Stones Cry Out

I’ve heard this charge leveled at the US many times before, but recently I heard it leveled from a Christian from the left side of the political aisle. He adds, to the usual concern about wasted natural resources, that consuming so much in disproportion to our numbers is immoral and unjust.

But this is only one side of the equation. I came up with a parallel situation to demonstrate the problem.

I spend most of my money on a very few things. My biggest expense is no doubt my house. I pay so much money to one person; my mortgage banker. He and my grocer, between them, probably get the biggest chunks of change out of my annual income. I have a family doctor who, too, gets a significant portion of my resources. And, as my kids have started going to college, two colleges have been getting a bigger slice of the pie.

(At this point, I quote a paragraph from his post and apply it to my parallel situation.) As a matter of justice, it would not be reasonable to think that it’s morally acceptable for those few people to consume more than half of my resources. Even though the laws were written in such a way that they are allowed to acquire those resources legally, it makes for an immoral and unjust situation, does it not?

If all you’re looking at is the percentage of resources consumed (and that’s all his bullet points cover) and using only that criteria to determine whether it’s just or not, then my mortgage banker, my grocer, my doctor and two colleges are acting unjustly with my resources.

Except that, for those resources, I’m getting shelter, food, health care and education. I’m getting a disproportionate percentage of what I need to live from this small number of people. Perhaps they could charge less for some things and not take as many of my resources for their lifestyle, but on balance I’m getting some essentials from these few folks.

In the same way, while it is true that the US consumes a disproportionate amount of the world’s resources, and while it is also true that many of us could do with less, the world gets quite a bit out of the bargain. Medical advances for longer and better lives. Educational opportunities that people come from all over to take advantage of. Technological advances in energy production to bring a higher standard of living around the world (and higher standards of living almost always result in better health). Agricultural advancements that let vegetables grow in the desert and other inhospitable conditions. And on top of all this, when the world needs protection from enemies or help during calamities, who’s the first place they turn for a shield or a helping hand? And who has the armaments and money to help out?

We do. The world’s getting quite a lot for the money.

Ask the illegal immigrant risking what he has to come to America for work. Ask the African who now has a garden courtesy of a charitable organization. Ask the Libyan who may soon be out from under a dictator. Ask the Dani tribesman in Papua, Indonesia who won’t die from an infection that is now easily curable. Ask the survivors of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.

So unless he’s ready to start laying into his grocer for the "unjust" use of his resources, it might be best to reconsider this pronouncement of immorality and unjustness.

Do you agree or disagree? My main point is that you can’t just look at the consumption side; there’s so much more to the question than that. While we consume more than our share, we produce so much from that consumption, and the benefits absolutely do not stay within our own borders. I believe the religious (question of how moral this consumption is) is being colored by the political. Not "going green" as much as you may wish me to is not, by itself (and this post isolates consumption by itself) a moral failing, or certainly can’t be used to solely just the overall morality.

I believe the Christian Left falls into this trap more often than they care to admit; conflating the political with the moral. Being against Cap & Trade or the Kyoto Protocol, or not following the Green Othodoxy is somehow immoral. We should be good stewards of our resources; I’m not denying that. But to look at the "bad" side of the equation without looking at the "good" side results in fatally flawed policies. We need to deal with the bad without damaging the good.

Good morning.

1. Talking about the early middle ages.
2. A question on climate.
3. Freedom, Religion and “Of vs From”.
4. A photo-essay noted.
5. Photo-voltaics and nature.
6. Economy, jobs focus and Mr Obama.
7. Marriage Minus monogamy … isn’t something that makes sense.
8. An Obama joke (as told by a Democrat (?)).
9. Perry and the secession remark.
10. Free cooperation and a well known park.
11. Ballistic clay, replica armor and some arrows.
12. Freedom and the teacher.
13. Regulations and a bridge.
14. High Tech and US business praxis.

A couple of thoughts from the sermon yesterday:

If your church were to close tomorrow, would your community be negatively impacted?

