Back in my "Ten Reasons to Believe in God: or Why I am an Athiest" post I gave a list of what I thought were the ten best non-strawmen arguments for believing in God. Some of these reasons I've tackled in various posts over the years, but today I'm going to take a stab at one of the more interesting ones: The Master Plan.
The Master Plan argument takes two forms. First, there is the grand scale argument that overlaps with the Argument by Design. Our world exists through such an unlikely combination of chance events, it's difficult to look at it and not suspect that there must have been some sort of plan behind it all. For instance, consider the amazing oddity of solar eclipses. The sun and the moon are very different sizes and very different distances. The odds that they should have the exact same diameter in our sky are, if you'll pardon the expression, astronomical. Yet, against all odds, the sun and the moon exist at the same apparent size in our sky, to the degree that the moon can perfectly block out the sun save for a tiny, perfect circle of fire.
And here's further food for thought about eclipses: They weren't the same in pre-human history. The moon is slowly moving away from earth. When dinosaurs roamed the world, the moon was larger in they sky than the sun. In a few million years, the moon will be far enough away that it will no longer be able to produce a total eclipse. So, it's not only an amazing coincidence that the sun and the moon are the same size--they just happen to be the same size at the moment that a species on earth is capable of witnessing them and understanding them.
The unliklihood of the solar eclipse seems too amazing for it not to mean something. I feels almost like God signing his work. Yet: If God wished to sign his work, and was willing to put in the effort of building a sun and moon and earth of exactly the right sizes and positions to make this possible... couldn't he have been a little less obscure? Why leave a calling card that, while unlikely, isn't impossible to produce by pure chance? It's unlikely that you or I will ever win a lottery, yet, it's inevitible that some people win. It's unlikely that any given planet around a star will have a moon and a sun with the same apparent size, yet, since there are likely trillions of planets, it's inevitable that this alignment will happen somewhere in the universe. Our number came up.
For the possible to occur, even against long odds, requires no leaps of faith. So, I find the grand scale version of the Master Plan ultimately unpersuasive; until someone shows me something that truly could not have happened by pure chance, even if that chance was a billion to one, chance still remains a more plausible explanation than God.
The small scale argument is, I think, a more difficult one to refute. Not on a logical level, perhaps. But, on a gut level, almost everyone finds that there are events that occur in their lives that feel as if a guiding power brought them to a significant moment. I've mentioned before that I got served my divorce papers on Valentine's Day, and the official court date for the end of the marriage was April Fool's Day. It just feels so literary and appropriate that it must have some meaning; one could argue that God appreciates irony, if nothing else.
Once, while rock-climbing, the climber above dislodged a stone almost exactly the size of my head. It fell about fifty feet toward me, hit the rock in front of me, richocheted, and passed over my left shoulder, close enough to snag stray hairs sticking out from under my helmet. A few inches to the right, and it might have killed me. I almost certainly would have needed significant dental work. I know dozens of other people who share similar close calls; probably more people have these close calls than don't. It's unsatisfying to think: I was a coin flip away from being dead. You don't want to think that life can end due to such random, pointless events. It makes the world seem scary that you can die for no reason at all.
On the other hand, a close call like this can impart meaning on a life. I know people who feel that their close calls were actually wake up calls. God shakes you up a little now and then, gives you a little slap to get your attention, then steers you back onto the right path.
This is a tough argument to refute because, on some levels, I don't want to refute it. I know people who have used close calls as a reason to turn their lives around. In college I had a friend who was an alcoholic; finally, he got scared enough that he turned to God instead of a bottle. What kind of cad would I be to tell him that's the wrong path? I know another friend who told me point blank that, without his knowing that there was a loving God watching out for him, he wouldn't be able to handle all the tragedies in his life. I think of God as a product of imagination... but if this product of imagination is sufficient to give some people the strength to get out of bed in the morning, why should I make it my duty to go around kicking away people's crutches?
I don't believe that any higher power is communicating with us when we have these close calls, or the weird literary twists like a Valentine's Day divorce. Chance events happen. We may not be happy at the thought that our lives are in the hands of purely random events, yet, time and again, it's been proven that they are. It doesn't mean you can't draw lessons from them. From some of my own close calls, I don't need a higher power to draw a message: Life is short and precious. Keep moving foward while you can.
As to why I might be tempted to kick away the crutch that is God... I think that there's a certain inherent value in learning that you can stand on your own two feet. There's a famous schmaltzy fable about footprints on a beach. There are two sets of foot prints, but when the going gets rough, there's only one. The sinner knows the second set of foot prints belongs to God and says, "God, when times are tough, I see you abandoned me." God says, "No, when times were tough, that is when I carried you."
Is it such a crime to think that healthy adults don't need to be carried through their difficulties? That there's a dignity to walking the whole way through sheer will and toughness? Discovering that you are strong enough to achieve things without the support of imaginary friends is, I think, an important step toward living a fulfilling life. And if you need a master plan to give your life meaning, do what I did: Write your own.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Abuses of Power
The scandal of the week seems to be the bonuses paid to executives at AIG, a company that is only afloat because congress has okayed an almost endless pump of money to flow into it. They've spent more to keep AIG afloat in the past six months than they've spent on national parks, law enforcement, education, prisons, roads, or toilet seats for submarines. Of course, there's outrage that executives of a company that is such a sieve of tax dollars are paid any bonuses at all.
Today, congress approved at tax that is carefully crafted to take back all the money from the bonuses (save for a modest $250,000 per bonus... we don't want to leave these people homeless after all).
I've listened to the bloodlust on the radio and I find myself, once again, on the wrong side of public opinion. I'm far, far more disturbed that congress has just used our tax code -- laws that are supposed to produce the revenue to fuel our government -- as a punitive measure to single out and take the money from a few hundred employees that are currently at the top of the public's shit list. If this passes the senate, and is signed into law, this opens the door for abuses I don't even want to contemplate. If we say it's okay to tax this handful of people at rates of almost 90% in order to soothe public outrage, then what happens the next time someone unpopular suddenly finds themselves getting rich, or richer? You think, "Hey! That would be great!" Oil executives? Tax 'em until no one dares own a rig, let alone an oil refinery. Big pharma? They're all blood suckers! Let's suck them dry first. Tobacco execs? They're damn close to murderers. Don't leave them a dime.
Using the tax code to punish may sound like a good idea... as long as your friends are in power. Let's say that you are a devoted liberal, and feel that there should be strong economic penalties on tobacco execs, oil men, and people who look at cancer patients as economic resources to be exploited. You will use the power of taxation only to further the public good.
But, only a fool would think that their party and friends will hold power in Washington forever. Sooner or later, those oilmen and tobacco execs are going to run for congress since it pays better, and the next thing you know they'll have the power to tax the things they find distasteful--windmill farms and personal trainers and any movie star who goes to the third world and returns with more children than she left with.
Don't give political powers to your friends if you wouldn't trust the same powers to your enemies.
So, I really hope that congress fails to enact this tax. And, finally... is anyone else stunned that a congress that is passing a budget his year that will be over ONE TRILLION DOLLARS IN THE RED is daring to scold anyone on their economic mismanagement? It's congress who should most be ashamed that they are collecting paychecks. In December, they asked the auto company CEO's if they would be willing to work for a dollar a year until their companies were back on track. Would congress do the same until they pass a balanced budget?
Today, congress approved at tax that is carefully crafted to take back all the money from the bonuses (save for a modest $250,000 per bonus... we don't want to leave these people homeless after all).
I've listened to the bloodlust on the radio and I find myself, once again, on the wrong side of public opinion. I'm far, far more disturbed that congress has just used our tax code -- laws that are supposed to produce the revenue to fuel our government -- as a punitive measure to single out and take the money from a few hundred employees that are currently at the top of the public's shit list. If this passes the senate, and is signed into law, this opens the door for abuses I don't even want to contemplate. If we say it's okay to tax this handful of people at rates of almost 90% in order to soothe public outrage, then what happens the next time someone unpopular suddenly finds themselves getting rich, or richer? You think, "Hey! That would be great!" Oil executives? Tax 'em until no one dares own a rig, let alone an oil refinery. Big pharma? They're all blood suckers! Let's suck them dry first. Tobacco execs? They're damn close to murderers. Don't leave them a dime.
Using the tax code to punish may sound like a good idea... as long as your friends are in power. Let's say that you are a devoted liberal, and feel that there should be strong economic penalties on tobacco execs, oil men, and people who look at cancer patients as economic resources to be exploited. You will use the power of taxation only to further the public good.
But, only a fool would think that their party and friends will hold power in Washington forever. Sooner or later, those oilmen and tobacco execs are going to run for congress since it pays better, and the next thing you know they'll have the power to tax the things they find distasteful--windmill farms and personal trainers and any movie star who goes to the third world and returns with more children than she left with.
Don't give political powers to your friends if you wouldn't trust the same powers to your enemies.
So, I really hope that congress fails to enact this tax. And, finally... is anyone else stunned that a congress that is passing a budget his year that will be over ONE TRILLION DOLLARS IN THE RED is daring to scold anyone on their economic mismanagement? It's congress who should most be ashamed that they are collecting paychecks. In December, they asked the auto company CEO's if they would be willing to work for a dollar a year until their companies were back on track. Would congress do the same until they pass a balanced budget?
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Three ideas for saving the nation; or, why we are doomed.
It's pretty easy to knock the current economic plans being advanced by our leaders. The plan of Obama and the democrats basically boils down to spending a lot of borrowed money. Pouring 1.6 trillion in borrowed money into the economy may indeed prove stimulating. If I add up the credit limits on all my credit cards, I can borrow roughly $70,000 dollars. I could run out tomorrow and spend it all, maybe on a hurricane tour of Vegas. I would certainly feel very rich for a short while. A lot of businesses would feel the benefit of me throwing money around like the sy is the limit. My neighbors might look at me with envy as I pull into the driveway with a new car. I'd be high on the hog--until I had to start paying it back.
I'd probably be okay for a little while. The payments on all this would be pretty high, but I still have my job and some money in savings, so I could meet the payments for a month or two. After I pay down the debt for a couple of months, I could borrow money from the credit I'm opening up in my credit cards and make payments for another month or two.
Still, anyone with a lick of common sense is going to be able to look at my monthly income and compare to my monthly payments and come to the grim conclusion that I don't stand a chance in the long run. Bankruptcy looms; my only hope is to sell the car I bought, sell all my assets, work multiple jobs, and live on Raman noodles and tap water.
This year, our government is going to spend roughly twice as much as it takes in in taxes. If it's a stupid idea for me to do this as an individual, can some one explain why it's a good idea for us to do this collectively? The one advantage the government has is it can print money. But, it can't change the actual value of money; it tomorrow it decides to just double the amount of currency in the system, it will have the effect of halving the value of our currency. (If we're lucky, half.)
So, are we doomed? Probably. I don't see anyone rising on our political scene anytime soon who will be able to take us in the direction of fiscal sanity.
Still, just for the fun of playing make believe, here are some ideas for how we could get out of our present mess. We don't have to be doomed. I think there are actions we could take today that would result in us being a financial powerhouse again within my lifetime:
A. Stop spending more than we bring in on stuff we don't need. See my previous beaver management post. Unfortunately, cutting out trivia like beaver and cricket management will only make a small dent in the budget. To seriously impact the budget, we have to slash some sacred cows. Here are a few cuts, in order of their likelihood of causing riots:
1. I love NASA. I think that it is good for us collectively to explore Mars with robotic probes. I think that our long term survival may one day depend on our ability to find all the asteroids and comets that pass near us and be able to shoot them out of the sky. But: Mars isn't going anywhere. If we have to shut down our space program until we are back into financial health, I'm willing to make that cut. We can go back again in 50 years and it won't be all that different.
2. Social security and other benefits must be means tested. Right now, the benefits are paid blindly regardless of how wealthy you are. This is fundamentally fair. If we only gave the benefit to the poor, it would be, in effect, a penalty on responsible people who planned for their retirement. But... so what? If we don't find cuts to make somewhere, responsible people are going to be penalized anyway by hyperinflation. Social Security is the single largest item in the budget. We can't do anything that will have any real impact without at least slowing its growth.
3. Close up shop on the American empire. We currently have troops stationed in 140 different companies. Our spending on defense is more than all the other countries of the world combined. Do we really still need troops in Germany and Japan? Once we go to war, are we obligated to leave troops there forever, paying lease money on bases to the host countries? Bring the boys back home. We have 55 nuclear subs lurking in oceans around the world serving as mobile missile bases, waiting to launch a final strike in the event of nuclear war. Why? It seems like we could get the same deterent effect out of, say, 5 or 10. Assuming we even need a deterent effect any more. Pakistan has, like, 1 bomb, and we aren't going to go to war with them, even though this is the country Osama bin Laden is probably hiding in. With nukes, a little goes a long, long way.
B: If you found yourself overwhelmed by your debts, one thing you could attempt would be to sell off your assets. It's a little different from increasing revenue; if I decided to liquidate my comic book collection, I'd get a one time burst of cash, but have no comic books left. Other people might have heirloom silver or jewelry that could bring high dollars. It's heartbreaking to sell these things, but such is life. It's time to look at what the government can put up for sale.
I'm not sure what the riot factors of any of these are, but let's just go for them:
1. We own millions of acres of national park land. I'm a fan of national parks; I frequently pay visits to them. But... we aren't going to be able to enjoy these parks if the economic house of cards collapses and we revert to cannibalism. Tough choices must be made. For instance, there are long stretches of shoreline around all four coasts that are protected as national parks. Ocean front property is big dollar property. We can put half of what we own up for sale. Developers will spend billions to snap this land up. Or, alternatively, state and environmental trusts will match or beat their offers. We could rig the auctions to weight the bid of an environmental group at twice the value of a developer. And, maybe once we are back on our financial footing, we can look at buying some of this stuff back. But for now, I'm guessing this could be extremely lucrative. (Though, admittedly, this is just a guess. I'm too lazy to do actual research into the true value of the assets held by national parks.)
2: For the land we continue to manage, when we lease rights, make those rights reflect their actual worth, rather than the sweetheart deals that are currently the norm. This can go hand in hand with expanding the areas we put up for lease.
3: How's this for a radical idea: Let's sell all the books in the Library of Congress. We'll of course keep scans of everything. But, look, Ghandi's sandles and glasses just recently brought in over a million dollars at auction. The Library of Congress contains books from Thomas Jefferson's personal collection. The highest price a rare book has ever sold for was $8 million for J.J. Audubon's Birds of America. I'm guessing many of the books in the collection could match or beat this price. I'm also guessing that there's a warehouse somewhere in Washington full of all the small stuff left behind by the Presidents. Every family that moves in redecorates; you know that somewhere there's a crate that contains all the drapes and bedsheets from when Herbert Hoover lived there. Maybe Ronald Reagan left his toothbrush in the white house medicine cabinet... he was getting kind of absent minded. I bet there are Reagan worshippers out there who would pay top dollar for his toothbrush. Maybe they could capture some DNA from it and try to clone him.
And, how's this for a plan: The white house has a lot of unused bedrooms. Why not insist that our presidents have roommates? I found a roommate to help cover expenses. Obama can suck it up and do the same.
C: The American Endowment. Ivy League colleges have endowments. Someone, or groups of someones, give them big chunks of money and this money gets invested and the colleges get wealthier and wealthier, even as the government funnels more taxes to them in the form of grants. Harvard has an endowment of 34 billion dollars (at least it did before the stock market tanked). What we need is an endowment for America. We know that Barack Obama can ask people for money, and they'll give it to him. He raised more money than he could spend in a political campaign; that's just jawdropping, considering how wasteful campaigns can be.
