train of thought

2011-11-20T16:59:00.000-08:00

This week I received an email from my brother explaining his view of our economic situation. My brother has a good high-school education, and is a pretty smart guy. He has always worked at blue-collar-type jobs, basically as a delivery guy. He lives a modest lower-middle class life, and he is a thoughtful and intelligent person. My guess is that he listens to a lot of Fox News and/or talk radio, but I don't know that for sure, since we live a continent apart.

Here are a couple of points he makes:

I see the economy as being based on manufacturing and tangible goods. What's made here anymore other than cheesburgers? And I see labor unions having a big part of the problem. If I ran a business and had the choice of paying an employee $50 an hour or $5 an hour to do the EXACT same thing, which do you think I'd choose ? All unions do is make "demands". The company isn't supposed to make a profit. To quote (a former employer who ran a small neighborhood grocery store), "Profit is not a dirty word ." Without the union , the company would just screw everyone.....without the company......there'd be no JOB!!

Let's begin by thinking about why one person owns a company and another person works for him, and where the profits come from. So to take the case of this particular small-business owner, he took over the business from his father, who probably started it from scratch and built it up to a nice little business. (Or to take a similar but larger-scale business, take Hood Milk as an example.) The guy who starts a business saves up his own hard-earned money, and at some point invests it in starting a business, at considerable risk to himself. If the business fails, he will lose everything. He may be the main worker at the beginning, and he probably works long hard nerve-wracking days. Of course he deserves to earn a profit on his money. Otherwise, why would he take such a risk?

But as time goes on, and the business grows, he begins to hire other people to do some of the work. Those people have less risk, so all they are being paid for is their labor, not the chance to earn or lose money on their investment. So of course they make less money than the owner.

In some cases, however, it is the workers who are doing all the work, creating all the wealth (profits) and they may even be risking their lives to do so, but a very small part of that wealth accrues to them, and a vast amount goes to the owner(s). If a man owns a coal mine, how much of the profits are generated by the labor of the coalminers, and how much by the guy who owns the land that happens to have coal under it, and who invests in the machinery? Sure, the owner or the company has made a huge investment in order to get that coal out of the ground, but so have the miners, who actually produce the coal on a day to day basis. How is that profit to be divided up?

A generation ago, the top people in a company might make 20, 30, or 40 times what the average worker made. Meaning that one guy at the top was believed to be producing something of value that was equal to what 40 of his employees did. Today, in big companies, the top guys make on average 344 times what the average worker makes. One guy is worth as much as 344 "little people."

Now of course in a company like Snell's Market, or even Hood's Milk, that might not be the case. But in the Fortune 500 companies, that is the amount of wealth that the CEOs skim off, and claim as their "fair share" of the profits that are created by the company.

I think it is legitimate to ask whether the people in suits making the decisions are actually the ones who are "earning" the money, or whether something is out of whack here.

So what would be the point of a union? It's the only way that the people doing the actual work can apply any pressure and retain a fairer share of the profits that they contribute to. As you say, as an owner, sure, you'd rather keep the $50 and pay the worker just $5. Unless there is some counter-pressure, wages will go lower and lower, until we're all living like medieval peasants or sharecroppers. Why not? If the employer controls all the jobs, and can get the workers to compete against each other for the lowest possible wage, it pushes everyone lower.

Did you ever see the movie They Shoot Horses, Don't They? When people are desperate, they can be taken advantage of and made to compete against each other. And who wins? Well, for a while, the rich guys win. Until they have all the money and no customers! Then lack of demand will cut into their profits, and in the end, everyone is worse off. (for details, see The Great Depression.)

And from where does ANYONE get the brass gonads to speak about "Re-distribution of Wealth ?" I can't understand the concept. Because someone works hard & gets rich, it not only makes them an ogre, but they should be "compelled" to hand it over to No-account jerks ? Not in my book. The only reasons I can find for my OWN lack of wealth are that I ain't smart ( or lucky) [or hard-working] enough.

So the same point prevails here. Where did this wealth come from? Did the rich person earn it all by herself, with no help from society at all? And no help from her employees? Then she can keep it all. J. K. Rowling, for example, who created the Harry Potter series. She deserves to get rich, since she created something of value all by herself. But in most cases, wealth is not created single-handedly. It is created by many people, including the street-sweepers who keep the city clean enough that people will go shopping. So they also deserve a share.

Creating Jobs

2011-10-08T08:41:00.000-07:00

The United States needs to create more jobs, and it needs to cut the deficit. These two objectives would seem to be in harmony, not in opposition, since people with jobs pay taxes, and people without jobs not only do not pay taxes, they cost the government money. So there must be a way to cut the deficit by creating jobs, jobs that pay enough that they workers can eat and also pay taxes.

To go about cutting the deficit by cutting government spending and laying people off is like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in the bottom. The more the government cuts spending, the more the people who did the things that the money was spent on will lose their jobs. (Even the federal government can't spend money without buying things, and when we buy things, we generate the need for someone to make those things and sell those things to us. And most of what the government spends money on is services, provided by people who get paid for providing those services.)

So it seems obvious to me that the government needs to keep spending money and employing people both directly and indirectly. Cutting spending can not make us prosperous. Unlike a family, when the government cuts spending, it doesn't maintain the same level of income. It cuts income at the same time, so now it's just operating at a lower level all around. (I understand that to some people, that is the actual goal. These are people who are motivated by a political philosophy that is opposed to government as an article of faith.)

So let's compare two methods of trying to create a more balanced budget while increasing jobs. One approach is to cut government spending, cut taxes, especially on high-income entities such as wealthy people and corporations, and look for this to work its way through the economy until it reaches the point that private businesses start hiring more workers.

Another way is to raise taxes on high-income entities, thus increasing the government's revenues, and then spending that money to do useful things, or even useless things, but things that require manpower (and womanpower).

Basically, the Republican approach vs. the Democratic approach, or the free-market approach vs. the Keynes approach.

We have basically run an experiment over the past 12 years as to what happens when tax rates are low and corporations have excess money and wealthy individuals and entrepreneurs have a large share of the nation's wealth in their portfolios. The results are in: they do not use that money to create jobs.

Not too surprising since "creating jobs" is not what anyone wants to do. A business person is not in the business of creating jobs. Not at all. Quite the contrary. A business person's goal is to create profits. Income. Wealth. Money. Not jobs. Jobs are an expense. Workers cost money. A business owner no more wants to create jobs than she wants to create taxes or inventory. Jobs, employees, are a cost of doing business. The more an employer can produce with fewer workers, the more money she makes. (Sure, she might want to create a job for herself, or her nephew, but in general, she does not want more employees, she wants fewer.)

If a company could make all its products or services with robots, and if the robots could design and create more robots, that would be the ideal. Products and services would flow out of the company, bringing in income, and no tiresome workers with their needs for health care and incentives would be needed. Nirvana. Perfection.

So is there anyone, other than unemployed people who want to see jobs created? Well the president and his party have a motive to increase jobs. People who get a job on his watch might vote for him. People who lose theirs will almost certainly not. (Note to Mr. Obama: even if they are African-American, their sense of pride in you will only go so far. A black person who lost his job in the past 3 years is a person whose vote is on the line.)

So what does this tell us? Businesses will create jobs only as a last resort, when they can't produce enough goods and services to meet demand any other way. Given a choice between money in the bank or another employee to manage, they will take the money in the bank every time. As they are doing this very moment.

However, if you tax that money away from them and put it back into circulation, you can use the money directly to create jobs.

Is this socialism?

No, this is reality.

If taxes went up on those people who have money they aren't using in any productive way, that money could be given to the state and local governments who are currently laying off teachers and police officers . Those teachers and police officers would spend that money, creating jobs for food servers and hair cutters. The food servers and hair cutters and police officers and teachers would not go on unemployment. Instead they would pay taxes. Oh look, more revenue to the federal government from both directions-- at the top and at the bottom. And thus the deficit could also be cut.

Is it fair to tax money away from people who have earned it, in order to create jobs for people who are not smart enough to find a job on their own? Well, only if the goal is a lower federal deficit, lower unemployment, more widespread prosperity, and ultimately, a better overall climate for people to create wealth.

Look at the way sports are managed in this country. A team that is rich and successful could buy up all the best players and dominate the game. Other teams wouldn't have a chance, and ultimately, the sport would not be interesting enough to watch, thus destroying not only the poor teams, but the rich successful one as well.

So mechanisms are put in place that function much like taxes on the rich. The team with the worst record (or almost the worst, to avoid incentives to lose) is allowed to pick first, in order to keep the sport balanced enough that it works for all the teams. Yes, there will always be winners and losers, but if the winners over-dominate, it hurts the entire game.

The same is true in the economy. Unless wealth is redistributed, it will tend to accumulate at the top so much that it will eventually destroy the whole system.

Smart rich people, like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates understand this. Thus they actually support higher taxes, and they re-distribute their wealth on their own.

It's too bad President Obama doesn't see what they see, shake off his fear of being called a socialist, and do what he can to save capitalism, as FDR did.

10 Years Later

2011-09-11T13:32:00.001-07:00

It is 10 years since the day that will always be known just as a date--September 11th. That also happens to be my parents' wedding anniversary, and this is the 62nd anniversary of their marriage.

I remember the fear that followed after that day in 2001--Was another attack imminent? Was anthrax part of the plot? I remember the strange combination of pride and humiliation, fear and faith. I lived 3000 miles away, yet it colored my life like it colored every American life.

I also remember the growing doubts about what really happened. Was there more to the story that we weren't being told? Gradually, I came to accept that most of what the government said happened on September 11th was more or less the truth. I still have some doubts about WTC 7, the 47-story building that collapsed from *not* being hit by an airplane. I still have some questions about why all the planes had so few passengers on board, and why a person I know got a "gut feeling" to pull all his money out of the stock market on September 10th. But I am willing to accept that strange things just happen to happen.

The one story that I still believe is a manufactured lie, however, is the story of the heroic passengers on Flight 93 in Shanksville, PA. This flight was scheduled to travel from Newark, NJ to San Francisco. It was taken over by hijackers some 45 minutes into the flight. After that, passengers supposedly made cellphone calls in which they learned that their hijacking was part of a pattern of hijackings, and that 2 planes had already hit in New York City.

Although there are some unlikely aspects to the story so far, up to this point, the story may well be true. But the rest of the story seems like pure propaganda to me. One passenger leaves his cellphone open and says, Let's Roll! A group of passengers rush the cockpit to try to eject the hijackers. And then, what next?

Well, either the passengers take the controls, or they don't. If they take the controls, if they disable the terrorist-pilot and fight off the other 3 terrorists, what would they do? They would contact the ground (with the help, perhaps, of the flight attendants, who must have some idea of how the radio operates) and air traffic controllers would do their best to enable them to land the plane somehow.

On the other hand, perhaps they are not able to overpower the 4 terrorists (though it's something like 35 to 4). The terrorist-pilot remains at the controls of the plane, but he hears the mob of angry passengers outside the door. This is the final and official story of what happened:

"The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that "the hijackers remained at the controls but must have judged that the passengers were only seconds from overcoming them" so the hijackers deliberately crashed the plane into the ground.

Now why would they do that? The hijackers intended to die by crashing the plane into the White House or the Capitol, presumably. Why would they panic and crash it into an empty field? What did they have to lose by doing their best to fight off the mob of passengers and continuing with the flight?

When the heroic story was first told, the narrative was that the passengers had made the noble decision to crash the plane, sacrificing themselves for their country. That didn't make any sense at all, so the story was revised to say that the heroic passengers so rattled a group of suicidal killers that the terrorists themselves made the choice to crash the plane rather than...what? Rather than fly it into the White House? Rather than get into a fistfight with the passengers?

The question of whether orders to shoot down the plane was ever given to the military has been raised, and the obvious answer is that that would have been a reasonable choice. A female military pilot has stated that she fully intended to crash her fighter jet into the commercial airliner to take it out before it could reach the Capitol.

I think that if the government and the military did make the choice to shoot down the plane, it would have complicated the narrative considerably, and diverted attention towards arguing about whether the US government should ever attack its own civilians in such a manner.

But that's what I think happened. I think the plane was shot down by the US military.

I don't see any reason that the hijackers would have preemptively killed themselves and their passengers in order to avoid a tussle in the cockpit.

And this means that I believe the government has created an elaborate heroic story, backed up by a fictionalized movie to cement it in the public imagination, in order to avoid a lot of hard questions.

Would the government do such a thing? Ask Jessica Lynch. Ask the family of Pat Tillman.

Keeping government small and local

2011-03-14T07:22:00.000-07:00

Tea Party types, and conservatives in general, like to rail against Big Government, and they want to keep government as small and local as possible. They claim that the Constitution was written with that expectation (it probably was) and that therefore, that is how it should always be (a questionable premise).

So my question is, How would that work out in the face of an event like what happened last week in Japan? Suppose Japan had most of its power and control vested in individual prefectures. What happens when an entire prefecture (several, in fact) are devastated all at once?

In the United States, we had the Katrina event, which brought devastation to several states. Absent a strong central government to help with recovery and to spread the cost around, how is a local government supposed to cope?

We face the possibility of destructive events on the scale of Japan's in the Pacific Northwest and from San Francisco to San Diego in California. And then there's the Yellowstone Caldera and the New Madrid Fault, if you run out of things to worry about.

The benefit of having a strong and effective national government is obvious. Any time risk is shared by a larger pool of people, it is minimized on individuals. That's how insurance works, and that's how government works. We need to stop demonizing government and think about the only thing worse than a government in control, and that is lack of a government in control.

A loving and merciful God?

2011-03-12T18:55:00.000-08:00

Ok, let's say that human beings were created by a direct act of a God who is omnipotent and loving. God cares about human beings, made them in His own image, and created a special place for them, which we call Planet Earth.

So what went wrong along the way? How did God overlook the fact that the planet He created for these humans was cracked and fractured and prone to generating massive earthquakes unpredictably, causing great suffering, loss of life, and laying waste the work of man's hands? Did the God not understand the basics of physics, the principles of seismology?

Did He do this deliberately, knowing that random large-scale loss of human life would be the result? Is it intended to test the faith of those humans who trust Him? Maybe make them more dependent on God (who then turns around and proves completely undependable)?

Did He just not care?

Or is the simplest answer that God did not carefully place us on this planet, and in fact God exists to the extent that human beings help and care for each other compassionately, and not to any other extent?

Where is God when the earth buckles and the sea pours over the land? The only place I can see Him (or Her) is in the brave, patient, compassionate, duty-driven actions of those who try to rescue their pets, their children, their parents grandparents, and complete strangers.

Pray for Our Miners

2010-04-09T19:40:00.000-07:00

It is heart-breaking to see and hear the people of West Virginia, whose loved ones are almost certainly dead at the bottom a coal mine that exploded from a mixture of toxic dust and gases, say, Pray for our miners! I fully respect and empathize with their belief that they need Someone to depend on., to survive in such a difficult livelihood.

But coal-miners' families surely prayed for their miners throughout the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries, here and in Great Britain--and yet miners continued to die. Probably the families of coal miners in China also pray for their miners, and still they die in large numbers.

But over the past 50 years in the United States, the number of coal mine fatalities was drastically reduced, not by prayers, but by strong unions and strong government regulation. Maybe God never thought of that, or maybe God is the force in those union miners and those government bureaucrats who insist that the safety of working men is more important than the corporations' profits.

What those grieving families need to do, once their tears dry, is to use their churches and their union halls and their radio stations to stand up and say, Enough. We won't send our men down into unsafe mines with dozens of safety violations. We won't stand by, proud yet cowed, in fear that if we speak up, the only livelihood we have will move elsewhere.

Maybe they will recognize that God really doesn't work in such mysterious ways. He works in a very obvious way--through the actions of human beings who recognize their own worth and the worth of other people and who refuse to accept injustice and suffering as God's will.

Another letter to the President

2009-10-19T07:55:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. President,

As you consider how to proceed in Afghanistan, I have a few thoughts that I hope you will consider. We are trying to support the idea of free and fair elections in Afghanistan, in the hopes of building a democracy there. That seems like a noble idea, but I believe it is unrealistic. As results have shown, there is massive "fraud" in the elective process there.

