She blinded me with logical fallacies

I know this may be hard to believe, but I once got into a silly and unnecessary argument with a former boss over the word "utilize" in a presentation.  I knew it was silly and unnecessary as it was happening, but I only have so much control over my pedantry.  I am only a man.  I ended up giving up, because he was my boss and kind of difficult to work for.  Even though it was silly and unnecessary, I still feel bad about it because the meanings of words matter, and utilize is a frequently abused word.  It shames me to this day.

Even though I caved in the face of middle-whelming opposition, I still feel strongly about use of words, as you can imagine.  I even got into an internet argument in the comments section of The Atlantic once when I was "working from home" (different boss) about inappropriate use of the word socialism.  I do care about that, too, but man, correcting randos on the internet about definitions of political philosophy is an uphill battle.

Another word that has been bugging me for quite some time now is how people say the word "science" but rarely seem to know what it actually means.  This tweet came across my feed recently and it filled me with that same urge to explain why everyone else is wrong all the time again.  The word science has had a sort of quasi-political, semi-chic renaissance.  I do not exactly know when or why it started, but its invocation is typically about smugness.

Science is a process by which an hypothesis is identified, an experiment defined and executed, then tested.  It is important that the hypothesis is stated before the experiment is defined, to try to expose and prevent bias.  The data from the outcome of the experiment is then compared to the hypothesis, and depending on the significance of the experiment, applied in some way, published or just filed away for posterity.  The details of the experiment are also defined, so that it can be replicated to be sure that the information is valid.  Science is not a body of knowledge.  It is a technique to build knowledge.  It is not a world view.

One of the places that exemplifies this smugness, besides Neil deGrasse Tyson's twitter feed, is ieffinglovescience.  I know that is not its name, but I do not like to use the f word. Looking at the website, it has science memes news, which is nice.  Nowhere on the website does the explanation of the Scientific Method appear.  The shop is pretty easy to find -- and it supports real science causes!  Whatever that means.

NdGT recently tweeted "a subject is scientifically controversial when actively debated by legions of scientists, not when actively debated by the public, the press or by politicians."  That is kind of nonsense, because scientists are not priests.  There's no magic cape you get to put on (or Van Allen Belt?) when you graduate with a science degree.  While my degrees are in Mechanical Engineering instead of physics, I am not a scientist either.  But I am at least as qualified as Bill Nye.

This particularly bothers me because it reflects poorly on my profession and associated professions when these people act like insufferable jerks using the logical fallacy Appeal to Authority to support a position they already believed.  Which, is antithetical to what science is supposed to be.

On the Racist Food

This week, I became the old man yelling at the cloud.   I wrote an email to a podcast complaining about its content.  It was On the Media's episode Is This Food Racist?  The podcast was a logrolling platform for another podcast that shares the WNYC distributor and had two main thrusts -- an interview with Rick Bayless, an Oklahoman who has dedicated his life to Mexican food (real deal stuff, not food truck tacos) and the response to a comment the guest made about Korean staple bibimbap about how to improvement.  A key piece of information is that both Bayless and Dan Pashman, host of Sporkful, are white and not Latin or Korean.  At least, that was key to Brooke Gladstone, host of OTM who interviewed Pashman.

I have gotten irritated by podcasts before -- mostly by stuff like how pretentious David Plotz can be on the Slate Political Gabfest -- but never have I actually written an email to voice that.  Food, though, has a powerful effect on me.  There were a few moments that made this happen.

The first was when Pashman, while interviewing Bayless, confronted him about whether he had advantages in his career with Mexican food because he was white.  He said that he never really thought about it, tried to figure out what they were asking him, and pretty much said Mexican food is good.  Afterwards, Pashman and Gladstone could not believe the gall of him unwilling to concede his white privilege.  At this point, the transmission in my brain ground its gears.  For some reason, the idea that his whole food palate is built on him being an American interpreting Mexican food, so the idea of getting advantages in this context is kind of meaningless.

The next was when Pashman acknowledged that during a discussion on Korean food, he suggested an improvement to bibimbap and got an array of calls, some positive, others not where he and Gladstone wrung their hands over whether it was ok.  The podcast played an interview with an offended Korean American discussing how as a child he was made fun of for his school lunches because there were noodles in them.  He then talked about how it felt like a white guy suggesting an improvement to Korean food was like trying to tell his Korean grandmother how to be hotter.  There are a couple of things about this: everyone gets made fun of for their school lunches.  Another is that these sorts of adjustments are how immigrant foods become assimilated so that when the next generation of Korean kids bring their lunches to school, it looks normal.  Finally, there is not definitive bibimbap, and if there were, this guy who called in would not own it.  He's not Korean Arnold Palmer.

The interview concluded with Gladstone asking Pashman if he would continue to experiment like that.  He said, probably yes, but while being more thoughtful of others.  It seems like a fine sentiment, but it also seems kind of crazy.  The idea that making food a different way is imperialism seems like it requires a lessening of the original in a way that really does not happen.  This is not the first time I have seen this sort of complaint, though.  (In the interest of full disclosure: I eat collard greens.  I cook them often, though never with peanuts.)

More importantly, though, is that this is what interaction is.  Integration like this is part and parcel of what America is, especially with food.  Pizza, General Tso's chicken, the California roll, the Cuban sandwich, everything that comes out of Louisiana, chili and the mission burrito are all results of cultures running into each other.

I also think that this is the kind of thinking that leads to people supporting people like Donald Trump.  It's hard not to see this as an argument that white people can't make foods from non-white people.  While the discussion is clearly more nuanced than that, the implication was clearly that this was somehow bad.  When immigrants arrived here with their recipes and found different ingredients available, they improved without feeling enslaved to an idea of authenticity.  I just can't see how the world isn't a richer place because of decisions like that, and if the offended Korean American's complaints cause others to be hesitant to experiment because they do not belong to the ethnicity, that's really a shame.

Queen of the Dairy

Dr Sighted loves Blizzards.  I like them too, but I am not very discriminatory in my dairy needs.  Any high quality ice cream is perfectly fine by me.  There was an old style Dairy Queen in my home town that I didn't realize was "old style" until I moved away and saw that there were others that serve hamburgers and what not.  I also found out that ice cream places close in the winter time up north, which is very sad.

They have a new commercial out and I don't even know what they are trying to sell me, but I love it.  While well placed Lionel Richie "Hello"s will never not be funny, I particularly like the guy who sings in front of the Corvette.  When this commercial comes on, I move kind of slowly to the remote to fast forward past them.  I also like how wooden the cheerleader's delivery is, and how unnecessary such an elaborate set piece is for two seconds of commercial.

This commercial is not special.  It is not Pie and Chips for Free, which apparently was posted 9 years ago, which is a weird thing to make me feel old.  I cannot imagine we will be talking about I'm a Fan a decade later.  But it is strangely charming and there are a lot of small details that show this was a very thoughtfully crafted commercial and you should pay attention to the Lionel Richie fan's mug and shirt.

The cheese that goes...