Right now, if Obama put out a call for all American's to pay an extra hundred dollars to help offset the budget deficit, I'm willing to bet he'd collect a healthy sum, though nowhere nearly enough to actually dent the deficit. Still, one reason I'd be reluctant to contribute to such a call is I know that the money I sent in would instantly be spent. It was spent before anyone even thought to ask me for it, in fact.
But, what if we had an endowment that American's could contribute to that was going to serve as a national trust fund? We could establish it for a set number of years-twenty five would be a good target. During these 25 years, we could only put money into the fund, and draw nothing out of it. We could launch the fund with a giant telethon. Bill Clinton could play his sax. Obama could auction off baby kisses. Dick Cheney could agree to stand in a stockade and let people throw tomatoes at him for a thousand bucks a pop. At the end of the evening, we'd have tens of millions of dollars. Then... we'd invest this conservatively. Only buy stocks with P/E ratios of 15/1 or better. Have a nice mix of bonds and money market accounts. Every year at tax time, we could have a check-off box asking if you wanted to contribute $5 to the fund. We could have the world's biggest bake sale on the national mall. We keep adding to the savings, and allow the power of compound interest to grow the endowment. Then, if we got the rest of our financial house in order in the intervening 25 years, perhaps we would be in a shape that when we start drawing on the endowment 25 years from now, we could use it to pay down the national debt, which is still going to be around. Maybe we could buy back some of those parks we sold, and look at sending people to the moon again. Instead of us borrowing money from China and Saudi Arabia, maybe we'd be in a position to loan them some dough.
In short, my plan breaks down to:
1: Cut spending. Stop borrowing.
2: Sell assets to pay down debt (or, get a roommate to share expenses).
3: Put money into savings and don't mess with it for a long time.
This happens to be my own personal plan for financial health. It's common sense, requires a little discipline, and trades luxuries today for a more comfortable and financially sound future. It can be done! There is hope!
.... yeah. I know. I think we're doomed too.
I'd probably be okay for a little while. The payments on all this would be pretty high, but I still have my job and some money in savings, so I could meet the payments for a month or two. After I pay down the debt for a couple of months, I could borrow money from the credit I'm opening up in my credit cards and make payments for another month or two.
Still, anyone with a lick of common sense is going to be able to look at my monthly income and compare to my monthly payments and come to the grim conclusion that I don't stand a chance in the long run. Bankruptcy looms; my only hope is to sell the car I bought, sell all my assets, work multiple jobs, and live on Raman noodles and tap water.
This year, our government is going to spend roughly twice as much as it takes in in taxes. If it's a stupid idea for me to do this as an individual, can some one explain why it's a good idea for us to do this collectively? The one advantage the government has is it can print money. But, it can't change the actual value of money; it tomorrow it decides to just double the amount of currency in the system, it will have the effect of halving the value of our currency. (If we're lucky, half.)
So, are we doomed? Probably. I don't see anyone rising on our political scene anytime soon who will be able to take us in the direction of fiscal sanity.
Still, just for the fun of playing make believe, here are some ideas for how we could get out of our present mess. We don't have to be doomed. I think there are actions we could take today that would result in us being a financial powerhouse again within my lifetime:
A. Stop spending more than we bring in on stuff we don't need. See my previous beaver management post. Unfortunately, cutting out trivia like beaver and cricket management will only make a small dent in the budget. To seriously impact the budget, we have to slash some sacred cows. Here are a few cuts, in order of their likelihood of causing riots:
1. I love NASA. I think that it is good for us collectively to explore Mars with robotic probes. I think that our long term survival may one day depend on our ability to find all the asteroids and comets that pass near us and be able to shoot them out of the sky. But: Mars isn't going anywhere. If we have to shut down our space program until we are back into financial health, I'm willing to make that cut. We can go back again in 50 years and it won't be all that different.
2. Social security and other benefits must be means tested. Right now, the benefits are paid blindly regardless of how wealthy you are. This is fundamentally fair. If we only gave the benefit to the poor, it would be, in effect, a penalty on responsible people who planned for their retirement. But... so what? If we don't find cuts to make somewhere, responsible people are going to be penalized anyway by hyperinflation. Social Security is the single largest item in the budget. We can't do anything that will have any real impact without at least slowing its growth.
3. Close up shop on the American empire. We currently have troops stationed in 140 different companies. Our spending on defense is more than all the other countries of the world combined. Do we really still need troops in Germany and Japan? Once we go to war, are we obligated to leave troops there forever, paying lease money on bases to the host countries? Bring the boys back home. We have 55 nuclear subs lurking in oceans around the world serving as mobile missile bases, waiting to launch a final strike in the event of nuclear war. Why? It seems like we could get the same deterent effect out of, say, 5 or 10. Assuming we even need a deterent effect any more. Pakistan has, like, 1 bomb, and we aren't going to go to war with them, even though this is the country Osama bin Laden is probably hiding in. With nukes, a little goes a long, long way.
B: If you found yourself overwhelmed by your debts, one thing you could attempt would be to sell off your assets. It's a little different from increasing revenue; if I decided to liquidate my comic book collection, I'd get a one time burst of cash, but have no comic books left. Other people might have heirloom silver or jewelry that could bring high dollars. It's heartbreaking to sell these things, but such is life. It's time to look at what the government can put up for sale.
I'm not sure what the riot factors of any of these are, but let's just go for them:
1. We own millions of acres of national park land. I'm a fan of national parks; I frequently pay visits to them. But... we aren't going to be able to enjoy these parks if the economic house of cards collapses and we revert to cannibalism. Tough choices must be made. For instance, there are long stretches of shoreline around all four coasts that are protected as national parks. Ocean front property is big dollar property. We can put half of what we own up for sale. Developers will spend billions to snap this land up. Or, alternatively, state and environmental trusts will match or beat their offers. We could rig the auctions to weight the bid of an environmental group at twice the value of a developer. And, maybe once we are back on our financial footing, we can look at buying some of this stuff back. But for now, I'm guessing this could be extremely lucrative. (Though, admittedly, this is just a guess. I'm too lazy to do actual research into the true value of the assets held by national parks.)
2: For the land we continue to manage, when we lease rights, make those rights reflect their actual worth, rather than the sweetheart deals that are currently the norm. This can go hand in hand with expanding the areas we put up for lease.
3: How's this for a radical idea: Let's sell all the books in the Library of Congress. We'll of course keep scans of everything. But, look, Ghandi's sandles and glasses just recently brought in over a million dollars at auction. The Library of Congress contains books from Thomas Jefferson's personal collection. The highest price a rare book has ever sold for was $8 million for J.J. Audubon's Birds of America. I'm guessing many of the books in the collection could match or beat this price. I'm also guessing that there's a warehouse somewhere in Washington full of all the small stuff left behind by the Presidents. Every family that moves in redecorates; you know that somewhere there's a crate that contains all the drapes and bedsheets from when Herbert Hoover lived there. Maybe Ronald Reagan left his toothbrush in the white house medicine cabinet... he was getting kind of absent minded. I bet there are Reagan worshippers out there who would pay top dollar for his toothbrush. Maybe they could capture some DNA from it and try to clone him.
And, how's this for a plan: The white house has a lot of unused bedrooms. Why not insist that our presidents have roommates? I found a roommate to help cover expenses. Obama can suck it up and do the same.
C: The American Endowment. Ivy League colleges have endowments. Someone, or groups of someones, give them big chunks of money and this money gets invested and the colleges get wealthier and wealthier, even as the government funnels more taxes to them in the form of grants. Harvard has an endowment of 34 billion dollars (at least it did before the stock market tanked). What we need is an endowment for America. We know that Barack Obama can ask people for money, and they'll give it to him. He raised more money than he could spend in a political campaign; that's just jawdropping, considering how wasteful campaigns can be.
Right now, if Obama put out a call for all American's to pay an extra hundred dollars to help offset the budget deficit, I'm willing to bet he'd collect a healthy sum, though nowhere nearly enough to actually dent the deficit. Still, one reason I'd be reluctant to contribute to such a call is I know that the money I sent in would instantly be spent. It was spent before anyone even thought to ask me for it, in fact.
But, what if we had an endowment that American's could contribute to that was going to serve as a national trust fund? We could establish it for a set number of years-twenty five would be a good target. During these 25 years, we could only put money into the fund, and draw nothing out of it. We could launch the fund with a giant telethon. Bill Clinton could play his sax. Obama could auction off baby kisses. Dick Cheney could agree to stand in a stockade and let people throw tomatoes at him for a thousand bucks a pop. At the end of the evening, we'd have tens of millions of dollars. Then... we'd invest this conservatively. Only buy stocks with P/E ratios of 15/1 or better. Have a nice mix of bonds and money market accounts. Every year at tax time, we could have a check-off box asking if you wanted to contribute $5 to the fund. We could have the world's biggest bake sale on the national mall. We keep adding to the savings, and allow the power of compound interest to grow the endowment. Then, if we got the rest of our financial house in order in the intervening 25 years, perhaps we would be in a shape that when we start drawing on the endowment 25 years from now, we could use it to pay down the national debt, which is still going to be around. Maybe we could buy back some of those parks we sold, and look at sending people to the moon again. Instead of us borrowing money from China and Saudi Arabia, maybe we'd be in a position to loan them some dough.
In short, my plan breaks down to:
1: Cut spending. Stop borrowing.
2: Sell assets to pay down debt (or, get a roommate to share expenses).
3: Put money into savings and don't mess with it for a long time.
This happens to be my own personal plan for financial health. It's common sense, requires a little discipline, and trades luxuries today for a more comfortable and financially sound future. It can be done! There is hope!
.... yeah. I know. I think we're doomed too.
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Federal Beavers
McCain this week railed against the pork in the latest budget. If he'd run as this McCain, I might have voted for him; instead he tossed aside every limited government idea he ever had to support last fall's bank bailout before he'd ever seen the bill.
One of the items in the budget McCain ridiculed was $650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi. David Price, my congressman here in NC, is responsible for the earmark, and today's paper carried his impassioned defense of the importance of beaver management.
In an odd coincidence, I've lived in both North Carolina and Mississippi, and these are the only two states where I've ever seen a beaver dam. I'm going walking later today, and the last time I went a little off trail I found two beaver dams on the same stream. The banks of the Eno are lined with trees and branches showing the handiwork of beavers who, I have to say, frequently chew off more than they can bite.
The damns can cause flooding, so I can see why it's important that somebody take control and remove potentially harmful dams. And, I can also admit that $650,000 is a really trivial amount of money as far as the federal government goes. It's, what, five or six toilet seats for the space shuttle?
But, here's the larger issue: It doesn't matter if it's not much money, or if it's a good cause. If it's in the federal budget, it should be for a project of national importance. How, exactly, is a person in Nevada benifited by having even a fraction of a penny of their tax dollars go to beaver management? Conversely, if there's money in the budget for managing Mormon crickets (which there is), how does this benefit me in North Carolina? (On a side note, the existence of Mormon crickets is a real testament to the persistance of Mormon missionaries, isn't it? I also thought I'd have a praying mantis joke here, but it turns out I don't.)
I can't speak for Mississippi, but North Carolina isn't a poor state. There are houses within a mile of me that sell for more than $650,000. If the people of North Carolina want to manage their beavers, we should hassle our state government to do the job. We could pay for the cost of the whole thing by issuing a "Busy Beaver" scratch off ticket through the state lottery.
Once you decide that it's appropriate to spend federal taxes on limited, local problems that are well within the scopes of local governments to pay for, what are the limits to federal spending? If you start funding beaver management, the day will come when you fund Elvis museums and gene-mapping for tobacco and rescue plans for car companies. It's the slippery slope argument--except that the slippery slope is often a fallacy, but in this case we're already sliding down the slope, full speed toward the cliff.
Is there no one left to put on the brakes?
One of the items in the budget McCain ridiculed was $650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi. David Price, my congressman here in NC, is responsible for the earmark, and today's paper carried his impassioned defense of the importance of beaver management.
In an odd coincidence, I've lived in both North Carolina and Mississippi, and these are the only two states where I've ever seen a beaver dam. I'm going walking later today, and the last time I went a little off trail I found two beaver dams on the same stream. The banks of the Eno are lined with trees and branches showing the handiwork of beavers who, I have to say, frequently chew off more than they can bite.
The damns can cause flooding, so I can see why it's important that somebody take control and remove potentially harmful dams. And, I can also admit that $650,000 is a really trivial amount of money as far as the federal government goes. It's, what, five or six toilet seats for the space shuttle?
But, here's the larger issue: It doesn't matter if it's not much money, or if it's a good cause. If it's in the federal budget, it should be for a project of national importance. How, exactly, is a person in Nevada benifited by having even a fraction of a penny of their tax dollars go to beaver management? Conversely, if there's money in the budget for managing Mormon crickets (which there is), how does this benefit me in North Carolina? (On a side note, the existence of Mormon crickets is a real testament to the persistance of Mormon missionaries, isn't it? I also thought I'd have a praying mantis joke here, but it turns out I don't.)
I can't speak for Mississippi, but North Carolina isn't a poor state. There are houses within a mile of me that sell for more than $650,000. If the people of North Carolina want to manage their beavers, we should hassle our state government to do the job. We could pay for the cost of the whole thing by issuing a "Busy Beaver" scratch off ticket through the state lottery.
Once you decide that it's appropriate to spend federal taxes on limited, local problems that are well within the scopes of local governments to pay for, what are the limits to federal spending? If you start funding beaver management, the day will come when you fund Elvis museums and gene-mapping for tobacco and rescue plans for car companies. It's the slippery slope argument--except that the slippery slope is often a fallacy, but in this case we're already sliding down the slope, full speed toward the cliff.
Is there no one left to put on the brakes?
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Free Robot!
I bought a new Roomba yesterday. Sears had the base model 405 for only $129.00, so it was really a no-brainer just to buy a new one. My old roomba has served me well for two years, but it's reached a point where the battery won't hold a charge for more than ten minutes, and it's showing it's age in a lot of small jury-rigged repairs I've made to it. The plastic clips that hold in the rotating brushes broke a while back and I wound up just using screws to hold the whole assembly in place. I haven't bought a new filter since I got the unit, choosing instead just to wash the old filter with soap and water every few weeks, which got the job done.
It seems a shame just to toss the old roomba in the trash. If the battery still held a charge long enough to finish a room, I'd still be using it. It occurs to me there may be some engineering class out there somewhere that would like to get their hands on a free robot for a class project. I'll even pay for ground shipping in the US. Just drop me a line at nobodynovelwriter (at) yahoo.com.
It seems a shame just to toss the old roomba in the trash. If the battery still held a charge long enough to finish a room, I'd still be using it. It occurs to me there may be some engineering class out there somewhere that would like to get their hands on a free robot for a class project. I'll even pay for ground shipping in the US. Just drop me a line at nobodynovelwriter (at) yahoo.com.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Two proposed ammendments
I'm not an economist. Nor am I particularly an expert in government, or the constitution, or law. I am someone who attempts to keep informed, but I confess, a lot of stuff that our government does defies any attempt to keep informed.