I believe that this kind of "fraud" and "corruption" is inevitable, and is a sign that Afghanistan is not at the point in its development to be suited to our concept of democracy. Democracy depends on an educated citizenry, while Afghanistan's literacy rate is very low. Democracy also depends on a concept of human society that sees each person as an independent actor, able and willing to make choices that differ from his or her friends, family, and neighbors. But not everyone thinks that way. In a tribal society, the needs of the tribe outweigh one's own personal opinions. The idea of standing up for one's own ideas and opinions is not something that is reasonable to everyone on this planet.

I think we should accept Afghanistan for what it is--a country that consists of tribal groups, with local strongmen as leaders, and work within that framework. Perhaps a king would make more sense than an elected president. It is possible to have a king, and still respect the rights of the people.

The more we push for fair elections in Afganistan, the more we play into the hands of the Taliban, who are naturally more in touch with the realities of life in Afghanistan. Look at those pictures of women in burkas, casting their votes. Do you really think that each person is free to vote her own conscience? Even in the city of Chicago, union leaders and ward bosses influence people's votes. What can we expect in Afghanistan?

Your responsibility as president is to protect our borders, to prevent terrorists from penetrating our country. It doesn't matter what some radicals in Afghanistan think of us, as long as they are not capable of getting into the United States and attacking us.

I am not willing to expend another dollar or another American life to support a questionable democracy in the distant country of Afghanistan. The only thing Afghanistan ever did to us was to allow terrorists to live there. Well terrorists also lived in Germany and Great Britain and Florida. This is not our country and not our responsibility.

Of course the generals want more soldiers and more time, When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you have is military force, everything looks like it needs more military force. It's not up to the generals! It's up to civilian leadership, and that means you.

Act like a man of peace, and end the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. When the people of Afghanistan are ready for representative democracy, they will fight for it themselves. All this training is a joke--soldiers who believe in what they are fighting for can be trained to do so in a very short time, as the Taliban shows. The national army can't be trained because they don't want to be trained.

If you escalate the war in Afghanistan, it will show beyonf a shadow of a doubt that you are in thrall to the military-industrial complex of constant war. Be a man of peace. Bring the troops home.

Sincerely,

Evelyn Uyemura

Letter I sent to the President

2009-10-11T15:03:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. President,

Congratulations on being chosen for the Nobel Peace Prize. I agree with your assessment that the intent of this prize is to spur action. And I am happy to hear that you intend to donate the prize money.

May I make a suggestion: use this money, and your prestige, and whatever political power you have, to bring peace to your old neighborhood, the south side of Chicago.

We have all heard the story of Emmett Till, and how his death at the hands of white racists in Mississippi in 1955 and his funeral in Chicago touched the hearts of a nation and began the progress towards civil rights.

But look where we are today: black youths beating each other to death in that same city. Children, like your daughter, and like my daughter, a student at the University of Chicago, fearing for their lives when they walk to and from school.

How can we have any hope of bringing peace in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Israel and Palestine, if we cannot even bring peace in a great American city like Chicago? If the money and attention and care that goes into fighting wars half a world away were focused on our own inner city, maybe we could have a hope of saving these young people who fall victim to random violence.

You are in a unique position, and the eyes of the world have twice been turned in your direction, and in the direction of Chicago. What better use could you make of this prize money, and of this opportunity, than to try to bring peace to Chicago. Please don't let this moment pass.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Incidently, the passwords to send a message to the president are most weird. The first one was "shoplift 000," and then there was an error, and the second one was "spooks Tazzer." wtf? That random word generator thing has racist tendencies!

Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize?

2009-10-09T17:22:00.000-07:00

Seriously? I actually didn't believe it when I saw the headline in my email this morning. Had to get 2 sources before I could believe that it is true.

Now, I love Obama as much as anybody. I think he is the right man to be president at this time, and I try not to worry too much about him being ineffective. (healthcare reform, anyone?)

But I think this is a ridiculous choice by the Nobel committee, and I think it devalues the meaning of the Peace prize. It was given mainly as a slap in the face to Bush.

Obama is the commander in chief of a military that is currently occupying two foreign countries, and he's considering expanding the presence in one of those countries. Guantanamo still isn't closed. Detainees are still imprisoned at Bagram Airforce base, and apparently are being sent there from countries outside of Afghanistan.

7 or 8 years from now, if Obama has turned the US into a peace-loving country that pays more attention ot the well-being of its citizens than it's "interests" abroad, he will deserve a Peace Prize.

Now? Well, you don't give prizes to people to encourage them to do something. You give the prize after they've done it.

I think this is silly and embarrassing, and possibly even manipulative. Bad call, Nobel Committee.

Let's talk taxes

2009-08-22T20:01:00.000-07:00

And just to keep it neat and simple, let's talk local taxes. City or county taxes.

It is taxes that allows the county of Los Angeles to run a public library system. I was at the library a couple of times this week, and I saw a lot of kids who probably come from low-income families, I saw people using the free computers to look for jobs and print out resumes, I saw old people reading the newspapers, and so on. It seemed to me like a very good thing. Most countries don't have anything like the public libraries we have, not even England or Japan.

If it were not for our public libraries, people with the money to spare could buy books in bookstores or through amazon.com. I can afford to buy books, and I do spend a fair amount of money per year buying my own books, magazines, and videos. I don't depend on the public library, though I like going there.

But if less government is better government, and if lower taxes are better than higher taxes, then it follows that we would be better off without taxing people to pay for libraries. If rich people want to donate books to poor kids, that's their choice, but why should successful, prosperous people who work hard and earn enough money to buy their own books have their money confiscated to allow access to books by people who haven't made the same good choices in their own lives?

Why should booksellers have to compete against public libraries that completely undercut them on cost? If we eliminated public libraries, more copies of books would be sold, increasing the income of hard-working authors, which would be good for the economy. Why should JK Rowling sell only one or two copies of Harry Potter to the library, to be read by dozens of kids? It seems awfully unfair to Borders and Amazon.com as well as Blockbuster, JK Rowling, and Houghton Mifflin that they pay taxes which then go to undermine their profits!

And ya know what? I bet some of those kids I saw at the library the other day speaking a foreign language have parents who came into the country illegally. That elderly Korean guy reading the Korean newspaper (my tax dollars being used to buy foreign language books and newspapers?!) could have over-stayed his visa. He may very well be an illegal himself.

This is essentially the same argument that is used on a broader scale to argue that we can't afford health care for all, that high taxes are unfair, that government should stay out of our lives. Is it convincing in regards to public libraries? Would anyone vote to close down their local libraries and sell the buildings in order to raise money, so as to lower taxes?

We take things like public libraries (and public schools and public highway systems) for granted. But if they had to be voted into existence now, would such a proposal pass? Or would people be standing up at meetings screaming, "I buy my own damn books and newspapers and dvds, and I'll be damned if I'll let some bureaucrat decide what books the city should buy. I fought for this country, and why should I be forced to pay for books in Korean and Japanese and Spanish, which I don't even read, or pay for books that are going to be read by kids whose parents came here illegally!! This thing will bankrupt us!"

Guilded Age 2

2009-08-19T10:43:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman recently posted a graph showing over almost 100 years what percentage of the nation's income lands in the pockets of the top 0.01% of the country. In other words, it's a measure of inequality, or the growth in wealth of the richest of the rich.

When the record-keeping began in 1913, the top sliver of the country earned less than 3% of the money earned in that year. (In a strictly egalitarian society they would, I suppose, have earned 0.01%) The income of the rich peaked in 1928, just at the verge of the Great Depression, with the wealthiest one-hundredth of a percent of the population receiving 5% of the income. After the crash, their share dropped down to around 2%, and then there was a long moderation, from 1943 to around 1983, when the rich's share of all income earned hovered just above 1%.

Since I remember much of that time period, I can say that it was a time when the working class became the real heart and soul of America. Working men could buy houses and cars and take their 5 or 6 kids on vacation, and their wives could stay home and raise the kids. Middle class people could send their kids to college, and college students from the lower middle class could work for 3 months and earn enough to pay their room and board for the next 9 months. If they took a year off, they could save enough to pay for 2 years of school. It was a good time, in other words. And rich people seemed to be doing ok too. (though I didn't know any of them! But you didn't hear of too many jumps out of Wall Street windows!)

The picture begins to change in the 80s, with the rich crossing the 2% line for the first time since 1938. And then the line bounces between 2 and 3% for a while, and suddenly between 1997 and 2007, it leaps up to 6%, the highest level ever.

The data only goes as far as 2007, but there does seem to be a notable coincidence--the last time the rich controlled so much of the income, the Great Depression happened. This time, we're calling it the Great Recession of 2008.

Do I point this out because I'm jealous of the top 0.01% of income earners and want to punish them for being richer than me. No, I assure you, that's not the point.

The point is that it is deleterious for everyone, for the entire economy, when a very small number of people receive a large share of the wealth that is generated. Why? Because money that is spent creates demand for goods and services, creating jobs and opportunities for those in the lower segments of the population. And if those jobs are paid a slightly higher proportion of the income that comes into a corporation, it benefits everyone. That's why we had widespread prosperity and growth from WW2 till the 1980s.

But when money pours into the pockets of the very rich, they have no need to spend it. They invest it in the stock market instead, producing bubbles as capital expands much faster than the markets for actual good and services (since those at the bottom are more numerous but have less to spend.)

The spike is probably somewhat self-generating--as more money is in the hands of the wealthy, they invest more, driving up the price of stocks artificially, creating paper wealth, which shows up as income. But meanwhile, the real wealth, which is produced at the bottom of the food chain, and also largely consumed there, stagnates, so the spike leads directly to the crash. Paper wealth evaporates, reducing the rich folks share of the income, but not actually touching their lifestyle, while at the bottom, people living paycheck to paycheck lose their homes and their jobs and their health insurance, and their kids lose their chance to go to college, so the crash, though it hurts the rich more on paper, actually hurts the poor in personal ways.

What could stop the spike and collapse pattern? It seems like 2 things--more reasonable behavior by corporate boards, stopping the inflationary spiral of top executive pay and spreading the wealth more evenly down through the totem pole (Wal-Mart, for instance, doesn't *have* to create the 3 richest people in the country and also pay its workers low wages. The see-saw could tip the other way.)

And government could provide the nudge in the form of a tax system that treat all income equally, whether it is earned by work or by investment, and by raising the marginal tax rate on large incomes, so that corporations and small businesses would be incentivized to leave the profits at work in the company productively, rather than sucking them out and distributing them in wages and bonuses, which money is used for speculation rather than worthwhile investment in actual productivity.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/even-more-gilded/

Who's really Killing Granny?

2009-08-19T10:42:00.000-07:00

No death panels needed, really.

Try to imagine yourself in this situation: You are 60 years old. You ran your own business for years, paid for your own health insurance, and then you had the misfortune to be diagnosed with cancer. Three times. You can't work as hard as you used to, but you can and must still work. So you find a job that covers your insurance.

And then you get fired.

Not so bad--COBRA requires that you be allowed to keep your coverage, as long as you pay for it. For 18 months. So for the past 14 months, this 59 year old cancer survivor has lived on unemployment, paid probably more than her income to remain covered, and searched for a job that will include health benefits. Not surprisingly, in this economy, the market for older, cancer-surviving, grey-haired women isn't all that hot, and so far, she hasn't found a job. If she doesn't have one in December, she will be without income and without health insurance.

She had medical bills to pay out of pocket in 2005 of $33,000, so odds are that those took a big bite out of her savings. And of course, if she was a real smart cookie, she had money in mutual funds in a 401k, but those have dropped by half for most of us, so it's pretty unlikely she can pay for private medical insurance anyhow, but with her medical history, under our current system, it's most likely that no insurance company in the country would take her at any price.

God forbid that we should have rationing. God forbid that we should have inefficient bureaucracy. Thanks heavens we have the freedom to choose our own doctors.

And if you worked all your life and have the misfortune to have a life-threatening illness before age 65, well let's hope God is on your side, because otherwise, you are on your own.

Here's the story and a picture of this woman. Look at her and think about her when you think of why our "health care system" might need a few tweaks.

Random Thoughts on Labor

2009-03-01T21:08:00.000-08:00

Throughout American history (and probably all history) there has always been a two-tier system of workers, one paid at the "full-pay" level, and one that is expendable in various ways.

At first, there was slavery. Slaves could be called upon to do any work that no one else wanted to do, and they were paid only subsistence.

When slavery went out of fashion, child labor came into play. And when child labor went out, women came into the marketplace. Female workers could be hired on a casual short-term basis, let go when work decreased, and they could be paid less than a man. And of course, in that same time frame, black workers were also paid less and had none of the rights and privileges of a white male worker.

When blacks and women finally gained a legal right to equal pay--not until the 1970s and 80s--there was a big gap. Who would fill in this gap between full-time, benefit-receiving, mainstream workers and the fluctuations in the market? Who would do the dirty work? That just happens to be when large numbers of illegal or undocumented workers began pouring into the country. That is also when out-sourcing began to be viable. With the internet coming of age, the niche that once would have been filled by educated but lower-paid, temporary female workers (housewives, women between graduation and marriage or child-reading) was filled by skilled or semi-skilled workers in China and India. The niche previosuly filled by "Negroes" was now filled by "Mexicans."

In academia, that very same niche, the last-hired, first-fired, non-benefit, no-commitment niche, is filled by part-time instructors.

In most cases, including that of part-time academic workers, the promise is that if you accept this low position on the totem pole, at some point, you can move into the mainstream. And then a new class of marginal workers will have to be brought in to fill your role.

I Voted!

2008-11-04T08:23:00.000-08:00

I woke up at 4 am this morning, to the sound of rain. Oh no, not rain on election day! Got up and showered at 5:30, and got ready for the day. I waited till just after 7:30 to go vote, hoping not to have to stand in line. By 7:30, the sun was out and every leaf glistening. "Morning has broken, like the first morning." I decided to walk over to Lincoln School, in case there was any difficulty parking. Right by the school, a car started backing out of its garage unexpectedly and almost hit me--a car with Ron Paul signs all over it. Figures. The crossing guard made sure I got across the street all right, and I felt like it was 1957 and I was walking to school for the first time!

Kristen's friend Sarah W-R was one of the poll workers, and she told me that there had been a considerable line at 7 am when they opened, which had just cleared. There were only 3 people ahead of me. I saw Kristen's name there, marked as Vote By Mail, and they tried to convince me that I had already voted by mail, but I drew my finger along the line and showed them that I was on the line above. Old age, not voter suppression. One poll worker had a sign indicating that she spoke Japanese and another had a sign indicating Chinese.

Obama's name was first on the ballot, and McCain was not second but third, I think. I inked it carefully, and after I took it out, I checked again to be sure that the mark was in the right spot.

By the time I was leaving, another line was building up, as parents came to drop their kids off for school and vote at the same time.

I walked home in the glistening morning sunlight feeling the Hope! feeling the Yes We Can!

My students were asking me yesterday who I planned to vote for. All I would say was, I'm gonna vote for the winner! Please God let it be true! I enjoyed this vote more than any vote I can ever remember. I also enjoyed voting No on Prop. 8. Since when would we vote to take rights away from people?

Now the tension builds!

The Secret Life of Bees

2008-10-17T17:59:00.000-07:00

For several years now, I've been teaching The Secret Life of Bees in my 1A and 1AX classes. Student reaction to the book has been almost uniformly positive, from international students and American students, from white students and black students, and somewhat from men, as well as women. Several times over the semesters, students have wanted to see the movie, but there wasn't a movie. I imagined what a good movie it might make, and when I heard that Dakota Fanning was going to play the lead (at least 2 years ago an internet rumor), I was surprised because she seemed too young.

But she grew up, and the movie was finally made and was released this weekend. Sam and I went to see it this afternoon. (Thanks, Sam! It's not really your kind of movie, but I appreciated your presence.) One of the first things I noticed was that an 11:30 am movie on Friday in south Torrance was quite full, and a substantial portion of the audience was African-American women and couples. Later I read that there is some concern that if it is perceived as a "black film" it won't play to white audiences. I am not too concerned about that. Millions of white women have read and loved the book. In fact, i was more concerned whether black people would accept the movie. There is some controversy about the fact that a white woman wrote a book that some (few) see as co-opting or stealing cultural icons that rightly belong to the black community. Here's hoping that, as in politics, so too in daily life, we can all appreciate a story that involves both black and white people in all their separate and intertwined glory. (Incidently the director and several of the producers, as well as the majority of the actors, of course, are black. But the lead is a white girl, and it's her story.)