There is an apocryphal story of my youth that immediately after I had my tonsils removed, I asked for not ice cream, which is the standard request, but Cheetos, which are not soft nor smooth.  I liked Cheetos as a kid more than I do now, but if I'm line for a catered sub lunch, I'll reach for the Cheetos probably more often than I'd reach for anything else since nobody seems to go for sour cream and onion anymore.  I guess onion breath is more offensive than orange teeth.

A couple of years ago, Cheetos sort of rebooted Chester from a sort of loser who thinks he is the coolest cat on the block who spends the commercials trying (unsuccessfully) to get his paws on some delicious Cheetos into a weird kind of jerk who uses Cheetos not for food, really, but more as props primarily to embarrass some of the people around the human characters (usually friends or family) in the commercial.  (I tried to find more samples on YouTube, but searching for Cheetos is mostly crowded out by videos like this about getting Irish people to try American things.  I must admit, I was amused.)

As an example, two recent ones have a child firing Cheetos out of a catapult at her father (I think?) for stealing the remote or something.  Another has a child making a Cheeto bikini for her sleeping father so that when he wakes up, he'll have bikini tan lines.  In none of these are there anything about the Cheeto dust that gets on everything.  It's not as bad as Dorito dust or glitter, but it's in the conversation.

There are a number of baffling aspects of these commercials.  First, none of the people seem to be fazed by the fact that there is a cartoon Cheetah telling them what to do, which, now that I think about it, is reasonably consistent with the commercial universe.  But really, why not show case the snack as being desirable?  The earlier incarnation was not Geico Cavemen or anything as far as commercial quality goes, but it was clear that the snacks were so good that Chester was willing to endure physical pain.  In the new versions, I'm not really sure that the effects would be any different if they replaced the Cheetos with a bag of bread crusts cut off from little kids' sandwiches..

They've made more of these commercials that Darrell Hammond got to make Colonel Sanders commercials, so there must be something to it.  But to me, it makes me sad.  I cannot imagine 3 year old me wanting to ask for Cheetos with a mascot like this after a tonsilectomy.  I guess it really isn't easy being cheesy.

Discomfort, Indeed.

As my wife likes to remind me, I am not really a Southerner; I am a Floridian.  Even though the latitude of my birthplace is 3 degrees south of hers, I am still an outsider, a sort of mongrel, even though a sizable portion of my higher education and all of my professional life has been spent squarely in the South.  I'm not sure I'll ever get to be a member of that club, in part because I don't drink sweet tea and sound like I was born closer to to the Iowa River than the Chattahoochee, where my wife was.

I do feel like I understand this place somewhat, though, and certainly felt more at home in Clemson, South Carolina than I did in Terre Haute, Indiana.  I was an outsider there, too, because the Midwesterners categorized me as one of those from the other side of the Line. College is a place where identity is both calcified and shattered, sometimes more than once.  I never got the impression that there was all that much that identified an Midwesterner, really, or an "Hoosier" in particular.  In fact, nobody even knew what a Hoosier is.

The same could not be said in the Upstate of South Carolina.  The people there had a distinct sound -- distinct from the other side of the state, distinct from the other Carolina and distinct from the other side of the Savannah River.  I could not tell an Ohioan from an Illinoisan in nearly the same way I can pick out an Upstater from a Low Countryman from an Alabaman or a Tennesseean.  The food is different in these places, the music, the dress (especially the colors -- Red is not welcome in the Upstate, and Orange is frowned upon in Athens, Georgia), the sense of place and the sense of story.

I think the story telling comes from the Scots-Irish stock that populates the region; I am convinced there is something inherent in the Celtic blood that makes words pour out like honey -- whether it be from the mouth or the pen.  Like any other people with a strong sense of identity, it's strange to have someone else try to tell your story for you, so I am not even sure I am qualified to write this now, but when I came across this New Yorker piece, my reservations about my credentials receded lazily like the tide over the dark, cakey pluff mud of the Charleston marsh.

After spending some half a dozen paragraphs talking about how Southerners are stubborn, xenophobic, backward, somewhat barbaric, greedy, racist, ignorant, out of touch while culturally dominant, football and Nascar obsessed, tribalist, and violent, he closes with a couple of throwaway sentences that make it seem he's really not judging (the phrase that's used down here is, of course, "Bless his heart"):

But there is a largely forgotten Southern history, beyond the well-known heroics of the civil-rights movement, of struggle against poverty and injustice, led by writers, preachers, farmers, rabble-rousers, and even politicians, speaking a rich language of indignation. The region is not entirely defined by Jim DeMint, Sam Walton, and the Tide’s A J McCarron. It would be better for America as well as for the South if Southerners rediscovered their hidden past and took up the painful task of refashioning an identity that no longer inspires their countrymen.

The implication is that the South we have now is an inferior facsimile of what the South should be that is popularly understood to be personified in a recalcitrant Senator, a dead business man, and a football star, after he describes the region in precisely those terms.  I don't know what sort of inspiration Packer expects the natives of my adopted home state and our neighbors to provide when the the picture he paints of Southerners is so grim.  None of the buildup to this terminus tells us how the positive qualities do indeed benefit society at large outside of a rather ambiguous listing of positive traits: "At the end of “The Mind of the South,” Cash has this description of “the South at its best”: “proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal.”  That sounds nice, until two sentences later, he extols vices to counter them.  He is treating my neighbors as either terrorists or children who ought to be mollified.

I am particularly sensitive to that sort of attitude because I chose to be among these people.  I picked Clemson University for graduate work.  I bought my first house in Augusta, Georgia.  I married one of the Peach State's daughters.  We decided together to move to Charleston.  And, in the next place we live, I am certain we will be greeted with y'alls, elongated vowels and an extremely dedicated knowledge of college football.  I like the polite conversation.  I like the weather.  I like the pace of life.  I like the sense of culture.  I like the emphasis on faith.

The task of refashioning the identity has been going on here for over 200 years.  Re-examinations of what it means to be born between Virginia Beach and El Paso came to a rather violent head in 1861, of course, and no one forgets it.  The benefit of losing, though, is being forced to have that conversation; the winner is spared from that kind of existential introspection.

So a magazine entitled the New Yorker is an odd place indeed to read about an explanation on what's going on inside of the cultural mind of the South, especially when, upon completing this story, I was offered a suggested reading link of this story. 

Like I said, I'm not actually a Southerner and I don't know if Packer is either..  I don't know why it feels like politics are dramatically different now than just two election cycles ago.  But I do know that Packer's infantile reduction of the region to the Republican Party, Wal-Mart and the SEC is not productive or accurate.  I am skeptical that you couldn't go to a small town in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Oregon and find similar evidence of the low-brow to which Packer objects.  And so what?  What exactly is he trying to argue?

Conflicted, I guess

As many of my college friends could tell you, I had a bit of a creative infatuation with the work of Aaron Sorkin -- particularly Sports Night.  I was at my most prolific as a writer then and at the time, it and the West Wing seemed like the epitome of pop writing and I never thought I had the talent to be F. Scott Fitzgerald, but I at least thought I could be an Engineer by day and a reasonably  pop writer of some sort by night.  I did that for a while with a weekly in the last place I lived, and sometimes I think I'd like to do it again.

