Dooble: A Miscellany

Bootstraps and Muck: On College Debt

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:34:00 +0000

Graduation = Debt

In this little morality play staged by OWS protesters, actors parody the "Get a degree, get a good job" narrative we all grew up with. This is one of the Occupy issues that hits closest to home for me. My wife and I have had to face the harsh reality that the story we were told proved untrue: while we probably make more money than if we hadn't gone to school, we are so burdened with debt that, in terms of a simple financial cost-benefit analysis, we may as well have skipped those long years of education. It's hard to pull yourself up by the bootstraps when your soles are stuck in the muck.

Eric Hoover, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, reports on a petition going around to get 1 million students to refuse to repay their student loans. The signers are willing to accept the consequences, but also seem to be betting that their numbers will send the kind of message that will change the system first. The "system," here, means the colleges, according to Hoover. Protesters seem to be accusing colleges of operating for profit margins rather than providing an affordable degree.

If only. Colleges probably could do more to control their costs. From what I can see, there is certainly a lot of non-academic expenditure in our colleges, but this is also part of the competition to attract and retain students. The expectations of "the market" have changed from not just getting "an education" but having all sorts of extracurricular and supplemental services and activities that provide some kind of finishing school for moral development. In our current economy, we can't continue to provide this experience at a rate students can afford - that is, given their poor job prospects on the other end.

So I'm not sure it is just, or even primarily, colleges. But it's also not "just" the students who (at least seem to) demand this experience. Expectations are probably somewhat out of whack; students are probably not as prepared for the sacrifice school may entail as they ought to be. But they are surrounded by a culture that is pushing them toward school, including a president who wants to get more people into community colleges and, by extension, to finishing four-year degrees.

Nor, I think, is it as simple as a bunch of punk, spoiled kids not wanting to "get a job" to pay back their debt. Besides the obvious "what job?" question, there is the fact of rampant underemployment. We have jobs; they just don't pay.

This is where I stick most, however. As much as I would benefit from such a systemic change, or a "student bailout" as some are calling it, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the logic. I took the loans knowing I would have to repay them. While I was assured my education was a good investment, there was no cosmic guarantee that I would get that great job that would allow me to quickly get out of debt and begin to live the high life.

If I default on my mortgage debt, the bank takes back the house and it's their problem. Maybe not the most moral decision, but economically it makes some sense. But there's nothing the government can comparably take back should I up and quit paying my student loans. The American people have invested in me and the contribution I, through my education, can make back to the community. To default would seem a betrayal of that contract.

But the point the Occupy movements are making is that the contract was broken on the other side first. That is, the government has increasingly become an extension of corporate interests that do not share the values which our education is meant to support. They permitted the creation of an economy that traded not on crop futures but on people's futures, that rewarded not the creation of goods and services but of fantasy "assets" that contributed not to the common good but to the pockets of the wealthy elite. Bankers, brokers and CEOs are getting record bonuses and we're fighting about whether teachers are getting paid too much.

We all know what is really valued, figured in terms of where we put our money - and it's not our farmers, teachers, or artists. It's not our pastors or social workers or even the people on the assembly lines making our TVs and cell phones. My wife cannot afford to provide mental health services to lower-income people because she has to earn enough to pay back her student loans. Factor in that a major health insurance provider has lowered its compensation rate and it gets even more frustrating.

The thing I don't understand about the conservative "get a job" perspective is how big businesses are the only institutions in this country that are beyond scrutiny. They'll put up with prosecuting individual misbehavior only because it allows them to say it was only a few people. But this is not an economy that rewards pulling oneself up from one's bootstraps, anymore. It rewards gambling with other people's money and shrugging your shoulders when you drastically cut your workforce. It's a value-less muck that needs moral leadership in all areas and all at once - government, businesses, banks, colleges, students, and workers.

Why can't we agree that some things - the poor, the widow, the orphan, but also the worker, the land, our food, our communities - and profit is not a value above all others?

Synonyms for Christian

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:25:00 +0000

I have been thinking a lot lately about Christians and the world. Every time I get involved in a Christian subculture I am impressed anew with the capacity of Christians to be tribal, insular, self-protective, complacent, passively submissive, and even fearful. Christians have done a good job of raising "good Christian kids" who go on to become "good Christian," which as often as not means "good American consumer-capitalists." I am far from convinced these are synonymous.

Think about it. Which of the following describes the Christians you know?

complacent		visionary
docile		loud
passive		activist
"sacrificial"		transformative
cooperative		imaginative
tribal		community-building
insular		embedded

Which of them describe history's famous followers of God, like Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, Solzhenitsyn, Mother Teresa, Peter, Paul, Moses - or Jesus himself? They're not all opposites, exactly, and the second column isn't exactly meant to be a list of specifically Christian attributes, but it seems to me that Christians should have more of the second column than the first. Obedience and submission to God and his moral law do not strike me as the same as obedience and submission to injustice and indignity just because it is perpetrated by "our" government against someone else (the working poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, usually). If Christ doesn't make a real difference in our lives - and in our lives as Americans - then how can he be relevant to anyone?

New Review: Anne Overstreet's Delicate Machinery Suspended

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 13:11:00 +0000

If you haven't checked out Englewood Review of Books, yet, this might be a good excuse. They've just posted my review of Anne M. Doe Overstreet's new collection of poems.

Warren Buffett: Complete Socialist?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 19:01:00 +0000

John Stewart once again proves that the best defense against Fox News is to take a second to think about what the talking heads are saying.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

World of Class Warfare - Warren Buffett vs. Wealthy Conservatives

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

Dooble: A Miscellany: Taxes on the Super-Rich Don't Hurt Jobs?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 15:09:00 +0000

People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.
View the whole post

via dooble-a-miscellany.blogspot.com

Warren Buffett wants to pay more taxes.

Taxes on the Super-Rich Don't Hurt Jobs?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 15:07:00 +0000

This isn't anything new - I think it was MoveOn.org that had an ad featuring millionaires asking to have their taxes raised - but it's important to hear Warren Buffett say it as the "super committee" prepares to look at our national budget problems.

Among his most interesting points (made with pesky facts) is that higher tax rates in the 80s and 90s corresponded with job growth, while the last ten years have seen the reverse:

People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

A friend of mine also shared this graph that shows our budget problems starting with GW Bush's wars and economic policy, which, disappointingly, Obama has not done much to counteract. How is it we're so incapable of having civil, adult conversations about these things with a moderate pragmatist in office?

Restoring Participation (Williams's Grace and Necessity)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 16:23:00 +0000

Participation in Western thought is usually a bad thing. Anthropologically, participation is the stuff of witch doctors and medicine men, the belief that one can be simultaneously oneself and inhabit the spirit or body of a crocodile or lion or river. Philosophically, it's a kind of group-think or convention that Socrates tried to break free from by asking what words meant. In the first sense participation is contrary to the integrity of the self; in the second sense it is the opposite of reflection, i.e., of philosophy.

In the latter half of his first essay in Grace & Necessity, Rowan Williams briefly discusses Jacques Maritain's use of participation in its theological sense of the "illuminating intellect."The idea seems to be an extension or implication of being made in the image of God. We are equipped with this illuminating intellect, which is "the reflection of God's formative mental activity within our own," a kind of "participatory awareness," below the surface of consciousness (preconscious, if anything; certainly not subconscious), "that resonates with the patterns of God's action in the created world."

What's this have to do with art?
The implication for art is, I think, clear enough. It suggests the artist attempts to listen to or perceive how, in Maritain's language, "things are not only what they are," how they "give more than they have." This presumes God's continuing activity in Creation to which our minds respond, and it explains in part why art always has a transgressive nature. Art in this sense reveals the "active intelligible life of the object" by denying its merely physical and perceptual boundaries, taking it up and rearranging, reorienting it to display it to us as a fresh thing (maybe even a thing always in need of freshening, thus of art).

This also clarifies how art is not, for Maritain, a product of the will or intention of the artist but still an act of intelligence. Art begins not with an idea, concept, or will but a sense, an intuition, or even perhaps a desire to know a thing intimately. It proceeds with an attention to the work itself (recall previous post) rather than to some purpose for the work, and so remains free, at least intrinsically, from moral judgments.

Williams shows that Maritain does at last recognize that art and morality begin to converge with respect to the world the work offers to us. We almost inevitably ask "whether a world laid before us by an artist is desirable for the kind of creatures we know ourselves to be." Theoretically, then, the work may be aesthetically beautiful but morally repulsive.

Or, more likely, morally problematic or stained. I think of Lars von Trier's Antichrist, a stunning film that disturbs and horrifies without the sensationalism and pornographic violence usually associated with the genre. It raises tough questions about the reality of evil and our modern attempts to explain or counsel it away, and it is just painfully beautiful visually. But ultimately von Trier's world is characterized more by darkness than light, held in the grip of an evil that will not be repressed and that offers no solution save desperate tears. It's for this reason that I really don't recommend the film to people - it's too dark, too hopeless, and it wants to burden the viewer with its own despair. Pan's Labyrinth might fit this category for me, too.

One last thing about participation
Williams doesn't explain how participation in Maritain isn't the bad thing philosophy thinks it is, but we might turn to David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite for help (sort of - it's a dense book, so whatever help it provides comes only after some serious work). In brief, Hart argues that the traditional understanding of the Trinity is of true difference, meaning God himself is a relation to himself. That is, there is no higher unity of the Trinity, which would make the persons of the Trinity lesser gods or mere aspects of God. In other words, in Christian theology, there is "difference at the origin," and difference does not collapse or resolve into some unity, nor does it represent some violence done to an originary unity but remains a harmony and a peace.

Basically, Hart refutes postmodernism's anxiety of participation by rejecting not only the modern thought it critiques but the heart of Western metaphysics itself, the theory of the One and the Many. The revelation of the Trinity, Hart argues, is that unity is itself diverse, contains differences that do not dissolve into one another. Creation is diverse, multiplex, abundant because it reflects, finitely, the infinite diversity and abundance of God's own nature.

Thus, if we sacrifice the concept of the autonomous self and the violence of either unity or division, participation becomes a joining in the dance, the invitation of love itself.

Modernist Aesthetics Today (Williams's Grace & Necessity)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 15:42:00 +0000

Aren't we post-modern?
What does modernist art theory have to offer Christian aesthetics today? That would seem to be Rowan Williams's question in his 2005 book Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love, which I've started reading in preparation for the Conference on Christianity & Literature's "Hospitable Text" conference coming up on July 14-17. The book presents Williams's case for the relevance of the "neo-scholastic" Jacques Maritain to Christian thought and practice in the arts in the present.

Williams admits that a system-maker like Maritain presents "an unpromising beginning" to our postmodern sensitivities about ideology and metaphysics. He counters not with a defense of Maritain but with the concrete, if anecdotal, evidence that artists he's shared his thoughts with have been largely sympathetic. This doesn't mean that there isn't an ideological critique to be made, but it does offer him some practical traction of not just theorizing but describing something that actual artists do.

