Baptism for Lulz

According to Slate, the Mormons have put up a firewall on their online baptism database (we’re in the 21st century now) to quell the slew of posthumous baptisms of famous (very) non-LDS figures like Gandhi and Anne Frank (the firewall also conveniently blocks access to whistle-blowers who exposed the zombie-Mormon plot).

Overzealous church members with lots of free time on their hands will have to find a new hobby – may I suggest tebow-planking?

My pundit prediction: The beleaguered Lulzsec will announce their triumphant return – and get revenge on the their persecutors – by baptizing Obama and Eric Holder; thus, as we all know, making them unfit for federal office and probably spontaneously implode in metaphysical contradiction. Or they’ll unbaptize (can you do that?) Romney and make him a real threat to the presidency this November.

In response to Earmark Controviersies

McCain can’t keep his facts straight

Earmarks.

Sure the article is correct, the GOP is skirting the truth about Palin and earmarks. Facts: She *requested* around $450 m in earmarks during her 2 years as gov. Before that, she used lobbyists to take in $27 m for Wasilla, the first federal funds in the history of that town (7000 residents = about $3500 per resident).

OK! Sure, wasteful earmarks are a problem. And the number of earmarks has risen ~ 300% in 10 years + the average $ value of these earmarks has risen 16% at the same time.

But I have a problem with this rediculous attention on so-called “pork barrel earmarks” and the demonization of Earmarks, in general. The press, cable shows, and the political talking points miss the Real point (big surprise). Here’s what the national conversation is forgetting: 1. not all earmarks are bad. 2. earmarks are not the REAL budgetary problem.

1. Earmarks can be a good way to give one-year, specific federal funds to a specific, and Finite project. Remember the Minneapolis I-35W bridge collapse? Earmarks are used to pinpoint federal dollars to badly needed reconstruction in special cases like deteriorating and dangerous transit infrastructure. The best part of earmarks is that the money goes straight to that specific project. That way, famously wasteful bureaucracies (like the Department of Transportation) have no excuse to appropriate shit-tons of money to their overall budget that they don’t really need.

Lets not forget, also, that bringing federal spending to their districts and states is part of the job description of our representatives in government. And lets face it, if someone’s using my tax dollars for interstate highways ANYWAY, I want my representative to get some so I can avoid taking 37 and getting pulled over all the time. If money is going out to build a new, better, large hadron collider – I want it built in Bloomington. Call me a pragmatic libertarian, if you will (but don’t call me a liberal!).

And as far as telling bad earmarks from good earmarks, we finally have a law that requires earmarks to be disclosed before they’re voted on (both McCain and Obama voted for it… although with 96 yays of the 98 present , it would’ve been political suicide not to). With this law, its now OUR responsibility to pay attention and hold politicians accountable for bad earmarks, which is how it should be… it’s our money.

2. Finally, the real point: earmarks might be a headline-grabbing, sensational symbol of government spending run amok, but they’re only about *2.5%* of the whole federal budget. Eliminate the “wasteful” earmarks and you probably saved a whopping 1% of the budget – which is great – but you’ve possibly eliminated or intimidated away at least some good spending in the partisan cluster-fucks which will surely ensue. Energy independence research grants, anyone? maybe not…

Besides our idiotic misadventures in the Middle-East, the real issue is “mandatory spending.” This is a special designation for federal programs that don’t need a new budget voted on each year – it’s automatically, “mandator-illy” included before the rest of the budget is made. They’re like my rent, utilities, etc. – they get first priority before I buy beer and other discretionary earmarks.

Now imagine I decided to make a rule that from now on I’ll pay my rent, utilities, life insurance, beer, a new handgun, and, say, $50 or $60 every two weeks for anything else. All of this will be automatically spent each month, regardless of the need for life insurance, beer, handguns, or $60 items.

The military makes up about 55% of mandatory spending – much of which was set during the cold-war arms race. Medicare and SS spending, also mandatory, has been rising since we have more retirees than ever, and soon will have more old, retired people than actual workers.

Once these mandatory spending programs are set, they are much easier to increase but very hard to decrease or reform (by design – they’re mandatory). How bad is the problem?

Mandatory spending was 29% of the annual budget in the 60’s (even with LBJ’s “Great Society,” the arms race, and the Vietnam War)

Now it eats up the majority of funds every year at 58% and growing. This, compared to a grand total of 2.5% in Earmarks, wasteful as some may be. How much money might be wasted in entitlements which are GUARANTEED funding every year?

Besides being irresistible to the media, earmarks are the focus of both candidates for a more self-serving reason. Earmark reform is relatively easy – and much of it was already done in 2007. However, real reform of 58% of the budget requires any or all of the following:

• the President to set lower mandatory spending with congressional approval (which requires unbelievable cooperation between the White House and Congress),
• the President to find new sources of funding to offset the costs (which requires an unprecedented economic genius in the Oval Office)
• the Congress to enact self-regulating spending laws, limiting increases (which requires prodigious bipartisan political will)
• or, the Federal bureaucracy to streamline, outsource, and cut costs, efficiently providing the greatest service to its citizens possible per tax dollar allotted (which would require such a disruption of the natural order as to make one believe in He, maker of heaven and earth, who so loved the world… etc. etc.)

As with most discussions in political horse-races, the Earmark thing is yet another distraction from uncomfortably large problems for which neither candidate (as far as I can tell) has real answers.

A Post on “Posting”

I’m not writing a book, nor posting as if I were intending to.

This is significant. Because the difference between words on a page of a book and words on a page of a blog is the type of interaction thats being attempted. In writing a book, or treatise or essay, I am presenting something to you. While on this blog, as many other blogs, I am trying to get a conversation started.

