We've dropped!

For the last couple of months, the stock market has climbed almost as fast as it fell around the end of last year. A lot of people were wondering if this was a sign that the recession was over. I've read some predictions that the stock market could get back to its former highs before the end of Obama's first term. I'm not an economist; the fact that I've tried to make money writing fiction should reveal a lot about my lack of wisdom in all things financial. But, in my own admittedly limited corner of the world, I just don't see the recession ending soon. In fact, I think there's still a lot of gloom and doom ahead, and wonder if the current stock market rise isn't just a bubble following a bubble, filling up more with hope and hot air than with any actual money.

My main argument lies in the familiar phrase, "Shop til you drop!" As near as I can figure out, we, the American consumer, have dropped. And, we aren't going to be able to get back up until we shed all the debt that's weighing us down. A lot of people I know, myself included, made liberal use of the easy, inexpensive credit that was available for much of the last ten years. It was easy to borrow money when you felt confident that the day would come when you'd just blast away all your debt in one big lump. After all, incomes kept rising, the economy was good, and the money in your 401k completely dwarfed your total credit card debt. Also, there was all that home equity to draw on. And, if you did get into trouble with one credit card, no big deal. You had a dozen other offers waiting in your mailbox, waiting to carry your balance at 0% interest for a year.

Now, all these assumptions have been shattered. Credit cards I've carried have arbitrarily bumped my rates even though I've never missed a payment. The offers I get for new credit cards still have intriguing teaser rates, but the rates that follow look worse and worse. I can't count on my income rising; I can name a dozen employers who've frozen salaries, including my own. I also can't look at my 401k as this magical pile of money that only gets bigger; I had a year to watch it bubble down to almost half its high. And, while I have a comfortable margin of equity on my house, I do worry that, if I had to sell it, I couldn't get what I think it's worth.

After a year like this, any sane, rational person has to think twice about borrowing more money. Rather than carrying debt cheaply until the day when you can blast it all away, I think many people have made the same choice I have: Stop buying stuff on credit, double up on payments, and develop a multi-year plan to wipe out debt. Maybe once all my current debt is paid off, I'll consider taking on some new debt, but I doubt it. I think it's going to be five years, maybe ten, before I forget the lessons I've learned this year.

Maybe I'm a rare individual to feel this way. Maybe only, say, 10% of people have been scared enough by this recession to swear off credit. For our consumer driven economy to suddenly lose 10% of its shoppers is a scenario that has to keep economists awake at night, sweating feverishly. If retail stores see sales drop by 10%, then they'll wind up cutting employees. Factories will get 10% fewer orders, so they'll cut employees. And, as unemployment keeps rising, more and more people who still have jobs are going to cut back on expenses as the possibility that they might lose a job becomes ever more real. Or, if they feel secure in their job, perhaps they'll worry about stagnant wages. Or, if they have money in 401ks, perhaps they'll be saving extra to make up for employers cutting matching funds, or just to build a buffer in case the stock market plunges again. All these things argue for subdued sales for months and years to come.

Again, I don't have hard data to back this up. I mainly have conversations with friends and coworkers; the number of people I know who are underwater on their mortgages is pretty amazing. And, the number of people I know who are going to make less money this year than last year is also pretty high.

So, after this little economic bump from cash for clunkers and the reliable retail boost of back to school sales, I think we're going to be in for a really tough fall and an absolutely Scroogish Christmas.

Of course, there are few counter arguments, ones I don't lightly dismiss. The most obvious one is that retailers are really good at figuring out how to pry cash out of our pockets. I used to never eat at McDonald's, but this summer they've been pricing all soft drinks at $1, and now I can barely drive past a golden arch without feeling thirsty. A lot of the restaurants I used to eat lunch at charge $1.95 for a soda these days. McDonald's has figured out a way to make me give them money I wouldn't have a year ago, and make me feel like I'm getting a bargain out of it, even though their actual cost on a large soda is probably mere pennies.

And, it wasn't long ago I bought a new pair of jeans at Walmart. The price was $8. It caught my attention; I'm not someone who ever went to the mall and paid $80 for a pair of jeans, but $8 looked like a typo. Instead, it was real, and the jeans were good ones. Honestly, you just can't mess up denim too badly. And, now, when I go to walmart, I find myself wandering into the clothing section to see if there are any other bargains.

Also, I can't help but notice all the $300 laptops these days. I don't need a laptop. My current one is barely two years old. But, gee whiz, $300 is, like, a tenth of what I paid for my first computer. I can't help but look.

Admittedly, I'm not going into debt buying my dollar sodas and eight dollar jeans. But, every time I go into a store and come out satisfied I've gotten a good deal, I find myself happy to go back into that store at a later time. So, perhaps the retailers of America have my number, and my five year plans toward fiscal independence from debt are going to be cracked by offers too good to refuse. Maybe a year from now, I'll be looking at a $200 laptop and thinking, "You know, that's really a steal," and I'll have the cash in the bank to buy it... then whip out a credit card to buy another couple of hundred bucks of new software to get the most out of the new machine. I mean, I don't play a lot of video games, but it seems like a waste not to test out a new computer with a really graphic heavy game. And, in this slow, step by step way, irrationality will again seep into my personal economics, and the economy will roar again.

But by December? I just wouldn't bet on it.

Health Care Reform

I'm more than a little conflicted on the issue of health care reform. Seldom has an issue presented such a contradiction between my philosophical principles and my actual practical needs.

Philosophically, I'm a free-market kind of guy. I view most government intervention with a fair amount of skepticism. On my purely libertarian principles, I'm rooting for the failure of the health care bills now winding their way through congress. I can't help but think that the bills are going to increase costs for everyone by slapping on new layers of regulations, beaurocracy, and taxes, and actually decrease the amount of health care that gets delivered by creating new paperwork. I don't even need to know that actual details of the bills (since, right now, no one knows the actual details of the bills) to have a gut level instinct that this is going to be a disaster.

Practically, however, I'm keenly aware of how badly the status quo sucks. I would love to quit my job and make a go at living off writing alone. That might seem insane to some; after all, right now, I don't have any future books under contract. But, I have confidence that, when I write books, I can sell them. And, I also think I'd write a LOT more books if I didn't have my current job. And, I've lived my life with at least a modest amount of financial responsibility. When I add up my assets of savings and property, they exceed my debts by a respectable margin. If I add in all future moneys contractually owed from writing (at least seven more checks still owed from foreign sales, plus an open-ended amount from earning out on Bitterwood) I think I could manage most normal expenses, keeping a roof over my head, food in my belly, and clothes on my back.

And then there's health insurance. This is where the dream smacks into a brick wall of reality. I was very, very happy two weeks ago to discover I don't have diabetes. I hadn't had blood work done in a couple of years, and I was worried; both grandfathers were diabetic, my father is diabetic, a younger sister is diabetic, and it just felt certain that the blood work was going to come back with bad news, even though I don't have any symptoms.

Now, as bad as actually having the disease might be, I'm pretty sure I'd have the discipline to manage it. My real fear comes not from the disease, but from the financial consequences: I have friends with diabetes, and those who can get health insurance privately pay dearly for it: $2000 on month for one guy I know. $2000 a month is more than I currently pay for all my bills combined, including my mortgage. If this amount were tax deductible, it would still probably wreck my dream of leaving my job, but at least I'd have a shot. But, of course, private insurance isn't tax deductible--but if your employer provides insurance, they do get a tax deduction, and you pay no taxes on the benefit itself. The system is weighted to provide a strong incentive for people to remain employed by corporations, and a disincentive to work for yourself.

Of course, I do have the choice of not buying health insurance. In an ordinary year, I doubt my health expenses total $1000. My lifetime total medical expenses probably don't exceed $20,000. But, I'm 45. Every year that passes brings the looming promise that one day I will develop something that blows this figure out of the water. Cancer, heart disease, or some severe traumatic accident could wipe out everything I own and then some in a matter of weeks.

It feels fundamentally unfair that an essentially random event like cancer or getting t-boned in my car would would incur a debt greater than the value of my house. It feels equally unfair that the system is rigged so that, if I stay at a job I don't enjoy, I'm protected from this danger for only a few hundred dollars a month, tax free, but if I go it alone, the cost is suddenly ten times greater.

One could argue, accurately, that government regulation has helped create this unfairness. They've designed the tax incentives for employers to provide health care, and have imposed regulations that prevent insurance companies from charging different rates for employer based health care based on risk. If you're a 25 year old vegetarian marathon runner who works for Fedex, you pay the same rates as a 55 year old chain smoking couch potato in the same job. Since they can't legally charge the chain smoking couch potato more under current law regulating employer health care, they wind up charging their customers who aren't protected by regulations; i.e., me, should I choose to live off writing alone.