The stimulus bill, for instance. The house drafted one enormous bill in only a couple of days, the senate drafted a different enormous bill in a similarly short time, a committee got together and melded the two into a third bill in under a week, a bill that was over a thousand pages long, that was voted on for final approval so swiftly that no average person could possibly have sat down and read every single line of this bill. I'm guessing that congress and the White House have teams to tackle the work of actually reading and writing these things; a couple of dozen people draft it, a couple of dozen people read it in chunks and give the actual lawmakers a two page memo with a lot of bullet points. It goes into law with no single legislator actually having read it.
When Enron collapsed, or the Wall Street investment firms crumbled, the CEOs were trotted before congress to be publicly berated for their irresponsibility. The CEOs often blame their woes on bad information from underlings. Congressmen rightly ask why were the CEOs collecting multimillion dollar salaries to run businesses when they now admit they didn't really understand everything that was going on.
Yet, how is our government any different? Not one elected official actually read the largest spending bill they've ever voted on. Obama is a very smart man by all accounts, but he cannot possibly be enough of a speed reader to actually go through this bill line by line and understand precisely what it is he's enacting.
I'm not defending auto industry executives, oil barons, peanut processing bosses, airline CEOs, or the titans of Wall Street, but for all the failures of their various industries, no single firm or business has ever found itself 12 trillion in debt. Where are the hearings where congressmen are called to testify before a panel of American citizens under oath and explain how they managed to run our country into the financial ditch?
Actually, minus the part about being under oath, we have the chance every two years to hold our congressmen to account. With the exception of a tiny handful of citizens, we can't be bothered. The percentage of voting age Americans who can even name their congressional representative is a joke. And, I'm no better; for all my ranting about the duty of being an informed citizen, I have representational fatigue. I can name my congressman and senators at the federal level, but I don't have a clue who represents me in Raleigh, nor can I think of the name of the mayor of my town as I type this. I'd probably recognize it if I heard it, but right now it's all lost in the brain fog.
I doubt we'll ever see another constitutional amendment passed in our lifetime, but I do have a modest proposal for a 28th amendment:
Congress shall pass no bill longer than 1oo pages, double spaced, 12 point courier font, with one inch margins on a standard sheet of legal paper (8.5x14).
This means bills like the annual budget and the stimulus bill, or funding for various wars, couldn't be voted on in huge omnibus bills that no one can possibly read. Every law would be of a size that there would be no excuse for a representative not to actually read it before passing it. Also, breaking bills up would clean out some of the crazy stuff that gets stuck in.
And, how about this for the 29th:
No representative may vote on a bill without signing an oath, under penalty of perjury, that he has read the bill in full.
I wish I could think of some amendment that would fix the American public, but perhaps that's asking too much of my brain on a lazy Sunday morning....
The stimulus bill, for instance. The house drafted one enormous bill in only a couple of days, the senate drafted a different enormous bill in a similarly short time, a committee got together and melded the two into a third bill in under a week, a bill that was over a thousand pages long, that was voted on for final approval so swiftly that no average person could possibly have sat down and read every single line of this bill. I'm guessing that congress and the White House have teams to tackle the work of actually reading and writing these things; a couple of dozen people draft it, a couple of dozen people read it in chunks and give the actual lawmakers a two page memo with a lot of bullet points. It goes into law with no single legislator actually having read it.
When Enron collapsed, or the Wall Street investment firms crumbled, the CEOs were trotted before congress to be publicly berated for their irresponsibility. The CEOs often blame their woes on bad information from underlings. Congressmen rightly ask why were the CEOs collecting multimillion dollar salaries to run businesses when they now admit they didn't really understand everything that was going on.
Yet, how is our government any different? Not one elected official actually read the largest spending bill they've ever voted on. Obama is a very smart man by all accounts, but he cannot possibly be enough of a speed reader to actually go through this bill line by line and understand precisely what it is he's enacting.
I'm not defending auto industry executives, oil barons, peanut processing bosses, airline CEOs, or the titans of Wall Street, but for all the failures of their various industries, no single firm or business has ever found itself 12 trillion in debt. Where are the hearings where congressmen are called to testify before a panel of American citizens under oath and explain how they managed to run our country into the financial ditch?
Actually, minus the part about being under oath, we have the chance every two years to hold our congressmen to account. With the exception of a tiny handful of citizens, we can't be bothered. The percentage of voting age Americans who can even name their congressional representative is a joke. And, I'm no better; for all my ranting about the duty of being an informed citizen, I have representational fatigue. I can name my congressman and senators at the federal level, but I don't have a clue who represents me in Raleigh, nor can I think of the name of the mayor of my town as I type this. I'd probably recognize it if I heard it, but right now it's all lost in the brain fog.
I doubt we'll ever see another constitutional amendment passed in our lifetime, but I do have a modest proposal for a 28th amendment:
Congress shall pass no bill longer than 1oo pages, double spaced, 12 point courier font, with one inch margins on a standard sheet of legal paper (8.5x14).
This means bills like the annual budget and the stimulus bill, or funding for various wars, couldn't be voted on in huge omnibus bills that no one can possibly read. Every law would be of a size that there would be no excuse for a representative not to actually read it before passing it. Also, breaking bills up would clean out some of the crazy stuff that gets stuck in.
And, how about this for the 29th:
No representative may vote on a bill without signing an oath, under penalty of perjury, that he has read the bill in full.
I wish I could think of some amendment that would fix the American public, but perhaps that's asking too much of my brain on a lazy Sunday morning....
Saturday, February 14, 2009
The Burger
I leave work at 11pm, dead on my feet, starving, nothing to eat since lunch. Just past the interstate there's a Waffle House. I pull in, grab a newspaper, sit at the counter, and order a double quarter pound bacon cheeseburger.
I can smell it on the griddle as it cooks. I watch them slide the cheese on with a spatula. It stays on the griddle until the cheese melts over the patties like a perfect coat of golden paint. These are stacked onto a bun and served up with a paper thin slice of red onion that goes edge to edge. Pickles, lettuce, onion, tomato, mustard, and, oh yeah, the bacon crisp and salty ... every bite of this thing is like eating sunshine and music and America.
Five AM. I wake to heartburn. My sweat smells like onion. There's an undercurrent of mustard and bacon to my spit. My stomach feels twice as heavy as it should. I'm two weeks away from my 45th birthday. I know better than to eat such meals in the shadow of midnight.
I'd do it again. I'd do it again.
The glory....
I can smell it on the griddle as it cooks. I watch them slide the cheese on with a spatula. It stays on the griddle until the cheese melts over the patties like a perfect coat of golden paint. These are stacked onto a bun and served up with a paper thin slice of red onion that goes edge to edge. Pickles, lettuce, onion, tomato, mustard, and, oh yeah, the bacon crisp and salty ... every bite of this thing is like eating sunshine and music and America.
Five AM. I wake to heartburn. My sweat smells like onion. There's an undercurrent of mustard and bacon to my spit. My stomach feels twice as heavy as it should. I'm two weeks away from my 45th birthday. I know better than to eat such meals in the shadow of midnight.
I'd do it again. I'd do it again.
The glory....
Thursday, February 12, 2009
The Unthinkable Alternative
First: The stimulus package. Ever since it became an issue, I've resolved myself to the fact we would get this stimulus whether it was a good idea or not. And, while I would rather see congress and the White House work on tackling the deficit, I did at least look forward to getting the $500 check Obama had talked about on the campaign trail. I find myself wandering through computer stores looking at netbooks. I have daydreams about a computer I can carry in my pocket. $500 can buy a nice netbook.
Now, the $500 tax rebate is a $400 rebate. Good enough. Except, congress isn't cutting checks for $400--they are just going to tinker with your withholding and the $400 will be spread out over several months. It works out to about $13 a week for most people.
On NPR today, they said that by handing out money in this slow dribble, it would ensure that people would spend it rather than save it. A lot of people would just put a large check in the bank, but an extra twenty bucks they'll spend on eating out.
Sadly, I suspect this is true. But now, we get the debt, and I don't get my netbook. But I do get to grumble on my blog, which is still a source of pleasure. All things have their upside.
Now, back to my ongoing atheism rant. Sorry if this blog has turned into "atheism central" in recent weeks. I've been getting a lot of feedback on these posts in emails and in person. Naturally, the more I talk about a subject, the more I think about it, and the more I have ideas for posts.
This time, I'm going to tackle # 7 in my list of ten good reasons to believe in God: The Unthinkable Alternative.
By chance, Joseph Farah at World Net Daily just posted a very nice summary of this argument in an essay he titled "Atheism - a lose-lose proposition." The article is really more of a rehash of Pascal's Wager, but in the middle of it he has this nice summary of the "Unthinkable Alternative" argument for believing in God: Because life without meaning is so empty. Because life without truth and justice and accountability is unfulfilling. Because, at the end of the day, in this case your life, you still wind up with nothing. This empty, unfulfilling life of injustice and misery is all there is. ... Who would want to have no hope? ... It's not that I believe in God because I hope He's real. I know He's real and that gives me hope.
This is an argument I've heard a zillion times. If there is no God, then life has no meaning or purpose. It's just a tedious trudge through an ever decreasing number of days before we vanish from this vale of tears. One variant of the argument goes, if there's no hope of heaven, what's the point of living a good life? If we're just random blips of animated matter, why don't we all just kill ourselves?
I think this argument reveals a lot about the people who make it. Apparently, this world is so terrible that it's a given that life is full of injustice and misery, and the only hope is an external one: A savior is going to clean up this earth, punish the wicked, and take the righteous to heaven where things will be just peachy.
I think this is rather depressing way to look at the world.
First, I don't believe there is an external force providing meaning and purpose to our lives. But that doesn't mean that we can't find our own meaning and purpose. We are not alone in this world; we are surrounded by fellow members of our species. For that matter, even other species... there's a surprising amount of purpose and meaning in life that can be found just in hanging out with a good dog or cat. It feels good to make a cat purr; it feels even better to make other people smile. It feels good to laugh, and sometimes to cry, and sometimes to take long walks, and sometimes just to nap. Life isn't pointless; the point of life, I would argue, is to live. Enjoy life while you're here rather than placing all your eggs in the basket of an uncertain afterlife. Really, the whole heaven argument breaks down to, "We'll all be so much happier when we're dead!" That's kind of pathetic.
There is injustice and misery in this world. But rather than asking God to take us away from all these woes, maybe we can roll up our sleeves and get to work on trying to fix things. As much as I dislike our present government, it is so much better than any government that existed anywhere 1000 years ago, or 500 years ago. We can argue that there may have been points in American history when things were better than today, but it would take a very cynical person not to see that we are collectively making progress on a whole slew of problems that were once seemingly impossible to solve. I mean, in the span of a human life, we've gone from a country where blacks couldn't ride at the front of a bus to a country where a man with an African father is elected president. We've mapped the human genome and are scraping away at diseases and conditions that were once certain death sentences. Our cars are cleaner and safer than they were even twenty years ago.
It's true that all our solutions seem to lead to other problems--the astonishing freedom provided by automobiles has empowered oil rich countries that don't have our best interests in mind, for instance. Or, treatments to improve fertility have wound up producing the current scandal of the unwed octo-mom. But... we'll keep fixing problems as they arise, create new problems, fix them, and so on. Life won't get boring. And that's fine by me.
I don't need God to have hope. All I need for hope are a few good friends and eyes willing to look at the world objectively to see that progress is possible. And even if the world is falling apart.. even if it's short and you are beset by problems that are going to kill you... even when all hope is gone... if you're breathing, you can still find joy.
Two weeks before Laura passed away, she was so sick she could barely eat. She was uncomfortable sleeping, or standing up, or sitting down. Walking from room to room exhausted her. She had a lot of stuff to worry about; her insurance was coming to an end and it seemed like everyone she tried to work with in the government aid services was either burned out our just plain mean. Her car wasn't passing inspection, and she'd thrown too much money she didn't have at trying to fix it. If anyone had a reason to sink into despair, Laura was a candidate.
I have a photograph of her from that last weekend before she went into the hospital. She's outside in the yard on a sunny April day, with her daughter, placing plants into flower pots. She's got a small yellow flower in her hand.
And she's smiling.
If you can't find a reason to go on living in a sunny day, with flowers, with family; if all this is hollow and meaningless for you if there isn't a God waiting to carry you away... then I'm honestly sorry. I wish you all the best in the next life, should there be one. I'm sorry you couldn't find more joy in the one you're living now.
For me, giving up on this life, this world, is the unthinkable alternative.
Now, the $500 tax rebate is a $400 rebate. Good enough. Except, congress isn't cutting checks for $400--they are just going to tinker with your withholding and the $400 will be spread out over several months. It works out to about $13 a week for most people.
On NPR today, they said that by handing out money in this slow dribble, it would ensure that people would spend it rather than save it. A lot of people would just put a large check in the bank, but an extra twenty bucks they'll spend on eating out.
Sadly, I suspect this is true. But now, we get the debt, and I don't get my netbook. But I do get to grumble on my blog, which is still a source of pleasure. All things have their upside.
Now, back to my ongoing atheism rant. Sorry if this blog has turned into "atheism central" in recent weeks. I've been getting a lot of feedback on these posts in emails and in person. Naturally, the more I talk about a subject, the more I think about it, and the more I have ideas for posts.
This time, I'm going to tackle # 7 in my list of ten good reasons to believe in God: The Unthinkable Alternative.
By chance, Joseph Farah at World Net Daily just posted a very nice summary of this argument in an essay he titled "Atheism - a lose-lose proposition." The article is really more of a rehash of Pascal's Wager, but in the middle of it he has this nice summary of the "Unthinkable Alternative" argument for believing in God: Because life without meaning is so empty. Because life without truth and justice and accountability is unfulfilling. Because, at the end of the day, in this case your life, you still wind up with nothing. This empty, unfulfilling life of injustice and misery is all there is. ... Who would want to have no hope? ... It's not that I believe in God because I hope He's real. I know He's real and that gives me hope.
This is an argument I've heard a zillion times. If there is no God, then life has no meaning or purpose. It's just a tedious trudge through an ever decreasing number of days before we vanish from this vale of tears. One variant of the argument goes, if there's no hope of heaven, what's the point of living a good life? If we're just random blips of animated matter, why don't we all just kill ourselves?
I think this argument reveals a lot about the people who make it. Apparently, this world is so terrible that it's a given that life is full of injustice and misery, and the only hope is an external one: A savior is going to clean up this earth, punish the wicked, and take the righteous to heaven where things will be just peachy.
I think this is rather depressing way to look at the world.
First, I don't believe there is an external force providing meaning and purpose to our lives. But that doesn't mean that we can't find our own meaning and purpose. We are not alone in this world; we are surrounded by fellow members of our species. For that matter, even other species... there's a surprising amount of purpose and meaning in life that can be found just in hanging out with a good dog or cat. It feels good to make a cat purr; it feels even better to make other people smile. It feels good to laugh, and sometimes to cry, and sometimes to take long walks, and sometimes just to nap. Life isn't pointless; the point of life, I would argue, is to live. Enjoy life while you're here rather than placing all your eggs in the basket of an uncertain afterlife. Really, the whole heaven argument breaks down to, "We'll all be so much happier when we're dead!" That's kind of pathetic.
There is injustice and misery in this world. But rather than asking God to take us away from all these woes, maybe we can roll up our sleeves and get to work on trying to fix things. As much as I dislike our present government, it is so much better than any government that existed anywhere 1000 years ago, or 500 years ago. We can argue that there may have been points in American history when things were better than today, but it would take a very cynical person not to see that we are collectively making progress on a whole slew of problems that were once seemingly impossible to solve. I mean, in the span of a human life, we've gone from a country where blacks couldn't ride at the front of a bus to a country where a man with an African father is elected president. We've mapped the human genome and are scraping away at diseases and conditions that were once certain death sentences. Our cars are cleaner and safer than they were even twenty years ago.