I am watching the season finale of The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin's latest project on HBO, and the technique is similar, but the tone is decidedly less pop.  The Newsroom features a main character, Will McAvoy, who is a disappointed Republican in the state of American politics.  Aaron Sorkin, on the other hand, is not a Republican of any sort, so writing a disillusioned one requires a sort of confidence I just don't understand.

I also don't understand how all of the positions are couched in such a way that the disillusioned Republican only targets the Tea Party and the failings of his own party, rather a more holistic criticism of the situation -- including failings of the administration.

Don't get me wrong, I suppose I am somewhat of a disillusioned Republican myself and there are certainly things about the conduct of the party I dislike, although I don't really feel much loyalty to the "team.".  (I consider myself more of a classical liberal, where I feel that the role of national government is to do the things that the private sector cannot profitably, and not much more than that.)  I don't like the win at all costs attitude of either party, I don't like how much of a dependence there is on the false moral equivalence (both sides have this problem -- and that I said "both" is tragic, because this should not be a binary problem) and I don't like the cowardice to go after lazy arguments rather than attacking the heart of the failings of American liberalism and progressivism.

I think that the current administration is a critically flawed one.  I think that, like 2004, there is a tremendous opportunity that is likely to be squandered by lining up behind the wrong guy because it is really hard to unseat an incumbent president.  I want to describe what I think the biggest flaws are how I wish the Republican Party -- or anybody, really, -- were challenging them.

1. Distaste for the law when it restricts executive power -- The two biggest examples are the GM and Chrysler bailouts and the intervention in Libya.  Without regard to policy (which I strenuously disagree with), the bailouts was of questionably legality, if not outright illegal.  In a guided bankruptcy, pensioners were given priority over bondholders, which is contrary to the way that bankruptcy proceedings go, because they were political allies.  (Links are here and here discussing this.)  During the NATO led intervention in Libya, which went from April 23 to October 31 (192 days) President Obama asserted that his administration was not in violation of the War Powers Act, which requires Congressional approval for military action exceeding 90 days, because the Libyan intervention wasn't actually a military conflict, since the bad guys weren't able to return fire against our superior forces.  That is, to put it nicely, an absurd explanation.  Libya was an illegal war.  There are other potential examples -- Fast and Furious, the way that the Bank of America president was treated -- but I don't have enough detail to document and defend it.
2. Lack of accountability for economic assertions -- During the preparations and sale of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act to the American people, the Administration sold it as necessary to pass in order to keep the unemployment rate below 8%.  That was a mistake, both factually and politically. The explanation from the Vice President was that "everybody guessed wrong."  That is tantamount to admitting incompetence and not an endearing answer. The current unemployment rate is 8.3%, which is the lowest it's been in three years, and higher than promised by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.  The ARRA was passed in early 2009, so the net increase is about 900,000 jobs for a $787 billion package amounts to about  $874,000 per job.  Not exactly a measure of efficiency.  (To be fair, that's an empirical rather than theoretical measure of efficiency -- let's say it saved 2 million jobs, as President Obama says, that's still $393,500 per job, which is not exactly a bargain either.)  Now, I do concede that Keynesian style stimulus can raise the GDP (since it's in the definition), I just don't think that there is sufficient discipline in the government to repay the debt when times are good, so I don't think it's effective policy.  Another of questionable value is "we ask everyone to pay their fair share."  What does that mean?  How much is enough?  Who decides what is fair?  The president is also quoted in that interview with saying, "we can't cut our way out of this hole."  Why not?  And how do we know when we're out of the hole?  Nobody has really said what victory looks like.  (To be fair, this isn't strictly a criticism of the president.)
3. Insistence on government solutions over individual ones -- We've all heard "You didn't build that" by now (the whole transcript can be read here).  The defense is that the president was not referring to business with "that" but rather the infrastructure he described prior -- but on full reading, I don't think it matters.  The tone of the speech is definitely one that you shouldn't take credit for your work, because there were a lot more hands in it than you appreciate.  The issue, though, is that every American has access to that same infrastructure and we're not all Michael Dell or Steve Jobs or Barack Obama.  Individual effort is a pretty big deal, and "you didn't build that" isn't the way the president should be talking about it.  Compare the tone of that speech to this one and see if you can tell the difference.  The heavy-handed paternalism celebrated in The Life of Julia is rather troubling.  It implies that people in general and women in particular can't manage themselves without a government caretaker.  My wife will make more than I do over the course of her career and it won't even close, regardless of who is president.

Like Will McAvoy, I wish the Republican candidate was stronger.  I think the principles of liberty and economic responsibility and government closest to the people are all messages that can win.  I don't think that the current Republican campaign is communicating that message, and they are playing to the bases elements of politics (both sides are, really, which makes the false equivalence rear its head).  The welfare ad is only of questionable veracity, if that.  Paul Ryan's weird marathon fib doesn't help, and this ad was deplorable.  At the end of the day, there are enough flaws with this president that opponents shouldn't need to resort to dishonest tactics to score points.  I hope they go after the heart of the man and make this really about choices and not about trivia, but I won't hold my breath.

Feigning outrage is outrageous

I don't really have any leftovers for lunch today, but I know I won't be going to Chick-Fil-A, even though Mike Huckabee told me to.  The reason is not because I am unsympathetic to the position taken (which isn't nearly as offensive as it seems to have been presented, see the quote below) or approve of the reaction that opponents have taken to Cathy's interview.  I am not joining in Chick-Fil-A Appreciate Day because the whole dust up is stupid.  This is the section of the interview that touched this off (linked here):

Some have opposed the company's support of the traditional family. "Well, guilty as charged," said Cathy when asked about the company's position.

"We are very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.

"We operate as a family business ... our restaurants are typically led by families; some are single. We want to do anything we possibly can to strengthen families. We are very much committed to that," Cathy emphasized.

I say this is stupid not because of the content of the arguments of the two sides, but because of the non-event that revealed the content.  Chick-Fil-A's ownership is famously and unabashedly outspoken about their Christian positions and Dan Cathy was giving an interview to The Baptist Press for crying out loud about maintaining those Christian positions even in the face of business success.  If this was a surprise to you, then I can only imagine that episodes of Law and Order are shocking and surprising each time, too.  (Hint: if they arrest the guy in the first 10 minutes, it's not him; the moderately famous B-level guest start did it; they're going to get a conviction; and the DA is going to say something somewhat pithy or ironic to close the show.  Dun dun.)

The reactions to the interview -- most famously by Rahm Emanuel (mayor of Chicago) and Thomas Menino (mayor of Boston) -- are terrible and deserve to be ridiculed.  For any government representative to say that a business in unwelcome because of the opinions of that business's owner is outrageous.  Buying from Chick-Fil-A today will do nothing to punish those mayors.