The reality is, as much as I dread government meddling in the free market, they've already meddled, and the current existing system is a Kafkaesque nightmare. It works for some people; for others its nothing but a drain of finances and energy. It's bad enough to get cancer. But to expect someone on chemo to try to understand the labyrinthine hospital bills that arrive side by side with insurance statements is just cruel.

How do we fix this? Those who tell you there is no problem with our current system are living in a different reality than I am. Those who tell you that the phone book sized bills floating around in various government committees right now are the fix are dreaming.

I think I could reform health care with a series of laws that could be written on 3x5 cards. Vote on each individually, rather than lumping everything together to pass or fall in unison. Target specific problems rather than trying to grab 1/7th of the US economy and attempt to rework it from the ground up.

1. Make private insurance tax deductable. If my employer gets a tax break for providing me coverage, I can't figure out what the argument is that justifies that I shouldn't get the same tax break if I'm self employed.

2. End the practice of rescission of health insurance for unrelated conditions. If you saw the Micheal Moore film "Sicko," you'll know what I'm talking about. It's probably the single most loathesome practice of the insurance industry. You go along for years, believing you have insurance, paying your premiums, and then one day you get cancer. The bills roll in. And, suddenly, your insurance company drops you. It seems they recently reviewed your application and discovered that you didn't report acne treatments you recieved when you were 19 in your medical history, so, sorry, but we're revoking your policy. The insurance company recently pointed out that only about 1% of their customers experience rescission. This is still tens of thousands of people each year, I'm betting that there are no healthy customers among this 1%. Now, I don't think that insurance companies should be open to fraud; there are people who will hide actual expensive conditions, and they should have the right to somehow penalize people who fraudulently apply for care. But, the simple solution here would be that all rescission decisions would have to be made within 90 days of applying for a policy. Let them check you out when you first apply. What's unfair is to keep you as a customer for years, even decades, then drop you the first time you get sick.

3. End the billing disparities between the insured and the uninsured for medical care. I once had a blood test for allergies. I got the bill afterward and discover the test cost SIX THOUSAND DOLLARS! It seems like something a doctor might mention when he orders the test. "We might be able to figure out the source of your sniffles with this simple test," says the doctor. "Great!" says the patient. "Oh, and the test cost six thousand dollars." "You know, my sniffles aren't all that bad," says the patient. However, the test didn't really cost $6000. Since I had insurance, there was a "negotiate rate," and the test actually only cost $1200. Insurance would pay 900, I'd pay 300. I did so, but couldn't help but wonder why a poor guy without insurance was going to be charged 5 times as much. But, this isn't some wierd anomoly: Look at your own bills. There's one rate for the uninsured, and a different one for the insured, and the insured rate is less. The logic baffles me. Why should the same service cost different people different prices? If the test can be provided for $1200 to the insured, it should be provided for $1200 to the uninsured. Am I crazy in thinking this? What am I missing?

Okay, I could probably go on to list at least ten more things that are unfair in our current system, but it's time for me to do some work on an actual novel now. But I know that at least some of my readers consider themselves libertarians, while others are conservatives. Can anyone tell me why the government should do absolutely nothing to reform our current system? Can you explain why these things I'm griping about aren't unfair?

Birthers

One reason it hasn't been too dificult to cut back on my news consumption (see my previous post), is that some of my once favorite right-wing news sites have stopped running any news stories at all other than articles calling into question Obama's status as a natural born citizen. Some of my favorite left wing sites are also having problems; sites like "buzzflash" are still running non-stop articles blaming all the world's problems on republicans, seemingly unaware that republicans have absolutely no governing power any more.

I enjoy a press that's confrontational in its relationship to government. I suppose it's not a shock that liberal sites have lost their edge. But it's the right wing sites that I feel most betrayed by. Barely a month ago, the house passed a sweeping climate bill, perhaps the most consequential legislation to come out of Washington in this year. At the time, the right wing sites made a big deal about the speed with which the legislation was passed; they complained that no one had time to read the bill and debate the details. But, there's now been a long pause between the passage of the bill in the house and the debate of the bill in the senate. It would seem like the right wing press would use this gap to go through the bill page by page and run an article each day discussing the details and talking about the ramifications. They complained about not getting to study the bill in advance, but apparently they really had no intent to talk about the specifics of the bill, ever.

Let's look at World Net Daily, a news source whose perspective on the world is usually in opposition to mine, but who I used to respect because they would, from time to time, actually report on an issue. For close to a year now, this site has been stuck on the "issue" of Obama's birth certificate. On the site today, the first twelve headlines deal with the issue in some degree. There are no articles about climate change, health care, Sotomayor, the Gates arrest, or any of our various wars. They've surrendered the field of debate entirely to focus on the "mystery" of why Obama won't release his long form birth certificate.

I honestly can't see how this matters in the least. The constitution doesn't require a candidate produce a birth certificate, only that the president be "naturally born" in the US. I don't know why Obama hasn't released his long form birth certificate. It may be that it no longer exists, or never existed. Paper records can have gaps; they can be lost or destroyed over the course of five decades. Hawaii has released a "certificate of live birth," it's a legally binding document good enough to issue Obama a passport. And, there are are birth announcements in Hawaii newspapers announcing Obama's birth. This seems to me to be the most devestating blow to the birthers. It just seems unlikely that Obama's parents were thinking ahead to his presidential eligibility when they announced his birth in Hawaiian newspapers even though they were actually living abroad at the time, as WND contends. The birth announcements list a physical address where the parents live; World Net Daily actually sent reporters to this address to interview the neighbors. None of them remember Obama from almost fifty years ago! Further proof of the conspiracy!

The greatest mystery to me is what, exactly, the birthers are hoping to accomplish. The absense of a birth certificate won't disqualify Obama as president. What they need to produce is hard proof that Obama was born overseas. In the absense of this evidence, they really don't have a case. But, suppose they found a Kenyan birth certificate. Then what? Presumably, just as the right wingers denounce evidence of Obama's American birth as smoke and mirrors planted by Obama supporters, a real, solid, Kenyan birth certificate would almost certainly be attacked as a forgery. Paper documents just aren't that hard to fake. I don't think a single Obama supporter would change their mind if WND posted photos tomorrow of a Kenyan birth certificate. I'm certain that the house wouldn't draft articles of impeachment. The republican's will roll into the next election squawking "birth certificate... birth certificate!" Democrats will laugh at them and say that they are afraid to talk about the issues of the day. Rather than triggering some great constitutional crisis, the republican will just look increasingly crazy and conspiracy minded, lumped in the same camp as flat-earthers, gold-standard proponents, and deniers of evolution (oh, wait, they already have these last two among their ranks).

Here's my advice to right wing news sites: Stop focusing on an issue that only appeals to the most xenophobic members of your base, and start focusing on the actual problems this country faces, such as our national debt, our foreign entanglements, and some of the structural problems built into our economy, some of them government inflicted, some inflicted by plain old greed. Absent the creation of a time machine, Obama's Hawaiian birth will never be established to the satisfaction of the hard core right, and will never be disproven to the satisfaction of democrats, and will never be of any interest at all to most independents. You're obsession with this non-issue, and utter neglect of everything else happening in the world, has contributed to your loss of me as even an occasional reader.

Race, Rogue Cops, and Stupidity

So, I spent most of the week steering clear of the news, but broke down yesterday and read a newspaper at lunch. I'd been hearing chatter over the arrest of professor Henry Louis Gates in his own home, but yesterday was the first day I'd really stopped to absorb the details. I googled and read the police report to get the facts as clear as possible.

Conservatives have predictably come down on the side of the cop. Gates is calling the cop a "rogue officer" and blaming his arrest on racial profiling. But, having read the details of the case, it looks like Gates threw a temper tantrum over being asked for ID. He got himself arrested not because he was black, but because he was being a jerk. The officer plainly didn't mistake him for a suspect. He understood that Gates lived at the house, as indicated by his police report. He wasn't using racial profiling to single Gates out as a robber. He was teaching a jerk who was hurling insults at him why you shouldn't be nasty with a cop.