So how was the movie? It's hard for me to say, in a way, because I have so internalized and memorized the plot that I can't really see how well the movie stands on its own. The movie stuck quite closely to the book, putting many of the most memorable lines directly into the actors' mouths. And almost miraculously, to me, the feel and tone of the movie seemed close to that of the book. But, as is almost inevitable, some of the depth is lost. A few of the cuts seemed regrettable to me. I have imagined so vividly so many times the scene when Lily and Rosaleen bathe in the creek after a disagreement that it *feels* as if I've seen it. But that scene, with its strong baptism imagery, was not included. Also, the scene when they stop to rest at Lily's church and steal a fan was omitted, as were any details about how Lily springs Rosaleen from the hospital (a much simpler scenario, that the young sheriff was busy flirting when the two walked out) was perhaps more believable, but it took away some of the charm of Lily's personality.

Also, it was more explicit from the beginning that Lily had held the gun that killed her mother, and so the pivotal scene at the end, when Lily runs after T. Ray to ask who really did it is necessarily changed to her asking if her mother had really come back to get her or not. Perhaps that works better, since it makes her quest not one to find out if she did it, but to find out if her mother loved her or not, which is a deeper and more universal quest.

The most significant plot change actually seemed to improve upon the plot of the book: the issue that got Zach in trouble and led to May's suicide. Rather than a fight between young black boys and older white guys over a rumor about Jack Palance bringing a black woman to the theater (though, oddly, the mention of that is left in), what happens is that Zach and Lily themselves sit together in the "colored" section of the movie, and the white guys storm in and abduct Zach. Again somewhat miraculously, he escapes with only a black eye and a few bruises, but is gone long enough to move the plot forward. And also nicely, Zach's mother is one of the Daughter's of Mary, and May learns of Zach's abduction when his mother slips into the house to pray before Our Lady of Chains.

The acting was mostly really good. Dakota Fanning was just right as a barely adolescent girl with a quick mind and a wounded spirit. (She reminds me very much of my niece Hannah.) I couldn't quite see Queen Latifah as August in my mind, but she plays the part well. Perhaps the best jobs were done by the guy who played T. Ray, as a believable angry redneck, whose wounded heart is conveyed with subtlety. I think I was most impressed with the character of May. I could never quite picture someone singing Oh Susannah as therapy, but she hummed it very lightly before dissolving into tears, and her cock-eyed smile and intensity was better than I could have imagined. The weakest character, for me, was June. I had difficulty, first of all, with her appearance and clothing style, since I certainly never pictured June in tight jeans and a form-fitting NAACP t-shirt (nor did I find that believable for the time period.) I also didn't feel that her anger and resentment came across as anything more than simple nastiness.

I wished there had been more period touches, more of a 1964 feel to it. Sam also felt that it didn't feel like he remembers 1964, or even like I remember Auburn, Alabama in 1973. A bit more of the music, and more of African-American culture and the feel of the Civil Rights movement would have made me really feel that I had time-traveled to South Carolina in 1964.

But my final judgment? Better than I expected. And a story I still love.

The Last Debate

2008-10-16T11:54:00.000-07:00

So we're down to the wire, and this is the last chance these two guys have to talk to the whole country before we vote.

So here's how McCain starts it off. After shoe-horning Nancy Reagan's name into the intro (remember Reagan? remember how warm and fuzzy he made you feel? Remember how old he was? ok, never mind), his first major point is this:

Americans are hurting right now, and they're angry. They're hurting, and they're angry. They're innocent victims of greed and excess on Wall Street and as well as Washington, D.C. And they're angry, and they have every reason to be angry

Wow, the word angry 4 times in the first 20 seconds or so? Guess who's feeling angry tonight? Man, Freud got that projection thing right.

Then he brings up the semi-mythical beast, Joe the Plumber:

You know, when Senator Obama ended up his conversation with Joe the plumber -- we need to spread the wealth around. In other words, we're going to take Joe's money, give it to Senator Obama, and let him spread the wealth around.

I want Joe the plumber to spread that wealth around. You told him you wanted to spread the wealth around.

The whole premise behind Senator Obama's plans are class warfare, let's spread the wealth around. I want small businesses -- and by the way, the small businesses that we're talking about would receive an increase in their taxes right now.

Who -- why would you want to increase anybody's taxes right now? Why would you want to do that, anyone, anyone in America, when we have such a tough time, when these small business people, like Joe the plumber, are going to create jobs, unless you take that money from him and spread the wealth around.

Poor McCain. He thinks that Americans live in fear of someone "spreading the wealth around." Well maybe in Sedona they do. But out here in the flatlands, our biggest fear is that the wealth will keep on doing what it's been doing (statistically speaking) for the past 8 years, which is clumping all up at the very tippy-top. So a little wealth spreading doesn't scare us, Senator McCain. We know how it's gone, we know who has the wealth. And it isn't plumbers who work for it. It's investment bankers who play games with it.

He actually said: "We need to encourage business, create jobs, not spread the wealth around."

Oh that's beautiful. Encourage business, but don't spread any wealth around! Keep it where it belongs--in rich guys pockets!

McCain also revels in his oldness, his memories of things that happened before most Americans were even born. Talking about the urgent need for town hall meetings (the lack of which forced him to call Obama a terrorist), he reminded Americans that this is "the way Barry Goldwater and Jack Kennedy agreed to do, before the intervention of the tragedy at Dallas."

Right. I was in the 4th grade then, and I am eligible for the Senior Special at IHOP. I don't think Obama was even born. Neither were most of his voters. Look it up in your American history book, you bunch of punks!

He also refers to the good things the government did in the Great Depression, as if it were only yesterday.

Then there are the times when he references things that even those of us who try to follow all these things just can't quite follow:

Let me just say categorically I'm proud of the people that come to our rallies. Whenever you get a large rally of 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 people, you're going to have some fringe peoples. You know that. And I've -- and we've always said that that's not appropriate.
But to somehow say that group of young women who said "Military wives for McCain" are somehow saying anything derogatory about you, but anything -- and those veterans that wear those hats that say "World War II, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq," I'm not going to stand for people saying that the people that come to my rallies are anything but the most dedicated, patriotic men and women that are in this nation and they're great citizens.

Hunh? What is this about Military wives for McCain? And Veterans of our many wars? And let's be serious here. Those numbers at "our rallies"? McCain isn't drawing crowds like that. Only Palin is.

He finally got up the courage to accuse Obama of, um, knowing Bill Ayers. And then he said this:

ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy

Get out. Destroying the fabric of democracy? By registering Mickey Mouse to vote? Damn, and when Mickey shows up and flashed his ID, we're gonna have to let that rodent vote! And there goes the neighborhood.

McCain pounced on Obama for saying he'd "look at" offshore drilling, calling it an example of how Obama's "eloquence" was deceiving people. Except that it was McCain doing the deception in this case, because the transcript clearly shows that what Obama had said the paragraph before was:
"And I think that we should look at offshore drilling and implement it in a way that allows us to get some additional oil. "

McCain also used this old tried and true method of casting doubt: compare Obama to...Herbert Hoover? Seriously?

Senator Obama wants to restrict trade and he wants to raise taxes. And the last president of the United States that tried that was Herbert Hoover, and we went from a deep recession into a depression.

All of you out there over the age of 80, who were actually alive when Hoover was president, I know you'll never forget how much you hated Hoover, and you will see that Obama is his direct descendent.

He also tried to scare the bejezus out of us all by telling us that under Obama, our health care will be like Canada's and England's. Nooooo! You mean like where Americans go to get drugs at a price they can afford? You mean like where people who have cancer or their kids have cancer, and all they have to focus on is dealing with the illness, and not also worry themselves sick dealing with insurance companies? You mean where a pregnant woman who needs to go on bedrest doesn't lose her insurance coverage? You mean where people aren't being forced into bankruptcy to pay for a one-week stay in the hospital? You mean where small business owners don't also have to worry about how they could possibly pay for their own insurance, much less that of their employees? That damn terrorist, doing that to us!

He ended up grinning into the camera, telling Joe the Plumber that at $250,000, Congratulations, you're rich! haha. (because everyone knows that don't touch rich. Cindy, now that's what I mean by rich!)

All in all, it was a pitiful performance by an angry old man who is despreately trying to distance himself from his own party (one of his biggest selling points is how often he can disagree with his own party, and he seems to think there's something wrong with anyone who belongs to a party he actually supports).

I can't wait to vote, and to see the results pour in.

Let Me See if I Understand This

2008-10-04T19:20:00.001-07:00

Ok, so I'm trying my best to follow the panic of 2008 and the bailout/rescue plan. My understanding is that people got caught up in a price spiral that was actually speculative in nature.

So instead of houses, let's pretend that they were buying Beanie Babies. When my daughter was in late elementary school Beanie Babies were all the craze. At first people bought the cute little stuffed toys for their kids to play with. The manufacturer, sensing a fad, starting releasing "limited editions" and otherwise manipulating the availability of particular versions. So a toy that started out costing $5.99 or so was being re-sold for much more than that. People bought special plastic covers for the heart-shaped tags in order to keep the tag neat because that would add to the value of the toy as a collectible. Many people kept their special ones in custom-designed clear plastic cases and never let little grubby hands near them. The belief was that a $5.99 toy bought today would probably be worth $100 in the near future. A few people actually paid $100 for a single toy.

So suppose I got caught up in that mania. I notice that $5.99 toys can be sold for $12 in a few weeks time. Geez, that's a fast profit. So I buy 1000 of the things. Invest $6000, expecting to sell them later and get $12,000 back. Easy money! A lot of other people are also buying them at the same time, which is one of the things that is already making the price rise.

After a few months, I try to sell my Beanie Babies. But the fad has passed and the market has cooled. It turns out that there are not too many people who really want $100 toys after all. Now I'm stuck with items that aren't worth as much as I expected. In fact, I start seeing them at yard sales for $1.

Well, lesson learned. Now I have a garage full of mistakes.

Except that, unfortunately for me, I didn't actually take that original $6000 investment out of my savings account. I actually borrowed it. Paid for it with my credit card, in fact. And I still owe--well, thanks to the miracle of compounding, I actually owe more than $6,000. I owe $7000. So I have a $7000 debt and a pile of collateral that's worth less, maybe a lot less, than $7000. How much is it worth? Well, in order to answer that question accurately, I have to find a buyer or buyers for 1,000 Beanie Babies. Maybe there aren't any buyers at all. Maybe if I hold a yard sale or put them on ebay, the selling price will be only 5 cents, because the intrinsic value of them is basically nothing at all. No one needs a Beanie Baby.

If this were a story about houses and mortgages, that last sentence wouldn't be true. Housing is a need and houses do have at least some intrinsic value, or at least the land does. How much land is worth depends, of course, on where it's located and what else is around it. There may be lots of land between 2 meth houses in some depraved suburb or inner city that have essentially no worth under present conditions. The taxes on it would be more than its useful value. But for the most part houses are worth something.

What is scarier than houses is paper. Specifically, Credit-Default Swaps, which if I understand the story correctly, were bought and sold like Beanie Babies, except they can't even be played with by bored children. They are promises, backed by nothing at all, that were sold for millions of dollars.

And sometimes they were "leveraged," ie bought with debt.

I think that's what's really gone wrong. Not housing, which people value for a reason, but financial instruments that were of less real value than a Beanie Baby.

Weirder and weirder

2008-09-08T06:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.alternet.org/rights/97939/?page=entire

"On June 8, 2008 Palin was publicly blessed, with the "laying on of hands" before six thousand Wasilla area church members, by Head Wasilla Assembly of God Pastor Ed Kalnins and on the same day both Kalnins and Palin described, at a "Masters Commission" ceremony at the Wasilla Assembly of God church, how she had been blessed prior to winning the Alaska governorship by an African cleric known for driving the "spirit of witchcraft" out of a town in Kenya, after which town supposedly crime rates dropped "almost to zero."

Sarah Palin's churches are actively involved in a resurgent movement that was declared heretical by the Assemblies of God in 1949. This is the same 'Spiritual Warfare' movement that was featured in the award winning movie, "Jesus Camp," which showed young children being trained to do battle for the Lord. At least three of four of Palin's churches are involved with major organizations and leaders of this movement, which is referred to as The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit or the New Apostolic Reformation. The movement is training a young "Joel's Army" to take dominion over the United States and the world.

Along with her entire family, Sarah Palin was re-baptized at twelve at the Wasilla Assembly of God in Wasilla, Alaska and she attended the church from the time she was ten until 2002: over two and 1/2 decades. Sarah Palin's extensive pattern of association with the Wasilla Assembly of God has continued nearly up to the day she was picked by Senator John McCain as a vice-presidential running mate.

Palin's dedication to the Wasilla church is indicated by a Saturday, September 7, 2008, McClatchy news service story detailing possibly improper use of state travel funds by Palin for a trip she made to Wasilla, Alaska to attend, on June 8, 2008, both a Wasilla Assembly of God "Masters Commission" graduation ceremony and also a multi-church Wasilla area event known as "One Lord Sunday."

At the latter event, Palin and Alaska LT Governor Scott Parnell were publicly blessed, onstage before an estimated crowd of 6,000, through the "laying on of hands" by Wasilla Assembly of God's Head Pastor Ed Kalnins whose sermons espouse such theological concepts as the possession of geographic territories by demonic spirits and the inter-generational transmission of family "curses". Palin has also been blessed, or "anointed", by an African cleric, prominent in the Third Wave movement, who has repeatedly visited the Wasilla Assembly of God and claims to have effected positive, dramatic social change in a Kenyan town by driving out a "spirit of witchcraft."

The Wasilla Assembly of God church is deeply involved with both Third Wave activities and theology. Their Master's Commission program is part of an three year post-high school international training program with studies in prophecy, intercessory prayer, Biblical exegesis, authority and leadership.

Watch Bruce Wilson's video documentary detailing the extreme Religious Right connections to the Wasilla Assembly of God church, "Sarah Palin's Churches and the Third Wave":

The pastor, Ed Kalnins, and Masters Commission students have traveled to South Carolina to participate in a "prophetic conference" at Morningstar Ministries, one of the major ministries of the Third Wave movement. Becky Fischer was a pastor at Morningstar prior to being featured in the movie "Jesus Camp." The head of prophecy at Morningstar, Steve Thompson, is currently scheduled to do a prophecy seminar at the Wasilla Assembly of God. Other major leaders in the movement have also traveled to Wasilla to visit and speak at the church.

The Third Wave is a revival of the theology of the Latter Rain tent revivals of the 1950s and 1960s led by William Branham and others. It is based on the idea that in the end times there will be an outpouring of supernatural powers on a group of Christians that will take authority over the existing church and the world. The believing Christians of the world will be reorganized under the Fivefold Ministry and the church restructured under the authority of Prophets and Apostles and others anointed by God. The young generation will form "Joel's Army" to rise up and battle evil and retake the earth for God.

While segments of this belief system have been a part of Pentecostalism and charismatic beliefs for decades, the excesses of this movement were declared a heresy in 1949 by the General Council of the Assemblies of God, and again condemned through Resolution 16 in 2000.

The beliefs and manifestations of the movement include the use of 'strategic level spiritual warfare' to expel territorial demons from American and world cities. Worship includes excessive charismatic manifestations such as hundreds of people falling, 'slain in the spirit,' and congregations laughing, jerking, and shrieking uncontrollably.

In early 2008 an outbreak of those phenomena commenced at the palatial former ministry estate of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, recently bought up and restored by prominent Third Wave author and leader Rick Joyner's Morningstar Ministries. The (spiritual) "breakout" lasted for many weeks and was publicized in an extensive collection of video footage available on YouTube. Healing services in the Third Wave movement claim to heal the sick and injured through methods that in some cases can appear bizarre - including, as in recent cases involving Todd Bentley, the patient being head butted or kicked by the anointed healer. Recipients of such "spiritual" or miraculous healing make a wide range of astonishing claims - to have been cured of life-threatening illnesses, had joints repaired or replaced, been given gold teeth or gold fillings, regrown stunted limbs and even had deformed skeletal structures straightened and reshaped. Worldwide mission efforts of the movement are built around the idea of combating witches, warlocks, and generational curses, which prevent churches from being able to take root.

