Simple Math

Check out this piece on how Utah is set to end homelessness. The answer?

Government spending.

Utah has reduced its rate of chronic homelessness by 78 percent over the past eight years, moving 2000 people off the street and putting the state on track to eradicate homelessness altogether by 2015. How’d they do it? The state is giving away apartments, no strings attached. In 2005, Utah calculated the annual cost of E.R. visits and jail stays for an average homeless person was $16,670, while the cost of providing an apartment and social worker would be $11,000. Each participant works with a caseworker to become self-sufficient, but if they fail, they still get to keep their apartment.

Huh. Whouda thunk it? Simple math...

Uh Oh

Tom Steyer may be liberals' answer to the Koch brothers

For years, liberals have fretted about the power of ultrawealthy people determined to use their billions to advance their political views. Charles and David Koch, in particular, have ranked high in the demonology of the American left. But in Steyer, liberals have a billionaire on their side. Like the Kochs, he is building a vast political network and seizing opportunities provided by loose campaign finance rules to insert himself into elections nationwide. In direct contrast to them, he has made opposition to fossil fuels and the campaign against global warming the center of his activism.

And he's much younger than the Kochs, now in their 80s.

Can't Private Industry Get Anything Right?

A couple of weeks ago Target's point of sale terminals were attacked by hackers, who stole the credit card and PIN numbers of as many as 40 million customers. Target isn't the only company to have this problem; earlier this month JPMorgan Chase admitted half a million card users' data were stolen. That was more than two months after they found out, and that was two months after it happened. The same thing happened to Sony in 2011.

People who ordered gifts weeks before Christmas were disappointed when both UPS and FedEx failed to deliver on the promised dates:

Mr. Yslas said that he ordered the gift from Chef Uniforms early in the month, and that it was shipped on Dec. 14, with an estimated delivery of Dec. 19. But on Dec. 19, U.P.S. changed the estimated delivery date to Dec. 23. The package arrived in Fort Worth on Dec. 22, and U.P.S. changed the estimated arrival to Dec. 24. On Dec. 23, U.P.S. pushed that to Dec. 26. Mr. Yslas said he had complained to U.P.S.

(Meanwhile, the US Post Office began making Sunday deliveries for Amazon.com.)

Yesterday Delta Airlines' website was so screwed up that thousands of people were getting round-trip tickets to Hawaii for eighty-six bucks.

Curiously, the folks who have been complaining about how the healthcare.gov website problems prove that government can't get anything right are silent about these private industry screwups.

They also forget that a private company, CGI group of Montreal, is behind the healthcare.gov website. The company's mistakes have not been limited to the federal website; they also did the work on the Massachusetts and Vermont health care websites. Those states are withholding payment from CGI Group because of numerous problems.

There's nothing intrinsically different between government and corporate bureaucracies. They're all run by human beings who make the same kinds of mistakes for the same reasons. The main difference is that we control government through the power of the ballot, while private industry can keep their dirty little secrets behind closed doors as long as they can buy off or threaten people into silence with lawsuits. So while it may seem government is less competent than private industry, the fact is that private industry is simply better at keeping secrets: just ask the NSA.

Some people seem to think that the healthcare foul-up is due to rank government incompetence, while data breaches are concentrated attacks committed by brilliant hackers. Target isn't saying how that credit card data was stolen, but most data breaches are due to rank incompetence: someone puts an unencrypted file on a web server and forgets it there, or loses a laptop with thousands of medical records, or doesn't upgrade to the latest version of the operating system, or visits a porn site and gets infected with malware that steals their password, and so on.

Ultimately, the health care website is just a front-end that allows consumers to make apples-to-apples comparisons between equivalent health insurance plans offered by private industry. That's all it is.

To sell it the president just needs to (using a word that's so popular with Republicans these days) "rebrand" it with buzzwords conservatives like: the new health care system is a public-private partnership that sets up a marketplace where standards-based insurance plans engage in healthy competition, allowing consumer choice. As with charter schools, some consumers get vouchers to help pay for private industry health plans. The system encourages personal responsibility and prevents freeloaders and takers from dragging the whole system down.