It's true that all our solutions seem to lead to other problems--the astonishing freedom provided by automobiles has empowered oil rich countries that don't have our best interests in mind, for instance. Or, treatments to improve fertility have wound up producing the current scandal of the unwed octo-mom. But... we'll keep fixing problems as they arise, create new problems, fix them, and so on. Life won't get boring. And that's fine by me.
I don't need God to have hope. All I need for hope are a few good friends and eyes willing to look at the world objectively to see that progress is possible. And even if the world is falling apart.. even if it's short and you are beset by problems that are going to kill you... even when all hope is gone... if you're breathing, you can still find joy.
Two weeks before Laura passed away, she was so sick she could barely eat. She was uncomfortable sleeping, or standing up, or sitting down. Walking from room to room exhausted her. She had a lot of stuff to worry about; her insurance was coming to an end and it seemed like everyone she tried to work with in the government aid services was either burned out our just plain mean. Her car wasn't passing inspection, and she'd thrown too much money she didn't have at trying to fix it. If anyone had a reason to sink into despair, Laura was a candidate.
I have a photograph of her from that last weekend before she went into the hospital. She's outside in the yard on a sunny April day, with her daughter, placing plants into flower pots. She's got a small yellow flower in her hand.
And she's smiling.
If you can't find a reason to go on living in a sunny day, with flowers, with family; if all this is hollow and meaningless for you if there isn't a God waiting to carry you away... then I'm honestly sorry. I wish you all the best in the next life, should there be one. I'm sorry you couldn't find more joy in the one you're living now.
For me, giving up on this life, this world, is the unthinkable alternative.
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Ten Reasons to Believe in God (or Why I am an Atheist)
While I frequently discuss atheistic themes on this blog, I've never thought about writing an actual book on the topic before. But, today while I was out for a walk, a book title popped into my head: Ten Reasons to Believe in God (or, Why I am an Atheist).
The book would take the very best ten arguments for the existence of God, or at least for reasons we should act as if there is a God, and tackle the arguments one by one.
In the comments of my previous post, I found myself playing devil's advocate with Mr. Cavin over "evidence" for God. But, the truth is, while I put forth this evidence tongue in cheek, plenty of people take holy documents as literal truth, and believe eye-witness testimony. There are others who look at DNA and see a code that could only be the product of intelligent design. Some people see evidence all around us that humanity has been visited and guided by superior intelligence since the dawn of time.
Still, I wracked my brain trying to come up with ten reasons that weren't obvious straw men. Here's the best I could do:
The book would take the very best ten arguments for the existence of God, or at least for reasons we should act as if there is a God, and tackle the arguments one by one.
In the comments of my previous post, I found myself playing devil's advocate with Mr. Cavin over "evidence" for God. But, the truth is, while I put forth this evidence tongue in cheek, plenty of people take holy documents as literal truth, and believe eye-witness testimony. There are others who look at DNA and see a code that could only be the product of intelligent design. Some people see evidence all around us that humanity has been visited and guided by superior intelligence since the dawn of time.
Still, I wracked my brain trying to come up with ten reasons that weren't obvious straw men. Here's the best I could do:
- Argument from design (life is just too complex to have arisen randomly... AKA the watch in the beach argument).
- Documentary evidence (various holy texts)
- Eyewitness testimony (plenty of people have talked to God directly)
- The Super Alien hypothesis (see the previous post)
- The God Shaped Hole (Something in the human psyche needs God. Why would this be if there was nothing there to fill that need?)
- The Master Plan (Life is too full of meaningful coincidence not to think there isn't a guiding intelligence behind it.)
- The Unthinkable Alternative (We must believe in God because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate. Take God away and we'll all be cannibals inside of fifteen minutes.)
- Pascal's wager (You have more to gain by believing in God than you do by believing in no-God.)
- Respect for tradition (My father, my grandfather, my greatgrandfather, etc. all believed in God and it worked out great for them. Why disrespect a winning formula?)
- Just because. Nyah! (When all else fails, you can't argue with faith.)
So, am I missing something? Do any of these feel like overly obvious straw men (even if some are worded somewhat playfully)? Is there an even better argument than these that I'm overlooking?
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Imagining God
My last post generated what may be the most comments I've ever gotten on a topic that didn't involve pictures of my cats. John Brown, a fellow SF author, whose Dark God trilogy is being published by Tor soon, has heroicly been refuting my critiques of Biblical based theology. I felt like his last post was interesting enough that I didn't want to take the risk that it might get overlooked by folks who didn't want to dig down through multiple levels of comments. So, here's John's argument on why it's not difficult to imagine there's a God:
I find it interesting that any lover of science and science fiction has a hard time imagining a God. I can see how it might be difficult to accept some of the specific Gods offered up over the centuries, but the idea of a God in general?
We can imagine man terraforming planets, we can imagine immortality, genetic manipulation, technological singularity, even FTL travel, but we cannot imagine that there's a being out there who has already learned all this stuff?
I find this as geo-centric a view as any astronomy that suggests the universe was created solely for the inhabitants of this earth. Is it not possible that somewhere else in this vast universe life exists and progressed long before humans ever arrived on this earth?
If so, then why is it so hard to imagine that they have progressed far enough to do what we say God has done? Build a world. Terraform it. Do things people not of his technological level find hard to explain.
It seems to me that it's difficult for science and SF not to lead the mind to a belief in supreme beings. Maybe not the specific beings described by any given creed, but certainly supreme beings. And if this is a possibility, then why is it so hard to imagine that they just might be involved with us?
Of course, then we find it hard to imagine anyone without human failings. Anyone with that much power just pulls out a Death Star and begins to blow up worlds. Again, why do we limit ourselves to such a homo-centric view? In all the vast universe, nothing arose more benevolent than men?
Are you truly saying that you find the idea that life has arisen elsewhere and progressed past the intelligence found here on earth fantastically remote?
John, these are some interesting arguments. But I think they are arguments for atheism, not for theism.
I don't in the least find it implausible that intelligence greater than our own could have arisen elsewhere in the universe. Of course, the evidence of our own world would argue that intelligence sufficient to produce beings capable of such basic technology as writing is exceedingly rare. Still, I can definitely imagine hundreds or thousands of worlds with intelligent beings that might know more than us. Unfortunately, even if there were ten thousand such races, they would be scattered randomly among the 70 sextillion stars currently visible using modern telescopes. They would exist at such vast distances that our odds of actually discovering and interacting with them is exceedingly low.
But, let's say that the odds are improved greatly if a highly involved intelligence on a nearby star decided to make our world a test lab. They spot our world forming billions of years ago, do some math and figure out it's going to be in the sweet spot in our solar system where liquid water is going to be possible, and decide to seed the world with genetic material. Then, since they are very patient aliens, they just wait four billion years for intelligent life to arise. From time to time, they send messages to the intelligent species to nudge along their development into good neighbors. They are benevolent, kind hearted aliens who want mankind to evolve out of its more animalistic tendencies toward war and violence and self destruction until, eventually, they can be full partners in the galactic community. But, it's important that they don't just drop in and give mankind all the answers to everything. They want to make sure man figures out the toughest problems on his own. It's the only way he will ever become a mature, intergalactic being.
I can definitely imagine this. (Although Eric von Daniken and Charles Forte beat me to it by several decades.) It seems plausible. I could write a SF novel on this premise and sell it, and folks who would read it would willingly accept the premise.
But here's the key point: The fact that I've imagined it doesn't make it real. In fact, I am able to recognize it as specifically unreal, an artifact of human imagination, since I was present as it was being imagined. When I write my books, I create worlds that feel real to me as I write them. The characters seem to come to life... I have plans for them as an author, but then the characters somehow defy me and create their own actions and dialogue. I wind up talking about Bitterwood and Jandra and Burke as if they are real people. I have readers who get emotionally invested with the characters as if they are real people.
They are not real people.
Given how easy it is for me to imagine worlds and peoples and new gods and new religions, it seems highly likely to me that all such religions are the product of human imagination. Some just happen to hit the right mix of gut level plausibility that they become wide spread, at which point tradition and culture start reinforcing the plausibility of the imaginary God, taking it as real and regarding those who think God unreal as kooks for disbelieving what everyone knows to be true. Religions also evolve to reflect the dominant mores of society; today's Christianity has no problem with rich people getting into heaven, for instance, and we revere the Ten Commandments even though, if asked what they were, most folks could probably name about four before getting stumped.
Just because a majority of people believe in something isn't evidence of reality. A recent survey found that 58% of Britons thought that Sherlock Holmes was a real person. And why not? We know a lot of facts about his biography; we know who his friends were, we know approximate dates of important events in his life, we even know where he lived and you can visit that very address on a tour of London. There are photographs and drawings of him. I'm betting somewhere there's a building where you can go and look at his pipe and hat.
My problem isn't that I find God difficult to imagine. My problem is that I find God very easy to imagine. Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are easy to imagine when you're a child. But part of growing up is learning to separate what's imagined from what's real. I think the fact that it's so easy to construct a plausible God purely from imagination is an argument against his reality, not an argument for it.
The fact that other people believe in imaginary things doesn't bother me in most circumstances. If a person believes in bigfoot or ghosts or King Arthur, it does me no harm. Where things get tricky, though, is when people take the advice of their imaginary friends and try to make other people live by this advice. An imagined God said a few discouraging words about men sleeping together a few thousand years ago, and suddenly this becomes a factor in picking our presidents. Or some guy wanders in from the desert in the seventh century and claims to have been talking to God, and today people are willing to blow up busses based on their interpretation of this wisdom.
Hopefully, one day, we'll get better at sorting out imagination from reality. At least, I can imagine such a day... even if there's not a lot of evidence for it.
I find it interesting that any lover of science and science fiction has a hard time imagining a God. I can see how it might be difficult to accept some of the specific Gods offered up over the centuries, but the idea of a God in general?
We can imagine man terraforming planets, we can imagine immortality, genetic manipulation, technological singularity, even FTL travel, but we cannot imagine that there's a being out there who has already learned all this stuff?
I find this as geo-centric a view as any astronomy that suggests the universe was created solely for the inhabitants of this earth. Is it not possible that somewhere else in this vast universe life exists and progressed long before humans ever arrived on this earth?
If so, then why is it so hard to imagine that they have progressed far enough to do what we say God has done? Build a world. Terraform it. Do things people not of his technological level find hard to explain.
It seems to me that it's difficult for science and SF not to lead the mind to a belief in supreme beings. Maybe not the specific beings described by any given creed, but certainly supreme beings. And if this is a possibility, then why is it so hard to imagine that they just might be involved with us?
Of course, then we find it hard to imagine anyone without human failings. Anyone with that much power just pulls out a Death Star and begins to blow up worlds. Again, why do we limit ourselves to such a homo-centric view? In all the vast universe, nothing arose more benevolent than men?
Are you truly saying that you find the idea that life has arisen elsewhere and progressed past the intelligence found here on earth fantastically remote?
John, these are some interesting arguments. But I think they are arguments for atheism, not for theism.
I don't in the least find it implausible that intelligence greater than our own could have arisen elsewhere in the universe. Of course, the evidence of our own world would argue that intelligence sufficient to produce beings capable of such basic technology as writing is exceedingly rare. Still, I can definitely imagine hundreds or thousands of worlds with intelligent beings that might know more than us. Unfortunately, even if there were ten thousand such races, they would be scattered randomly among the 70 sextillion stars currently visible using modern telescopes. They would exist at such vast distances that our odds of actually discovering and interacting with them is exceedingly low.
But, let's say that the odds are improved greatly if a highly involved intelligence on a nearby star decided to make our world a test lab. They spot our world forming billions of years ago, do some math and figure out it's going to be in the sweet spot in our solar system where liquid water is going to be possible, and decide to seed the world with genetic material. Then, since they are very patient aliens, they just wait four billion years for intelligent life to arise. From time to time, they send messages to the intelligent species to nudge along their development into good neighbors. They are benevolent, kind hearted aliens who want mankind to evolve out of its more animalistic tendencies toward war and violence and self destruction until, eventually, they can be full partners in the galactic community. But, it's important that they don't just drop in and give mankind all the answers to everything. They want to make sure man figures out the toughest problems on his own. It's the only way he will ever become a mature, intergalactic being.
I can definitely imagine this. (Although Eric von Daniken and Charles Forte beat me to it by several decades.) It seems plausible. I could write a SF novel on this premise and sell it, and folks who would read it would willingly accept the premise.
But here's the key point: The fact that I've imagined it doesn't make it real. In fact, I am able to recognize it as specifically unreal, an artifact of human imagination, since I was present as it was being imagined. When I write my books, I create worlds that feel real to me as I write them. The characters seem to come to life... I have plans for them as an author, but then the characters somehow defy me and create their own actions and dialogue. I wind up talking about Bitterwood and Jandra and Burke as if they are real people. I have readers who get emotionally invested with the characters as if they are real people.
They are not real people.
Given how easy it is for me to imagine worlds and peoples and new gods and new religions, it seems highly likely to me that all such religions are the product of human imagination. Some just happen to hit the right mix of gut level plausibility that they become wide spread, at which point tradition and culture start reinforcing the plausibility of the imaginary God, taking it as real and regarding those who think God unreal as kooks for disbelieving what everyone knows to be true. Religions also evolve to reflect the dominant mores of society; today's Christianity has no problem with rich people getting into heaven, for instance, and we revere the Ten Commandments even though, if asked what they were, most folks could probably name about four before getting stumped.
Just because a majority of people believe in something isn't evidence of reality. A recent survey found that 58% of Britons thought that Sherlock Holmes was a real person. And why not? We know a lot of facts about his biography; we know who his friends were, we know approximate dates of important events in his life, we even know where he lived and you can visit that very address on a tour of London. There are photographs and drawings of him. I'm betting somewhere there's a building where you can go and look at his pipe and hat.
My problem isn't that I find God difficult to imagine. My problem is that I find God very easy to imagine. Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are easy to imagine when you're a child. But part of growing up is learning to separate what's imagined from what's real. I think the fact that it's so easy to construct a plausible God purely from imagination is an argument against his reality, not an argument for it.
The fact that other people believe in imaginary things doesn't bother me in most circumstances. If a person believes in bigfoot or ghosts or King Arthur, it does me no harm. Where things get tricky, though, is when people take the advice of their imaginary friends and try to make other people live by this advice. An imagined God said a few discouraging words about men sleeping together a few thousand years ago, and suddenly this becomes a factor in picking our presidents. Or some guy wanders in from the desert in the seventh century and claims to have been talking to God, and today people are willing to blow up busses based on their interpretation of this wisdom.
Hopefully, one day, we'll get better at sorting out imagination from reality. At least, I can imagine such a day... even if there's not a lot of evidence for it.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Atheism's worst kept secret
An author by the name of Ray Comfort has recently launched a campaign to "pull the plug on atheism" at this site. It may seem odd that I, an atheist, would waste time promoting the site, but, honestly, the first argument I read there was so mind-bogglingly bad that I can't help but think he's going to be doing atheism a big favor.
In a post titled "Atheism's Big Secret," Comfort makes this supposedly shocking statement: "An atheist is someone who believes that nothing made everything." He considers this to be the ultimate intellectual absurdity. He goes on to argue: "if I say that I don’t believe that a builder built my house, then I am left with the insanity of believing that nothing built it. It just happened. " In another article he states: "You cannot have a creation without a creator. You cannot have things made without a maker."