He defines modernism (acceptably, I think) as "that approach to art that concentrates on the fabric, inner and outer, of the work made rather than any supposed external reference, representational or theoretical." This is really an apotheosis of art that takes Platonic idealism (the theory that art imitates an invisible, ideal reality) to an aesthetic extreme. On the one hand it's a powerful theory of art's independence from the particulars of context that might limit its cultural contributions to a specific historical moment. On the other hand it's the root of the formal criticism of theme, character, plot, meter, rhyme, etc., that drives so many students nuts.

"Post-"modernism, as far as the above, basically points out that art is entangled in its particular moments, cultures, power struggles, and even languages and discourses. To the extent that art reinscribes and reinforces class, gender, race, or other oppression, criticism has an ethical, social, and political purpose in demystifying and deconstructing it. Even when my students want to idealize art, they are still quite sensitive to issues of voice and identity that grow out of postmodern thinking.

The sin of the angels & other fallacies
Part of what Williams does in the first section of his first chapter, "Modernism and the Scholastic Revival," is to show that Maritain isn't a modernist in the purely formalist sense. Maritain does want to separate artistic production from the field of action in which one might level political and ethical critiques, but he also wants to avoid a Platonic idealism regarding art. The artwork is always, for Maritain, bound up in its particular moment - to think that the work links directly to an ideal reality is to commit the "sin of the angels."

Maritain also denies that art is about stimulating specific feelings - the fallacy of emotionalism, related to the affective fallacy - or about adequate expression or correspondence to the artist's "subjective integrity" - the fallacy of intellectualism. Nor, finally, is art about changing the world according to the artist's vision - the "magical fallacy."

Okay, so what is it?
Art is about integrity to the specific material product. It is work because it requires shaping of some matter in a particular context, but it is art and not politics because its end is intrinsic to itself. Beauty itself seems to follow as a result or consequence rather than a goal. There's a radical emphasis on the work itself that, I think, might surprise many evangelicals:

Art is not about the will - though it unquestionably works on the will. In its actual execution, art does not require good dispositions of the will . . . , nor does it aim to produce good dispositions of the will or indeed any particular dispositions of the will. It does not aim at delight or the desire of the good. It seeks the good of this bit of work. And the artist as artist is not called on to love God or the world or humanity, but to love what he or she is doing.

Here's where the notion of common grace or general revelation may be useful, because Maritain's description of the artist's orientation to the work will be solipsistic or narcissistic unless we can appreciate (and love?) the goodness of Creation, that is, of the starting point, the stuff, of artistic production. Maritain considers art an intellectual praxis because the artist engages with the world, but in such a way that she suspends or displaces her will for the sake of her apperception. The artwork doesn't imitate the world but reshapes the particular data of the artist so as to reveal the world to us.

This means that art serves the purpose not of ornament or entertainment or even mere play but of supplementing, augmenting, amplifying the world. Its work is "rooted in the sense of an unfinishedness in 'ordinary' perception," a sense that our other modes of knowledge captured part but not all of our reality.

And so . . .
In my work with Relief I often see poetry and prose written to under Maritain's fallacies. Protestants, in particular, are idea oriented, concerned with right doctrine and belief, and so it makes sense that we would be tempted to write every story as a parable. But, at least in our common social and public lives, the depth of our thinking and the range of our emotions is distressingly shallow, and parables written to those realities are themselves often shallow - or just false.

Maybe Maritain is on to something. Maybe the artist serves God by serving the work first. We may have significant experiences or insights that are worth sharing, but it's rare that the authenticity of the experience can carry a whole poem, nor can a poorly-written poem do justice to the experience. But before we can even begin to appreciate this relationship between form and content, we actually need a cultural rediscovery of art. We tend to either reduce it to commercial entertainment or elevate it to an elite (read irrelevant) realm of struggling artists and wealthy buyers. We're happy, moreover, with our feel-good, consumable reality, guarded by the experts of science, economics, and politics (listen for the echo: Wendell Berry, Wendell Berry, Wendell Berry . . .).

What I take away from these initial thoughts on Maritain, then, is that we have to want more to get more, and we have to change our orientation from biding our time until we enter paradise to believing that the kingdom is here among us and available to us.

An Occasional Poem: Cultivation

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 21:37:00 +0000

On the Books & Culture blog, Marcus Goodyear challenged us to write more poetry, suggesting a specific theme of cultivation. Here's my effort.

Garden

O how proud she was, my wife,

of the tiny salad she grew

in our friends’ backyard.

My two-year old, not inclined to greens,

pinched delicately one leaf burnishing purple

and remembered how he pulled it from dark earth,

then fed it through his lips and beamed.

“I eat it!” he declared in a way we should maybe use

of the body broken.

The leaves were bitter on the tongue

but light and windy still

with the memory of fresh air.

We’re getting closer, we’re looking for,

the seeping Godness deep down things.

Deep down in things, bless it, that once were a gift

beyond price. We forget.

We forget. Take and

Eat it!

Criminal Minds (Can science predict your child's criminal future?) | chronicle.com | Readability

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:24:00 +0000

By Josh Fischman

Philadelphia

He was locked in a van in England with violent criminals, repeatedly, during his late 20s, says Adrian Raine, lifting a fork of salmon ravioli from his plate at a tony restaurant on Walnut Street. "I was at the maximum-security prison in Hull," says the psychologist, now in his 50s, and his job involved attaching polygraph-type sensors to the prisoners' skin to measure their agitation as he bothered them with loud sounds and flashes of light. His lab was in the back of the van, he says, "and the guards were very concerned these men would commandeer the vehicle and escape."

Their solution? "Take my keys away and lock the doors from the outside."

Raine, now chair of the criminology department at the University of Pennsylvania, a few blocks from the restaurant, stops eating for a moment to remember. "So there I was, in this very tiny space. And I kept watching the needles these sensors were connected to, for I imagined that the first sign these men were about to rush me would be the needles starting to swing wildly as the men got excited and prepared to attack."

They never did. Raine always got out of the van unscathed, but the slightly built, graying Englishman has never strayed far from the company of killers, wife batterers, and psychopaths. He has spent a career trying to spot ever-earlier signs of dangerous minds—clues to bad behavior even before a criminal commits a crime.

Along with several other researchers, he has pioneered the science of neurodevelopmental criminology. In adult offenders, juvenile delinquents, and even younger children, dozens of studies have pointed to brain features that seem to reduce fear, impair decision making, and blunt emotional reactions to others' distress. The studies have also highlighted body reactions that are signs of this pattern and are tied to criminality.

Society has always wondered about "bad seeds," people who seem to be possessed by devils. But what is emerging from this research is a cluster of biological markers that plant the bad seed in the brain. More striking, they appear to predict antisocial behavior even before it happens. Early warnings could avoid a world of hurt, because some of these people are terribly dangerous. Kent A. Kiehl, an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, has described in The New Yorker a psychopath whom he encountered during his research: The man started with petty crimes as a child and was convicted of arson by age 17. After a prison stretch, he moved back in with his mother, got in an argument with her, and wrapped the phone cord around her neck when she tried to call for help. He then threw her down some stairs, stabbed her several times, crushed her head beneath a propane canister, and went out to celebrate with a three-day bender.

"So if I could tell you, as a parent, that your child has a 75-percent chance of becoming a criminal, wouldn't you want to know and maybe have the chance to do something about it?" asks Raine.

But predicting criminality makes a lot of people nervous. It raises the specter of earlier scientific episodes in which researchers claimed that aspects of biology—like ethnic background—determined behavior or intelligence. With what everyone admits is still a young and imperfect science, there is also the possibility of getting it wrong, and ruining someone's future with an undeserved "bad seed" label.

Still, Raine has many supporters. "He really has a broad range of work," says Abigail A. Marsh, an assistant professor of psychology at Georgetown University who has studied brain areas related to psychopathy. "I'm particularly impressed with his long-term studies, where he's traced physical patterns in children to conduct problems in adulthood, because doing that kind of research is difficult."

Raine himself acknowledges that he's going down a dangerous path. "The brain changes. Family and the environment may protect it and may even alter some of the physiology that we see," he says. "So we don't want to say that biology is destiny." Indeed, he is in the midst of an experiment with young children who show some markers of aggressive behavior, to see if psychotherapy or a diet rich in brain-protective supplements can reduce chances of antisocial acts.

"Of course, all of this brings up tremendously difficult ethical questions," he says. "But I don't think I'd be doing my job unless I said that we need to start talking about them. It's time we start this discussion, before we start labeling people."

The notion of a changeable brain was not at all part of the last serious scientific attempt to link physical traits to behavior or thinking. In the 19th century, physical anthropologists like Paul Broca and Paul Topinard—founding figures in the field—took calipers to skulls and scales to brains to show that specific brain shapes were features of particular races or groups, and that the mental abilities of those races followed those shapes almost without fail. There was the "facial angle," a degree of forward thrusting that was supposed to mark intelligence. Europeans purportedly had an angle of 80 degrees, Africans of 70 degrees, and apes rather less. The method was called craniometry, and it served an assumption that racial differences were primordial and showed up as immutable mental characteristics. (Phrenology, a pseudoscience that tied various bumps on the head to fine-grained personality traits, was never taken seriously by researchers.) The notion began to unravel when other scientists, like Franz Boas in the early 20th century, took up their own calipers to show that the anatomy of a race in fact shifted across generations.

And as Raine points out, the individual brain does change. Beginning in the 1960s, scientists began amassing evidence of "plasticity" when they found brain regions taking on new functions to make up for injury. In the 1980s and 1990s, they established that animals generate new neurons when they learn new skills. They also found that human babies reshape their brain pathways as they grow. Anatomy at birth may influence many things, but it is not fate.

It was in that environment that Raine began exploring psychology. He was born the son of a bricklayer and an ice-cream vendor in Darlington, in the north of England. During a brief flirtation with an accountant's career ("I was a boring kid and good with numbers," he says), he was wandering in a bookstore one weekend afternoon. "I came across a book by psychiatrist R.D. Laing on how faulty family communication can make you a schizophrenic. It was like an epiphany for me, reading about this effect on brain and behavior. So then I wanted to go to university and be a psychiatrist."

The university turned out to be Oxford—Jesus College—where Raine vacillated between wanting to be an experimental psychologist and wanting to teach primary school. That second impulse, though not followed through, was fateful. Student teaching "showed me there were some kids who were just bullies, very extreme, and I wondered, Why? Where did the behavior come from? Why were some kids angels and some devils?"

He made the topic into his doctoral research at the University of York, where he began using the lie-detector-like sensors, later featured in his prison van, to measure heart rates and changes in the way the skin conducts electricity in teenagers with varying degrees of aggression.