Oh, and if he cussed out some teachers, called a few women sluts, slammed the work ethic of blacks, and insulted the intelligence of Latinos that would seal the deal.

The Good Guy With A Gun Lie

Great piece in last Sunday's Times on mental health and guns. It sadly shows how the system we currently have is failing.

The police seized the firearms, as well as seven high-capacity magazines, but Mr. Russo, 55, was eventually allowed to return to the trailer in Middletown where he lives alone. In an interview there recently, he denied that he had schizophrenia but said he was taking his medication now — though only “the smallest dose,” because he is forced to. His hospitalization, he explained, stemmed from a misunderstanding: Seeking a message from God on whether to dissociate himself from his family, he had stabbed a basketball and waited for it to reinflate itself. When it did, he told relatives they would not be seeing him again, prompting them to call the police. 

As for his guns, Mr. Russo is scheduled to get them back in the spring, as mandated by Connecticut law.

If our current laws worked, Mr. Russo should never be allowed to possess a gun again.

The other takeaway from this piece is this...

It was the shock of a potentially avoidable tragedy that pushed Indiana lawmakers to act. Reports of gunfire brought Officer Timothy Laird to Indianapolis’s south side one night in August 2004. Kenneth C. Anderson, a schizophrenic man who the police later learned had just killed his mother in her home, was stalking the block with an SKS assault rifle and two handguns. As Officer Laird stepped from his patrol car, he was fatally shot. Four other officers were wounded before one of them shot and killed Mr. Anderson.

Good guys with guns get shot ever year. Criminals are not deterred by them. Here are the latest statistics. That's 31 deaths last year. Recall these gun myths as well which include the statistics like this one.

Chances that a shooting at an ER involves guns taken from guards: 1 in 5. 

So, the notion that there are Jack Bauers and John McLanes in waiting out there to save the day is the product of the Gun Cult's hubris filled video game like fantasy. We don't need bloviating assholes in our schools with firearms. Considering they are belligerent adolescents who likely spend too much time playing their X Boxes and Play Stations, it makes perfect sense that they think we live in a fictional reality.

As Adam Lanza showed us, that's a pretty dangerous thing to believe.

Huh?

Sarah Palin: I didn’t read ‘Duck Dynasty’ interview

So, all the bitching and she didn't even read it? Still the ignorant and belligerent adolescent, I guess. Here is the full interview with Phil Robertson from GQ for those of you who read.

I'm still wondering how "immunity from dumb ass shit I say filled with hate, anger and bigotry" got translated into a first amendment issue. I'm also wondering why the outrage at outrage doesn't work both ways. Where's the outrage about the fictional War on Christmas?

Hitting Close To Home

I found this review of Chris Faraone’s latest book, I Killed Breitbart, to really hit home on the familiarity level. Internet comments sections are certainly full of "weirdos, hucksters, and rubes who comprise some of the loudest corners of our national conversation." The "barbaric buffoonery of online discourse" does indeed color far too many comments sections filled with people who think they are actually making a difference. Ah well...

No Need To Confess

Paul Ellis has a great essay on why there is no need to confess your sins in order to be saved. He lists 12 main reasons and each one is well sourced with Biblical verse. Make sure you read the sub links to each one as well.

Nikto had a comment recently that I wanted to bring out front in its entirety as it relates to this post. He was replying to a comment that Not My Name made regarding a verse from the Bible.

Your description of that passage is exactly why it makes little sense to dwell on every little nuance in the bible. It doesn't appear to have been written down until centuries after the events occurred. There were numerous copies that disagree with each other. Councils like that in Nicaea picked and chose which books to include in or exclude from the bible, which passages in those books to include or exclude. They made those decisions for political and social reasons as much as theological ones. 

In this day and age most every passage is interpreted differently by one Christian sect or the other, again to suit their particular political or social agenda. The end result is that there is no way for any human alive today to claim to have any knowledge whatsoever what the true word of the lord can possibly be. 