Mike Rose, senior pastor of Juneau Christian Center has a long relationship with Rodney Howard-Browne, credited with being the instigator of the outbreak of 'Holy Laughter' around the world, including the Toronto Airport Revival. Thomas Muthee visited Wasilla Assembly of God and gave 10 consecutive sermons at the church, from October 11-16 2005. As both Palin and Wasilla AoG Head Pastor Ed Kalnins have attested, Thomas Muthee 'prayed over' Sarah Palin and entreated God to "make a way" prior to Palin's successful bid for the Alaska governorship. Muthee made a return visit to the Wasilla Assembly of God in late 2008. Thomas Muthee's Word of Faith Church is featured in the "Transformations" video which details an account on how Muthee drove "the spirit of witchcraft" out of Kiambu, Kenya, liberating the town from its territorial demonic possession and enabling a miraculous societal transformation. The "Transformations" video set is used as an argument for social improvement through spiritual instead of human means, and as the best method for fighting corruption, crime, drugs and even environmental degradation.

In the video, producer George Otis declares that after Thomas Muthee and his followers banished the "spirit of witchcraft" from the town, the crime rate in Kiambu dropped almost to zero, along with the rate of alcoholism, and according to Otis most of the residents of the town joined churches. The "Transformations" video has helped spark a network of 'Transformation' ministries and mission organizations and 'transformation' has become a buzz word for change based on supernatural instead of human efforts.

The Third Wave, also known as the New Apostolic Reformation, is a network of Apostles, many of them grouped around C. Peter Wagner, founder of the World Prayer Center. This center, which was built in coordination with Ted Haggard and his New Life Church in Colorado Springs, was featured in an article by Jeff Sharlet in Harpers, May 2005, "Soldiers of Christ." Sharlet was one of the first to write in the secular press about the World Prayer Center which is often referred to by those familiar with the Third Wave as the 'Pentagon for Spiritual Warfare.' It features computer systems that store the data of communities around the world, mapping out unsaved peoples' groups and spiritual mapping information for spiritual warfare. Wagner has his own group of about 500 Apostles in his council and each of these Apostles has ministries under their authority, sometimes hundreds or thousands. Recently various networks of Apostles came together to form the Revival Alliance. Leaders of the Revival Alliance including Rick Joyner of Morningstar anointed Todd Bentley whose Lakeland Healing Revival has recently been a controversial topic in the Evangelical world.

Wagner's top leaders often conduct spiritual warfare campaigns against the demons that block the acceptance of their brand of Christian belief, such as 'Operation Ice Castle' in the Himalayas in 1997. Several of their top prophets and generals of intercession spent weeks in intensive prayer to "confront the Queen of Heaven." This queen is considered by them to be one of the most powerful demons over the earth and is the Great Harlot of Mystery Babylon in Revelation. (The "Great Harlot [or 'whore'] of Mystery Babylon" theme also figures prominently in the sermons of Texas megachurch pastor and Christians United For Israel founder John Hagee, former endorser of John McCain's 2008 presidential bid.) Wagner and his group also claim that the Queen of Heaven is Diana, the pagan god of the biblical book Ephesians and the god of Mary veneration in the Roman Catholic Church. Following the 'Operation Ice Castle' prayer excursion which included planting a flag for Jesus on Mt. Everest, one of the lead prayer intercessors from the excursion, Ana Mendez, reported that there had been dramatic results including, "millions have come to faith in Asia... and other things happened which I believe are also connected...an earthquake had destroyed the basilica of Assisi, where the Pope had called a meeting of all world religions; a hurricane destroyed the infamous temple 'Baal-Christ' in Acapulco, Mexico; the Princes Diana died... and Mother Theresa died in India, one of the most famous advocates of Mary as Co-Redeemer."

Church of the Rock, led by Senior Pastor David Pepper, has taken their youth to participate in 'The Call, Nashville.' This event is held at various locations around the country under the leadership of Lou Engle, also featured in the movie "Jesus Camp." At these events youth are worked into a frenzy of anger and consternation at supposed national moral corruption. Engle, who shuffles while he preaches in imitation of Jewish prayer, is featured toward the end of the "Jesus Camp" video documentary.

The Third Wave movement is cross-denomination and is not synonymous with any specific denomination, nor is it synonymous with Evangelical or Fundamentalist. Although the movement emerged from Pentecostalism, it draws its support from a variety of denominations and religious streams. They believe they are forming a post-denominational church to take the world for the end times. To date, all of the writing and objections to this movement have emerged from other Evangelicals and Fundamentalists who believe the movement to be unbiblical. Also, it is other conservative churches that refuse to embrace the 'outpouring of the Spirit' that are targets of much of the anger of the movement."

You can find more information on the Third Wave movement and additional links to the activities of Palin's churches on www.Talk2action.org in the following articles:

Sarah Palin's Churches and the Third Wave, Part One

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/9/5/0244/84583

Sarah Palin's Churches and the Third Wave, Part Two with embedded video:

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/9/5/03830/11602

The video is also posted at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K_1Eit0pxM

And yet more on Sarah Palin

2008-09-07T22:02:00.000-07:00

Sorry, this is a bit of an obsession, but I am just so appalled at the choice of this woman. Of course it's not her fault. She was nuts to accept the role, but McCain was absolutely out of his mind to make the offer, and it was his call.

But I just can't get over how bad this decision was. And how unvetted! So of course now we all know that her 17 year old daughter is pregnant. Well, life happens and all that. But now that it has happened, does it strike anyone that maybe this girl getting herself knocked up was a kind of protest or plea for attention? Her Mom had been governor for 15 months, and the state capitol is a long ways from home--Alaska's capital city is practically in a different time zone than the main part of the state.

Given this state of affairs, isn't this another reason for her to say a polite, Thanks but no thanks to McCain's lunatic idea? Don't the needs of her daughter enter into her decision-making at all? In addition to the obvious embarrassment this would open her daughter up to, didn't it cross her mind that maybe the girl needed a bit of hands-on mothering for a while? (If McCain were to win, God forbid, it would seem that the birth of Bristol's baby would pretty much coincide with Inauguration day.)

And then there's Palin's son. Ok, he's in the army now (or maybe it's the National Guard), about to be sent to Iraq. So any mothering she might have done is pretty much over. But it seems that he didn't get much family time before that either. He spent most of his senior year in high school in Portage Michigan (also a long ways from Wasilla.) The ostensible reason was so that he could play some kind of semi-pro hockey. But there are also rumors that he had had a run in with the law back home in Wasilla. A group of 4 boys were arrested for vandalism on a fleet of school buses. Only one was identified by name because the other 3 were juveniles. Lots of folks in Wasilla must know who that guy's buddies were, though. And whether Track left town to let things cool off at home.

And by the way, her reference to him enlisting on 9/11 at first made me think she meant 9/11/01. But actually it was 9/11/07. Oh. Her words are parsed out rather carefully, and she's getting on the job training now in how to be a candidate for national office. Usually you expect that you've already learned how to go on tv and give an interview before you get such a role on a major ticket.

But, yeah, she's totally ready to be president if needed. Yup, yup.

More on Sarah Palin

2008-08-31T21:20:00.000-07:00

So you are in your first major elected position, and you have 4 kids, and then you find out you're pregnant, and then you find out the child will have Down Syndrome. Geez, pretty challenging circumstances.

And then you start hearing your name mentioned as a possible VP. Wow, what the hell is going on here? Are you guys nuts? Uh, my plate is already pretty full.

So against all the odds, crazy old Johnny Mac actually gives you the call. What do you say? What are you thinking?How do you wrap your head around the fact that you might go from part-time mayor of a small town in the middle of nowhere to heartbeat-from-the-presidency in 2 years?

Well, if you are a rational person, using normal thought processes, you don't. You can't. It doesn't make any sense, and you know it. So you say, Thank you so much for thinking of me, I am deeply honored, Senator, but I have to say no thank you.

But if you are an evangelical Christian, a Pentecostal Christian in fact, you have grown used to stories of miracles, of things that just can't happen somehow happening. You have read The Cross and the Switchblade, and you know how people "step out in faith," taking on mortgages to buy properties that are miles over their heads, and then having God miraculously come to their rescue at the last second by having some rich Christian businessman send them an unsolicited check for the exact amount they needed--some fabulous amount of money, right to the penny--$139,853.54 Praise God!

You can see yourself as David to Washington's Goliath, as Caleb, the only one who believed God and disregarded the giants in the land, as the Virgin Mary, for crying out loud, going about your business in boring old Nazareth, from whence nothing good ever comes, and cast John McCain as the angel Gabriel!

You can use your magical thinking and call it faith and get out of the boat and have a go at walking on water.

Right up until you sink like a stone, just like all the other water-walking messiahs out of disrespected backwaters.

Maybe there will be a crucifixion, with liberals playing the part of the Sadducees and Pharisees and the New York Times as Pontius Pilate.

Or maybe you will just fade away, find a likely excuse and give the answer you should have given in the first place--I am honored, but I am not ready to be Vice-President, thank you all the same.

In the real world, Santa Claus doesn't exist, and gravity does, and all the magical thinking in the world won't make a backwater, half-a-term governor into a senior statesman ready to step into the presidency.

Sarah? Really?

2008-08-30T15:01:00.001-07:00

Since yesterday morning, when I learned that McCain had chosen a woman named Sarah Palin as his VP, I haven't been able to stop thinking and reading and shouting about it. It is the single stupidest thing I have ever known a politician do.

Oh, it does have some political plausibility. She's a Pentecostal Christian who believes in Creationism and opposes abortion under every and all circumstances. She's pro-guns and anti-environmentalism. So it seems like it might appeal to some folks who mistrust McCain.

But is there any way in hell that anyone can pretend to believe that McCain put Country First in making this choice? Is there any way that people can will themselves to believe that after looking over all possible candidates for Vice President, this PTA mom's name rose to the top of the list on her merits alone? Is this really the second-best person in the country to get that 3 am phone call? Is there anything whatsoever in her resume that would suggest that she's ready to be governor, much less vice president, or God forbid, president? Running New York City doesn't really prepare you to be president. How does running Wusilla, or even the entire state of Alaska (population 683,478, ie a fair-sized American city, but certainly no New York or Chicago. In fact, it would be # 17 if it were a city, between Austin and Fort Worth Texas.)

And I don't care if it sounds un-feminist of me, but no mother worthy of the name goes back to work 3 days after her special-needs baby is born, and then takes on a new job more demanding than anything she's ever done before.

If this doesn't sink John McCain, then it will surely sink the whole country. It is a disgrace to the Republican party, and I wouldn't be surprised if this turns out like that Harriet Miers thing, where a woman manifestly unqualified for the job has to be withdrawn from contention.

I would hesitate to hire a woman with her resume as president of a community college, and McCain is offering her to us as the person he most trusts to take over the reins of the country if something were to happen to him? No way, no how, no McCain!! Go get her, Hillary!!

Irony meter meltdown

2008-07-30T22:04:00.000-07:00

Ya know what I particularly love about the indictment of Senator Stephens REPUBLICAN of Alaska? I love that his constituents are all conflicted and stuff about his downfall because he did so much for them. He was a genius at getting federal money for all kinds of stuff in Alaska to make people there happy. He really knew how to get the old pork rolling. He could spend tax money like no one else, and all for the benefit of those poor Alaskans, those staunch rugged individualists who just needed a little hand up or hand out from federal coffers.

Do these guys have no shame, no conscience at all? They gripe and moan about "tax and spend liberals," but what is all this, but taxing and spending? Let's face it, it's really quite all right as long as those tax-purchased projects are benefitting good honest hard-working (you know, white) Americans. It's the idea that "our" hard-earned money is going for "them,"( black or brown people), that "big government" becomes such a problem. The whole fiscal conservative thing is such a crock. If corporations, or small business people, or farmers, or middle class people, all of whom sound pretty white, need money, then that's just our nation at its finest. It's only when some "welfare queen" can be invoked, or some immigrant "popping out an anchor baby" while howling in Spanish, then they get all tight-fisted.

Can't afford clean technology

2008-07-15T20:12:00.000-07:00

I heard something the other day about Bush saying that if we make regulations that require industries to produce less pollution, it will cripple our economy, and we can't afford to do things like that.

But that doesn,'t make sense to me. When it comes to a war, everyone always says it's "good for the economy" because it increases orders for all sorts of stuff. Money is being spent, jobs are being created, the economy is humming. However, war is a means by which we produce a lot of equipment in order to destroy things--other people's infrastructure, but also a lot of airplanes and tanks and hummers and other equipment. So we've "helped the economy" by ordering things at taxpayers expense and then destroying them. Wow.

On the other hand, tighter emission standards, for example, would also require spending a lot of money. But spending money is *good* for the economy, remember? And in this case, instead of spending it to bomb and kill and destroy stuff, we would be spending it to keep our own environment cleaner, healthier, more productive. How can that not be a net gain?

If I lived in a city where people threw their garbage and chamberpots out the window (Europe in 1500, say), then sure, sewers and garbage collection would cost a lot more--at least at first! But in the long run, look what that investment (spending) on infrastructure produced--not only cleaner, more pleasant cities, but new jobs, longer, healthier lives, and an overall improvement in the standard of living. Only a moron would prefer to foul the streets with sewage. And yet, if it's the air that is being filled with diesel particles, or CO2, we suddenly can't afford it. The huddles masses of Europe felt they couldn't afford to do anything but throw their feces into the gutter, too--but when they stopped doing that, they also stopped dying of dysentery! Thus a huge jump in productivity.

China is currently growing its economy while pouring life-threatening quantities of pollution into the air. They also think they can't afford to keep the air clean, but they pay with their lives for this savings. Of course, what happens, what always happened, is that the poor pay with their lungs while the rich get the "savings." (Though a city like Beijing is pretty miserable for rich as well as poor.)

Books

2008-05-26T07:59:00.000-07:00

There were more instructions, but I'm gonna keep this simple. Bold the books you have read. Italicize the books you've started.

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The life and times of the wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the nightime
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves (what? That's not a book!)
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
*Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

(from: http://www.librarything.com/blog/2008/04/librarything-love-and-unread-books-meme.php )

Polygamy

2008-05-24T15:27:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago some 400 plus children,. plus their mothers, were forcibly removed from Longing for Zion compound in Texas by Child Protective Services. The situation is not easy to deal with--if you stand up for Constitutional rights, it seems that you don't care about the welfare of a bunch of young women (usually called girls by the media) who are being forced to have sex (ie raped) by men old enough to be their fathers or grandfathers. If you stand up against child abuse, it sounds like you don't care about religious liberty and the right to be left alone by the government.

I have wavered and gone back and forth on this--wow, it's really bad how much control those guys have over the women and children, but then wow, it's really bad that the government took all those kids away from their parents without any proof of individual wrong-doing.

Just now it dawned on me what is wrong with what happened: look at who was taken away--the victims. The women and the children. Presumably these are the very ones whom the state is trying to protect. Look who was left in their own homes: the men. If a crime was committed (or many crimes), who should be arrested and taken away? The men. The ones accused of rape. Not the victims. If the crime is having sex with underage girls, why take the girls into custody? Oh sure, I know the answer: to protect them. But if the perpetrators were arrested, the girls would be even safer, not being placed in foster care, where sexual abuse is a well-known possibility.

Why were the men not arrested? Obviously, because you need to have some sort of evidence, some proof, some accusation at least, that this specific man had sex with this specific underage girl. That's what they didn't have.

This is of a piece with the loss of civil liberties since 9/11. Instead of the government having the burden of proof that this specific individual committed this crime, whole classes of people are picked up based on their membership in the class, and assumed to be guilty, with no probable cause, no evidence, and no opportunity for the accused to hear the evidence against them.

Clearly, in Texas, there was no urgency to remove those kids from those homes. This lifestyle has been practiced by these people for 100 years. It would not have hurt to wait long enough to pinpoint an accuser, and have her named the man whom she claimed abused her, and then arrested him and charged him with a crime. And let the girl remain in her own home. Let him be taken away and placed with strangers. Let him do the perp walk in front of cameras while everyone looks at how he dresses and how he wears his hair.

I will never forget a woman telling me about how back in the 1950s, she reported to her teacher that her father was raping her. And how the police car came to her house and took....her. That feeling of guilt and shame never left her. She was the bad girl who had to be taken away.

If a crime has been committed, let's arrest the rapists, the pedophiles, the polygamists. Not the girls.

Ya know what I really like?

2008-05-18T10:31:00.000-07:00

I really like the idea of Obama's 2 little girls living in the White House. How amazing will it be for a black woman and 2 black girls to be the First Family? Obama is kind of post-racial, but Michelle is a southside Chicago black girl and so are her kids. To have that as the image of America's First Family will really be Change with a capital C.

Who wants to be a ....president of the US??

2008-04-29T14:17:00.000-07:00

Ok, so Obama is having a really hard time with damage control regarding his pastor. Every time he thinks he has "put it behind him," it pops back up again.