But after he got his degree, he couldn't get a job. "Biological explanations were not popular at that time, the late 1970s. It was not on anyone's radar screen at all. I sent out 67 job applications, to universities as far away as Papua New Guinea, and I got 67 rejections. The only place that would take me was prison."

As a prison psychologist at Hull, starting in 1980, he worked with rapists, murderers, and pedophiles. That was also the year that Robert D. Hare, now an emeritus professor at the University of British Columbia, published the first checklist that could single out psychopaths from other personality types, and Raine began trying various interventions with that group. "The main thing that I learned was that I really can't change these people," he says. "It brought me back to kids, to earlier stages, thinking we've got to look at the earlier, predisposing factors, when maybe we can do something."

After two years at Hull and two at another prison, Raine broke out of jail and into academe, first at the University of Nottingham and then at the University of Southern California, always pursuing those predispositions. One of his major lines of research was long-term studies of children, measuring physiological reactivity at young ages to see if any pattern related to bad behavior decades later.

Testing and following children for years is not, as Georgetown's Abigail Marsh says, a simple thing to do. They tend to drop out, move away, disappear. But Raine lucked into a major source of data. In the late 1960s, the World Health Organization had started a project to closely follow about 1,800 children on Mauritius, a small island nation in the Indian Ocean. The nice thing about remote islands: People don't tend to move away and disappear.

Over the years, Raine and several colleagues have shown that children from Mauritius who show slower heart rates and reduced skin responses when annoyed by loud tones or challenging questions tend to have criminal records when they get older. In 1996 the researchers showed that 15-year-olds with this pattern tended to have criminal records by age 29. In 2010, the age was pushed back further: 3-year-olds who had those physical responses were rated by teachers as more aggressive than other children five years later.

But when such kids got better schooling and nutrition starting at age 3, they had more-typical physical reactions. And by age 23, their incidence of criminal behavior dropped by 35 percent.

There is a theory behind this, and it's about being insensitive to fear. Normally, a startling noise races the heart and sends the body into a high state of alert, which is what the skin electrodes pick up. But research indicates that children who are not alarmed don't react to the threat of punishment when they misbehave. Nor do they react to the distress shown by other people. They don't learn that their bad actions, like causing others pain, have bad consequences for those people. The pattern builds on itself until—maybe—it creates a person who wraps a telephone cord around his mother's throat.

Another line of evidence supporting this idea—the cold-blooded criminal—comes from studies of young twins who have what are called callous, unemotional traits. At Southern California, Raine was part of team studying 605 families of twins. Some of the twins were identical, sharing 100 percent of their genes, and some were nonidentical, sharing 50 percent. When identical twins show more similar traits than nonidentical pairs, it most likely means that genes have a stronger influence than environment, because all of the twins were raised in the same surroundings.

In Raine's twins studies, when the children were ages 9 and 10, researchers gave them a battery of psychological tests to assess aggression and antisocial behavior. They also asked three different kinds of observers—parents, teachers, and the children themselves—to rate the children's antisocial tendencies: The results showed that these traits were more consistent in the identical pairs. "I think at least 50 percent of this can be attributed to genetics," Raine says.

More recently, Nathalie M.G. Fontaine, an assistant professor of criminology at Indiana University at Bloomington, and a team of researchers have followed more than 9,000 sets of twins in England and Wales from the time they were 4 through age 12. Those young children in whom parents and teachers saw repeated callous behavior and lack of emotion were the ones most likely to have patterns of lying, cheating, and stealing by age 12. Moreover, "biology appears to play a role in this," Fontaine says, because traits appear to be carried across twins. "In boys with high CU [callous, unemotional] traits, for example, we think 78 percent of their CU traits are inherited," she said when she presented the findings at this year's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

After years of observing behavior like this, and noting its repeated connection to dulled nerves, Raine began wondering what blunted the senses. Ultimately, of course, all nerves connect to the brain. So was there something actually in the brains of these people that tied into this lack of fear, lack of sensitivity, and abundance of mayhem?

Others had been considering the same thing. Antonio R. Damasio, a pioneering professor of neuroscience, was one of the first to demonstrate that damage to parts of the brain is tied to antisocial actions, in work done during the 1990s at the University of Iowa. (He is now at Southern California.) He focused on the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped area in the middle of the brain known to help process emotions. In patients with lesions in the region, he observed a repeated pattern of bad decisions, like making risky bets while gambling. Cut off from emotional reactions, these people lacked an alarm bell that signaled a poor choice. They could see many courses of action but, shorn of feedback from the amygdala, couldn't tell good from bad. That extended to reading other people's emotions, too: The patients had trouble distinguishing frightened expressions from happy ones. James R. Blair, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, has found these abnormalities to be especially common among psychopaths, which could explain their unsettling ability to hurt other people horribly yet feel no remorse at all.

Damasio also found that damage to the prefrontal cortex, a brain area involved in decision making, could turn mild-mannered patients into rash, destructive individuals, seeming to rob them of a "brake" on their impulses. This led him to propose that the two regions normally link up to prevent people from harming others by generating emotional alarm (the amygdala) and acting on it (the prefrontal cortex). When either part of the chain is damaged, antisocial actions result. Damasio called this "acquired sociopathy."

In 1997, Raine and several colleagues put the theory to the test on real killers. They compared the functioning of the brains of 41 convicted murderers with those of 41 normal people. Using positron emission tomography, or PET, a type of scan that measures the activity in areas of the brain, they saw lower activity in both the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala of the murderers' brains.

When they further divided murderers into those who came from "good" homes and those who came from "bad" homes—those filled with neglect, abuse, and poverty—the first group again showed lower activity in the prefrontal cortex, in particular an area called the orbitofrontal cortex. Raine's interpretation: Genetics and anatomy were more influential on their development than was the way they grew up; the murderers from good homes seemed to be terribly affected by this low-functioning brain region.

And it wasn't just function. Brain form was also impaired, Raine and his coworkers found. A series of studies using magnetic resonance imaging, which reveals structures and shapes, showed that criminals and people who scored high on tests of antisocial disorders had different-looking brains. Both the orbitofrontal region and the amygdala were smaller than normal. And the corpus callosum, the bridge between the brain's two hemispheres that helps them communicate, was abnormally large.

But those findings raised a chicken-and-egg type question: Did the brain features produce the behavior, or did the behavior change the brain? Violent criminals are known to bang their heads into walls and abuse drugs, and both of those things damage the brain, possibly producing the shrinkage Raine was seeing on the brain scans. He needed to go back even further, to birth and beyond.

You can't put a fetus in a brain scanner. What you can do, however, is look for a defect that begins before birth and can still be detected in adults. Raine found it in a hole in the head. More precisely, a thin wall of brain tissue that separates a hole—all brains have these spaces—into two. The hole appears during the 12th week of a fetus's development, and the wall—pushed forward by a normally developing amygdala and other brain areas—divides it by the 20th week. When the wall doesn't form completely, a condition known by the jawbreaking name of cavum septum pellucidum, it's usually a sign of abnormal development in the amygdala and other structures. Years later, in adults, the failed wall can be spotted in a brain scan.

Raine, who moved in 2007 to the University of Pennsylvania, found that the condition is also associated with dangerous minds. In a 2010 paper, he and his colleagues compared people with and without the feature on several fronts. The groups were tested for antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy, and aggression. Their records were searched for criminal arrests and convictions. In every single one of those areas, there were a lot more men and women with the wall defect. Here, finally, was evidence tracing criminality back to the womb, before any head-banging could occur. It was evidence of changes in the brain that nicely tied in with the abnormalities seen in adult criminals.

"I think there's no longer any question, scientifically, that there's an association between the brain and criminal behavior. We're beyond the point of debating that," says Raine. "Every study can be criticized on methodology. But when you look at the whole, at all the different designs, it's just hard to deny there is something going on with biology."

Indeed, the evidence keeps coming: This month a team of researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and of Southampton reported that 15-year-old kids with conduct disorders had smaller amygdalae than those with no behavior problems; the more severe the disorder, the greater the shrinkage. Some genes have even been linked, tentatively, to these conduct disorders.

So what do we do now?

One thing we don't do, says Fontaine, is mark children as future criminals. "No way! I would never put a risk number on a specific child," she says. "We are talking about groups, not individuals. We don't know what will happen with any one child, because there are also protective factors." The plastic, changeable brain means that a strongly supportive family, or an influential schoolteacher, or religion could blunt the effects of a hole in the head. Or as Damasio, who thinks Raine has produced a strong body of evidence, puts it: "The changes are themselves changeable."

Raine himself is a big believer in protective factors. "You can't make a lesion to the prefrontal cortex and, hey presto, you get a criminal. It's not like that," he says. "Of course social factors are critically important." In his current study of Philadelphia children with the slow physical reactivity that has been linked to trouble, some are getting a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids and calcium to see if those protect brain cells, some are getting cognitive-behavioral therapy, and some are getting both to see if trouble can be staved off.

Still, the time is coming, Raine believes, when putting numbers on children will be tempting. If a 75-percent chance of a bad seed isn't high enough, he wonders, what about 80 percent? Or 95? "Look, I have two children, 9-year-old, nonidentical twin boys," he says. "And I'd definitely want to know, especially if there was a treatment that has a chance of success. But I realize not every parent will. We have to start having this conversation now, though, so we understand the risks and the benefits. It's easy to get on your moral high horse about stigma and civil liberties, but are you going to have blood on your hands in the future because you've blocked an approach that could lead to lives being saved?"

"One swallow does not a summer make. But together, this is a message in the sky."

Josh Fischman is a senior editor at The Chronicle.

via readability.com

File this under: Science-Fiction Was Right...Sort Of. This is Minority Report stuff, only with the ethically-essential understanding of the brain's plasticity and a belief that we can help people change. The theory about fear of punishment is surprising in that it flies in the face of motivational research that suggests punishment is not a good way to teach something. But even here it's tied in with empathy - understanding how another feels - the lack of which is a short-hand way of thinking about psychopathy.

A bigger question for me concerns the study that divided people into "good" homes and "bad" homes. Presumably this had to do with socio-economics and the parents' education level. If studies show that "good" homes can still produce psychopaths, then we're moving closer to Minority Report-style lock-em-up-before-they-can-do-any-harm thinking. But what about parenting style? What about community cohesion and stability? The quality of public education? Social safety nets? How do these contribute?

Social Scientists Explore Ways to Save Us From Our Own Decisions | chronicle.com | Readability

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:04:00 +0000

By Thomas Bartlett

We don't make sense. Our reasons for doing what we do, for choosing what we choose, frequently fail to add up. We are more dishonest and less logical than we imagine. And psychologists and economists seemingly never tire of pointing this out to us.

So can anything be done? Or are we hopeless?

In search of an answer, I attended a special session on choices at the Association for Psychological Science's recent annual convention, which boasted some of the biggest names in social science at the moment. Among them was Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, author of two best-selling books, and a prolific researcher with a winningly dry wit. You don't want to follow his presentation.