And, I fully, 100%, think the cop was completely wrong to arrest Gates. It's one thing to stand in the middle of a city street and curse a cop until you're blue in the face. It truly is disorderly conduct to make an ass of yourself in public. But, this confrontation didn't unfold on a city street. It unfolded in Gates' living room, and later on his own lawn. And, honestly, if you don't have a right to shout insults at a government official in your own living room, what exactly do you have the right to do? If at any point after it was established that Gates was the rightful occupant of the place, Gates told the cop to get out of his house, the cop should have left, no further questions asked. There was obviously no crime in progress. It seems like the 4th ammendment would be on Gates' side, as well as the first ammendment, which would seem to grant the freedom to shout out, "This is what happens to black men in America!" That's not a threat. It's a statement of a political opinion. If you're in the middle of a movie theatre shouting it out, I guess there's an argument that you're disturbing the peace. But if you're shouting it out in your own living room?

Conservatives are supposed to revere the constitution, but I haven't heard a single one jump to the defense of Gates based on the first or fourth ammendment. Instead, conservatives are revealing their most cherished value here, a love of authority, and a tendency to always side with the cop over the accused.

Now, with all this said, I have to admit that I think Gates was an idiot. According to the facts I can find, he and his driver did, in fact, break into his front door. I don't think it should have been a huge suprise to him when a cop showed up to investigate. In fact, I think a smart man would have said, "No problem officer, I live here, but I do appreciate you're dropping by so quickly to investigate. Good to know that you're watching out for me." If the cop was sceptical that Gates lived there, it seems like Gates could have proved it in half a minute even if he didn't have a photo ID on him. It's his own house--isn't there at least one picture of him hanging on a wall somewhere? So, Gates could have been smarter.

But, the cop certainly could have been smarter as well. In his own police report, he acknowledges that Gates produced an ID, and when he radioed in, he said that it appeared that Gates was the legal resident to the house. Gates may have been standing there hurling insults at him, calling him a racist, a redneck, and a son-of-a-bitch, but so what? He stuck around on Gates property long after he'd established that it was, in fact, Gates property. He knew that the break in he'd come to investigate hadn't happened. He should have said "And a good day to you too, Sir," to Gates insults, tipped his hat respectfully, and marched out. He couldn't seriously believe Gates was committing any actual crime. Certainly somewhere in the city, there were matters more deserving his time and attention?

Obama was stupid to say the cop acted stupidly. The cop was stupid to arrest a man who hadn't committed any actual crime. Gates was stupid to throw a temper tantrum at a cop who had a legitimate reason to stop by.

One last thought: I hope that Gates has installed some really, really good locks on his house. Because I imagine that if his house is ever actually burglarized now, it's going to be a very, very long time before the police actually get there.

No news is no problem

Sorry for the lack of updates the last two weeks. I took a vacation and went down to Myrtle Beach and avoided the internet as much as possible. While there, I read a book called "The Black Swan" that deals with what is in some ways an really obvious premise: we can't know the future. However common sense this is, businesses and governments are often blind to it. They make forecasts, because it's obviously a good thing to plan and have goals. But, the problem often comes from the fact that they treat these forecasts as hard and fast reality instead of mere guess work. People seem built by evolution to take the present and project it out into the future. As a result, you wind up with people believing that housing prices and the stock market only go up, or that health care costs will only spiral out of control until everyone is bankrupted, or that a warming trend of a few decades is proof that the world is going to turn into a Venus-like hell where our cities vanish beneath oceans and what land is left is desert.

One of the counter-intuitive bits of advice the author gives is that people should stop reading newspapers and watching the news on a daily basis. He's making his argument mostly from a financial sense, since there is evidence that people who check the price of a stock frequently are less able to judge it's performance accurately than someone who only looks at it once a month or so. There's a tendency for people to confuse information with knowledge.

I've decided to follow this advice. I'm a news junky. I listen to NPR any time my radio is on in my car or my house. I frequently read two newspapers a day, one at lunch and a different one at dinner. Then, I spend hours in the evening cruising political sites like realclearpolitics and drudgereport. I think I can safely say that my typical day includes at least 4 hours devoted to consuming news. I don't think, however, that I wind up with 4 hours of knowledge for my efforts. So, I'm switching off NPR when I drive in favor of books on CD. I'm going to skip newspapers in favor of books when I eat alone. Instead of cruising realclearpolitics, I'll spend more time writing.

At least, that's the goal... who knows what the future will actually hold.

One reason I'm not that concerned that my knowledge of world events is going to suffer is that I really feel as if newspapers, NPR, and most news outlets have stopped reporting on world events in any meaningful way. Rather than spending a week reporting on the details of a climate change bill, NPR and cable news will instead bring on pundits to make claims and counterclaims and focus on what is likely to happen in upcoming votes. During political campaigns, there is almost no coverage at all of any issue with any substance or depth, and instead the news cycles are mainly dominated by reading the entrails of the polls and the airing the bloviations of spin doctors from the various campaigns.

The bias in our news system isn't one of liberal or conservative. It's one of punditry and prophecy over facts and history. Our news is forward focused, and recent history seems to vanish. The talking heads making inaccurate predictions six months prior are still on the air making predictions of what will happen next week. Actual reporting would, by neccessity, have to report on what has happened in the past. It would take time to gather actual data. But, time is no longer on the side of facts. The news cycle demands that something go out on the air every minute of the day. Reporters are to produce stories mere hours, or even minutes, before they hit the air. If a thing happened yesterday, it's old news, already forgotten. No one is going to spend weeks or months digging down to establish truth. I'm not certain that reporters or politicians or the citizens recognize truth any more. Everything is now just spin and position. Indeed, the more an "issue" is discussed by the media, the less sure I become of any actual facts underlying the debate.

So, I'm jumping off the wheel. I've been spun enough.

Books for Breast Update

As of July 1, Team Dragon met its fundraising goal of $1000 for the Susan G. Koman Foundation. I've had 33 contributors, a couple of whom already had copies of Dragonseed, so I still have 20 copies left to give away. But, on the fundraising page, it showed my goal had been met 100%, and donations have pretty much stopped since I hit $1000.

I just raised the goal to $1500. I have mixed feelings about raising the goal. On the plus, it's for a good cause, and I hope the higher limit will encourage people who still learn about this cause to contribute. The only downside is that I dislike moving the goalpost, so to speak. I told my friends and fans I wanted to raise $1000, and you did an amazing job of making that happen in only a week. I don't want to diminish your hard work and dedication by taking away that 100% filled-in goal thermometer. But, in the end, I think the greater good falls toward raising the goal and trying to collect a little more if I can. It may be that the news of this drive has spread as far as it's going to, but if there is someone out there who hears about this in the coming weeks, I don't want them to be confused into thinking the Books for Breasts drive is over. If I can raise even another hundred bucks toward fighting breast cancer, I intend to do so.

Thanks again to everyone who helped meet the initial push toward $1000. I cannot begin to sum up my enormous gratitude for this. As readers of my dragon novels may surmise, I'm not someone who always sees mankind in the sunniest light. The fact that so many people jumped in for this cause so quickly has reminded me that the greatest thing about humans is their humanity. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Another thing to make me lose sleep....

Below is the screen shot of the Amazon home page when I signed in earlier today at a public computer. It's tiny, but if you click on it, you'll be able to see it better. Even small, however, you might notice that the world's premier online bookseller seems to have stopped pushing books. The main page does feature a prominent add for the Kindle, but everything else is electronics, sporting gear, music and movies. Not a single book is being offered. True, if you go there looking for a book, they'll have it. But to not have a single book on display on the splash page is a disturbing hint of the future for a writer such as myself.

Amazon was one of the forces that drove neighborhood bookstores to near extinction. Judging from the space they are devoting to their front page, they Amazon is firmly committed to no longer being an online "bookstore." Books are just an ever smaller part of their total retail package. I'm sure they'll always carry books, but if they don't bother to market them, it seems like we'll be on a downward spiral. They'll sell fewer books because they don't market them, and they won't market them because they don't sell.

Anyone want to tell me why I shouldn't be worried about this? Anyone? Please?

We Shall All be Healed

Yesterday, Books for Breasts passed the $1000 mark on funds collected, and I still have about 20 books left to give away!

Back in 2004, the Mountain Goats put out an album titled We Shall All be Healed. I suspect they borrowed the phrase from the prayer, "Heal us, Lord, and we shall be healed." I first listened to the album in Laura's bedroom. She was on chemo at the time, and was spending much of the day in bed. The album is mostly about the self-destructive behavior of drug addicts, but there are some lines within it that filled me with neo-religious visions. In one of the songs, John Darnielle sings, "I dreamt of a factory, where they manufactured what I needed, using shiny new machines." He's talking, in the context of the song, about methamphetamines, but I would find myself dreaming of men and women in white lab coats, toiling over test tubes and microscopes, typing data in to computer terminals. These were the invisible soldiers in the war on cancer, and it filled me with the hope that any day I would pick up a newspaper and find that there had been some breakthrough, and Laura's cancer could be healed. I knew of people who'd lived with cancer for ten years and more. If Laura could hold out ten years, I was certain she would beat the disease.