But he is not alone is having problems.

Obama can't control his former pastor.
Hillary can't control her husband and former president.
And McCain can't control his temper.

Sheesh. And one of these three will be president a year from now?

Slow Motion Collapse?

2008-03-15T07:29:00.001-07:00

You know those videos of the implosion of a building that is being torn down, when they play them in slow mo? Well that's what I feel like I'm watching in economic news lately.

I read this in the NY Times today, after Bear Stearns needs to be propped up by the Fed: "there’s only so much the Fed — whose resources are limited, and whose mandate doesn’t extend to rescuing the whole financial system — can do when faced with what looks increasingly like one of history’s great financial crises."

Yikes, one of history's greatest financial crises? Yikes.

Apparently what happened yesterday and today was a modern version of a bank run. But these days, you don't see farmers and small businessmen lined up outside a local bank in a midwestern city, trying to get their cash out. It happens in virtual space, where no one can see the lines forming and the angry mob gathering.

So, if I understand this article correctly, what's happening now is that much of the bad debt of all the messed up mortgages on property that was appraised and sold far above its real-world value is now being taken on by the Federal Reserve Bank (in other words by the full faith and credit of the US government). The people who sold property which was inflated far beyond any realistic price have their money. The people who bought it will walk away. And who will be holding that empty bag?? Hmmm, that looks like us.

The argument for free-market, anti-regulation, pro-business policies looks like it's circled around, right back to 1929. Except that in 1929, the government wasn't also simultaneously throwing money into a black hole overseas and calling it the Global War on Terror.

It strikes me that we've tried to run an economy on the cheap, on borrowing and debt and buying cheap stuff from overseas. A strong economy is built on things like educating more people (see GI Bill)and building infrastructure here at home that will last (see things like rural electrification, the interstate highway system, and all the bridges and schools and public works built in the post-war period, which we are now watching crumble to the ground while we blow things up overseas.) An educated population and a functioning infrastructure will lead to slow but steady increases in real productivity. Money borrowed against the equity in your home to finance a big screen tv manufactured in Asia will lead to....well, let's see where it leads.

Rational Voters?

2008-02-24T15:57:00.001-08:00

Most of us, including myself, like to think that we are pretty rational thinkers, and that we make our decisions on the basis of facts and common sense. So whether it's choosing the brand of peanut butter we buy or who to vote for for President, we claim to have reasons and to have thought the whole thing through.

But actual experimental evidence shows that we are actually pretty irrational in what we do much of the time. Game theory and economics are based on the idea that we are rational actors who can determine what's to our own benefit and who will act on that information. However, people don't act like that in real life. For a quick example, $1 saved is $1 saved, regardless of how we come by it. So if $2 toothpaste is $1 off or if a $20,000 car is $1 off, it's the same benefit. But I would bet that there's no one who would care about saving $1 on a car, while almost everyone would be glad to save 50% of the cost of a tube of toothpaste. And if a $1 item is offered for free, we'd all get excited. And yet in terms of our finances, it's still just $1.

Advertising is built on the fact that we tend to like and trust things that we are familiar with. Advertising long ago gave up on giving us factual data, and instead it works almost entirely at causing us to feel some sort of emotional attachment to a brand. We all like to think that we're not swayed by advertising, but the evidence is against us. We might react negatively rather than positively, but on the whole, advertisers pay big bucks because their stuff works.

Psychologically, we all tend to divide the world into "us" and "not us." This is an essential survival strategy left over from our tribal past, when our survival depended on generalizing quickly and acting instinctively thereafter. For example, if I meet one grizzly bear and it attacks me, the next time I see a bear, I don't have to stop and wonder if this bear is as bad as the last one. I just run. And if I meet a member of another tribe who might kidnap me, I run as well. So we quickly size up whether a person is "one of us" or a dangerous alien.

In politics as well, while we offer reasons for who we choose to vote for, our reasons are likely to be rationalizations rather than real logical reasons. We want someone we can identify with, someone who is "one of us." We respond at a level below the rational to advertising of all sorts, and most of politics is conducted through advertising. Sensible candidates know this, and they go to a lot of trouble to "identify" with us in various ways. We may be reacting to candidates as images of parents or potential spouses or bosses or friends. When Christian conservatives vote for Bush or Huckabee, they are not doing so because they necessarily agree with a flat tax or an opposition to nation-building. It's because they feel, "That's me. That guy represents me." When people hate Hillary Clinton, it's not really because of the details of her health plan. It's because she reminds them of a teacher who humiliated them in 4th grade or the smart girl in class who wrecked the curve in Soc 101.

Our rational brain is the weakest link in our mind. Anything that we have to think about, we do poorly. As long as we're thinking about how to drive a car, we can't really drive. If we have to think about grammar rules, we can't speak fluently. Geniuses in math and science "see" patterns in a flash of insight, and then have to laboriously try to reason their way to a proof after the fact. We are very good at seeing patterns. We are very poor at reasoning analytically. We actually feel the strain of trying to think something through, whereas things that are below the level of consciousness, like speaking our native language or walking or driving a car, are effortless.

One of the arguments against Obama is that people's attraction to him is not based on good solid policy reasons. But no one ever became a Democrat or a Republican or a Libertarian or a Green by a careful cost/benefit analysis. We identify with a certain position at subliminal levels. Those who choose McCain may be responding to his courage in North Vietnam, which tells us almost nothing about how well he'd do as president. Those who choose Hillary may see her as embodying their hopes for a gender-equal society. So what does Obama represent that is so attractive to so many? He's part Tiger Woods and part Robert Kennedy and part Morgan Freeman and he's young and vital and new. He's black and white, he's rich and poor. He's American and foreign. And a lot of people find that more attractive, at a gut level, than a Vietnam vet or a Mormon or a pastor or a nagging mom or a 911 mayor or an actor or a southern populist. They say, Yup, that's us.

And then we hope to God that the person we've projected our hopes into can do the job.

Gunmen and Demons

2008-02-17T13:51:00.000-08:00

Once again, we have a story about a man who had some sort of psychological issues or mental illness who snapped and ended up killing 5 innocent people plus himself. In this case, the gunman in question seemed on the surface to be quite normal, and no one ever imagined that he'd go out in a blaze of mayhem like this. How can we explain such incidents? Was he evil? Was he sick? Was he demon-possessed?

In biblical times (and in fact in much more recent times and in pretty much every society on earth, regardless of their theology), the explanation for unreasoned evil has been that a force external to the person, a force that is non-material and malignant, known as a demon, somehow took control or gained influence over the person and drove them to commit an act of violence that cannot be explained by the ordinary vices and passions that occur in everyone. We all understand why a person might take a gun and rob a bank, or why she might kill in a jealous rage. But we don't have any explanation for why a person would cut himself, or why he would not only end his own life but plan ahead to take as many strangers with him as possible. We understand selfishness and lack of self-control and greed. But we don't understand pointless evil like this.

So until recently, the best possible explanation has been that there is some spiritual creature, a non-material source of evil, and that this evil power (or even God himself) sends evil spirits to trouble people and to goad them into doing evil, simply for its own sake. People who are possessed by demons might have to be restrained in some manner, and they might be subjected to aversive treatments, or they might be prayed over or exorcised in some way, but their own lack of culpability is relatively clear to most observers.

Demonic influence was blamed not only for insanity and depression in biblical and other societies, but also for epilepsy, deafness, and many other illnesses. Little by little, the biological basis for epilepsy and deafness and leprosy and paralysis and even depression has come to be understood by western science. We realize that people don't fall into seizures because a demon troubles them but because of chaotic electrical activity in their material brain. We know that nerve damage, and not spiritual factors, are responsible for deafness. We know that it is not sin that causes children to be born blind, but various genetic or developmental factors. While we can't prevent all these diseases, we do know where to look for the origins of them, and it's not karma or the parents' sins or anything else, but simply disease processes in the material body.

In the case of depression or psychosis or suicide or other "mental" states, we are a little less clear. We still believe that not only do we have a body, which includes a brain, but we also have a disembodied "mind" or "soul" or "spirit" of some kind, and if it behaves in destructive ways, maybe it is the fault of the person himself, rather than a biological disease. Or maybe, if we are a fundamentalist, we think there may be an evil spirit involved somehow.

One thing that is interesting to me is that "demon" as an explanation works just as well as "virus" or "chemical imbalance." Until recently, no one anywhere on earth had any ability to see a virus or a brain chemical, and so it made perfect sense to think of these as "spirits." They are invisible, they act in arbitrary and unintelligible ways, and once in a while the placebo effect is strong enough to over-rule them, but most of the time, God's will is done and we suffer the ravages of whatever malign forces run amok in the world we inhabit.

If the Bible were actually God revealing otherwise unknowable facts to mankind, I would expect God to have explained these things. On the other hand, if the Bible is a record of some people doing the best they could to grope towards God and towards justice and righteousness and fairness and an understanding of life, then we could expect just what we have--an intuitive guess that some unknown evil power is at work in some people, to be known as demons. There is nothing in the biblical revelation that goes beyond what all people figured out for themselves about the cause of mental and physical illnesses.

So call it a demon or call it an imbalance in dopamine and seratonin, or whatever the cause of such breakdowns turns out to be. Already we have some drugs that can work on these chemicals in a crude way. Some day in the not too distant future, the diagnosis and treatment of brain states that cause destructive outbursts will improve, maybe to the place that the treatment of leprosy and deafness is at today. Another demon will have been driven out.

But it will be human effort, not an act of God, that will have done it. And both the cause and the cure will be biological, material, not spiritual. Even the placebo effect, that seemingly magical ability of the body to respond to worthless cures, is a biological fact about human brains--that the brain's influence on the body is stronger than we thought, that the brain, being part of the body, effects the rest of the body. It is not an ethereal thing called "mind" somehow magically affecting matter. Mind is what brains do, just as heartbeats are what hearts do.

Conservatives and Progressives

2008-02-14T08:16:00.001-08:00

First, I think Progressive is a more accurate term than "liberal" (and not just because talk radio has made the word "liberal" sound like a curse word.) The two terms--conserve vs. progress parallel each other in an interesting way.

And that points to a very interesting thought about why and how people think in conservative or progressive ways. There has been research done recently that actually suggests that these two approaches are brain-based and maybe even genetic> I don't think it's necessary to go that far, since people, including myself, do change their positions.

But I was wondering about what accounts for the linkage between evangelicalism and conservatism. Part of it is related to questions of sexual morality, but the link between laws about sexual morality and conservatism as a political and economic doctrine aren't all that sensible in the first place. So let's leave abortion and gay rights out of it, and look at more classic forms of conservatism, and see why it appeals to the same people who tend to be biblical fundamentalists.

My theory is that both religious fundamentalism and political conservatism are based on the same impulse or under-lying belief: that somewhere, at some time, the truth and standards that should be followed for all time have been written down, and that our role is to take these written rules as the basis for how we behave.

Thus the Constitution and the Bible have the same kind of authority. It is authority that can be read and understood by anyone, that we all have access to and don't need priests or judges to interpret for us, and the ideal state would be one in which we all adhere to what was written in the past in as straightforward a way as possible. (Mormonism takes this to its logical conclusion and actually teaches that the US Constitution is divinely inspired, but most conservatives implicitly believe much the same thing.)So the desire for "strict constructionists" is the same as the desire for biblical literalism.

Thus the same people who believe that the ideal church would be one that was just like in the days of Paul tend to believe that if we just went back to the way things used to be in 1800, our country would be pure and free.

On the other hand, progressives are more like Catholics in some way, in that they believe that as conditions change, our response to them ought to change as well. Not only is it not possible to go back to some idyllic pristine past such as the early church or the early republic, it would not be desirable either.

The church grew from a small local persecuted minority to a world-wide dominant belief, and the US grew from 13 small isolated states to a world power, and as realities change, so must our laws and our way of living, and this is as it should be. Just as the early days of Apple computers, in someone's garage are not the Platonic ideal of Apple, neither is the incipient stages of the United States or the church an ideal state.

The desire for a clear written document that can directly guide our lives, as opposed to a living group of human beings who re-interpret and apply principles to changing conditions is based, I think, in a kind of awe of writing. Writing is so permanent, so seemingly immutable and not subject to change. But in fact, I think it is more the case that written documents are actually less stable than they seem, since they cannot simply be read and applied, but must always be interpreted, and who we are and how we live will necessarily change what we see in a written document.

So this Read-and-obey mentality seems naive to me. It doesn't really understand how reading works, and it doesn't understand how much we impose our own preconceptions on anything we read. It also gives tremendous weight to the ideas of people who are no longer with us, and overlooks the fact that the original writers, whether they were Paul or Jefferson or Shakespeare were fallible men no different than our current leaders (really!). But once their words are enshrined in writing, they take on an authority that would never have been given to the spoken words of the very same individuals.

My conclusion is that the real difference underlying two approaches to government and religion is a different concept of authority. Is authority best held in adherence to a written document that should be simply read and followed in as literal a way as possible? Or is authority inevitably vested in people who re-interpret and re-apply principles to new and changing conditions, perhaps even questioning and changing some of the original ideas as they go?

Addendum: One further bit of evidence of this being an underlying approach to things is that conservatives tend to approach even things like grammar from this same point of view. For example, the understanding of the role of a dictionary probably splits along the same lines, with conservatives seeing the dictionary as a permanent and infallible guide to how we should speak rather than something that changes as our language changes. And they would probably hold out for old shibboleths such as proper use of whom as a standard that, even if they don't meet it, "ought" to be met for philosophical reasons. They also have a visceral attraction to "phonics" as a rule-based and unfailing means of teaching reading.

Free Market Economics

2008-01-02T20:58:00.000-08:00

I was reading bits and pieces in The Economist magazine today, and noticing that a lot of smart folks seem to think we may be on the verge of some kind of big economic trouble, based on sub-prime mortgages, lack of liquidity, "the credit crunch" and other things that I may not understand too well. They were talking about how much real trouble banks may be in, and the sub-text was, Remember the Great Depression?

So I was thinking about that, and thinking about how the idea of the Free Market has become a kind of gospel over the past generation or so, and how much good free markets do indeed do. But if banks and other major institutions start losing credibility, if value starts disappearing and panic sets in, as used to be common in the earlier days of a market-based economy, will government be able to intervene, will people want that, and what will happen?

And it occurred to me that a useful analogy might be medical care. A free market economy is sort of like a healthy young person. Most of the time, even if she gets sick, a healthy young person doesn't need any help from a doctor (the government) to get better. You get a cold, you're best off staying away from interventions by doctors and even OTC medicines are a waste of time and money. Like the market, your body is a self-healing, self-correcting mechanism. The flu? Still not much a doctor can do, and though you might feel bad for a while, you will inevitably recover. Just like the economy. The free market lays some low and rewards others, and it all works out for the best.

But this hands-off, laissez-faire approach, while sensible in most situations, isn't an article of faith that should be followed in every circumstance. The same person who can ride out colds and headaches and stomach flu and even pneumonia isn't going to be as lucky with a burst appendix or an aneurysm. The same beliefs that served well in normal ups and downs--"I don't need no damn doctors giving me all kinds of treatments and maybe (likely!) making things worse!"--will serve very badly in a crisis of a different sort. And while colds come and go if left alone (treated they last a week, untreated they persist for 7 days)--burst appendixes are pretty much a one-way trip.

So suppose rather than just normal bubbles of enthusiasm and over-investment and then corrections, something really new and serious happens to an economic system? Suppose, despite protections built into the system after the 1930s, a downward spiral of loss of confidence, lack of demand, falling prices, unemployment, loss of tax revenue, and so on, actually recurred? Would there be anything outside the free market that could intervene, the way a surgeon can intervene when the self-correcting, self-healing system that is the human body is overwhelmed by forces too strong for its corrective mechanism? Obviously, too much intervention, unskillfully done, can make matters much worse. Most of the time, even with a bad stomach ache, you don't need surgery. But if you do need it, you need it bad. And a predisposition to say "Doctors (governments) are the problem, not the solution" will leave you in pretty bad straits.

So I wonder if we're like that healthy young person, who each year is more and more confirmed in her belief that the whole doctor thing is a n unnecessary evil, until she runs into something that she can't handle on her won. And I wonder if the doctor will be available and have the skill to help in a crisis?