In the past few years, Mr. Ariely has shown that people who believe they're honest are still perfectly willing to behave unethically when it suits them and when they think they can get away with it. For instance, in one study, participants were asked to complete a set of simple math puzzles in a limited amount of time (like finding two numbers in a matrix that together equal 10). They were given a small reward, like 50 cents or $2, for each completed puzzle. The more puzzles they completed, the more money they received.

In the experiment, participants whose results had to be verified by an experimenter completed significantly fewer puzzles than those who were allowed to report their own results and collect the cash. From that, Mr. Ariely concludes, when people saw a chance to cheat, they took it. They didn't cheat a lot, but enough to be noticeable. And other research he's done indicates that this same kind of minor corruption pops up on tax returns and expense reports. People who cheat in the lab probably cheat in the real world, too.

But there may be an easy solution: When Mr. Ariely set up the same type of experiment but first reminded people of the university's honor code or asked them to write down as many of the Ten Commandments as they could remember, the cheating was eliminated. Gone. Nothing about the situation was different; the subjects could cheat without consequences if they so desired. But a simple reminder ahead of time that cheating is not OK was enough to keep people honest.

The Duke professor has tried to convince corporations and policy makers of the power of such reminders. He even suggested that the IRS have taxpayers sign the honesty pledge before completing their forms. So far the federal government hasn't warmed to the idea. The tradition of signing at the end of a form is, for whatever reason, difficult to abandon.

Like Mr. Ariely, Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, has written often about decision making, though lately much of his research has focused on decisions made by people below the poverty line. The poor make unwise decisions, just like the nonpoor, but the repercussions can be much more severe. A middle-class person who makes a few lousy financial choices may have to cut back on creature comforts, while a poor person may end up on the streets.

One decision that hurts plenty of poor people is opting not to put their money in a bank. When encouraging people to use banks rather than a mattress or a freezer, it's good to reduce the hassle factor. Small obstacles like an intimidating form or a long drive, Mr. Shafir says, can stand in the way of smart decisions.

But being in the right frame of mind might help, too. In one study, Mr. Shafir found that poor women who were asked questions about their loved ones— such as "Which of your family members do you feel closest to?"—were more likely to agree to open a savings account that required a $20 monthly deposit than were women who were asked what they did for fun. As with Mr. Ariely's honesty experiments, nothing more than a cue to remember their obligations to others may have done the trick.

Mr. Shafir emphasizes that, while it's easy to be judgmental about the financial decisions of poor people, everyone is subject to a certain amount of irrational thinking. In a recent paper on so-called choice overload, Sheena Iyengar, a professor of business at Columbia University and author of the best seller The Art of Choosing, illustrates exactly that.

When we have too many choices, studies have demonstrated, we tend to get overwhelmed and do nothing, but Ms. Iyengar has shown that choice overload has another downside. In her study, participants were told to choose from a selection of coin-flip gambles. For instance, one gamble might be that if a flipped coin lands on tails, the participant gets $10, but if it lands on heads, he or she gets nothing. Another option might be receiving five bucks no matter how the coin lands. And so on.

One group was given three such options, while another was given 11.

You might think that the group with 11 choices would be more likely to find the most profitable option. In fact, when they had more choices, participants leaned toward the safest choice, like taking five bucks no matter how the coin landed. The problem is that the least risky choice isn't always the best. (For instance, starting a business may be risky but may be a risk worth taking.) But something about having lots of choices makes us seek out safety.

The implications of this finding go well beyond flipping coins in a laboratory. Ms. Iyengar argues that real-life decisions, like health care and 401(k) plans, are subject to the same choice-overload phenomenon. It might be sensible for companies and the government to remember that before touting the supposed superiority of a lengthy menu.

The takeaway is not that we can remove our tendency to make dumb or unethical decisions, but that it's important to be aware of our natural deficiencies. Maybe we don't make sense, but perhaps we can outsmart ourselves.

via readability.com

File this under: Science Confirms What We Already Knew. Of course, we don't always reflect enough to know what we know, and it's nice to know it's not just me that does this. The middle section describes experiments that target a self or other orientation, but there's also a question of immediate v. long-term benefit. Situations where our effects on others are rather remote (filling out tax forms) really show up the role of ethics in our lives, i.e., to come between our immediate self-interest and our long-term character and community goals.

You can't reconcile Ayn Rand and Jesus

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Column: You can't reconcile Ayn Rand and Jesus

By Stephen Prothero

Updated 3d 18h ago |
488 | 22

Share

The new darling of the Republican Party is pro-choice and anti-religion. She once wrote that, since "an embryo has no rights," abortion "should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved." And when asked by Playboy magazine whether religion "ever offered anything of constructive value to human life" she answered "no," adding that "faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life."

Her name is Ayn Rand, and though she died in 1982 this novelist, philosopher and anti-communist crusader is the hot new thing in the GOP. The American public may have met the April opening Atlas Shrugged, a film based on her novel of the same name, with a collective shrug, but Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh tout her books, and her genius. And the opening line of "Atlas Shrugged" ("Who is John Galt?") pops up regularly on handmade signs at Tea Party rallies.

USA TODAY OPINION

On Religion
Faith. Religion. Spirituality. Meaning. In our ever-shrinking world, the tentacles of religion touch everything from governmental policy to individual morality to our basic social constructs. It affects the lives of people of great faith — or no faith at all. This series of weekly columns — launched in 2005 — seeks to illuminate the national conversation.

Among Rand's adoring acolytes on Capitol Hill is Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who at a Library of Congress symposium held in 2005 on the centenary of the Rand's birth called her "the reason I got involved in public service." Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who announced his third presidential run last recently, has invoked Rand in the House on matters as disparate as NASA and the post office. His son, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, used her novel Anthem in Senate hearings in April to argue against government regulations to phase out the incandescent light bulb.

When asked to name his favorite political philosopher, George W. Bush named Jesus Christ. But Ayn Rand is the GOP's new savior, and no one seems to be taking notice of just how opposed their two philosophies are.

Individualism vs. collectivism

In Rand's Manichaean world, it is not God vs. Satan, but individualism vs. collectivism. While Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor," she sings Hosannas to the rich. The heroes of Atlas Shrugged (which, alas, is only slightly shorter than the Bible) are captains of industry such as John Galt. The villains are the "looters" and "moochers" — people who by hook (guilt) or by crook (government coercion) steal from the hard-won earnings of others.

Turning the tables on traditional Christian morality, Rand argues that altruism is immoral and selfishness is good. Moreover, there isn't a problem in the world that laissez-faire capitalism can't solve if left alone to perform its miracles.

I first read Atlas Shrugged and her other popular novel, The Fountainhead, while festival-hopping in Spain after graduating from college, so I can attest to the appeal of this philosophy to late adolescents of a certain gender. As an adult, however, Rand's work reads to me like a vulgar rationalization for greed lying on top of a perverse myth of the right relationship between individual and community. So when Ryan says that, "Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism," I have to question his use of the word "explaining." "Duping" seems like the more appropriate verb.

As someone who has written extensively on the religious illiteracy of the American public, I am not surprised that few Republicans today seem to understand that marrying Ayn Rand to Jesus Christ is like trying to interest Lady Gaga in Donny Osmond. But there is nothing Christian about Rand's Objectivism. In fact, it is farther from Christianity than the Marxism that Rand so abhorred. Despite the attempt of the advertising executive Bruce Barton to turn Jesus into a CEO in his novel The Man Nobody Knows (1925), Jesus was a first-class, grade-A "moocher."

I am somewhat surprised, however, at how few GOP thinkers seem to see how hostile her philosophy is to conservatism itself. Real conservatism is first and foremost about conserving a society's traditions, including its religious and political traditions. But Rand's Objectivism rejects in the name of reason appeals to either revelation or tradition. The individual is her hero, and God and the dead be damned.

Real conservatism is also about sacrifice, as is authentic Christianity. President Kennedy was liberal in many ways, but, "Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country" was classic conservatism. Rand, however, will brook no such sacrifice. Serve yourself, she tells us, and save yourself as well. There is no higher good than individual self-satisfaction.

One of the reasons we are in our current economic quagmire is that none of our leaders is willing to ask us to sacrifice. Democrats call for more spending and more taxes; Republicans call for lower taxes and less spending, and what we get is the most fiscally ruinous half of each: lower taxes and more spending.

A budget of too little Jesus

Over the last few weeks, various Christian groups have criticized Republican leaders for proposing a 2012 budget that in their view is both un-Christian and anti-life. First, dozens of professors, priests and nuns at various Catholic universities criticized House Speaker John Boehner for a legislative record on the poor that was, in their estimation, "among the worst in Congress." "Mr. Speaker, your voting record is at variance from one of the Church's most ancient moral teachings," they wrote. "From the apostles to the present, the Magisterium of the Church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor."

Then a consortium of evangelical and Catholic groups aired an ad scolding Ryan, who spearheaded that GOP budget, for his own "anti-life" stands. In this ad, Father Thomas Kelley, a self-described "pro-life" priest from Elkhorn, Wis., insisted that "God calls us to protect life at all stages," not just in the womb.

In short, these Christians are telling the GOP that there is too much Rand in their budget, and too little Jesus.

I don't see either Atlas Shrugged or the Bible as holy writ. I think the Bible is more wise, better written and, ironically, less likely to come across as holier than thou, but I have not come either to bury Ayn Rand or to lament her recent resurrection. My aim is to force a choice.

If you are going to propose a Robin Hood budget, you have to decide whether you are robbing from the poor to give to the rich, or robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Because you cannot do both. You cannot worship both the God of Jesus and the mammon of Rand.

I don't agree very often with the Watergate criminal and evangelical leader Chuck Colson, but he has it right when he refers to Rand's "idolatry of self and selfishness" as "the antithesis of Christianity"

Rand's trinity is "I me mine." Christianity's is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So take your pick. Or say no to both. It's a free country. Just don't tell me you are both a card-carrying Objectivist and a Bible-believing Christian. Even Rand knew that just wasn't possible.

Stephen Prothero is a religion professor at Boston University and the author of the book God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World — and Why Their Differences Matter.

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

Posted 3d 21h ago | Updated 3d 18h ago

Share

We've updated the Conversation Guidelines. Changes include a brief review of the moderation process and an explanation on how to use the "Report Abuse" button. Read more.

Please wait while we process your request

Please wait while we retrieve the user's information

Bio

Your bio is currently empty. Now is a great time to fill in your profile.

This profile is private.

This profile is only shared with friends.

This profile is under review.

We were unable to request friendship with this user.

We were unable to request friendship with this user. Are you logged in?

Your friendship request has been sent to this user.

We were unable to terminate friendship with this user.

We were unable to terminate friendship with this user. Are you logged in?

You are no longer friends with this user.

We were unable to ignore this user.

We were unable to ignore this user. Are you logged in?

This user is now ignored.

We were unable to stop ignoring this user.

We were unable to stop ignoring this user. Are you logged in?