She didn't, alas, make it ten years. And, if she had, I no longer believe the cure is going to be found tomorrow, or the next day. The last five years of research have yeilded important discoveries, the chief and most important of which is that we still have much more to learn.

But, when America was discovered by Europeans, it took them a while to figure out what they'd found. They set up colonies before they really even understood the shape and scope of the continents they'd encountered. I feel like we are in a similar stage in the understanding of cancer: We are still making maps of its boundaries. We are still sending surveyors into its interiors. We do not yet know all there is to know, but we are daily pushing the frontier ahead of us. And, just as we continued to improve the technology to map America--today, I have the ability to look down on the roof of my house from space!--we are only going to increase our understanding of cancer. Even discovering our ignorance, learning, for example, that a drug wipes out cancer in rats but does nothing for people, is progress. As we seek to understand what doesn't work, we gain insights into what will work.

So, on this warm June Sunday morning, I'll give a little prayer of gratitude to those unknown explorers in their lab coats who are seeking a new, cancer-free world. And, I extend a great big, heart-in-my-throat thank you to everyone who's donated this past week. You've done a good thing. You've put your money where your heart is.

The day is coming. We shall all be healed.

Books for Breasts!

Followers of my blogs, and the readers who read the acknowledgement pages of my books, will know that I lost my partner Laura Herrmann to breast cancer in May 2006. I've been interested in cancer research since then and have privately made contributions to cancer related charities, but I've never put out any sort of appeal on my blogs to solicit for this cause, until now.

Last week, I received several cases of my latest book Dragonseed. One of the ongoing themes of Dragonseed is the idea of healing, both from physical and spiritual wounds. Within the book there's a miraculous object called a dragonseed: Eat the seed, and all your injuries will be healed. Even your oldest scars will vanish.

I have some science fiction hoodoo underlying the dragonseed. The technology to create a pill that will both diagnose and cure any illness is pretty far out in our future, if it exists at all. But, the part of this that isn't science fiction or hoodoo is that I believe that technology has the power to work miracles. We have MRI and PET scans that can look into a human body and see it working in minute detail. We have developed surgical tools and techniques that can remove diseased tissues from a human body without doing undo damage to healthy tissues. My father had a heart attack recently, and the doctors had to place stents in his arteries. The incision to perform the operation was small enough to cover with a band-aid. And, right now, there are researchers who are taking apart cancer cells molecule by molecule to understand the genetic engines that drive them to a degree unimaginable only a few decades ago.

We live in an age of miracles because we live in an age of knowledge. Modern computers are finally powerful enough to process all the complex data contained within a human cell. The only barriers remaining between our present understanding a cure for any disease you can name are time and money.

These are not insignificant barriers. New technologies are always expensive. And, to be blunt, the world has a limited supply of really smart people, and a nearly unlimited supply of problems for them to solve. For better or worse, money is one of the most important driving forces of where the smart people focus their energies. In the sixties, it was decided we would put a man on the moon. We threw money at the problem, and produced a glut of rocket scientists. In the eighties and nineties, computer technology was fed enormous sums of money by the stock market, and smart people focused their energies on designing hardware and software, and with the result that today my cell phone has more memory than I do. There is a lot of money today flowing into health care, but only a fraction of this money goes to research of any given disease. I'd like to invite you to increase the fraction going to breast cancer research, both due to my personal connection to the cause, and because I think that this is the right moment in history to truly make a difference. I firmly believe this is a disease than can be cured within our lifetime. I don't know if one day we will simply swallow a magic pill and be healed, but I do know that the day will come when we will be able to profile any cancer cell and match it with the appropriate drug to wipe it out.

To help bring this day closer, if only by a minute or two, I'd like to announce my "Books for Breasts" promotion. Anyone who contributes to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation through the "Team Dragon" fundraising page will get a free signed copy of Dragonseed.

You can contribute to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer foundation by clicking here. This will take you to my personal fundraising page; just click the button that says "support James." Then, to get your signed copy of Dragonseed, just email me your mailing address to nobodynovelwriter@yahoo.com. I've set aside 50 copies for this cause; if I give them all away by the end of July, I'm pretty sure I can get my hands on another 50.

I've set up a modest goal of raising $300* through this promotion. This means I need to average contributions of $6, which is less than you'd pay for the book on Amazon. However, I'll send you a book for a contribution in any amount, even if it's just a buck. Spend a buck, get a book, save some breasts. Who's with me?

*Okay, I obviously seriously underestimated the generosity of my readers. I hit $300 in under 24 hours. So, I'm going to raise my goal to $1000. Thank you to everyone who's given so far, and everyone who has helped spread the word via blogs and twitter. If I run out of books, I've had some interest from other writers in contributing their books to the cause. I'll keep you posted if it comes to this.

War on Cancer: An Alternative Approach to Health Care

Health care reform is probably the biggest legislative goal of the Obama presidency. I have no doubt that, by the end of the summer, some sort of expensive and complex bill will get signed into law. But, as with the carbon control bill, my hunch is that what emerges will be toothless and nearly pointless. The money just isn't there for a truly radical reform, and the fact is that the majority of the public is reasonably well served by our existing system and doesn't want the boat rocked. Our existing system covers about 80% of the public. I'm sure that a significant chunk of this 80% is unhappy with their coverage. But if 1 in 4 people with private or employer covered health care want some government program to replace it, then you still have 60% of the population satisfied with what they have. If you're a congressman or senator, and you have the choice of pleasing 40% of the population and disrupting the status quo of 60%, you are probably going to stand by the status quo.

However, I think that there are things that our government could do that would be politically popular, save costs in the long run, and actually accomplish some good. Our government is pretty good at selling wars. We have a war on drugs that has filled our prisons to overflowing. We have a war on terror that leads us to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to fight wars and inconvenience travellers around the world. Attach the word "war" to a cause, and suddenly budgets are no problem.

So, I think it's time that we have a War on Cancer. We are at a unique moment in human history. Since humans first became aware that they were humans, the functions of the human body have remained mysterious to them. Humans have been humans for at least a hundred thousand years. During this time, we've worked under a lot of very bad theories of how the body worked. The last century, however, saw a genuine revolution in our understanding of the body. This revolution pales in comparison to what we will learn in the next hundred years. In the last year of the last century, we mapped the human genome for the first time. Essentially, we finally opened the pages of the owners manual to the human body, and we haven't even had a decade to process all the information inside. Within the human genome, we will find the causes for entire categories of diseases and once we find the causes, we can craft cures.

Fifty years ago, if we'd declared a War on Cancer, we probably could have thrown a trillion dollars at it and not produced much in the way of results. Today, we have the technology available to process as much information as we can gather. Curing cancer is now mainly a function of gathering information and designing the tools and software to turn this data into something of practical value. Designing these tools is going to be very, very expensive. We do throw a lot of money at cancer research already. According to various numbers I've been able to google, it looks like the federal government spends upward of 10 billion a year on research. 10 billion isn't a trivial number unless you compare it to the figure being discussed as the cost of Obama's health care plan: 1.6 trillion.

A lot of our health care costs today are driven by the need to pay for new equipment and medicines. Machines for CAT scans, MRI, and PET are outstanding tools for detecting cancers at an early stage. They are also crazy expensive, so getting a scan on one of these machines runs into the thousands of dollars. (Also in this cost is the training of people who can run the machine, and the training of people who can read the results.) The same can be said of building a predator drone and arming it with missiles, along with the training of people to fly them. Senators will throw billions toward weapons without blinking an eye. Why not spend similar amounts of money on medical equipment? If the government picked up the cost of all imaging equipment, and insurance companies were no longer shelling out thousands every time one of these scans was performed, it could provide genuine savings that could be passed on to consumers.

I don't want to put forth the idea that I think curing cancer is going to be easy. To start with, there isn't a single disease that constitutes cancer. Cancer is really 200 different diseases, all with their own challenges.

Still, imagine what could be accomplished if the federal goverment spent as much on a War on Cancer as it does on the War on Terror. Cancer is a far more clear and present danger than terrorism to the average citizen. Cancer kills roughly 1500 people a day: every two days, it's a wide-spread, yet somehow invisible 9-11. Imagine if the US spent as much designing and building a new generation of imaging machines as it spends on designing and building the next generation of weapons.

A cure for cancer is waiting out there in our future. If we can accelerate the research so that we've mastered this disease by 2020 instead of 2050, we could enjoy 30 years of cost savings, assuming we could drive the cost of treating some cancers down to the cost of treating, say, a broken leg.