So lets be real with it.My name is Thomas, and I have some questions for you.

Boredom

The Gods were bored, so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, so Eve was created… Adam was bored alone, then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille, then the population of the world increased, and the people were bored en masse. To divert themselves, they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. The idea itself is as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom had gained the upper hand.  – Kierkegaard

My summer has been another cycle of ‘getting and spending.’ Quite boring.

Dawkins On “Militant” Atheism

This video is interesting because Dawkins succinctly explains the political dimension of atheism.

Dawkins’ argues that even though many atheists don’t see it as a political problem (the “I just don’t believe in god, I just don’t go to church, my atheism is not that important to my daily life” arguments), since theists see it as a political problem – it is. To point this out, Dawkins showed a quote from G. H. W. Bush saying “… I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots.” While this was just Bush talking out of his, um, behind… imagine if he had said that about Catholics, Buddhists, Indians, etc. I don’t know how many feel this way about atheists, but if the highest office of the land held someone who talked this way, I would bet on many. Additionally, it goes without saying that there are no outspoken atheists holding high office. All this singles out atheists, effectively, as a minority group which are denied political power, about which the majority hold political views (usually, dislike) – and, ergo, atheists are a political group.

He argues, with some preliminary research, that the smartest people tend to be atheist or agnostic, but since American culture disallows atheists from being elected to public office, the American public are robbed of capable leaders.

He puts it best:
“High office… is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it, the intelligentsia, unless they’re prepared to lie about their beliefs… American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.”

A few minor objections I have with this reasoning or conclusion are:

– Of course not all smart people are atheists.

– What are the stats of theism/atheism correlated with civic-leadership? Surely we want government officials to be smart, but I wouldn’t want a congress filled solely with university professors.

– Dawkins assumes that the “intelligentsia” should be running the country, but more than IQ is needed for those offices (although certainly I wish the average IQ in Washington were slightly higher)

– Dawkins assumes that, unless more of the country becomes non-religious, atheists will have to lie and say they are christian (or something). This is the biggest argument, and it stems from libertarianism.

And libertarianism could be an answer to Dawkins’ problem: if politics on both sides were more constitutionally-minded, the atheist problem would not exist. JFK said “I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic.” If our political culture were true to article 6, section 3 of the constitution, atheists would have no problem getting into office and they wouldn’t have to lie about it. They would simply say – none of your business, I’m running for president, not pope.

From what I can tell, a lot of libertarians are atheist. But libertarianism (and the constitution) is neither religious nor non-religious.  It contains the original, i.e. traditional, “American Values.” It’s something everyone could get behind, and it could even the playing field for atheists.

Richard Dawkins has a keen ability to rile people up and piss people off, which is why his TedTalk on militant atheism is so surprising. Besides his usual, funny, wise-cracks about the follies of theism, Dawkins’ preaching on militant atheism was not outrageous at all – nor was it militant. His basic message was for atheists to stop beating around the bush – stop being polite, diplomatic, or afraid – and come out.
“We need a consciousness-raising coming out campaign for American atheists.” Dawkins makes no call for atheist mobs to beat up clergy, no revolutionary rhetoric is used. Basically he says atheists, be brave, set an example for the other timid atheists, and ‘come out of the theism closet’. If this message is extreme or militant, then the cast of “Queer Eye” is the most militant groups in America today.

The student really knows how miserable will be that golden future which is supposed to make up for the shameful poverty of the present. In the face of that knowledge, he prefers to dote on the present and invent an imaginary prestige for himself. After all, there will be no magical compensation for present drabness: tomorrow will be like yesterday, lighting these fools the way to dusty death. Not unnaturally he takes refuge in an unreal present.The student is a stoic slave: the more chains authority heaps upon him, the freer he is in fantasy. He shares with his new family, the University, a belief in a curious kind of autonomy. Real independence, apparently, lies in a direct subservience to the two most powerful systems of social control: the family and the State.

On Futurism

There might be a tendency to think of futurists as either “pie in the sky” utopians or “death from above” doomsayers. Or maybe just crackpots who make predictions that seem about as plausible as stories in the National Enquirer. Futurism can take all of those forms, or can just be a tool to make a cool sci-fi book or movie. However, serious futurists do have an important task and real methods. These methods are about as exacting and dependable for prediction as those in political science, large population sociology, or macro-economics. Not exact and not always dependable, for sure. That is, futurism is more like quantum than Newtonian physics. Maybe not even that dependable.

However, like quantum mechanics, there is a degree of indeterminancy. Futurists cannot predict exactly when the next generation of computers will come out, what the next microchips will be made of, or how. But futurists do one indelibly important task – they track general trends. When all other sciences and humanities are concerned either only with the past or present, futurism generalizes the past into studiable trends, and extrapolates them into a probable future. Trends studied include: computing power, global communication, global warming, population, and scientific/technological innovation.

Taking the general extrapolations as a starting point, futurists then *gasp* imagine what the future might mean (I would argue the best theorists, philosophers, and prognosticators always, and necessarily, use imagination). This imagining is neither precise nor singular. The futurist community, instead, thinks of several scenarios for the future (e.g. some insist on singularity soon, some don’t; some insist the singularity will be awful, some think it will be great, and some think it will just be “different”). This dialogue, no matter how fantastic it might get, is necessary. The best way to combat problems and find solutions is if we’ve already been talking about that problem for years. The more we talk about the future of ethics, technological utility, and every-day life, the more we will be at least mentally prepared for whatever might come our way.

More on Futurism:
Ray Kurzweil
Seminars About Longterm Thinking