For the people who want to boycott or protest, however, that's their prerogative.  Except the timing is lazy; according to the Washington PostPartisan blog, Chick-Fil-A has been giving money to "anti-gay" charities for like 9 years and obvious about its desire to be seen as a Christian friendly company since its inception -- they did not just start closing on Sundays, you know.

So, my question is, why did this reaction only happen to the interview a week and half ago?  Why today?

Headlines are fun sometimes

Earlier this week, Mitt Romney spoke to the NAACP.  (He's running for president, by the way.)  I read a few articles about the event because this time of year is slow for news.  I don't mean to minimize the relevance of the NAACP, but I have read this story before.  Well, that's not entirely true; I have never read one where the sitting President of the United States was a member of the class for which the NAACP was founded to help.

Now, when I read this headline on Townhall.com, I was surprised: Romney Receives Standing Ovation for Straight Talk at NAACP Convention.  Townhall is, admittedly a conservative website trying to spin a conservative angle.  Now, compare to a Slate.com headline: Romney Booed at NAACP Appearance for Promising Obamacare Repeal and Huffpo.com: Mitt Romney Booed At NAACP Convention For Saying He'd Repeal Obamacare.  Neither of those sites are particularly sympathetic to Romney.

The contents of each piece are a bit different, too, with Townhall going into the most detail and making it sound like he's going to peel away a third of black voters, even though polling suggests he has 6 percent of support among that group (according to the Slate article).

This is an interesting case, because Slate and Huffpo are really "Dog Bites Man" stories, so they're not really that newsy in the first place.  Townhall comes off as that weird place where emphasizing facts in a particular way comes off as bias -- kind of like moving what should be an A6 story to the front page.  Townhall was the only one to mention standing ovation at the end (and buried it, so it was probably a zealous editor writing that headline) and Huffpo did mention the politeness of the crowd.  The Slate story only talks about the boos surrounding Obamacare.

Each outlet did publish other stories, but these were the first to come up after the event, the sort of first impressions.  I found it quite interesting that each chased the angle they wanted in the first run by the editorial staffs.

What does this mean?  I think that the headline, the newsy part is that Romney spoke before the NAACP, because that is not always something Republicans do.  The fact that he would be facing a hostile crowd is not hard-hitting journalism and trying to paint as rosy a picture as Townhall does is really nothing short of spinning for your guy.  Both really strike me as sorts of hackery.

I think that if you read all three, you can come away with a reasonable picture of the story -- the NAACP was a polite but partisan crowd hearing a speech from a presidential candidate maybe 2% of the attendees would vote for.  And quite frankly, the more interesting story coming out of the NAACP Convention is that Obama did not speak at the convention this week, the summer before his re-election to president when he needs to have the NAACP's constituency as energized as possible to win.  (Here is a Townhall.com link about it and a Huffpo.com link about it -- oddly enough, I could not find a Slate.com one telling that same story.)

I guess the moral of the story is to take your news with some skepticism, even for benign, trivial stories, and seek out sources from different perspectives.  The aggregate of these small stories matter in shaping the political and social narrative by reinforcing expectations (Huffpo and Slate) or really making the outlook seem rosier than it might actually be for Romney (Townhall).

Stop Children, what's that sound?

After watching How I Met Your Mother reruns tonight on WGN, the Chicago news came up, covering the ongoing protests of the NATO summit there.  The reporter asked the protestors what message they were trying to send and she had to go three deep before anybody had anything meaningful to say: complaining about the Afghanistan War, which was part of the summit's mission anyway.  (The first said she was there to hang out because the leaders were having dinner and "we weren't invited" the second guy literally said nothing.)

I don't really sympathize with protestors now, so when I look back at the protestors 50 years ago, like the Freedom Riders and civil rights leaders, I kind of wonder if I'd have been on the right side then.  I hope I would have.  Looking now, though, I find it hard to believe that history isn't going to look at these people as jokes, if it remembers them at all.

It feels like a disappointment that these people are getting this kind of news, thinking they're changing the world, yet they don't know what they're changing from or to.  My generation is awesome.

Publilius Syrus was right

On Tuesday, the President of the United States said something that implies one of two things: he doesn't know what a speculator is or he thinks we don't know what a speculator is.  Frankly, I don't care which it is, because neither is a good quality in a president.  Remember when Bush couldn't say nuclear?  How much comfort did that instill?

"We can't afford a situation where speculators artificially manipulate markets by buying up oil, creating the perception of a shortage and driving prices higher, only to flip the oil for a quick profit."  -President Barack Obama

 Speculators are people who think that something is priced too low.  If you find a $10 lamp at a yard sale that you turn around and sell for $25 at an antique store, you're a speculator.  If you bought into a hot stock tip, you're a speculator.  If you bought a lottery ticket, you're actually a gambler, and a poor one at that. 

All of those things, though, are voluntary, and require two parties.  The guy who sold you that $10 leg lamp would have preferred to sell it for $25, I'm sure, but either getting rid of it quickly was worth something to him or he didn't know its actual value.  But, after this transaction, both the seller of the lamp and the buyer of the lamp are happier than they were before, otherwise the lamp would not have been sold.  So, in every case of speculation (even on oil), in order for a speculation "bet" to be made, somebody else must take that bet.  Somebody on the other end of the speculation thinks that the price they are being offered is, at the very least, fair, if not good.  Unless you make all your own stuff, everything you've ever bought you  because you thought it was worth the money on the price tag (or somebody else did).

Speculators have been demonized as predatory or parasitic, because they don't make things.  However, price correcting does have value and is not without risk.  Other people selling lamps are happy to know what they are worth (have you ever looked at what similar items are selling for when you post on Craigs List?).  Sometimes the price is not predictable and goes down instead of up or vice-versa, making those various bets go bad.  Like Beanie Babies. 


The price of oil might be undervalued, too.  People are complaining about the price at the pump, but the concept of price is really just a means to distribute resources.  Money is valuable because it serves as a store of value and is easy to carry.  Food is valuable to me, as are books and candy.  How valuable?  We measure that in its monetary value.  If you remember your supply and demand curves from economics, as the price of transportation goes up, people will still pay (inelastic good), but some will find other alternatives  (Biking, carpooling, public transportation, moving closer to work, getting a smaller car, etc.) or suppliers will increase production to take advantage of the higher prices.  If that's the case, then it stinks, but your lifestyle will have to change.  During the Carter Administration, gas was rationed and price was not the means that the resources were distributed, and instead it was (among other things) wait time.  Would waiting in line be less aggravating?

It may not seem fair to the poorer if this happens, but it's not any less fair that the poor don't have Gulfstreams, that the busy may not have time to wait in line for gas, or that interesting people get attractive spouses, either.  That's how resources work, really.  In fact, there are a lot of people who think extra taxes on gasoline would be a good thing in the long run, implying that there is definitely room in the market for speculation.