Perhaps this is just science fiction dreaming. Perhaps there is no cure. But, the War on Drugs can't be won, the War on Poverty hasn't been won, and the War on Terror will never be won. A hopeless cause isn't neccessarily a worthless cause. Politicians like getting behind stuff like this. And, unlike some of these wars, the situation isn't hopeless. We are already seeing declines in deaths from cancer, a few fractions a percent each year. Can we change this so that 10 or 20 or 30% fewer people die each year?

At the risk of overusing a phrase: Yes we can.

Why I think the carbon bill is doomed.

Observers of politics this week saw two of Obama's biggest legislative initiatives crash and burn. We'll maybe not burn, but at least they crashed. First, house democrats have proven unable to find any compromise on a bill to regulate carbon emissions. This isn't a shock; if you're a democrat from a state that mines coal or pumps oil, it's going to be political suicide to vote for any sustantive measure that will reduce the consumption of oil or coal. The only way to reduce the consumption of these two commodities is to increase their cost, and increase it a lot. When gas doubled from $2 to $4 a gallon, American's bought less gas. SUVs sat on car lots while the Prius built up a long waiting list. The simplest and most direct path to cutting gasoline consumption would be a gas tax of about $2 a gallon that would push todays cost of gas closer to the $5 mark, with a built in clock for raising rates: every year, the tax increases a dime.

No one who wants to be reelected would vote for this, but it would be a simple way of meeting part of the goal. The mechanism for collecting the tax is already in place, so there's no additional beaurocratic costs. And, this proposal might actually cut the deficit instead of increasing it.

However, gas is only a fraction of the problem with carbon. The big problem (assuming you view carbon as a problem) is coal. My electric bill averages about $80 a month. I'm not sure that most people appreciate how inexspensive that figure is compared to all the benefits I derive from it: Cool air in summer, hot water year round, information at my finger tips 24 hours a day, the freedom to read at night, the ability to pop corn in three minutes flat, and a giant box full of food that stays cold all year round. Electricity is modernity, and in the US, electricity is coal. If you want American's to conserve electricity, you need to raise the cost, and raise it a lot. The challenge that faces most alternative power sources aren't technological, but economic: Coal is simply cheaper than its competitors, and will remain so in the US and China for a long time, since both these countries are sitting on huge deposits of coal.

The direct path to making coal less attractive than its competition is to tax it at a substantial rate. If my electric bill doubled next year, I'd be forced to change some of my habits. For instance, I routinely wash my clothes with warm water. I could save a few bucks a month just by only using cold. I could save even more by using a clothesline to dry some select items of clothing... towels and blue jeans take a lot of energy to dry, for instance. Also, I could turn off my computer the 20 hours a day I'm not using it. When I replace my refrigerator, I'd select one with the lowest energy star rating. LED light bulbs might suddenly seem cost effective.

But, again, the direct path isn't being discussed in congress. Nor should it. I think most American's recognize the economic costs of a direct tax. If you double their gas bill, they will drive to stores less often and spend less money when they get there. Double their electric bills, and they'll again be cutting back in other areas. The effects ripple through the economy as stores and restaurants cut staff. It's economic suicide to double our energy costs directly.

So, the bill that congress has to craft is one that doubles our costs while making the blame fall elsewhere. They want us to come out of this angry at Exxon and Duke Power, not them. But, even if they manage to shift the blame, they can't ignore the political consequences that will fall on them if the recession deepens and unemployment goes even higher. So, I think that the eventual outcome with be that they pass a bill too long for anyone to read that actually does nothing at all. For instance, it's not difficult to pass a law saying that our carbon emissions must be cut in half by 2050, then leave all the paths to that goal vague, toothless, and slated to kick in years from now. I think that when Obama runs again, he'll have a climate bill he can point to as an accomplishment... I just don't think it will actually accomplish anything.

I started by saying that two initiatives crashed and burned this week. The second was health care. I'm going to save my thoughts on this for my next post. Unlike our energy policy, I think there's a smart, politically popular path available to the goal of controlling health care costs. Stay tuned.

A Cure for Cancer

Veronica Gray, Simon Gray, Me, Andy Herrmann, Jessica Herrmann, James Herrman, and the top of Maggie's head (in stroller).

June 13 Susan G. Koman Race for the Cure in Raleigh.

Saturday I took part in the Susan G. Koman Race for the Cure. I did the 5k fun run (though I walked it) with Laura's kids, her brother Andy, and her sister-in-law Jessica.

I've never used my blog to solicit money, except, of course, to encourage people to buy my books. I figure the world is full of good causes, and people will naturally support the things that matter most to them, whether it's Boy Scouts, the local library, NPR, March of Dimes, or whatever. People don't need me to tell them how to be charitable.

On the other hand, I have no problem advocating for other things I feel strongly about. I don't mind making the case for atheism and libertarianism. So, here's my brief pitch for why I think that it's worth sending some of your charitable dollars to organizations actively engaged in the search for a cure for cancer: Unlike certain problems, cancer actually has a solution. Poverty, for instance, has proven time and again to be able to sustain itself as a problem no matter how much money is thrown at it. Similarly, if you give money to Girl Scouts or NPR, more power to you, these are terrific organisations. But, fifty years from now, these organizations are still going to be asking for money. I'm not convinced that will be the case with cancer charities.

Cancer isn't a philosophical problem that can be debated for centuries without ever arriving at a conclusion. It's a defect in the normal function of the cells of the human body. There are specific, identifiable steps that the cells must go through in order for cancer to grow. Fifty years ago, we didn't have the tools we need to track each of these steps. Today, we have instruments available to model the cells in tremendous detail, to the point that we can generate computer models of individual protein strands within the cell. We are in the early stages of a revolution in our understanding of the human body. The information contained in any cell was too complex to fully model only a few years ago. Now, we can carry around terrabytes of data on devices small enough to slip into a pocket. We finally have the tools to truly understand everything that is going on inside a cell.

I don't want anyone to think that I'm underestimating the difficulties that still lie ahead. For one thing, "cancer" isn't one disorder. Even specific types of cancer like breast cancer turn out to be composed of lots of different sub-types, growing in responses to different triggers, following different paths of progression. Cancer isn't a single problem to be solved, but hundreds, if not thousands, of interrelated and overlapping problems.

Still, it is fundamentally a physical problem, and the physical world may be complex, but it's not infinitely complex. Our bodies can be understood, and they can be manipulated. There is a cure out there in our future, and once we cure one type of cancer, the others will follow, and one day we will fear cancer no more than we fear smallpox or polio.

All that stands between us and a cure now is time. There are unknown number of man-hours of study and research between us and a cure. But, the old adage tells us that time is money, and the reverse is also true: Money is time. The more money that's made available for research, the more people will be employed in the research, and the faster those man-hours will accumulate.

So, if you are someone who likes putting your charitable dollars toward problems that have solutions, consider making a contribution to a program searching for a cure for cancer.

I believe in matter

A few months after Laura died of cancer, I went the Bodyworks exhibit, where corpses were preserved with plastic. Peeled and posed, they show the inner workings of the body, the muscles, bones and nerves. I spent a long time studying a lung riddled with cancer. I could see the tiny knots of tissue that had ended Laura’s life. Looking at the tumors I felt peace, and optimism. Laura’s death hadn’t been the act of a capricious god, nor some failure of spirit or karma. The tumors that killed her were physical, not some concept or idea. They were growths of tissue and nothing more. They were matter.

And matter is wonderful.

The beauty of matter is that it can be understood. It obeys rules. The secrets of matter unfold daily before the collective study of mankind.

I believe our most urgent problems have their solutions in the material world. Our understanding of steel and oil gave us the internal combustion engines that power our comfortable modern lives. Our study of plants and soil have led to bountiful harvests undreamed of by earlier generations. We live longer lives due to our understanding of diseases, and our ability to better engineer the delivery of clean water and dispose of our waste.

It’s true that every advance brings new challenges. Longer life spans lead to a growing population that strains our resources. Increasing crop production has come at the expense of natural habitats, and fertilizers and pesticides can poison our streams and fields. But we know of these problems because of our continued study of the physical world. We’ll solve these problems by deepening our understanding. We’re building new materials from the atom up to capture the energy of the sun. The age when power comes to our homes via copper wires, or to our cars as flammable liquids, is near an end. In our lifetimes, our roofs will become power plants and a new generation of batteries will propel us along the highway. Our growing knowledge of genetics will give us crops that feed more people with less harm to the environment.

And, yes, I believe that one day the tumors that killed Laura will no longer threaten anyone. Cancer is caused by a few stray genetic switches that get flipped and turn ordinary cells into voracious growth machines. One day, we’ll design the key to turn these switches off.