It doesn't require a lot of effort to see the fallacies in all of these statements. Working backwards: First, I suppose it depends on what you mean by "made." If you simply mean "come into existence," then things come into existence all the time without the efforts of a conscious maker. No one makes mountains or oceans or storms. These things come into existence unguided by any sentience. A tree makes other trees, a chicken makes other chickens, but I don't think that's what Comfort has in mind. The fact is, it doesn't take a lot of effort to see that most things exist in the world without the active guiding hand of a creator. While I may wax poetic about the world and call it "creation," I do not, in fact, regard it as a creation.
The classic argument against atheism is, suppose you were walking on the beach and found a watch. You would assume that there was a watchmaker. But the main thing I find when I go walking on the beach is a bunch of sand. Do I therefore assume there's a sandmaker? It seems more plausible that the sand I'm walking on is the finely ground remnants of former mountains, which ceaselessly churning natural forces have turned into a nice place to get a suntan. Show me a beach covered in watches and you'll have an argument. (Though, if I actually found a beach covered in watches, I'd look for an overturned tanker with "Timex" written on the side.)
As for the builder who built Comfort's house: I don't think any atheist is going to argue with him. Yes, houses are obviously built by designers who plan for men (and occasionally birds and dogs) to dwell in them. The earth, alas, doesn't show such careful and intentional design for human dwelling. We are a species that lives on land and drinks fresh water. The world is 80% saltwater oceans. Of the 20% land, vast chunks of it are covered with ice, or deserts, or volcanos, or disease-ridden swamps. Man has, of course, made footholds in just about all these environments, but, still, despite the panic attacks of environmentalists, there's a lot more of this planet where people either can't live or don't particularly want to live than there are really sweet spots. If the world was created for humanity, it was created somewhat carelessly, I would argue.
Which brings us back to the first argument... the damning one that's supposed to shatter any intellectual pretense left to atheism, the idea that something can arise from nothing. First, I'll quibble a little: I don't think that most scientists would agree with the contention that our universe arose from "nothing." I think it would be more accurate to state that if you wind the clock of the universe backwards far enough, you reach a point beyond which the laws of physics fail and we are left with the unknown and the unknowable. I don't think you can factually argue for or against nothing beyond the point of the Big Bang. All evidence for what went before has been erased. It is this big void of the knowable that gets the "nothing" tag hung on it.
Some people would like to insert God to fill this void of knowledge. What came before the first click of the clock? God! But... where is the evidence? There is no more evidence of this than there is of "nothing." However, let's say for a moment that you make the serious argument that God existed before the first tick, and was the one who was there to wind the mainspring. If this is a scientific argument, then the question arises: What are his properties? What existed before him? Who made God? Most religious people would argue: No one made God. His properties are unknowable. Nothing came before. An infinity of time existed in which there was nothing... and then suddenly, God decided there would be something.
So, the very same absurdity that supposedly wrecks atheism is present in the God argument. You reach a point where you cannot know what came before. Here's the point where the atheist and the theist differ, I think: Atheists are tough enough to look at that inpenetrable moment of nothingness and shrug it off. So what if there's a wall to the knowable? We'll muddle through. Theists, however, seem crippled by the thought of nothing. What came before creation? What was God doing before us? Why did he wait for infinity before deciding it was time for some company?
Theists hold a very human centric view of "creation." All time and space exist so that we may exist. Distant galaxies, billions of years of star formation and destruction and formation and destruction and planets forming and dying and forming again all occur so that humans can exist for a few thousand years on a moral testing ground created so that God can judge their behavior and decide whether or not he wants to spend more time with any given individual, or whether any given individual should suffer unending punishment for a few decades worth of sin.
Atheists, on the other hand, can see that humanity occupies a very, very, very tiny speck of all time and all space. We aren't the point of the universe. We're not even an afterthought, or any thought at all. We're just brief blips of improbability, having fun while it lasts.
I can live with that.
In a post titled "Atheism's Big Secret," Comfort makes this supposedly shocking statement: "An atheist is someone who believes that nothing made everything." He considers this to be the ultimate intellectual absurdity. He goes on to argue: "if I say that I don’t believe that a builder built my house, then I am left with the insanity of believing that nothing built it. It just happened. " In another article he states: "You cannot have a creation without a creator. You cannot have things made without a maker."
It doesn't require a lot of effort to see the fallacies in all of these statements. Working backwards: First, I suppose it depends on what you mean by "made." If you simply mean "come into existence," then things come into existence all the time without the efforts of a conscious maker. No one makes mountains or oceans or storms. These things come into existence unguided by any sentience. A tree makes other trees, a chicken makes other chickens, but I don't think that's what Comfort has in mind. The fact is, it doesn't take a lot of effort to see that most things exist in the world without the active guiding hand of a creator. While I may wax poetic about the world and call it "creation," I do not, in fact, regard it as a creation.
The classic argument against atheism is, suppose you were walking on the beach and found a watch. You would assume that there was a watchmaker. But the main thing I find when I go walking on the beach is a bunch of sand. Do I therefore assume there's a sandmaker? It seems more plausible that the sand I'm walking on is the finely ground remnants of former mountains, which ceaselessly churning natural forces have turned into a nice place to get a suntan. Show me a beach covered in watches and you'll have an argument. (Though, if I actually found a beach covered in watches, I'd look for an overturned tanker with "Timex" written on the side.)
As for the builder who built Comfort's house: I don't think any atheist is going to argue with him. Yes, houses are obviously built by designers who plan for men (and occasionally birds and dogs) to dwell in them. The earth, alas, doesn't show such careful and intentional design for human dwelling. We are a species that lives on land and drinks fresh water. The world is 80% saltwater oceans. Of the 20% land, vast chunks of it are covered with ice, or deserts, or volcanos, or disease-ridden swamps. Man has, of course, made footholds in just about all these environments, but, still, despite the panic attacks of environmentalists, there's a lot more of this planet where people either can't live or don't particularly want to live than there are really sweet spots. If the world was created for humanity, it was created somewhat carelessly, I would argue.
Which brings us back to the first argument... the damning one that's supposed to shatter any intellectual pretense left to atheism, the idea that something can arise from nothing. First, I'll quibble a little: I don't think that most scientists would agree with the contention that our universe arose from "nothing." I think it would be more accurate to state that if you wind the clock of the universe backwards far enough, you reach a point beyond which the laws of physics fail and we are left with the unknown and the unknowable. I don't think you can factually argue for or against nothing beyond the point of the Big Bang. All evidence for what went before has been erased. It is this big void of the knowable that gets the "nothing" tag hung on it.
Some people would like to insert God to fill this void of knowledge. What came before the first click of the clock? God! But... where is the evidence? There is no more evidence of this than there is of "nothing." However, let's say for a moment that you make the serious argument that God existed before the first tick, and was the one who was there to wind the mainspring. If this is a scientific argument, then the question arises: What are his properties? What existed before him? Who made God? Most religious people would argue: No one made God. His properties are unknowable. Nothing came before. An infinity of time existed in which there was nothing... and then suddenly, God decided there would be something.
So, the very same absurdity that supposedly wrecks atheism is present in the God argument. You reach a point where you cannot know what came before. Here's the point where the atheist and the theist differ, I think: Atheists are tough enough to look at that inpenetrable moment of nothingness and shrug it off. So what if there's a wall to the knowable? We'll muddle through. Theists, however, seem crippled by the thought of nothing. What came before creation? What was God doing before us? Why did he wait for infinity before deciding it was time for some company?
Theists hold a very human centric view of "creation." All time and space exist so that we may exist. Distant galaxies, billions of years of star formation and destruction and formation and destruction and planets forming and dying and forming again all occur so that humans can exist for a few thousand years on a moral testing ground created so that God can judge their behavior and decide whether or not he wants to spend more time with any given individual, or whether any given individual should suffer unending punishment for a few decades worth of sin.
Atheists, on the other hand, can see that humanity occupies a very, very, very tiny speck of all time and all space. We aren't the point of the universe. We're not even an afterthought, or any thought at all. We're just brief blips of improbability, having fun while it lasts.
I can live with that.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Memories from Noise
Back in college, I had a friend named Ian Feinberg who was gifted with the natural instincts of a prop comic. One bit I remember vividly is that our cafeteria used to have these little "breadsticks" on the salad bar, that were really crackers the size and shape of a a Slim Jim, with rounded ends like a cigar, and Ian one day popped one of these into his mouth, grabbed a friends lighter, then lit it and smoked it. He got a pretty good amount of really awful smelling smoke out of it, if I recall correctly.
But, just this week, I swapped an email with Ian where I made reference to this gag and he wrote back confused by what I was talking about. He just didn't remember doing it.
I have another friend from college named Greg Hungerford who's been my best friend for the last twenty-five years. He's been witness to many major events in my life (or at least has heard about them very swiftly). Yet, every now and then, he'll be telling a story about one of our shared experiences and I'll notice events diverging from my own memory. Not usually important stuff, but little details where he remembers things one way and I remember things another.
I believe that there's an objective reality that underpins the entire world. I'm not one who goes in for the mystic mumbo jumbo that we create our own worlds through our perceptions. The past is a concrete thing. Yet, we are stuck attempting to percieve the past with tools ill suited for the job.
Human memory is notoriously fallible. I think my memory is pretty good about some things, but I have evidence it's truly lousy in other areas. For instance, I know some people who can tell me every teacher they ever had going back to kindergarten. I can't remember any teacher names past college. Zero.
On the other hand, when I went to dinner last week, I got into a discussion about Elizabeth Dole, our recently dethroned senator, and someone made a comment about what a lousy job she'd done as head of the Red Cross, where she'd opposed screening blood for AIDS. As much as I hated Dole, I had to spring to her defense. She hadn't become head of the Red Cross until the early nineties, and they started screening blood for AIDS back in the mid eighties while I was still in college. Someone grabbed their i-phone and went to wikipedia to verify this against Dole's biography. I was right... wikipedia right, at least, which is an iffy thing. Orson Scott Card complained in a recent post that his wikipedia page contained factual errors such as the dates of certain events in his life. He'd logged on and corrected these errors--and someone came along and "corrected" them back to the incorrect information.
When I think back about the big events in my life, I'm struck by how often they have good story arcs. After all, my major romantic relationships all had beginning, middles, and ends. There are portents and omens in the opening scenes of my memories that hint at how things will unravel later. Events frequently seem timed for maximum literary irony: I was served papers for my second divorce on Valentine's Day, for instance. Or, I wrecked my Honda Prelude, putting a long dent in the door and knocking hundreds off its value as I was driving it to the dealership to trade it in on my current car. Or, I once won a 5000 to 1 payoff on a slot machine on my birthday; another year, I got an offer from Solaris to buy Bitterwood on my birthday. One a more bittersweet note, I got my contract for Nobody Gets the Girl on the same day Laura got news that her cancer had returned.
Any given life is going to be full of these weird juxtapositions and coincidences. It's easy to see how some people can attribute some higher, guiding power to their lives assuming their experiences follow similar "storylines." I find myself wondering if it's just some pattern recognition function we humans have evolved that orders our memories into these meaningful arcs. Out of the background noise of daily events, does our brain constantly seek out causality and organize our lives into stories? After all, it would be useful to survival to remember the time you were out on the savanah laughing and singing with your family and a lion suddenly burst from the high grass and dragged away your child. You might learn not to let your guard down; you might learn there's a time and a place for laughter, but never to laugh in the high grass.
One thing that interests me is the effect technology is going to have on memory. When Laura passed away, I had strong memories of some of the things she'd told me in her early emails to me. I still had those emails. But when I went back to quote from them at her eulogy, I discovered I'd edited her words in my memory. I remembered the gist of what she had been saying, but specific lines in my memory were often patched together from bits and parts of different sentences. It's now so easy to document our lives in photos, emails, and recordings. I wonder if it will change us as humans as we constantly confront a recorded past that is slightly divergent from our memories. I suspect that what will happen is that we'll not dwell overly much on the documentation... traditional memory, flaws and all, will win out, since it gives meaning to the noise of events in our past.
But, just this week, I swapped an email with Ian where I made reference to this gag and he wrote back confused by what I was talking about. He just didn't remember doing it.
I have another friend from college named Greg Hungerford who's been my best friend for the last twenty-five years. He's been witness to many major events in my life (or at least has heard about them very swiftly). Yet, every now and then, he'll be telling a story about one of our shared experiences and I'll notice events diverging from my own memory. Not usually important stuff, but little details where he remembers things one way and I remember things another.
I believe that there's an objective reality that underpins the entire world. I'm not one who goes in for the mystic mumbo jumbo that we create our own worlds through our perceptions. The past is a concrete thing. Yet, we are stuck attempting to percieve the past with tools ill suited for the job.
Human memory is notoriously fallible. I think my memory is pretty good about some things, but I have evidence it's truly lousy in other areas. For instance, I know some people who can tell me every teacher they ever had going back to kindergarten. I can't remember any teacher names past college. Zero.
On the other hand, when I went to dinner last week, I got into a discussion about Elizabeth Dole, our recently dethroned senator, and someone made a comment about what a lousy job she'd done as head of the Red Cross, where she'd opposed screening blood for AIDS. As much as I hated Dole, I had to spring to her defense. She hadn't become head of the Red Cross until the early nineties, and they started screening blood for AIDS back in the mid eighties while I was still in college. Someone grabbed their i-phone and went to wikipedia to verify this against Dole's biography. I was right... wikipedia right, at least, which is an iffy thing. Orson Scott Card complained in a recent post that his wikipedia page contained factual errors such as the dates of certain events in his life. He'd logged on and corrected these errors--and someone came along and "corrected" them back to the incorrect information.
When I think back about the big events in my life, I'm struck by how often they have good story arcs. After all, my major romantic relationships all had beginning, middles, and ends. There are portents and omens in the opening scenes of my memories that hint at how things will unravel later. Events frequently seem timed for maximum literary irony: I was served papers for my second divorce on Valentine's Day, for instance. Or, I wrecked my Honda Prelude, putting a long dent in the door and knocking hundreds off its value as I was driving it to the dealership to trade it in on my current car. Or, I once won a 5000 to 1 payoff on a slot machine on my birthday; another year, I got an offer from Solaris to buy Bitterwood on my birthday. One a more bittersweet note, I got my contract for Nobody Gets the Girl on the same day Laura got news that her cancer had returned.
Any given life is going to be full of these weird juxtapositions and coincidences. It's easy to see how some people can attribute some higher, guiding power to their lives assuming their experiences follow similar "storylines." I find myself wondering if it's just some pattern recognition function we humans have evolved that orders our memories into these meaningful arcs. Out of the background noise of daily events, does our brain constantly seek out causality and organize our lives into stories? After all, it would be useful to survival to remember the time you were out on the savanah laughing and singing with your family and a lion suddenly burst from the high grass and dragged away your child. You might learn not to let your guard down; you might learn there's a time and a place for laughter, but never to laugh in the high grass.