There is also the awkwardness of the word "artificially."  What does he mean by that?  Is he saying that some participants in the market are illegitimate?  How is that determined?  If I buy a used car for $1500 with the intent on keeping it, but later see on Craigslist someone willing to pay $2000 for it, would that be an artificial transaction?  How long would I have to keep it before it's not speculation anymore?  Or what if I hire a travel agent?  Or buy stock from a stock broker instead of an IPO?  Or buy tickets to a Clemson game on Stub Hub?  Or just a guy selling tickets outside the stadium?  Are they equally artificial?  What is a natural price increase?  What about the extra costs incurred by taxes?  The president could push to lower gas prices by introducing a bill to Congress to suspend gasoline taxes, since they are price effects that are not even made by market participants; at least the speculators have skin in the game.

Now, does that mean Obama doesn't understand high school economics?  Possible, but personally, I think it's more that he doesn't like the answer.  Like people who complain about their lottery tickets not winning.

It is finished

There are seven Biblical phrases that Jesus said while on the cross and, of course, "It is finished" is one of them.  It was a declaration that His earthly mission was complete, He had accepted our sin and served as sacrifice on Good Friday.  This would be a marvelous story of self-sacrifice and an example how to treat each other if the story ended there.  But it's not where the story ended.

Three days later, on a Sunday like today, Christ rose.  He predicted this (Mark 8:31-37, Luke 18:31-35).  He told His disciples what was necessary and what would happen -- like the Scripture has told us what is necessary and what will happen -- and they did not understand.  I can't say I blame them; we still have trouble understanding now.

The importance of the Resurrection is a demonstration of both His power over death (symbolically important for us, since we no longer have to fear death) and His faithfulness (more immediately important to us because He fulfills promises).  He promises us the Spirit, the counselor, in John 14:15-21.  In Matthew 28:20, He states, "And lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world."  (The preacher at my church in Clemson used to end his sermons with that, and it gave me goosebumps every time.)

The Bible is a series of promises that God lays out and fulfills.  His track record is pretty hard to beat.  This, though, is the realization of the most important one.  Today is the anniversary of the Resurrection of Christ, the Son of God, the fulfillment of the promise that in addition to all the things laid on for Good Friday, that He is with us.  That He is trustworthy.  That He is more powerful than death.  I can get behind that.  Happy Easter!

What's good?

I'm pretty sure that every kid at one point asks their parents "Why is it called 'Good' Friday if that's the day Jesus died?" (getting off of school, notwithstanding).  The answer I remember hearing is something like, "He died for our sins on that day," which, of course, is true, but sin is awfully abstract for a kid.  Sin's bad (and a condemnation to death), we know that, but when you're, say, ten, what could be so bad to need somebody to die for them?


Even if you can wrap your head around that, it still seems a little irrational, if not rather nice.  This fellow was selfless enough to let himself endure an excruciating (the root of this word ex- Latin for "out of" and crux Latin for "cross" literally means "out of [or from] the cross", a descriptor that describes the pain associated with crucifixion) experience just because other people are bad. 

Sin serves as a barrier to communication between people and God (Isaiah 59:2), like when I leave my shoes out in the bedroom with my wife.  (She doesn't like that.)  Communication is critical to a functioning relationship and any kind of separation like that causes dysfunction.  Unfortunately, no one can escape this separation (Romans 3:23), either with God or any other relationship, really. Granted, shoes are small potatoes (I hope), but if I leave them despite her protestations, it's disregard for her wishes, and that's not respectful and being disrespectful of my wife is violating our marriage covenant.

God and the tribes of Israel had their own special covenant -- one of prosperity in exchange for obedience -- and His people didn't always hold up their end of the deal.  He warned them with prophets and geopolitics (Habakkuk 3), but people didn't always buy in.  They did, however, get legalistic and focus on the details rather than the message, and the prophets tried to steer them back (Hosea 6:6, Micah 8:6).  They, or rather, we, didn't always listen.

What have you done to remove the barriers in your relationships with friends, spouses, or children?  Moved schedules, bought dinners, given up free time to help, right?  Well, God feels the same way.  The book of Hosea is really a love letter to His people and tries to do those things to win us back that you would do to your husband or wife: "Therefore, I am going to allure her [His people]; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her. (Hosea 2:14)" and "I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you to me in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion.  I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the Lord. (Hosea 2:19-20)" 

So He did.  He hated that barriers to communication between us so much that He sent us Christ, to eliminate them forever ("For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)").  Because He so loved the world.  He sent us Christ, His son, to suffer on the cross and accept our sin, to be our sacrifice, to give us a path to escape death.  Simply to make Himself more accessible to us. 

Christ even tells us how big a deal this is in John 15:13: "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."  That's exactly what He did.  For you.  For me.  For everyone.  Today, we celebrate that we can escape sin because He laid down His life for us.  That's why we call this Good Friday.  Really, kids should be asking, "Why isn't it called Best Friday, instead of just Good?"

On a mssion

Nicholas Kristof, columnist for the NY Times who is famous for being an all around good guy and doing stuff like personally buying a freeing sex slaves, wrote a column on Wednesday about how in addition to not agreeing with conservative values, liberals don't really understand them, either.  The column is pretty interesting, but I'm always leery when people start asserting that we are hardwired towards philosophical attitudes like he does towards the end though.  What is more serious, though, (as usual) is the commentary from the blokes on the internet.

Aside from the clear demonstration of the fluid definitions of "liberal' and "conservative" and the repeated assertions from each camp that you must be brain dead in order to belong to the other, the thing that jumped out to me most is the attitude repeated by more than one poster that giving money to churches isn't really charity because churches don't really care for the poor.  This is troubling for a couple of reasons: there is a fundamental misunderstanding of people out there of what churches and other religious communities missions' actually are or those communities are not fulfilling them.

Make no mistake: caring for the poor is absolutely and unmistakably a mission of the Christian church.  It is also a mission of just about every other religious community as well, but the tenor of the commentary of the article is largely American and largely focused at Christians, so I will focus on that from here on out.  Helping the poor, though, is intrinsically wrapped up in Christian identity, starting with the Old Testament.  (Leviticus 19:10, 23:22, Deuteronomy 15:7, 15:11, 24:14-15, 24:17-18, Matthew 6:1-3, Luke 4:18-21, 14:7-14.  I could go on...)  One specific example, though, is the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31-46) which is an excellent summary of the position and the inspiration for a fun Cake song.

In the parable, Jesus, after His return, will separate people into two categories -- sheep and goats.  The sheep will be blessed and given the inheritance of the Kingdom of God because "I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink..." there are a few other needs that the sheep satisfied, but ultimately, it comes down to the fact that they took care of the earthly needs of those who were needy.  The goats, on the other hand, are cursed and rejected from the inheritance because they did not do those things.  "I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me."

Now, if the churches are not doing those things, then we are failing at one of our missions.  If people don't know that this is part of what Christians are charged to do, then we are also failing on another mission -- one so important that it is known as the Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20) -- to teach "all nations" what Christ taught.  I hope it's the second one, because that's easier to fix.