That means that the hundreds of Christian sects claiming to be the sole purveyors of the word of god are misled at best or lying at worst. All of them are guilty of the greatest hubris, thinking that they alone can possibly speak for god. If one sect happens to get everything right, how can we meager humans possibly decide which one that is? 

If it's impossible for us to pick the one true sect of Christianity, what does that say about a god who condemns us to eternal damnation for failing to adhere to a set of rules that he has completely failed to lay out clearly and concisely? The federal government manages to publish a new set of tax forms every year; why can't the creator of the universe be bothered to send down a new set of stone tablets every century or so? 

Any rational person must therefore come to one of two conclusions: either all religion is hogwash, or the exact details and rules are irrelevant. In either case, the only thing we can do is make a good-faith effort to be moral and ethical, and exercise humility. 

Condemning others for failing to abide by your particular set of religious dictates is the height of arrogance. You can pick the bible apart all you want to justify your dogmas, but you have no authority to impose your beliefs on others. If someone tries to do that -- be they Osama bin Laden, Ayatollah Khamenei, Patriarch Kirill 1, David Koresh, Joe Smith, Pat Robertson, or Charles Taze Russell -- you know they're either trying to steal your money or gain political power. 

Interestingly, Pope Francis has in recent days spoken with much less hubris than previous popes. Whether that will result in major changes in the Catholic Church remains to be seen, but it is a hopeful sign.

Yep.

Companies that Don't Clean Up After Themselves

Remember the market, that perfectly efficient generator of wealth and goodness that can do no wrong? Well, it ain't working very well for natural gas. So many goombahs have jumped into the fracking boom that the price of gas has collapsed. Many drillers have gone bust, leaving private property owners, states and the Bureau of Land Management to clean up their messes.

Case in point: Wyoming. According to a story in The New York Times:

Hundreds of abandoned drilling wells dot eastern Wyoming like sagebrush, vestiges of a natural gas boom that has been drying up in recent years as prices have plummeted.

The companies that once operated the wells have all but vanished into the prairie, many seeking bankruptcy protection and unable to pay the cost of reclaiming the land they leased. Recent estimates have put the number of abandoned drilling operations in Wyoming at more than 1,200, and state officials said several thousand more might soon be orphaned by their operators [2,300 are idle but have not been abandoned].

Wyoming officials are now trying to address the problem amid concerns from landowners that the wells could contaminate groundwater and are a blight on the land.

When these companies declare bankruptcy the weasels who promised to clean up after themselves disappear into the wind, leaving the local people to live with toxic waste and water that burns when it comes out of their wells. In Wyoming drillers pay a paltry fixed amount to cover cleanup costs, regardless of how many wells they drill: it's nowhere near the amount needed to pay for all the wells the drillers have abandoned.

Wyoming is now on the hook for tens of millions of dollars in cleanup costs. In a few years states like North Dakota that are raking in cash now will be digging themselves out of another toxic mess. But there's another similar threat appearing in Minnesota, one that should be nipped in the bud before it festers.

PolyMet Mining is a newly formed Swiss-backed Canadian company set up to exploit copper and nickel deposits in northern Minnesota, near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA). The metals are bound into sulfide rocks in very low concentrations: less than half a percent. The metals are mined by grinding up the rock in huge open pits and processing it to extract the metals, freeing sulfides in the process. Each ton of rock will produce only a few pounds of copper or nickel.

PolyMet is promising that they'll provide a couple of hundred local jobs for 20 years. However, the tailings from these mines will leach toxins like sulfuric acid and arsenic for the next 500 years. If these wastes run off into the lakes, streams and rivers in the area, it would decimate wildlife in the area, making the BWCA unusable. If the runoff reaches Lake Superior, it will kill fish and wildlife there as well.

PolyMet has promised to provide ongoing mitigation for the next five centuries. But as we've seen, companies simply cannot be trusted to make those kinds of promises, for even five, 10 or 20 years. Anyone promising to clean up the site for 500 years is simply lying. The foreign owners of the company don't give a damn about what happens to the land or the people after they've extracted the precious metals; the subsidiary of the international monolith that owns PolyMet will simply declare bankruptcy when the metals are all gone and walk away leaving a horrible, expensive mess.