One thing that interests me is the effect technology is going to have on memory. When Laura passed away, I had strong memories of some of the things she'd told me in her early emails to me. I still had those emails. But when I went back to quote from them at her eulogy, I discovered I'd edited her words in my memory. I remembered the gist of what she had been saying, but specific lines in my memory were often patched together from bits and parts of different sentences. It's now so easy to document our lives in photos, emails, and recordings. I wonder if it will change us as humans as we constantly confront a recorded past that is slightly divergent from our memories. I suspect that what will happen is that we'll not dwell overly much on the documentation... traditional memory, flaws and all, will win out, since it gives meaning to the noise of events in our past.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Best Wishes, Mr. President
I wound up with the day off due to snow. I listened to the Obama swearing in on the radio. I'm fairly jaded when it comes to ceremony in politics, or ceremony anywhere, for that matter. Still, I appreciate him mentioning for mentioning "non-believers" in his list of Americans. He didn't mention Scientoligists, though. I bet they're pissed.
Over at World Net Daily, Joseph Farah has asked his readers to pray that Obama fails. I suspect this will have about as much success as their prayers that Bush would suceed, but it still strikes me as a little mean spirited. Let me be blunt: I think that Obama has made a lot of promises to do things that I think are pretty dumb things to do. I think running up the national debt another trillion bucks in the name of stimulating the economy is crazy. I think that promising to sink more money and troops into Afgahnistan is pointless. I'm deeply afraid of the economic damage that might result from some of Obama's environmental policies.
Despite all this... I hope that I'm looking at the data before me and interpretting it wrong. The world is big and history is vast. People can argue that doing "X" lengthened the Great Depression, while others argue "X" shortened it. We'll never really know. And, this isn't the Great Depression. History can't repeat itself, not really, because time never allows the same initial conditions. The reality is, I can weigh facts and make arguments, but it all comes down to soothsaying. I like to think my opinions have a little more logic behind them than, say, astrology, but, honestly, I don't have a whole lot of evidence for that. If I was actually any good at predicting future economic trends, why the hell aren't I rich?
I honestly with Obama all the luck in the world with his plans. I hope he proves that everything I think I know is wrong. I'd love to see things turn around in his first year in office. It would be good for my friends and family and nation, and it would be good for me.
And if things turn out to be a disaster... well, I guess hard times can sometime enoble people. Even the worst can all work out for the best.
Over at World Net Daily, Joseph Farah has asked his readers to pray that Obama fails. I suspect this will have about as much success as their prayers that Bush would suceed, but it still strikes me as a little mean spirited. Let me be blunt: I think that Obama has made a lot of promises to do things that I think are pretty dumb things to do. I think running up the national debt another trillion bucks in the name of stimulating the economy is crazy. I think that promising to sink more money and troops into Afgahnistan is pointless. I'm deeply afraid of the economic damage that might result from some of Obama's environmental policies.
Despite all this... I hope that I'm looking at the data before me and interpretting it wrong. The world is big and history is vast. People can argue that doing "X" lengthened the Great Depression, while others argue "X" shortened it. We'll never really know. And, this isn't the Great Depression. History can't repeat itself, not really, because time never allows the same initial conditions. The reality is, I can weigh facts and make arguments, but it all comes down to soothsaying. I like to think my opinions have a little more logic behind them than, say, astrology, but, honestly, I don't have a whole lot of evidence for that. If I was actually any good at predicting future economic trends, why the hell aren't I rich?
I honestly with Obama all the luck in the world with his plans. I hope he proves that everything I think I know is wrong. I'd love to see things turn around in his first year in office. It would be good for my friends and family and nation, and it would be good for me.
And if things turn out to be a disaster... well, I guess hard times can sometime enoble people. Even the worst can all work out for the best.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Buyer Beware!
I've had a Chase Platinum Mastercard for several years now. For the most part I've been satisfied with it. I parked a balance on it a few years ago that I've been paying down; I had it targeted to pay off this year, actually. Never once have I ever been late on a payment, on this or any other card. So, today I get my bill and I notice that the balance fell a bit less than normal. I looked over the statement and I see that there's a $10 "transaction fee." Quite mysterious. I called up their service line... I waited for half an hour on hold before I finally spoke to someone. I was informed that in order to maintain my low interest rate, they were now charging the $10 fee each month. I could eliminate the fee if I agreed to a higher interest rate. I was informed that these are my only choices: pay the fee each month, or take the higher rate.
I am, of course, mortified. This card had a very low interest rate; it was actually one of the last cards I planned to pay off. Now, of course, it's jumped to next on the list. I'll pay them off next week.
I went and read reviews of Chase and see that I am by no means the only customer they've pulled this on. They must have performed some cold calculus and figured more people would pay this fee than they would lose as customers. So: Buyer beware. Chase is a corporation who will change the terms on you even if you have good credit. If you have an account with them, pay it off. If you don't, avoid them at all costs.
Also, I plan to write my congressman David Price to compliment him on voting for the TARP funds that are going to support these crooks. It's so nice to know that even after I cancel my credit card, the government is still going to bend over backwards to make sure this bank doesn't go under....
I am, of course, mortified. This card had a very low interest rate; it was actually one of the last cards I planned to pay off. Now, of course, it's jumped to next on the list. I'll pay them off next week.
I went and read reviews of Chase and see that I am by no means the only customer they've pulled this on. They must have performed some cold calculus and figured more people would pay this fee than they would lose as customers. So: Buyer beware. Chase is a corporation who will change the terms on you even if you have good credit. If you have an account with them, pay it off. If you don't, avoid them at all costs.
Also, I plan to write my congressman David Price to compliment him on voting for the TARP funds that are going to support these crooks. It's so nice to know that even after I cancel my credit card, the government is still going to bend over backwards to make sure this bank doesn't go under....
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Oh Lord....
So Michael Newdow is suing to prevent Obama from using the words "so help me God" when he takes the oath of office according to this article.
Newdow is also the guy who sued to have "under God" taken out of the pledge of allegiance. I share the same faith as him, but I would like to publicly state that not all atheists are this fragile. I feel about as threatened by a "so help me God" in an oath of office as I do by someone saying "Bless you" when I sneeze.
It's a free country. If Newdow wants to throw away his money on pointless lawsuits, I suppose he has that right. But I don't think lawsuits are the way to win over hearts and minds to his point of view. In fact, I suspect they have the opposite effect; they make the Christian majority feel as if they are under seige, causing them to go into fits of outrage on talk radio and fox news.
Who knows? Perhaps that's what Newdow wants. For the most part, you can be an atheist in America from cradle to grave without anyone hassling you about it, and some people have the mindset that they need to be hassled in order to feel as if their life is some great struggle.
Perhaps next he'll seek to legally change his name from Michael due to its obvious Biblical origins. Just saying his name in public is almost like praying.
Newdow is also the guy who sued to have "under God" taken out of the pledge of allegiance. I share the same faith as him, but I would like to publicly state that not all atheists are this fragile. I feel about as threatened by a "so help me God" in an oath of office as I do by someone saying "Bless you" when I sneeze.
It's a free country. If Newdow wants to throw away his money on pointless lawsuits, I suppose he has that right. But I don't think lawsuits are the way to win over hearts and minds to his point of view. In fact, I suspect they have the opposite effect; they make the Christian majority feel as if they are under seige, causing them to go into fits of outrage on talk radio and fox news.
Who knows? Perhaps that's what Newdow wants. For the most part, you can be an atheist in America from cradle to grave without anyone hassling you about it, and some people have the mindset that they need to be hassled in order to feel as if their life is some great struggle.
Perhaps next he'll seek to legally change his name from Michael due to its obvious Biblical origins. Just saying his name in public is almost like praying.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Can we stop and think for a minute?
I read an article today that said that Obama wants to give congress only a week to consider the $1,000,000,000,000 stimulus package he's submitting when he takes office. If we don't act swiftly and decisively, we're facing 10% unemployment and the next great depression.
There are others, however, who say that running up the deficit now is foolish, that it will only prolong our economic misery. A popular argument among conservatives now is that the New Deal actually deepened, if not outright created, the great depression.
I have my doubts about that argument. To state that, we would need a parallel universe where the New Deal didn't happen so that we could measure how long it took to get out of the depression. In the absense of this, the most we can say is that the New Deal didn't end the Depression--the massive deficit spending of WWII did. The US ran deficits of 40% GDP during that time. And no conservative can argue that this deficit spending wasn't good for the US economy. However, a few minutes of thought show that we purchased something useful with that spending.
Our WWII debt purchased a massive industrial base that stimulated the consumption of every raw material America produced and trained millions of people in the art of industrial production. The workers who were building tanks and jeeps didn't go back to farms after the war... they stuck around and produced cars, televisions, appliances, etc. When they did go back to farms, they took industrial and factory techniques with them. Chickens, cow, corn, soybeans, etc. stopped being small family businesses and instead became agro businesses. Meanwhile, overseas, our military actions produced a new world order where former enemies became trade partners. We took our 40% GDP deficits and made investments that created the modern world.
The biggest and best argument against further deficit spending today is that our economy is already soaking in 10 trillion dollars of federal deficit spending. This is an inarguable fact: We have already thrown trillions into our economy and it did stimulate spending and comsumption. The US consumer took part in this deficit spending by creating their own deficits using credit cards and mortgages to produce historically quite lavish lifestyles. Today, our homes average 2300 square feet. In 1970, the average home was 1400 square feet. Our homes got larger as families got smaller, so all that new space is mainly being filled with stuff... and many families rent storage lockers to hold the excess stuff that no longer fits under their roof.
Some deficit spending is wise. Borrowing money to go to school might be a good investment. Borrowing to buy a house is generally a better use of your money than renting, even today. I borrowed to buy my car, since in my area a car is pretty much a requirement for having a job. The money I make driving to work more than offsets the debt of buying the car.
Mindless deficit spending is unwise. Americans have built up their personal debt buying televisions, iPhones, and pizzas. The government deficit spending has been mostly unguided. We haven't been making long term investments with the $10 trillion, we've been paying interest, enriching bankers, maintaining military presence in all corners of the world, and funding staggering entitlement programs that send both Ross Perot and my grandmother social security checks each month. Ross is worth a few billion, my grandmother isn't, but I'm guessing he gets the larger check.
I am firmly opposed to a trillion dollar stimulus package passed within a few weeks of Obama's swearing in. If we act with haste in the interest of "doing something," this trillion is going to just be wasted, and will leave us in a weaker position than we were before.
I am open, however, to a well thought out investment. If Obama announced that he was going to use the trillion in a three year plan to tranform the US into a single payer health care system so that US industries no longer had to price this cost into their products... I'd give it some thought.
Don't like the thought of the government taking over health care? Well, what about spending a trillion to produce a next generation high-speed wireless network that would cover the entire US? Might this be as much a stimulus as the interstate highway system investment was? Show me some numbers. If I'm being asked to go into debt, I'd at least like to be informed what I'm buying.
The reality is, alas, I won't be shown the numbers. The trillion will be spent and stuck onto the debt we're already piling on our children. We'll never get to rerun history and see what would have happened if we'd taken a wiser path.
There are others, however, who say that running up the deficit now is foolish, that it will only prolong our economic misery. A popular argument among conservatives now is that the New Deal actually deepened, if not outright created, the great depression.
I have my doubts about that argument. To state that, we would need a parallel universe where the New Deal didn't happen so that we could measure how long it took to get out of the depression. In the absense of this, the most we can say is that the New Deal didn't end the Depression--the massive deficit spending of WWII did. The US ran deficits of 40% GDP during that time. And no conservative can argue that this deficit spending wasn't good for the US economy. However, a few minutes of thought show that we purchased something useful with that spending.
Our WWII debt purchased a massive industrial base that stimulated the consumption of every raw material America produced and trained millions of people in the art of industrial production. The workers who were building tanks and jeeps didn't go back to farms after the war... they stuck around and produced cars, televisions, appliances, etc. When they did go back to farms, they took industrial and factory techniques with them. Chickens, cow, corn, soybeans, etc. stopped being small family businesses and instead became agro businesses. Meanwhile, overseas, our military actions produced a new world order where former enemies became trade partners. We took our 40% GDP deficits and made investments that created the modern world.
The biggest and best argument against further deficit spending today is that our economy is already soaking in 10 trillion dollars of federal deficit spending. This is an inarguable fact: We have already thrown trillions into our economy and it did stimulate spending and comsumption. The US consumer took part in this deficit spending by creating their own deficits using credit cards and mortgages to produce historically quite lavish lifestyles. Today, our homes average 2300 square feet. In 1970, the average home was 1400 square feet. Our homes got larger as families got smaller, so all that new space is mainly being filled with stuff... and many families rent storage lockers to hold the excess stuff that no longer fits under their roof.
Some deficit spending is wise. Borrowing money to go to school might be a good investment. Borrowing to buy a house is generally a better use of your money than renting, even today. I borrowed to buy my car, since in my area a car is pretty much a requirement for having a job. The money I make driving to work more than offsets the debt of buying the car.
Mindless deficit spending is unwise. Americans have built up their personal debt buying televisions, iPhones, and pizzas. The government deficit spending has been mostly unguided. We haven't been making long term investments with the $10 trillion, we've been paying interest, enriching bankers, maintaining military presence in all corners of the world, and funding staggering entitlement programs that send both Ross Perot and my grandmother social security checks each month. Ross is worth a few billion, my grandmother isn't, but I'm guessing he gets the larger check.
I am firmly opposed to a trillion dollar stimulus package passed within a few weeks of Obama's swearing in. If we act with haste in the interest of "doing something," this trillion is going to just be wasted, and will leave us in a weaker position than we were before.
I am open, however, to a well thought out investment. If Obama announced that he was going to use the trillion in a three year plan to tranform the US into a single payer health care system so that US industries no longer had to price this cost into their products... I'd give it some thought.
Don't like the thought of the government taking over health care? Well, what about spending a trillion to produce a next generation high-speed wireless network that would cover the entire US? Might this be as much a stimulus as the interstate highway system investment was? Show me some numbers. If I'm being asked to go into debt, I'd at least like to be informed what I'm buying.
The reality is, alas, I won't be shown the numbers. The trillion will be spent and stuck onto the debt we're already piling on our children. We'll never get to rerun history and see what would have happened if we'd taken a wiser path.
Saturday, January 03, 2009
How to spin a story
For the last couple of days, I've been seeing articles about the survey of military personnel regarding their feelings about Barak Obama. "Liberal" MSNBC has the headline "Troops Concerned about Obama." Conservative WND has the headline 6 of 10 in service wary about Obama. Beneath is the subhead, "Survey: Nobody has confidence in this guy as commander and chief." If you go to google news and type "military survey obama" you can turn up dozens of examples: The Military Doesn't Like This Guy.
Here are the numbers actually produced by the survey:
8% of respondents didn't offer an opinion.
25% are pessimistic.
33% are optimistic.
35% are uncertain.
So, looking at the raw numbers, significantly more troops are optimistic about Obama than pessimistic, and the plurality are uncertain--a term that could indicate skepticism, but could also indicate a sense of fairness--let's give the guy a shot at actually running things before we form an opinion.
To arrive at a majority "concerned" about Obama, you have to add the pessimistic to the uncertain. But it's just as valid to add the uncertain to the optimistic. You could have run the headline, "7 in 10 troops look forward to Obama as commander-in-chief." It would be no more accurate than the other headlines, but also no less accurate. "More in service optimistic than pessimistic about Obama" is far more accurate than any headline I actually saw.
I don't regard this as evidence of some vast right wing conspiracy. I do think it's evidence that, if you have a story where things are somewhat ambiguous, it's only going to hit the news if there's a way to put a negative spin on it. It's not news to say, "Largest plurality of troops waiting to form opinions on Obama." It is news to imply there's going to be conflict, and that the troops dislike Obama. If you're conservative, this reinforces your world view that sensible people hate this guy. If you're liberal, this reinforces your world view that conservatives (in the military) are close-minded and grumbling about Obama before he's served a day in office.