Loyalties

As you can tell by my icon, I follow the Clemson Tigers.  (Woo! Big wins over Wake and UVa this week!)  I am emotionally invested in their performance (for better or for worse...) for a couple of reasons: I attended the institution, so their performance academically and athletically reflect on me, whether that's fair or not, and my performance reflects on them as well; awareness and support is good for the school; it is fun.  I get something out of it, and when I give/spend money on their stuff, so does Clemson.  It also lets us talk about stuff other than work at work.

That relationship gets further away when you look at professional sports, because I didn't attend anything to do with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers; I was simply born near where they play.  A lot of people at work have brand loyalties to their cars like sports teams, and that's kind of fun, too, because cars are so oddly personal while the corporations themselves are still quite distant.  If you dislike a design decision with Ford or a racing team hire they make, it is not easy to voice that opinion to someone who cares.  So the give and take is a little further removed from university teams (which is one of the reasons I prefer college to professional, and why I think it's ok to use "we" in reference to college but less so for professional teams).

One brand loyalty that makes even less sense to me is the political party.  I understand why candidates and elected officials show loyalty: the parties give them money.  But why should I, as a voter, give money to a party rather than a candidate?  What about either the Republican or Democratic Party is constant enough to foster such a relationship?  Aside from getting their people in power, what vision do they serve?

I think they are obsolete, and the evidence to support this really started in 2004 when Howard Dean revolutionized the way that political candidates raised money.  Ron Paul and Barack Obama pursued that tack as well, and other movements, notably the Tea Party, has also shown that a group of people can focus their political interests without the structure of existing political parties.  There will be future ad hoc coalitions like the Tea Party, and I think they are a more appropriate representation of popular will than something entrenched, precisely because they are not entrenched.  If they lose the pulse of the interested participants, it fades away.  There is clearly a large minority (or possibly plurality) of disaffected voters for whom the mainline Republican and Democratic platform is not adequate.  Part of the problem is the arbitrary restriction of the growth of the size of the House of Representatives to an insufficient 435 members.  Making the seats more accessible (which was the Constitutional intent) would allow for those coalitions to be able to participate.

Even still, there are those people who will refuse to vote for another party because they are in the other party, much like people who refuse to buy Ford because Dale Earnhardt drove a Chevy, even when the candidate of the other party could (conceivably) represent his or her (let's be honest, probably his) values better.  Ever heard of a yellow dog Democrat?  Why should that concept even exist?

So stop.  Forget them.  Pick the guy you like best.  Start locally, because they aren't partisan.  Defy the arbitrary strictures of platforms.  Why are pro-labor, secularism and pro-abortion lumped together?  Why are free trade, conservative social values and strong defense?  Any of those could be separated from any other, but they are not because the political parties and their platforms require them to be, due to the binary nature of partisan politics.  That's silliness.

I need to go change into my orange shirt and make fun of a Tarheel.  It's a big game this Saturday.

I know I shouldn't use the R word

I was reading a couple of NY Times articles online recently (this and this) and, while the content was troubling, the fact that these are online added a new wrinkle to bring all kinds of other trouble: comments.  This could very easily be a self-defeating topic since this blog has a label "comment-whoring" since like all narcissists who write these things, comments are like money, crack and Reese's cups all rolled into one.  (I love Reese's cups, by the way.)

The comments in the two stories kind of remind me of the reaction to the Halftime in America ad, which I'm pretty sure you've seen already.  People saw what they wanted to see in it, regardless of response.  I know I myself am not above bias, so I do that too.  But, being an engineer, I also know that data is important.  I want to point you towards this link of of Confirmation Bias and Hostile Media Effect, both are cognitive biases that I think are relevant.  (There are probably more, but who are we kidding?  You're not clicking those links.)  For example, the Depression and Post WWII eras are cited by both Keynesians and anti-Keynesians as justification for their positions.  The same data yields wildly different conclusions.  How?  Those biases.

Another example: last week, the latest unemployment numbers came out, and they declined and currently sit at 8.3%.  To quote from Businessweek, "While the unemployment rate has declined 1.4 percentage points over the past 24 months... the population-to-employment ration hasn't budged, holding at 58.5%..."  Both supporters of the president and his opponents have cited the unemployment decline as a vindication, as an improvement of the statistics on the one hand on the one hand, and a demonstration of the ineffectiveness of his policies on the other. 

In each case, they both can't be true at the same time.  Yet, the folks who leave comments on those articles assert each position with such verve that the other side must be stupid or deceptive to disagree.  I'm not sure that deception is entirely out of the question in some cases, but really, a lot of this is driven by confirmation bias and seeking out data that supports your established position, rather than looking for real data.  Data is, after all, boring.

Sometimes, though, finding legitimate data is a challenge.  For example, who is a credible source on climate change?  (Honestly, I don't believe either side.  I don't think anybody understands the science to nearly the degree they say they do.)  Or, if you saw Meet the Press on Sunday, Mitch Daniels asserted that a lot of the stifled business climate is a result of excessive government regulation, to which Michael Bloomberg later agreed.  However, neither really said which regulations.  It's just a mantra that people say.  Then again, there are plenty of people think that the business climate is the way it is due to insufficient regulation.  They can't both be right at the same time.

Many comments in the first NY Times link talk about how the Constitution is both obsolete and hard to change and, just like Daniels, don't really talk about why.  There is also a sense that the stagnation caused by the Republicans as an opposition party is somehow contrary to the intent of the document is a rather sever misunderstanding of its purpose.  An active government was not considered a positive by the authors of the Constitution.  Additionally, it being hard to change is by design.  That is a problem, though, for people who think that government should be more active regardless of how they feel.  On the other hand, it is venerated as a sacred document by those who think it is from the hand of God, and any desecration is blasphemy.  They both can't be right at the same time.

I frequently call these discussions, especially on public pages like that as arguments between retards on the internet, so I don't know how seriously I should take them.  I feel bad about calling them retards, though, because it's not a nice word.  It carries a weight, though, that I think is hard to convey otherwise.  How can I imply that same weight without being offensive? 

Responsibility is hard

I'm pretty sure it's evident, but I live in South Carolina again now.  It's my second favorite state, but has the potential to pull into first because I wasn't born here so I'll never really be accepted as one of their own but hope to participate in their society, like Jame Goodall and the apes, but since I live with my wife here, the best times of my life are ahead of me with her here.  I also had two pretty good years at Clemson.

As a resident of the Palmetto State (which has a rather obsessive, borderline creepy relationship with its imagery [see below]), I get to vote in the primaries tomorrow.

As a former opinions editor, this makes me giddy.  It's like Christmas or St Patrick's Day that only comes around every four years.  Politics are the bread and butter of opinions editors, and most other people don't like discussing it, and when they do, they normally don't know what they're talking about.  So, soccer fans, I know how you feel.

 I went through the emotional gamut that I always go through during these primaries -- excitement about the strength of the field, and then eventual disappointment once we get to know them. That's the way that most things work, though; I got excited about watching the Orange Bowl, and well, that was kind of a disappointment, too.  Really, though, it's not as bad as it looks, because exaggeration gets attention.  "Worst. Episode. Ever."  It's funny because it's absurd.

