Careful What You Wish For

This recent piece from the Christian Science Monitor illustrates the pitfalls of requiring a photo ID to vote.

As Wisconsin implements its law, it is opening a window into why a photo ID can be so difficult for the elderly to obtain. But it is also highlighting what some activists are calling a "war against the Greatest Generation" as federal and state budget cuts fall disproportionately on the elderly. Whether it is the government shutdown making it harder to obtain veteran's benefits or cuts to food stamps or state welfare programs, many in the Greatest Generation feel that they are now being left in the cold. 

So, they might end up alienating their own base? Wow. That's rilly smart!  Well, folks like Genevieve Kujawski can rest assured that Democrats will protect their right to vote even if it is against them. 

A Very Overheated Religious War

The situation in the Central African Republic is simply terrible. Roving gangs of Christian extremists in the capital of Bangui have been targeting Muslim neighborhoods and wantonly killing people in the name of their God for retribution against Muslims gangs that have done the same. I'm not sure what God they worship but it certainly isn't the Christian one. Thou shall not kill, remember?

French troops are arriving in the coming days to hopefully keep the peace. They are also sending air support to hopefully quell any future uprisings. AP is reporting that the French are reluctantly going in which strikes me as complete bullshit as they are partly responsible for the situation on the ground. The CAR has never gotten over the Scramble for Africa. French meddling in the region created the power struggles that we see today. So, this is largely blowback from colonization over a century ago.

It's going to take a lot more than 1200 troops to stop what is now clearly genocide. The United Nations needs to have a robust and permanent presence there and the French need to invest far more resources (especially financial) than they are now. It's very quickly becoming too late and far too many people have died.

3.6 Percent

The United States Economy grew at the much faster pace of 3.6 percent in the third quarter than originally thought. Second quarter growth was also revised upward to 2.5 percent. The reasons for this growth include private inventory investment, personal consumption expenditures, exports, and state and local government spending.

Very welcome news indeed!

Discovery!

I have been searching for awhile now for a way to address the often prejudiced and sometimes racist attitudes towards the president without provoking the usual shrill and hysterical reaction from the Right. I have now found such a way.

First of all, was that really the cover of the National Review? Yes it was.  Talk about a dog whistle! Chait is dead on right with his analysis in this piece. Here are some my favorite bits...

It is bizarre to ascribe haughtiness and a lack of a capacity for embarrassment to a president whose most recent notable public appearance was a profusely and even flamboyantly contrite press conference spent repeatedly confessing to “fumbles” and “mistakes.” Why would Hillyer believe such a factually bizarre thing? One answer is that, by the evidence of this column, Hillyer believes all sorts of factually bizarre things. But most African-Americans, and many liberal whites, would read Hillyer’s rant as the cultural heir to Northup’s overseer: a southern white reactionary enraged that a calm, dignified, educated black man has failed to prostrate himself.

But are Hillyer and other conservatives really that bad?

Before plunging further into a poisonously defensive racial debate, I should note that I feel certain Hillyer opposes slavery and legal segregation, and highly confident he abhors racial discrimination, and believes in his heart full economic and social equality for African-Americans would be a blessing. (More than two decades ago, Hillyer worked against the candidacy of David Duke.) His feeling of offense at Obama’s putative haughtiness (“chin jutting out”) might be a long-ago-imbibed white southern upbringing bubbling to the surface, but more likely a flailing partisan rage that could just as easily have been directed at a white Democrat.

You can accept the most benign account of his thought process – and I do – while still being struck by the simple fact that Hillyer finds nothing uncomfortable at all about wrapping himself in a racist trope. He is either unaware of the freighted connotation of calling a black man uppity, or he doesn’t care. In the absence of a racial slur or an explicitly bigoted attack, no racial alarm bells sound in his brain.

So, they are just ignorant and don't want to reflect and change. Shocking...

Of course, this part of a larger problem.

The broad social structure of white supremacy is not a part of the working conservative definition of racism. Conservatives see racism as a series of discrete acts of overt oppression. After slavery had disappeared, but before legal segregation had, conservatives considered it preposterous to claim that blacks suffered any systematic disadvantage in American life. 