A deeper question might be to ponder why anyone bothered with this poll. Honestly, what does it matter whether the troops like Obama or not? Most people in most professions think their highest level managers are clueless jerks. (I have no poll data to support this, just a lot of conversations with people who work for big corporations.) Our military is going to go do the job they are told to do whether they like the Pres or not.
You hear about contractions in the news media. NPR is laying off reporters, newspapers are folding, networks are closing offices. But, honestly, if surveying groups of people about their feelings about the future performance of other people passes for news these days, what's the loss? There's actual news happening in the world; wars and rumors of wars, financial turmoil, a slew of new politicians pouring into Washington and state capitals. We shouldn't be wasting ink on these pointless surveys.
Here are the numbers actually produced by the survey:
8% of respondents didn't offer an opinion.
25% are pessimistic.
33% are optimistic.
35% are uncertain.
So, looking at the raw numbers, significantly more troops are optimistic about Obama than pessimistic, and the plurality are uncertain--a term that could indicate skepticism, but could also indicate a sense of fairness--let's give the guy a shot at actually running things before we form an opinion.
To arrive at a majority "concerned" about Obama, you have to add the pessimistic to the uncertain. But it's just as valid to add the uncertain to the optimistic. You could have run the headline, "7 in 10 troops look forward to Obama as commander-in-chief." It would be no more accurate than the other headlines, but also no less accurate. "More in service optimistic than pessimistic about Obama" is far more accurate than any headline I actually saw.
I don't regard this as evidence of some vast right wing conspiracy. I do think it's evidence that, if you have a story where things are somewhat ambiguous, it's only going to hit the news if there's a way to put a negative spin on it. It's not news to say, "Largest plurality of troops waiting to form opinions on Obama." It is news to imply there's going to be conflict, and that the troops dislike Obama. If you're conservative, this reinforces your world view that sensible people hate this guy. If you're liberal, this reinforces your world view that conservatives (in the military) are close-minded and grumbling about Obama before he's served a day in office.
A deeper question might be to ponder why anyone bothered with this poll. Honestly, what does it matter whether the troops like Obama or not? Most people in most professions think their highest level managers are clueless jerks. (I have no poll data to support this, just a lot of conversations with people who work for big corporations.) Our military is going to go do the job they are told to do whether they like the Pres or not.
You hear about contractions in the news media. NPR is laying off reporters, newspapers are folding, networks are closing offices. But, honestly, if surveying groups of people about their feelings about the future performance of other people passes for news these days, what's the loss? There's actual news happening in the world; wars and rumors of wars, financial turmoil, a slew of new politicians pouring into Washington and state capitals. We shouldn't be wasting ink on these pointless surveys.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
The New Year in a Pickle
Last night I went to Mt. Olive NC with my friend Cheryl and we wound up in a prime viewing spot for the annual pickle drop to commemorate the New Year. Pickle manufacturers being sensible people, they hold this event at 7pm... which happens to be Midnight Greenwich Mean Time.
I was moved more than I thought possible by the act of celebrating the New Year with a three foot tall glowing pickle dropping into a vat. Perhaps it was the symbolism, since 2009 starts off with the whole world "in a pickle," a very odd phrase that people would understand to mean "in trouble," but if you stop and think for a minute, why on earth would "in a pickle" ever have been chosen to mean "in trouble?" I mean, pickles are, for the most part, positive things. It's hard to find people who absolutely dislike all things pickled. I suppose some sorts of pickles are sour, or have a vinegar taste, but why isn't the phrase, "in vinegar?"
And another thing: When we were driving to Mt. Olive, I made the comment that it was "smack dab in the middle of nowhere." Which got me thinking about what an odd phrase "smack dab" is. I looked it up and it is in the dictionary meaning "directly," but no citations of its origins are given.
One reason I suspect that true artificial intelligence lies very far out in the future is that machine intelligences will probably always be restricted to operating under some sort of logic or rules. Humans are under no such obligation when they are creating their languages. We can take a word like "smack" and have it mean the act of striking someone--"Terry smacked Lisa's bottom"--or it can mean a kiss--"Lisa planted a big smack on Terry's cheek"--or it can mean a drug--"Terry was too strung out on smack to care"--or a commerical product--"So Lisa went and ate a bowl of Sugar Smacks"--or the act of popping one's lips apart to indicate satisfaction with the taste of something--"The cerial was so good she smacked her lips"--and, of course, it's half of a phrase indicating "directly"--"Feeling energized, Lisa punched Terry smack dab on the nose."
Our language is just too strange for words....
Thursday, December 11, 2008
And this is different how?
The news this week has been about the stunning corruption of Illinois governer Blagojevich. I admit, when I first heard the quotes from Patrick Fitzgerald, it was pretty jawdropping that he'd been so open about the financial advantages of the appointment. But, my second, more cynical reaction is, how is this different from politics as usual throughout government? How many congressmen, senators, and members of the executive branch leave office to take positions on the boards of corporations who at one time they held some power over? Or, if not them, their spouses? When former presidents leave and go on tours to give motivational speeches for a million bucks a pop, do you think it's really their tremendous oratory skills that earn them those fees? How many ambassadors and department heads have no skills directly related to their current positions, but did show skills as a fund raiser or campaign organizer? What was it on Micheal Brown's resume that got him top spot at FEMA?
We have laws that discourage nakedly handing politicians money on the front end, but once they are out of office and out of the spotlight the money always seems to flow their way. We, the public, just shrug it off. What can we do? It's not like we can vote them out of office once they are out of office. Prosecutors aren't going to chase them. It's not illegal, after all, for an ex-politician to take one of these high paid jobs. One reason it's not illegal is because the politicians have carefully crafted the laws to make sure it's not illegal.
I hate to be so negative. This is the point of the essay where I'm supposed to say, "The situation is rotten, but here's what we, the public, can do!" But, honestly, I don't have a clue how we get our way free of this stuff. Any legislation that politicians write to reform the system is going to be designed to create a new system of graft.
For those of you who'd like some sliver of hope, I'll reach into resources as a science fiction author and offer you this: There is always hope of an alien invasion. Yes, they may raze our cities and devour our children, but perhaps they'll be honest about it.
We have laws that discourage nakedly handing politicians money on the front end, but once they are out of office and out of the spotlight the money always seems to flow their way. We, the public, just shrug it off. What can we do? It's not like we can vote them out of office once they are out of office. Prosecutors aren't going to chase them. It's not illegal, after all, for an ex-politician to take one of these high paid jobs. One reason it's not illegal is because the politicians have carefully crafted the laws to make sure it's not illegal.
I hate to be so negative. This is the point of the essay where I'm supposed to say, "The situation is rotten, but here's what we, the public, can do!" But, honestly, I don't have a clue how we get our way free of this stuff. Any legislation that politicians write to reform the system is going to be designed to create a new system of graft.
For those of you who'd like some sliver of hope, I'll reach into resources as a science fiction author and offer you this: There is always hope of an alien invasion. Yes, they may raze our cities and devour our children, but perhaps they'll be honest about it.
Monday, December 08, 2008
A Curious Art
I've been thinking today about the curious disconnect that exists between the act of producing writing and the act of consuming it. Artists of other media have the potential to watch their art being consumed. A singer can look out on the audience as she sings. A painter can stand in the gallery as people look at his paintings. A movie director can sit in the movie theatre and see if the audience is laughing or crying where he intended.
While a writer can read his work out loud, for the most part this is just a variant of acting; he's reading a script, and the success of the reading will depend not just on the words but tone, inflection and body language.
But the one thing a writer would almost never have the chance to do is to watch someone sitting silently reading his book. I suppose it could happen every now and then by chance that a famous author might be on a plane and spot someone reading their latest best seller. But, even then, reading is such a silent, internal process... how does the writer know what the reader is seeing and hearing as the pages turn?
Each story we write is only a message in a bottle. We will never know where it may wash ashore.
While a writer can read his work out loud, for the most part this is just a variant of acting; he's reading a script, and the success of the reading will depend not just on the words but tone, inflection and body language.
But the one thing a writer would almost never have the chance to do is to watch someone sitting silently reading his book. I suppose it could happen every now and then by chance that a famous author might be on a plane and spot someone reading their latest best seller. But, even then, reading is such a silent, internal process... how does the writer know what the reader is seeing and hearing as the pages turn?
Each story we write is only a message in a bottle. We will never know where it may wash ashore.
Monday, November 24, 2008
The Card
Rastronomicals asked about my claim to be a card carrying atheist. I figured I'd go ahead and post the card here to remove all doubt. Feel free to print this card out and use it as you wish. It looks especially authoritative if you laminate it.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
D.N. Drake Guest Blog
James Maxey's note: First, just so there's no confusion, Dave Drake is not David Drake, the SF author of, like, a zillion books. This Dave Drake is someone I know from Codexwriters. His posts there can be a bit provocative and sometimes he'll bring up topics that are deemed off limits for that site. So, I reached out to him about a month ago to see if he'd be interested in doing a guest blog on a controversial topic of his choice. He came through with the following essay:
Change is coming!!! Hallelujah!!! In January 2009, the USA's next president, Barack Obama, will be inaugurated. With all the hype of him being the first black president, many people miss the fact that he isn't black, but rather a man of German, Irish, English, Cherokee, Kenyan descent who was raised by a set of ivory white grandparents. Its strange to me how even the supposedly "liberal" (what a misnomer!) left can be so calloused as to call this multicultural melting pot of a man "black". In fact, its funny how most Americans can actually be so blind to their Eurocentric definitions of race.
In the days when whitey was in charge of fucking the world up (pick a day between January 20th 2009 and any AD date that tickles your fancy) there was a bit of a superiority complex (not unusual for people in charge, regardless of parentage). This fueled the Johann Friedrich Blumenbachs of the world, and this then led to common understanding of what pedigree whiteness is-- pale skin and high foreheads. Anything askew of this was no longer "pure" white, but "tainted" -- and for obvious reasons, no longer "superior".
For some reason, this unfortunate falacy has widdled its way permanently into the brains of most people, including the many many non-white peoples of the world. This is my first gripe with all this "change" talk going around. If the pot starts out calling the kettle black, then this "monumental" moment of racial progress and equality in America is already flawed. Really, the only way "change" is going to happen is if Americans realize that being "American" is not just a nationality anymore, but an ever increasing ethnic and cultural identity.
But one may wonder if there is any silver lining to this current socio-politcal mess. Well, yes... there is, or at least I hope there is. If we, as a nation, can stop walking on fucking glass... that would be great.
What I mean by that is... if Kanye West says anything else that can be categorized as categorically annoying-as-fuck, then he needs to be treated in the same manner as dumb-ass Don Imus. Equal treatment for equally moronic people. Either that, or nobody gets punished (which is what I'm personally in favor of). Enough with the P.C. "can't say the N word with an er at the end" and the "check this box if you're Caucasian" bullshit. Nobody should use racial slurs, and I'm not fucking Turkish!
The first thing thats going to have to change (to many an African American's chagrin) is the special 'blacks are off limits' rule. Now that there's an arguably "black" man running the county, there absolutely NO REASON why whites can't poke fun at any ethnic minority of their choice. It shouldn't (and doesn't) need to be labeled as insensitive any more... (even though I don't know what I ever needed to be sensitive about, I was born in 1986 to a Dutch nanny and a second generation Irish American who descended from near slave-like plantation workers on the old Emerald Isle... COUGH... and no complaints here mind you). True, racism ran thick through the streets not so long ago (civil rights movement only a handful of decades ago), but its time to get over what happened half a century (or even one and a half centuries) ago.
James Maxey again: Thanks Dave. I sort of agree with one of your points, and largely disagree with another. I'll reply in the comment box.
Change is coming!!! Hallelujah!!! In January 2009, the USA's next president, Barack Obama, will be inaugurated. With all the hype of him being the first black president, many people miss the fact that he isn't black, but rather a man of German, Irish, English, Cherokee, Kenyan descent who was raised by a set of ivory white grandparents. Its strange to me how even the supposedly "liberal" (what a misnomer!) left can be so calloused as to call this multicultural melting pot of a man "black". In fact, its funny how most Americans can actually be so blind to their Eurocentric definitions of race.
In the days when whitey was in charge of fucking the world up (pick a day between January 20th 2009 and any AD date that tickles your fancy) there was a bit of a superiority complex (not unusual for people in charge, regardless of parentage). This fueled the Johann Friedrich Blumenbachs of the world, and this then led to common understanding of what pedigree whiteness is-- pale skin and high foreheads. Anything askew of this was no longer "pure" white, but "tainted" -- and for obvious reasons, no longer "superior".
For some reason, this unfortunate falacy has widdled its way permanently into the brains of most people, including the many many non-white peoples of the world. This is my first gripe with all this "change" talk going around. If the pot starts out calling the kettle black, then this "monumental" moment of racial progress and equality in America is already flawed. Really, the only way "change" is going to happen is if Americans realize that being "American" is not just a nationality anymore, but an ever increasing ethnic and cultural identity.
But one may wonder if there is any silver lining to this current socio-politcal mess. Well, yes... there is, or at least I hope there is. If we, as a nation, can stop walking on fucking glass... that would be great.
What I mean by that is... if Kanye West says anything else that can be categorized as categorically annoying-as-fuck, then he needs to be treated in the same manner as dumb-ass Don Imus. Equal treatment for equally moronic people. Either that, or nobody gets punished (which is what I'm personally in favor of). Enough with the P.C. "can't say the N word with an er at the end" and the "check this box if you're Caucasian" bullshit. Nobody should use racial slurs, and I'm not fucking Turkish!
The first thing thats going to have to change (to many an African American's chagrin) is the special 'blacks are off limits' rule. Now that there's an arguably "black" man running the county, there absolutely NO REASON why whites can't poke fun at any ethnic minority of their choice. It shouldn't (and doesn't) need to be labeled as insensitive any more... (even though I don't know what I ever needed to be sensitive about, I was born in 1986 to a Dutch nanny and a second generation Irish American who descended from near slave-like plantation workers on the old Emerald Isle... COUGH... and no complaints here mind you). True, racism ran thick through the streets not so long ago (civil rights movement only a handful of decades ago), but its time to get over what happened half a century (or even one and a half centuries) ago.
James Maxey again: Thanks Dave. I sort of agree with one of your points, and largely disagree with another. I'll reply in the comment box.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Whose vote does the GOP still want?
When I was browing real clear politics a minute ago, a headline jumped out at me. "The GOP is Leaving Black Voters Behind." My immediate reaction was that this headline was backwards... black voters have left the GOP behind, probably more or less permanently.This actually meshed pretty strongly with something I've been thinking about lately. Currently, former Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee seems to be on TV a lot arguing against gay marriage. You have a few rare republicans who are okay with gay marriage, like David Brooks, and a lot who keep silent, but the most vocal opponents seem to be from the religious right. The democrats aren't really for it either, at least not those seeking national elective office, but they aren't really going out of their way to say it's a threat to society the way the Republicans seem to be. The overall message from republicans is: If you are gay, we don't want your vote.
You can shrug this off, I guess. Homosexuals are a relatively small segment of the population. Losing their votes is no big deal.
The same is true of atheists. Libby Dole was able to run her "Godless" ad because the political cost no doubt seemed small. There aren't that many atheists in North Carolina as a percentage of the population. Who cares if they don't vote for you?