All of these problems are complex, but none are infinitely complex. Our understanding of matter has given us the power to process unimaginable amounts of information in the etchings on a silicon wafer or the magnetic alignment of atoms on a steel disk. As we learn about matter, we can build increasingly powerful tools to study and manipulate it. We are nowhere near the final boundaries of our understanding.

I'm James Maxey, and I believe in matter.

___

Note: I've written this post with the goal of submitting it as a "This I Believe" essay on NPR. These are limited to 500 words, though the real limit is actually a time one, I think. I'm pretty sure the essay can't be more than three minutes long when read aloud. I feel like there's a lot of stuff I'm not saying in this essay, many points I'd like to expand on. But, I'm putting it up here to see if anyone has any comments on its relative effectiveness or clarity. If there's anything that confuses you, or any obvious typos you note, I'd love to hear about it. My goal is to submit this to NPR next week.

Thanks!

The Comic Book Writing Paradox

I read comic books faithfully for over thirty years. I got hooked on them as a kid, collected them as a teen, and accumulated them weekly as an adult, spending a sizable portion of my monthly income on the continuing adventures of my favorite characters. But, I quite cold turkey a few years back. I realized I was part of the problem with comics--I was buying them out of sheer momentum rather than out of actual entertainment. DC and Marvel had tried to grow up with me, selling me comics when I was 10, 20, 30, 40... but the comics they were selling 40 year old me were of no interest at all to kids I knew.

Wores, I wouldn't want to show many of the storylines to kids if they were interested. Identity Crisis was great, but do I really want a child to read about Dr. Light raping Enlongated Man's wife? Or Green Arrow stabbing Deathstroke in the eye?

There's an interesting paradox in modern comics: On average, they are better written and better drawn than they were when I was a kid. At the same time, they just aren't as fun as they once were. Maybe it's just me... perhaps my "sense o' wonder" meter got broken when I turned 40. On the other hand, lately I have gone back and read some of the comics from the seventies, and I do spot some things that I think made comics better back then.

1: You got a LOT more story out of each issue. Comic books these days are very cinematic. A character can spend five pages just putting on his costume. You spend a few more pages of him dealing with friends and family, adding depth to the character. Before you know it you're down to only a page or two where the hero and villians can smack each other around, assuming you get there at all. In the seventies, things moved. Somebody was crashing through a wall by at least the third page. The Justice League could split up in a single issue and travel to the age of dinosaurs, Saturn, the 35th century, the Rock of Eternity, Smallville, and Atlantis and still wrap up all the plot lines by page 17. Seriously, the pacing is just headspinning. Most books today just move too slow.

2: You actually had new characters and villians showing up. Today, it seems like the majority of "new" heroes are actually reboots of old heroes. One surprise when you read Superman from the seventies is that Lex Luthor doesn't show up every issue. There are a lot of one shot villians. Batman can actually go a whole year without fighting the Joker. The storylines today overuse the same core characters. The characters are more trapped in their never-ending battles today than they were back then, even though comics were just as dedicated to returning to the status quo.

3: I know that this is going to sound dumb, but better writing has created worse comic books. I consider myself a pretty good writer, and feel like I have fairly high expectations of the novels I read and the movies I watch. I like depth of characters, I like thought-provoking plots, I like events that forever change characters and force them to contront hard moral choices. I think you can find these same elements in most modern comics. Today, if you get a writer on a comic book who is also a novelist (say, Orson Scott Card on Iron Man) he's going to bring to that comic book the writing aesthetics he's learned from novels. He'll spend a lot of time establishing motives for all the characters. He'll build a plot slowly and plausibly, nailing down every element and action so that it feels real. The science will be well researched and have at least some nod toward actual facts. Over the course of six issues or so, the novelist turned comic-book author will manage to tell a story that will present you with a smart, solid tale that will make you think.

When the story is collected as a graphic novel, it's a good tale. Unfortunately, when it's appearing in monthly installments, seventeen pages at a time, any given issuie is actually sort of... boring. (I'm not picking on Card here, by the way. I've seen this with almost all novelists turned comic book writers.) You pay four bucks to pick up a comic book, but you don't get a story for your four bucks, you get a fragment of a story, and it's just not that satisfying.

In the seventies, the depth of motivations for a supervillian was usually along the lines of, "Well, I've got this freeze-ray, and my mama sewed me this costume... why shouldn't I rob a bank today? What are the odds of the Flash showing up AGAIN?" And when the Flash would show up, he'd trap the villian inside a giant birdcage that just happened to be nearby at the giant birdcage museum, because, you know, you find these things in big cities. The moral dilema of the issue would be whether or not he should sign autographs for the cops afterwards or rush off to keep his date with Iris. It writing wasn't deep, and it wasn't sophisticated, the science made you roll your eyes, but, somehow, it also wasn't boring.

In the seventies, comic books were written by people who understood they were writing comic books. They had a set number of pages to fill, month after month after month, and each month had to cram in a story. To meet their deadlines, they would throw in the wierdest crap you can imagine, and explain it with the flimsiest of logic. You wound up with 17 pages of strange wonder. Today, comic books are being written by people who write excellent novels, televisions, and movies... but who don't know squat about comic books, where a single issue is the most important unit of story. Today, any given issue of a comic is just a fragment of a larger graphic novel. Who wants to spend 4 bucks on a chapter when you can wait and buy the whole story line for half the price of buying it chapter by chapter?

If novelists want to write about superheroes, they should... in novels. In the mean time, the industry should go and find a bunch of hacks who turn out stories quick and dirty, in hope of recapturing the lost formula that made comics great.

Or, perhaps looking to the past is the wrong approach, and it's time to fully embrace evolution. Blasphemy of blashemies, maybe it's time for the comic book to disappear. Instead of publishing monthly issues of Batman and Spiderman, the publishers can release two or three graphic novels per year. I think you'd wind up with even better graphic novels as a result, because you'd finally be acknowledging that this is the artform that is actually being published.

Ten Reasons to Believe in God, part 8, 9, and 10

A few months ago, I launched my "Ten Reasons to Believe in God, or Why I am an Atheist" series. I think at this point, I've tackled six of the reasons. Below is the original list, hyperlinked to relevant posts:

1. Argument from design (life is just too complex to have arisen randomly... AKA the watch in the beach argument).
   
2. Documentary evidence (various holy texts) Note: This links to the same post, but my argument against the documentary evidence is in the comment section in two long posts down near the end. I'll consolodate all this into an actual essay eventually. Right now, I'd rather tackle fresh topics than rehash stuff I've already covered.)
   
3. Eyewitness testimony (plenty of people have talked to God directly) Note: Again, this is an argument I made in the comments section of the linked post.
   
4. The Super Alien hypothesis (All the attributes of God can be plausibly imagined and explained by SF authors so... why not?)
   
5. The God Shaped Hole (Something in the human psyche needs God. Why would this be if there was nothing there to fill that need?) I haven 't tackled this one in a coherent fashion yet. Stay tuned.
   
6. The Master Plan (Life is too full of meaningful coincidence not to think there isn't a guiding intelligence behind it.)
   
7. 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.)
   
8. Pascal's wager (You have more to gain by believing in God than you do by believing in no-God.) See below.
   
9. 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?) See below.
   
10. Just because. Nyah! (When all else fails, you can't argue with faith.) See below.
    

The last three arguments are, to my mind, the closest things to strawmen I included on my list. But, what can I say? I was struggling to fill out my list due to some strange cultural need to put every concievable topic into lists of ten. And, these are actual arguments I've encountered over the years; it's not like I'm just making them up to shoot them down.

Pascal's Wager: This is an agument made by the philosopher Pascal that, even though the existence of God can't be proven, you should live as if it's true, because you have everything to gain if it is true, and nothing to lose if it's false. If you believe in God and there is a God, presumably you go to heaven. If you believe in God and there is no God, you die and that's it. If you don't believe and there is a God, you go to hell. If you don't believe and there is no God, you die and that's it. Only the first of the four possible outcomes has a good conclusion, so you'd be an idiot not to shoot for it.

Plenty of people have tackled this argument, so forgive me if this is mostly a rehash of stuff you've heard before. The first argument is: Which God? You can't simultaniously believe in the God of Islam, the God of Christianity, the Hindu dieties, the Great Spirit, and Xemu. Pascal made his argument immersed in a culture of Christianity. Today, we know that the proposed choices are many: Choosing one faith may lead to your damnation in another faith. The argument fails because God isn't a single definable quality.