Hence the recent racism is over tweet.  They simply can't out of the black-white mindset. If racism isn't over, then the blacks and liberal whites must be continually crying wolf and trying to get free hand outs or something.

Pay close attention to how the president is criticized by the Right. The framework for the criticism is exactly how Chait describes it.

Oh, Are They?

Large Companies Prepared to Pay Price on Carbon

From the article...

The development is a striking departure from conservative orthodoxy and a reflection of growing divisions between the Republican Party and its business supporters. A new report by the environmental data company CDP has found that at least 29 companies, some with close ties to Republicans, including ExxonMobil, Walmart and American Electric Power, are incorporating a price on carbon into their long-term financial plans. Both supporters and opponents of action to fight global warming say the development is significant because businesses that chart a financial course to make money in a carbon-constrained future could be more inclined to support policies that address climate change. 

As I have stated previously, eventually the private firms of this nation will accept the facts. 

Completely Inconsolable

I've had some rather lengthy discussions with my conservative friends of late that have led me to the same conclusion as Jamelle Bouie: No matter the facts, the GOP is committed to the message that Obamacare has failed.

The Republican complaints of two months ago were purely opportunistic. For them, it just doesn’t matter if Healthcare.gov is working, since Obamacare is destined to fail, reality be damned! At most, the broken website was useful fodder for attacks on the administration. Now that it’s made progress, the GOP will revert to its usual declarations that the Affordable Care Act is a hopeless disaster. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Americans have gained access to health insurance thanks to the Medicaid expansion or the exchanges, and many more will join their ranks as the deadline for coverage approaches. 

They are completely inconsolable and it seems they want to stay that way. 

Where's Her Apology?

Martin Bashir has resigned from MSNBC after taking Sarah Palin to the mat over her ridiculously awful comparison our debt to slavery. Not only was she insensitive but she demonstrated (once again) that she is sorely lacking in an understanding of our debt. On his Nov. 15 broadcast, Bashir called Palin "a world class idiot" because she made a comparison to slavery while discussing U.S. debt to China. The host then read an excerpt from the diary of a former plantation manager who wrote of forcing one slave to "S-H-I-T" in another slave's mouth, and said "if anyone truly qualified for a dose of [such] discipline... then she would be the outstanding candidate." He has since apologized for the remarks and now tendered his resignation from the network.

What I'm wondering is where is Sarah Palin's apology? Does she get to play with different rules?

Yes. Yes, she does.

In fact, so do all conservatives. They get to act like jack wagons because...well...they are. And their base eats it all up. But liberals don't get to act that way because they are the adults in the political arena, hence Bashir's resignation. If the Fox News personalities were held to the same standard, there would be no one working at the network.

Honestly, it's pretty fucking unfair if you ask me. It's almost like we simply have accepted that it's OK for conservatives like Sarah Palin to say offensive things. They get a pass and liberals don't. 

Great Deal of Hope

I think I have overreacted a tad to the somewhat glacial pace of guns and mental health legislation. Take a look at this.

The simple fact there are many deep red states answering the president's call gives me a great deal of hope. States are doing their own thing and that's just fine with me. Considering the Gun Cult is also a big supporter of states' rights, it seems to me they can't do anything about it. That really gives me a great deal of hope:)

What if there is a way to fix all this stuff and not change the lives of the Gun Cult? I think it may already be happening and it's just a little under the radar.

The Idolatry of Money: Not Just Bad for the Soul

Pope Francis raised a lot of conservative hackles with his latest epistle, Evangelii Gaudium. He has been called a Marxist by the likes of Rush Limbaugh. Here's an excerpt:

No to the new idolatry of money

55. One cause of this situation is found in our relationship with money, since we calmly accept its dominion over ourselves and our societies. The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person! We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.

This relentless pursuit of profit isn't just bad for our souls, it's also bad for our social, economic and physical well-being.  And it could well mean the end of modern medicine (see below).