Bhutto

2007-12-27T19:52:00.000-08:00

I'm sad that this apparently decent woman has been killed. I'm worried that this bodes very badly indeed for the people of Pakistan in the near future, and perhaps for the people of the United States more indirectly. I heard George Stephanopoulos (sbbing for Charles Gibson) intimate that the US had a lot to do with her semi-triumphant return to Pakistan recently. Apparently the point of backing her was that she was both pro-Western, moderate, and popular, and that we were trying to hedge the Musharef bets we've been placing for the past several years. He is clearly on his last political legs, and we wanted to put someone civilized in play because we can't afford to have Pakistan (like Iraq but with nukes) go the way of Iraq.

I think the coverage of this story that most appalled me was the Today show replaying footage of Ann Curry laying into Bhutto for risking her own and other people's lives in her return. I have no idea what gave Ann Curry the idea that it was her job to tell Bhutto how to live, but she didn't just "ask tough questions," she literally attacked her for her decision. And I have no idea at all why NBC/Today thought it would be cool to replay this wholly inappropriate line of questioning in response to her death. It looked like, "I told you so!" Really weird.

Long theology post

2007-12-23T07:47:00.000-08:00

Joseph Campbell, who wrote extensively about the power of myth, said that both atheists and fundamentalists make the same mistake about the things they read in sacred books. Atheists read something like the book of Jonah, for example, and say, it couldn't have happened like that, and therefore it's a lie. Fundamentalists read it and say it's true, so it actually happened exactly like that. Both misunderstand what sort of literature they are reading. It's not history and it's not science. It's symbolism, metaphor, myth. And so it is neither factual nor a lie, neither literally true nor literally mistaken. It's meant to speak to the spirit and not the intellect.

The Bible is a record of how the spirit spoke to men (and perhaps women) in ages past, written down as best they understood it. There is change and development and contradiction in it because people's experience of God changed and developed and improved (and at times, no doubt, regressed.)

God moved people of old and spoke to them in ways they were ready for. In the end of the Bible, we are clearly shown that in times past, God spoke through the prophets, but now His spirit dwells within us, and not in a chosen people or a tent or a sacred building or a collection of old writings. Jesus didn't leave a manuscript, he left a bunch of people who had experienced God in Him. Emmanuel means God with us. Not God up in the sky or God in a book or God in only one person. God with us.

Paul stumbled upon an incredible idea for an ancient Jew: that God cares just as much about Gentiles as he does about Jews. That was a complete overthrow of the entire Old Testament. Paul read the OT in a radically new way, turning the meaning of stories on their head. The story of Sarah and Hagar (mothers of Isaac and Ishmael) is presented in such a way as to make Hagar (mother of the enemies of Israel) stand for Israel, and Sarah (mother of Israel) represent Gentiles (Gentile believers in Christ.) It was, I believe, an authentic spiritual insight, it was God's word to Paul and to us through him. But that doesn't make his opinions about women speaking in church or covering their heads equally significant to us today. It's not. It doesn't make his request for his cloak and his scrolls the word of God. It doesn't make his own admittedly subjective opinion about divorce and remarriage binding on everyone in the world.

The Bible is a record of how people were moved and inspired by God. But the Word of God is living--it's not a book. It can best be seen in a person, Jesus Christ. But even He was limited by the time and culture in which He lived. In fact, He doesn't seem to have even seen beyond the nation of Israel in what He said and taught. So in that sense, Paul went beyond Him.

That process should continue. God didn't stop moving people to new depth of insight in 66 AD. That's one excellent point that Catholicism makes. God continues to move people to see the gospel in new and more mature ways. There's no reason to think that the oldest form of Christianity is the best--living things grow and develop.

Yet in many ways Catholicism has also missed what the spirit is saying to people today. The idea that because having as many children as possible was once the moral and unselfish thing to do, it still is today, is simply wrong, in my opinion. The belief that individual human babies were in sperm led to condemning condoms and masturbation (condemnation that all Protestants accepted as well until maybe 1940 or so)--but now that we know otherwise, it's just silly to try to pretend otherwise. The belief that loving homosexual relationships are evil is no longer tenable. (And if the Catholic church isn't living proof of what happens when you try to suppress people's sexuality, I don't know what is.)

Catholicism teaches me that my ultimate responsibility is to follow my own conscience. Commonsense and some attempt at spiritual maturity teach me that I can't believe things that I don't believe. So I'm stuck with what my own spirit suggests to me is in accord with the spirit of God. Some of it is derived from things in the Bible, and some of it is not. It's Catholic, but not necessarily what the Pope teaches. Confusing and even chaotic, but it's the best I can do.

I would say that God is being revealed progressively through human history. God is able to be revealed more and more in and through us.

This is an experience I had several years ago. I was starting to lose my faith in God as I had imagined Him, and I was starting to suspect that what we call "God" is not exactly a free-standing entity. And this alarmed and disturbed me. So as I struggled with the idea that God didn't really exist in the way I had supposed, I (somewhat contradictorily) addressed this question to God: "God, are you separate from me?" The answer I thought was the "right" (orthodox) answer was, "Of course!" But that's not how it went. As I asked that question, I clearly and immediately "heard" this response: "Do you want Me to be?"

That's quite a question. Do I want to be separated from God? Gee, that can't be good. Then why do I want God to be separate from me? Why do I want God to be separate from humanity? Suppose God's one and only dwelling place is human beings, humanity, us? Jesus certainly hinted as much, with all that talk about what you do to the least, you do to Him, and how you keep the law is to love your neighbor.

If I think about most of the things that God is credited for, such as providing food, saving people from death, bringing people back to life, forgiving sins, etc. turn out, on closer inspection to nearly always come by way of human hands. Even in the Bible! God hardly ever smites people himself--he gets some people to do all the smiting. He doesn't mete out his own justice--he sends people to do it. Even the most supernatural of events, such as water from a stone or children raised from death, require a human intermediary. In the NT, every single "divine" thing that Jesus did, he also told his disciples to do, including forgiving sins and laying down his life for others.

The project that I think humanity is at work on is becoming One, by which I mean feeling and acting for each person as we feel for those nearest and dearest to us. In tribal societies, this is a reality--what is good for the tribe actually compellingly feels to be what's good. In organized religion and nationalism, we see this sense of identification and willingness to live and die for others expanded to a much larger group. But this enlargement comes at the cost of a strong sense of Us vs. Them, and often involves a stronger sense of alienation and disregard for all those on the outside of the circle.

Hence, while it's noble for a man to die for his comrades or for the abstraction of his country (more noble than for him to refuse to serve), his nobility is played out on the field of engaging in large-scale murder of "the enemy." Further enlargement of one's identification and loyalty beyond family and tribe has turned into a greater evil, in that much more hatred and destruction can now be guiltlessly done in the name of God and country. But that sense of the nobility of stepping beyond self to unity with a greater whole is real. It's just that until, in really practical terms, this identification is with all humans, or even, as the Tibetans believe, all sentient creatures, there is always an Us vs. Them that poisons the Oneness.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.

That they all may be One, as thou Father in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us.

Non-believers are often much better at sensing this and responding to it than believers, who are taught to divide humanity into "saved" and "unsaved," perhaps the most pernicious division of all. Believers are incapable of sincere, single-minded response to the needs of others, because they always have a sense of "ought" and a sense of their own goodness and a sense that their kindness is somehow a bribe or a message that might bring this lost soul to God--and unbelievers feel the hidden message behind all the things that Christians might do for them. On the other hand, a complete reprobate might stop and help his neighbor change a tire without any hidden subliminal message. They feel a connectedness, a sense of mutual responsibility and interdependence, rather than a "moral obligation." These are the folks who will say, Lord when did we see thee hungry and feed thee? And Jesus will say, Whatever you did for the least person, you did for me. Because the dwelling place of God is with mankind. Emmanuel, God with us.

(copied and saved from 2 discussion board posts I made.)

Good movie week

2007-12-21T19:56:00.000-08:00

This week I've watched two movies on DVD and one at the theatre, and all 3 of them were great. On DVD I watched Wag the Dog, an oldie but goodie. Of course I had heard the plot--and the similarities with the Clinton administration--but I had never seen it. It holds up well, although surprisingly, fashions actually have changed in the past 10 years. Dustin Hoffman is a riot.

Then I watched Little Miss Sunshine for the second time. The first time I saw it in Maine with my nieces last January, and this time I watched it with Kristen. It is such a wonderful movie. It's a strange combination of rather raunchy humor and very moral and uplifting message. It leaves you feeling so hopeful about humanity.

Then today, Kristen and I went to see Juno, about a 16 year old girl who gets pregnant and decides to have the baby. It's so snarky and quirky, and yet again, despite some raunchy language and a few naughty bits, very moral, and very uplifting. It would be easy to make the adoptive mom just a stereotype, and in a way she is--the yuppie woman who is so perfect and who seems to want a child almost as an accessory. But she has depth, and in the end, when her husband (who is well developed throughout the movie) turns out to be kind of a loser, she shows herself to be worthy of the trust that Juno placed in her. The relationship between Juno and her Dad is sweet, as is the stepmother, who really sticks up for her.

So after 3 hits in a row, I am taking a chance on one more: Arctic Tale, which I rented. I was really looking forward to this when it came out, since it was advertised all over the place. But to my surprise, it never even played at any of the local multiplexes. So I plan to watch that this weekend and hope I can keep the string going.

Kudos

2007-12-20T15:46:00.001-08:00

I love shopping at New Balance shoe store. A few years ago, I bought a pair of shoes and after several months of wearing them daily, I started having pain in the bottom of my heels. I went back to buy a new pair of insole supports, and explained why I needed them. The salesman noted that actually, I probably needed a new pair of shoes in a more supportive style. Ah, I thought, another hundred dollar pair of shoes! But the guy said, we can take these old ones back and you can just pay the difference. I was stunned. I'd worn them for months!

As a result of that one good transaction, I, my husband, and my daughter have bought all our shoes there ever since. They are instantly comfortable, and today, when I bought new insoles again, the pair they sold me didn't fit quite right. I went back an hour later, and they cheerfully let me exchange them for a better pair.

Their customer service is excellent, and their product is the best.

"Buying" a Cellphone

2007-12-20T06:22:00.001-08:00

Almost everyone in America has a cellphone. Certainly every college-age person. So when Kristen's cellphone stopped working, I knew we needed to buy her a new one as soon as possible. Since we've been on our current plan for more than 2 years, and since we've received various notices that we're eligible for a free new phone, I thought it should be relatively simple to go to an AT &T store and just buy a phone.

I thought wrong.

It turns out that you basically can't just buy a cellphone, at least not at any sane price. We went to the nearest AT&T store and explained our situation. We don't want to change our contract in any way, just buy a new phone to use. The guy talked in code for a few minutes, ending by suggesting that we open a new line in order to get a discounted phone. How much would a new line cost? Oh, only $10. $10 per what? Uh, per month. For how long? Well for 2 years. And how much of a discount would that buy us? Like $150 cheaper. And what would we do with that line, since we already have 3 lines and 3 people? Oh, it would be a ghost line. Just to get the discount. Wait, you're suggesting that I spend $240 over the next 2 years in order to get a $150 discount? His response: I'm not saying you should do it, but that's what some people do.

Translation: I confuse some people so much that I trick them into paying $240 to save $150, but since you can multiply, never mind.

We gave up and waited till the next day, during which we did a bit of research to find out if there are sane and simple ways to just buy a phone at a reasonable price. Turns out that the answer is essentially no.

You can get phones in one of three ways: get a phone below cost in exchange for signing a 2 year contract, pay what the sales persons sneeringly refer to as "retail" (ie over $300 for a piece of equipment that you know isn't worth that much), or buy a pay as you go phone for somewhere around $50~$75 and then pay 10 cents per minute to use it.

This last option would be fine for people like Sam and me, who use cellphones mainly for quick calls to check on things. (And even these have hidden tricks built into them, it appears, like $1.00 per day charges that apply only on days when you use the phone. wth?) But Kristen often calls just to chat, and talks for as much as an hour at a time. And I don't want her to worry about the cost every time she makes a call.

So we went to 4 different AT&T stores and Circuit City, in a feeble attempt to find out if there was a way to avoid signing up for an additional 2 years of service and still get a phone for under $100.

As a last resort, we went to Radio Shack, which had two advantages: it has multiple phone services available, so that you can directly compare costs, if you don't already have a provider. (We wanted to continue with AT&T not because it's necessarily good, but because Kristen's phone line is a $10 a month add-on to my basic service.) The other advantage of Radio Shack is that the guy who waited on us was really knowledgeable and also low-key and didn't seem like a scam-artist.

What we ended up doing was adding 2 years to Kristen's line (but not to the contract as a whole) and getting a phone for only $16, which was actually the sales tax only. Even if we take into account the $10 per month, the most we paid for this phone was $216. And of course, she can use it freely. We hesitated about the 24 month thing because she hopes to spend several months in Italy next Fall. But we figure she'll just have to get a pay as you go phone that works in Europe or something. It's only 10 weeks.

But my question remains: why do they have to make it so damn hard to simply buy a phone? Why the long-term contracts? As Kristen pointed out, cellphones may be obsolete within 2 years. And if it's such a good deal, why do they have to basically trick you into staying with them for 2 years up front? And once you've fulfilled that obligation, why do they make it impossible to avoid a second 2-year commitment? They don't seem to trust that their service would be good enough that you would willingly buy it. If they sold their phones for a realistic price, instead of the vastly inflated "retail" price which they then "discount" to give you a sensible price for your phone, maybe people would buy more phones! Is the whole aura of shell-game really necessary?

Election Anxiety

2007-12-11T20:59:00.000-08:00

Suppose that Huckabee gets the Republican nomination and Hillary gets the Democratic nomination. What a mess that would be. All the Christians will feel compelled to vote for Reverend Huckabee, and all the liberals will have to vote for Hillary, and it will be presented as a choice between Jezebel and Saint Michael or something. Fearfully, Huckabee would probably beat Hillary, especially after the hate-Hillary machine gets cranked up. The funny part of it all is that Hillary is actually too *moderate* for most real liberal/progressives.

I really don't want to contemplate the idea of President Huckabee.

From a distance it would seem like there's no possible way the Republicans can win in 2008, after the mess Bush has made of the last 8 years. But if it were Huckabee vs. Hillary, I can see it happening. In my worst dreams.

This can't be good

2007-09-15T14:49:00.000-07:00

Long queues formed outside branches of Northern Rock today as anxious customers waited to withdraw savings after the bank was forced to seek an emergency bailout from the Bank of England.

Savers went in person to Northern Rock's branches to withdraw their money, after facing difficulties contacting the bank on the phone or via the internet.

Customers who manage their money on the internet were blocked from seeing details of their account, including statements, when they tried to log in.

This morning Northern Rock gave warning that its profits would fall by 23 per cent, and its shares have dropped by nearly a quarter in value, after problems in the global credit markets forced it to ask for emergency financial support.

William Gough, 75, arriving at a Northern Rock branch in Central London this morning, said he did not believe the bank’s assurances that his savings were safe and intended to withdraw his funds.

“They’re telling us not to worry but we’ve heard it before, with Marconi”, he said, referring to the collapse of the telecoms equipment firm in 2002.

“At the time I put the money in I wouldn’t have imagined something like this would happen,” Mr Gough said while joining the back of a 40-strong queue.

Customers queued for up to an hour and, as news of the Bank of England bailout spread, the throng inside the branch was so dense that some struggled to open the door. from the London Times

I continue to hear things about the economy that look really grim. A run on the bank? A literal panic? When is the last time something like this happened? I can't find any reference to a bank run in the Anglo world since the Great Depression.

The war in Iran has begun

2007-09-09T14:59:00.000-07:00

Office of the Press Secretary
August 28, 2007
President Bush Addresses the 89th Annual National Convention of the American Legion
Reno, Nevada

[. . . ] The other strain of radicalism in the Middle East is Shia extremism, supported and embodied by the regime that sits in Tehran. Iran has long been a source of trouble in the region. It is the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism. Iran backs Hezbollah who are trying to undermine the democratic government of Lebanon. Iran funds terrorist groups like Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which murder the innocent, and target Israel, and destabilize the Palestinian territories. Iran is sending arms to the Taliban in Afghanistan, which could be used to attack American and NATO troops. Iran has arrested visiting American scholars who have committed no crimes and pose no threat to their regime. And Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.
Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere. And that is why the United States is rallying friends and allies around the world to isolate the regime, to impose economic sanctions. We will confront this danger before it is too late. (Applause.)
Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people. Members of the Qods Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are supplying extremist groups with funding and weapons, including sophisticated IEDs. And with the assistance of Hezbollah, they've provided training for these violent forces inside of Iraq. Recently, coalition forces seized 240-millimeter rockets that had been manufactured in Iran this year and that had been provided to Iraqi extremist groups by Iranian agents. The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased in the last few months -- despite pledges by Iran to help stabilize the security situation in Iraq.
Some say Iran's leaders are not aware of what members of their own regime are doing. Others say Iran's leaders are actively seeking to provoke the West. Either way, they cannot escape responsibility for aiding attacks against coalition forces and the murder of innocent Iraqis. The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops. I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran's murderous activities.(Applause.)
We seek an Iran whose government is accountable to its people -- instead of to leaders who promote terror and pursue the technology that could be used to develop nuclear weapons.