Northern Minnesota already has already gone through this before: in 1960s and '70s Reserve Mining Company dumped tons of taconite tailings from their iron mining operations into Lake Superior every minute, polluting the lake with carcinogenic asbestos fibers. Lake Superior provides drinking water for cities on the lake. Miners also got mesothelioma from the asbestos. Reserve Mining was sued multiple times and declared bankruptcy in 1986.

The underlying problem with resources like natural gas, crude oil, iron, copper and nickel is that the price doesn't depend on how much it costs to clean up the mess that extracting them produces: it depends on much customers are willing to pay. The cost of extraction, cleanup and pollution mitigation varies wildly depending on the local geology and climate. A copper mine in a Utah desert isn't going to have the same pollution mitigation costs as a copper mine in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. But now that is that we've exhausted all the deposits where mining and mitigation are cheap we're looking to places where it's more expensive and more dangerous.

Just as not every high-school football player can expect to play in the NFL, not every copper and nickel deposit can be mined at an acceptable economical and ecological cost. Reflexively "Saying "Not in My Backyard" is just as bad as plunging ahead with every hare-brained scheme a foreign bamboozler comes up with.

Northern Minnesota is just too wet to safely exploit low-concentration metal deposits with current technology. The BWCA provides thousands of permanent jobs in tourism and recreation: it makes no sense to risk the loss of those jobs when -- not if -- PolyMet fails to live up to its word to keep the lakes and steams clean.

Anyway, why do we need so much copper and nickel in the first place? Electronics: everyone is buying a new smartphone and a new tablet every year. This suggests a more reasonable alternative: instead of trashing pristine places like the BWCA, why aren't we building these devices so that their component metals can be efficiently recycled, rather than just dumped in landfills?

That would make the phones cost more. But shouldn't the gluttonous people who cause a problem pay for its solution, rather than dumping all the environmental cleanup costs on the people who happen to live near the mines?

Merry Christmas!

The Meaning of the Bible

A reader sent me this link to use as "ammunition" against my regular commenters. I also found this page within the site that illustrates many of the contradictions, by category, contained in the Bible.  My own research has already led me to address many of these concerns for my own journey of faith so there isn't much new here but I wanted to have a thread up on the importance of looking at everything written in the Bible and not just one or two passages.

I'm sure I'll disappoint the reader who sent me this link because I think he was under the impression that I would reject the Bible as a result of all these contradictions. Not gonna happen. But what this site does show is that it's impossible to believe and live by every single word in the Bible without being in dichotomy. It was written by men who were not as advanced as we are on a number of different cultural levels.

So, a thinking person has to recognize what was right for their times and what is right for today...what has been lost in translation from Aramaic to Greek to English and what has not...what was metaphor and hyperbole what is fundamental and basic. Coming to grips with these contradictions is very hard for some Christians. In the final analysis, though, it doesn't matter if you accept Jesus as your savior and do your best to live by His teachings. That's how I can cast many of these contradictions aside. Once you figure out what is backwards thinking and what is forward thinking, it's quite easy to accomplish.

Celebrating his birth tomorrow means being filled with the light of love, peace, and hope and rejecting anger, hate, fear, and guilt.

Rewriting the Bible

Christmas always brings out the worst in conservatives and this story really drives that home (as well as explaining recent religious discussions in comments).

Don’t know Aramaic, Hebrew or ancient Greek? Not a problem. What they are looking for is not exactly egghead scholarship, but a knack for using words they've read in the Wall Street Journal. They have a list of promising candidates on their website— words like capitalism, work ethic, death penalty, anticompetitive, elitism, productivity, privatize, pro-life—all of which are conspicuously missing from those socialist-inspired Bibles we’ve been reading lately. 