The crash of 2008 was due to the laser-like focus on profit and personal gain, without regard to the broader consequences for future profits and the stability of the world's financial system. But this disease goes far beyond the financial sector.

Self-Destructive Profit Seeking in the Energy Sector
The relentless pursuit of profit is especially prevalent in the energy sector. In the United States there has been a mad rush to exploit the technology of hydraulic fracturing, causing contamination of aquifers, proper disposal of fracking waste, and even a precipitous and unsustainable drop in the price of natural gas: In 2012 the CEO of Exxon, Rex Tillerson, said, "We are all losing our shirts today."

That mindset spills into other areas. Minnesota and Wisconsin have been hit by a mad rush for sand mining (sand is needed for the fracking process). Developers wanted to tear up small towns along the Mississippi River for the sand. There was a lot of resistance as residents of these towns feared for their health: breathing the fine dust from sand mines can cause serious diseases like silicosis.

Some people didn't wait and got in on the sand rush, when it was selling for $200 a ton. Now, however, the price has plummeted, and they're selling it as cow bedding at $3.25 a ton. And companies are still clamoring to dig up those towns for their sand.

Profit Over Health
Focusing on profit rather than the common good is bad for our health. The food industry uses chemistry to make their products as addictive as possible, cramming more and more irresistible burgers, fries, chips and soda down our throats, causing an epidemic of obesity and diabetes and heart disease.

The meat and poultry industry directly feeds their animals antibiotics because it increases weight gain, increasing profit. Bacteria develop resistance to these antibiotics because of this overuse, causing flesh-eating superbugs for which there is no treatment. The same thing happens when doctors prescribe antibiotics for acne, or sore throats caused by viruses, or when patients don't take the full course of an antibiotic treatment for strep (or, worse, tuberculosis).

Antibiotic resistance would seem to be a new target for drug company profits. Alas, companies aren't interested because they can't milk them forever: you take antibiotics for a couple of days and then you're cured.

Focus on Cash Cows
Pharmaceutical companies would rather sell drugs for chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension, which they can get a monopoly on for 20 years. They want to make drugs that cost their customers $10,000 or $20,000 a year for the rest of their lives (which most of us don't pay directly because of health insurance). All too often these new drugs aren't any better than the old drugs; they have a lot of new side effects that the drug companies just try to sweep under the rug.

And there's a lot of evidence that many of the drugs taken for chronic conditions are overused and provide only marginally better outcomes. Most patients would see more far more improvement by reducing stress, exercising, eating right and getting enough sleep. And they should just avoid foods that cause heartburn and allergic reactions instead of taking drugs for the symptoms.

But instead Big Pharma pushes for more blockbusters for chronic disease, and ignores mundane antibiotics to pursue the holy grail of profit. The problem is that when antibiotics become useless, medicine as we know it we know it will end, drastically reducing the need for all the drugs Big Pharma is cashing in on now.

Think about it: any kind of surgery requires antibiotics as a prophylactic measure. Even now the most common complication of surgery is infection. Without antibiotics any invasive medical procedure entails significant risk of death. Diabetics, heart attack victims and cancer patients will die from infections in huge numbers: they won't be taking those patented drugs for 20 years. Drug companies need antibiotics to maintain a large pool of customers for their other drugs.

The End of Modern Medicine?
Without antibiotics kidney, heart, liver and lung transplants are impossible. Many cancer treatments that suppress the immune system are impossible. Abdominal surgery is impossible. Dialysis is impossible because the port becomes infected. Artificial heart valve, knee and hip replacements become impossible. Cosmetic surgery would be insanely risky. Lasik and cataract surgery become far too dangerous, risking blindness and death from infection.

Most people would forgo any kind of  elective surgery. We would rather suffer from agonizing neuropathies, torn ACLs, cataracts, retinal detachments (causing blindness) and crippling orthopedic problems for the rest of our lives than risk death from infection. Amputations for what are now minor infections would be commonplace. Battlefield wounds, which have become amazingly survivable with the advent of antibiotics, would once again be frequently fatal.