Is yours the best church in the city, or the best church for the city?

Guns: A year after a law was passed in Virginia allowing those with permits to carry concealed weapons into bars (i.e. "alcohol-serving businesses"), gun-related crime in bars actually declined slightly. They did not turn into the shooting galleries that were predicted. This didn’t make national news, of course, because it doesn’t fit the narrative. If it had gone up, I’m quite sure we’d have heard about it for days on the evening newscasts.

Politics: First Ed Schultz and MSNBC selectively quote Gov. Rick Perry to make it sound like he’s being racist against the President. Seems you can’t say the word "black" in any context without it being called "racist". Then, MSNBC’s newest talker, Al Sharpton, takes the smear and, ironically, calls Gov. Perry divisive and ugly for saying something he didn’t ever say! Say what you want about Fox News, but if you don’t see far, far worse bias on the part of MSNBC, you’re just not paying as close attention as you think you are.

The Economy: The US may have lost it’s AAA rating from Standard and Poor’s, but on that same day, Ohio’s rating went up. Republican Governor John Kasich has presided over newly-balanced budgets, an 8.6% unemployment rate, and a steadily improving economy, coming back from the recession quicker than the Feds. This was done with reducing the size of government and rewarding job-creators.

And speaking of the economy (click for a larger version):

Would a serious Democrat primary challenge for President help or harm the incumbent?

Remember it would be a platform and forum in which the general election (non-primary) would be framed and the lack of that will mean now till late spring will be dominated by the GOP primary race for which there is no corresponding activity on the Democrat side.

On the other hand, he could lose.

Good morning. 

1. Racism … this can’t be said by a non-Black person (is because of implicit racism, shouldn’t anyone be able to say anything irrespective of race, i.e., if statement X is racist depending or not depending on the race of the speaker isn’t that an implicit racist notion?). 
2. The writer claims the linked statement by Mr Limbaugh is racist … I’m not going to disagree, but on the other hand I have no idea what or why that statement is noted as such.
3. This on the other hand, seems more clearly racist.
4. On Ms Bachmann and theocracy.
5. On climate and Carbon dioxide. 
6. And a climate question.
7. A little whining from the left. Wow, that’s just completely ahistorical.
8. Cinema … and liturgy in a sci-fiction movie.
9. Let’s see, atheists cling to a theory that the more intelligent and better educated you are the more likely you are to be an atheist. Look at the top ten list, that second list is clearly matches the top academic institutions nationwide, or not.
10. On poltical attractiveness of Keynsian economics.
11. Fun with a little Zirconium.
12. Affording kids.
13. Mr Perry … should it? Yes. 

Good morning.

1. Fashion, I’ll go with fabulous.
2. So … alchohol involved or not?
3. Noting a poor analogy made by the President.
4. The legal/not-legal drug problem.
5. Missing the other half of the statement. Mr Buffett when asked why he gives to other charities and not the IRS … offered that the other charities yielded more for the dollar and were far more efficient than the government. Ooops. 
6. Haven’t made money in decades … or not. Not this might have been a speakers gaffe, but more likely Mr Obama really didn’t go into any details over finances of moribund financially instable companies when making the decision to bail them out. 
7. Zooom.
8. Dragons in space.
9. Where are the incentives?
10. Chastity.

James Taranto explains Obama’s terms.

Obama in Iowa yesterday: "We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, got the economy moving again, created 2 million private sector jobs over the last 17 months. But over the last six months, we’ve had a run of bad luck."

Robert Heinlein, in "Time Enough for Love," 1973: "Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded–here and there, now and then–are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’ "

Punishing job creators with higher and higher taxes is to now be referred to as "bad luck".

Good morning.

