white, White) People.

7. You shall not commit adultery and get caught during an election year.

8. You shall not steal unless it’s from the workers’ pensions.[iii]

9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Just kidding, Glenn.

10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s. Instead, you shall go forth and buy these things for yourself on credit and keep the “too big to fail” banks happy.