Death rates from car accidents, falls, food poisoning, child birth, caesarean sections, skin infections, pneumonia, etc., would skyrocket, killing from 1% to 9% to as many as 30% of patients.

It takes years to develop new antibiotics, and because of the way we do things, bacteria quickly develop resistance to new ones much faster than they used to. We need stop putting antibiotics in animal feed, and stop prescribing them for every whining brat and pimple-faced teenager who visits the doctor's office. And someone's got to step up and start developing new antibiotics now, because it takes years. If it ain't the drug companies, it's going to have to be universities and non-profit institutions funded by the government. That means we've got to stop whining about how high taxes are.

The total focus on profit without regard for the common good has to end. It's bad for our souls, it's bad for our environment, it's bad for our health and it's bad for our future.

Back To The Drawing Board

Midwest and national manufacturing grew in November, reports say.

From the article...

Factories making machinery, metal parts, furniture and other long-lasting goods saw product orders jump in November, which helped boost hiring across the manufacturing sector, according to two closely watched reports released Monday.

So, when people buy more things, the companies that make those things hire more people. Huh. I thought companies hired more people when they got tax cuts and demand had nothing to do with it. Apparently, I have been misinformed.

And growth is widespread?

For the nation, the Institute for Supply Management reported growth across several industries, including plastics, rubber, textiles, furniture, paper, metals, transportation equipment, computers and printing. In addition, U.S. manufacturing jobs grew, creating “the highest reading since April 2012,” said Bradley Holcomb, chairman of the Institute’s Manufacturing Business Survey Committee. Fifteen out of 18 manufacturing sectors grew, giving hope that the worst of the lackluster recovery is behind the nation.

And the cost of health care is seen as decreasing?

Over the next few years, the government is expected to spend billions of dollars less than originally projected on the law, analysts said, with both the Medicaid expansion and the subsidies for private insurance plans ending up less expensive than anticipated.

And now even the web site is working better? Sheesh!

Ah well, I guess it's back to the drawing board (and deep into the bubble) for the apocalypcists!

Good Words

"The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking" (Albert Einstein)

Black Friday Meltdown

Here's a great example of a gripe that liberals have that I just don't get.



This is evidence of the "End Times?" Like my colleagues on the right, emotions are causing memory loss. I can think of...oh, I don't know...EIGHT ZILLION examples in history where we have been much worse off than today. The Civil War comes to mind as does the Spanish flu epidemic. Compare the deaths of hundreds of thousands to some excited shoppers. And you really think this show our country is on the downswing? If anything, it shows that free markets really do work!

Sadly, it shows that the far left and the far right have so much in common that they start to sound like each other after awhile. Their irrational fear, anger and hate has to be validated and this line of thought always ends with THE APOCALYPSE.

Look out!

Good Words

"There is a natural human tendency to believe that any major development, no matter how long before an election, will be the last important influence on said election. This theory is fine in the last days before an election, but with almost a year to go, it is pretty unlikely that the national political situation will suddenly become static for well over 300 days." (Charlie Cook)

Anyone that tells you they know for certain what the outcome of the 2014 election is going to be is simply engaging in wishful thinking...

The Hunger Games Effect

Gun advocates often talk about the positive effects of instructing kids in the use of firearms. It provides many teachable moments, including close attention to safety, dedication to discipline, self-control and self-reliance. Hunting with rifles gives you a chance to get outdoors in the fresh air, bond with family and friends, maintain a connection to traditions from the past, and so on.

But all of that is doubly true for archery.

I got to thinking about this after seeing a story at Minnesota Public Radio about the huge boom in archery among girls since the Hunger Games books and movies have become so popular. The heroine of the Hunger Games is Katniss Everdeen, famous for using a bow. Bows (albeit crossbows) have also been appearing in recent TV shows, including Revolution and The Walking Dead.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife is also taking advantage of the opening of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire:

To further promote participation in archery, Colorado Parks and Wildlife is advertising its archery programs during the movie’s premier. The static, 15-second advertisement depicts a female archer along with the slogan: "Get in the game – explore your passion for archery."