1. Heh.
2. Violence and the Interwebs.
3. More on riots.
4. Economic indicators.
5. States and gun laws.
6. No apologies for what? He also, one might note, makes no apologies for streaking. Alas, nobody is accusing him of that either.
7. A narrative from Libya.
8. Just to buy votes … 
9. Obamacare, now being sold as bait and switch. How is that a good thing?
10. So, just curious. Do you get the mpg rating your car is touted to get?
11. Midway and government economic interventions.
12. Offender registries. Seems like a case of tried and failed … so when will they be eliminated? Likely not in our lifetime, eh?
13. An academic exercise in a journalistic setting. 
14. Kansas preacher visits the Madison political froth.

Good morning.

1. What is Dominionism?
2. So, the Administration now tries to optimize that which is already being aggressively optimized. And to think the difference between this admin and the prior is that the current one is alledgely smart. Perhaps a correction on that notion is needed.
3. Anti-intellectualism is an American trope, not liberal/conservative.
4. Not true I for example, never pay attention to Mr Buffet.
5. Here’s a slightly snarky response to Mr Buffet.
6. How about a cynical one?
7. Our admin continues the abandonment of Taiwan.
8. Duh. We’re not known as a petroleum based economy for no reason.
9. Guns and bars.
10. Speaking of guns ….
11. Global politics, networks and an interesting conversation.
12. Top ten weird ideas (held by Mr Perry)… alas not very interesting or weird at all.
13. Campaign paid for by taxpayers. 
14. 5 Questions posed by a liberal that “conservatives can’t answer” … I guess it helps to never listen to actual conservatives. Answers are to those questions are not hard to find. The first (two) are quite obvious (and alas the same question). I think I can do it in two or three sentences. Let’s consider the economy as a mountain climber … stimulus is like giving the climber more caffeine. Regulations are like additional weights holding him down. Uncertainty is like spraying lubricants on the rock. How speed his climb without giving him caffeine? Hmm. To a liberal apparently there is no way to do that. The real question on such a thing is why the liberal mind things that more caffeine is the only possible response. 

Be Prepared
An online link to first aid manuals (PDF formats), many of which were designed for use on naval vessels, or while in remote locations. Good source of preparedness for a natural or manmade disaster.

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Illegal Aliens are… Illegal?
A couple of months old, but still amusing (or scary). From her own lips,

We have 12 million undocumented immigrants in this country that are part of the backbone of our economy… the Republican solution that I’ve seen in the last three years is that we should just pack them all up and ship them back to their own countries, and that in fact it should be a crime and we should arrest them all.

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Geek News
The Bionic Eye gets closer to reality.

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Geek News # 2
1,235 exosolar planets.

There have been more casualties in Afghanistan under less than 3 years of Obama than we did under 8 years of Bush. Additionally, in the first 3 years of the Iraq war, we had fewer casualties than two and a half under Obama. This is not to criticize Obama for these deaths; that’s what happen in war. But Reason magazine notes that this raises 2 questions. "First, where are the antiwar protests? And second, where is the press?" The "anti-war" protestors are, as I’ve said before, more anti-Bush (or anti-Republican) than anything else. And the press are tied up trying to dig up dirt on Sarah Palin. It’s a full-time job, y’know.

Unions hand-picked 6 of the most vulnerable Republican state senate districts to target for recall. They just needed 3 wins to take control. They could only manage 2. Granted, recall elections have been notoriously difficult to win over the years, but if Democrats and the unions that sponsor them can’t get their base energized over their own referendum on alleged "anti-worker" sentiment in hand-picked districts, that doesn’t say much about how the public views them.

Atheists seem to believe that if humanity would just get rid of this archaic religion thing, violence would drop and peace would reign. Just ask Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchens, or even John Lennon. Yeah, well, how did that work in the Soviet Union, where atheism was essentially the national religion? Or in Europe today, especially Britain, where religion is on the decline?

And speaking of ideas not working, how’s that gun ban in Britain working out for those store owners in the middle of the riots?

Remember the spontaneous "You lie!" outburst by Rep. Joe Wilson of S. Carolina during an address by President Obama about his health care bill? Joe said that after Obama said, "There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms — the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally." Well guess what? Turns out Joe was right.