My position, as described by the political compass, is economically right and a little libertarian.  (See below again.)  So, I'm trying to figure out where I fall.  Sounds kind of mopey, like every high school drama, "Where do I belong?"  But really, that's the fun.  That's what life is like.  It's choosing the new meal at the restaurant, seeing the new movie, and surprising your wife with something fun.  It's figuring it all out.  This time, figuring out for whom I want to vote is quite significant for the rest of the county.  It's fun, but it's also a little intimidating, because it feels important.

I have taken this responsibility seriously, pretty aggressively consumed the media about the candidates to make informed decisions and I hope that when it's your turn, you will too.  People say every election, "This is the most important election of our time."  It might be true every time, but if so, it's silly to say.  That's like saying, "This is the most important meal ever.  If I never eat again, I'll die.  So I must eat this Reuben sandwich."  I do love Reuben sandwiches, though.

Sins are bad, mmkay

One of the prongs of a recent political discussion has been clanging around in my head, and I have not been able to quite put it to rest.  It comes from the role of faith in politics and the perception that its presence leads to  oppression, if not specifically targeted at disadvantaged groups, then effectively so -- primarily women and homosexuals.  Since this discussion was concerning American politics, it was really in regards to Christianity.


It bugged me, because Christianity, if properly understood, has no room for that.  When it enters politics, though, that's a different story -- Theodosius's decision to establish Christianity in the 4th Century created a new privileged class within the Roman Empire and Europe hasn't been the same since and, unfortunately, frequently not for the better.  This gets to the issue of "religion" vs. "faith" and, while seemingly nuanced, is significant.


This is important to me because this image that became presented, one of an oppressive and restricting Christianity is not the same image that I have of it in my experience.  Christianity is primarily about love and forgiveness, because each of us has found love and forgiveness through Christ based on His mercy and nothing to do with our actions.  That mercy extends to anyone who seeks it -- regardless of color, gender, sexual preference, or behavioral history.  That is, it is entirely inclusive to anyone, so long as a relationship with Christ is pursued.  That's at the heart of John 3:16, the verse that nearly everyone has heard at least once. Additionally, when asked what the most important commandment is, Jesus answers with love God -- and the second, love your neighbors (Matthew 22:35-40).  


Christianity has no inherent political aims within its scripture, really highlighted by Matthew 22:21, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's."  We have applied a rather crude litmus test to our politics to require the appearance of Christian faith from our leaders whether they really believe it or not.  It is very important to note that there are a number of ways that belief manifests itself, we are all sinners and no one really knows another's heart, so it is difficult to say who falls in which category, but the more vocal certainly get tougher scrutiny.


Rick Perry is an example of such a candidate.  One of the issues that he put front and center in his ad entitled, "Strong" is one that really gives credence, unfortunately, to the position I am trying to argue against.  He opens with a volley against homosexuals, which is a controversial subject.  I think that Christians and homosexuals frequently get hung up on another way out of proportion to the need.  While there is ample scriptural evidence that points to homosexual behavior as being sinful, it's also important to note other common things that are sinful: divorce, gossip, not giving freely, greed, and putting God to the test.  There aren't really protests of objection against divorce courts, celebrity tabloids, politicians who claim to be faithful but are not with their money when their tax returns are released, television shows that have a character make a deal with God or threaten Him with unbelief unless some desired outcome is reached with nearly the enthusiasm that religious people go after homosexuals.


This sort of public reaction that we do see begs the question that some sins are worse than others.  That is a rather nuanced theological question, but ultimately, sin is failing to meet God's expectations, and failure is failure.  In order to reach fellowship with God, we need forgiveness from that failure, and Christ is the vehicle God provided to achieve that, out of God the Father's love for humanity.  (See Romans 6:23.)  Every sin is a source of separation from God -- a lack of Christlike perfection -- so we are all in this boat together.  The very powerful story of Jesus and the sinful woman in John 8:2-11 shows us that we are not able to judge and should not.  By judging, we are assuming for ourselves the role of God the Son, which is also sinful.

Now, this isn't to say that we shouldn't object to sinful behavior.  The charge for Christians to share our story (Matthew 28:16-20) is based on a sense that we have something valuable -- a relationship with Christ, a loving God -- that others might want.  It is a path to redemption, truth, and freedom.  Sinful behavior is an obstacle to achieving that relationship, and not loving people is unmistakably contrary to God's will.

That's an important o

I read an interesting article on the New York Times blog the other day.  It's a philosophy professor at Amherst, Louise Antony, trying to defend her point of view of moralistic atheism.  The basic premise is that she considers there to be a natural right and wrong in nature independent from God, whether He exists or not.  She breaks down two concepts of morality that she calls the Divine Command Theory (DCT) -- where things are good because God wills them -- or the Divine Independence Theory (DIT) -- where God wills only things that are good.

She talks about how the second is a more enlightened way to think because, well, it allows people not to need God and people like her to feel better about the fact that they are living in a similar fantasy that she thinks people like me do.  She has a long explanation about how different the two theories are, centering around the arbitrariness of DCT versus the steadiness of DIT.  If "goodness" were a natural property, like mass or electrical charge, then for us to make any use of it, there must be a way to measure (or at least detect) this property.  She posits that we can, and cites some examples involving home invasion, slavery and torture.  And I think we can all agree that those are in fact, wrong. However, they weren't always. 

Private property is a very old concept and violation of it has been considered socially unacceptable behavior outside of wartime in just about every culture as long as we have written things down.  Slavery was practiced by just about every major culture for a very long time, with most Western countries banning it in the 19th Century and some Middle-Eastern countries acting as late as the 1960s.  The Geneva Conventions were adopted in the 20th Century, not because we became enlightened and grew out of it like witchcraft, but because the practice was rampant and the countries that did not abandon a Judeo-Christian worldview wanted to stop it.

That's not to mention cultures like the Aztecs who practiced human sacrifice, Indians who had the institution of sati until the British outlawed it, the Arab concept of honor killings, and our very own policies of institutionalized racism that were finally taken off the books in the 1960s.  I think we can also agree that they are wrong as well.

So why didn't we know enough then that it was wrong?  The simplest answer is that there is no universal and innate natural "goodness" outside of an agreed upon standard.  The laundry list of sins that humankind is evidence that we need such a standard, and Western culture (and Middle-Eastern culture as well) has adopted the Abrahamic traditions as that standard.  Prof. Antony's concept, absent some sort of evidence that this idea of natural goodness can be identified is no different than pagan pan-theism -- there are petty gods in everything (or a single universal force permeating everything) providing its intrinsic value -- not unlike George Lucas's Jedi religion.

She also makes a point about how it is better to be good absent the threats of punishment or promise of reward.  Maybe.  But if there are no consequences to our behavior, why is it better?  We call electrical charge positive and negative, and I always preferred working with positive charges in class because it's easier to work with, and the word negative carries bad connotations.  Think of another example.  The NCAA has myriad arbitrary rules about what college students can or cannot do in order to play their sport.  Reggie Bush used his talent to provide a house for his family beyond their means.  However, that was against the rules.  Did he do anything wrong?  According the NCAA, yes.  Is that rule right or wrong?  Does it matter?