This user is no longer ignored.

We encountered a problem recommending this user.

pluck_user_recommend_permission

You have recommended this user.

Type Comment
(optional)
pluck_user_mp-abuse_too_long_err
Send Cancel

What Do You Think?

To leave a comment, you need to sign up.
Sign up Log in

298 comments

Sort:

You voted

Abuse Reported Report Abuse

Score: 13

Name withheld

teachusteacher

6:03 PM on June 5, 2011

This comment is hidden because you have chosen to ignore teachusteacher. Show Details Hide Details

The right wing is no stranger to hypocrisy.

7 replies1 reply

7 replies1 reply
Please wait while we perform your request.

You voted

Abuse Reported Report Abuse

Score: 82

Name withheld

ClemsonS197

6:33 PM on June 5, 2011

This comment is hidden because you have chosen to ignore ClemsonS197. Show Details Hide Details

Equating that all Republicans are deeply religious is the same as equating all Democrats are homosexuals.

3 replies1 reply

3 replies1 reply
Please wait while we perform your request.

You voted

Abuse Reported Report Abuse

Score: 58

Name withheld

Sergeant Jackson

6:40 PM on June 5, 2011

This comment is hidden because you have chosen to ignore Sergeant Jackson. Show Details Hide Details

Ayn Rand was neither Rep. or Dem. She liked being free in America after growing up in Russia.
She loved her freedom. She believed in working for a living, she did it.
There is no right or left wing in our volatile problems. Time to work and contribute to the USA. Whatever, from either party. Live and Learn on your own. Then Vote, every election.

You voted

Abuse Reported Report Abuse

Score: 46

Name withheld

R.A.Stro

7:10 PM on June 5, 2011

This comment is hidden because you have chosen to ignore R.A.Stro. Show Details Hide Details

A big key is missing in this puzzle, whether the oversight is willful or from ignorance doesn't matter. The missing key is that the individual earns his money; it is up to him to tithe, donate to the truly needy, or to an organization that can efficiently put his donation to good use. This is the Christian reconciliation, I don't have to have someone else do this for me.
Because of the inherent lack of efficiency in the Government it is a waste to let the Government mandate you pay tax dollars to be distributed to those who won't work, those who milk society for their "Artistic" existence, those who are corrupt and to line the pockets of the Government in crowd.
It's sad but the author put blinders on himself, Ayn's book was about excepting responsibility for ones own actions, and applying self determination instead of trying to figure out how you can survive off the sweat of someone else's labor.

4 replies1 reply

4 replies1 reply
Please wait while we perform your request.

You voted

Abuse Reported Report Abuse

Score: -15

Name withheld

jjcctt

7:14 PM on June 5, 2011

This comment is hidden because you have chosen to ignore jjcctt. Show Details Hide Details

Real conservatism is first and foremost about conserving a society's traditions, including its religious and political traditions.
__________________________
The author's argument hinges on this premise, and it is false. Conservatism is first and foremost about financial responsibility among individuals and governments. It is the one unifying theme, the common thread that ties all conservatives together.

1 replies1 reply

1 replies1 reply
Please wait while we perform your request.

You voted

Abuse Reported Report Abuse

Score: -52

Name withheld

100378

7:16 PM on June 5, 2011

This comment is hidden because you have chosen to ignore 100378. Show Details Hide Details

Props to Ayn Rand....and come to the real world Stephen Prothero...admitting to writing on the 'religious illiteracy of the American public' shows your ignorance. Rand was clearly ahead of the times.

1 replies1 reply

1 replies1 reply
Please wait while we perform your request.

You voted

Abuse Reported Report Abuse

Score: 18

Name withheld

crppplll

7:19 PM on June 5, 2011

This comment is hidden because you have chosen to ignore crppplll. Show Details Hide Details

I've never understood how Repubs can be Christian and Conservative. I have always considered them to be oxymorons.

5 replies1 reply

5 replies1 reply
Please wait while we perform your request.

You voted

Abuse Reported Report Abuse

Score: 47

Name withheld

mindstorms

7:20 PM on June 5, 2011

This comment is hidden because you have chosen to ignore mindstorms. Show Details Hide Details

One should really do a bit of investigation before picking your heroes.

You voted

Abuse Reported Report Abuse

Score: 31

Name withheld

John Q. Public

7:36 PM on June 5, 2011

This comment is hidden because you have chosen to ignore John Q. Public. Show Details Hide Details

If the wealthy do not care if the poor and middle class live or die, the poor and middle class will not care if the wealthy live or die. I really don't think that is where they want to go.

2 replies1 reply

2 replies1 reply
Please wait while we perform your request.

You voted

Abuse Reported Report Abuse

Score: 11

Name withheld

Denel12

7:46 PM on June 5, 2011

This comment is hidden because you have chosen to ignore Denel12. Show Details Hide Details

Political views and religious beliefs are separate. Conservatives are drawn to her concept of individualism as a core value of the human condition rather than collectivism.
That her views of religion are entirely negative is irrelevant. Thomas Jefferson is a hero of Conservatives and he was agnostic.
If we didn't appear to be headed toward a government that favors collectivism and if a movie on Rands beliefs were not in the theatres, Rand's beliefs would retreat to their esoteric tomb.
I know many liberals who are also Christians and I know many conservatives of the same Christian beliefs.

4 replies1 reply

4 replies1 reply
Please wait while we perform your request.

Next

Please wait while we file your abuse report.

Report Abuse

We're sorry. We were unable to report abuse at this time.
Type Comment
(optional) Send Cancel

Please wait while we send the email.

Email This

We're sorry, but the comment you are sending has been removed from the site.

We're sorry. We were unable to send the comment at this time.
To
Please specify a recipient.

You can only send messages to 5 addresses at a time.

The address "" is not valid.
Subject
Please specify a subject.
Comment
(optional) Send Cancel

E-Mail

Delicious

Digg

Facebook

FriendFeed

LinkedIn

MySpace

Copy to Clipboard

Reddit

Slashdot

StumbleUpon

Tumblr

Twitter

Yahoo! Buzz

Copy to clipboard

Score
vote upvotes up
vote downvotes down

Ads by Google
The True Church of God
There is Only One... All Can't Be
Right! Watch Free Video Here.
www.theRCG.org
Christian Based Business
Do what we do and earn six figures
from home. No MLM. Free report/Mp3
www.FourStepConsultants.com

via usatoday.com

Real conservatism is first and foremost about conserving a society's traditions, including its religious and political traditions. But Rand's Objectivism rejects in the name of reason appeals to either revelation or tradition. The individual is her hero, and God and the dead be damned.

Playtime with Google Doodle

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 15:17:00 +0000

google.com

In honor of Les Paul's b-day, a fun doodle at the Google homepage.

The Grand Rapids Lip Dub: A Giant Street Party Set To Music : Monkey See : NPR

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 02:54:00 +0000

via npr.org

Wow. You go, GR.

Kate Winslet: ‘I Don’t Look Like That And I Don’t Desire To Look Like That’

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:57:00 +0000

via front.moveon.org

Still worth talking about ads and women's body image. It seems we could have the same conversation about men's body image, too.

Relief accepting comics, images, interviews!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 24 May 2011 21:35:00 +0000

edit
Relief News Tuesday: 5.24.2011

May 24, 2011 in Relief News with 0 Comments

Now Accepting Graphic Narratives, Images, and Interviews!

Issue 5.1 is ready to ship, and the submission period for issue 5.2 opened May 1. New work is already flowing in, meaning our editors are starting to think about all the work they have to do again.

This issue we’re excited to try out some new content, so we’re announcing here that Relief will now accept graphic narratives and images for consideration. This is an experiment, so we won’t run anything if we don’t find work that meets our standards, but we’re optimistic that through this site and word-of-mouth (that means you) we can find some great stuff.

This will make Relief, as far as we know, the only place you’ll be able to find graphic narrative of a Christian/spiritual bent. There are others doing images, but we think there are plenty more great artists out there whose work needs a home.

We will also be accepting queries for author interviews. Guidelines for this new content can be found on our Submissions page.

via reliefjournal.com

We're pretty excited to be expanding the kinds of content Relief carries. This is going to take some word-of-mouth and Internetting, so we hope you'll tell your friends.

catapult: How to improve education in the United States

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:29:00 +0000

How to improve education in the United States

by Bill Boerman-Cornell

Most everybody in the United States has been to school at some point in their lives. This seems to result in everyone being convinced that they know the solution to our education woes and no one else does.   Lately I am hearing more and more statements like “I’ll tell you what the problem is…,” or, “You wanna know how to fix the education system? All we have to do is…,” or, “If we could get rid of….” I am glad that people are interested in education, but, particularly as Christians, I think we need to be careful to address this problem thoughtfully.

As somebody who thinks about education all day (I am an education professor at Trinity Christian College), I would offer the following ten suggestions for discussing the educational situation in the United States:

1. Don’t dump on the teachers, administrators, students, or parents.

I confess, I am confused about this whole thing. It would be political suicide to attack almost any profession the way politicians and pundits are attacking the teaching profession right now. Imagine if a prominent politician talked about how plumbers or firefighters don’t really work very hard, get paid too much for what they do, and should bear the brunt of our attempts to cut the federal budget. That politician would be forced to resign within a day or two. Public outcry would force such a response. Yet at the moment, it seems quite fashionable to claim that teachers are overpaid, underworked slackers who don’t do a good job.

Let me be clear. Although there are poor workers in every profession, the vast majority of classroom teachers work harder than any pundit will ever be able to understand. Teaching is also one of the lowest paid professions if you add up the hours of grading and extracurricular activities.

For some reason, when we talk about education, we want to start by assigning blame. While I recognize that not all teachers, parents or administrators are perfect, the majority of all three groups are giving their lives to make a difference for the children. Despite what Fox news has been saying lately, teaching is not an easy nine-to-three job with summers off. I have only ever met one teacher who left school every day at 3:00 p.m. (and he was not a particularly good teacher.) Most full time elementary and high school teachers I know are at school by 7:30 in the morning and stay most days until at least five. Then they go home and grade papers until late into the night, every night. They take calls from parents at home (and often until quite late in the evening). Middle school and high school teachers often are involved in extracurricular sports and arts programs, which can mean that they don’t walk into their home until nine at night.   Combine the amount of work teachers do with the low rate of pay and we can conclude that teachers go into teaching either because they have been called to it and want to make a difference, or because they are too dumb to realize what a raw deal they are getting. Based on my experience, I’d say the large majority of teachers fall into the first category. Think about your own favorite teachers growing up and you will understand what I mean.

It would also be easy to blame the administrators for the focus on standardized testing, for the lack of support of our teachers, for the cutting of school buildings and programs and so on. Just like there are some bad teachers, there are also some bad principals and superintendents. Before we begin attacking them, though, we need to know what they are dealing with. Administrators don’t set the budget, though they often need to enforce it, no matter how unrealistic it is. Administrators don’t create laws like No Child Left Behind, though they are the ones who have to deal with its requirements. Administrators also contend with decaying buildings, uncertain enrollments and short-lived attempts at reform. So before we attack all administrators on the basis of some bad ones, we need to recognize that they have a hard job, too.