In the several years since their translation project was inaugurated, all of the New Testament and several books of the Old have been thoroughly revised. But lots still remains to be done. If you've got a soft spot for Leviticus, the Book of Amos, Lamentations or Numbers, they are all still available for rewrite, so get cracking!

I wonder if our resident biblical scholar is helping them out. Sounds like this is right up his ally.

Take that story where the mob surrounds a woman accused of adultery and gets ready to stone her, but Jesus intervenes and says, “He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone" (John 7:53-8:11). It might have been a later addition that wasn’t in the original Gospels, according to some right-thinking, or rather right-leaning scholars. So the editors have excised this bleeding-heart favorite from the Good Book, and they've also removed Jesus’ words on the cross, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." “The simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing,” Schlafly points out, proving that, “Jesus might never had said it at all.”

Yep. Sounds just like him.

Christmas Memories

These photos are absolutely hilarious. This one is my favorite.

I get the dog but why the black baby doll?

Hilarious!

Did You Know That the Amazing Paul Rudd Has Quietly Been Pulling Off One of the Longest Running Jokes in Late-Night History?

Amen

Good Words

People are so obsessed with guns today and they associate any legislation with the government taking their rights away. The NRA is such a strong lobby they are like the mafia and have these politicians kissing their rings or their ass because they donate money to their campaigns. After the Sandy Hook shooting there were more people ranting about losing their guns than those who were mortified at what happened. How selfish and inconsiderate. That said a lot about today's society right there. (from a recent FB Post)

Indeed.

End Fucking Yesterday

Clair Davis has died.

Shot at point blank range by 18-year-old Karl Halvorsen Pierson at Arapahoe High School on December 13, Davis is another in a series of nauseating gun violence statistics. A friend of mine put it most sadly and eloquently on Facebook this morning.

Clair Davis died. She died because ANOTHER underachieving boy (and they are all BOYS) understood masculinity and power in terms of violence. The gun is being used as a pathetic shortcut to manhood.

Indeed. They are all boys and that's where the focus should be on preventing this sort of thing from happening again. Recall this post (ban hammered on HuffPo) from Peter Brown Hoffmeister.

Have you ever heard of a school shooter who’s hobbies are kayaking, rock climbing, and fly-fishing? If that seems absurd – and it does seem absurd to me – we might be onto something. I don’t think that those hobbies can create a school shooter. There’s just something abut the natural world that defuses anger. I know this because the outdoors helped saved my life. An outdoor diversion program for troubled teens started the process when I was sixteen. Camping and hiking and climbing helped me mature further as a nineteen and twenty year old. And now, as the director of a high school outdoor program, one of my student leaders said recently that “the outdoor program saves lives.” That’s not me. That’s nature. Kids need the outdoors. Help the young people. Get them outside.

More than this, parents need to engage their young sons and get them involved in the community. If they are mentally ill, they should not be allowed access to guns. If they are old enough to buy their own guns and are exhibiting warning signs of wanting to commit violence (or if they have already committed violence), call the police.

The other key thing that has to happen is we need to take school shootings out of the zeitgest. I contend that beyond the issue of mental health, guns and young men is the fact that these shootings keep happening because they are part of our "monkey see, monkey do" culture. Somehow, they have become "normal."

And that shit needs to end fucking yesterday.

Yep

A Sunday Reflection

Dear Conservative Christian,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from you, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

 a) When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

 b) I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

 c) I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

 d) Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

 e) I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

 f) A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an Abomination (Lev 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?

 g) Lev 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

 h) Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev 19:27. How should they die?

 i) I know from Lev 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

 j) My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev 24:10-16) Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14) I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging. Your devoted disciple and adoring fan.

Markadelphia

Hmm...

So, now we like Politifact, do we? I guess when it says things we like, we likey. When it doesn't, we don't likey, are shouty about it being liberally biased, and are all angwee and stuff. Hmm...there's a word for that and it rhymes with Schmadolessent.

For the record, I think Politifact's Lie of the Year was a fine choice. They do a great job of calling people on their bullshit regardless of what side of the aisle they are on.