The second argument can boil down to: "If God is real, he's not an idiot." If you don't really believe, but act as if you do because you think it might lead to a reward, presumably, He'll know. Acting as if you believe when you don't really believe is just hypocricy, and Jesus specifically had no time to waste on hypocrits. Maybe Marduk is more forgiving.

So, we move on to the next argument: Respect for tradition. I honestly feel that this is the dominant reason for belief in God. Your parents believe in God. They take you to church where you are taught about God. Your extended family shares the same beliefs, and the friends you make in church form the foundation of your social circle. There's a very strong need for people to be part of their group. Many faiths have traditions of shunning members who wander. The consequences of formally leaving a faith can be devastating. An atheist who was formerly Mormon or Jehovah's witness might find themselves given the cold shoulder at family reunions... a fundamentalist Muslim might find himself beheaded at a family reunion. Peer pressure doesn't stop in high school.

Of course, this isn't just the negative argument: Stray and you will be punished. There's also the positive argument: You respect your parents and grandparents, and they made a pretty good life as devout Baptists, or Catholics, or Wiccans. You witness your father going out and doing something charitable--taking Christmas hams to the poor, maybe--and he tells you that he's doing it because the Bible says it's a good thing to care for those less fortunate. You've seen good people who credit their goodness to faith in God, and you want to be a good person. The virtues of your role models leads you to emulate their faith.

This is a tough argument to refute because it's not so much an argument as it is an ingrained human cultural behavior. Christian parents give birth to babies who are most likely to grow up as Christians. Buddhists give birth to future Buddhists. So it has been and so it shall be. If religion were really something people spent a lot of time thinking about, it seems like we'd see a lot more mixing of faiths within nations and families. And, to America's credit, we do see a lot of mixing. We are simply exposed to more faiths than our forefathers were. And, the more faiths you encounter, the harder it is to feel like your ancestors had a lock on the Holy Truth. Sure, you saw your parents delivering Christmas hams and learned that Christians are charitable. But, later, you go and help build a house with Habitat for Humanity and you find you're working beside a tattooed lesbian Buddhist who drives nails in a single strike and seems to really be happy with her place in the universe.

The most effective argument against "Respect for Tradition" is that a person paying any attention at all to the world will quickly come to realize there are hundreds of different traditions that are worthy of respect. Are all these charitable acts drawn from all these different traditions? Or is there something more fundamental at work? If you strip away all religion, would you find that humans would still be charitable? Might the good behaviors of humans be attributed to their humanity, rather than to divinity?

Which brings us, at last, to number 10: You can't argue with faith. Nyah! Long time readers of my blog know about my relationship with Laura Herrmann, who died of breast cancer three years ago. Laura believed in God. She wasn't a Christian, she didn't pray, but she felt, deep down, that there was some force in the world that gave meaning to everything. There was no name for her god, other than God. There was no religion. She just believed in a "guiding force." Someone was watching the light at the end of the tunnel.

Once she got sick, I certainly wasn't going to argue with her faith. She took comfort from it; it was a source of strength. But, early on the relationship, I'd talk a lot about my beliefs and would ask her to expand on her beliefs, and her whole argument was, essentially, "It's just what I feel." It is, perhaps, the ultimate argument ender. You can't really tell people that they aren't feeling what they are feeling, or that a feeling they may have is right or wrong. You can of course argue that people have their facts wrong, but Laura's argument was free of all facts. It was pure feeling. It was her hunch, and she was sticking with it.

I've argued in a previous post that my atheism is mostly an act of faith. You can intellectually refute all the factual claims made by various religions, but you can't actually prove the non-existance of an amorphous, undefinable God. So, to make that last leap from agnosticism to atheism is, for me, a leap of faith.

Before it sounds as if I'm in full retreat in the face of argument 10, let me make a counterargument. It may be fruitless and unrewarding to argue with the faith of others, but I personally find it to be highly rewarding to argue with my own faith. It may look to the casual reader like I've compiled this list of arguments for believing in God only to shoot them down and make myself feel more smug in my atheistic triumph. The truth is much more complex: I actually go out of my way to discover new arguments for God and against atheism because I enjoy testing what I feel. Laura may have been satisfied simply believing, but I like putting my brain into gear and grinding away at questions that may, ultimately, have no answers. I actually am excited by the possibility that I may discover that some of my fundamental assumptions are wrong.

By constantly questioning and challenging my own assumptions, I think I gain a few things. First, I believe I learn empathy by trying on the thoughts of others. I may not believe their arguments for believing in God, but I can see where they're coming from. I don't walk around assuming that the faithful are all deluded fools blind to the truth; I assume they have reasons for believing what they believe. Second, I find that spending hours thinking about this stuff is good for my creative life. My novel Dragonseed (coming soon!) is driven thematically by how much faith people should have in their leaders, and what paths one can follow to discern what is true. (Plotwise, it's driven by dragons biting people and people stabbing dragons. Also, dragons biting dragons and people stabbing people. In other bits, dragons stab dragons and people bite people. It's a work with many, many facets.) Anyone could make up a fictional world and fill it with heroes and monsters. What makes my novels interesting (I hope) are the thousand sleepless nights I've spent tossing and turning as I contemplate God and the Absense of God.

So, yes, you can argue, "this is just what I believe, so shut up," and I'll leave you alone. But I'm here to testify that beliefs you can examine and argue possess their own rewards.

At least, that's what I feel.

Nyah.

Is America a Christian Nation?

Barack Obama is on the record as saying, "Whatever we once were, we're no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers." In response to this, a group of 41 congressmen have introduced House Resolution 397, a bill that basically says, "We are too a Christian nation, so there!" In the body of the bill are a long list of arguments explaining why and how our founding fathers specifically established America as "Christland," and it was only a clerical error that resulted in the name "America" getting into the official record. Or, whatever.

This is just the latest response to the increasingly popular notion that Christianity is under attack by the government, despite all evidence to the contrary. I am unaware of a single church in America that was surrounded by armed policemen this morning preventing people from going inside. Christians enjoy the same rights that I do to print their own newspapers and books, to rent billboards and advertise their spiritual products, and even to go door to door and spread the good news. The few restrictions that are in place are restrictions placed on the government, not the citizens. The principal of a school, as a representative of the government, cannot go on the intercom each morning and read the Bible to all the students in the school. But, that same principal, as a private citizen, is free to read the bible out loud to anyone in earshot when he's not serving in his official capacity. The man can be Christian, but the office can't.

This seems like splitting hairs to a lot of Christians. But, the "America is a Christian nation" crowd seems, to me, to be a little unclear on what, exactly, the central tenents of Christianity are. From a theological standpoint, can a government even be Christian? Does a government have a soul that can stand before the Lord on Judgment Day? Does a nation? Or does it all come down to individuals? It seems to me that the concept of group salvation is specifically dismissed in the scriptures. The notion that a nation can be Christian is as spiritually meaningless as the idea that a cat can be Christian.

The central dogma of Christianity is summed up in good ol' John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, and whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but shall have everlasting life." The contract between God and man in the New Testament isn't a group contract. In the old testament, the pact was between God and a collective nation or race. But in the New Testament, being a Christian is a contract between God and a specific individual. Your salvation doesn't depend on the actions of your neighbors. If you live in the heart of, say, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and your neighbor to the left is a lesbian wiccan who dances around naked in the pentagram in her backyard during full moons, and your neighbor to the right is a full-blown radical communist atheist with a hammer and sickle tattoo on his bicept, and the family across the street has just moved in from some country you can't pronounce, and you aren't sure exactly what their religion is, but it seems to involve doing horrible things to chickens... it doesn't matter to God. When the rapture comes, God isn't going to pass you by because he doesn't approve of your neighbors. All he cares about is whether you're a "whosoever."

I suspect I would get much less frustrated with the more vocal proponents of Christianity on the right if they would show some glimmer of understanding of their own religion. It matters not one whit to Jesus if America is a Christian nation. Nations aren't the functional spiritual unit that he cares about. They are doing nothing to advance the work of Jesus by introducing these bills. If these congressmen really want to spread the gospel, I'd like to suggest they've chosen the wrong profession. They might be more effective evangelists as preachers or missionaries. Their attempts to legislate Christianity into the hearts of their fellow citizens is just sad. If someone can give me even one good reason why they should be wasting a dime of their tax-paid salaries worrying about this, I'd love to hear it.

Road Trip!