Appearing in select Colorado theaters Nov. 15-28, the ad also includes a QR code and link, which sends movie audiences to a resource webpage. The webpage features CPW's archery programs, an interactive map of shooting ranges, videos and a summary of partnering organizations that offer archery or bowhunting programs in Colorado.

When I was a kid my dad sometimes hunted deer during the bow season. In some states the bow season is a lot longer, so bow hunters get more opportunities. A bow always seemed more sporting than a rifle to me; a rifle hunter is more of a sniper than a sportsman. A bowman also has to be pretty damn good: if your first shot misses, you're not likely to get a second one. And because arrows aren't as cheap as bullets, bow hunters are less likely to shoot at any random motion in the woods.

In many ways bow hunting is safer than rifle hunting. Since the inherent range of a bow is much shorter than a rifle, and wind and foliage affect the flight of arrow more than a bullet, you have to be a lot closer to your target. That means you're more likely to be able to clearly see your target and less likely to shoot something other than a deer. The maximum range of an arrow is much shorter than a bullet, so your misses are also much less likely to hit innocent bystanders. It's nearly impossible to accidentally shoot yourself or a friend because you aren't tramping through the woods with a loaded weapon: you only nock the arrow when your target is in sight. Rifle hunting accidents are tragically common [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. The most likely injury bow hunters suffer is probably falling from a tree stand.

A bow doesn't destroy your hearing either.

A lot of hunters use both bows and rifles. Some people ask which is better. Rifle hunting is easier and faster. But the main difference is the relationship between the hunter and nature: bow hunting is more like fishing. It's quiet, placid, idyllic, contemplative: the forest is filled with natural sounds; bow hunters strike in silence.

Rifles are intrusive and loud. When my wife owned a horse she hated riding during rifle season because of the constant barrage of rifle fire. The noise unnerved her mount, making him skittish. And she was always afraid of some nitwit mistaking her gray gelding for a deer (which happens distressingly frequently), or getting hit by stray shot from half a mile away (which also happens: 1, 2).

Sure, rifle hunting requires skill, and I don't think it's wrong: we've killed so many wolves that a hunting season is necessary to keep the deer population in check. The other men in my family do it all the time. But bow hunting seems like another magnitude of difficulty greater, a much better test of your skills than pointing and pulling a trigger at a range of two or three hundred yards. I can see the attraction of bow hunting: killing the animal isn't the real goal, the act of the hunt is what matters.

It makes me wonder how much of the rugged woodsman talk that some gun advocates spout is bluster to cover the fact that they just like things that go boom.

The Entertainer Makes No Sense

It's been awhile since we heard from entertainer Rush Limbaugh. Yeah, I know there is still a group of frightened old men that listen to him every day but what I'm talking about is Rush saying something profoundly moronic with the purpose of getting noticed outside of the bubble. The media then proceeds to act "outraged" at what he said in order to bring in some viewers from inside the bubble. It's a win for him and a win for the "liberal" media.

His latest remark (The Pope is a Marxist) makes no sense to me, though. The Catholic Church can do whatever it wants with its money and mission. If they want to help feed the poor and heal the sick through the redistribution of their wealth, shouldn't they be left alone to do so? If the worry is that the Pope will somehow convince the leaders of the world to adopt Marxism as their government framework, that's just plain silly given how globalization is already out of the bag. There are free markets everywhere and prosperity is rising all over the world so, in some ways, the Pope is just wrong.

Perhaps Rush simply doesn't understand what Marxism is or, more likely, has no clue whatsoever that Jesus Christ espoused in the Bible. Material wealth mattered not to Christ and he encouraged people to help those less fortunate through the church. Being strong in spirit and believing in God where far more important to Jesus. That was the whole part about not being able to worship God and money at the same time. In fact, the Bible vilifies the wealthy and insists that the true path to God lies in serving the poor and healing the sick.

So what the fuck is Rush talking about?

Another Member of the 1% As Mythbuster

Henry Blodget is co-founder, CEO and Editor-In Chief of Business Insider, one of the fastest-growing business and tech news sites in the world. Business Insider's investors include Institutional Venture Partners, RRE Ventures, and Bezos Expeditions. The site has 25+ million visitors a month. A former top-ranked Wall Street analyst, Henry is also the host of Yahoo Daily Ticker, a digital video show viewed by several million people a month.