There is a lot of talk about the fact that the United States is preparing to make a first strike attack on Iran with the hope of taking out not only possible nuclear development sites, but the entire military capability of Iran. The plan is to do this assumed to involve little need for ground troops. In fact, it can probably be done almost like a computer game, with the American soldiers sitting at a console somewhere far away.

But based on what the President told the American Legion, to predictable applause, that confrontation has already begun. The use of the word "confront" is relevant, because the Senate also passed a resolution using that same term in regard to Iran, 97-0. So much for Democratic resistance to the plan for endless war. Lieberman is the author of that bill. http://lieberman.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=278727

I read elsewhere that Israel sought and received assurance before supporting the war in Iraq that Iran would be next on the list, to be followed by Syria.

But who is listening? Who is protesting? Who is even paying attention? The Today show shows us young women whose skirts are too short for Southwest Airlines, and the evening news offers us heart-warming stories about Marines who are also artists or soldiers whose legs were blown off but who still run marathons.

I don't think this war will be quite the piece of cake that Iraq was. I seriously fear for the future of my country. We seem to be positioned for a replay of both the Great Depression and World War 2. And Congress seems to have taken Ambien, sleeping through the whole thing.

Training an Army

2007-08-30T19:02:00.000-07:00

Brian Williams on tonight's NBC news reported on a situation that goes to prove what I've been saying about Iraq for years now. The report, from Richard Engel, is about the Kurdish region of Iraq, more properly called Kurdistan. The people there want a separate country, because they are not Arabs and they don't consider themselves Iraqis. They have a strong sense of national identity and a strong loyalty to the Free Kurdistan cause.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Kurdistan has been allowed to have its own army, called the Peshmerga. The Peshmerga actually believe in the cause for which they are fighting, and their loyalty is straightforward and undivided--they want a free and peaceful homeland.

What I've been saying is that it doesn't take months and months, nay years and years, to train an army to "stand up" if in fact the soldiers want to stand up for what you're asking them to stand up for. The reason we can't get "Iraqis to stand up so that we can stand down" is that the people we're trying to stand up are not interested in whatever agenda it is that we're trying to "train" them for. It hasn't taken the "insurgents" (whoever they are) long to train their men and put a backbone in them. And it also hasn't been difficult to get the Kurdish army, protecting Kurdish people, to acquit themselves like men and to provide real security for their own people.

This should be a sign to us that whatever the hell it is we're trying to "train" the Iraqi police and army to do, they don't want to do it, and therefore we will never succeed in "training" them to want to.

We train soldiers and Marines in something like 6 months. It's easy to do, because they come in wanting to be U. S. soldiers and Marines, because they actually believe in what they are being taught.

Apparently what is going on in Iraq is something else, some kind of passive aggressive resistance by the "trainees," who want a paycheck maybe, a job maybe, but who deep down simply don't buy what it is we're selling. So they vote with their backbone, by collapsing every time the trainers' backs are turned.

The Iraqi politicians don't want the program we're pushing on them either, or they wouldn't all be on vacation or simply absent.

So we've done what at least some, maybe even most, Iraqis wanted, which is to remove Saddam. And now whatever we thought was in it for us, they have no intention of giving us. So we either raise the war to a whole new level, basically forcing our positions upon a conquered people, or we leave. Like they used to say about Vietnam, declare victory and go home No WMDs, no more Saddam, job done!

We will only find out what all those half-trained Iraqi soldiers really believe in and want when we see what they're willing to die for. And it sure as hell ain't for us. Maybe it will be to keep the Kurds out of Kirkuk. Maybe it will be to keep Iran out of Baghdad. We'll never know till we get out of the way and let them stand up on their own two feet, or slink down on their own asses.

Mother Teresa's lost faith

2007-08-25T17:38:00.000-07:00

Mother Teresa's letters-- in which she apparently confides that she had no sense of God's presence, no feeling of faith or consolation, no assurance of the reality of God or heaven or the human soul--are about to be published. I had heard previously that this was the case for her, but it seems that the length and depth of this "dark night" is a bit of a shock to almost everyone.

It is not to me. And I think it is real evidence that she is a saint, by which I mean an enlightened person, one who has actually reached union with God, or spiritual marriage as it is called in the Catholic tradition. Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa, and most familiar to me, Saint Therese of Lisieux, all felt this emptiness and silence. Buddhists would understand it better, perhaps, as the end of the ego and of the sense of separation between one's self and what one understands as God.

I think that the great secret of mystical experiences is that at the end, there is a great emptiness. Images of God, voices of God, are all delusions and idols. God as one has imagined Him simply no longer exists. He has been entirely internalized. So the double-mindedness is over. The ability to have an internal dialogue with this Other is gone. Both Saint Teresa and Saint Therese talk about prayer turning into simply silence, resting on some inchoate sense of God. But finally, even that sense evaporates. Then there is no inner Other, nor any sense of an outer God in Heaven. There is only One. All the drama and fireworks is over. There's no push or pull, no ought or should. No Law. No sin. No guilt.

Faith is not meant to be eternal. Nor is hope. Only Love endures. But with no sense of the Presence of this Other, there is no One to love or to be loved by. One must simply act from love. If one's theology insists that this is a defect, then this state will be experienced as painful, as it apparently was in Mother Teresa's case. But I think it's painful because the endpoint of mystical prayer has been covered over in the western tradition. Those who reach it think they have gone astray, and they keep silence to avoid scandalizing or harming others.

Perhaps it is the providence of God that Mother Teresa's letters were not only not destroyed, as she intended, but are being published for all to see.

The truth is: The Son of Man is the Son of God, and there is no Other. There is no God to be found anywhere else but in one's own self and in the wounded selves of others. Jesus knew that and viscerally experienced it on the cross when he found Himself forsaken. The Law, the Prophets, and even faith itself are only means to this burned out but open-hearted end.

Make Love Not War

2007-08-21T20:40:00.000-07:00

One last thought about war. Isn't it odd that most people feel vaguely ashamed of sex. Yet what's so shameful? Sex expresses love or desire, or even a bit of aggression, it creates pair bonds that hold families together, it relieves tension and stress, and it creates new life once in a while. Almost everyone needs and wants sex on some sort of regular basis. It feels good and gives mutual pleasure and usually no one gets hurt. Yet it is a source of shame.

While war, which kills and maims and brutalizes, is a source of pride.

Men are expected to be proud of their brave deeds killing other people, and to blush in shame over the fact that they got naked with a person they love.

Something has gone badly amiss.

War, what is it good for?

2007-08-21T20:02:00.000-07:00

I am reading Flags of Our Fathers, written by a son about his father and 5 other men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima. His description of the battle of Iwo Jima is extremely vivid and detailed--descriptions of men literally cut in half by bullets, the top half of a body standing upright in the sand, and the incredible number of men killed, more Americans in a few days than in the entire Iraq War so far.

One of the things that struck me is the extreme youth of the "men" who were fighting. I always thought that calling them "our boys" was a kind of odd thing, but in fact, they were boys, most of them Kristen's age, many of them younger. Too young to drink, too young to vote, too young to marry, but old enough to see unspeakable horror (flamethrowers used to burn men alive in front of their eyes, buddies with their guts in their hands, heads rolling from bodies). What must it have done to the survivors?

I wondered about the eagerness and willingness of so many young men to volunteer in WW2, but a little thinking about the great Depression makes it a little more understandable. A kid who was 18 in 1942 was born in 1924 and was 5 years old when the stock market crashed. His entire childhood was spent seeing his father and uncles struggle to find work. His family probably could barely afford to feed him, and the odds of going to college or starting a career must have looked pretty grim. Then along comes Uncle Sam, offering steady work and prestige--become a man, save the world, be a hero! After watching his father's humiliating struggle to stay afloat, this must have looked like a great opportunity. And for many young men, it really was. 18 and 19 year old kids were given heavy equipment to operate, tanks and trucks and even airplanes. And thousands of excess workers were killed during the war, so that those who came back intact really did have a much brighter future than their elders ever had.

An article in this month's Harpers Magazine discusses whether war has now become obsolete. It speaks of war as a cultural choice, not a part of human nature. Human beings have to breathe and eat and have sex, but they don't have to wage war. One of the oddities of the viewpoint in Flags of Our Fathers is that it partakes of the WW2 opinion that the Japanese fought unfairly. It is rather striking that the Japanese are pictured as barbarians because they refused to surrender and were willing to fight to the last man and to undertake suicide attacks. This struck American soldiers as an unfair, unsporting position.

The fact that there is such a difference of opinion as to how the game of war ought to be played makes it clear that it really is a cultural construct. The Americans didn't think they were playing dirty pool when they used tanks of gasoline to send sheets of fire into a position where they knew Japanese soldiers were hiding. But they were horrified by the fact that the Japanese didn't need the assurance that at least some of them would come back from a mission alive. The Japanese also committed many atrocities--mistreating prisoners, whom they believed to be shameful cowards because they had surrendered. But while the Japanese were cruel to individual soldiers and apparently to captured cities in China and elsewhere, were they any crueler than the men who firebombed Tokyo and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is torture less cruel when done at a distance?

Is it really possible that the human race is beginning to reach the point at which wholesale war such as the American Civil War, WW1 and WW2, in which millions died, no longer seems supportable? The war in Iraq is really notable for the very small number of Americans killed (and probably the number of Iraqis killed is relatively insignificant compared to say Russia in WW2). And yet large numbers of Americans oppose this war. Imagine if we were losing this number of men, not in years but in days. Would anyone support such a cause?

Sure, radical Islam would like to attack us, but there is no threat that Islam will mass millions of soldiers and actually invade our country. Islam doesn't have a military. It has martyrs. Rather a different concept. And it is clear to the rest of the world that Islam is attempting to live in the past, in an imaginary 12th century golden age or something. It may nip at our heels and cause some trouble, but it's a far cry from the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Or the United States or Great Britain.

The only country in the entire world today that actually contemplates using military force to invade and pillage other countries is the United States. And even our appetite for such adventures seems to be waning. Young men (and women) of today really do have better options than 17 year old children of the depression had. The propaganda that it is sweet and lovely to die for one's country is slowly losing its hold on our imagination.

Perhaps like slavery and child labor and wife beating, war will gradually come to be seen by almost everyone as immoral and self-defeating. It can't happen too soon.

Putting 2 and 2 together

2007-08-05T10:48:00.000-07:00

In a previous post, I wondered about why the WTC buildings pulverized into dust rather than collapsing into big chunks of concrete and rebar. And I pondered the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis-Saint Paul. Now it occurs to me that the way that bridge collapsed provides further evidence that something other than gravity brought down the WTC.

The I-35W bridge was approximately 64 feet above the river below. That's the equivalent of 5 to 6 stories high. And when concrete and steel fall that far, it remained almost entirely intact. It fell in huge chunks, and it did not turn to dust at all. Obviously the World Trade Center is much higher--110 floors and 1368 feet in all. (12 feet per floor. But the individual floors fell onto the floor below, pancaking, as we are told. So each floor was falling only 12 feet at a time. When a slab of concrete falls 12 feet, it does not crumble to dust. It falls in maybe 2 or 3 or 6 large chunks. And then the next floor falls, again only 12 feet, and there is more weight and there would be more fracturing, and so on. (And it seems certain that fire, no matter how hot, would not turn steel and concrete to fine powder either.)

If the powder occurred at the ground level, after the top floor had jounced down 109 times, breaking up more and more as it went, then perhaps we could credit that the effect of gravity had crumbled the top floors to dust. But in the pictures, we can see clouds of dust roiling out of the building long before it reaches the ground. The building vanished before our eyes and was reduced to a fine powder.

We now know for certain that chunks of concrete remain intact when they fall 6 stories down. Let's assume that these large slabs fell another 6 stories. Would they be talcum-like dust yet? No? Another 6 or 12 stories? Would they even be brick size chunks? Remember, we saw with our own eyes this week that after the first 6-story fall, the slabs of concrete remain almost 100% intact.

We also know that human beings are not broken into tiny bits by such a fall either. Almost everyone survived a 60 foot fall. And we know from the space shuttle and from accidents in which parachutes fail to open that human bodies can fall not only 1300 feet but 10 times that, 13,000 feet, and not disintegrate. (In fact, people have *survived* falls from airplanes without a parachute!) Now of course, a human being standing on the 50th floor of the WTC is about to be hit by 60 floors of concrete before falling the final 50 floors down, so of course, we would expect any human remains to be crushed and mangled, perhaps beyond recognition. But we would not expect that body to be vaporized or turned to dust.

So I am forced to wonder if the WTC was blown apart by something other than fire and gravity.

Good for the Economy

2007-08-03T16:50:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about the collapsed bridge in the Twin Cities, and the fact that the cost of maintaining our crucial infrastructure seems so expensive that it is out of reach or not politically feasible.

Given that a country has a finite amount of tax revenue to spend, it seems obvious to me that when it is spent on one thing, it is not available to spend on something else. (Of course, the amount of tax revenue available is adjustable, simply by growing the economy and/or raising tax rates. But realistically, it's not easy to squeeze more money out of taxpayers, and being anti-tax and anti-government is a kind of religion in the United States since at least the time of Ronald Reagan.)

So the easy and obvious assumption is that every dollar spent on the military in general and the war in Iraq in particular is one dollar that is unavailable not only for touchy-feely things like education and health care but also harder core things like highways and bridges.

And yet there is a common belief that "war is good for the economy." How can this be? Well, they tell us, war creates jobs, spurs spending, money is transferred from the government (which got it from taxes of course) to corporations, and these corporations then hire workers and pay them wages, and that all this is economic growth. And in a way, I suppose it is. But if the government can create jobs and strengthen the economy by spending money, why would it do so better spending it on tanks and planes that will be used up in a war than it would spending it on roads and bridges right here at home (or schools, or health care, or whatever you care to imagine, museums or monuments)? It appears to my naive eyes that there is no positive benefit to spending government money (ie taxes) on military equipment. And it further appears that once the money is spent, it matters a lot whether that money has gone for something that is durable and will contribute to further economic growth, rather than something that has no real use to our citizens.

If buying airplanes and helicopters Humvees and then using them up is the road to a strong economy, would it be beneficial to build such equipment and just blow them up in our own desert in Nevada? Certainly everyone would agree that buying equipment and materials and then destroying it so that you can build and buy more is a huge waste of taxpayers money.

And surely everyone would agree that a working bridge or highway is of more use to us than a bunch of ruined and used up military equipment. (It's also more use than a bunch of functioning military equipment for that matter.)

So how is war helpful to the economy? The old-fashioned reason for war was to acquire booty. A more modern purpose is to acquire land or resources. If you gain something tangible from the war, such as access to resources (oil, for example), then the cost of warfare may be offset by the expected gain. (And of course, if someone else is trying to take away your liberty or your resources or land, then you fight not to gain something but to keep from losing something.)

Apart from some expected gain if you win a war, war can only hurt the overall economy. Taxing people and then using the taxes to pay them to build materials which are then used for non-productive purposes is a losing game. (If it's not, then why not just tax people and pay them to build materials and then throw the products away. Clearly, while this would increase employment, it's like the New Deal make-work projects only worse. At least the New Deal built hiking paths and wrote books and so forth.)