Some pundits seem to argue that it is the students’ faults, which seems to me a very difficult case to make. Aside from the difficulties of growing up and surviving adolescence, students have to try to learn in underfunded schools — schools that must, if they wish to survive, respond to a very unreasonable set of requirements connected to a standardized testing system that has been shown again and again to be of limited value. Standardized tests measure too little of a student’s development, do so inaccurately and take far too long (often two weeks of test prep per semester). To blame students for the struggles the education system is going through is like blaming the flowers for the spring rains.

Likewise, while some parents should spend more time teaching and setting an example for their students, we have to be careful about making assumptions about lives we do not know. In the current economic climate, many parents in lower income communities are forced to take multiple minimum-wage jobs. Working as much as they do often means that, during the week, they only see their kids for an hour or so a day. The alternative to working so much is that they cannot afford food and a place to stay. If we want parents to be more involved in the education process, we will need to find ways to help find secure jobs that would allow them to see their kids more.

There is nothing wrong with looking for ways to make teachers more effective, administrators more able to help students and communities, and parents more able to take an active part in their children’s educations, but we should avoid dumping on them while seeking a solution.

2. Solutions take time.

Sometimes I think that all education initiatives should be required to run for at least ten years before being evaluated. Here is how reform in our current system works. A superintendent (who, in the case of Chicago Public Schools, usually does not have a background in education) decides on a particular reform. (Often, this reform is initiated by a curriculum company with a product to sell the district.) The teachers in the school attend a one- or two-day in-service (training session) to learn the new approach. The principals in the individual schools are responsible for enforcing it. Typically at the end of a year, the program is evaluated, and, more often than not, abandoned in favor of a new program from a different curriculum company. This effort results in wasteful spending as curricular program replaces curricular program. And, because the teachers know that any given program is unlikely to last, they pay it lip service, but then stick with the teaching approaches they know will work. This means they do not implement the approach with enthusiasm and it is doomed to fail.

Instead, imagine a system in which the teachers and administrators come together, decide on reforms particular to their district and schools, then work at implementing them for ten years, secure in the knowledge that the reforms will not be here today, gone tomorrow. This might also eliminate the short-term motivation for curriculum companies.

3. Solutions need to be for all of God’s children.

There are many parts of America’s educational system that are not failing. In fact, many international comparisons of our educational system with others show very impressive gains. The problem, though, is that those are averages. The reality is that, while there are many well-funded, high-performing schools (often in affluent, largely white suburbs), there are also many poorly-funded, low-performing schools (often in economic high-need, largely African-American or Latino neighborhoods in urban centers.) As Christians, we need to make sure that the solutions we come up with would help all of God’s children.

On the one hand, school choice (also called vouchers) sems like just such a solution. Average the amount it costs to educate a student for a year, then allow parents to take that voucher with them to whatever school they want. This encourages competition in schools, schools become stronger and, best of all, if parents don’t like a particular school, they can switch. So urban families could, if they wanted to, send their kids to a suburban school. Sounds great, right? The devil, however, is in the details. Depending on how the program is implemented, it could have every different results for very different people. For my family, it would be great. My wife and I send our kids to a private Christian school in the same suburban community where we live. Under a voucher system, our tuition bill would be greatly reduced and our kids would still get a great education. It sounds ideal.

But what if I lived 20 minutes away on the South side of Chicago? For a variety of reasons, it costs more to educate a student in an urban environment, so under a voucher system, those schools would receive less funding.   That’s okay, though, because I could just send my kids to a suburban school, right? Well, if I live in that part of the city, it is statistically unlikely that I own a car. I also probably work one or two jobs to make ends meet. And because Chicago has both a city and a suburban busing system, getting my children from my apartment to the suburban school I want them to attend might involve an hour-long trip either way. So that might not be a practical solution.

Could I just send my kids to a Christian school? Maybe. It would be interesting to see what Christian schools would do if they were flooded with voucher applicants who were not from their denomination or ethnic culture. What if there was not room in the school for all the applicants? How would the school decide? I say all this not because I am opposed to voucher systems in principle; rather, I think whatever solutions are proposed need to be for all God’s children, not just the rich, or those who attend church, or those who belong to a particular ethnic group.

4. Education costs money. This is okay.

I remember touring the new control tower at O’Hare Airport almost 20 years ago. When I first heard that air traffic controllers only worked for an hour before getting a half hour break, and that the tower was equipped with ping pong tables and nap rooms, I was incensed. Then I stopped a minute and thought about it. Do I want the air traffic controller landing my plane to be fresh and mentally alert, or would a sleepy and overworked controller do just as well? I’ll take the former, thank you, even if it means I have to pay for control towers with ping pong tables, and extra staff to cover rest breaks.

Our first impulse is usually to doubt other people’s work ethics. We want to decide whether and how much people deserve to be paid. Lately there is a constant call for eliminating waste in the system. I am okay with that, but there is a difference between cutting paperwork on the administrative level to save money and increasing class sizes from 20 to 40, or cutting funding for workbooks, or lowering teachers’ already low salaries. Some efforts to eliminate waste only end up cutting into the effectiveness of teaching.

In order to have an excellent education system, we will need to pay for it. I send my kids to a private Christian school, but I pay my local taxes cheerfully (despite that fact that my children don’t take advantage of the public school system). This is not because I am a virtuous person who should be admired for my civic responsibility, but rather because I recognize that, when kids go to school, they learn things that result not only in being more likely to find a job, but also in their ability to make the good decisions necessary to run a democracy.

Education is a tiny slice of federal, state and local budgets. If we are looking for somewhere to cut, it makes sense to start with those things that consume a much bigger slice (military spending comes to mind). If we want a strong education system, we ought to be increasing funding for schools, not decreasing it.

5. We do not need more standardized testing.

I am not opposed to assessment, evaluation or accountability, but since No Child Left Behind, we use state tests like the ISAT and the MEAP to evaluate not the individual child’s progress, but rather, the school’s progress. Because the tests are so high-stakes, struggling schools, as a matter of course, take two whole weeks for test prep, which results in a significant loss of instructional time. Schools also cut arts programs, history classes and athletics programs in the mistaken belief that since these courses of study are not assessed on the test, they are not important. In fact, a significant body of research has shown that all three of these programs increase critical and analytic thinking skills. Finally, testing students every year seems to result in an overly myopic analysis of what is happening. Often, schools rewrite curriculum, initiate or cut programs and make personnel decisions based on a single rise or dip in test scores from one year to the next — sometimes when the change in test scores is well within the margin of error. In order to determine the effectiveness of a new program, one really needs to try it for a couple of years first, so we don’t need more standardized testing. In fact, we need less of it.

6. Want to get rid of teachers’ unions? Make them unnecessary.

Unions began as a response to unfair hiring and employment practices. One could perhaps argue that back when teachers’ unions began, teachers were woefully underpaid and could be fired at the whim of the school board, often, for example, by teaching a concept or a book that the board disagreed with. In those days, there was no appeal process. But now we have such processes in place, and teachers are paid better, and their hours and insurance costs are reasonable, right? So why are the unions still around?

The reason unions still hold power is that teachers still feel they have to fight to hold onto every concession they have gained over the last several decades. City officials wish to cut staff, increase class size and cut programs. Often, the unions are the only voice for stopping such moves.

Want the unions to go away? Then your course of action is clear: pay teachers what they are worth, show gratitude for their service with good health care, provide funding for professional development so that they can continue to grow in their understanding of their content area and their teaching techniques. Thank them for their work (they’ll thank you for your work as well). In short, treat them like the hard-working professionals they are. Do this, and maybe administrations can begin to work with unions, not against them.

7. Solutions should involve parents.

Teachers are given the chance to work with children. They should never forget that those children are on loan for seven hours a day from their parents, who, for the most part, love their kids and want what is best for them. When schools and parents and communities start to work together, the school tends to improve, far more than if the administration buys an expensive new reading curriculum or hires a new administrator. Working together, teachers and parents can reinforce each other, be more creative about solutions to problems and keep the interests of the children in the forefront.

In fact, we could perhaps broaden this final rule to say that, if we are serious about improving our education system, we need to listen to each other as teachers, administrators, parents, children, politicians. And do not listen so that you can have a chance to pontificate (as I have been doing in this essay), but rather, listen in order to find ways to make things better for all God’s children. If we can do that, our discussions will surely bear fruit.

|

Tip Jar

post comment

via catapultmagazine.com

Education should be expensive. There's little way around it. If our politicos complain, it's usually a red herring to distract us from real issues and even to get us to accept, implicitly, that education isn't important to us. We'd apparently rather vilify our teachers and administrators than take responsibility for the conditions we've created. I like that Boerman-Cornell also emphasizes the importance of the community developing its educational practices rather than a distant government.

Small Business Owners Demand Repeal Of Bush Tax Cuts For The Rich

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:08:00 +0000

WASHINGTON -- Michael Teahan, like his father, mother, and uncles before him, is a small business owner. The 52-year-old has spent most of his adult life running his own businesses: a restaurant, a coffee bar and various companies involved in the espresso machine business.

"I was the only person in my family to go to college, because that’s not what we did -- we all opened up businesses," Teahan says. "For some people, that’s a big hurdle ... for us, it was like having lunch."

Teahan currently operates Espresso Resource, a company that imports espresso machine parts from Europe to sell to U.S. restaurants and coffee shops. And he’s doing very well for himself: The two-man operation clears about $1 million a year in total sales, Teahan says -- enough to secure himself annual income in excess of $250,000.

That makes Teahan one of the few small business owners to actually benefit from the Bush administration's tax cuts for the wealthy. He says the cuts save him about $12,000 a year, compared to what he paid before they were enacted. But as debates over the federal budget deficit have intensified, Teahan has found the political discussion increasingly divorced from the reality of his experience as a small business owner.

Tax cuts for the wealthy, according to Teahan, will do nothing to bolster his firm. They won’t affect his hiring decisions, they won’t encourage him to buy new equipment or help him move into a bigger warehouse. He says all of those decisions -- the nuts and bolts of actually running a small company -- depend on the his customers' economic conditions, not his personal tax rate.

"What we do in business, how we spend our money, how we allocate our resources -- that has very little to do with tax policy," Teahan says. "I map my business based on my customers, and what my customers want to buy, and what they can afford to buy."

It’s a common complaint from small business owners. While congressional Republicans and entrenched corporate lobbying groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- which is holding a Wednesday meeting on small business priorities -- and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) have been pushing hard to preserve the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy by touting the interests of small firms, much of the small business community is demanding that those very tax cuts be repealed. The tax breaks for the wealthy will add $700 billion to the debt over the next 10 years, according to the White House's Office of Management and Budget. And many small firms say that money would be better spent on direct aid to the middle class.