His recent piece on his site explains exactly why rich people don't create jobs, echoing Nick Hanauer who is mentioned in the article. Healthy economic systems nurture job growth. This photo shows just how unhealthy our economy is right now.

The bottom 90 percent (the blue color in the graph) are customers and if their wealth is stagnate, our economy doesn't work the way it should.

The company's customers buy the company's products. This, in turn, channels money to the company and allows the the company to hire employees to produce, sell, and service those products. If the company's customers and potential customers go broke, the demand for the company's products will collapse. And the company's jobs will disappear, regardless of what the entrepreneurs or investors do.

Now, again, entrepreneurs are an important part of the company-creation process. And so are investors, who risk capital in the hope of earning returns. But, ultimately, whether a new company continues growing and creates self-sustaining jobs is a function of the company's customers' ability and willingness to pay for the company's products, not the entrepreneur or the investor capital. Suggesting that "rich entrepreneurs and investors" create the jobs, therefore, Hanauer observes, is like suggesting that squirrels create evolution.

Wealthy people like Mr. Blodget are realizing that they need to actively support change otherwise there won't an economy in which they can enjoy their riches.

Calling Iran's Bluff on Nuclear Power

A lot of pundits have been trumpeting nuclear power as the solution to our climate change woes, despite the ongoing nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima. Politico has an article that explains the reason why it's hard: nuclear waste.

The United States has no long-term nuclear waste storage facility. There was supposed to be one at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but that has been torpedoed by locals who don't want the nation's nuclear waste in their backyard. Who can blame them? No one else is stepping up, including states like Georgia, where the first two new nuclear power plants in over 30 years are under construction.

Nuclear plants have been storing the waste in pools in their reactors or in "dry casks" on-site, risking a Fukushima-type disaster in hundreds of locations across the United States. However, they're still paying a fee on nuclear power that was supposed to finance the storage facility, which was supposed to have opened 15 years ago. It didn't, and probably never will, so the utilities are suing the DOE.

The cost of having no storage facility is listed variously at $38 billion, $50 billion or $65 billion, depending on who you listen to and when you're talking about. The federal government has been spending a couple of billion dollars a year to settle claims with utilities.

The problem is that we will never have one single safe place to store nuclear waste. No state will ever allow it. Some geniuses have tried to create "temporary" radioactive waste storage sites on poverty-stricken Indian reservations to get around Congress and state legislatures, taking advantage of tribal sovereignty. But this failed when the Department of the Interior denied the company, Private Fuel Storage, a right of way to transport radioactive waste.

Talk of more American nukes is going on at the same time that conservatives in the United States and the prime minister of Israel are actively calling for military action against Iran to kill its nuclear program. Those same people are blasting the Obama administration's attempts to negotiate a peaceful resolution.

Iran claims it has no intention of developing nuclear weapons; they say they simply need nuclear power to generate electricity. They currently use a lot of oil for power generation, but that really hurts their trade balance because they can't sell the oil they burn to produce electricity. But when Iran finally gets their nuclear power plants up and running, who's going to take the radioactive waste they produce? We certainly can't let Iran keep it. And we don't want it either. Where's it gonna go?

Iran is a sunny and mountainous country. That means it's a prime candidate for solar and wind power. Some countries want to encourage this: the EU doesn't impose sanctions on renewable energy equipment destined for Iran, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. Iran also has good potential for geothermal power generation.

Conservatives in the United States have been actively sabotaging development of solar and wind power in the US, while touting the benefits of nuclear power. These same conservatives are ready to go to war with Iran to stop them from opening nuclear reactors like the ones we're building in Georgia. Because they know Iran's real intent is to build a nuclear bomb -- which I admit may be true.

So we should call Iran's nuclear bluff: let's start a Manhattan Project for renewable energy to help countries like Iran develop their solar, wind and geothermal potential, as well as storage systems for the power generated by intermittent renewable sources. Then they'll have no legitimate reason to refine uranium for nuclear power plants, which could also be used in nuclear weapons.