Why do we need voter ID laws? To keep this from happening; overenfranchised Democratic voters. And how about this bit of irony: "While NAACP President Benjamin Jealous lashed out at new state laws requiring photo ID for voting, an NAACP executive sits in prison, sentenced for carrying out a massive voter fraud scheme."

Dale Franks of Questions & Observations has some great points about our economic situation. A couple of paragraphs, from one post talking about the hole we’re in:

And don’t come back at me with some lame "Our GDP:Debt ratio was 120% at the end of WWII" silliness.  Yes it was. And you know how we fixed it? We cut Federal spending from $92 billion in 1945 to $38 billion in 1949. For 2011, 40% of the federal budget was financed with borrowed money: We’ll spend  $3.818 trillion, of which  $1.645 trillion is borrowed. If we funded only defense, Medicare/Medicaid, and Social Security, and interest on the debt, we’d still have a deficit of $673 billion. Just to balance the budget this year—forget paying off any debt—we’d have to cut an additional ~25% from Health, Defense, and Pensions. Follow the link and download the CSV file, open it up in Excel, and run the numbers yourself. The magic number to balance the budget this year is the revenue of $2.174 trillion.

That’s $2 trillion this year, not over 10 years.

And from another post, noting that tax increases alone, even historic tax increases and an incredibly rosy set of other assumptions, aren’t going to do it. Spending cuts, substantial cuts, must happen.

In order to pay off this year’s share of the $61.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities, the government will have to collect $4.261 trillion in revenues.  With an estimated 2011 GDP of $14.922 trillion, that comes to 28.6% of GDP. If we assume government revenues rise to the historical average, the we’ll need the government to take 31.6% of GDP in tax revenues. Happily, because we’re assuming a 3% rise in GDP and revenues for every year over the next 30 years, that percentage will decline slightly every year, until, in 2041, we’ll only need to collect 20.5% of GDP in tax revenues to pay off the last installment, assuming, again, 14.8% of GDP covers the operation of government.  If we go back to the 17.8% figure, then we’ll have to collect 23.5% of GDP in revenues.

Either way, for the next 30 years, we need to collect substantially higher tax revenues than we have collected at any time in the nation’s history, and we have to do it every year for 30 years.

The point being, this is probably not possible, economically or politically. This is how bad our situation is, and how much action we need to take now on spending.

And yet, who gets blamed for trying to bring sanity back to the budget? (Click for a larger version.)

Good morning. Our families backwoods canoeing trip to the BWCA went well. More on that tonight. How about … links?

1. Marriage and discussions of same.
2. 9/11 and response.
3. Motivation for research.
4. Climate science and a little “follow the money” logic.
5. From an adminstration that’s been just about the most anti-business anti-growth of the last 40 years … those remarks are, what, meant to be ironic?
6. Exhibit A.
7. Today … the Dormition of the Theotokos …. soooo what’t that about? An answer.
8. Rage against the machine?
9. A slug in the lung as response to riots?
10. A science social matrix.
11. Aquinas meets phenomenology.
12. Abortion and technology … 
13. William and cinema. I do recall really liking the John Cleese Taming of the Shrew (which isn’t on the list).
14. We actuall do “things” about the weather … they’re “things” called housing, heating and A/C.

Public Photography is “suspicious” and “antisocial behavior”
At least, it seems to be in the UK where a photographer was arrested for the crime of taking photos, on a public street, of a Christmas celebration. Video here.

I suppose if the photographer wanted to be left alone by the UK police he should have taken to looting, ransacking, and destroying downtown shopping establishments.

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But, we’re okay taking photographs here in the US, right?
Not in Long Beach, California, where the police department seems to think they have the right to detain photographers they deem to be taking photographs “with no apparent esthetic value.”

I suppose the new LBPD motto is to “protect and serve… and provide art criticism.”

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And, so, it’s come to this

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“Can anyone recall a memorable phrase from one of Mr. Obama’s big speeches that didn’t amount to cliché?”

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Oh, back to even more subversiveness…