The overall principle is no different than it would be for the economy of a household. If I spend my money on remodeling my house, then when I'm done, I have a more valuable and usable house. If I spend it on buying materials that will make me more productive (such as a car or a computer or education) then I increase my earning power. If I spend my money on things that are not of lasting value (such as vacations or gambling or fashion) then when I'm done, I have less money and no greater ability to be productive. This is what military spending amounts to. While there may be some beneficial side effects (maybe some antsy young men get trained in some skill or maybe some new technology is invented), the bottom line of military spending is that it is throwing money away. And spending on infrastructure (or education or health or public works) is investing that some money in something of long-term value to the citizens whose money it is.

infrastructure

2007-08-02T19:21:00.000-07:00

I am always amazed when I consider what a wealth of blessings have been left to us by those who went before us. Think of how much money it took to build the interstate highway system, the NY subway, the thousands of public libraries and public schools. All we have to do is maintain them. I look at the library on my campus, and the thousands of volumes of books still there that some other taxpayers provided for us. Now, it is up to us to add the new volumes that make it a usable collection, and we balk at it.

The words "crumbling infrastructure" just took on new urgency with the collapse of a major bridge in a major city. The collapse of levees in New Orleans was of course an even bigger disaster, but we could comfort ourselves that this was some kind of 100 year flood, an act of God that could not be anticipated. But when bridges have a series of reports indicating that they are in bad shape, and nothing is done, it is our own fault. Our parents paid taxes to build these things. If we don't want to go back to the day of ferry boats and dirt roads, we have to pay whatever it takes to maintain our physical infrastructure.

Business people cry about taxes, but the infrastructure those taxes support is what makes their generation of wealth possible. There are smart people in the backwaters of Brazil too, but without good infrastructure (and a good legal system), ideas and hard work won't make you rich. Everyone pays taxes so that everyone can live better. And when we don't our infrastructure inevitably falls apart.

Credibility and Conspiracy Theories

2007-08-01T19:58:00.000-07:00

The concept of "Conspiracy Nuts" began after the assassination of Kennedy, when anyone who didn't accept the findings of the Warren Commission could safely be written off as a Conspiracy Nut.

The same brush-off has been resurrected to deal with questions about what happened on 9/11. And perhaps both "conspiracies" are a product of the same mind set. Perhaps if we took any event that is reported in great detail and subjected each detail to careful and critical scrutiny, we would begin to doubt our own existence.

Perhaps.

Nevertheless, I have some unanswered questions which lead me to doubt the official conspiracy story. (Keep in mind that the official story involves a conspiracy involving dozens of people on several continent and a series of amazing coincidences.)

So here are my wonderings.

The first thing that strikes me is the small number of people on all 4 of the planes that crashed that day. I have flown on a number of occasions before and after 9/11, and for at least 20 years it has been extremely unusual for there to be more than a handful of empty seats on any commercial flights in this country. Airlines simply cannot stay in business if they fly half empty flights coast to coast on a regular basis. In 2006, the percentage of seats filled on average was around 80%.

The planes that crashed on 9/11 each had between 181 to 224 seats available.

Flight 11 (Boston to LA) had 76 passengers and 5 hijackers (=81 passengers) and at least 100 empty seats

Flight 175 (Boston to LA) had 56 passengers (including the hijackers) and at least 125 empty seats.

Flight 77 (DC to LA) had 53 passengers + 5 hijackers (=58 passengers)and at least 128 empty seats.

Flight 93 (Newark to San Francisco) had 37 passengers (including 4 hijackers) and about 144 empty seats.

Think about the likelihood of 4 flights, on a beautiful fall morning, leaving at a convenient hour and traveling between major coastal cities being so empty. When is the last time you've gotten on a commercial flight and 3 or 4 empty seats for each passenger? I haven't seen fill rates like that since the 1970s!

Did the terrorists mercifully choose half-empty flights to minimize the number of deaths? Was there some other reason that the flights they were on were eerily empty? I don't have an answer, but this does strike me as a surprising coincidence.

The other big question in my mind is why the WTC buildings not only collapsed, but exploded into a cloud of dust. When I saw the buildings come down on live tv, my first thought was, Oh my God, it's like Columbine, they had planted explosives in there!

Now I have some doubts whether that would have been possible, because apparently it takes a lot of manpower and a lot of time to wire buildings for demolition. Perhaps it was done, but I'm inclined to think it wasn't. But is it possible that some other mechanism was used? I read a website about the possibility of some sort of high-energy lasar type systems that the military has created.

It is hard for me to believe that layers of concrete and steel pancaking onto one another would literally disintegrate to such an extent that no bodies were found but only tiny fragments. By way of comparison, after the Challenger blew up in midair and crashed into the ocean, the shuttle was found nearly intact in the ocean and all the bodies were recognizable as being still belted into their seats. That space shuttle was a lot higher up than a tall building, and yet in their fall to earth they didn't vaporize. And that was an actual explosion, not a "collapse."

There are many other loose ends, but these two questions, based on commonsense observations, put me in the Conspiracy Nut category.

Pat Tillman and Conspiracy

2007-07-28T12:19:00.000-07:00

Pat Tillman was an NFL football player who walked away from a lucrative contract to serve his country after 9/11. An Army Ranger, he expected to be sent to Afghanistan, but his first deployment was to Iraq. Apparently at some point Tillman, an educated and thoughtful guy, came to the conclusion that the invasion of Iraq was "fucking illegal," in his words. He was re-deployed to Afghanistan (any connection to the fact that he was a well-known guy and had some strong opinions?)and while there, he was killed.

The first story that was presented to the public was that he had died as a hero in combat against the enemy. He was awarded a Silver Star and a Purple Heart and a story was created to support the belief that he had died from enemy fire That story was a fabrication. Within a few weeks, it was revealed that in fact he had died in a "friendly fire accident," caused by the fog of war. However, his own family did not believe that it was an accident, and continued to push for answers. The President claimed "executive privilege" on further details of the incident, which is surpassing strange if it was simply an accident.

Now more details have been released. The AP is reporting that he was killed by 3 bullets to the forehead, and that Army medical examiners believed that it appeared to be a crime rather than an accident since the bullets were fired from as close as 10 yards. They also reveal that there is no evidence that there was any enemy fire at all in connection with his death, and that the Lt. General who was questioned about the incident contradicted himself and others as well as claiming to have "no recollection" more than 70 times.

It has also been revealed that Tillman was opposed to the Iraq war and opposed to Bush, urging comrades to vote for Kerry. He also was an admirer of Noam Chomsky, who opposes U. S. Imperialism, and had made plans to meet with Chomsky when he returned home. (Chomsky has confirmed this, as has Tillman's mother.) He never did return home for that meeting.

So questions have been raised, questions I am inclined to credit, as to whether there could have been an order from above to silence this guy. We know for absolute sure that there was a conspiracy involved in covering up the actual facts of his death. Would military leaders risk their own careers in order to cover up their men's mistakes? Or is there something far more sinister here? If it is simply a mistake that is being covered up, why would the president need "executive privilege"?

This is a very disturbing story.

AP report.

Sexual morality

2007-07-24T17:21:00.000-07:00

Christian ideas of sexual morality are based upon standards set down somewhere between 1500 BC and 50 AD. A lot has changed since then, to put it mildly. The Old Testament seems to me to have echoes of a conflict between pastoralists and agriculturalists (see Cain and Abel, and some comments about how Egyptians hated shepherds, for example.) It is also set in a time when patriarchy was just coming into its own, perhaps as a consequence of the transition away from a herding economy to a settled agricultural one. So the standards of morality were based on the need to pass land on from father to son, to have clear lines of patrimony, and to maximize fertility in order to "subdue the land." Women are treated as useful chattel.

Catholic teaching also reflects an overwhelming concern with making sure that people have the maximum number of children. Thus birth control, abortion, masturbation, and homosexuality all seem immoral because they detract from the imperative to have children. (Of course celibacy is a possibility, but actually priestly celibacy was imposed in order to prevent church property from being passed down to sons.)

Interestingly, Protestants and even people with no religious concern at all also had felt a moral imperative to have lots of children until fairly recently. Some American presidents had 8 or 9 or more. It was a sign of wealth and success. It was a sign of manliness to father large broods, and a sign of womanly competence to mother themn to adulthood. People viscerally wanted large families. The moral rules actually coincided with their inner moral sense that childlessness was selfish and immature and irresponsible. People needed children economically.

In the United States in particular (and no doubt Canada and Australia as well) the sense of a large unpeopled land made people uneasy. The idea that wilderness is attractive and appealing is very recent indeed. "A howling wilderness" is how people in the 1700s and 1800s perceived unsettled land. So having as many children as possible made instinctive sense to people.

But clearly both our reality and our inner sense of things have changed. We instinctively know that having more children is not economically necessary or helpful and that the world doesn't need as many more people as possible.

So our feelings about sexual morality no longer coincide with what we read in ancient documents. It takes real mental energy to explain why it's wrong to masturbate or to use birth control. (Protestants only became comfortable with birth control witin the past 60 years or so. In the past everyone knew that only a man having extramarital sex would have need for a condom.) The availability of safe and effective birth control makes pre-marital sex an attractive choice, whereas in the past pre-marital sex meant a child without the necessary support and a disaster for the "unwed mother" economically and thus socially. Now it doesn't mean any such thing.

If the spirit of God were moving among people today, leading them to look for the most loving and considerate answers to questions of sexual morality, would S/He not react to society as it actually is, rather than as it was 3000 years ago? Catholics in their millions have felt led by the most moral of considerations to use birth control and limit their families, and it's only the leadership which is stuck on old mores from old conditions. Most Christians who think much about it see the sense in allowing 2 men who love each other to form a family and adopt children. Surely this is more moral than condemning them to a life of shame and furtive unttached sexual encounters. Most Christians have already thrown in the towel on birth control, and pre-marital sex is condemned only in the faintest of ways. It is obvious to me that the hardline on abortion and homosexual relatinships are a rear-guard action that will whimper to an end within the next 30 or 40 years.

God in times past spoke through the prophets, but today His spirit resides within us, and we know that it is moral to have sex only with a person you are lovingly committed to and to only have as many children as you can provide with a strong start in life, and that they are not workers to help you but dependents whom you must nurture for 20 or more years.

Sensitive and thoughtful unbelievers probably have a keener sense of what today's sexual morality really entails than do people with their heads in an ancient book looking for rules. They hear what the Spirit has to say right now.

Let the Generals decide?

2007-07-24T17:07:00.000-07:00

One of Bush's frequent statements is that he doesn't believe that "politicians in Washington" ought to be running the war, and that he prefers to let the military decide what ought to be done.

He is completely wrong, both constitutionally and common-sensically (again!)

The Constitution very wisely puts the decision to declare war in the hands of "politicians in Washington," ie Congress. Congresspersons have to stand for election and they have to be able to face their constituents and explain to them why their sons and daughters should die in this war. The principle of civilian leadership is the difference between military dictatorships and democratic societies. The Constitution also makes the President, a civilian, a politician in Washington, the commander in chief. The military answers to a civilain leader, not the other way around.

From a practical point of view, it is also foolish to ask the military to decide what should be done. There's an old daying that when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Similarly, if you ask a surgeon what to do about cancer, what do you think she will suggest? The military has a very specific job: to fight wars using military might. Every problem they face will have to be answered by the only tools they have--soldiers, tanks, bombs, bullets and so on. The military cannot negotiate or conduct diplomacy. It can retreat but it can't end a war on its own. So if you ask a general what he needs, what will his answer be? More troops, more weapons, more fighting. What else could he possibly say?

The fact that Americans have been swallowing the propaganda coming from the politician-in-chief in washington is extremely worrisome.

Health insurance

2007-07-23T19:06:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about the concept of "health insurance" in America, and it seems to me that "insurance" is the wrong model. In the past, ordinary health care (which was mostly ineffective) was rather inexpensive as well. Back in the early 60's when I was a child, it cost $3 or $5 to see the doctor. Minimum wage was around $1, so this was 3 to 5 hours work for a very low-end worker. Nowadays, the co-pay is between $5 to $20, which is 1 to 4 hours pay for that same low-end worker. But insurance is paying quite a bit more. So even for ordinary doctors visits, most people feel the need for insurance.

And even more than doctors visits, many people, including me, need several prescription drugs to maintain their quality of life, whereas 40 years ago there were very few effective drugs for things like asthma (ask me how I know!)

So for many people, health expenses are not some imponderable possibility that might strike like a tornado or earthquake without warning. They are a predictable cost of living. And needing checkups and screening tests are not random events that may or may not occur. They are as inevitable as brushing your teeth.

I understand the libertarian/economic argument that one of the reasons health care costs have risen so fast is that the ordinary consumer is sheltered from feeling the full effect of them, and thus market pressures are somewhat absent. If you received food without paying for it item by item, but rather through some employer-paid benefit, and if it didn't matter whether you bought ground beef or sirloin steak as far as your own costs, then food prices would probably become unmanageable too.

But it does seem to me that the insurance model is misplaced. It made sense in a time when you could pay for a doctor visit and still pay your mortgage that month, and when insurance was for unexpected catastrophes such as cancer or a car accident. But most people who are insured these days are covered for all sorts of ordinary predictable expenses. And that means that the price of those predictable expenses are far higher than they would otherwise be, because billing the insurance and getting reimbursed are big expenses for doctors, which they must add to their prices (I remember when a doctor's wife could handle the bookkeeping and the cost of the visit was tossed in a drawer of $1 and $5 bills, to be simply counted up at the end of the week.) And the insurance companies must also make a profit.

So although some claim that governmental bureaucracies are inevitably wasteful and inefficient, I don't see how they could possibly be worse than medical costs that must build in a profit for the drug companies, the doctors' corporations, the insurance company, and the hospital. There are vast inefficiencies and tons of paperwork in coding and billing and processing payments and invoices that no one can understand. And it is a simple fact that Americans, by one means or another, manage to spend more per capita on health care costs than any other country, and yet not have any better results or even as good a life expectancy or infant mortality rate as countries spending less.

Also, or current "system" (if it even deserves the name), redistributes some of the costs of health care, but it does so very unevenly. Employers are expected to pick up a large share of insurance costs, but doing so makes them seem uncompetitive. Those companies that don't do their "fair share" of this unwritten agreement can cut their costs and pass them along to taxpayers (I'm thinking WalMart for example) but a company like Ford Motor has a long tradition of good benefits and so looks like a bad investment, since they are now stuck paying retiree benefits. Meanwhile Japanese and other carmakers don't have to add that to the cost of their cars, since it is already part of the tax burden shared by the entire country.

So I could ask the question like this: is health care expense more like a tornado, which might hit at random and from which you need to be protected, or is it more like public education, something that benefits everyone and which can be done effectively by spreading the costs across the entire community in order to make sure that no one goes without?

My conclusion is that it is an expense that will fall on almost everyone and which is vital to us as a community and a nation, and so the costs should be shared evenly. No company should be able to shift its share onto others, and no one should be denied coverage because they might need to use it!

If health care were provided to all at minimal cost and supported by taxes, there would be fewer millionaire CEOs and more middle-level government employees. People who wanted to start a business or quit their day job for something a bit risky would be able to do so with far less anxiety, and this alone might trigger a wave of creativity and entrepreneurship. Small employers would not be competing with larger employers or foreign companies on an uneven playing field. And since everyone would be covered, the idea that a pre-existing condition makes you uninsurable would come to a well-deserved end.

(It strikes me as criminal that insurance companies treat individuals who need insurance as if they were lone rangers--the insurance company is spreading the risk among the millions they insure, so why do they single the individual out and make them pay far more than if they were part of a "group.")

I don't see any reason why under a government run system, there couldn't also be private doctors for those who could pay, and for those who wanted things like face lifts or breast augmentation. I don't see how a not-for-profit system of covering everyone could cost more than one that also has to provide huge executive salaries, and advertising costs, and all sorts of clerical inefficiency, and dividends for shareholders. How could it? Do private colleges cost less than public ones? The idea that things done privately are cheaper is just a dogma put forth by conservatives, with no real evidence. Compare Blackwater to the Army and see which one costs more. The private companies pay their soldiers of fortune $100,000 a year. How can that be cheaper?

Could there be problems and bureaucracies to deal with? Sure, but there already are the same problems with insurers. And we leave working people with no means to pay their medical bills. And it's not like this has never been tried. Most developed countries already do this, and life has not fallen to sub-Saharan levels in Canada or England or Japan. The current system is a millstone around the neck of American productivity. It's time to create a real system of health care, not health insurance.

Let's see how this goes

2007-07-23T19:03:00.000-07:00

So I made myself a blog to talk about my knitting. But I spend a fair amount of time posting comments on various political and theology boards, and I thought maybe it would be fun to have a place where I can initiate my own posts and try my hand at writing about my thoughts, mostly to clarify them for myself. If it's boring, I can stop. If no one reads it, but if it's fun, that'll be ok. So off we go.