Advertisement
Vintage Vinyl
So what really affects small businesses? High health care costs, which will likely be ameliorated by President Barack Obama’s health care reform, and limited access to credit in the wake of the financial crisis. Just as important to Teahan, Poore, Prince and other small business owners are federal economic policies that directly benefit their middle class customers. If extending tax breaks to millionaires means denying aid to the middle class, their firms will suffer.
"My customers work for a living,” Teahan says. "They’re working on espresso machines and selling coffee. They’re not these uber-rich Wall Street bankers. [My customers] need the money. If they’ve got money, then I'm doing great."
The upper-end Bush tax cuts are not corporate taxes -- they’re taxes on wealthy individuals. Many small firms are not corporations, and owners report their profits as the individual income of their owners. Some firms, like Teahan’s, choose to incorporate, though they never officially report a profit because all excess earnings are paid out to the owners.
The U.S. Chamber and the NFIB say that, because these business profits are reported as individual income, allowing tax hikes for wealthy individuals will hurt small business. The U.S. Chamber declined to comment for this story but NFIB spokesman Kevan Chapman says his organization has repeatedly polled its members and found that they favor the Bush tax cuts.
"We have over 300,000 members who would disagree with the notion that we don’t represent small business. The last time we balloted this measure was in November, and 89 percent said the federal government should extend those tax breaks," Chapman said.
There were 26.9 million small businesses in the United States in 2008, according to the Small Business Administration, though that figure includes millions of people who work on contract for employers but have no business, in the traditional sense, of their own. There were 6 million small firms with at least one employee.
Another small business groups beg to differ with the NFIB. The American Sustainable Business Council, which represents 70,000 small firms, maintains that "there is a strong business case for letting the tax relief for the wealthiest expire,” noting that doing so would "reduce the federal budget deficit and lessen the crisis with state and local budgets around the country.”
Frank Knapp, president and CEO of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce has written on the Bush tax cuts issue for The Huffington Post. He emphasizes that many of the people who report business income on their personal income tax returns are bond traders, partners in corporate law firms, lobbyists and hedge fund managers -- not the kind of activity that most people think of as "small business.”
These alternative small business groups say that the debate over the Bush tax cuts has been heavily skewed by talking points from the NFIB and the Chamber. The Chamber has a long track-record of backing the economic priorities of corporate elites, while the NFIB has increasingly become a partisan wing of the Republican Party, as HuffPost detailed in January.
While the NFIB continues to support the indefinite extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, it opted last year not to fight for a bill that would expand lending to small firms.
"Any small businessman who is in the NFIB is paying his enemies to stab him in the back,” says Prince, the record store owner.
Alpha Express VP Young agrees. "It's the corporate interests and the wealthy stealing our name to further their agenda," she argues.
While the upper-end Bush tax cuts would increase the federal debt by $700 billion over the next 10 years, the broader class of Bush tax cuts, which affect many middle-class taxpayers, would cost $3.1 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
"We should have learned from the last decade that slashing taxes for the richest Americans is a great way to grow the national debt –- not jobs," says Holly Sklar, the executive director of Business for Shared Prosperity, a non-partisan small-business group funded predominantly by the Ford Foundation. "Few small businesses benefit from the top rate tax cuts, but many lose from a shrinking middle class and deepening budget cuts in everything from the Small Business Administration and education to vital infrastructure repair and modernization. The tax cuts are like termites, eating away at our economy and our nation’s future.”

FOLLOW HUFFPOST BUSINESS
ON

Facebook:

Like

8K

Follow us on Facebook
Get updates from HuffPost posted directly to your News Feed.
'; var coords = [-5, -72]; // display fb-bubble FloatingPrompt.embed(this, html, undefined, 'top', {fp_intersects:1, timeout_remove:2000,ignore_arrow: true, width:236, add_xy:coords, class_name: 'clear-overlay'}); });

Twitter:

GET ALERTS

CONTRIBUTE
TO THIS STORY

Send Corrections

Send Us a Link

Contact us

Send a Tip

Send Photos/Videos

Comment

Get HuffPost Business On Twitter and Facebook! --> Subscribe to the HuffPost Money newsletter! Know something we don't? E-mail us at huffpostbiz@gmail.com -->

via huffingtonpost.com

I get that few small business owners really benefit, and that the benefit is personal and has little effect on their businesses, but I'm less and less able to understand why conservative Republicans are so committed to the wealthiest and most powerful people and companies. Either they are so ideological that they'd rather gut the government at the expense of the common people or they're being paid off somewhere down the line. Or both.

Dean Baker: Why Does Senator McCaskill Want to Bankrupt Our Children?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 06 May 2011 13:55:00 +0000

That is what people should be asking Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill along with her fellow senators who are advocated strict caps on government spending. The idea being pushed by Senator McCaskill, together with Tennessee Senator Bob Corker and several other prominent senators, would limit federal spending to 20.6 percent of GDP. It would require difficult-to-obtain super-majorities to exceed this cap. Spending would be cut across a variety of programs if the cap is not reached.

This proposal is hugely deserving of ridicule for a variety of reasons. First, it operates from a blatantly wrong premise -- that government spending has grown out of control.

Those familiar with arithmetic know that government spending had increased by little as a share of GDP prior to the downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. In 2007, the last year before the onset of the recession, spending as a share of GDP was 19.6 percent. That is 1.1 percentage points less than the 20.7 percent share 30 years earlier in 1977. So the idea that there is a long-term trend of out-of-control spending is simply not true, or what they call outside of Washington, a "lie."

Spending has risen in the wake of the downturn, but this was not due to a flood of new and expensive government programs. It was overwhelmingly attributable to the expansion of safety-net programs like unemployment compensation and food stamps and a decline in GDP, which raises the spending-to-GDP ratio even when spending remains constant.

If McCaskill and the other senators are upset about this recent rise in spending then they should be going after the incompetents at the Fed and Treasury who somehow could not recognize the $8 trillion housing bubble whose collapse wrecked the economy. This was indeed a horrendous mistake that has been devastating to the country, but it has nothing to do with government spending.

Over the long term government spending is projected to rise, but this also has nothing to do with the profligacy of Congress. There are two reasons for the projected increases in spending. The first is an aging population. As a result, federal programs that provide for elderly like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will cost more money.

The second reason is that health care costs are still rising out control. The United States already pays more than twice as much per person for health care as other wealthy countries. This disparity is projected to grow even larger in coming decades. If this proves true then it will both impose enormous costs on the private sector and lead to growing strains on the budget.

By contrast, if health care costs were brought under control we would be looking at huge budget surpluses in the decades ahead. Of course controlling costs would mean confronting the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and other powerful lobbies. Unfortunately Senator McCaskill and her colleagues lack the courage to confront such powerful elites.

In fact, McCaskill and her colleagues do not even have the courage to propose cuts for specific programs. Does McCaskill wants to cut Medicare, Social Security, Head Start, unemployment insurance? She won't tell her constituents or the country. She just wants to cut generic spending.

This one might sell well with the Wall Street crew, but it is incredibly bad policy. First off, any budget expert can quickly devise 100 ways to game spending caps, the most obvious being tax expenditures, where the government gives a tax break for items it wants to subsidize. This does not count as spending.

More importantly, a strict limit on government spending that is binding would prove enormously costly because there are some things that the government does more efficiently than the private sector.

Providing Medicare to retirees is one of the items in this category, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). CBO's analysis of Representative Ryan's plan for privatizing Medicare showed that having private insurers take over the Medicare program would add more than $34 trillion to its costs over its 75-year planning period, an amount that is almost seven times the size of the projected Social Security shortfall.

CBO's analysis implies that the Ryan plan, which was approved by the Republican House last month, would increase the cost of paying for retirement health care for someone turning 65 in 2022 (the first year the plan takes effect) by almost $170,000. This doesn't count the cost transferred from the government to beneficiaries. This is pure waste associated with using a more inefficient private system rather than the public system.

There is a similar story with Social Security. The administrative costs of privatized systems like those in the United Kingdom or Chile are 20-30 times as high as the administrative costs of the Social Security system in the United States. This would cost a typical retiree close to $40,000 in higher fees (which is income to the financial industry) that would come directly out of their retirement income.

If Senator McCaskill and her colleagues really expect their caps to be binding then they must want to privatize either Social Security or Medicare or both. Arithmetic leaves few other options. By 2030, CBO projects that spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would take up 14.5 percent of GDP. If we assume, conservatively, interest payments of 3.0 percent of GDP, this brings us to 17.5 percent of GDP against a proposed cap of 20.6 percent.

Any reasonable level of spending on the military, education, infrastructure, the environment and research and development would push the country far over the cap. This would leave little choice except to privatize Social Security and/or Medicare imposing an enormous and unnecessary burden on our children and grandchildren. The higher costs associated with privatized programs will leave all but the wealthiest workers struggling in retirement.

Of course, the senators who want to impose this enormous burden on our children and grandchildren will mostly be enjoying a comfortable retirement themselves by the time the effects of their policy are being felt. In the meantime, they will have enjoyed the praise of the Wall Street crew and the elite media for having the courage to destroy the programs that the middle class depends upon. Welcome to Washington.

via huffingtonpost.com

Another instance of someone offering a specific, human values-based argument about the economy against a vague, fear-based argument.

A Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death | Relief: A Christian Literary Expression

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 02 May 2011 19:00:00 +0000

A Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death

May 2, 2011 in Faith and Culture with 2 Comments

Ian David Philpot

Web Editor Ian David Philpot shares his reaction to the announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death.

I read the news in a text message from my fiancée late last night.

Shortly after, I was reading Facebook and Twitter updates covered in people celebrating and others quoting Scriptures from Psalms and Proverbs about not rejoicing in your enemy’s falls.

And I was torn.

I wanted to celebrate what had happened. I remember nearly ten years ago crying in classrooms with fellow students as we watched the tragedy of September 11 unfold, and I wanted those tears to be wiped away by this step towards a “safer world” (more on that below).

“I don’t think it’s a day for going to a bar. I think it’s a day to maybe go to church.”
–MSNBC’s Chris Matthews

The part of me that wanted to celebrate was the patriotic side. It wanted to write to everyone quoting the Psalms that David’s hands were so bloody that God wouldn’t let him build a temple. And to those quoting Proverbs, I wanted to remind them that Solomon reigned in peace because of the killings his father was able to execute.

But the patriotic emotions didn’t last too long.

Jimmy Spencer, friend of mine and of Relief, wrote a note on Facebook titled “Whose Death Does God Cheer?” (You can read it on Jimmy’s Tumblr.) It infuriated me and calmed me at the same time. Those who commented on his post felt either one way or the other.

Here are a two snippets of the comments on Facebook that got my attention:

“Get real. Take your Jesus and stuff it…”

“Thanks for voicing something that goes against what 90% of my facebook feed says.”