Stairs at Hatteras Lighthouse. There are 240 of 'em.
Lake Mattamuskeet, a big honkin' lake

Egrets, we saw a few, but then again, too few to mention....
(all photos are by Cheryl Morgan)

I took a three day weekend and hopped into my friend Cheryl's space-age Toyota Hybrid and together we went out to see the watery parts of the world, or at least the sort-of damp parts of North Carolina. While exploring Google maps, I couldn't help but notice that there's a great big chunk of land on the inner banks that has no towns of any size. Once you leave Washington, NC and head east on 264, you cross about 90 miles of highway with no Walmarts, McDonald's, or even a chain grocery store. Also, no traffic. There was a stretch of highway between Englehard and Stumpy point where we didn't pass a single car going the other way. Nor were there any driveways, mobile homes, or any other signs of civilization save for the highway itself. We passed a town sign for "Leechville." There were no houses anywhere to be seen. I assume the place had plenty of leeches, because it fell somewhat short on the ville. It is good for the soul to spend time in such emptiness.

The highlight of the 264 journey has to be Lake Mattamuskeet. This is the largest natural lake in North Carolina, almost 18 miles long. There are places where you can stand and not see the far shore. (In the photo above, the trees you see are an island... beyond the island, it was water as far as you could see.) Almost every other significant body of water in North Carolina is cluttered by development, but Mattamuskeet is mostly untouched. The southern shore is a federal wildlife sanctuary. The north is presumably open for development, but there's nothing there. No hotels, no restaurants, just miles and miles of open space. We did see one boat ramp, but never saw a boat on the water. One reason the lake is probably undeveloped is that it's shallow--the average depth is 2 feet. I imagine this limits the use of larger boats. I also can't help but think that mosquitoes probably rule the land later in the year, though we weren't bothered on our trip. The wildlife on the wildlife reserve were ridiculously helpful in showing themselves. We saw deer, otters, egrets, herons, snakes, and turtles, lots and lots of turtles. Also, we saw the tracks on the shore that just had to come from a bear. I definitely want to return with binoculars and a better camera. Also, a fishing pole.

For more pictures of wildlife, check out Cheryl's flickr from the trip.

Manteo lies at the far end of 264. It's the start of the "touristy" area, a gateway to the Outer Banks. But, Manteo was still nice. One thing we really appreciated was the work they had put into their public spaces. The waterfront is all one long boardwalk with plenty of places to sit great views. It was very inviting and open. You felt like they really wanted people to enjoy the town.

The following day, we drove down Highway 12, from Nags Head to Hatteras. This is not empty space, devoid of humans. But... it's not without its charm. And, the Hatteras lighthouse is again open to visitors. We climbed to the top. It was something of a workout, but totally worth it for the view.

Afterwards, we took the ferry over to Ocracoke. Ocracoke was lovely--very empty on the northern parts of the island. And, the town itself is quite charming. However, the public space is the exact opposite of Manteo. Every square inch of the waterfront is private property. It's really tough to find a space to stand to watch the sunset. All the people we met were really friendly, but all the "no trespassing" and "keep out" signs gave the town a slightly hostile vibe. The highlight of the island was the star gazing. We drove back up to middle of the island. There were no man made lights for miles. The night was a little hazy, but even with the humidity the stars popped out with spectacular clarity, nearly free of light pollution. We had a guide to constellations and were pleased to spot a half dozen or so. Normally, when I look up at the night sky here in Hillsborough, I'm lucky to even see the Big Dipper.

Monday, we left Ocracoke on the ferry to Cedar Island. It's a two hour boat ride. For about an hour of the ride, you can't see land in any direction. It rained, alas, and the wind was fierce, so we spend most of the ride in the car. Cedar Island had a beach that was one of the uglier beaches I've ever seen. Lots of trash, and dead jellyfish everywhere. But, the drive out of town through the wildlife preserve is gorgeous, just miles and miles of marsh.

When we finally reached Beaufort, it felt strange to see fast food restaurants and grocery stores again. Beaufort isn't a big city, but it felt like a metropolis after three days spent on 264 and Highway 12. A few hours later we were back on I-40, and the star-starved skies of Raleigh-Durham. But, it's nice to know that the wilderness, and the stars, are still out there.

Shadows on the Screen: Laura Herrmann, Three Years Later

I went to Laura's grave to leave some flowers. It turned out that the earth was already quite generous in this regard... the whole section of the cemetery where she was buried was white with clover. With the rain we've been having lately, it seems as if clover sprouts and blooms in the wake of a lawnmower. The persistence of the tiny flowers is aggravating if you desire a crisp looking lawn. But, with a flip of a mental switch, you can see the flowers as flowers once again, and wonder why anyone in their right mind would ever wish to mow them.

The clover triggered a memory of driving around with Laura in the country a few weekends before she died, specifically to look at fields blooming with clover, wild sage, and other tiny flowers that in aggregate paint the spring landscape. And of course, one memory can trigger a cascade: I wound up thinking about our trips to the beach, and about scouring the shoreline for fragments of beach glass, which she collected with the goal of decorating, well, something. Maybe a table one day. She did cover one light switch plate in her bathroom with beach glass.

Foolishly, I once spotted beach glass for sale in one of the gift shops at the beach, and suggested she could reach her goal of a table-sized quantity much quicker just buy buying a bag or two. She looked at me as if I were an idiot. The stuff for sale at the shop wasn't "real" beach glass. It had been manufactured in a rock tumbler. It was actually much nicer and smoother than the stuff we'd find on the shore, some of which would still have a sharp edge or two. But it wasn't real. It wasn't of any use to her.

In hindsight, it's plain to me now that our hours spent walking along the beach, heads down, eyes searching for any hint of green or blue (the most cherished forms of beach glass, with brown and white the most common), weren't about gathering the glass. They were about gathering memories.

It's so easy to pass through life in too big of a hurry to stop and build any memories. Last summer, I spent nearly all my free time hunched over a computer banging out books. With the exception of a few moments, most of last summer just blurs into one long haze of typing. This year, I'm not going to be such a slave to the keyboard. I want to go out and see the world, and look at some flowers. I want to go hiking and fishing; I want to just get in my car and go places I've never gone. The one thing I definitely don't want to do is spend my summer sitting around watching television, or surfing the internet. Nothing is worse than a skull full of memories of all the TV shows you've watched. It's like bringing home bags of beach glass from a shop. Sure, you've got recollections of exciting adventures, clever things people said, and breathtaking scenery... but they've all been manufactured for you. A real memory isn't going to be quite as clean. You're going to remember that when you walked on the beach, you got sunburned. When you went hiking, you inhaled a pound of gnats. You went fishing and caught some nice fish, but you also buried a hook under your fingernail when you were reaching into the tackle box.

And you'll cherish these experiences all the more.

Real memories, like real beach glass, should have a few sharp edges.

A few random thoughts on politics

Driving home tonight, I was listening to news about Arlen Specter switching to the Democrats. I'm not happy about it, not because I particularly like any Republican policy, but because I did like that there was at least still some small sliver of a balance of power.

On the other hand, in a way that has never really happened in my lifetime, it's interesting that one party really owns all the responsibility for managing the country's problems at the moment. Since Republican's can't pull off a filibuster even with 100% solidarity, and since the Democrats have a firm majority in the house, there really is no excuse at all for the Democrats not to fulfill their collective promises. Claims of republican obstruction are going to ring hollow. On a wide range of topics, from climate change, to fuel supplies, to foreign policy, to health care, the Democrats will be left with two choices: Act, or try to blame Bush.

I suspect we'll see the later strategy. I don't think Democrats are truly eager to enact rigid carbon caps; they have to know that this would strangle the economy at the worst possible time. I predict, instead, that they will hem and haw and commission on it, then enact some legislation that goes into effect in 2016, after Obama's out of office. When pressed why they aren't acting more aggressively now that they hold all the reins of power, they'll say that their hands are tied by the economic stagnation that Bush created. Any foreign policy that doesn't go their way: Bush poisoned the waters.

And, I think this will have some traction for a year or two, but, long term, the democrats are going to really have to figure out how they are going to placate their most rabid members. Bush's blood will only sustain them so long. Eventually, all the interesting fights will be democrat versus democrat.

Here's an idea I had that may be the Republican's last hope of wielding any power: Every last member of the house and senate should switch their party affiliation to Democrat. Just have the republican party fold up shop, and flood the ranks of the Dems with conservatives, who will then have a real shot at building political coalitions with moderates. Remove the power of party labels by putting everyone under one umbrella, and shift the debate from what defines a party to what defines the individual members.

I know it won't happen, but it's still an interesting thought. I suspect the republicans will just hold on, hoping for the day that the democrats stumble badly enough to bring them back to power, which certainly will happen one day. After all, I don't think the Democrats owe their present popularity and power to Barack Obama--I think the real savior of the democratic party was George Bush.