The largest point, though, is that her worldview requires faith.  Just like mine does.  And it is intellectually dishonest of her to argue that she is morally superior because she subscribes to DIT and thinks she can arrive at moral behavior without needing God because she's smart, without regard to the moral infrastructure that was built by a history of religious people.  The two concepts ultimately are different only in the academic sense that she presents, not in the real world in which we live, because the objectivity she claims cannot be divorced from the culture that surrounds us.

She also discusses interpersonal relationships, and says that by acquiring value through God you are essentially denying the human value of everyone else.  We kind of do that now, as well; society determines value by the law, and for a while in the United States, even, black people were worth less than white people, and we even defined the ratio.  Fetuses are worth very little in the eyes of the law.  That changes when society decides it would.  We, as enlightened smart people, changed our minds. 

Tribalism, where we prefer and value people who are like us or related to us more than others, kind of fits the mold as well.  Most of history was driven by this or the similar idea of nationalism.  In many places, history still is driven by them.  We look at the Janjaweed and know that they are doing wrong, but they see themselves as looking out for their own people, because they feel that their people are worth more.  The Japanese thought they were worth more than the Chinese in Nanking.  I could go on.

I suppose her counter-argument would be, "Those things were wrong even then, we just disobeyed them.  We were wrong, too."  Maybe, but how would we have known?  She cites Plato as positing this argument before the birth of Christ, so it's not like we haven't had the material to work this out until the 20th and 21st Centuries.

If there really is a natural goodness we can identify without God, humans suck at it.  Christians already knew that, though.  We need a standard.  Christians identify that as the unchanging Bible and the life of Christ. 

There are good arguments about the ability of atheists to be moral people.  However, this one, this particularly condescending one, is not it.  (That's why people don't like atheists: they tell you that you're wrong while claiming to be morally superior.  It's not a very becoming look.)  An example is quite simply to follow the Golden Rule -- but then again, that owes its origin to millenia of religious thinking.

Moves Like Dabo*

Did you know that there is a phrase in the college football consciousness "pull a Clemson"?  (Search for that, or typical Clemson, or something along those lines...)  Basically, it means that your goal is yours for the taking as long as you do what you're supposed to do and don't screw up -- but you do anyway.  For as long as I can remember, that's been emblematic of the Clemson football team, because I'm not old enough for the big days of the 80s when Clemson was busy being awesome on the gridiron.  This year, though, actually looks different.

It's a funny thing how that "always been there" kind of attitude affects you.  I cannot believe I am going to reference the Sing Off two posts in a row, but when Vocal Point, a talented group of Mormon boys, sang Ain't Too Proud to Beg on the show, I looked up from my smartphone where I was doing something completely unrelated and manly like reading about football and monster trucks and said, "This sounds really white."  (In the interest of full disclosure: I am allowed to say that, because I am really white.)  It made me appreciate the Rolling Stones in a way I never really had before, because they had always been the Rolling Stones -- this icon of music in a way that you just don't understand unless you know that they were one of the pioneers that broke barriers by making it ok to listen to music that black people made by trying to sound like them, like Elvis and other white blues musicians.  While that may sound vaguely racist, it was a revolution in all the positive ways that art is supposed to be revolutionary by sharing white and black experiences (which ultimately, are the same experiences, which wasn't really universally accepted in 1966, when the Temptations first recorded that song).

This lack of perspective is why people think that politics are the ugliest they've ever been right now or that Justin Bieber is the greatest musician in the history of musicians.  (Clearly Rick Astley is ahead of him.  [Interesting note: Rick Astley also covered Ain't Too Proud to Beg.])  It also leads to the strange acceptance of the status quo that Christians feel about their faith and what it really means.

Just like I've never known a world where Clemson didn't choke away ACC title opportunities or an undiscovered Rolling Stones, I've always been exposed to the Christian message that by faith and faith alone we are forgiven.  There's never been a discovery kind of moment like the first time you see HDTV or taste real vinegar barbecue sauce and think, "This changes everything." 

That's how Christianity is supposed to feel: revolutionary and liberating.  Christ's arrival changed the way that men and God could relate and broke down barriers that separated men from one another.  Those are no small things and because we've been steeped in the culture it's really easy to look at church and see something stodgy and establishment, like seeing Sir Michael Jagger and Keith Richards, cultural icons, rather than two kids from Kent trying to sound like Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley.  Most of us probably have never even heard a song by Muddy Waters or Bo Diddley.

Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley are key parts of the Rolling Stones' story, as 1981 and Frank Howard (and the football wilderness of the 1990s and 2000s, for that matter) are to the Clemson story.  The inaccessibility to God before Christ (and God's desire to bridge that gap as explained by the prophets) and the Greco-Roman concept of class are parts of the Christian story, too.  And it makes the whole thing look bigger.

*Title from this edsbs.com blogpost
**I just had to.  Here's the actual link.  It's not bad, really.

Blow it up

This blog cut its teeth on criticizing commercials, and quite frankly, I think I ought to get back to my roots. I don't watch as much tv now as I did in school, so it's going to be harder to actually manage. Now that football has started, and Dr. Sighted is inconsolable because UGa is behind by 2 TDs right now to Boise, we are seeing and will continue to be seeing more commercials. She did a better job during the first half of the Clemson game when we looked like injured garbage. Adjusting to marriage is hard.

Dick's (the sporting goods store) has a fun campaign where they have professional athletes giving instruction to people buying apparel and explaining why they need it and how it will make them perform better. A few memorable ones were Darelle Revis selling shoes or shorts or whatever and talking about going to his island -- Revis Island -- only to find out that his protege is named Gilligan. There is another one involving Ndomakong Suh (best name ever) hunting quarterbacks selling whatever Revis wasn't There is a good one now with Steven Jackson (not the basketball player) moving in slow motion. There is one, however, that goes over dumber than Kris Humphries answer inevitably will the first time Kim Kardashian asks, "Does this make my butt look big?"

Clay Matthews is the go to guy after the Packers won the Super Bowl, because he looks like a mutant Midwestern wrestler with hair like the cute blonde in your sophomore biology class. He is selling shorts or shoes or whatever in this commercial and it's just him running into stuff in the store. No clever comment from the store, they try to be funny with the family blocking him, except there's nothing going on that they are blocking. There's nothing to blow up! There should have been cowboys robbing a train or a caped man with a handlebar mustache kidnapping Song Girls (Clay went to USC, you see [the real one in LA, not the fake one in Columbia, SC] and the Song Girls are the best thing about the school) that he could blow up. Right now, it just feels like build up with now release. No snap, no crackle, no pop!

The wasted opportunity of the situation is what gets me most. Bad commercials are a dime a dozen -- just ask Taco Bell. But bad commercials with potential to be great? They are the ones that make us feel like we did when Utah State choked away the Auburn game today.