After reading all of this, the spiritual side of me took over. The side that loves others, no matter who they are or what they’ve done. I almost feel disappointed that it didn’t come out sooner, but I’m just a regular ol’ imperfect person.

And it’s not that I think we should’ve let Osama bin Laden continue to murder people. But I think we need to observe a stillness for the loss of life.

I saw this video clip on MSNBC of Chris Matthews talking about what will happen now. He said something that really stuck out to me: “I don’t think it’s a day for going to a bar. I think it’s a day to maybe go to church.”

That hit me hard.

Our world isn’t any safer. Gas prices won’t go down. We still won’t be able to get through airport security with a bottle of water. There hasn’t been a big shift in how our world works.

But hopefully there can be a shift in our hearts for how we view those who have wronged us.

via reliefjournal.com

Relief's web editor expresses what, I hope, many of us are feeling today.

Worldly Justice, Perhaps, but not Earthly Peace

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 02 May 2011 14:35:00 +0000

It's not clear OBL's death means what we would like it to mean. http://bit.ly/l0G1jV

More straight talk about Bell's Love Wins

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 17:06:00 +0000

“Rumors of Rob Bell’s Heretical Universalism
Have Been Greatly Exaggerated”

A review of

Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell,
and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.
By Rob Bell.

Review by Adam Ellis.

Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.
Rob Bell.
Hardback: HarperOne, 2011.
Buy now: [ Amazon - Hardback ]
[ Amazon - Kindle ]

The fact that Rob Bell’s new book is considered controversial is as much a testimony to the marketing prowess of HarperOne (not to mention the unintentional marketing prowess of some critics), as it is to any theology contained in the book. The first lesson that can be derived from all of this is that if you want to publish a successful book, HarperOne isn’t a bad way to go.

To begin with, let’s look at two things that shouldn’t be surprises, but (based on the more angry reviews I’ve read) apparently are:

Rob Bell is not a Calvinist (“New”, “Neo”, or otherwise). He doesn’t write like one. He doesn’t adhere to exclusively Calvinist doctrine. He doesn’t see the terms “non-Calvinist” and “Christian” as mutually exclusive.

Rob Bell writes almost exactly like he talks. That means that there will be

words

      and half-sentences

            laid-out unconventionally

                  throughout

                        the

                              book.

With that being said, there is much about this book that is worth discussing. I’ll go ahead and go on record as saying that the vitriol-fueled rumors of Rob Bell’s heretical universalism have been greatly exaggerated. Bell’s critics claim that the arguments in his book fall outside of historical Christian orthodoxy, while Bell himself claims to be saying nothing new, and that everything he argues for can be found within the stream of historic Christian orthodoxy. So, who is right? Well, that all depends on who you are asking, doesn’t it? In contemporary use, the term “orthodox” is quite subjective, though almost no-one attempting to employ the term as a theological trump card will admit this subjectivity. (Additionally, it should be noted that all reformers were technically heretics when they initially proposed their reforms, and that the way that the term “orthodox” is normally employed today seems more like a power game than anything else…but I digress)    Frankly, there isn’t much theological content in this book that you wouldn’t find in the work of N.T. Wright, Dallas Willard, and anyone who advocates a “restoration of all things” eschatology. Even on the particular subject of Hell and eternal punishment, Bell doesn’t say anything that isn’t in the same spirit of what N.T. Wright argues in his chapter on Hell in Following Jesus:

“First, it must be said as clearly as possible that as soon as we find ourselves wanting to believe in hell we find ourselves in great danger. The desire to see others punished–including the desire to do the punishing ourselves–has no place in a Christian scheme of things. There is, of course, a right and proper desire for justice, for the victory of right over might; the desire to punish, however, must be sharply distinguished from this.”

And later, Wright goes on to state:

“[M]ost of the passages in the New Testament which have been thought by the Church to refer to people going into eternal punishment after they die don’t in fact refer to any such thing. The great majority of them have to do with the way God acts within the world and history.”

If you’d like to see those ideas teased out and backed up, I’d recommend that you read Bell’s book and Wright’s work on the subject. I don’t offer these quotes from Wright as a sort of “trump card” here (Indeed, for some, Wright’s name won’t carry any weight at all). I’m merely attempting to show that Bell isn’t alone in his arguments and that it isn’t accurate to claim that only someone who doesn’t take the Bible or history seriously would make such an argument. It is simply not the case that in Love Wins, Bell is ignoring scripture and making an unbiblical argument. In his chapter on Hell, he actually lists and discusses every passage in the Bible that directly or indirectly discusses Hell. One may disagree with Bell’s interpretation of the Bible, but (particularly on this point) an accusation that he’s ignoring scripture is laughable.

It’s not that I don’t have any criticisms of the book. In his chapter on Heaven, Bell states:

“Jesus often referred to the ‘kingdom of heaven,’ and he tells stories about people ‘sinning against heaven.’ ‘Heaven’ in these cases is simply another way of saying ‘God’.”(82)

There is a sense in which this is sort of true, but, at the same time, it is so oversimplified that it is utterly unconvincing as it is stated.   The fact is that the Gospel of Matthew records Jesus as using the term “Heaven” in this way, which is made all the more obvious when these texts are compared to the parallel texts in the other Gospels where the same term is rendered “Kingdom of God.” This comparison would make Bell’s case much more convincing than simply claiming that Jesus often used the word “Heaven” as a euphemism for the word “God” (while offering no more detail or supporting information).

Additionally, in his chapter on Hell, Rob cites Jesus warning to Capernaum in Matthew 10, and says:

“[Jesus] tells highly committed, pious religious people that it will be better for Sodom and Gomorra than them on judgment day?

There’s still hope?

And if there’s still hope for Sodom and Gomorrah, what does that say about all of the other Sodoms and Gomorrahs?” (84)

My problem here is that it’s just a weak supporting argument. The fact is that Jesus’s message here is directed at Capernaum, and Sodom and Gomorrah are brought in to the discussion for comparison’s sake. Jesus is also well known to use hyperbole as a rhetorical device in precisely this kind of scenario. Again, I’m not necessarily disagreeing with the point Bell is making here, I just don’t think he does himself any favors by using this particular text in this particular way.

This is not an academic book, and it doesn’t claim to be one. Rob Bell is more pastor than professor, more artist than engineer, and more conversation partner than debate opponent. He asks questions, not to undermine the Bible and/or faith, but rather because he thinks the Bible and/or Faith are so important…and because he thinks the people that God loves (read that as “everyone”) are so important. If you think that theology is best done by engineers and that “Christian books” should always and only reinforce what you already believe, then this isn’t the book for you. If you think theology is more art than science; if you believe that neither God nor truth are threatened by questions; and if you suspect that there may be more reason to hope than you’ve dared to hope for, you’ll really enjoy Rob Bell’s exploration of how “Love Wins”.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the RSS feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 27th, 2011 at 5:12 pm and is filed under *Featured Reviews*, VOLUME 4. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

via erb.kingdomnow.org

This is a helpful review with respect to the controversy, but I think the big shame in all the hubbub about the book is that, while I'm learning what it's _not_ about, I'm still not sure what it _is_ about.

Wonk Room » 73 Percent Of Republicans Oppose Cuts To Medicare

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 17:01:00 +0000

via wonkroom.thinkprogress.org

Huzzah to 73% of Republicans and 70% of Tea Party-ers. There's still some sense of social responsibility among conservatives.

PHD Comics: Dark Matters Video - "We [scientists] have no clue!"

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 14:38:00 +0000

via phdcomics.com

This is a fun video by PHD Comics looking ahead at some crazy new directions for physics and cosmology. What I'm hoping is that dark matter will be an excuse for why I'm often running out of time.

Relief | Christian writing unbound. Confessions of a Bible Virgin

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 17:37:00 +0000

Bear Witness as I Experience My First Time…

April 27, 2011 in Faith and Culture, General, Staff Posts with 6 Comments

Travis Griffith

It seems we’re born into a world where everyone is blind.

We don’t know who we are; so we search, arms outstretched, wandering, hoping we run into some form of ourselves that might know the answers.

It’s during that journey through the darkness that many people turn to religion.

Religion provides millions of people with the answers they seek, but for countless others it only raises more questions that outweigh the faith required to believe.

My journey is about to take a turn that every fiber of my being tells me not to follow. And I’m going to need your help.

First, though, a little history.

Continue reading >>>

via reliefjournal.com

We as a staff are both excited and a little trepidatious about Travis's new project. Let's face it, there's stuff in the Bible we still don't like ourselves. Blessings on you, Travis. As Walter might warn you, "You're about to enter a world of pain," though I say that in the best way possible.

Dooble: A Miscellany

Bootstraps and Muck: On College Debt

Synonyms for Christian

New Review: Anne Overstreet's Delicate Machinery Suspended

Warren Buffett: Complete Socialist?

Dooble: A Miscellany: Taxes on the Super-Rich Don't Hurt Jobs?

Taxes on the Super-Rich Don't Hurt Jobs?

Restoring Participation (Williams's Grace and Necessity)

Modernist Aesthetics Today (Williams's Grace & Necessity)

An Occasional Poem: Cultivation

Criminal Minds (Can science predict your child's criminal future?) | chronicle.com | Readability

Social Scientists Explore Ways to Save Us From Our Own Decisions | chronicle.com | Readability

You can't reconcile Ayn Rand and Jesus

Column: You can't reconcile Ayn Rand and Jesus

By Stephen Prothero

USA TODAY OPINION

Name withheld

Name withheld

Name withheld

Name withheld

Name withheld

Name withheld

Name withheld

Name withheld

Name withheld

Name withheld

Playtime with Google Doodle

The Grand Rapids Lip Dub: A Giant Street Party Set To Music : Monkey See : NPR

Kate Winslet: ‘I Don’t Look Like That And I Don’t Desire To Look Like That’

Relief accepting comics, images, interviews!

Now Accepting Graphic Narratives, Images, and Interviews!

catapult: How to improve education in the United States

How to improve education in the United States

1. Don’t dump on the teachers, administrators, students, or parents.

2. Solutions take time.

3. Solutions need to be for all of God’s children.

4. Education costs money. This is okay.

5. We do not need more standardized testing.

6. Want to get rid of teachers’ unions? Make them unnecessary.

7. Solutions should involve parents.

post comment

Small Business Owners Demand Repeal Of Bush Tax Cuts For The Rich

Dean Baker: Why Does Senator McCaskill Want to Bankrupt Our Children?

A Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death | Relief: A Christian Literary Expression

A Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death

Worldly Justice, Perhaps, but not Earthly Peace

More straight talk about Bell's Love Wins

Wonk Room » 73 Percent Of Republicans Oppose Cuts To Medicare

PHD Comics: Dark Matters Video - "We [scientists] have no clue!"

Relief | Christian writing unbound. Confessions of a Bible Virgin