Also, the right has spent a lot of the recent years in a froth about illegal immigrants. Fairly or unfairly, this translates into an anti-hispanic vibe. Who cares? Illegal aliens can't vote, and just how many hispanics are there as a percentage of the population? You can certainly run the country without their support.
Then there are blacks. One could argue that republicans have a very high-minded view of race. It doesn't matter what group you belong to or the color of your skin; there doesn't need to be any special treatment for minorities because all individuals have the same rights, and the GOP is the party that values individuals over the collective. And, hey, the GOP has appointed blacks to cabinet positions and the supreme court; they aren't racist. And, bluntly, I don't believe they are; still, as a group, they seem to have decided that black people aren't worth targeting as voters. And, so what? They aren't the majority population. You can certainly win without them.
I actually could have been a Republican at one point. Republicans in 1994 went into office promising fiscal responsibility and reform, things I embrace. Yet, even then, the Republicans were deeply tied to people on the religious right who were publicly making the argument that true Americans were Christian; atheists need not apply. So, I remained in the libertarian ranks, and watched with grim satisfaction as the republicans self-destructed.
The GOP seems only to want the votes of the white protestant majority, plus maybe a few Catholics. The rest of the population is just to weird and different to deal with. And any given subgroup is too small to worry about when you write them off.
Except, if you write off enough of these small groups--atheists, gays, blacks, hispanics, muslims, liberals, and NPR listeners... pretty soon you've got a majority of people opposed to you.
What is the GOP's plan? Whose vote, outside of protestant whites, do they still want?
Monday, November 17, 2008
Friday, November 07, 2008
Weirdly Boring
This was one of the most historic elections of my life, yet somehow it was weirdly boring. I wound up going to bed at 10pm. Once Ohio was called at 9:30, the game was mathematically over.
On a larger scale, the game was over the week before the first debate when the stock market collapsed and McCain "suspended" his campaign to deal with it. He just looked like he was flailing around, clueless about what to do, and he completely wrecked three decades of opposition to pork by endorsing a 700 billion dollar Wall St. bailout only a day after it was announced. We just don't build enough 300 million dollar bridges to offset spending like that, and even Americans aren't bad enough at math to get fooled by this. If he squelched 16 billion in pork a year, he'd need to be president for 44 years to offset this single 700 billion dollar charge.
I guess I've been spoiled by the last 4 presidential elections. Both Bush elections were squeakers, and both Clinton elections had Ross Perot throwing a spanner in the works. The returns had a little suspense to them. We haven't had a blowout of this magnitude since Bush v Dukakis.
I've been amused by listening to the frothing among right-wing commentators that the reason they lost this time was that McCain wasn't conservative enough. Ann Coulter complains that they couldn't go after Obama on immigration or carbon caps or stem cell research because McCain was on the same page. The far right never did embrace McCain, though they all came on board with Palin. They also complain that the press never did talk about William Ayers or Jeremiah Wright... which makes me wonder just what newspapers they read.
I hate to smear Republican's with such a broad brush, but it feels to me like they have no arguments to make except to stoke our fears and then promise to protect us. Terrorists! Fear them! We will protect you. Gays! Fear them! We will protect you. Scientists! Fear them! We will protect you. Mexicans! Fear them! We will protect you. Liberals! Atheists! Reporters! Blacks! Drug lords! Socialists! Taxes! Darwin! Iran! Iraq! China! Cuba! and, oh my god, the RUSSIANS! They're practically in Alaska already!!! Gather your children, head for the cellar, and mail in your absentee ballot so that we can save you!
Democrats are also guilty of their own fear-mongering. They've been quick to talk about our economy being on the verge of the next Great Depression. Oil companies are going to cook our children and starve the polar bears and Diebold is rigging the election so that black votes don't get counted! If the Republican's ever get their hands on the economy again, we'll all be homeless and uninsured! Still, while I sometimes feel like my intelligence is being insulted by Democrats, I've never had them swerve out of their way to actually insult me personally, the way that Elizabeth Dole did with her "godless" smear ad.
There was a time when the Republican pitch boiled down to: Big army, small government. They've had their shot at power, and what did we get? Our big army is completely bogged down in a nation that never threatened us. Our government has grown to a behemoth with its fingers in every single American pie. They've abused their first promise and betrayed their second one.
How do they crawl back from this? I have no idea, though I suspect Democrats will find some way soon enough to revive them.
On a larger scale, the game was over the week before the first debate when the stock market collapsed and McCain "suspended" his campaign to deal with it. He just looked like he was flailing around, clueless about what to do, and he completely wrecked three decades of opposition to pork by endorsing a 700 billion dollar Wall St. bailout only a day after it was announced. We just don't build enough 300 million dollar bridges to offset spending like that, and even Americans aren't bad enough at math to get fooled by this. If he squelched 16 billion in pork a year, he'd need to be president for 44 years to offset this single 700 billion dollar charge.
I guess I've been spoiled by the last 4 presidential elections. Both Bush elections were squeakers, and both Clinton elections had Ross Perot throwing a spanner in the works. The returns had a little suspense to them. We haven't had a blowout of this magnitude since Bush v Dukakis.
I've been amused by listening to the frothing among right-wing commentators that the reason they lost this time was that McCain wasn't conservative enough. Ann Coulter complains that they couldn't go after Obama on immigration or carbon caps or stem cell research because McCain was on the same page. The far right never did embrace McCain, though they all came on board with Palin. They also complain that the press never did talk about William Ayers or Jeremiah Wright... which makes me wonder just what newspapers they read.
I hate to smear Republican's with such a broad brush, but it feels to me like they have no arguments to make except to stoke our fears and then promise to protect us. Terrorists! Fear them! We will protect you. Gays! Fear them! We will protect you. Scientists! Fear them! We will protect you. Mexicans! Fear them! We will protect you. Liberals! Atheists! Reporters! Blacks! Drug lords! Socialists! Taxes! Darwin! Iran! Iraq! China! Cuba! and, oh my god, the RUSSIANS! They're practically in Alaska already!!! Gather your children, head for the cellar, and mail in your absentee ballot so that we can save you!
Democrats are also guilty of their own fear-mongering. They've been quick to talk about our economy being on the verge of the next Great Depression. Oil companies are going to cook our children and starve the polar bears and Diebold is rigging the election so that black votes don't get counted! If the Republican's ever get their hands on the economy again, we'll all be homeless and uninsured! Still, while I sometimes feel like my intelligence is being insulted by Democrats, I've never had them swerve out of their way to actually insult me personally, the way that Elizabeth Dole did with her "godless" smear ad.
There was a time when the Republican pitch boiled down to: Big army, small government. They've had their shot at power, and what did we get? Our big army is completely bogged down in a nation that never threatened us. Our government has grown to a behemoth with its fingers in every single American pie. They've abused their first promise and betrayed their second one.
How do they crawl back from this? I have no idea, though I suspect Democrats will find some way soon enough to revive them.
Saturday, November 01, 2008
Further Election Musings
I voted yesterday. I was confronted with what was probably the longest line I've ever stood in to vote, and this during early voting, a process designed to help avoid long lines. Listening to chatter, the crowd seemed heavily democratic, though that's not a big shock given that Hillsborough is in Orange County, which is probably the most left-leaning county in North Carolina.
The crowd also felt a little young to me. Maybe that's just a reflection of the fact that I'm 44, and at some point in my life I was going to slowly come to the awareness that in any given crowd most people would be statistically younger. But my rather subjective memory is that most voting lines I've stood in have been dominated by people older than me, while this crowd looked to be heavily under 30.
Again, it's foolish to extrapolate from a single polling place on a single day voting trends for a state, or a nation. But, I've never allowed looking foolish to hold me back in the past, and I see no reason to start now.
I have a theory as to why North Carolina and a lot of other traditionally republican states might be in play this time: Rush Limbaugh. Back during the Democratic Primary, Rush Limbaugh instituted a vote drive called Operation Chaos where he encouraged voters to go out and vote for Hillary Clinton in order to keep the democrats divided all the way to the convention. His stated goal was to see infighting and civil war among the democrats. Shortly after he started Operation Chaos, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the the Texas primary by roughly 1% of the vote, or 100,000 voters. Did Rush Limbaugh have enough sway in Texas to give Hillary her winning edge? I haven't bothered to look up actual numbers, but I'm willing to bet Rush has a lot of Texas audience. It seems plausible that he kept her hopes alive by giving her this little boost. If she'd lost Texas, it's possible that she would have seen the light and pulled out of the primaries rather than riding them out all the way to the end. (Or perhaps not--she obviously stayed in long after it was mathematically impossible to win.) By keeping the election alive until the very end, North Carolina wound up with a primary that actually mattered, something I haven't seen before. The result was that in the spring, hundreds of thousands of new voters registered as democrats, while republicans had nothing much to get excited about, given that their primary was mathematically over.
Thus, my theory is that by helping keep the democrat fight going all the way to the end in the spring, Rush Limbaugh actually laid the groundwork for a democratic edge in the fall.
Moving on from the presidential election, I was torn this year over whether or not to vote for Elizabeth Dole for senator. In any other year this would have been easy: No. I don't vote for incumbents at a federal level. It might seem dumb to have such a blanket rule, but I have 11 trillion good reasons why anyone who is currently in Washington should be fired, regardless of party. Still, Dole was one of a handful of senators who voted against the Wall Street Bailout. Also, I think there's a really good shot that the democrats are going to have a filibuster proof majority in the senate, and voting for Dole might save a seat for the republicans and make the numbers 41 to 59. It would be the only small brake left on the democrats over the next two years if current trends hold. But, this week Dole unleashed a new TV ad implying that her opponent Kay Hagen was an atheist, or at least hung out with the godless. The tone of the ad was such that it was clear that Dole felt that the only proper response to an atheist offering you a campaign donation was to spit on the money, and then slap the atheist. So, of course, as an antheist myself, it instantly became impossible for me to support Dole. Then, Hagen jesused up and sued Dole for the horrible accusation that she had ever willingly been in the same room as an atheist. In my mind, the proper response would have been, "I'm not an atheist, I'm actually a Sunday School teacher, but I'm running to be a senator, not the pope, and I'll proudly represent the godless as well as the Christian, the Muslim, the Jew, or the Scientologist." Then, I would have voted for her. Instead, I voted for the libertarian in the race, Chris something or other.
One final thought on the election: Despite the pro-Obama mood in the crowd yesterday, I'm starting to wonder if there's a signal in the polls that he might actually lose this thing. It's true that he's leading McCain in just about every poll I've seen. But, I notice that his numbers seldom reach 50%. Instead I'm seeing a lot of polls with numbers like 49 to 44 Obama, and I have to wonder what the 7% of undecided voters are waiting on before making up their minds. Could this 7% represent a percentage of Americans who won't vote for Obama because he's black, but who won't come out and admit this to a pollster? Obviously, I'd rather have Obama's poll numbers right now than McCain's. Still, it is hard to imagine what the undecided are waiting on at this point.
I think we'll see Obama win electorally pretty handily. I think the democrats are going to get to 60 in the senate. What happens next is tricky. I think there are so many things the democrats are going to want to do all at once that you might wind up with a kind of paralysis. What first? End the war? Stop global warming? Boost unions? Reform health care? Reinstate the fairness doctrine? I can see slap-fights breaking out on the floor of the house, and two years from now the Republican's sweep back into power in the midterms.
We live in interesting times.
The crowd also felt a little young to me. Maybe that's just a reflection of the fact that I'm 44, and at some point in my life I was going to slowly come to the awareness that in any given crowd most people would be statistically younger. But my rather subjective memory is that most voting lines I've stood in have been dominated by people older than me, while this crowd looked to be heavily under 30.
Again, it's foolish to extrapolate from a single polling place on a single day voting trends for a state, or a nation. But, I've never allowed looking foolish to hold me back in the past, and I see no reason to start now.
I have a theory as to why North Carolina and a lot of other traditionally republican states might be in play this time: Rush Limbaugh. Back during the Democratic Primary, Rush Limbaugh instituted a vote drive called Operation Chaos where he encouraged voters to go out and vote for Hillary Clinton in order to keep the democrats divided all the way to the convention. His stated goal was to see infighting and civil war among the democrats. Shortly after he started Operation Chaos, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the the Texas primary by roughly 1% of the vote, or 100,000 voters. Did Rush Limbaugh have enough sway in Texas to give Hillary her winning edge? I haven't bothered to look up actual numbers, but I'm willing to bet Rush has a lot of Texas audience. It seems plausible that he kept her hopes alive by giving her this little boost. If she'd lost Texas, it's possible that she would have seen the light and pulled out of the primaries rather than riding them out all the way to the end. (Or perhaps not--she obviously stayed in long after it was mathematically impossible to win.) By keeping the election alive until the very end, North Carolina wound up with a primary that actually mattered, something I haven't seen before. The result was that in the spring, hundreds of thousands of new voters registered as democrats, while republicans had nothing much to get excited about, given that their primary was mathematically over.
Thus, my theory is that by helping keep the democrat fight going all the way to the end in the spring, Rush Limbaugh actually laid the groundwork for a democratic edge in the fall.
Moving on from the presidential election, I was torn this year over whether or not to vote for Elizabeth Dole for senator. In any other year this would have been easy: No. I don't vote for incumbents at a federal level. It might seem dumb to have such a blanket rule, but I have 11 trillion good reasons why anyone who is currently in Washington should be fired, regardless of party. Still, Dole was one of a handful of senators who voted against the Wall Street Bailout. Also, I think there's a really good shot that the democrats are going to have a filibuster proof majority in the senate, and voting for Dole might save a seat for the republicans and make the numbers 41 to 59. It would be the only small brake left on the democrats over the next two years if current trends hold. But, this week Dole unleashed a new TV ad implying that her opponent Kay Hagen was an atheist, or at least hung out with the godless. The tone of the ad was such that it was clear that Dole felt that the only proper response to an atheist offering you a campaign donation was to spit on the money, and then slap the atheist. So, of course, as an antheist myself, it instantly became impossible for me to support Dole. Then, Hagen jesused up and sued Dole for the horrible accusation that she had ever willingly been in the same room as an atheist. In my mind, the proper response would have been, "I'm not an atheist, I'm actually a Sunday School teacher, but I'm running to be a senator, not the pope, and I'll proudly represent the godless as well as the Christian, the Muslim, the Jew, or the Scientologist." Then, I would have voted for her. Instead, I voted for the libertarian in the race, Chris something or other.
One final thought on the election: Despite the pro-Obama mood in the crowd yesterday, I'm starting to wonder if there's a signal in the polls that he might actually lose this thing. It's true that he's leading McCain in just about every poll I've seen. But, I notice that his numbers seldom reach 50%. Instead I'm seeing a lot of polls with numbers like 49 to 44 Obama, and I have to wonder what the 7% of undecided voters are waiting on before making up their minds. Could this 7% represent a percentage of Americans who won't vote for Obama because he's black, but who won't come out and admit this to a pollster? Obviously, I'd rather have Obama's poll numbers right now than McCain's. Still, it is hard to imagine what the undecided are waiting on at this point.
I think we'll see Obama win electorally pretty handily. I think the democrats are going to get to 60 in the senate. What happens next is tricky. I think there are so many things the democrats are going to want to do all at once that you might wind up with a kind of paralysis. What first? End the war? Stop global warming? Boost unions? Reform health care? Reinstate the fairness doctrine? I can see slap-fights breaking out on the floor of the house, and two years from now the Republican's sweep back into power in the midterms.
We live in interesting times.
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