Coincidentally, we can use those same renewable energy systems in the United States, where sun and wind are plentiful in many parts of the country. If we lead by example we'll also have a much better chance of convincing Iran of our noble intentions.

As the developing world slowly rises out of poverty they're going to need electricity. Countries like China and India are already killing their own citizens with noxious clouds of smoke from coal-fired power plants (it's gotten so bad they're even banning barbecue grills). In the near future, more developing nations are going to start competing with us for oil and natural gas. If we set the nuclear precedent with Iran, they'll also want uranium, with all the attendant doom that engenders.

No matter how much we frack, there simply isn't enough oil and gas in the ground to satisfy the demand as the most populous countries in the world come to expect the energy-dense standard of living we enjoy in the United States.

Renewable energy isn't just good for our environment: it could ratchet down international tension and reduce the chance of war. Most third-world countries have abundant local renewable energy resources, including geothermal, OTEC, solar and wind power, and maybe even hydrogen production. By developing these energy sources, we will reduce global demand for oil and gas, reducing the possibility of war (and incidentally leaving us with more oil and gas).

The war in Iraq cost us a trillion dollars, and will continue to cost us billions in the future as we deal with the medical and psychological wounds inflicted on veterans. Invading Iran would cost just as much, if not more since it has twice the population of Iraq. Even if we delude ourselves into limiting the attack to an American-backed Israeli "tactical" strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, it's hard to believe Iran's surrogates would not initiate a campaign of terrorist attacks against Western targets across the world. Which we would eventually have to respond to with force on the level of Afghanistan or Iraq.

We should be working to give Iran what it needs, not what it wants. They need renewable energy, not nuclear power. We should be spending a few hundred billion dollars over the next few years on renewable energy research, which we could then sell to Iran and other third-world countries, ultimately recouping our investment.

Most wars are over resources -- land, minerals, water and energy. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor because the United States had embargoed Japan's oil supply, and they wanted to capture oil resources in the Dutch East Indies.

Investing in renewable energy sources and intermittent energy storage will save us trillions of dollars in military expenditures over the long haul. And that's not even considering the savings from preventing the inevitable wars that will result from widespread starvation, drought and flooding brought on by climate change. Which will be a whole lot less likely if start developing renewable energy resources before the oil runs out.

Anti Woman Myths

Here's a very well researched piece on how many anti-woman myths are still around today. A great example...

During the Dark Ages, and ever since then, women were considered property: They were defined by their relationships to men (flipping the ancient matrilineal code on its head). Their father, husband or even brother could make demands of her and she was bound to obey. Most marriages were arranged, even in the lower classes. A wife had no separate legal status apart from her being married to her husband. Women, with few exceptions, could not participate in public life, politics or the justice system (unless she was the accused). A woman was pretty much expected to stay at home, keep house and have kids. Especially the latter, as the interpretation of Genesis 3:16 (and other parts of that book) was that women were compelled to have as many children as they could, even at the cost of her or the children’s welfare. This is still the way some men feel.

Any time I hear dire predictions about 2014, I usually refer people to stuff like this. It's very hard for the nutballs to hide on women's issues.

Greek V Hebrew

I'm not sure how this article ended up in my "To Post" file but it is an interesting exposition on the Greek versus the Hebrew view of man rooted in justification by faith alone. I don't agree with everything contained in the piece but it's a worth a full and studied read as he offers excellent historical and spiritual insight to the classical world collision with the dawn of Christianity. The conclusion?

The Greek view is that "God" can be known only by the flight of the soul from the world and history; the Hebrew view is that God can be known because he invades history to meet men in historical experience.

Very interesting.

My favorite line is this...

The unifying element in New Testament theology is the fact of the divine visitation of men in the person and mission of Jesus Christ; diversity exists in the progressive unfolding of the meaning of this divine visitation and in the various ways the one revelatory, redeeming event is capable of being interpreted.

Various ways indeed:)